20VC: Anthropic Unveils Mythos | SpaceX's Financials Leaked: Is it Worth $2TRN | Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Are They Back in the AI Race | Jason's Critique of Dario Amodei & How OpenAI Could Win the Enterprise Game

AGENDA: 00:00 — Anthropic Unveils Mythos: The Model "Too Good at Hacking" to Release 05:56 — Why Mythos is a Quantum Leap in Cyber Risk 10:11 — The "Boy Who Cried Wolf": Jason's Critique of Dario Amodei 14:00 — The Oppenheimer Moment: Are Founders Using Doom as a Marketing Tool? 19:22 — Amazon's $20B Secret: Is NVIDIA's Chip Stranglehold Finally Loosening? 22:28 — Claude vs. Lovable & Replit: Anthropic Moves into App Building 25:24 — The 60% Death Spiral: Why Public SaaS Stocks are Entering a Doom Loop 39:51 — Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Alex Wang's First Model from Super Intelligence Labs 44:18 — OpenAI's $50B Ad Vision: The Plan to Monetize Intelligence 53:50 — Token Maxing: How CIOs are Reclaiming Control Over AI Budgets 57:57 — SpaceX's Leaked Financials: The Math Behind the $2 Trillion IPO 1:08:00 — Thoma Bravo Shuts Growth Equity 1:16:18 — Who IPOs First; OpenAI or Anthropic?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I don't buy Dario anymore. So I'm pretty bullish, actually, on OpenAI and the enterprise.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  I think it's a two-way fight. Anthropic has the advantage of clarity and focus. OpenAI has the advantage of the consumer business.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  If your agents are only 60% as good, you're in a slow death spiral. It appears to be the most expensive IPO at scale of all time.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  The Elon discount rate is zero, and the Elon probability of failure rate is zero to get to 2 trillion.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  I can't open the Strait of Hormuz myself. I can't do this like enough already. Let me just use my tokens.

• 0:31Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and it's my favorite show of the week. Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, analyzing the biggest news in tech this week. Anthropic unveils Mythos, but withholds it from public release because it's too good at hacking. Public software stocks tumble to new lows with Citi saying there really is no floor. Optimistic. And then finally, Meta debuts Muse Spark. It's Alex Wang's first model from Meta's superintelligence labs. Does it save Meta in the race to catch up? But before we dive into the show today, are you a founder working nonstop to raise your next round? Are you an investor doing all you can for your portfolio companies to help them stand out?

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• 4:09Harry Stebbings?

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• 4:55Harry Stebbings?

  Withheld from public release because it is too good at hacking. Discovered thousands of zero day vulnerabilities. Admittedly, some were quite old. How did we think about this? Did it deserve the reaction that it got? I would say widespread fear that there was then shown in a loss of market cap of a lot of public companies in the US.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Let's leave to one side the was it a marketing stunt? Or did they not have compute? Let's focus on what Mythos does in terms of cybersecurity and what your correct response to that would be. And, you know, if you read a lot of the stuff, it finds a whole ton of vulnerabilities, including some that have been literally there for years, right? So that's kind of the, oh, my God, that's scary. That's why they withheld it and shared it with a bunch of security vendors, right? And then you see a bunch of kind of counter arguments that basically some version of this, which is using older models and using them well, you can actually get to the same outcome, right? You can find the same security vulnerabilities, right? And that's the counter. And there was a whole bunch of Twitter that said, eh, this is not a big deal. And, you know, I'm processing through from the outside and my conclusion is those people who said it's not a big deal are wrong and Anthropic is right.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  And I was thinking about the metaphor here today, right? Because what they were saying is, and it's actually very interesting about the whole agentic revolution. It's kind of a microcosm that allows us to talk about a lot of things. It's like, basically, the naysayers are right, which is that you can take an older model, you can point it at some of these issues, you can kind of query, you can direct it a couple of times. And someone actually did the exercise of, here's how I found the same bugs. I had to steer the model a little bit and you got it, right? But the comment is Mythos just kicked off on its own, agentially goes and looks at all the code. And finds them on its own. And the metaphor I was trying to look at here is very simple. It's like it's the difference between a rifle and a machine gun. In one sense, both of them can kill someone. But one shoots one bullet and then stop and reload. And the other just spews guns bullets out.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And in the first world war, you know, we all tragically learned that machine guns are. It might be the same thing, but quantity makes a huge difference. And I think that's what's really going on here. The speed at which this can process reason across large code bases means that they're just going to find more bullets. They're going to shoot more bullets. So the Twitter cynical, it's not that different, isn't true because it's the it's the capabilities to do so much so quickly with such human direction that makes it definitely a quantum step difference in terms of real capability. My big aha was it's it's not overblown in the sense it can find stuff.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  I think that AI is enabling every single breach possible. Every security hole to be found, not a subset of the hottest companies, not folks trying to attack open AI APIs, but everyone. And like, for example, you know, the other day, my fitness pal bought Cal AI, right? Cool story, right? What was it, Harry? A hundred million dollars, 19 year old kid from Miami, something like that. A great story. Two days later, it was instantly breached. All the records were stolen. 3.2 million records, everyone single use everyone, all the data on you, all your HIPAA data, every single thing on you was stolen within days. And it became a sport for a hacker. They just stole it all. Now, the root cause was, and actually this is surprisingly common. It's an issue Superbase and others had to deal with. They didn't have any authentication on Firebase.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  As most databases are now built by AI, as more and more apps are built by AI, the number of issues is going to explode. And if Mythos and Friends lets bad actors find every site the second it launches with any PII and steal it. We may enter an era later where sites get more secure as as it's flipped on the other side. But I think we're going to go through a transition phase where security is just getting worse and worse and worse. Because every single website can be instantly hacked and stolen from it. And the whole Mythos run, they said Claude said it took them $20,000 of credits or a couple. Flowers or something like that, right? And hey, that's enough that I'm not going to do it against Scale's website. If I could simplify that and distribute it against every single thing with any PI on it,

