South Park Commons raises $275M Fund 3 to back pre-idea founders across the US and India

True, true, true. Yeah. Yeah. It should be completely riverboat gambling. It needs to be either more lawful and become a prison or more lawless and become a gambling haven. It does have like that riverboat vibe of like, you know, being in the bayou, hanging out on the river boat, gambling.

It's kind of like international waters. Anything goes. Anyway, our next guest is here. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Do we have you? Hi. How are you guys? Good to see you. We're doing great. Uh, welcome to the show. Uh, would you mind kicking it off a little introduction for yourself? Your yourself?

Yeah, for sure. Hey, hey everyone. Adita Agraal here. Uh, I'm the managing partner here at Southspark Commons. I've been in the tech industry for about 20 years now. Um, kind of started off by meeting a very young 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg in like early 2005 when I just moved out here.

Facebook was still working out of the famous house. Uh, and you know, so kind of meeting a 19-year-old Zuck at that point was pretty obvious that dude was special. Uh, and then kind of How old were you at that time? I was uh 22. Wow. Okay. Okay.

So, you were like, uh, three years younger than me, but generational founder, I should probably join the company. That's great. You know, it's funny.

It's like I I kind of joke that I love working for founders younger than myself, cuz I went for working for Zuck to I then did my own company after Facebook, which then got acquired by Dropbox. I was Dropbox's first acquisition and then I was the CTO there working for a young Drew Hston and a young Arashi.

Wait, so did you recruit Guido Van Rossam person? IC personally recruited GVR to come join Dropbox Python. Wow. Absolutely legend. And it's interesting the benev the benevolent dictator for life of Python. Probably the most important programming language in modern history.

Yeah, it's interesting you say that because you know Python at that point Dropbox was probably the most used I would say consumer app maybe actually the most used kind of app in general written mostly in Python because most of our a bunch of our back end and front end was actually kind of like codegen using Python and Guido is a legend I mean like I think that the way he has crafted Python you know both by himself and at Google and under kind of the Dropbox opices was just legendary and it's kind of amazing it's kind of becoming the uh the programming language of choice for AI as well, right?

Kind of like most of the AI programming is actually done all in Python, which is pretty which is pretty crazy. Wild. Yeah, he's best to ever do it. Let's talk about let's talk about the news uh because it was hitting the timeline. I think it was Friday. Uh new fund three.

Maybe talk about the genesis of the fund uh and you know the the series of funds to get where you guys are today. For sure. Um you know, happy to tell you about SPC fund 3. That's alpha common fund 3.

But maybe I, you know, instead of kind of uh telling you about the fund sequence, let's talk about why SPC exists, right? Um SPC was started in 2016 with the simple premise that um if you are a talented technologist, do not waste your life kind of tackling small ideas, right?

Um I'd say that there are two big mythologies that we've been trying to bust, if you will.

So the first big mythology is that you know we all have this mental model of kind of like founders essentially getting a stroke of inspiration going up at the top of a mountain and then coming back to us with kind of the promised product right it's a very it's framed as this like solitary hero kind of or heroine kind of act but our strong premise is that great companies basically come out of insanely high talent density right they come out of places like PayPal which kind of like kind of show like you know what greatness looks like and then people go out and build things they come out of like places like um you know obviously Facebook then we have had a bunch of companies out of Google uh Derog Spark obviously um you know and we also see this greatness kind of occurring in clusters all across us like we see it in like elite sports teams we see it in elite kind of like musicians we kind of see it in like essentially academia so our take was that if you want to start a company why would you want to go and kind of like ideulate by yourself right instead be surrounded by super high talent density people who challenge you like you know where interesting collisions of ideas can happen.

Um, and it's kind of a semicompetitive collaborative setting, right?

You want to be surrounded by the best people who are kind of challenging and pushing on your ideas, but then you also have a little bit of like, you know, you're looking over your shoulder being like, I want to aspire to the greatness that I see around me, right?

Um, so that's our first mythology, which is that in order to start a company, you should be surrounded by great people.

And the second one which is maybe it's you know it's it's more than a pet peeve for me which is that there's a generation of founders that argue over the last decade in Silicon Valley who basically because of the availability frankly of early stage seed capital kind of latch on to the first idea that they think of right because they have some idea somebody gives them like a seat check and then they think that the idea is good right and our take is that actually like you know instead of just focusing on the first idea that you have.

Take some time to wander. Let your mind kind of like go lateral. Figure out like it's unlikely that the first idea that you have is the best one, right? If you kind of just think about it from a probabilistic perspective.

So our take at SPC is that come spend 6 9 12 months with us wandering, ideulating, exploring, tinkering, letting interesting ideas come about. Um and in some ways everybody is so focused on scaling the mountain. We talk about hypers scaling.

We talk about scaling the mountain that nobody stops to ask like is this the right [ __ ] mountain? Like is this the best mountain that you want to go climb? Everest has like you know 16 peaks over eight sorry the uh the Everest range has like 16 peaks over 8,000 meters. Like which one are you going to pick, right?

Like that's a pretty good one, right? Um so K2 because it's the hardest. K2 is the hardest in the winter. Highest fatality rate by Yeah. Some founders just want the pain and so they go okay K2 North Face during the winter. Oh yeah.

What uh really quickly what uh the the name uh not South Park Capital, not South Park Ventures, South Park Commons. What's what does that mean? It it was a name that was actually chosen by our early members, right? So our early members in circa 2016 2017. The idea is that it is a meeting place of ideas, right?

like it's kind of formed by the commons obviously very famously out of London but a place where a the intellectual public can gather to kind of like you know uh introduce ideas kind of essentially um debate ideas some of you know some of the folks that we were inspired by back in the day were Benjamin Franklin's Hunto club right we actually remain deeply inspired by that which is it exists as a society to better each other to kind of like to towards greatness um so the idea was that SBC I mean sure we have 20 people on staff here we a bunch of investors.

I think we're awesome. But ultimately, a lot of like the value of SBC is being surrounded by great talent that can all kind of like push each other. So when you come back to the genesis of the fund, right guys? Like in the early days, there was no fund. We framed ourselves as a learning community.

