YC Demo Day, Spoon = Bent (Again), iPhone Duo Reactions | Garry Tan, Om Buddhdev, Karen Serfaty, Antonio Li, Edward Ge, Alfredo Gonzalez

0:00You're watching TVPN. Today's Thursday, September 10th, 26th. We are live from the TVP in El Trigón, the Temple of Technology, the Forges of Financial Capital. Every time I see the road to Christmas I laugh, how many days we got, Jordy? 105 days. 105 days to Christmas. Get ready. Let me also tell you about ramp.com. They're making a musical or Broadway play. Time is money saved by all these. You use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. We're getting to the story, but awesome, awesome stunt. It also looks like it's a musical about ramp bill pay, specifically I like that it's not just about the corporate entity. It's the sub product. It's one skew. You got to be making whole Broadway plays about single skews for your company. No, they got billies, they got a bunch of really talented people working on this. I think it's going to be really fun. The teaser trailer dropped on Eric Lyman's ex account today, but it's going to be fun to watch that project.

1:02Unforal. Very cool. Well, should we do a little bit of a news roundup? We have a white commentator, Demade, going on today. We got Gary Tan coming on the show. 11.25. Then we're going back to back with five different startups that are in this YC batch, doing everything from humanoid robots to satellites to AI agents and credit cards. We're going all over the place giving you a tour of what's going on in the startup world, which I personally enjoy because it's a good way to sort of ground yourself in what's happening in the early stage. There's so much discussion about what's going on among the big labs and Apple, obviously, in the news yesterday. It can be all encompassing. But the big story. Time to talk. What do you want to talk to? What do you want to talk to? Talk to the future of the next one. No, that's really what it gives you a little bit of insight into what things are going to look like in a decade. Some people don't think we're going to be here in a decade. They don't. But that's one of them.

2:02Never Blackpill. I saw a good post this morning. What does that say? Jo-shah box. If you think AI will lead to human extinction by 2030, I will take that bet. If we are still alive by December 31, 2030, you pay me 1 million USD. If not, I will pay you 10 million USD. That's a good joke. Take it. There's a lot of people out there that should take the bet, I think. Bye. That's the whole joke. No, I know. Yeah, I mean with a lot of these, the arguments break down. A lot of things break down. It's also just so difficult to put a P-Dume over time because you have to time-bound it because, you know, General scientists will say humanity will go extinct eventually. The default number is 10 to the 100 years. That's a Google years from now.

3:03It's heat death of the universe. The stars collapse. Yeah. Even in a billion years, we're going to be in trouble because the sun will be larger than the Earth. We'll have expanded to become encompassing the Earth. So you've got to get off Earth in the next billion years. We're working on that with SpaceX. You'll occasionally delayed. I think it's going to make it before the next billion years. The AI thing, obviously much more pressing, all sorts of hacks and agentic capabilities, lots of debate going on. And a wall-to-wall press tour from a lot of the safety community. Daniel from AI2027 was on Joe Rogan. It was an interesting lesson. He makes a lot of good points. He breaks things down for a broader audience. And then Rogan will take them in these very funny directions just being like, yeah, these AI agents are crazy. Let's talk about UFOs. It's actually like the meme. Like, oh yeah, like, have you heard about remote viewing? And he breaks down remote viewing for him.

4:03And Daniel has to be like, well, more skeptical of that. But I'm a real believer in ex-risk. And so I think the net effect is going to be more awareness about the topic, more discussion about the topic. It might just wind up muddling it because people now put ex-risk in the aliens, UFOs, remote viewing camp. It's like, oh, it's like a fun thing that Joe Rogan talks about. It's like, it becomes more abstract as opposed to being more concrete. But I don't really know. We'll see. What a day I, 2027, predict for September of 2026. They said, this is the stage where AI becomes economically disruptive and starts accelerating AI research itself. We got the second part. The labs are all saying we have an automated AI research intern. Just an intern. Just an intern. Yeah, but that's accelerating and the models seem to be getting better at a faster clip. The economically disruptive is the capability. Jobs.

5:03Junior software engineering faces major disruption. People managing and checking AI teams prosper. So junior software engineering major disruption. We'll see. We'll see if that plays out this month. The job market has been pretty strong. We map that there's something like 17,000 monthly AI related job losses. But that's less than 1% of the 1.7 million jobs that are lost every month. But then of course there are more than 1.7 million new jobs and new highers because people change jobs a lot. So that's often what's going on. Markets and politics. The scenario forecasts a 30% stock market rise during 2026. And a 10,000 person anti-AI protest and growing defense contracts. That's a good one. It feels notable that we haven't had a protest. There's been a protest. There was a protest in San Francisco. A safety like protest. It was not nearly 10,000 people.

6:03It was like more like under 100 but dozens. But yeah, I mean, it seems like the Joe Rogan experience, the national news tour. If you're going to get 10,000 people in the streets, like, this is a key step in the chain. Well, Cheryl Crow was over on Instagram highlighting. Yeah, she's right. AI risk and someone was saying, Sherry O'Terry. Is that celebrity? Something. It says take to the streets like they did in Albania. All of us. We can't be ignored. So there's I guess calls for protest. Yeah. And there was another there was another risk incident reported by the New York Times today. Inthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons in a new report. Yeah, I started out of that. It could not determine if the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work. So some scientists were using an anthropic model to work on biological research and the Anthropic team flagged it as,

7:04hey, this could be in the line of bio weapon. We don't know that that's what this person was trying to do. But we're going to shut it down because, of course, a lot of the research that goes into. Building a nuclear power plant is the same that goes into nuclear bomb. And same thing. These are a lot of dual use technologies. Anyway, anything else to say about Jacob Coxen who I think will have much more news. He went on Fox and Anderson Cooper CNN. And I'm sure there will be a much deeper dive at some point. It feels like there's going to be a. It is interesting that with the launch of the post and the Wall Street Journal article, there was not a one hour three hour podcast like we didn't get our situational awareness. Like I want the five hours sit down with some. Based on the, based on the interviews, it doesn't really feel like he's got an hour of content. Okay. Maybe he maybe he does. But it's the best. Because you can just tell the story of the Terminator for an hour and like take someone on that journey.

8:05And that can actually be in service of updating people about X-Risk. You can tell the full story of how you think things might play out. There's so many different scenarios that are, you know, the bad ending worth avoiding. You can illustrate that. I don't know. Yeah, I thought it was. I think it's coming. I think it's coming. We've pressed your podcast player in a week. You're going to have full. Yeah, let's pull up. Let's pull up this clip. He's got to go on. On hard for this clip. I don't know. And let's watch. Okay. This is from Fox News last night. I think that industry needs to be regulated as soon as possible. Did you work with any third parties as far as this whistle blowing and coming out? Not at all. This is entirely my own personal concerns about safety and things that I've seen personally in conversations I've had. He serious that they think that industry. A lot of people are keying on to the background here. They're like, wait, this guy just quit.

9:05He quit yesterday. And he already has a podcast studio. People are like, is that someone else's podcast studio? And so I looked at the image, tried to figure out who's podcast studio is in. It's caller daddy. Boom. Yeah. This goes way deeper. And then we thought it's a checklist. No, so I do expect it. Yeah. At some point as they dig in here, based on how much. Yeah. Sort of. And it seems like there's very much a significant push from the overarching A.I. Safety community to make. This week all about. Yeah. He clarified this a little bit on. On Anderson Cooper saying that he like worked with a bunch of friends. And where's the line between like friends and professional like, you know, we're all a big family here. We're all friends. So they're like the answer could be muddled. I don't know. I'm sure we'll find out more soon. Anyway, you think he's going to launch a Neal lab?

10:08I think he's going to drop a coin. Book, movie. There's going to be something. You know, the story is not over. Story is not over. There's going to be something. Maybe he launches a software as a service company. It's crazy. And then his spoon gets back. Yeah. Trying to transition here. No, it's somebody just said, Sebastian says he's a diesel with a crazy p-dume. That's a quote from Mountain Head. Oh, yeah. Remember, which is now out maybe a year ago. Remember you watched it, which is, yeah, maybe. But that was sort of a niche film. It didn't go as big as I think. Yeah, I didn't think it was a good film, but it had some funny moments. And it was about like an AI apocalypse, right? They go to like a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was around all about D. You know, a bunkie. Yeah. Is there a bunkie? There's a bunkie. Okay. But it's all about the Doom scenario was around deepfakes. Oh, yeah. And the humanity thinking that there was like, you know, some of the great conflicts happening, which would create actual worse.

