Ridge CEO Sean Frank turned down data broker offers and explains why — plus agentic commerce, TikTok shop, and the e-commerce macro

Speaker 2: here in person. Good to see you. How you doing? Woah.

Speaker 4: There we go. 99

Speaker 2: Those are the 99 Oh, yeah. It's the ones. Made America? Oh, okay. So wait. What do you... What did New Balance actually do? They just recreated the image. Oh, they just recreated... They've been selling that exact shoe for like thirty years. Okay. Okay. So there's... It's not new limited... It's definitely out of style

Speaker 4: right now. But it's still a fantastic pair of shoes. Dude, you say The beautiful thing with the nine nine two is like you can you can just wear the same pair of shoes over and over and over and for like five year periods. It'll be... Of your life, you'll be like, wow. I think it's just early. This guy Sean is this guy Sean is like, you know, he's got taste. One, I'm a style icon. Check it out, dude. I'm rocking the the Palantir tennis merch. But

Speaker 3: then their numbers just came out. I mean, they're they're privately held. New Balance will do $10,000,000,000 this Woah. So they're they're they're modern, the other shoe companies. Nike's going down. Yeah. Nike's in trouble. Right? I mean, HOKA just reported numbers. Horrible. Horrible quarter for HOKA and Decker. Interesting. Okay. I mean, ON getting crushed, but... It's getting crushed? Dude, these you say they're they're not cool, but a lot of people buying them. Yeah. That's not at least synonymously cool. Volume.

Speaker 2: A lot of people shop it on TMO. That's true. That's a hotbed of high fashion.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Deckers is an interesting interesting company. They have HOKA, which just went on this crazy run. Didn't they buy HOKA for like a few million dollars? I think it was under $10,000,000. Yeah. And now it does like billions a year. It's like a... 4,000,000,000... Yeah. 4,000,000,000 a year. Yeah. Crazy business. They have UGGs too, which again, kind of all these... When you when you can...

Speaker 3: When once you have an iconic silhouette, you actually have some type of durable revenue from it, but there's still this like crazy up and down. Yeah. And, you know, they got into slippers and like that had like a cool moment maybe, you know, 2020 or whatever. Slippers? Like the UGG slippers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Have a big crush with that. Okay. But they they used to have a bunch of other brands. It's really just those two now. Yeah. Like they they like they report all the other brands as just like other and it's a big category. Yeah. It's like Tiva.

Speaker 4: You remember Tiva's? Tiva's. Yeah. Talk about not being cool. Was like, yeah. Back in the day back in the day, if you had a pair of Tivas on a couple of Nature Valley bars and some construction paper, you could do anything. You could... You were ready to take on the world. Yeah. That's good.

Speaker 3: Who's putting up more FSD miles? You Tesla boys, Tesla fam... Oh, dude. You got a you got a Tesla? I capitulated. You know, he was texting me like talking

Speaker 4: mad shit. I was like, bro, you have to get a Tesla. It's so easy. I mean, I'm at like 95 percent FSD, maybe more, 98. You're higher? There's some bug in the software where it says I've done zero FSD miles, but I've done hundreds at this point. Interesting. The the one the one real issue with the Tesla is, like, having to charge your car in all these, like, super seedy places. Why are charging me? Because, like, gas... What are doing? How far are driving from? I went on a road trip Friday. I went to the new wave pool in Palm Desert. Okay. Okay. And there was no way... They they advertised the range. And, of course, they're like, well, don't charge the battery more than 80% because it's not good for the battery. Crank it up, bro. He'd do it anyway. Yeah. I I... I'm gonna do Of course. And so the problem is, like, gas stations have all this, like, super prime real estate. Yep. And the the supercharging stations will be in just, like, these, like, dark sketchy parking lots off the main road or whatever. So you end up like hanging out by your car just in like not the best places.

Speaker 3: Yeah. But now if someone tries to shoot you, you can you can drive off. That was a that was a feature they added. What do you mean? Like, if it's a Texa gunshot, it just drives? But you definitely don't wanna be in the car while it's charging. No. No. So it used to be you couldn't drive when it was charging, but now you can.