We framed ourselves essentially as like an exploration society, kind of the royal exploration society in the 1800s in the UK with the idea being that like being a founder is kind of being like an explorer in the early days, right?

you're trying to navigate the idea maze, uh you should be able to like you know throw away like the bad ideas in pursuit the great ones.

Um and then over time what we realized is that this is actually an interesting model for early stage kind of like company exploration right so we would basically provide a place where people would come in and essentially it was very hard to get in right it's you know we do maintain super rigorous standards for essentially getting in we put people through multiple interviews reference checks so for instance this people this year 20,000 people plus will apply uh to be part of SPC uh across 250 spots across SF New York and Bangalore Um so it very rigorous to get in but once people essentially got in we would kind of like have like a very vibrant intellectual environment where we would invite like really interesting people at the frontier of their fields.

Uh you know so for instance I remember back in 2016 and 2017 a young Vitalik would be like walking through kind of like STC just talking to people about some of his ideas around distributed systems. We would have GDB and Ilia walking around telling people about kind of what was happening in deep learning.

And I know that today these guys are like world famous, but back in 2016 they were still trying to pioneer something that felt a little bit heretical, right? Which is this idea that we were about to enter kind of a kind of like a Cambrian explosion of machine learning away from the deep learning winter.

So you know we have always welcomed the people who are kind of in some ways pushing the boundary. Um any so it was framed as a learning society but as people kind of came and spent time in SPC we realized that they were actually converging on more interesting ideas for you know by way of their exploration.

So as they started essentially starting companies uh Ruchi and I Ruchi is one of the founders of like SPC would basically write you know you know angel checks and introduce them to our uh investor network.

But over time we decided that like hey why don't we start a fund to invest in SPC companies uh and the fund would also the for instance the fees coming in from the fund would be used to essentially like provide for staff and also provide for the building that we have in South Park right um and that fund one was a $55 million fund in 2018 that fund uh has done phenomenally well it's kind of going to be in the top 5% of its vintage of that year um on the back of on the backs of that there you go boom boom boom boom Um is that the money bell?

Okay, there we go. The size gone. Um and then on the backs of that, you know, we raised another fund in uh 2000 in late 2021, which was $135 million fund. That fund is actually outpacing fund uh fund two is outpacing fund one.

Um and on the backs of that, we have just raised fund three, which is the $275 million fund to invest across uh across the globe, but also specifically the USA and India.

uh and the model scaling well you know like we I'm curious so so I want to get into uh potentially some of the learnings uh the broader learnings for companies uh you talked a little bit about the sort of uh the unicorn factory you know companies come they get you know2 to5 million they announce their fund raise maybe they launch and that's sort of like this like you know they get then they're on this sort of treadmill right and it just speeds up and speeds up and and you know, hopefully you don't get thrown off of it at some point.

You can keep the pace up. But um uh one of the things I've been talking about recently on the show is kind of the how that that timeline can actually end up hurting your business if you pick an idea.

You have a super high-profile launch and then everybody knows you as this company that does this one thing, but maybe in that process you discover a totally different idea or it makes sense to to pivot.

And I'm curious, you know, seeing so many of these companies go from zero to one and then I'm sure ultimately oftent times, you know, pivot into other areas, what is the what is the what is what is the core advice that you're giving to founders that are joining at the earliest stages SPC, maybe pre- idea or maybe they only have ideas of an idea to help them avoid that.

You know, we saw um we had the founder of of H Cly on a couple weeks ago and he's had, you know, two maybe three, four, five super viral moments around what he's doing.

And my my uh advice to him was, you know, don't be afraid to basically reinvent yourself just because, you know, in three months if it's not working as well as it should, right?

And I've gone through this in in in the past myself, which is, you know, going viral before you have product market fit is not always gift and a curse. It's a gift and a curse, right? Yeah.

I mean, honestly, I mean, it's it's I think it's a wellred question and I think in in so far as the question also contains some of the answer, right? My take is that honestly uh the cheapest time the easiest time uh to kind of do path finding and to do pivots is in the earliest days.

And in some ways like obviously my point of view is that you shouldn't raise a ton of money right like the first two three $5 million should be easy to raise right like that should be your easiest raise right in the sense of like you have you have you're kind of converging on an idea that is making people excited uh what you really want in the earliest days is to have a lightness of being in terms of like making sure that you can actually objectively examine the idea from all sides right like if it's not working put another way here's Something I often tell founders, your first $2 million of sales should be damn easy, right?

Like I think that people often conflate that like I'm going to go and do hand-to-hand combat to kind of go and get my first $2 million of sales. It's like what are you talking about? Like if you have a great idea that first two five should be easy, right?

People should be taking a product that is halfbaked because it's so resonant. So my take is that like wait around and kind of like keep on kind of like doing big pivots or small pivots until that idea comes into focus. Right.

Yeah, entrepreneurship like any founder that you talk to that has gone on kind of a unicorn or a decagon journey, it is long. It is super painful, right?

Like if you are going to sign up for a super long kind of like game, take the time in the beginning to make sure that it's actually like the right mountain, the right game to play.

Um and I think that I mean if you kind of think about it guys it makes sense that a lot of trends I think at least in our industry make sense to me when viewed from the lens of like we are trying to push founders to start things as soon as possible right like you know software kind of enables that like you know super low cloud computing costs kind of like enable that but I think the flip side is something what we have seen is that I actually would argue that over the last 10 years founders have shied away from a problem that doesn't immediately come into focus Right?

If you can't code like V1 in like a month or if it requires like physical atoms, if it requires kind of like talking to anybody that is not over the internet, people tend to shy away from it, right?

And my take is that there are actually tons of super interesting kind of problems to tackle if you widen your aperture in the early days.

And again, you know, whether you raise like a million dollars or $5 million, I I would urge raising less, but ultimately it's kind of about having that mindset of being light in the beginning because none of your early investors actually care that much if you pivot like five times because the alignment around like biggest sorry the biggest outcome is always is just there.

Yeah. How did you think about fund construction uh with the new fund? Uh just the nature of venture means that you know a handful of companies in the fund will end up you know being you know maybe an order of magnitude larger than than the rest.