• 8:50Speaker 00

  you know, bad actors are just going to hit everybody. They're just going to hit everybody, right? I think it's a big deal, whether this is a publicity stunt for not having enough capacity. I know maybe a little bit, right? But everything's going to be found, every security hole, right?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Agreed, which is why the second comment I'll make is the reaction to it in terms of security stocks going down to me didn't make sense.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Because going forward, part of the process of security will be to use Anthropic or another code model to check your code before you deploy to find these vulnerabilities. This will be a thing, but someone's going to have to administer that. Someone's going to have to build frameworks and harnesses to do pre-screening code. But then more importantly, everyone's going to have to operate on the assumption that if you miss anything, they're going to find it, which is different than if you miss anything and you're really strategic, they might find it, right? To Jason's point, if the other side now have machine guns, then you've got to build tanks. So what security is might change. The vendors who step up and meet the challenge will triumph and the ones who don't will fall away. If Anthropic say that their model now allows anyone to find any vulnerabilities and they're

• 9:56Speaker 01

  going to withhold it for six months, that means that in six months and one day, every bad guy on the planet is going to be pinging your code and trying to find the bad bits. So you're going to be investing in cyber. So I think the part that made sense was the this is a big deal. The part that didn't make sense is the cyber stock should go down because I think you're going to want way more defenses because the bad guys are more heavily armed. And yes, it is an arms race.

• 10:20Harry Stebbings?

  Do you buy Dario's? It's too powerful, we can't release to the public. Is it just great marketing?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  I don't buy it anymore. I'll tell you something, one thing that changed with me with the Miso thing, for what it's worth, I don't buy Dario anymore. What I mean is, listen, he may well be the second greatest founder of all time behind Elon. Look what he's done in five years, right? Five years to 30 billion, the greatest grudge startup of all time, right? I mean, it's hard as a founder to not, to your jaw, not to fall on the ground. But I am just. So burnout of the boy who cries wolf, every job's going to be destroyed. Everything is insecure, everything like enough already. And like, I've heard it so many effing times and then about Mythos. I have to hear that like he's created the spawn of evil if we're not careful. Like, I just can't, I've rotated back to team Sam after all this because I just can't take the,

• 11:11Speaker 00

  can't take the endless boy who cries wolf. It's like, even if you're right, there's, I can't open the straight of Hormuz myself. I can't do this like enough already. Let me just use my tokens. Seriously, I've lost confidence in his, not in him as a CEO, but this endless marketing machine, I'm tuning it out now. I don't care anymore what he says about this stuff.

• 11:30Harry Stebbings?

