Kris Marszalek bought ai.com for $70M, turned down a $500M flip offer the same day, and launched with 300K Super Bowl signups

intelligent model yet, state of theart reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. [music] And we are going to bring in Chris from Crypto.com. He's in the reream waiting room and now he's in the TBP Ultradum. Chris, good to meet you.

What's happening?

Nice to meet you guys. How are you? Thanks for

I love the background. The logo is looking great.

Is that real or is that AI?

It's totally made up. [laughter]

Well,

I was like, it feels feels pretty quick to have, you know, the actual

design. Manufacturing it takes time. Well, take us through the thesis for AI.com. Wait, before we Yeah. Before we get into the Super Bowl, like let's let's maybe rewind to maybe probably a year ago. You see a domain on the market. I think they had been trying to sell it for a while, I imagine, and uh you came in as a buyer, but walk us through that whole

journey. Yeah, I bought another domain and the agent who was brokering this um told me about AI.com being um you know in a process of of being sold if you will. So I immediately recognized the importance of it and just jumped on it. Got on the phone the same day.

Um got the deal done. We shook hands. Um there were some ups and downs through through the

through the process, but we managed to uh to get this done. uh you've had some good success buying uh buying iconic uh domains. What did you pay for Crypto.com? Have you ever disclosed that?

I don't think we ever did, but we paid $12 million.

Wow.

And I I would argue that that was um a more difficult decision, if you will. We were a small company back then.

Um $12 million was about a third of our capital.

Wow. And it was bang in the middle of the 2018 bare market. So people were discussing whether crypto is going to survive or not. [laughter]

Yeah. The person selling it to you was like probably like this guy is

I'm so glad to be washing my hands [laughter] with this.

Of course. Of course. You uh ended up ended up looking

it's on the Staples Center. I drive by it all the time.

Um okay. So yeah, you you see this domain is on the market. Do you have any idea what you wanted to do with it at the time of acquisition or did you just think that hey this AI thing is probably pretty important? Maybe I should own AI.com. Oh

look, we um we were building products ever since Chad GPT launched and uh playing with uh consumerf facing side but also internal tools. So constant experimentation. Um and the vision from day one was uh you know we want to build a consumer product. We believe that you will have four billion people having personal assistance that should play the role of kind of a chief of staff for your entire life with uh with great context um being proactive getting things done for you rather than just chatting. So the vision didn't change from day one. Uh, and then yeah, I guess fast forward, how did you how did you proc before we get into the kind of Super Bowl and that whole strategy, how did you how did you process kind of the open claw launch? It sounds like you guys are integrating the uh are you building

some of those patterns at least?

Yeah, at least some of those patterns. Are you kind of forking the project? Talk about that. So as we started building this product about mid 2025, it was never just it just didn't click. It didn't have this you you couldn't pass the uncanny valley. Uh and I think the pivotal moment where we started seeing this change is Opus 4.5 release. it started working much much better and uh we obviously saw cloudbot going live and adding some elements of their architecture to it. I think it gets it done in terms of how it feels as a product. You just need to solve a whole litany of issues to make it consumer friendly like how do you set it up without being technical, you know, the security issues around your data. This those are serious serious issues when you want to bring something to the mass market. So uh I think we've uh we're combining everything that we've built over the last say 8 months into something that we can roll out to the end users and we're starting doing this tomorrow.

Wow.

Tomorrow. Okay. Uh before we get into the product and kind of more the vision, let's fast forward again to the uh to the Super Bowl specifically. How did that how did that all come together? it it felt like it was coming together quickly, but we know we ran a much much smaller ad. We ran a regional ad. Uh you do have to lock these things in ahead of time, but uh walk us through the process of kind of preparing uh and then experiencing uh the the Super Bowl Sunday.

So, I bought the domain in April.

Um the deal closed and we got the domain successfully. So, I'm like, "Okay, we need to launch this and it deserves um a global stage and in May we were one of the first companies to actually buy the spot.

Oh, no way.

Wow.

At that at that time we had just the domain and idea what do we want to do with it but the product didn't exist.

Mhm. Um, and you know, I I know that we only have one shot to get this done uh correctly, and I didn't want to release the product until I felt that it's there uh for the end user.