Uh and I imagine you've learned a lot of lessons from the first couple funds around you know making sure that you're you're able to participate in in in multiple rounds um and and that kind of thing. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, I'd say that the the first thing that we often talk about is that fund size is an in uh is an output, not an input variable, right? I think there's a lot of managers in our industry that basically raise a a big fund and then come up with a strategy to deploy the fund.

For us, kind of the the methodology always has been like fund size is an output of the number of founders that we can serve, the number of people we can have in our community. We strongly believe in that our community is best facilitated when things feel intimate, right?

So this is why like you know none of our spaces in SF New York and Bangalore are more than like 150 people. Um and then we kind of have a sense of like how many of these members can each of our kind of like investors support such that we can actually provide them with an amazing frankly white glove experience.

Like I personally work closely with like 30 40 50 founders per year.

Um and that's the fun part of the job right so a lot of it is just like what is the maximum number of people we can support both in the community but also in a per investor basis and then we kind of back our way into a fund size from that um frankly you know I think that right now um we are not constrained uh the big the big thing that we're constrained by is simply our ability to support these founders not from demand for the product if you will right like I think that just looking at the numbers in terms of how many people want to be part of SPC I I think we are humbled I think by the interest.

It also kind of makes sense guys in the sense that I think a lot of one of the really interesting trends for us is that how many second-time founders join us right or how many like essentially people who have been early employees at like a stripe or a scale join us and I think it's because they see the I I think we're kind of spreading a philosophy which is that if you want to play this repeated game of startups right and you want to start companies like it's better to be surrounded in the early days by super high talent density.

I think one of our goals at SPC has always been that startups are hard but startups create a lot of value. Let us figure out a way to kind of like actually make them more net productive for everyone. So I think that the minus1 philosophy is resonate is resonating.

We obviously want to serve as many founders as we can ourselves, but I also hope that like other people start up minus one things, you know. Uh and we're starting to see a bunch of uh I would say um folks who have similar philosophy like minus one I think has entered the vernacular now which makes me really proud.

Um so yeah, one side is an output. I actually think we can serve a lot more people as we figure out ourselves how to scale. But more than that, you know, like minus one is kind of a big thing. It's kind of a big philosophy that makes me proud to be able to share with the world. Totally. Uh you co-ounded Bezel.

Uh sorry, not not Bezel. Bevel. Bevel. Bezel. Bezels were part of the motivation for kind of talking about Bevel, but yes, I did co-ound Bevel last year. Yeah. Uh I I would love for you to talk about that and and how it's been. Um it makes a lot of sense.

I think one of the biggest complaints people have about different fitness trackers is uh uh the the the data is not always consistent, right? You know, your your Whoop might tell you a different uh tell you you're walking more than your aura ring or or uh or whatnot.

And you know, having a platform that can pull all that data into a single place and help you understand different trends makes a lot of sense.

um and uh you know just just the nature of um you know bundling and and unbundling but talk about uh maybe the genesis there and and how it's been going for sure you know um I think probably like a bunch of us six years ago uh kind of when COVID first kind of like the lockdowns and stuff started decided to channel a lot of my pentup energy into kind of just like going full beast mode on my health you know like basically analyzing everything like sleep uh fitness fitness, nutrition, uh body metrics, everything.

And I started to maintain these super detailed spreadsheets and these spreadsheets were basic like I have all of the data collected on a daily basis going back six years. It's kind of stored in a combination of Excel, sorry, like Google Sheets and Air Table. Yeah.

Um and I think everything that you said like you know I would collect data from three different sources, right? I would collect data from my Aura ring. Um I also had an early Fitbit. Uh and obviously when Apple watch came out and some of the data would be like a little bit different and I would basically normalize it.

I would also collect a bunch of qualitative data about my own kind of like I would say experience. Yeah. Um so when I was talking to Ben and Gray who were at SPC, you know, they were also essentially going through similar journeys.

They kind of been through a little bit of the ringer in terms of their first startup and we were talking about what we wanted out of essentially like a health app.

A lot of what we were saying is that essentially number one um all of these health devices at this point were kind of like offering you like a dashboard of your data but nothing was really tying it together.

I mean Apple health is fine right like it's not a bad product but it's a little busy um and it's kind of like very specific to that ecosystem.

So our take was that how do we kind of create as step one the best place to ingest all of your kind of health data because at this stage it's not just your rings your watches it's also your eight sleep mattress it's also like you know everything basically is kind of like creating this health data which is awesome right it's beautiful because I think it's indicating that consumers care about this so our take was step one how do we get all of this into the into a one place that essentially uh oh is that a there we go amazing Yeah, that that's a great product, right?

Like eight sleep, but eight sleep gives you a nightly sleep score as does your aura ring maybe if you wear your watch. So like how do we make sense of all of this data into a clean consistent place, right? Um and it's I mean it was a simple proposition. It was one of those classic things. Let's just build what we want.

Um and Ben and Gray are just worldclass kind of builders and designers. So they just built something that was beautiful. it was easy to use and we put it out there and it's just been all kind of like crazy organic demand.

Um, you know, we're not diverging too many numbers, but you know, we are definitely kind of the uh the number of users and kind of paid subs, it just kind of blown us away. We've kind of been on a tear for the last four, you know, last like six months.

Um, well, there's there's this I there's this idea that uh once you get to a certain obsession level in health, the amount of money that you'll spend on an incremental 1%, you know, gain in your health is like, you know, you get to a point where you're, you know, I did this like NAD treatment last year. Oh, yeah.

that in hindsight was like I think a terrible use of funds, but it was like it was like a series of I think it was like six grand over like multiple treatments and I was like I didn't feel anything at the end but at the time I was like yeah if this is going to make me performance yeah if I'm going to feel like you know 5% more energized during the day it's totally worth it but um it's a great market that's cool I'm curious uh la last thing because I I know we have a cut off here and there's probably a founder you need to chat to uh chat with um what are you seeing being uh today at a high level.

You guys have a unique insight into the the sort of trends and categories that will be probably hot in a year. Um and you're probably making those investments now.

um you know I'm sure a lot of the obvious stuff you know agents um MPC that that kind of thing but what what what's um what's getting a lot of your probably two probably two areas that I would highlight and m maybe this is I think some both of these are somewhat well understood now the first one is the amount of I would say enthusiasm and excitement for stuff around robotics is very real this is both kind of like building actual robotics like hardware to kind of building robotics kind of I would say middleware kind of like think like you know end toend stacks for coding on robots then obviously robotics foundation models um it's it's it's hard to say whether it will all translate into usable products over the next three or four years but over a 10 year horizon I think that the energy is just substantial much more so than I've ever seen in my career.