  What specifically do you not buy? I'm just trying to understand.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Listen, if every, Dario's like 80% of jobs are going to be destroyed in two years. We need, we'll need no programmers by next week. Okay, that endless thing. Maybe he's right, but what can I do about it? I heard you, I heard you the 11th time, I heard you the 80th time. I heard you on Joe Rogan, I heard you on TBPN, I heard you on Harry. I just can't, and then, and then the Mythos thing and they were holding it back. And it's like, I believe you're, you're a safety guy, but if you talk your game too much, I just got to check out at some point. Show me something that's inspiring. Like, I've actually, I honestly feel like his message is uninspiring. That's the problem, it's uninspiring.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  I'm gonna push back a little on that, but in the following way. I think a lot of the doom warnings are wrong and the doom warnings to date have been wrong. If you look at the unwillingness to release chat GPT-2, which in retrospect was overdone. But I think the concerns are sincerely held. And yeah, it also is good marketing, I acknowledge that too. But I think the starting point is there is a belief here that these things could happen. To be very concrete, I think he's totally wrong about the economics 50%. I think that's beyond madness and I'm not worried about it in the slightest. But I do believe, and I've thought about this a lot because what I realized is if I'd met them at the sea, which I didn't because it was outside our backs bracket, but if I'd met them, I would have done exactly what you did, Jeff, and I would have listened to the doom warnings.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  And I said, that's all silly and wrong, therefore I won't do the deal. And what I've learned is something More nuanced, I think a lot of Silicon Valley companies have this have a culture that's overreaching and you listen, you go the grandiosity. If you're kind of a grounded person, you reject the grandiosity. But what I've internalized is the grandiosity is a rallying is sincerely held because I don't believe you can portray grandiosity consistently for five years. If you don't believe it, so unless you're really psychopathic, so sociopathic, I should say. So I think it's sincerely held and I think it has a huge unifying effect on a company like take, for example, Elon and we're going to Mars. The minute we had to file an S one and someone had to say, you might have to go to prison if you say things wrong. We said, we're not going to Mars, we're going to the moon.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  So you could be cynical, if I'd looked at that deal much earlier on, I would have said the cynical but incorrect approach would have been to say, I don't think they're going to Mars for here's 10 reasons. Therefore, I'm not going to do the deal. The more evolved approach, and this is why I'm pushing back in on Tropic is I don't think they're going to go to Mars. But I do think the Mars vision over 20, 30 years is a rallying cry that will allow them to do amazing shit in the short term, which they've done. And I think the same thing applies with Dario here, it's like, I think it's all over. I think half of Silicon Valley, I'm going to say it here, is running around thinking they're inventing the next thing after the atom bomb. And I simply don't, I don't think we're going to unemployed 50% of white collar workers, I think it's madness. I think it has some legitimate dangers in cybersecurity and bioterrorism, but they're manageable.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  I think we're all, it's all overwrought, but that overwrought intensity has allowed them to build a culture which had no churn, given a mission clarity. And then we'd given them it's a given them a $30 billion revenue line and a possibly trillion dollar market cap. And what I've learned, and it's really hard for me because I find all this problem bullshit like it's like the Airbnb, remember the Airbnb was the sharing economy. And Uber was the, you remember the sharing economy, it sounded like a bunch of communism, we're all going to sleep on each other's, you know, air mattresses. That was a visionary airy fairy bullshit that turns out what really is going to happen is people are going to buy houses and rent them out. So what I've learned, you know, Steve Jobs was a bicycle for the mind that turns out we're all just going to sit on our phones and, you know, watch Instagram and get depressed about other people's lives.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  But the vision, umfy bit, it just helps keeps the machine of innovation churning. Here people. So what I've learned to do, which is really hard is literally listen to the idealism. Don't say, do I agree or not? Say to myself, will it motivate people enough to do something where there is economic advantage to be obtained? And that's a very cynical old person's perspective. But that's the context in which I say, I think Dario believes all that stuff and I think it's useful for them and I think it's wrong. But it's damn useful and it's worked.