Speaker 2: Oh, you can you can just... Can move off. That's great. That's great. So it just rips out the... Yeah. That's crazy. The only Tesla charger I've seen is like at Harris Ranch up to five. And that's a very nice stop because you go in, you get a steak. It's great. Doesn't... Isn't the smell horrific? Not inside the restaurant. It sort of gets you ready for the experience of being an autograph. Back when I was a kid driving by driving by Harris Ranch. Yeah. You put on the circulation I

Speaker 4: would be the prankster in the back. Oh, you would roll down the window.... Child locks on, I would roll down the windows.

Speaker 2: Brutal. That's brutal.

Speaker 4: So you didn't sell your you didn't sell your data? You turned I it turned it down. What'd they offer you? 15?

Speaker 2: Some like 10? 5?

Speaker 3: I would I would maybe take that deal. You would.

Speaker 4: Hey. Hey. Hey. All the labs, this guy's got a price.

Speaker 3: I mean, we're 15,000,000. Yeah. Maybe. That was... Like, yeah, there's a bunch of companies now. Like, there's a viral post that Yeah. There's like four ads back to back. Like Yeah. All these different programs. I've been seeing the micro one ads for sure. And then I saw... I I... I've seen a few other people post about them. Are they a sponsor? No. No. Okay. Because they're... They have an aggressive affiliate program. I don't know if you guys were part of it or not. I'm not. In there. But there there... If you're willing to make an intro to a brand, they'll give you $50. So like as soon as I did that post about... 15? 50. 50. Yeah. For an intro to a brand. So I did that post and I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna sell. 50 comments being like, but if you do wanna sell, please use my link. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2: Interesting.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay. But yeah, $480, it just... It wasn't worth it. Okay.

Speaker 2: Why? Why? It seems like it's, you know, the the... I know I know it could be a Faustian bargain. We can get into that. But it's free money. It looks like free money for a lot of companies. Yeah. Mean a lot of... You know, historically

Speaker 4: throughout all of human history, people have said there's no such thing as a free lunch but AI is changing a lot of things. It's possible now that this time is different. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, if you get a bunch of cold emails from people all offering you 6 figures, there's probably something else going on. I mean, I'm sure you get, like, text messages and emails daily for, like, lines of credit too. Right? I can show you 50 of them after Yeah. There's so many. It's so annoying.

Speaker 2: What... But what what actually worries you about potentially selling data? Because right now, if I go to any LLM and I ask how much is Ridge doing in revenue, it will probably estimate that on things you've said on podcasts and, like, open web data. And then if asked to, you know, build a financial model that models the the margins, it might be able to get close with, like, first principles thinking like it's a McKinsey associate. But it's not gonna have the actual data. But if you sold the data and it wasn't deanonymized, it might actually wind up in the training data. Is that the fear? Or is it someone being able to go to an agent and just say, like, build me a direct ridge competitor. And it's like, well, you're in luck, buddy, because I got all the data. Is that it? Or what what what what makes it unsettling? I think, I mean,

Speaker 4: at a high level, it's like you run a business that does hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and taking Yeah. Taking $500,000 to risk any... To to to introduce any incremental risk. Right? There's already all this risk to running a business, you know, like Yeah. You're you're... You sell, you know, technology products now. Who knows where that market goes? You sell fat, you know, fashion apparel style products that again go through cycles and risking, you know, the golden goose for not even one egg. It's crazy.