Uh, you know, these things uh you need to be able to develop an emotional connection with the product in order for this to be sticky and retentive. Uh, so [clears throat] I only made a decision that we actually gonna pull the trigger on this um a couple weeks ago and that's why the ad feel felt like it was, you know, quickly put together. It was quickly put together.

So you bought So you bought the Super Bowl spot on Crypto.com if you wanted to.

Yeah. What was the idea? Like, hey, if if we don't run it for AI.com, we have the Crypto.com ad ready. We'll just run that. We have the crypto uh business, we have a prediction markets business, you know, we could do there's always some level of optionality, right? Um but this is the moment to run an AI ad as you guys have seen. It is

and and and and timing is really important in life. You know, scale, timing, and combination of these things.

It's a good reference.

Uh okay, so you put the ad together in effectively two weeks and then you run it and what happens then? Because I think you got you got the the attention from buying the world's most expensive domain ever. Then you got the attention of like, "Hey, there's this new AI product I've never heard of with a crazy domain running a Super Bowl ad. Should pay attention to it." And then you got a whole another kind of amount of uh of attention from people being like, "Wait, I just got an ad for AI.com and I landed on the website and it's not and and the website's down." So, what what what what kind of happened?

[laughter]

uh did you uh you spent the the 70 million on the domain, the 8 million on on these spot and then you didn't have enough for to host it or [laughter] what uh what happened? I'm assuming a lot of people got through but certainly a lot of people got uh got stuck as well.

Yeah, I think we are happy with the outcome.

Okay,

we had about 300,000 people signing up.

Wow.

Wow. Let's go.

That's a lot.

Can we get the gong? Can we get the gong,000 signups? Yeah, there's been a lot of big numbers.

That's a big number for a one day for a one day. Um, but uh on a on a on a more serious note, how did you uh how do you even prepare for that that amount of traffic? Like how do you how do you what was going on in the war room?

Guys, you know, we've uh we're on a platform that is used to spikes, right? Um, and we've got a great DevOps team and we've got all the stuff that you usually would expect, autoscaling and whatnot. So, there were intermittent problems for some people, but largely it held up.

Uh, so I I think fundamentally it's the name and the fact that there's a certain element of curiosity there and we designed it in a it was a very simple call to action.

Go and um and sign up. Yeah.

Um, so I think it worked. Yeah, talk to me about consumer AI. Chachi PT has broken through Gemini and Google, they've been leveraging, you know, the Google platform and the network to onboard consumers. Nano Banana was a big moment. Sora and the Meta Vibes app sort of made a splash but haven't been super sticky. Uh where do you see the gap in breaking through with consumers in a new way or just doing what consumers already expect but better, cheaper, faster? Like where is the consumer AI opportunity now that we're three years into the chat GPT boom?

I think fundamentally you're able to actually get stuff done uh right now. So that's a big differentiating factor for the user experience. Um and we don't really know where this experiment is going to take takes us uh given the how the domain is um is resonating with people you know we can introduce uh social network elements to it. I think the fact that every single person um on earth is gonna have an assistant of this sort

can unlock new type of interactions and and you know make our lives just better through serendipity advice staying on top of things and being proactive really understanding us. So it's

I'm pretty pretty excited about the wandering aspect of it. We try to keep an open mind and not really be set on one thing. We will uh we now have 300,000 people waiting for us uh to give them the product. Uh we're going to very quickly iterate on it. I'm a huge believer in moving quickly and

and and listening to actual customers and we will see where the journey takes us. I take a very long-term view.

Uh you know what can we do with this in 10 years? It's I think it worked in the crypto space and

the opportunity here the size is much much bigger.

Yeah. So much of what happened in crypto was sort of permissionless you know uh bankless uh this opensource these networks anyone can set up a node and part of this latest uh open claw clawbot you know hype cycle is driven by the fact you like you get a Mac mini it can talk to iMessage it can talk to WhatsApp it can talk to telegram it can go sort of wherever you go as a person and that feels unique because maybe openi can't go over to WhatsApp because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to let him. And so I'm wondering about how you're thinking about the trade-off between certain things that are only possible with an open-source AI system that is sort of acting as an impostor as a human versus you're a company. If you want to integrate with WhatsApp, you might have to give Meta a call. So, how do you think about delivering the vision of like a truly universal AI agent that can do things with the realities of the business community?

Yeah, there are a lot of um business and UX challenges here.

Yeah.