• 15:31Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, what do you want him to say then? You said, oh, I didn't find him inspiring enough. What would, what would make you happy? What do you think he should say?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Before things got tougher, I think Sam was good at teasing at this. I want him to take us to Mars. I want to see the good side, even Vinod, who is very direct that there's going to be a lot of job losses, right or wrong, Roy disagrees. But Vinod's very direct. His point is it's gonna be okay. We will figure this out with AGI. Well, everyone will pay more taxes, even in California. It's okay. Mark Andreessen, his point is we're entering an area of deflation and abundance, right? I don't need, I don't need too much on the other side. I don't, I don't need the fluff, but I just need a little inspiration that there's some good, and I'm not saying maybe the law, maybe the third hour of Dario's speeches have it. But everything I see on social media feels like he's an inverted Debbie Downer and

• 16:20Speaker 00

  I'm just tuning out now and maybe in the enterprise, he's got to change as the years go on as this works less well with the million dollar customers. Right? It may have to be more positive about the benefits in your workflow.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And again, I think Jason, the odd thing is we're actually agreeing on one thing. Tune out the noise. In the words of Haldeman, you know, don't look at what we say, look at what we do. I always love quoting Nixon White House as what used to be the most cynical White House we ever seen, but we can come to that another day. And ignore what the people are saying, oh my God, this could eliminate white collar jobs and wringing their hands and saying this is awful. Look at what we're doing. We're shipping code, we're shipping software, we're doing 30 billion in run rate. Oh shit's amazing. Turns out you're not buying the guilt, you're not buying the hand wringing, you're actually buying the revenue and the revenue is amazing.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  I've spent a lot of the last year attempting to help founders that they genuinely need to move more quickly, that they are too complacent in their approach to AI, that they have at best a 60% solution, 60% answer to the problem. I've tried, I've tried to vibe code in public, I've tried to build my own apps, I've tried to share how we rebooted our teams to three humans in 2028. I've done all this and I, and I know it's profoundly helped a lot of people. I get so many messages, so many, so many public company CEOs, leaders reach out to me, even me, I'm like, I'm almost done with this phase. I have alerted you, okay? If after me with my 10 trillion tweets and 2,000 blog posts and 54 20 VC pods together, if you haven't heard the

• 17:45Speaker 00

  message that you gotta, like you gotta catch up in AI, maybe, maybe I'm no Dario, but even I'm ready to move on to the new world. I'm leaving the past behind. And if we're all going to live in a world of robots and AI lawyers, so be it. Like, and I'm frankly, ready to write off a lot of portfolio companies and a lot of public companies. It's time to move on, guys. If you're not going to get there in April of 2026, then so be it. Well, let's mark, do a markdown and call it a day and good luck to you.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  I'm going to close with the Oppenheimer quote. All of these founders have their Oppenheimer moment. They want to be Vishnu, destroyer of worlds. And that's been, you know, they all referenced the book, obviously, everyone, you know, so obviously channeling Sam and channeling the Oppenheimer moment, you know, with, with the new atomic bomb. My favorite moment in that movie was when Harry Truman says, get that crybaby out of the White House. In the end, Harry correctly says, I dropped the bomb. The equivalent of that is if a whole bunch of people are fired, Jamie, Jamie Dimon will fire them. He doesn't need you wringing your hands with guilt, Dario, it's okay, right? Other people, and it was a great moment when Harry correctly said, history won't say, Robert Oppenheimer, you killed all those people. History will say, you built the bomb, and history will say, I dropped it. And so in other words, get over

• 18:53Speaker 01

  your guilt, ship the product in a methodical fashion, do be careful. I do think he was right to keep that product back, but in the end, you know, it's not stoppable. I appreciate that you, I actually think he's very thoughtful about it. So I'm on his side on being thoughtful. I don't think it's fake, but this is going to happen and other people are going to own the problem. Onwards.

• 19:11Harry Stebbings?

  The final element, which is connected but not the same. Which is Mythos was trained entirely on Amazon's

• 19:17Speaker 01

  I don't think that's correct, straightforwardly. I'm sorry, I cut you off there because I've had too much coffee, but whatever. It feels like a three cup morning for Rory, doesn't it, Harry? Where are you saying? Might be four. Okay, sorry, keep going, keep going, because I'll let you finish your sentence.

• 19:31Harry Stebbings?