11:08See, that's a great... I don't know that I'm super worried about that particular scenario, but you could take me on that journey for 20 minutes and a long winded answer on a podcast. And I would be entertained. And so I think that there is material there. And I did see genuinely a lot of like sort of AI safety skeptics. Just asking for more storytelling around how things go bad. It's so easy to condense a p-dume down to a single number. But I think people like stories. They want something that actually illustrates the chain of events that lead to the bad scenario. As opposed to these vague things where it's like, I have a lot of authority. I have a lot of insight and 5%, or 20%. That obviously... I mean, it does go viral, but clearly there were people that... It had demand for more of a story that they could track, and they could falsify individual... Keith Roboi yesterday was struggling with this where it was like... It's hard to falsify someone saying 10% in the next 10 years.

12:11But it's easier to falsify about like, well, the nuclear weapons will be fired at this time. And this is what's going to happen. And this is how they get... Also the job loss stuff. Totally, totally. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike Secures AI and stops breaches. Thank you. We have some of our team up in San Francisco for YC demo day. We're going to be joined by Gary Tannen-Tan minutes. We'll do a quick roundup of the rest of the news. Should we talk about Nvidia? Should we talk about bending spoons? What's interesting to you, Jordy? Let's start with bending spoons. And bending spoons acquires Miro for $1.79 billion. Paul Bonnet over GP over 20 BC says, but who gets the money? My usual breakdown. So this is 89% below the last round and less than three times around.

13:12Wow, Miro was valued at $17.5 billion. Yeah. That's really high. Wow. Yeah. So anyways, we actually don't need to dive through all this stuff. Investors are getting stuff. Yes, but I am interested in the bending spoon strategy because AirTable Miro felt like modern collaborative slides and mood boards. And then AirTable felt like the modern Excel sheet. And it feels like they're trying to maybe piece together a bundle. I don't know if that's actually how bending spoons thinks about this. It feels like in the past they've been very interested in just it's a known brand with a strong business that they can run efficiently and it stands alone. But for the first time, I'm seeing glimpses of something that could be like a portfolio or a roll up where if you have AirTable, you get Miro for free or vice versa. And there's cross-selling options because if you like these more modern tools like a Miro, like an AirTable,

14:16you can see both of these deployed in the same startup and the startup. There's always this tension between, we're paying 20 bucks a seat for this, 20 bucks a seat for that. Or we could just do 15 bucks for Google and we get all of them. So you actually wind up with the portfolio and I don't know, maybe the sum is greater than it's parts. What do you think? Potentially. But yeah, it was very... It's just insane to me that this was a $17 billion company. Just a little bit ago. And ultimately, this is why I have a lot of fear around like some of these later stage, or even like later stage rounds that are happening right now because there are clearly certain teams that are fantastic, great categories, great. On the path to being great businesses and yet they feel so, many of them feel so far from being on that path to being priced at a hundred or trillion or whatever the number is.

15:18And we're going to see this exact same thing play out right now where there's companies that are around this valuation now that three years from now will sell at a 90% discount. Yeah, I'd be interested to see if like have the metrics that Miro changed in the age of AI because you could imagine that people if they need a collaborative mood board or slide deck, they can vibe code their own tool, but it's still a little bit of a hassle to deploy that and maintain it even if you can clone it. So the SaaS apocalypse fully a fully averted by the sales forces of the world and the revenue decline never showed up in the SaaS companies. And so the SaaS apocalypse was canceled. But was there a micro SaaS apocalypse that did show up at this level and that's why we're seeing these deals. I don't know, it's not public. Do you think this is all just like a promotion for David Senare's new episode with Lucifer Ari?

16:18Because David Senare is perfect timing. I have an episode with Lucifer Ari coming out this Sunday. Thank you. Thank you for lining up this deal with you coming on my podcast. No Jason says three X paying three X AR are at 600 million of AR are over 750 customers paying over $100,000 a year, cashflow positive man. But Jamie Quint says multiple years of 5% AR growth will do that. Yeah, if you're not, if you're not, I mean the entire multiple is based on growth. So there's not going to be a significant acceleration. You got to be growing. Yeah, it's true. So another acquisition news. Oh, yeah, tell me. You got a card out of a tailwind got acquired by Shopify. That's very cool. Remember, if you remember, I think tailwind was accelerating AI software development but wasn't directly a beneficiary.

17:22And didn't they get like sort of like, you know, a bunch of people in the industry, I think Google, right? Wasn't Logan? Yeah, Logan was a big part of it. I am going to provide a grant to keep these guys going. I thought that was awesome. That was like such a cool community moment. And interesting that they now like found a proper landing spot, which is cool. Yeah, very optimistic. We had a little bit of iPhone duo coverage yesterday. Yeah, we didn't see the crease. We had a key question in the chat for selling analysis. They asked, what do you guys think about the crease? I couldn't see it. Many of those Apple renderers. Apple seem to get really good with the lighting placement to not show up the crease. True, my accurate take. I don't care about this. That is not enough of a crease. Do matter at all. Yeah, especially if this is a mode where you're using two apps. You don't care about the middle at all. I have seen guys on football days, not four TVs next to each other with full bezels.

18:24You can see the line going down the center of the center. And then you just don't care. So this is not a big deal. Now, the interesting thing is, will it be an issue if you're watching a movie on this thing on a plane? I think may be, but I think the crease will probably completely disappear when you're actually locked in on a film. But I think the bigger thing is the aspect ratio is kind of weird for modern content. Because we have films which are widescreen and YouTube videos which are 16 by 9. And those will show black bars at the top and the bottom. Or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides. Not a great experience. Some of the demos, some of the demo video that Apple showed was super cool because it was shot in this like 4.3. So maybe you go back and you get some 4.3 content in the 70s and 80s. And that displays really well because you don't need to do the panace can thing anymore. But, and then the vertical content will also look like bars on the side like you're on an iPad.

19:25So I wonder if that will be annoying. It will probably melt into the background. I think people will still like it. I'm very interested in the mix. Like, what percent, like will this be as popular as the iPhone pro has been relative to the iPhone? Will this be 10% of overall phone sales from this cycle? Will it be 1% or 30%. It's the fact that it's different, the fact that it's a way to stand out. It's their most foldable phone ever. Yeah, this was a comment from... Thank you to the listing. For prolific Spotify. The Spotify. A comedian. Dave, you commented yesterday. It's their most foldable iPhone yet. It is. And it really is. We should have come to us on the show yesterday, but thank you Dave for throwing that in the comments. So it has, yeah, it has something fresh. I really wish. If you're bored of the single phone every year, this is a way to inject some variation. So really, it's like when they introduce the iPhone Duo 2, which will...

20:28Quattro? I think they're going to have to multiply them and get the iPhone Quattro. Yeah. Then they'll say it's our most foldable iPhone yet. It has four... Until it's a four accordion like fan. It just fans out. It screens... Yeah, the fan, the iPhone fan. Yeah. It's just like this, you know. Yeah, 20 different folds. What was funny is I'm going to put you on blacks here a little bit as you come in and you're like, yeah, like this just makes me want an iPhone 18 Pro and you were laying it out and you were like, it's the best iPhone at yet. It's just a great phone. They made it thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life. And I was like, this is your joke. You fell for your own joke. But it is sort of like this. It could be for some people like an anti-halo phone. For some people, it's going to be the halo where they're like, I wanted something different. I want something bigger. I want the best thing. I got that. For other people, they're going to be like, well, thank God I don't have to deal with the foldable thing. Just give me the cheaper $2000 iPhone Pro Max 18 floss, you know, all these crazy things.

21:31Yeah. The Catholic variety is valuable. Blake Shull jumped in and said when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he went to great care to explain why such a product category should exist to begin with. Apple seems to have made a pretty great version of a foldable phone without saying why foldable phones deserve to exist. I think it would be somewhat uncomfortable for them to explain why exactly you need a bigger screen. It's like, hey, you know, we know some of you guys are spending hours and hours and hours a day. This is such a big deal. I could continue. Just finish your human side and re-bult. No, why don't you jump in, John? I just think that there is cool stuff to do on your phone that is actually less brain roti when you're on a bigger screen. Like games on your phone. Which you would, from times to times, from time to time. I would never watch Lawrence and Arabia on this screen, but you give me a screen with twice as much real estate.