Speaker 3: Yeah, dude. We're we're talking just like maybe an egg white out of that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not very worried about... Well, a couple things. Yeah. The first is, to Jordy's point, $480 is not that much money. Sure. Right? Privileged position to say that. I know a lot of people would love it, but, know, I could probably negotiate up to maybe a million, maybe 2,000,000 or whatever, but saying... King castle. King of the castle. It's just not gonna make that much of a difference in a year. Right? You know, we'll... We're up 50% this year. We're we're already doing You hundreds of millions of got any more? It's almost like it's just it's not that much money. Yeah. Number two, I think that the LLM platforms are gonna get the data anyway. Oh, sure. Because you're using that. Yeah. Like Right. You know, Codex is an amazing tool I use all the time. Yeah. Right? I, you know... I mean, if you're in the enterprise plan, they're they're not training on the data but there's still other ways that stuff gets... They're gonna keep adding features and it's like, if you just give me a little more data, hey, a little more data, you get gets better and better. Yep. You know, Astra is already amazing. Yeah. Like in two more version cycles, it's gonna run my entire business. Sure. Of course, it's gonna have all my data. Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, hey, we have to train to make it a little bit better. But, oh, sure. So I think they're gonna get it for free anyway. Yeah. Yeah. The third thing is... And there are other companies that have the data. Like Shopify has your data. Totally. And like they're... And like AWS, what might might store the data. And they just have different retention and what they can do with it. The the micro one offer, the data broker offer is like, we're taking the data and we can do whatever we want with it. Right? Yeah. And they do claim that it's no customer data. They're like, we're... Hey, we're not... They'll do d d inanominate...

Speaker 2: They'll run the de anonymizer.

Speaker 3: Right? Yeah. And they're like, you know... Anonymizer. There's probably some indemnity, so like you're not gonna get sued for selling your data or whatever. True. But still, it's like, look, if I'm getting random cold emails nonstop for $480, I think we're probably in the beginning of the AI AI wave. Maybe it's gonna be $4,800,000 in a couple of months. So you're holding out. Yeah. I'm holding out. That's... If you want rich data, go ahead and just email me, you know, $30,000,000

Speaker 2: offers. There go. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense.

Speaker 3: Do you know other companies that have taken it? Yeah. There's there's a whole list of companies that have taken it. I mean, look, it's been hard for consumer the past couple of years. Sure. You know, if you add in tariffs or whatever else is going on, like, you know, all the consumer brands are all like posting up negative growth if they're public. It's like, know, they're they're shrinking 3%. A lot of people would take that offer just to have some cash coming in. I wonder how valuable it actually is. I always thought that,

Speaker 2: like, the coding data was... Would be valuable, but the e commerce stuff, I I I mean, I guess they want the Slack as well, like how business processes run

Speaker 4: so then the models can... Yeah. Sometimes when I hear about a company that sold their data, I'm like, don't want their data in the models that I'm training the models that I'm using. Right? Because I don't wanna I don't wanna live like you.

Speaker 2: Dude, undoubtedly. Like right now, people are desperate to take that money, their business is probably not going great. So they're gonna have a big cohort of customers in the data that are just like, here's how not to run an e commerce brand. Yeah. But that could be valuable too, you know. There's a lot of Reddit comments that were down voted and that was like, oh, that one doesn't make any sense, or that one doesn't answer the question posed by the Reddit thread. Like, the anti signal is as valuable as the signal sometimes. Yeah. That's a good point. What about agentic commerce? Are you seeing traffic from Muse, traffic from Instinct, traffic from any of the AI platforms, yet it feels like with the Shopify integrations, you're set up to be one of the products this holiday season that gets suggested as if somebody goes in there and says, hey, I'm doing some Christmas shopping for my family or my husband or brother or something. You could pop up. Are you seeing anything yet? Are you anticipating anything? What's the state of that? Yeah.

Speaker 3: We've seen very little traffic start coming from agentic platforms. Mhmm. But LLMs still drive, I mean, an exponential growing part of our traffic. Sure. So like... And the conversion rate on those is just so so high. Yeah. You know, a conversion rate from a ChatGPT search is like 25% or whatever. If someone's clicking through, they're actually gonna make a purchase. But I do think it's a great time to be one, selling everywhere and then two, as big as possible. Because, you know, I do think Muse will end up, I mean, having 200,000,000 downloads or whatever. Like it's going to be, you know, super used and I think shopping's gonna be a huge use case. Sure. So being a top spender on Meta is incredibly popular. Like I think it's gonna make you more popular on the Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. You kinda get there for free. Yeah. And then Amazon... You're giving them so much data via the ads platform.