  Well, apparently Mythos was trained entirely on Amazon's Tranium chips. Jassy disclosed that it's now a $20 billion annualized business, growing triple digits. Tranium now is nearly sold out, Uber among one of their biggest customers. Question being, if this is the case, are we slightly seeing a loosening of Nvidia's stronghold on the market? And does this change how we feel about Nvidia?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  First of all, I think you need to be really precise here because I checked, I didn't know this point, so I checked it. It's like, it sounds like you're saying, oh my God, they're shipping Tranium trips to others who are using, who are buying chips and using them. They're not, they don't to a rounding error have a merchant silicon business. So they're not competing directly with Nvidia. What is true is Amazon, instead of buying Nvidia chips, is buying its own chips and then offering cloud hosting services and inference services and model training services. So think of it as less, oh my God, someone's buying chips and competing with Nvidia. It's that Amazon is not buying Nvidia chips, instead using its own chips. And most of that runway is internal purchasing. So what they're really saying is Amazon is saying, we have a CapEx budget of 200 billion a year this year,

• 20:36Speaker 01

  which probably means about half of that typically is chips, it's 100 billion. So where we can, we're buying our own chips. Of course we are, and where we're not, we're going to have to buy Nvidia just like everyone else. So that's true. And then in terms of who's quote unquote a customer, all they're saying is this, is when they're either when they're, if they're doing training runs for Atropic, which I'm sure they are, or they're doing inference runs, which I'm definitely sure they are because that's a product they offer through Bedrock. When they're doing that, they're running it on their chip. So yes, in that sense, some of the Mythos model was probably trained on Tranium trips, but not because Atropic said, yo, I love Tranium. It's because to the extent that Amazon is offering them compute, some of that computes on Tranium. That's all that's happening here.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  All that said, it's still 20 billion of dollars that didn't go to Nvidia that went to Amazon. So it is at the margin meaningful. It's 10% of Nvidia's revenue, a little less than 10%. So it's not a mega competitor. It's just an in-house bundled product at some significant scale.

• 21:34Harry Stebbings?

  I'm loving this Rory, Jason.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you know, 10% is material. Like, I don't want to, we don't need to spend all of our time. 10% is material, right? And I guess the bare case is just everyone's building their own chip or deploying their own chip. Everyone's trying, everyone's trying, especially on inference. And that just Nvidia is dented. It's dented sufficiently to see multiple compression. It's dented sufficiently that our 401ks go down more, right? It's really just that it's, that when things are priced to perfection, there's dent, right?

• 22:01Harry Stebbings?

  Fortnite maiming markets.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, Fortnite. Nvidia may have its own Fortnite moment as.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  And remember, I think Amazon and Nvidia had a famously, have a famously difficult relationship. So they're probably the company most interested in not buying from Nvidia. I think what you're saying is fair. At the margin, it's 20 billion to like to have 10% is not meaningless market share.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  But, you know, the big picture comment is compute is scarce, chips are scarce. They're pretty much sold out. The stock's at 194. It didn't super accelerate it when they did that trillion dollar backlog comment, but it didn't go down either. So I think we're up against a constraint limit rather than anything else.

• 22:36Harry Stebbings?

  We're going to stick on Anthropic, but Musa, Anthropic to now compete with lovable directly. They launched recently and lost 48 hours of competitive product.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  You sure it was launched?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Harry, see, Harry's a media guy. He thinks when things are announced that they're real, Jason is a software guy. He actually thinks you have to ship product.

• 22:52Harry Stebbings?

  No, it's all about the announcement. Surely you've seen that in the last few days.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  As the lovable replit guru here, look, Claude Code is clearly directly competitive with Cursor. And then you have this slightly different segment. I'd love your opinion, Jason, on the kind of the lovable replit segment. How do you think about the competitive threat from a Claude, from a slash Anthropic to those players?