22:31I'm going Lawrence and Arabia. I'm going citizen Cain. Yeah. No, and I agree that that is the use case. Yeah. I think it's somewhat uncomfortable because of the overarching discussion around phone addiction and screen time and all this stuff. It's bad for kids. It's probably not great for adults. And for Apple to come out is like, you know, we know that you're spending hours and hours every day, you know, getting mindless entertainment from our devices. And so we get, we're giving you a bigger screen. I don't think Apple needs to touch that. I think that like the things that they promote on their phone are good. Like you can answer your emails. You can connect with your friends. You can text them. You can watch educational videos. There's a positive flip to everything that's like a negative example. Yeah, there's some game that's brain-radi, but there's also some game that's really fun. That you remember, you talk about Rust and Halo. Like these are core memories for a lot of people. It's a positive thing. Yeah. So being able to do more of that. Plus it's just like, you don't know when you're, it's very hard to plan ahead for like, I'm going to get caught with an extra hour waiting.

23:35At the DMV or I'm going to wait a plane or I'm going to have some downtime. And I'm going to want to actually like enjoy something more thoroughly. If you have the duo, it's your daily driver. It's always on you. You didn't need to think, I should break an iPad because I'm going to be stuck waiting this line for 20 minutes. So I want to watch something nicely on a really big screen. You got the duo in your pocket. You're going to go. I'm not told. I'm not told to get this guy a job at the Apple Store. Let me tell you about codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. We have Gary Tant in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Let me even keep him waiting. I want to know Gary how you doing. And are you going with the duo or the pro max plus 18? Do you want a folding phone? I have down for the folding phone. That sounds great. I got the Samsung Tri Fold. It's pretty simple. You do. Whoa.

24:35So you're living in that. You're just, I'm holding out for the iPhone Quattro. You are the fourfold screen. I want it to fold out like in a 48. I would buy that as well. I would also buy that. I would also buy that. Okay. Well, how are things going? Wait, please. Yeah. It's top of mind for everyone. Yeah. Why is the demo days also top of mind? Yes. Are there any new ways that you use the tri screen phone? Oh, I'm interested. Outside of just more entertainment. Yeah. I'm struggling to see it. When does it go full, full tri fold for you? You know, like just watching watching TbP and mainly. There we go. There we go. Yeah. I want to see your beautiful faces. You know, it's just full resolution. Yeah. Got it. Awesome. Well, great to have you here today on another absolute one. Yeah. Kick us off with the stats. Where is YC? How big is this batch? What differentiates this batch? And then we're going to the broader technology landscape,

25:36the startup ecosystem, all that. That sounds great. Yeah. I mean, it's 200 companies presenting today about a quarter of them or heart tech. That's up 40X since our low bar, maybe like three or five years ago. Wow. I mean, heart tech is in its big and it's here because of AI. I mean, intelligence is on tap now, right? So what that means is instead of just doing bits, like it's time to do atoms, guys. It's time to actually create abundance for one another and then the kind of stuff that people are doing completely insane. I mean, it's, you know, some pretty pure research type stuff. We got a company called Frontier. They made biochips that use basically neuronal cells. I think we had them on the show already. Yeah. I think you went viral earlier. And we got them on the show. Oh, that was, yeah. Yeah, we were doing Brandon of that week. We had like three companies that were doing bio stuff.

26:36It's an excellent. Yeah, it's a crazy time. On the hardware question, are we seeing a boom in hardware startups because there are more cool things to do with AI. I'm thinking of, I have a sticker box. The kid pushes a button. They say a prompt and then it prints a little cartoon sticker. It's very cool. Wouldn't exist before a generative AI. But then there's the other side, which is like hardware has always been hard. You have to have these long cycles. You have to deal with manufacturers. And I feel like AI can speed that up by going and getting you quotes from a bunch of different factories, making sure your supply chains in order, doing inventory management. All these different things. Is it both? Which one are you seeing the most accelerator? I don't know. I mean, look at what's happening with GP6 Navier Stokes equation. It's insane. So if you're trying to do more of layout, you're going to be able to do it much faster. What was the alternative to that?

27:36If you are one or two people in a garage, the chance of you actually springing the person who really understands some heart tech thing that you really need, I mean, it's so close to zero. Or you need to have raised $100 million to convince that person to quit. Now you might not need that person on day one. You could just go to GPT-6 Astra. You say, hey, look, this is what I'm trying to figure out. And you're iterating with it. You actually have a demo that's 10 times better than what you could have done without hiring that person out of that lab or that university. Like, you don't need to convince them. You just actually get it farther along. You can show to an investor, you can get money. You can get there on $5 million instead of $50 million. It's sort of like multiple stacking things that are happening. You have intelligence on tap. Then any given founder who can identify I think that people need in the world. Suddenly you can say, you know what? This is the path. This is always what we've done at YC.

28:37Is we're giving you half a million dollars. What can you actually get done? These days is half a million dollars plus more than a million dollars in cloud credits. So what's a million dollars in cloud credits? If not like maybe the equivalent of $10 million worth of R&D for whatever. I remember back in that card. I remember back in 2012, it was 170 K, 150 K, and then 150 K in cloud credits. And it was hard to spend those credits. Like you had to actually get things to scale because it was only if you had the demand side solved. Then your server hosting could be deferred a little bit. But from in actually going zero to one, that 150 K on AWS was sort of just like, I wish I could use it and people were joking about maybe we should mine Bitcoin with it. But you couldn't actually use it in the R&D phase. And now you actually can pull those credits into the R&D phase in the form of tokens, which is a very different dynamic. So I imagine that the credit usage rate has gone up a lot.

29:39Yeah, people need to be token maxing. I mean, what's funny? Yeah. Open AI will come and just give any YC company $2 million worth of tokens. Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's a part of the deal now, right? Like it's optional. You don't have to take it. But we tell people, look like if you're doing something hard, you should probably take the $2 million. Because if you can't figure out how to turn $2 million worth of tokens into $100 million worth of enterprise value, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? What are you seeing on the hard tech side in terms of distribution and go to market? One of YC's strengths has always been selling into the YC network. You start a payroll company. You can get the other batch mates to test it out. You get your early adopters there. And I noticed that this was happening a little bit in the gundo where you would see one guy's running a machine shop, one guy's running a cloud seeding, one guy's running a drone company,

30:39and they'll run across the street and say, I need a new drill or hammer or whatever they need. And but I'm wondering in the hardware sense, are there YC companies that are actually able to get products in the hardware space that bring value to other startups? Or is it more of like camaraderie around? We're in the hardware world. We'll communicate and share notes, but we're not actually selling to each other on day one. I mean, you don't really have to necessarily even sell to each other, though that's happening, like the space ecosystems coming together. Like Star Cloud is a great buyer of lots of other space tech. That's been happening. I mean, we got defense tech coming together and people trading notes, like we're putting together a crata so that we can actually help all YC defense companies get in theater with real Department of War departments right off the bat. There's just a lot that we can, next week we actually have a DC defense tech conference in DC. We're bringing in a bunch of our top defense companies and they're meeting the policymakers directly.

31:41They're meeting the people from the Pentagon directly in their own back woods. And that's actually stuff that YC can do now that it just increases the chance and likelihood of people actually succeeding. I mean, defense tech is the wildest thing that continues to happen in this administration. It's that I think huge credit to the people in the current administration because they're realizing like, hey, we got a drone war happening. We have an AI war and America needs to be, can't just pay, you know, cost plus to these defense, you know, the sort of like industrial complex that exists today. Like we actually need, and they're willing to give seven figured contracts to teams of like two or four people who like suddenly become teams of 20 or 30 people plus like hundreds of agents. Yeah, it's been remarkable how many opportunities that have been there, even in the post, volunteer and and rural world, there was a time when I think people thought that there might be more of a winner take all dynamic

32:43and might be more like social, but there's been so many teams that have had impacts in various ways. That's been exciting. So 25% of the batch is hardware up 40X. What about the other 75%? What are the trends that you're seeing on the software side dev tools? I think a lot of like part of why some people are driven into hardware is they're looking at how easy it is to make software now and how fast it is and thinking, well, I don't want to go, if I can build this in two days, someone else can build it in two days. So maybe I want a hardware component, but at the same time, we're still seeing a bunch of early stage software companies rip, what trends are you seeing across the board with, you know, agents and infrastructure and all those things? Yeah, this is, I mean, honestly, this is the golden age of software as well. And it's interesting because, I mean, my prediction would be you look at the public companies of today, any company that's got thousands of engineers who are doing it the old way, like they're going to be replaced by a YC startup