Um, and the second one I'd point out is that, you know, a lot of the times the conversation around foundation models has really centered around essentially like take what we have and kind of like throw more compute at it, throw more data at it.

But it's surprising to me that a lot of people don't actually take a step back and realize there lots of smart researchers out there who are building the next generation of algorithmic changes to these models.

So there are lots of really interesting both uh I would say variants but also novel takes on for instance what would a pure RLbased kind of like model look like right if you had to ingest reinforcement learning from day one so I'm seeing a lot of energy around building the next generation of foundation models it's a little bit I would say still hazy but it's very exciting because I think that I still think we're at the tip of essentially the innovation we're going to see on top of these core LLM capabilities Yeah, it makes total sense.

I mean, uh, assume we're at the end of history and all the future algorithmic progress. It's so crazy, right? Like everybody assumes that like it's just going to pause and then we're going to scale it up and I'm just like, no, no, no. There's a ton of like energy around core innovation around the algorithms.

That's very interesting. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. All right. Well, I know we've already had uh some of your founders on, but let's make sure to get more on and uh thank you for coming on and telling the story and congrats on the new fund. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Cheers. Congrats.

Have a good one. Uh, should we rip through through some timeline? Get out of here. Let's do it. Started a little bit late. Uh, we'll get timeline hours. It's timeline. Play some sound effects. I have been missing that sound effect. It's so good. I mean, last week was That's not even the main one.

That's the different one. I want the Ashton Hall. No, not that one. The Ashton Hall. The Ashton Hall. You know the one I'm talking about. This is the one. This gets me so fired up. I love this one. Anyway, uh Morgan Howell, friend of the show, uh put a random thread boy in the truth zone.

Aaron Richards writes, uh, "In 2020, Morgan How published his bestselling book, The Psychology of Money. It sold four million copies and changed the way we think about money. Now, he's predicting the collapse of America. Here's everything you need to know. " Beautiful photos from Diary of a CEO.

And Morgan Hel comes in and says, "Lol, I am 1,000% not predicting the collapse of America. " Double kill community note and the actual author of the book telling you that you're wrong. Um, yes. Absolutely wild. Uh, for step it up on X Aaron Richards. You're on notice.

Uh, the next slop thread you post better be factual. What's uh Morgan Hel's latest the art of spending money uh is his next book. I like that. So excited about it because it's very interesting. Yeah, we got to have him on more regular. That was such a fun conversation when we had him on. Yeah, absolutely brilliant.

That'll be great. Thinker. Um anyway, we want to take a second to tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, and prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program, go sign up at Pervant. I've used them across multiple companies and I am excited to be uh working with them now at TVPN. We got to get Whimo on Vanta. I'm sure that there's a lot of compliance with a business like that.

Uh and I'm sure they're already on Vanta probably. Uh yeah, we'll have to fact check that one. But next post is from Jane Wong. She says, "This Whimo almost t-boned a cyclist blowing through a red light at an intersection in San Francisco. Who's in the wrong here?

Why isn't the robo taxing yielding to some yielding to someone who always has the right of way anywhere and everywhere at all times? " But what's interesting is that a lot of people were looking at this and being like, "This is incredible performance by the way.

" Like it it stopped and and the and the biker kind of came out of nowhere. Um, but Christian Kyle is putting uh his, you know, bet his dollars on the gambling table. I don't know what what analogy I'm using here, but he uh he says, "Prediction in 2040 it will be illegal for humans to drive cars. " What do you think?

I think it's going to come. Illegal though, that's going to be hard. I think it will be frowned upon. frowned upon. Uh yeah, I mean I do it is it is funny as a as a legal to ride horses. Yeah, true. But it's frowned upon to it's one of those things, right?

So So it's technically I think legal on most roadways to just ride a bike, right? Maybe maybe not on a free but it's frowned upon if you're in like you know a 45 like if you're like expressing your right to cycle in like a highway, right? Like a onelane highway and you're like riding in the middle. Yeah.

It's kind of I could see it being like that. I mean, I do think it will become at some point just so objectively clear that it is dangerous for humans to drive that there could be plenty of pressure at least in some in some areas. I think I think uh Whimos very underrated horses also underrated.

First off, let's go through the stats. One horsepower, not bad. It's pretty good. And horsepower the most jacked horse probably two horsepower. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, how do you rank? Uh there was journalism was racing on Saturday uh against big horse weekend. Who who were they racing against? Sovereignty.

Sovereignty one. Sovereignty mogs journalism again. Um but uh but yeah, I was thinking about does is is journalism really one horsepower? Is that the right way to think about it? Or or is journalism getting up into the three or three or four range? Totally possible.

Also, Henry Ford famously said, "If I asked people, they would have said, "A faster horse. " What's wrong with a faster horse? If we've been spending the last, if instead of the Ford Motor Company, it was the Ford horse performance-enhancing drug company, we could have horses up in the 20 horsepower, 200 horsepower.

Who knows? The right cocktail gear. Here's this should be our investment strategy for the day that it get uh humans get banned from driving cars on roads. go and buy all these legacy racetracks that haven't really been as po, you know, you can go and do a track day all over America.

It's it's some it's popular in some circles, but I think if car if humans were banned from driving, for sure they're going to hit the track a lot more. They're going to hit the track way more. It's going to become the new round of golf.

There's actually a uh some track in California that just got bought out by a new investment firm and they're going to modernize it, build like a hotel on it and uh build like a paddic so you can store your cars there, do all these different things more of a was it button willow or I think it might be that might be right.

Um it was up for sale and it wasn't that expensive. You know about thermal club in uh loosely but tell the audience. I mean I don't think it's been an amazing business. Uh not yet. It didn't work for them, but maybe it would work for us.

But uh but yeah, no, it's basically they they built a track and then they built a lot of houses that are specifically designed for car enthusiasts. So they have transparent drive in and out. Yeah, they have transparent uh flooring so you can look down and see. That's great. Uh yeah, I love it.