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Well, look, Eric from Bolt on these screenshots, Eric from Bolt said, I was at a dinner with the CTO of Level. We all knew this was coming. It was just a question of when. And then I asked him if he thought the screenshots were real. And he said it didn't really matter because, because it was coming. That's a, that's a number three or number four player's view. The meta question, you know, if this were, if this were 52 episodes ago, I'd be like, well, you know, it could happen, but it's not important enough. They're going to have to get into databases and hosting and identity management and OOF and user support, like consumer level and user support. Like it's a whole bunch of things culturally that they don't want to do. But the pace of innovation at Anthropic is so intense that on a whiteboard, it's hard not to want to grab a couple billion of extra revenue from vibe coding, right? Because, because you're just, you're just a database and an OOF.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  You know, for them, it's 30 days of work, right? The old school VC would be like, it's distracting. Even if they launch it, they're not going to maintain it. They're not going to have support. They're not going to, they're not going to put all the resources you need to maintain it. But the truth is, and maybe Eric from Bolt's point is maybe if they don't directly compete at the prosumer level, right? Even if they don't build a base 44 lovable replit, they might just go halfway there and that might be enough. Like it might be, it might be something that developers use who just want to get something going. Right? It might be something that, that more technical product teams use, which is like the number one highest ROI category for replit and lovable, these, these product teams. And they may only target the nerdier, the more technical part of the market. And that might be sufficient to, again, name, name, name the folks.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  It doesn't have to be a hundred percent. They don't have to replace shopping sites and stuff like that to have a material presence. So, but you know that Anton and Amjad and everyone thinks, thinks about this 26 hours a day. How do we stay ahead? Right? How do we stay ahead? But Jason, those product teams could just use Figma make, right? I mean, They can use make.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Don't feed, now you're just, now you're just fucking poking the bear, Harry. Please leave the bear alone.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Well, I'll tell you, we could talk about make. And he's off, and he's off. No, I just, well, let's stay on this topic. It actually ties to if we talk about software stocks, why I've become more pessimistic since the last show on them, but. Oh no, why have you become more pessimistic? Because we are kind of ahead in this agentic thing, right? At least in the real world, I do talk to lots of teams, lots of senior product teams, lots of CEOs, more than I ever done in the last 10 years combined. Okay. Every week, multiple Zooms, multiple calls. And there are exceptions for sure, but I would say here's why I'm pessimistic and why I think that the drawdown is accurate, even though I don't understand the public markets. I think almost everybody's building a 60% solution. And make is an example.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  You look and you look what Claude did or prompting did last November and you've spent the last four to six months building something that's kind of similar to what these products were like five to six months ago, but you can't really afford the tokens. You're worried about the cost. You can't build all the features. You're trying to use cheap models to bring costs down. You're trying to limit it and you end up with make, but everyone has a make. Why is make so crappy? It's because you didn't care enough to spend the money or put the team and make is a good copy of replit or lovable from last summer. That's what happens. And by the time make catches up to replit and lovable today and then, and then they decide it's too expensive and then they decide they have to lock it down because they can't afford the agents and tokens. Now you're nine months behind and 12 months behind.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  And so what I mean is, and so it's not just that you have a 60% competitive solution. Here's the meta problem for the incumbents. You can't charge for a 60% solution. Here's the problem. If you could charge 60% of what Claude charges or Lagora charged or replit charged, that'd be great. That's enough to charge 60%. But a 60% product has to be free. It has to be included with your base charge. And while we're recording this, for example, today HubSpot's launching its next group of AI agents, right? And I'm excited to try them and I will be supportive. If they're only 60% as good as the standalone solutions, HubSpot cannot really charge for these things. You can't get away with charging another 20, 40, $60,000 to HubSpot customer if your agent is fine. It works like in isolation.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  When I meet with internal product teams at large companies at scale, they are so effing proud of themselves. They show me their agent that they built. They show me their vibe coding thing. And if I didn't use any other products, I think they were great too. Or if this was 51 weeks ago, I would think these products were great and they're so insular at their 2,000 person company in their, in their, in their fancy campus, wherever they are with their mugs, bringing their mugs to the meetings because, because at their pace and their. Failing even as they're proud of themselves with their 60% solution because the market will not, they will use it like they'll use your 60% solution, but they're not going to pay for it. You're stuck in this doom loop of yes, I have an AI product as a public B2B company, but no one is willing to pay for it for 60% solution. They're not willing to pay 60%.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  And so we can say all these companies have moats and ServiceNow has the biggest mode of all. So it shouldn't be sold off and this and that. But if your agents are only 60% as good, you're in a slow death spiral. And that's what I see. I can't think of maybe one or two exceptions of everyone at scale where their agents are as good as either a standalone company or just what I can do in Claude. Now, I can't maintain Claude. There's a whole bunch of issues. But if it's only 60% as good, there's no way I'm going to pay this AE that just called me up 100 grand for it. I'm not going to do it. It's not good enough. Checking the box does not work with agents. The check the box feature cannot be monetized in the AI era. And this is why I think they're all properly sold down because none of them, they all have 60% solutions, all of them.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  It's do or die, guys, because you can't sell these things. There's two counter examples. We could argue over agent force. The base 44 Wix one may not save Wix, right? Which has repurchased like 30 or 40% of its company. But at least they made a bet that got them beyond a 60% solution, right? To nine figures in revenue.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot to unpack on what's happening in SaaS. But I think I've internalized that Jason has articulated one of the big truths, which is unless you have a product that's good enough to charge for independently, you won't have revenue re-acceleration of any meaningful scale. And if you don't have revenue re-acceleration, then you're in a different valuation metric. And I'll talk about how to value mature companies with probably persistent users, but stock-based comp issues and no growth issues. And you can do that. And you know, one of my rules is price clears all market. There's a price at which ServiceNow and Salesforce are all quote unquote worth something. So zoom out a million miles, Jason is right. If you can't charge for your shit, you won't re-accelerate. And if you won't re-accelerate, you instantly move to another valuation bucket.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  I've listened to you a few times and I think there's a clarity of simplicity there because you can talk a lot about, hey, we're doing this or the other, but the What level test is can you charge for it? So I really it's a big frickin comment. Because I've been wrestling with what do you use to sort out all these public SaaS companies? And you know, what are the, how do you think about it? Right? And if you're in a very workflow centric market for the last decade, you are definitionally in an agentic centric market now. There might be other things that are more payments related or stuff like that, where I think there's different dynamics. But if you were in a workflow centric world for the last two decades, like Salesforce and ServiceNow, you are in an agentic world now. And if you're in an agentic world now, you better have exactly what Jason says, agents that are worth the money, which means they do the work. It's actually a very brilliant test.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  And I think if I was, I'm literally looking at the horizontal software applications list for Morgan Stanley. And Jason, you're right, that was probably the first. If I'm thinking about how to value this bucket of 1.6 trillion, that is the first test. If yes, then you're on the increasing value scale and you can make it out. And it's still going to be hard, see Wix for details. If no, then you're in the how do you value a company with mid single to high single digits growth rate at best? Probably, I think, an example of Salesforce very sticky. And you know, that's a separate valuation question, right? I think that, you know, at nine times, these things are trading now at eight to nine times cash flow. You might be hitting a point where just the money allows you to be a deep value play. You know, the P E's of something like Salesforce excluding stock based comp,