Speaker 2: It's not even just about like making sure your landing pages are discoverable to Muse because you've already have a relationship.

Speaker 3: Totally. Interesting. And what I've heard from people at Meta is that like they're not going to monetize it anytime soon. What they want to do is if they can just get people to like make like purchase conversions like happening inside that app, it's just something they couldn't have done, you know, and all the data they lost over iOS 14. Sure. Like it's just gonna make your ads perform that much better. And so if you're a big spender, you'll you'll get that data cycle started sooner. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. As as

Speaker 4: a brand, somebody that is selling products online and getting demand from a bunch of different sources, how do you expect the the economics to work out with these agents? Because like we've talked about this a bunch on the show and my my view is like, if an agent wants to have a high take rate, they have to be generating like new demand that wasn't already in existence because another you 30% from the humble e commerce operator. No. But like if you're running if you're running a bunch of meta ads and somebody gets excited about a brand... About your brand and then they go to their agent and say like, buy this product, I want it. Yeah. You don't wanna pay again to acquire that customer because you already effectively did. Right? They have to like understand their user well enough to suggest Ridge at a at a point in time where they're not already like, sold on the brand to drive, like, an entirely new customer.

Speaker 3: Yeah. What I think they'll end up doing is they'll try to eat from both ends. So, like, they're gonna keep the meta business, you know, where they're generating all this demand for you, and then how to actually monetize the agent, it'll just end up being payment processing fees in excess of 5%. Right? It's like Stripe is, you know, somewhere between a quarter of a percent if you're on debit card or, you know, 2% using an AmEx. I think they'll just say, hey, it's five or 7% payment processing through Muse. And maybe that stacks on top of the Shopify rates, so you end up losing 10% over there. But that way, they're just... They can get half of your revenue off of just making you spend money on ads and then also treating it like a payment processing app. So I think that's how they'll they'll maximize it because I do think they'll have a problem. It's like, how can you take more out of this? Yeah. And they'll just position it as a different percentage coming out of the same pie. And that would look like, in the Shopify payments, like dashboard, you would like turn on I'm accepting that payment at a higher rate just like stores can say, look, I don't... There's plenty of stores that are like, we don't accept Amex because it's a higher rate. Right? Yeah. Well, yeah. Basically, essentially, but like you can just turn on sales channels Sure. Like inside of Shopify. That would be one of those. It'd just be... Muse would be a sales channel.... Be a higher rate. And it'll just have its own fees tied to it. I wonder if they'll if they'll do that versus just trying to come in at the same rate as the

Speaker 2: as the credit cards. Like, we we we were talking to somebody who builds credit cards, like branded credit cards that are, you know, more tech enabled for, like, Kroger, for example. Like, you know, you go to Sears or you go to JCPenney, you get, like, their credit card. And we were thinking, like, well, it makes sense that, like, if an Instinct or a Muse had, like, their own credit card that they provision for you in the app, you apply to a credit check, you get it, you're paying it off, but then they're able to take the interchange fee and give you points or tokens based on what you spend or something like that. Well, know, Meta already has MetaPay, and I'm sure I can already put MetaPay on my Shopify store. Sure. So this would just be MetaPay with its own rates Yeah. Just in Muse, and the products are just served via Yeah. And they did a ton of legwork on that with the the stablecoin effort and whatnot. Like, they were they definitely were trying to get that going, but it never really broke through. I I mean, it sounds like you don't even have MetaPay enabled even though You don't... There's no downside to turning one more thing on. I guess it's the clutter.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And also, it's just... It's really hard to, like, get users to use a new payment method. Yeah. It's like, you know, Shop Pay is an amazing job forcing on everyone's phones. So it's like, you you take Apple Pay, you take Shop Pay, you take PayPal, you take normal credit cards. And then like, then there's all these buy now pay letter people all competing for ad space. And then it's really hard just to, you know, have another thing on there. Yeah. What about the other side?