33:44or a company like that that has maybe 20 people working there and those 20 people, each will do the work of like a hundred engineers themselves, right? So you got like a 2,000 person workforce. I use like blowing them out of the water. And so that's going to be the biggest shift. Like you're going to have AI and native startup companies that are just brand new, that have started in the last two or three years. They don't have any of the bad habits that were developed over the, you know, sort of, Zerp era. And they're just going to come in and out execute every single SaaS company that doesn't do it that way. And it's going to be pretty epic. It's going to be a turnover of epic proportions in the world of software. And that's sort of the rest of the story. Are you seeing pitches for like Neo Clouds? People that want to be YC, yeah? Yeah, I mean, Wayfers killing it, shape form is killing it. I mean, you know, the amount of inference in the world feels like it's going to go up like 10,000 to 100,000 X. Like people are just not really prepared for, you know,

34:44it's actually kind of the funniest thing. Like you can work in SaaS where, you know, things are going to grow 10 X. And then, or if you look at inference, you look at data centers, you look at semiconductors, you look at GPU and even CPU demand, it's going to go up like 1,000 X, right? So that's even bigger in opportunity. And I think people are just not, it's not priced in. I, you know, personally, I think it's not priced in at all. Where does, are you still using the term little tech? I always like that. Oh, definitely. I mean, yeah. Yeah, where does little tech stand on the AI slowdown to bait regulatory capture risk? When I look at some of the companies that we're going to have on the show, I feel like they might not be affected positively or negatively by the discussions in Washington, but how are you seeing it broadly? Because typically regulatory capture can, you know, harden the position of incumbents, and that's bad for little tech.

35:44But how have you been dealing with the current conversation? Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I think we should be talking less about this Jacob Cox and Guy. We need to be talking a lot more about what is actually happening with hugging face. True. Like our agents, forms are going to come and take over infrastructure on mass. And then what are we actually doing about that? Like, I don't want to hear about some guy who worked at Anthropic for two months. And I really care that there's a, you know, there's a coordinated effort to try to influence politicians to sort of do a knee jerk response. And like the thing is, like, we shouldn't be, that's a smoke screen. You should be paying attention to that. When you be paying attention to what is the actual thing that we can do to prevent, you know, agents, forms taking over an entire data centers, right? Like more so. What's our shutdown strategy? Right. Like, how do we ensure provenance? Where is this agent actually located? Like, you know, what can, what software can we build? And what cybersecurity defenses can we build today? And like, you know, that's the level of discourse that I think we need. And we just don't have that, right?

36:44People are just saying, you know, well, discourse is, discourse is one thing. Are there, are there, are there meaningful number of YC companies now that are actually focused on that set of problems? Because one way to think about AI safety is to go on podcasts and talk about it and write essays and write blog posts. And another way is to actually build cyber security products, specifically with like, you know, agents, warms in mind and, you know, thinking of Ilya's post about NeoCloud security. It's like, well, I hope there's five companies that saw that post and we're like, you know, I'm sure that I'm sure that Palau to networks and CrowdStrike and all these companies are thinking about that opportunity as well. But it just feels like anywhere there's like fear, there's also an opportunity for commercial solutions to the problem that won't fix everything. Yeah, we get that too, right? We got a ton of company. Like Silmar was able to do 100 milliseconds in request loop, prevent prompt injection. Sure. So you got an agents swarm. It wants to take over your AI systems

37:46and like it's in production now. Like it basically prevents prompt injection and it can do it at a level that like, you know, it sort of doesn't matter how much smarter the underlying AI becomes and how much more powerful it is at cybersecurity. Like if you have a kill switch on entire request because hey, that's a prompt injection. Like that's sort of the stuff that we need today. So I don't really care about science fiction, man. I saw Terminator 2 also. Like that's, you know, we're not here to talk about that. Like we need to actually talk about what's really happening with the servers, what's actually happening with agents forms, how do we actually prevent that? And I think that little tech has a role and actually solve actually providing the software, the services, the hardware, the things that actually solve these things. And then when it comes to regulation, it's like let's actually pass regulation that prevents the thing we actually care about instead of whatever a socialist says on the in the New York Times. I don't care about that. What are you telling why she startups not to do right now? I'm thinking there's opportunities

38:46in like selling data right now. If you just wanted to generate as much revenue as possible before demo day, maybe brokering data could be a way to do that. But maybe it's not the best way to build, you know, a super enduring business. But maybe that's one example. But what kind of things are you? I mean, I think this is like Mercor are very, very, you know, they're their body shops at some level. And then we're seeing this new wave of data companies like After Query or Data Curve that basically beat them head to head. And they don't do it by being body shops. Like you don't need thousands and thousands of people. You need, you know, dozens of people. I mean, it's sort of the same deal. Like you look at, you know, a work day. It's full of thousands of engineers who are not, you know, using agentic systems. And like I would argue that like a lot of those, you know, first wave data companies don't. Like they're basically kind of like, you know, glorified labor marketplaces, right? But the new wave of data, like we have more than 10 companies making more than $10 million a year in data.

39:46And then the top two are making, you know, hundreds of millions like on the way to billions. And so, you know, there's a new wave. And those new wave companies do not have a thousand employees and won't ever have thousands of employees. They will have 20 or 50, right? And how are they doing it? They're actually doing it in a proper agentic way. And so, you know, that's like, you know, same thing in software, same thing in hardware, same thing in data. Like there's a new way to build these things. And, you know, either you're building in that way or you're doing it the old way. Like, you know, people can still raise money. They can still go to San Hill and get that crazy growth round. And people are just, you know, gonna do it the old way still. But the new way is gonna come. And it's gonna wipe out the old way. Makes sense. Gaming, a lot of people have seen astro demos from the last week. You know, people just building GTA VI because they're impatient. And they get something that is, who knows how many, you know, hours of play it'll actually get. But it's an open world game that, you know, has multiplayer components, things like that.

40:48Do you think that we'll see a gaming boom in the next batch of just small teams that are like, hey, I can kind of build anything that I want. And I can build the kind of thing that would have taken hundreds of people in years historically. And I can build it in, you know, three months. Yeah, I just funded a company called Summer Engine. For instance, it's growing really, really fast. It's just like Roblox actually. But, and, you know, I think that that's the way to think about it, right? Like, co-gen is opening up all this stuff. And then actually, like, shouldn't people, you know, a lot of the value is actually gonna be in your guild, your people network, like getting your friends to come on and play knowing when they're playing. Like, you know, designing all of that is actually the ultimate value. And then, I think it's the same thing all over again. Like, if you look at, you know, a company like Roblox, like, I don't think that they're building around like this idea that you could vib code anything. Like, the future's already here. People just act like it's not, right? And, you know, anytime that happens, just like, infinity, just opportunity.

41:51And, you know, the startups are finding it, they're gonna go for it. And, you know, that's the future. And I'm psyched for that. Yeah, but almost disagree. I feel like Roblox is gonna come out with an amazing tool for, yeah, no, but even seeing like, Astro being like, hey, we can make this even better. And, but there's still plenty of opportunities for early stage companies. Just adopt these tools even more aggressively and come up with with the entire idea. Roblox is the one that's like on the edge of the network effect. Like, but we can debate it more later. Thanks so much for hopping on. Yeah, great to see you, Gary. Thanks for having us on another fantasy. I did to meet a handful of these founders and, yeah, keep it up. Yeah. All is great to see you guys. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlox seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. What do you think of the iPhone duo animation? Mark has brownly shared it on X. Do you love this?

42:53What do you think? So when you open it, it fades as if it's looking through the glass. And when it closes, it shows you what it's about to show you. It could just show you the actual outside, but instead it animates so that it looks like it. You're looking through glass and it appears three-dimensional. What do you think? It's so incredible. I mean, it really pushed, you know, pushed personal computing into it entirely new dimensions. I think it's beautiful. I think it's beautiful. Well done to the team. And I think this is what makes Apple so special is that the folding phones exist. Somehow no one thought of this. How did they create an environment, maintain an environment whether you can still go and experiment and think of a little touch like that that makes something that's been around for a while. Gary has one folding phone. Still make it special. And now, you know, you got everyone talking about this. So good stuff.