Also hackathon project self-driving horse. Totally doable. Think about it. Horse, you just need to put in compass, GPS. You literally strap a phone to the horse and then in one tiny servo motor moves the res to the left or the right.

You can steer to the horse and little little motors goes kick and the horse goes and all of the tough parts about like the horse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The crop the riding crop. You could easily automate that. But the hardest part about you know Whimo is like the fine motor like oh slight object detection.

You want to scrape. You want to look out. A horse isn't just going to run into a a bicyclist. horse is going to see that and you know stop immediately.

Yeah, you do a horse in the loop, you know, the sort of interim stage where it's not fully autonomous and the horse the horse can take over, you know, you basically have an end toend neural network running in the horse's brain already. It's probably like GPT3 level. So, give it some credit.

Could he could could could be frontier. Could be frontier. Horses were often on the frontier. Horses have been on the frontier. They remain on the frontier. They are frontier models. They're frontier models in the in the horses. I think we're getting somewhere. We're getting somewhere.

I really do think you could train your horse to just learn your commute and just say, "Hey, take me to work. I'm going to take phone calls. " I mean, people were doing that for thousands of years. It's so Lindy. Let's bring it back. Let's bring it back. I'm going to daily a horse. I'm going to daily a horse.

One horsepower, maybe. One horse. One horsepower. Oh, it's so good. Anyway, uh what should we do, Sam? Less than data is oil. We should just have him on the show at some point. Talk about it. Yeah, let's let's have him on the show. He's He's yapping too much on here. I want him to just read it to me.

I don't Yeah, just come on and read it to me. I want to read your post. I want you to read it to me. Uh well, you know what? Uh Sam Lesson loves ads. Ads. He likes billboards. He loves billboards. And and to be honest, Lesson is going to love when people pivot from American dynamism back to ad optimization.

It's going to happen. And he's going to be ready to fund. Yep. Fund them all. Yes. Uh but head over to Adquome Advertising Made Easy and Measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

Only AdQuick combines technology, out ofome expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Get on adqu. com. Just do it. Uh Gary Tan had a funny early Palunteer story. He said they were doing some of their first sales meetings for Palunteer and team was all under 25 years old at the time.

They were staying at the Mandarin Oriental. We said, "Hey, this is a startup. Why are we wasting money on this? " Alex Karp said, "The people you're selling to will ask where you are staying, and we aren't selling Motel 6 software. We are selling Mandarin Oriental Software. " That's a great line. It's great.

Apparently Joe Moel said he was responsible for this. A lot of people are going to take this the wrong way and go and stay at the Aman. But um there's also, you know, probably other ways to accomplish accomplish this. But we we we're we're selling Ammon and Giri sports betting podcast.

Microtransaction riddle riddled mobile app games. Yes. Something like that. Mobile games. Uh I love this post from Salana.

If we can't do trains, we should at least do a big autonomous pod network on a special guardrailed 150 mph lane with cars the size of gorgeous sleeper carriages which link up in giant chains with elegant bars and restaurants on long haul drives across the country. This is so doable and so beautiful. I love it.

Uh I've been big on the tear down the speed limits. Uh I I firmly believe this is much easier than building new highspeed rail is just take down the speed limit signs and just have an American autobond and then put it in it's incumbent on the individual to drive safely. Cars are getting way safer.

They have autopilot now and lane keep assist. So if you're on a long drive and you can you can get a car that goes 150 miles an hour for like 50 50k, right? Like plenty of cars have like they go way up there. Yeah. Going super fast.

get like an '05 AMG and you're good and you're just cruising and it will actually cut the time the travel time in half. You can drive twice as fast. Have to get better brakes though. Yeah, they do.

But uh I think anytime AMGs are where it's at these days, anytime you see a car driving double the speed limit in traffic, it's always a Model 3. You're like, "Bro, I know the brakes aren't that good, but but going to Mammoth from LA and an E63, like a S63 just bombing. Can't beat it. 160, you get there twice as fast.

That's a drive that doesn't require people that's a drive that people have been known to to get there in in, you know, 60% of the time that Apple Maps, you know, says. I mean, it takes it takes uh it takes a lot to build something new in America.

a lot of permits, a lot of eminent domain, a lot of regulations, a lot of different consultants and legal battles, but just having a bounty for, hey, take down all the speed limit signs. It's now an autobond. Pretty easy. So good. Pretty easy. Uh here was the the post you were referencing earlier.

Wasteland Capital says, "It's still amazing that Buffett's crowning achievement was simple simply buying Apple in 2016 when Apple was already the largest company in the world by market cap. " Wow. And just adding and holding on to it. So good. Uh amazing.

So Berkshire with Apple 174% the S&P did 168% but without Apple they would have been at 142 versus the S&P is 168. But again people were saying like is it really fair to consider that because you know Apple's in the S&P so the S&P would be lower as well. But anyway still just like a good pick.

You know he didn't he didn't he wasn't too dogmatic about like oh I'm just a silver investor like I'm just a you know I mean for a long time he he was not anti-tech, but he just didn't fully understand it and then realized figured it out. They're selling candy in hardware form. I like this. I like it.

Candy Crush device. Candy Crush, the seas candy of mobile devices. Yeah, it's great. Uh this is funny. This is a funny uh post for a few reasons. It is by Unemployed Capital Allocator. Yeah, it is funny. And it's a screenshot.

Uh, unemployed capital allocator says from a friend, a capable analyst, the chasm has been crossed. 03 is significantly better than I at my job in almost every aspect. Uh, brutal, but not surprised. Uh, so your job is to just analyze a thousand times more companies. Yeah. And then you'll be fine. Scale it up.

Scale it up. Just do more queries than everyone else. Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Uh, I mean, this was interesting. I I had this up earlier and it didn't get into the stack, but I'll pull it up now.

Is it really that much different than just being like, "Yeah, Google is is like I mean there were people that were cells in individual spreadsheets calculating all day long. Excel is, you know, significantly better than, you know, somebody whose job was just to crunch numbers all day long. " And we moved forward.

We did more work, found more capital to allocate, more things to analyze. Yeah. Yeah. That's funny being like Excel is so much better at multiplication. I kept trying to put this to the to the AI people that would say like yeah, there's going to be serious unemployment because of AI.