Speaker 2: I think it was Eric Souffert or maybe Ben Thompson were talking about, like, one of, like, the no brainer but potentially, like, less sexy plays that Meta could make in AI would be an AI agent for dealing with the ads manager. And I know that a lot of people... You probably have hooked up a variety of AI agents to the...

Speaker 4: But isn't the ads manager all... Already just like an AI agent for getting you to... Is it just a black box or do you actually need

Speaker 2: a layer on top of that? Well,

Speaker 3: Manus, one of the main use cases Yeah. That they rolled out Yeah. Was we're gonna be the agent for It's pronounced Manus. Yeah.

Speaker 2: It's Bill Gurley. Is that Bill Yeah. Yeah. And like... Yeah. That made so much sense. I mean, Jordy was was super excited about that.

Speaker 3: And when you you logged in, it said we can run your ads for you. That was like the first call. I was like... Yeah. They they... Like there was a bunch of calls trying to roll that out. Had to roll it out, but they're definitely spinning it up again. But, yeah. How much of a headache internally

Speaker 2: is managing the ads manager?

Speaker 3: Every year they remove some features. I mean, look, it's still a... We have three full time people at Ridge whose job is is manning... Managing the ad account. Wow. And that is getting new creative in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's understanding what's going on and looking at the data. Yeah. It is... You know, there's third party tools. Like, we use Northbeam or whatever else. Like, it's it's moved past just being and looking at the ad account. Sure. Sure. Sure. But, yeah, I mean, it's it's a fucking pain in the ass. It always crashes. Yeah. Right? It'd be so great to to just eventually... Meta's vision is like they want to fire their sales staff and just like you give them a big bucket of bucket of mucking and then they find your customers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it does feel like it's a ways out, Jordy. What's the state of

Speaker 4: e commerce like infrastructure as a category? Does it still feel investable?

Speaker 3: I don't think a lot of people are investing in it right now. Does that make it a good time to invest? You know, it's hard to say. Like e commerce enablement, like e commerce, like widgets or whatever. Right?

Speaker 2: Like the site builders probably got steamrolled by Yeah. Some shotted pages. Even

Speaker 3: large companies who have, you know, like post scripts of the world, I think they're staring in the future being like, I don't know what's coming and I don't know what to build. Right? I've I've made a couple investments in like e commerce tools that like I think are really cool and like AI enabled right now. Yeah. But I just think, you know, if SaaS is feeling a pinch, e commerce SaaS is for sure feeling a pinch. Yep. Right? Yep. E commerce already isn't cool and then SaaS is super uncool right now. It's just... It's a very ugly time. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.

Speaker 2: What what else are you seeing on people actually using AI internally to run operations? Like last time you were saying maybe demand planning had sort of evolved in the AI era. Is there anything else? I know creative was sort of early early glimpses,

Speaker 3: but where are you getting leverage these days? Dude, every model gets better. Yeah. So I mean, demand planning, I think, is totally solved. Okay. Project management, task management, totally solved. Yeah. The data and analysis, I think, is totally solved. Yeah. I just did my q three reporting and it's three prompts. Right? Because all the MCBs are are set up. Yeah. Like, I have all the data flowing in Yep. To like my my harness of choice. And then three prompts, I have my full q three report. Yep. Right? So finance is gonna be totally solved. Sure. And then creative, I mean, it's there. Right? If you go into any Facebook ad library, I just think like It's all AI. We're still paying a lot of, you know, humans to make, you know, UGC for us. Sure. Right? And we have great, you know... We're blending that in with other stuff. Yeah. And it's really the the humans are just good at scripting and concepting. We're way more a bit being on the cutting edge than a model. But actually comes with visual production, the models are all there. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Is there...