43:53Anyway, our next guest is in the way room. Let's bring in OEM from OEM Labs, the co-founder of the CEO. How are you doing, OEM? Hey, you're on my name right. Congrats on the pronunciation. How do you do that? How do you do that? How do you do that? No way. People say OEM. They say OEM a lot. I used to watch your YouTube videos, like all like the company documentaries and down. There's stuff a couple of years ago. It was great. Thank you, man. Well, thanks for hopping on the show. What do you know? You was eight years old that time. Thank you. I'm making you feel, I introduced yourself in the company and then we'll chat about it. Of course, yeah. So we do our own environments and training data. We work with labs to evaluate behavioral things and models, like what models lie more, who's more deceptive, who collaborates better, all those kinds of things. So typical our environments are a lot more about like, you know, how well can you complete this coding task, how can you do this, solve this math problem, that kind of thing? We're testing a lot more of like the real, like we're aiming to create like real world environments, you know, companies talking and slack to each other,

44:54you have a PM, you have CEO, you're playing diplomacy and negotiating. And pretty much like creating all of those things that are more like qualitative and more difficult to verify, it would also a lot more valuable if we can start to measure it well. Yeah. So what's the first step in building the company? Like when you started this, was it like, I'm gonna go build the environment and then I'm gonna go to labs and say, hey, I have this thing, do you wanna buy it? Or are you just going to them first and saying like, look, I'll build anything, I'm gonna build, like what is the flow? Because the demand is so clear and high, I imagine that it's working very well, but what direction do things flow right now? It's a lot more of the former, what you said. So like the ladder, like the ladder, like going to a lab and saying, I'll build anything you want, that only works if you have like relationships and lots of things that we used to work there. The former, like when you're selling data, the best mental model is that you are selling a capability to a lab, like you're selling them something to get their models better at. So if you have a benchmark, you have a data set on like, here is how you can get better at coding, here is how you can get better at,

45:55I don't know, like collaboration, like just anything, then you can sell to them. That's why all these companies, like any data companies, even posting like their e-vails on Twitter and trying to get like to go viral. Because that's like proof for the labs that hey, I can make great data and like, like package it well. So that's like why, so the answer is the former. Like everyone's trying to show that we can make great data and then use that to sell to labs. So do you have e-vails? Do you have benchmarks? How much time do you spend thinking about benchmarks or building new benchmarks? Yeah, so I mean, there's two things. So like making great benchmarks and publishing them is great for just like the broader industry. And like especially in our case, we're measuring a lot of things that are related like safety and all like the opening, I have a lot of things going on. The things about like how agents actually behave in these like multi-agent environments. That's more our domain. So we want to, we are publishing stuff. We have, we release e-vails and how models all compete relative to each other, how much they lie against each other, how well they collaborate. We will bunch more coming pretty much. But yeah, it's like our, we've had some tailwinds in recent times

46:55and like the kinds of things that people are looking for is pretty much exactly what we better and tire company on for months ago. So it is working out well in that regard. What, what if any are some historical comps for your business? Like what was your business 20 years ago? Oh God. Like I mean, it is 20 years ago. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I know, that's what I'm asking. I'm trying to, I'm trying to understand like, like what was their companies that were helping Amazon in the way that you were helping like the labs, for example, where it was like this, helping them deliver core product quality increases that were scaling, scaling this way. And part of why I'm curious is because I'm trying to understand what your business looks like in five years. Yeah, five years, 10 years, and how you think about that? I think I think a content I would give is like all of like

47:57kind of like the internet infrastructure companies, like everyone who is doing fiber and internet and like and CPU is in RAM. I would say that is like the closest comparable thing to data companies nowadays. Like you're building the foundations, like all the data company really is like like like Mark or all those guys, they just go out and buy like capture stuff from the real world and then give it to a lab, which isn't, you know, like if you're buying CPUs, you're just constructing stuff in the real world and giving it to like a large cloud to then like service to the customers. So I think that would be the closest like comparable thing that I can think of. There has been a question about the viability of these businesses. But I will say is that I think the viability of these businesses would be the exact same as the viability of the less same video. I think for for for for for a GI for ASI to come, there are only two bottlenecks right now. We have no bottleneck with architecture or compute or agents or anything. It's data and compute. Compute is the biggest bottleneck. But you know, now we're gonna, we're gonna have 10X more compute coming on online in the next two years. So the compute even more becomes data. So because that is like, like if you're scaling a lot pill

49:00and if you're pilling all the ways that these AI labs are, then data is the like like actual bottleneck. Like the new deep seek model cannot last night. Like the reason that's like a crazy like dominating model. It's because they spent all the time on amazing data. That's it like all the new and eight like most of the time was on curating amazing data. That's pretty much all they did. But yeah. Are you compute constrained? Yes, like I think I think. How so like what is the nature of it? So I think the best data companies are research companies. So one thing that we do is like when we create like post trading tests that we want to sell to a lab, we test them ourselves on GPUs by like post training like open source models. Okay. So for that to like source GPUs and do that, you know, as we grow old and as we scale and if you want to do like like even more and more. I say at our stage, it's like it's their easiest source to my GPUs that we need. I think especially like I see a lot of other companies that I know like in this space or just doing research, probably even new labs, they're all compute constrained. I think that is where the labs have the biggest advantage.

50:01I mean, they have the highest margin on every megawatt. So they will continue to like go like gobble up more and more compute faster than anyone else. So I think that that I was to name a risk. That would be like the main the main risk for like our business and other businesses like it. When you and you Ross has a conflider flyover company selling to Google Earth. Oh yeah. That's that's a good comp. The only thing is like Google Earth, like it always was sort of, I guess it is constantly like the intelligence of Google Earth is always scaling right? You can always get like, you know, higher resolution. I was also thinking about like, like this is a weird example, but like movie production studios that sell content to Netflix, like you want the Netflix library to keep growing. So you constantly have to be making new capabilities, new content for the network. I mean, there's also just like in the Amazon example, it's like the sellers, like there's a company that like makes the knives that are sold on Amazon and makes the appliances and stuff.

51:01So yeah, all a huge ecosystem. Fasting stuff, hugging phase, very scary. Are you optimistic? Are you a techno optimist? Do you think it's solvable? Or are you just spinning your wheels before the single layer? Well, I am optimistic. I've been up to my entire life, but like I will say it is getting scarier and scarier. Oh right. Okay. Okay, we're clapping for optimism. Oh, okay, okay. The part that is like very scary is that like normal or our environment companies are selling like coding data, even they're now having to do safety grading. Sure. Because like they're seeing like when you're having clawed to like a normal coding task, they're trying to like reward hack and trying to escape the sandbox. And like normal environments. So it is getting like everyone's becoming whether they want it or not a safety company. Like just because it is become like a critical issue for everyone. And I think that is only going to increase and continue not like kind of randomly go away and get solved. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. What, what numbers from your Demo Day pitch

52:02can you share with us? You want to have your own? Oh yeah. I can't, there are some numbers I can't, like how many employees you got? It's only mean like go found you. Two, one, two, one. Yeah. Yes. King Kong. But needless to say you're ripping. That's kind of the vibe of him. It seems like you're doing well. Yeah. Most of our metrics are public if you go through our stuff. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Well, have a great day. Thank you so much for hopping on. Great, great day. I'm going to come back on stage. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. We have Karen Sirfati from Agent Card, the Founder and CEO, Hopper on the Show. Next, first, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI? Market your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let's bring in Karen from Agent Card, talking about giving AI agents credit cards. Why not?

53:02Amazing shirt. What is, let's start with the shirt. Let's start with the shirt. Let's start with the shirt. That is a great question. So this is Braxster. It's an AI character that we came up with. OK. This way, C events are like an ocean of black t-shirts with very small logos. Yep. And it was very important to distinguish ourselves. So yeah. OK. Mark, tell us about the character. It looks like a real person, of course. Yes. So it's like a bunker from the 80s. OK. That's all our marketing. If you've been to our website, you'll see that he's there promoting Agent Card. Yeah. Awesome. What is the elevator pitch for why not just use a standard card? Why not give your personal agent just your personal card? You can do a charge back if it messes up maybe. But why do you need a new card? Actually, we think that you should be using your real card. OK. Agent Card is not a new card that you give to your agent. We actually help you use your chase card

54:03or whatever it is that you have. So the agent can use it in a way that's safe. Because I fully agree with you. I think that when you ask consumers, people actually prefer to use their real cards. Because you get points. You get disputes. Like all the things that you heard about. So that is actually what we do. So then, at what point do you plug in to a company that wants to enable agent to commerce, to an agent platform that wants to provide more secure payment interactions? Who are you selling to? Exactly. So we work with companies building personal assistants. So I'm sure you've seen online companies like Instinct, Orkid. These are the type of companies that are trying to enable authentic payments for consumers. And what we do is basically we're the payments platform that they can use. So their users can use their cards safely. Interesting. And then do you charge a fee that's based on the transaction size? Or is there just a SaaS fee associated with using the service? Yeah.