Like okay, let's actually quantize this. Let's say over under American unemployment by 2030 is you think it'll be over or under 10%. Like we've been at above 10% before. It's not that crazy that high like 20%. Yeah. But America's always been at like routinely at like three and four.

And so the the question of, you know, will we actually see unemployment? Uh, still an open question in my opinion. Um, lots of people talking about, oh, I'm going to stop hiring, but we're not really seeing it in the data. Yeah, China still has urban youth unemployment at 16 and a half%. Who knows how accurate that is.

Pull this post up, Michael. I thought it was relevant to the last one. This is from the CEO of Fiverr. Okay. Yeah. You know, you have to imagine he knew this was going to leak. I think anytime a CEO sends a companywide email that's dramatic, they're probably expecting it to leak.

He says, "Hey team, I've always believed in radical cander and despise those who sugarcoat reality to avoid stating the unpleasant truth. The very basis for radical cander is care.

You care enough about your friends and colleagues to tell them the truth because you want them to be able to understand it, grow, and succeed. " So, here is the unpleasant truth. AI is coming for your job. Heck, it's coming for my job, too. This is a wakeup call.

It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person. AI is coming for you. Didn't didn't mention podcast here. So, um, you must talking about people that work at Fiverr or the Fiverr.

No, he's talking to corporate at Fiverr. You must understand that what was once considered easy tasks will, this is the part that's interesting. What was once considered easy tasks will no longer exist. What was considered hard tasks will be the new easy and what was considered impossible tasks will be the new hard.

If you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm not I'm not talking about your job at Fiverr. I'm talking about your ability to stay in your profession in the industry. And everyone's been saying this.

We've seen like three C's at this point. The part that's interesting is AI first organization. The part that's interesting here is uh digging into easy tasks will no longer exist. So if you're a marketing manager and the CMO is like, "Hey, we should put up a blog post about this regulation.

" That can now be done instantly. Five minutes. Yeah. Instantly. It It's not sort of a painful research and writing process. It's just sort of done for you. Hard task will be the new easy in that, hey, why don't you generate 20 new ads? Yeah, what should our strategy be?

Um, and then impossible tasks, I think, are these more agentic sort of mile, you know, complex uh sort of milestone based tasks. Um, but overall, it's interesting.

Um, I'm going to pull up the Fiverr uh Fiverr Fiverr is one of those companies that people identify as as a a company in trouble just given that a lot of their work is uh lower skilled uh sort of services.

little illustration, little cartoon or little blog post and that type of record a sound bite, you know, record a size gong. So you go size hilariously human in the loop for that one. I think that's Ben's voice, right? Yeah. Yeah. Ben is our Fiverr. That's Ben. He's like, "No, no, no, no. It's not even a Fiverr job.

It's not an AI job. It's not a Fiverr job. It's a full-time employee job. " Yeah, I know. But Ben's like Ben's like, "Ai, you're not taking my job. I'm making every sound bite. " We we tried to use AI for it and his voice was way better. Still, Ben's built different. We built different. Yeah.

Um advice I always give to founders, be present. Building a startup is very hard. Sometimes you just want to hide. But it's also an incredible ride working with and meeting great people. Constant growth, endless creativity, and working with this new technology that is changing the universe. Life goes by so quickly.

Don't run away from it. We only get to do this once. Take pictures. Take pictures. Look around. Yeah. Once if we're lucky, twice if we're good. Interesting. Be present. I don't know what the what is the opposite of that. Like how are you? I I guess sometimes you want you just want to hide. What does that mean?

Hiding from the organization, hiding from the world while you're building something. I don't know. I think I think it's one of those I'm not very into like meditation or anything like that. That's just because you uh always on. You're always on.

Somehow you don't follow any eastern, you know, sort of practices and yet you're one of the most present, you know, people I know. So, you're just built different. Uh but but I think this this is one of those things founders, you know, go through these periods of of excitement and euphoria and then pain.

And that pain is usually like the the classic is you know you have an idea you raise some money you launch it's euphoric and then and then you realize uh oh yeah it you know the reward for hard work is more hard work and uh even if you're you know even if you're you know Jensen Wong the the job is only getting harder every single day she met Jensen asked what brand his jacket is told meo.

There we go. I'm not surprised. Uh, but you know what's equally exciting and what was the word? Euphoric. Euphoric. Buying a watch on bezel. Oh, I was going to say I was going to say we missed Bezel. Go to getbzel. com. Buy a watch.

Anyway, uh uh we we can move on because we can also talk about numeral which is also euphoric. Sales tax on autopilot. Sales tax on autopilot. Many people I mean it really will allow you to have more time to be present as a founder. Yeah.

If you're if you're getting sucked into sales tax compliance, you're not going to be present growing. Yeah. Experiencing. If you're spending less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance, I mean, that's that's plenty of time hours back that you can be present and just in the moment. Exactly.

Full Rick Rubin mode. Just vibe vibing. Vibing. Vibe entrepreneurship. Uh what what else is there? Some uh some deep analysis of Grock 3. Did you see this? It's like uh they're doing deep deeper search in Gro 3 and one of the one of the steps that it takes is searching posts by Elon Musk.

The information I am looking for just seeing like, hey, has Elon said anything about this? Let's throw that in the results. I mean, he does post a lot. I mean, whatever he's posting is probably relevant. It's a good way to find fine tune the model. Yeah. On your CEO, not even hiding it. Very silly.

Um anyway, what what else should we talk about? Uh I thought this this post from Kari uh was uh quoting Dee uh founder of linear. DD says every single one of these companies was started uh by people from one part of the world and it's CLA, Cursor, Datab Bricks, Zenesk, Spotify, Linear, Public. com also.

Oh yeah, that's right. Scandinavia, Unity, the Nordics built different. Very interesting. And of course, linear. You think it's the weather because it's similar government as the southern states, you know, Italy and and Spain and Greece, but once you're on the French Riviera, no time to grind. You're chilling.

Yeah, it's tough. You're chilling. If you're in the Greek islands, you're not you're not putting in 20our days coding. That's the That's why SF just stays on top. It's not because OpenAI, you know, created the next trillion dollar company.