Speaker 4: It feels like we're headed to a point where, like, a human will still have a great idea for an ad concept, but then agents and... Will will run and just, like, clone it really quickly? Because we've seen this already where, like, if you guys create a great ad concept, I'm sure a bunch of other brands will, like, mimic it very quickly, and then you'll run it for however long it works, and then you have to find the next one. Is that is that happening already where you can... You basically just have agents trawling all the different ad accounts, finding what's working, and then and then running their own tests? Yeah. And that is like a new a... Like version of ecommerce software that's rolling out. Right? Like it's,

Speaker 3: you know, we call it like an ad strategist, like an... Or a creative strategist, but like the AI version of that and they are just going across what's trending on TikTok right now or what are your competitors having their ad account. And there's pulling... Because Facebook ad library is open. It's like they're pulling all that stuff in Yeah. And then giving you a million concepts. But it's still humans are coming up with the best concepts, and then it's just replicating it via AI. Yeah. What do think of those

Speaker 2: AI slop ads that actually ship you the physical slop? I saw somebody saw an ad for... It was a a pool floaty in the shape of a tank that would allow... It came in like a squirt gun and you would, like, spray the water around and it looked super fun and he bought it and it was very like Tmu and it barely worked, but but they did actually ship it. Have you seen any of these? Is this like a larger octopus like superstructure or is this just like independent people? Do you... Have you traced any of this stuff down yet? Well, there's always been shitty drop shippers. Okay. Right? This is like that on steroids, basically. Yeah. And it's just it's just that with more rapid better ad creative. Yeah. Because the whole problem with, you know, the drop shipper is you try a thousand brands. Yep. Like literally in like a... In a month, you might try a thousand different products Yep. Different websites. Yeah. And then you'd find one that works. Yeah. And this is... Now it's just way easier to do it. You can get better creative. Yeah. But that person should be lucky they actually shipped it because Yeah. There's a whole, you know, culture of just no shipping. No shipping. Just like... It wasn't about the Escobar phone. I think that that Yeah. Never shipped. And there's people there's people on Twitter who sell courses teaching you how to no ship. No ship is a term for it. It's like you're just stealing. It's insane. What about the macro? I'm interested in how... Are... Is inflation top of mind for you whatsoever? Is that something you think the models can actually help you grapple with? Like, what is the optimal pricing? Should you raise prices in a time of inflation? Like, a lot of the rich history has been during low inflation periods. We're now going into higher inflation, but the journal is pretty optimistic. The mighty American consumer is crashing through inflation and driving growth. So spending doesn't seem to be down, but every company has to deal with inflation one way or another. Right.

Speaker 3: Look, nothing has broke the American consumer. Like, since, you know, 2008 Yeah. With the American consumer spends. So... Yeah. Well, that being said, look, as long as you have sales coming in, as long as like you have great new products, I think you'll be able to to win in this economy. But if you do look at the S and P 500 and you remove out AI enabled companies and just look at, like, discretionary consumer, sales are going to be down probably an average of 5% this year, If it's the Nikes, the Lululemon, there's very few e commerce brands or brands in general crushing it right now. Yep. So I think, look, we're gonna have a great year. We're gonna continue to grow. I think customers are really happy with what we're doing. I think more... There's a lot of stories like that. But the macro level is like, you know, Aura... I talked to JPMorgan that day that that IPO got pulled. Yeah. There was like, you know, full teams working on that. There's people on the floor about to get rich and they pulled it back because... It was like four x oversubscribed.

Speaker 2: Which is low. I know it's low, it's still like they they had filled the order book. Like Yeah. They did their job and that... And that's a lot of people that they were coordinating with, you know. It wasn't like it wasn't like, oh, no one showed up. Were There lots of people who were like, oh, I'm getting shares today, you know. Yeah. So like all that work was on the finish line and they pulled back. I think it's because like,

Speaker 3: dude, Nvidia just posted the greatest quarter in human history. It's like, why the fuck would I wanna invest in that or Reformation or Lululemon for that matter? Yeah. Like why... So I just think on the business side, the businesses are more adorable than ever. I think they're going fantastic. But, you know, if you want to do an exit in the next twelve months, I don't think it's happening. Yeah.