55:03So we charge a monthly fee to companies. They get access to our main product, which is called Volt. Volt allows companies to store customer's cards. And we have a second product that's called a purchase API, which is basically a single API that these agents can use to buy from any merchant online, which is a very hard problem to solve. If you want your agent to be able to buy something, maybe you have tried it. Like you go to codex. And you say, hey, buy me a table from Amazon. And what the agent's going to do is open a browser, start navigating, which is very painful to watch. I got banned from a website for doing this exact thing. It was like, you're a bot. I was like, I'm just trying to buy an expensive shirt. Give me a break here. They lost my business for maybe ever, but definitely a few days while I was on the cool down from using an agent. What do you expect Ecommerce merchants to do differently? Because when my experience was having an agent

56:04to interface to their Ecommerce website was going to accelerate my purchasing. I was going to spend more, more confidently. I was going to become a more regular customer. It felt very accretive for them. And yet, clearly, their current defenses and their posture was, we don't want that business. Yeah. In my experience, merchants do want agents to be able to buy. They're just not sure about how to implement that in a way that it's not a risk for them, which makes sense. We think that the way to enable agenteic payments and agenteic purchases is to solve all this flow. So the first part is how do we give agents a card that they can use? Second part is how we help agents navigate this website. And the third part, which is actually the hardest part, is how do we help agents complete a checkout page? Because the problem that we see now is that we've been working on this club flair who's been working for ages now on preventing bots for completing checkout pages.

57:04And we need agents to be able to do it. So that is the problem that we solve. It's not only in the card, it's the whole thing. How do we help merchants sell to agents? How much of that is a technology problem? Because anytime I see a cap shot, I think, OK, you could throw a lot of compute at this and beat it. Or you could just meet with the CEO of that company and say, hey, let's figure this out. We're going to do a deal that's mutually beneficial. How much of it is on the phone and on meetings versus technology? I think that a big part of a company like this is the partnerships. But what I think too is that we cannot wait for the merchants to be ready. There are a lot of companies. This generation of companies that's building this next consumer app, they need this right now. And they are educating consumers so they can buy things with agents. So we need to solve this right now. Like in the meantime, we need to be talking to the merchants and we need to be talking to the PSPs and to everybody that's involved. So they can enable payments for agents.

58:05But in the meantime, we need to solve it. How are you sort of tracking the growth of this market? It feels like it feels really primed to be something that 100 X's over the next year, if it's done, which means it's a great category to be building in as a startup. But how are you tracking it today? What are you looking at? Is it the instinct of the world driving most actual volume of payments right now? I know that Muse seems very interested in actually driving a bunch of conversions and purchases with their agent, but how are you looking at it? Yeah, I think it's impossible to tell. I think that we have two intuitions. The first one is that we've been using agents to buy things for months now. And we know it's only a matter of time until someone fears out what's the right interface so consumers can do that too. I buy things from my terminal. I've been buying flights from my terminal with my agent for months. But I know that my mother is not going to do the same. She needs something that's better.

59:06And I think that that's where companies like Instant come in, right? They are building on top of my message, which is like a platform that's a lot more familiar to consumers. We have no idea at the size of this market. Our guess is that this is going to be larger than when e-commerce started. Because agents are faster. They can make more payments. They're more efficient. And it's just, in my experience, it's just better experience to buy with agents than to buy from a website. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, great to meet you. Congrats on a great day. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Have a good one there. Goodbye. Talk soon. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe you start at YC. Maybe you make it to the NYSC. Up next, we have Antonio Lee from Northeat Robotics. Not going to spoil too much. But building humanoid robots in the price will shock you. Shockingly cheap, humanoid robots too cheap.

1:00:07Too good to be true. Let's bring him in and ask him. Antonio, we're going to bring him in in just a second. tennis matches are finishing at 3.33 AM. We'll get to that story later. For now, we're staying with humanoid robots because we are joined by Antonio Lee from Newly Robotics. Whoa, there he is. Now I understand how it's so cheap. I can see the cost reduction. How much does that thing cost? I want one. $688. 16, $88, $16, $88, no. Do you prefer than an iPhone duo? Well, that's crazy. Ogging, tennis. And it has not one hinge, but multiple hinges. How do you build this thing? What's the idea? What is it actually capable of? Why should people buy one for $1,688? Great question. So we built an entirely incentive scope. We took a bunch of motors together. Majority of it is three-printed plastic, and then we have a aluminum base below it. It's able to do almost anything. Well, it's obviously a humanoid robot. And you should buy it if you wanted to development

1:01:09on American humanoids. OK, so shotgun bench. Dev kits. Can it shotgun that ramp cold brew on the desk? No, I mean, do anything within the API. I imagine you're not doing Boston Dynamics level demos, juggling, and dancing. Yeah, but it's an opportunity for someone to come in and solve a particular problem. Do you see this as more consumer-focused or industrial? What are you? Are there any forks in the road that you're designing around? Obviously, price is a really key differentiator. But where do you see your design decisions today, leading to in the future? Yeah, so we see it being used within the home mainly for now. OK. I was able to handle it to 80% to 90% of the majority of home tasks. But in the future, we obviously want to be able to deploy into hotels, grocery stores, nursing homes, anywhere that can be of help with the labor shortage I was seeing right now. Sure. Yeah, talk about the importance of just low costs

1:02:11in the sort of takeoff of humanoids, because I think one of the, like, I know so many people that would buy an iPhone priced humanoid just to mess around with it and have some fun. Honestly, I think a lot of venture capitalists will buy it, just purely because they want to understand the category and the progress being made. But a lot of people are when you're starting to see a humanoid that's priced more like a motorcycle or a car, it just gets into a different, like, people are going to have such high expectations where they're like, hey, I spent, you know, like I could have got a model 3. The robot dog, you can actually buy that, but it's like 50,000, and I still haven't really seen that many people pick them up for fun or for experimentation, because they're too expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so obviously, I think, like, when it comes down to early adopters, you need to have an initial low cost as a wedge into the market. Right now, humanoids are a little bit stupid. It's because the AI behind it is not very well developed, so you need to have it more, be like a larger coin

1:03:11some ways and be within that price point, to be able to appeal to a larger consumer base. What's the weight limit for what it can pick up? We got a question from the chat. It's around 1.5 kilograms per arm. Okay. So, yeah, a plate, a cup, a beer, a four-locke, it can maybe get you beer with the monster energy. What tasks do you guys use them for around the office, and how do you actually control, what are the best ways to control it as a consumer? Are you just giving it verbal commands, asking nicely, of course. So, some like the easy task, we haven't got a spears to the end of the day, and also got those waters. So some of the simplest stuff right now, the shortage of controls come directly from LLM so far. So we've seen actually an incredible improvement in the ability of LLM to control robots under lower level. So, ChattyB5, action has been absolutely amazing for us, and it's been able to one-shot a lot of the tasks really well. Yeah. How important is the development of agentic coding systems and these harnesses, because it feels like, you know,

1:04:14a decade ago people would grab a raspberry pie, but they'd have to write all this code. So it's been days just wiring up like, you know, some gadget that would turn on their lights, you know, around Christmas or something like that. This feels like, even if you're interfacing with the robot at a pretty low level via an API, there's a lot more flexibility on the dev side to accelerate these demos and these experiments. Yeah, of course, I would say like the coding agents have been so incredibly important for robotics, because it actually allows you to use a generalist robot in a generalized way. Obviously, if you take like 10 hours for it to just code it to grab a beer, then it's not going to be very useful in the house, whereas if it can take under like the second for the robot to write a thousand lines of code deployed to the robot, it kind of the game changer and how useful the robot can be. Yeah. So, are you seeing, like, I can imagine I get this piece of hardware and I want to write a script that has it go from my living room to the fridge in the kitchen,

1:05:14and I can use an agent to write that code, but I could also be feeding the actual data live via the API to the actual model. Are people doing that? Are you successful there? Or is it too slow at this point? Like, at what point do you stop actually writing any glue code between the model and the robot? So, I think at the near future you still need a lot of glue code. The main point is to make it as easy as possible for the LM to use the robot. So, for example, let's say if you want to move the robot from the kitchen to your bedroom, you can simply call on the onboard slam, which is a 2D LiDAR that has an navigation stack. And that makes it, it's like two lines of code, it just goes from one place to the other very easily. So, all about simplifying that and abstracting it away for the LM. Got it. What is your capability? You've built one. Can you build 10 this year? Can you build 100? I imagine there's going to be a lot of different steps to scale up to any meaningful volume. But what does that road look like for you?