So, um we'll have to resolve them one by one. Sure. And our our view is we want to stand on the side of the consumer and help them make the uh these you know technical choices uh make sure that their data is safe make sure that they can do what they want to do without putting themselves at risk and solving these issues with uh with access to data with with user experience it cannot feel like a chore.

Mh.

Uh you know today you need to be really technical to get value out of it. Mhm.

So there's plenty of work and it's difficult and that's part of the opportunity.

Yeah. One of the uh uh some unrequested feedback for me, I had kind of heard that AI.com was like potentially something like some type of uh uh rel you know leveraging some open claw technology and then I got hit with a Google login and I was like I don't have time to read through kind of the the full terms of service and privacy policy and really understand. So, I would love to see I mean maybe there's plans for it, but I'd love to see just like being able to create account an account on the platform totally to play around with it just because I was looking at my Gmail which my life is on my work email which obviously uh you know has its own

privacy concerns all that stuff. Um what you're you said you're rolling out the product tomorrow. What's the first thing that you want people to do with it?

I think this is the big part of the product. uh figuring out how do you onboard people to it and get them to do a couple of things so that they can see value very quickly and connect with it. I think

uh I think today it's pretty hard to um to get the feeling for what it can do without really connecting your email and calendar.

Yeah.

Um we will see. I I feel that there's going to be a lot of experimentation there and we will look for user feedback and and truth in data in numbers of what really works and what doesn't. uh to a certain degree you need to gify it until such point where uh where users are deep enough that it actually gives them the feeling of like wow this is special this is different

yeah yeah that gamification is so important like you see the studio giblly moment where you know the latest images in chat GP launches and you don't even have to think you just have something in your camera roll and you're going to type studio gibible and you're going to get the value prop and then a couple months later you're still going to be go in there for slide inspiration and stock photography and all the other things that you can do, but there's a killer app on day one that you come in and you and you get joy out of.

Uh, did you ever talk to the original owner of ai.com? I heard he sat on it for 30 years because his initials, his first and last name, his first name starts with A, last name starts with I, so he had like bought the domain. Wow.

I'm shocked that he held on to it for so long. You would think like IBM Watson IBM Watson in like 2010 would like we'll give you a million bucks for it. But uh

he held on.

Look uh we spoke um on the day when we closed the transaction because he had a it was a little bit of a bidding war. He had a very serious bidder on the other side and uh it required um

connecting in order to get it done.

That's good. Your deals. By the way, and and by the way, um right after um we closed the deal, I got approached for the from the other side offering 500 million plus, not for 500 million for the domain. I think I could have pushed it to a billion uh if I wanted to, but I didn't want to. So, I think you guys need to you guys need to understand I am pot committed.

I love it. I love it. You are committed. I love I love that you're just thinking you're you're viewing this like obviously you're taking it very seriously but you're also taking the approach of like it's very early days

in you know uh what will be a long journey for for the project but also the industry and

uh you're just going to you know listen to your users and figure it out but the conviction to turn down what would have been turning 70 million into uh 500 or a billion in in 24 hours is uh is admirable. Will you train a foundation model? I

think I'm more focused on getting this to scale and getting the data flywheel going so that we can deliver for our users. Our users don't really care about which model runs in the background as long as the job gets done and their data is safe. Uh but once you get to a certain scale, who knows?

Anything's on the table. I like it.

Well, I'm sure you'll be back on.

That's very

I'm excited to see this roll out and uh

I'm signing up tomorrow. I might be using a dummy Google account, but I will be signing up and testing this out. I'm excited. And then I'll slowly forward myself data for my real account to give you a little bit more a little bit more to see what it can do. But I'm excited for for uh for uh for the launch tomorrow. And congratulations. uh I mean a fantastic career but also uh this particular project really really fun execution and a wonderful story. So thank you for coming to church.

Do you come you you're basically the mayor of of Los Angeles through the through the crypto.com arena. Do you do you come through much?

You're a Lakers guy.

Um I've been uh in DC last week and then I stopped over in Silicon Valley. I have never been to the arena.

Never been to the [laughter] arena.

Wow. You got to come sometime. Catch a game. Um, maybe we should uh catch a game.

Yeah, they also do monster truck rallies there. Underrated Crypto.com Arena experience, especially if you have kids. Big monster truck guy. I'm a big monster truck guy. I don't really follow basketball that much, but I will be watching Gravedigger live on the Crypto.com Arena. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

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