It's it's so Yeah, it's at times like the fog makes it so hard to want to be outdoors that you just want to create shareholder value.

Yeah, people were predicting that because of global warming it would lead to the downfall of San Francisco because it would get warmer, balmier, more people would just be hanging out in Dolores Park all day and Portland would become the new Imagine if imagine if AI was being built in Portland primarily.

the the the AI safety people just Oh, are you talking about the artificial intelligence company of Portland, the huge alpha there? Huge, safest AGI on earth. Um, this post, uh, praying for exits, uh, friend of the show, we should meet him. We should meet him. We should have him on the show sometime.

Uh uh actually honestly I feel like we can we can go out on enough of a limb and say it's possible. Praying for exits has been on the show. We've had so many guests it'd still be very hard to nail down. Um it's entirely possible.

Uh this email from Steve Jobs to Bruce uh who is uh Chisen who was the CEO of Adobe at the time. Uh Bruce, Adobe is recruiting from Apple. They have hired one person already and are calling lots more. I have a standing policy with our recruiters that we don't recruit from Adobe. It seems you have a different policy.

One of us must change our policy. Let me know who. Steve. That's so good. So hard. 64,000 likes. Prank for exits. Let's get it. Gigab banger. Gigab banger. No. So, apparently there was a whole lawsuit surrounding this around how Yeah, tech companies do this. It's like anti-competitive. It's totally anti-competitive.

Um, yeah. you're not supposed to do that. Uh and uh yeah, it's it's good for employees, I guess, if um market uh and say, "Hey, you're making, you know, a million dollars at Apple. How would you like to make $2 million at Adobe? " And then it's a bidding process. Yeah.

But, oh well, we have this we have this policy with other with other podcasts. So, we do. Yeah. So, sue us or don't. Um Alex Stap has a story about universal telling you about this. I didn't understand this to break it down. So, um, universal antivenenom may grow out of man who let snakes bite him 200 times.

I hate snakes. I'm Indian. You had a you had a you had a truly hate snakes. You had a snake interaction uh recently that we won't go into. Gross. Um, scientists identified antibodies that neutralize the poison in whole or in part from the bites of cobras, mambas, and other deadly species. He's 57.

Over 18 years, he injected himself with more than 650 carefully calibrated escalating doses of venom. Oh, okay. So, he didn't actually let them. Wait, no. He also allowed the snakes, mostly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in video, to sink their sharp fangs into him 200 times. Wow.

It's Yeah, he built the tolerance. This is poison resist. Yeah. This is what This is what did you in this weekend? Yeah. Everyone Yeah. You just too much of a thoroughbred. You're on the thoroughbred diet. If you're on the junkyard dog diet, nothing could I have poison resistance for everything.

Microplastics unaffected. I really I really it it really you're you're John's had this running joke on the show for those that haven't heard that like a single inorganic blueberry uh would would cause you to be sick and you know throw up and and all this stuff.

And then over this weekend I got food poisoning and no one else did. Yeah. Except Sarah who's also on the thoroughbread diet. On the thoroughbread diet. So awesome. There's something there's something there. You need to you need to build your poison resist, man.

Yeah, yesterday was so And like we were eating like lovely food, but there's probably something there that you weren't used to. Got me ridiculous. Gnarly. This bit of dare devilry, one name for it, may now help solve a global dire health problem. More than 600 species of venomous snakes roam the earth, biting as many 2.

7 million people, killing about 120,000 people, and maming 400,000 others. the numbers thought to be vast underestimates. Brutal. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, this guy's blood. Scientists have discovered antibodies that are capable of neutralizing the venom of multiple snake species.

So anyways, major sacrifice uh still kicking. And he says, "I'm really proud that I can do something in life for humanity to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away that I'm never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see probably. " And uh I hope he's monetizing this. That's all.

He went he really went through the ringer. But it sounds like he enjoyed it. Bit of a massochist. Um well, let's go on to Harvard. Their tax exempt status is to be revoked, says Trump. And uh Sheil, uh good friend of the show says, "Wild impact on our world.

Hearing from multiple funds currently raising that universities have paused allocations. Uh I had some ideas for how Harvard could get back in the good graces of the Trump administration. Do you have any takes? " I think step one is Harvard needs to prove that they're on the side of Trump.

They need to add division one bodybuilding. Absolutely. You know, they're known for they have a football team. They have crew. Oh, everyone knows. Oh, the the the um the you know, Harvard crew team, the the what's it called? The something on the Charles head of the Charles. It's really fancy. Uh crew race.

Uh but if they get into bodybuilding, I think that would be a big step forward. They should also get into pro- wrestling at the collegiate level.

NCAA pro wrestling but you know Trump has been in many Wrestlemania and if you could go full scholarship to Harvard as a wrestler junior wrestling not not the typical wrestling but the pro wrestling specifically. Um I think that'd be I think that'd be a big step up. Yeah. Anything else that they could do?

I think if they go for a profit, it might actually wind up maybe they don't allocate. Maybe they become build a high frequency trading option like start prop trading their own endowment. Why are they outsourcing? I'm sure they're pretty close to that already. They should just start leading series A's. Yeah. Just direct.

Just go direct, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this this is interesting. One um Bucky uh Yeah.

shared something recently about how one of the dynamics here is in many ways this will negatively impact net new funds or funds that are getting off the ground because Harvard would have already committed for the the major platforms the funds they're in it with for the long haul they're they're making commitments multiple funds out and so this is primarily I I doubt they're reneggging on existing commitments so uh don't worry light speeded A16Z general catalyst will will be okay.

You don't have to worry. We're going to make it through this. Mark German had some news. Apple is teaming up with Anthropic on a new AI powered vibe coding platform and is rolling it out internally to employees. It could come to third party developers in the future. Details and what this means. Um, interesting.

Makes a ton of sense. Uh, I don't know how familiar you are with iOS development, but it most of it happens within Xcode, which is not as it's not open source, so it's not forkable like VS Code.

And so it like you can't really I think most iOS developers if they're really serious they have to use Xcode or they get good at Xcode. And so uh to just not have a cursor competitor or a vibe coding option in that software is like really antiquated.

It's always been a harder harder IDE to use, but it makes a ton of sense they would team up with someone for this. Anthropic probably a good pick. So we'll see. No, it makes a lot of sense. Uh and there was other news. Claude is known as one of the best when it comes to programming.