Speaker 4: What's going on with live? How is... And specifically TikTok, how how is TikTok changing at all, you know, post acquisition? Feels like we're what? Oh, yeah. Nine months out from Skydance. Maybe six. But... Yeah. Look,

Speaker 3: TikTok is actually going, you know, phenomenal. I think there's... The current playbook for e commerce brands is you find a bunch of great TikTok affiliates. Okay? You incentivize them with high commission rates, but also a percentage of ad spend. You have them make a bunch of great creative, and then you run that creative everywhere. And it's just a way that like overnight a brand can have a thousand people making great content for them. Like we have a Discord full of people making great content for us. So like our TikTok shop revenue is in the 6 figures, but it enables growth on Amazon and everywhere else. Sure.

Speaker 4: 6 figures annually?

Speaker 3: No. Per month. Okay. Yeah. Which is which is... We're like a top 50 TikTok shop brand. Like we're we're we're doing a good push there and I think it's working out. But like the spillover is what it's all about. Sure. With that being said, you know, that's really just like this creative flywheel aspect. It's like getting like all of these videos and posting them. You know, you asked about live in particular. I've... I was talking to TikTok. They know like live premium shopping isn't gonna work in America, but like they're experimenting with new models, which is like auction. Right? So if you... Why do they know that? They just looked at the data and they're like, this doesn't work. They keep trying it and like, you know, they always went to Vietnam as like the success story. Like it does work in Vietnam. But like, there's thousands of people who do it full time in Vietnam who make an average of $500. And to like have a full time US salary be a livestream shopper, the GMV has to be so big off those livestreams that like the math currently isn't working. Yeah. But it is working for auction. Right? So like a whatnot competitor. Like Yeah. If you go on TikTok live right now, there's people opening up Pokemon cards and auctioning it off, and they're very excited about that. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 2: This AI influencer, the boxer Jean Philanthrope

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Seen this guy? Dude, there's a whole there's a whole network of them. They're all... It's all Hicksfield. There's a whole network of them. Do

Speaker 2: you think... I mean, the the the end of this story was like you dropped a coin on pump fun sort of boring end. But do you think that there's a world where brands will partner with AI generated influencers or potentially even incubate their own AI influencer? Is there a world where you just you just say, okay. We have this specific target market. Let's work backwards from the content they wanna see, and let's do the Higgs Field thing and have someone run this whole process from start to finish. And this person will be like an in house, you know, content creator.

Speaker 3: Yeah. But I I would challenge that like Yeah. I wouldn't call this person influencer. I'd call it like, you know, content. Yeah. Like... And your four year feed is just a content feed. So Yes. Like, you know, don't think anybody's following this person and like being like, oh, I really wanna be like the AI boxer guy or whatever. But I just think we're gonna see way more unique AI content coming Just like... It's gonna be an explosion of it. I guess the question is like, do you think the

Speaker 2: do you think the number of different faces in Ridge content will become more concentrated or less concentrated over the future? Because you could potentially go to a world where every ad has a different person in it because you're able to either hire or generate a different character. Or you have really like four archetypes and there are four characters and they're consistent across years of content. And you keep seeing like your Steve who's like the avatar of this particular cohort.

Speaker 3: Do you have a do you have a read on which way it'll go? I mean, it's it's hard for me to say anything but like yes and. Yes and. It's gonna be both. Like, you know, right now, half of our ad spend on our ad account goes to videos featuring Marques. I'm sure. Right? So MKBHD co owner of the brand. Yep. But then told I you about that I have a thousand TikTokers making videos. Sure. That altogether, they get probably 20% of my ads. Yeah. So it's like a barbell. Yeah. So it's like, you know, if you can still have a celebrity, a famous person in there, like Sure. That can drive like a bunch of, you know, traffic to you. Yeah. But then also, it's like people do just want... You can't beat the open mind, just the crowdsource nature of thousands of videos, thousands of content. They will find the best hook. Yeah. You just have to get that done. And that'll just be done with AI. Yeah. And I'm thinking like there is a there is like a it's a very tight rope to walk as a brand. Like, you could imagine