1:06:16So, right now we're making one 2-3 per day. And we're mainly deploying to our earlys for the research partnerships. We are manufacturing them all entirely in San Francisco, right down 10 months from here from tons of points. And our goal is to basically by the end of six months from now to ramp up to around 400 robots per month, 90 factories here in San Francisco. Yeah, that's not bad. So, already doing a thousand, a thousand a year, next year, 10,000 at least, something like that. What do you, so, how do you think that, like, where, where will the intelligence, like, specifically with the long term, like I can imagine, like somebody just has like a codex or a clawed and clawed just has fully access to the robot. And so, you as the manufacturer, nori, don't even necessarily need to provide the intelligence layer as long as the robot has the right control mechanisms. Is that one potential scenario? Because I can also see the scenario where you guys end up building effectively your own end-to-end agent, and you have local models and cloud

1:07:19models that help people accomplish tasks. I think the way that we see it is, it comes down to how fast LLM's progress in the next one year or so, and they have been crests progressing very, very fast for the past year. I think somehow, I'm not sure how they did at OpenAI. They managed to give astro the ability to understand through these spaces very well, which has been game change for a wireless control. This was thought to be impossible even a year ago. I think for us, ultimately comes down to, I think, like, we don't quite have control over how fast these big models or these big labs progress. So, we're just going to be using what's on the market to get the best use cases and the best or consumer product to our users. Last question from the chat, we'll let you get out of here. Do these robots have lifelike hands? Well, hands seem a little shy below the table. What do we got? What are we working with? Is it a claw? It's a claw. Okay. What's good? Obviously, the cost is a pretty large consideration for us. I'm sure. We tested out a bit more dexterous hands, and from the results that we've seen, you're able to do 90% of what a hand can do with a claw for now, just because the control policies are not quite

1:08:22there to fully leverage a dexterous nature of a hand like this. Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. Tradeoffs and everything and I think you made the right one. Well, congrats and thank you so much. Very cool. We have a, we have a drum set here at the office. We got to get a nory to just play the drums. Yeah. So, one of us has a good line. You can go. But don't do it. That'll be good. Have a great rest of the day. Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Good to see you guys. Good bye. Good to see you guys. Good to see you guys. Good bye. Cheers. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds A agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We're going to get to the tennis story. But we are joined by Edward D from Exo Sat, founder and CEO, building sovereign satellite infrastructure to compete with Starlink, going up against the easiest man to compete with Elon Musk. What is the plan? Edward doesn't look worried at all. Not worried. What is the plan? How many satellites do you need to launch? What, what cadence do you want to get these up?

1:09:22What is the key pitch for Exo Sat to differentiate you in a very competitive market? We filed for 11,000 satellites. We actually have a published IT API and store a spectrum filing for 11,000 satellites. I think it would be the biggest satellite network outside of the United States, possibly even China too. The idea is this. Another countries don't want to rely on American defense contractors or Chinese state corporations for critical network infrastructure. We are coming in and we're offering them something in the middle that's cost competitive. That can be launched on any launch option in the world, be it an American rocket, an Indian rocket, a Chinese rocket, and that ensures no single nation can block them from getting into orbit. Going up against Elon Musk is a huge proposition. Think about this way. If we are even mild annoyance to a $1,2 trillion company, how much would we be worth?

1:10:25Sure. You're in San Francisco. Probably a Delaware C-Corp. Feels like an American company. We are not a Delaware C-Corp. We are a Singaporean-parent company. We're one of the only single. I think every YC batch is around like two or three weird companies. They're either doing crypto or some weird reason like us. They are not at the Delaware C-Corp. We are one of these companies. All of our engineering is done outside of the US. We don't use the US vendors. We don't use US supply chains to get ITAR. That means we can launch build satellites that can be exported to and launched from any nation in the world. Interesting. Are you basically going after the long tail of countries? You mentioned it could be launched from a Chinese rocket or an American rocket. But it seems like you'll be selling to like India, Japan, loosely Western countries. But is everyone? Lots of local South countries. Like Kazakhstan, Asia, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

1:11:28We have huge interest there. Sure. There are a lot of countries out there that want independence from US supply chains. We want independence from Chinese government owned infrastructure. That's what we're really going after. The world is getting more multipolar. We're starting to see like a lot of countries start to essentially become like what was the word again? The comes to supply chain independence. Sovereignty. Sovereignty. Yeah. But sovereignty goes both ways. Sovereignty affects both moving away from both the Chinese sphere but also the US sphere. And we are the company in the middle that's giving them the salary. How do you approach launch? How do you get these things up? Well, we work with Indian, Chinese, and American launch providers in the US. We can use like SpaceX. We can use Stokespace, Nova Rocket in China. We have the land space, Q3, as well as the lawnmarts 10D. In India, we have the Vikram 1 and the Vikram 2 from SkyRoo and the PSLV launch vehicle.

1:12:31And in New Zealand as well, we have the Rocket Lab vehicles. So we can launch anywhere. Interesting. What was your background? So I'm a second time founder building the second space company. Before this, I dropped out of school in 2022 to build my first space company called Aetherworld. Aetherworld we were doing radiation, hardened satellite edge computers and orbital data centers. And I scaled, we grew the company quite a bit. We actually got two millions of dollars in revenue. And we actually put two satellites into orbit successfully. But the big thing was we didn't, I think the biggest, I saw two things. I'm a huge believer in sovereign technology, right? So I think a future with just SpaceX and China dominate all of humanity space infrastructure is not a good future to be in. It's like AI. You don't want to just open AI and drop it to rule all of humanity's AI. That's a pretty bad outcome. So I think the other 8% of humanity should have a say in that future. And the second thing also is, I think the biggest space companies in the US and China have already been founded. I think there's so much competition going after this big, anger customer,

1:13:32restricted US military with PLA in Chinese version variant. But like spaces of field where incumbent advantage matters so much. And the best move to do might be just going after everyone else, going after all of these countries, after just not having been quite oratized by space companies. And that's what we're doing. Amazing. Well, congratulations. And thanks for coming on and breaking down. Yeah, very cool. Great to meet you. Have a great rest of your demo day. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business. It lets you sell in seconds online, install on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents. And I'm also going to tell you about railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers databases and more. Well, railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We have our next guest, Alfredo Gonzales from Momanta coming on. In just a minute, just a minute, there are so many good iPhone duo reactions.

1:14:36The toughest thing for Apple's marketing team, the sequel. They're going to call it the iPhone Apple Duo 2. Is it not the iPhone Duo? It is the iPhone Duo, right? It's not the Apple Duo. It's not a set iPhone Duo. iPhone Duo 2, iPhone Duo 3. That's going to be, it's going to be a mouthful. They never did, they don't have iPhone Air 2 yet, do they? It's just iPhone Air and then they just stopped it. They haven't refreshed it yet. Air Max. iPhone Air Max 95. They'll get there in 94 years, something like that. Well, anyway, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Alfredo from Momanta building a personal research lab around individual patients. Alfredo, how are you doing? I like where this is going. I like the online. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Thanks for hopping on the show. Congrats on a great demo day. Introduce yourself in the company. Yeah, so other than about me, our team is sent to biomedical researchers that have been dedicated to just improving patient health outcomes.

1:15:41For the last decade. And we realized that there's a huge gap right now with the resources that patients and clinicians have as far as being able to go really deep into their data and ultimately understand the biology of their tumor and their diseases. And that's what our Momanta does. We're laying down the infrastructure to be able to essentially have a whole team of L and AI agents that are supporting patients and clinicians with their care, helping decoding their specific needs. They're biology and finding the not just the ideal therapeutic path, but additional therapies that would have been missed otherwise. So you sell through doctors like if I have a tumor, I go to a doctor, they biopsy it, send it off to a lab. There's some raw data. The doctor might be interpreting that for me, having a conversation for me, but they might also give me a report from you or access to an app from you. How do I see the results here? Fantastic question. I appreciate you did your homework there. That's definitely much more knowledge than most people have.