Daria one says, "Nick, Apple is partnering with Anthropic. " Uh, very interesting. I wonder what the structure of that deal will be because most of like you don't think of Xcode as having like a consumption based pricing. It's something that just comes pre-installed with a Mac.

Look, Apple's Golden Goose the App Store is getting cooked right now. And uh I would not uh you know I I can imagine that Apple will find a make uh and Anthropic will find a way to make uh plenty of money on.

I mean in the similar vibe coding world the CEO of Windsurf uh went on the podcast if you think about it though like I'm sure that I don't believe that Apple anthropic vibe coding you know Xcode platform can make up for that what what may end up being a massive drop in app store revenue.

But it it is pretty funny to think about, you know, it's like, okay, like, hey developers, you're not going to give us our, you know, uh, 30% cut. Oh, we're going to handicap. We're going to charge you, you know, you can use regular X code, but if you want to use AI to code, uh, it's going to cost $100,000 a month.

That's great. Uh, well, Windsurf CEO uh, went on the white spotted in two polos. Sam uh, enjoyed the the fashion. I thought that was a fun little uh, Easter egg in his podcast. I don't know.

I don't know any any details, but I have to imagine that's the kind of move you make when uh you're very close to closing or or or a done deal. That doesn't it doesn't seem like a yolo move. You know, if if a deal were to not go through, I don't think the double polo is going to save it, right?

We're talking about billions. Although, he was very muted. I don't know if we should read into the shades and hues of the double polo choice, but it was nowhere near as as vibrant as Sam Alman's original double polo.

Maybe maybe it's more like a jobs not finished double polo versus he's like I'm I'm open to the really bright uh colorways, but we're gonna have to let's get to a billion ARR first on Yeah. Uh we have some personnel news.

Will Brown uh he came on the show what last week, the week before, told us that everything was great at Morgan Stanley. Then he completely rugpulled them and dipped immediately. No. Uh Will had actually known he was going to take off for a while.

Um and we got to have him back on when he joins the new company, which should be he's been just teasing it out. I don't think he's announced it yet. Let me let me double check. It's time for a new adventure. The ML research team there has been a wonderful home for the past two years.

I've learned more than I ever could have imagined about LLM's markets responsibility and how things work in the real world.

I mean, he's a very very interesting poster and and always brought a very interesting um unique perspective because he wasn't fully aligned with one of the labs um and and kind of had more 30,000 foot view at Morgan Stanley and I really enjoyed his takes and uh excited to continue following him on his career.

Total narrative violation that the finance guy wasn't extremely conflicted, but it was it was fun while it lasted basically. Yeah. Yeah. Um anyway, I think that's a good place to end. Thank you for watching. Uh, this is a great show. We really enjoyed it.

Wait, I got one last post because it is uh I'm gonna throw it in here. Michael, if you can pull it up. Uh, I think it's pretty funny. What is this post? Uh, VC's trying to figure out who Arurer Rock, who they are trying to figure out who he is. I invited him on the show anonymously. Thought he might uh do it.

We're not sure exactly when he will be able to, but I'd love to get him on the show anonymously. I would not dox him. I respect his from my friend Anish. Um, yeah, the the funny thing here is he kind of mis uh so Arford Rock sort of like misreported. Oh, he did. Replet's revenue. Okay.

He he called him at 40 million of ARR raising it two and a half to three billion which felt expensive. Yep. But then he had to show a followup uh graph showing that they added roughly 30 million AR in a month. Oh, okay. Okay. That's pretty good. So he had he he basically Yeah.

I mean that's the problem with those leaks is that a lot of times they're they're super out of date. Uh because you're getting you're getting docs that like oh yeah I they did send me a deck last year.

I passed it to somebody then that day pass it to somebody and then pretty soon it's like 8 10 months later when when that leak is happening and founders always get frustrated with that because they don't want to share any financials let alone old financials and so usually some horse trading but yeah what what is this image citizens?

I I don't get the reference. Do you? I don't get the reference either but you should because you're you're a big movie guy. Yeah, but not this time. I don't know. Yeah, but it it is interesting. Uh I've DM'd with uh Mr. Arthur. And uh I we we also talked him about him coming on the show.

It's just so hard because there's so much incentive for people to try to triangulate Sure. who he actually is. And eventually some skitso is going to do it, but for now it's it's very fun. Maybe there should be a poly market for it. Who is are for rock. Yes. You can list out a couple top candidates. Yes, that'd be fun.

Yes. Um I had a fun poly market. I'm tracking the trade war. I'm tracking the trade war and uh it's at a 19% chance that there's a US China trade deal before June and I said I honestly believe I could hammer out a trade deal in a weekend if I was in charge. What do you think Tori think?

You're you're good at at you know finding win-wins you know and uh that's kind of really what it takes. Step one, Cin Ping, let's get it lifted. Let's get it. See you at six. See you at six. Yeah, let's do it. I mean, that's really the chance uh the the the the right strategy.

The other one that's interesting um what else you tracking? I don't know when when did this uh screenshots ever ever since uh the double polo the chance of will OpenAI acquire Windsurf before August has just been steadily going up. So, the market Oh, okay. The market reacting very positively to the double polo into it.

Um it does feel like if the deal was falling apart, you would be like I'm not in a real like joking mood, right? So I feel like the read on the double polo is probably positive 68%.

But again August like the question that like the date is so important there because that could slip because a lot of people you know a lot of the open eye employees are very are very wealthy now and so they're probably getting ready to go on summer vacation pro usually starts like miday and they don't come back until what like August September October sometimes.

A lot of venture capitalists will be out for four or five months. It's actually going to be a big challenge for us at TBPN because most of our best yappers are going to be at the Amalfi Coast for five, six, summer vacation. We might have to set up uh you know a remote studio in the south of France. Yeah.

Just to make sure that we have some coverage, a dedicated helicopter to sort of take people between the boats to um or or potentially a water-based studio. Water based studio would be good. A boat would be uh would be very helpful. Well, anyway, uh it is fantastic to be back in the studio. It's great, John.

And we got to get out of here. It's going to be a big week for technology. It will be. Anyway, thanks for watching. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.