Speaker 2: David Protein Bar having an AI version of the David, like the sculpture. Totally. Because the sculpture could come to life and talk and like educate you about the product. But that would feel off brand right now based on where they've gone with that brand, at least to me. And I feel like there might be some pushback to that. There might be some some reticence to, like, embrace, like, the idea of, like, a truly Tilly Norwood, like, AI

Speaker 3: front person. But do you... I mean, to your first concept Yeah. Like Ridge would for sure sponsor a content creator who expresses himself via AI avatar. Sure. Sure. Sure. It's really like there could be a content creator who has a thousand AI avatars and they make different videos and they have different stories or whatever. Like, that would just be another content account response. Yeah. It's sort of happening with like Burnt Peanut.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This live streamer and uses like sort of a graphics layer. It's not fully AI. VTubers in general. VTubers. Exactly. And so, yeah, the VTuber market. Interesting. Anyway.

Speaker 4: What are what are the kind of marketing opportunities that you guys are debating internally? Because I feel like at Ridge scale you could be thinking about making everything from making a push into IndyCar to working with like, you know, truly tier one athletes, you know, global superstars. How do you how do you think about, you know, trade offs and where you should be investing money? What kind of bar something has to clear instead of just going and working with like the next thousand TikTok creators?

Speaker 3: Yeah. So like the masses are always going to be there. We're always going work with a ton of YouTubers, like a ton of podcasts. Like, we're always going to have those partnerships going because I think like there's just lots of groups of people that you can miss if you just do TV ads or meta ads or whatever. But like, look, at our scale, you know, a Super Bowl commercial's in play. Right? You know, we just did a campaign with Tony Hawk and it's like, okay, how do we make that bigger and better for next year? Like what's the next celebrity we want to bring on board? But yeah. And then, and then eventually it's, you know, probably by the end of next year, it's like in store activations, meaning us having our own stores. That's probably like the the path to any of these brands. Like how do get to 1,000,000,000 a year in revenue? It's like mass campaigns, celebrities in them, and then opening a bunch of stores.

Speaker 4: Could a modern department store, will the department store ever be reborn? Because when I was getting my Tesla charged at a CD location on Friday, I had to go into the department store to use a restroom because Tesla chargers stations don't have, you know, amenities like that. And I was walking around and I was like, I haven't been in one of these in probably ten years but it's pretty cool that like there's a bunch of little zones in one store with different brands and they get their sort of owned experience. But it feels like the current generation of shoppers or the new generation of shoppers just doesn't really have that muscle. They have the muscle of like, I like this brand. I'm gonna go to their dedicated

Speaker 2: retail store or I'll go to... Kids whose days don't want to be mall rats. That's what you're saying. It's not even malls. It's like, you know, the the... Oh, yeah. I guess the department store specific. Yeah.

Speaker 3: The the curation aspect. Yeah. Look, think there's definitely a place for it. I I mean, it's it's not breaking news that like department stores are at the very bottom that they've ever had. Right? Yeah. Like Nordstrom could take them private. Like they're probably the the shining example of a good department store nowadays, but they still had to close a bunch of stores. And then their business is just supported by their off price, their rack business. Yeah. I think it could be done, but like the real estate economics are what fuck you up because people want the Century City Mall. Like big, vibrant, outdoor, beautiful. But like to develop that was probably a $5,000,000,000 project or whatever. Right? So how do you get enough space where you can make it as elegant as it needs to be while also making everything pencil? It's why like, you know, Japan sells a bunch of department stores and I think Europe does this better than The US. It... It's it's Lindy. Like like it's not going Like go it'll... It can make a move, but we're gonna open our own source. I think it's easier to control your faith that way. Yeah. Well, good luck. Guys. Thank you so much, Let's...

Speaker 2: You're you're coming up to hang soon. Alright. Nice weekend. We'll see you then. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.