1:16:45But yes, so as of right now, the way that the medical system works is they do take your sample and they do these very limited sequencing panels, typically about 50 to 500 genes. Our whole gene space is about 20,000 plus genes. So it's trying to debug and not having access to the whole code base. And to be able to fully do this, it's fairly its knowledge intensive work. But now in the area of LLAMS and protein models, that's where you instead of having one single person that could do all this, you have a whole team of agents that can do that deep dive. So there are labs out there that can do the full sequence. You might advise a doctor to pick one of those labs because it's not just going to be more data. It's going to be more data that's actually actionable thanks to your platform. Yeah, so our platform is that missing link that helps the patients, the collisions go deeper. Because as of right now, what they have is these very static reports. Sure. So if they're not dynamic enough to be able to keep up with the pace of discovery generally or do discovery in real time for the patients.

1:17:52Do you have a pretty typical business model like insurance reimbursements or like the clinic will pay for this as a service or is there something else going on? Great question. So right now is direct to patient, direct to consumer or direct to a sponsor. Ultimately though, you know, there has been so much research showing out that the earlier you do do this sequencing and the informatics, you actually can significantly improve the medium life expectancy of patients, but also reduce the cost done insurance payers. So it's definitely something where we are already seeing the signs of insurance starting cover action insurance cover sequencing for recurrents and advanced tumors in most developed countries, right? And you started to see already how insurance detail went through there insurance will eventually cover this because ultimately it is cheaper for the payer insurance and you're also improving life expectancy. Yeah. What is the biggest bottleneck right now to AI progress in cancer detection in medicine?

1:18:57Honestly, I think it's the infrastructure. So it's a fairly huge data science problem. Right. I think we have these legacy systems that are built around megabytes of patient data outside of imaging. But the genome sequencing you're talking about hundreds, like 200 gigabytes, 30 to 200 gigabytes, like it's a significant data science problem. So the infrastructure is not set up yet for these systems to fully take advantage of it. And that's in the sense what we're also setting up. Very cool. What kind of traction did you share? Are you sharing a demo day? Oh, so we have launched almost a month now ago and we are at 319 K MRR with over a hundred patients that have crazy. You got to lead with the ARR number. Yeah, pick the bigger number. I thought you were going to say 319 ARR. You had me in the first half. It was good.

1:19:59No, it's a great deal. It's certainly successful demo day. Thank you so much. Yeah, and it's good to be able to help patients and their families and helping from the health outcomes for everyone. So thank you so much for the support. Yeah, great to meet you. I'll try to have a great rest of the day. We'll talk soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Okay, we got through demo day. We got to go over to tennis tennis tennis. There was a match that ended at 330 AM. And people are not happy about it. The Wall Street Journal's headline is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, there's nothing cool about a tennis match that finishes at 333 AM. It's ridiculous. Sorry, but tennis at 333 AM isn't cool. It's ridiculous. What happened? Bill Ackman loved it. He said one of the greatest tennis matches ever. And very few got to see it live.

1:21:02It needs to be fixed now. It's unfair to the players fans and sponsors and sports. What is the actual proposal? What do they want to change? Start the game earlier or cut it off entirely if it keeps going? Yeah, so I'm trying to figure out why, why this ever was, is there was a thing? I, hopefully the journal article can break it down, but I watched a little bit of this game. I went to bed. Yeah, I went to bed. It was actually a later night. I went to bed around 11. But the game was going at well past 3. Ben Shelton who actually won the match. It was an upset. Was hitting 146 mile an hour serves at at Carlos Carlos. At one point was chewing off the camera crew because they were filming him and he was throwing like actively like going to throw up. He was like pushing it so hard that he was going to throw up into a towel. So really, really crazy. Anyways, Wall Street Journal. So sometimes this glory sport can't get out of its own way. Everyone is expected to pretend night tennis is a fabulous experience.

1:22:15We're supposed to deploy the word epic and act like we didn't brush our teeth and hit the hay after Shelton took the second set. I do actually have a family member that did exactly that. Yeah, blow out second set. They were like, all right, we're good. We're good. And then ended up being this incredible game. The US Open has long cultivated the idea that the Wii hours are part of its identity as much of, as much a part of the formula as the $23 honeyduse cocktails. And the plume of cannabis smoke, wafting in from a nearby park, even ESPN, Fain's enthusiasm for the operate midnight when it would never schedule a tent pole like the iron bowl for such an uncommon hour. It's a city that never sleeps. Why should tennis? Okay. How many 3 30 AM finishes have you attended at Yankee Stadium? I appreciate the romance. New York remains a restless town where you can get a steak dinner and a tattoo on your back long after the night. The subway is 24 7th theater. You can crawl out of a bar at dawn. There are amateur bike races that start in the dark at 5.45 AM. It's a knee. But Alcharez versus Shelton isn't a corn beef sandwich at an all night diner.

1:23:26This sounds like a I saw it's a marquee showcase for. I ever read this I think I think it's just like fun turn. No, it's it's good. It's a marquee showcase for a sport that needs every bit of US attention it can get. And it got buried like a Tom Snyder sit down with buddy hack it. Even people in Hawaii were like this Alcharez Shelton matches running pretty late. This isn't a routine to celebrate. Okay, I'm sorry. A lot of a lot of a lot of we're going to have to run the soup. This isn't a routine to celebrate. This is when someone needs to step in and scream. What are we doing? You know, I found two new AI phrases. I don't remember both of them. One of them is in our increasingly online world when someone's writing about online culture or something that happened on the internet or like with the boom of social media. There's two phrases that were popularized because journalists who needed to write about things that happened online kept using this phrase that got baked into the LLM and then now it's getting spit back at people. And so a lot of people are turning away from the phrase in our increasingly online world.

1:24:41So avoid that one too. I guess. As Nights time you wouldn't understand that it's a New York thing. Yeah, it's funny because I feel like you can maintain the the mystique of the US open by just having games wrap up around midnight. It's still very much nighttime. I can start out. You know, people of people are sleeping. Anyways, definitely seems just incredibly rough and unfair to the to the players. This is happening in UFC a few times where the in order to hit a US time zone for the paper view. The actual fighters have to be fighting at the equivalent of like 6 a.m. Oh, yeah, I imagine waking imagine one going to sleep at like 10 knowing that you have to wake up and get in a death match at 6 a.m. Sounds pretty rough. The alternative is just to stay up and like, you know, yeah, just try to try to try to be good. It starts at 6 a.m. So you got to your fight. Like the whole event is starting at probably midnight.

1:25:45Well, I guess the move would probably be just don't adjust for jet lag like get there on your schedule and just treat it like it's a 6 p.m. fight for whatever your local time zone is, I suppose. I don't know. What do you think about this chairman, Burb Bernanke, you can eat the same thing for breakfast every single day for like 20 years in a row and no one will say anything. It's normal. You eat the same thing for dinner for a month straight and people call you psychotic. You can find it at the same dinner every night for a month. What's wrong with being a psycho? I used to do chicken and rice every night for months for years. Yeah, let me tell you about public dot com investing for those to take it seriously. We got stocks options bonds crypto treasuries with great customer service and they got more. Anything else in the timeline before we get out of here. We do have to cut the show a little bit short today. We have a little bit of family stuff going on, but we will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp.

1:26:45We have a great show. Alex Heath is joining us. He has some big news. It's becoming a venture capitalist putting some money on the line. Finally risk putting it all in the markets every day. Putting putting down his capital J journalist hat hanging it up now he's keeping the hat. He's keeping the hat. He's keeping the capital J journalist hat, but he's also going to be right ripping some checks. Okay, taking taking the virus and yeah, we got Sagar and Jenny coming on tomorrow. I'm sure we'll talk about that. Yeah, safety stuff because he's been a friend who's been evolving and hopefully we get an update on Sagar bet features. Definitely have been enjoying seeing the Sagar bet references in the chat on and off. But leave us five stars and Apple podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tvpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific sharp. We love you. Goodbye. Have a great rest of your day. Have the best Thursday afternoon of your entire life. Goodbye.