• 31:19Speaker 01

  it's 11 or 12 times forward P E when the market's 20, right? This is unparalleled. So if you want to make yourself a value play, money can still be made, but it's, it's a grim way to make money. The only way to still be a growth play is to pass the Jason test. So that's my zoom out comment here. You said it in financial terms a few weeks ago, which is reacceleration. But today you're actually articulating the predecessor test. If you have agentic workflows, then you will have reacceleration. Then you'll be in the Jason happy bucket. And if not, then you'll be in the tragic value bucket. And you will have to do hard things that would make Dario and Sam cry. If you're going to make this thing cash flow, it's going to be involve SBC reduction. It's going to involve headcount reduction. It's going to involve a bunch of grim shit and you can probably still make money. But you're also top stopped.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Nothing magical will ever happen to a high single digit growth rate tech company. Companies kicking off cash. At best, you build a mini version of IBM CA and the top five executives make money. It's not going to be fun. Jason, would you buy service now, now?

• 32:17Speaker 00

  No, I wouldn't buy any of them. I'm looking for products that are more than a 60% solution. The world's moving too fast. When we started this, this pod, I wasn't sure if I believed it or not. I was probably on the fence, but there was definitely a sense that the models might plateau, right? That there'd be parity, that they're all pretty good. They all basically could, could, could, could do a chatbot. It's clearly not the case today. If we tie it to the beginning of this conversation, the models have radically accelerated their power since December, right? Since, since, since, since Opus 4.5 and more, and we haven't used Mythos or whatever, it's going to be even more powerful. And so I'm not optimistic that, that anybody building to last year's spec slowly can compete.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  It's too furious. It's too furious. And, and I also think that the problem with moats is they keep your customers in, but they don't lure any new ones in. No one's excited to cross the moat except the folks that want to breach the castle walls. This whole moat discussion, I think, is at the edge of moronic. It's at the edge of moronic. Hooray, you have a moat and your customer. I signed a five-year, you know, the average service now deal is between three and five years. So what? That doesn't bring in anybody new. It doesn't bring in agentic revenue. It just means I'm trapped. Prisoners, prisoners don't create growth other than at the margin, right? Other than, other than with the margins.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  First of all, I love the mode analogy. That's great. And what you're basically saying is Jason is not a buyer of any stock. That's not a growth story. I've come to the conclusion you are right on that. And one of the reasons I enjoy doing this part is when we argue, sometimes I change my mind, right? Because let's, I want to play out the value track just for another few minutes, right? I think the problem with the value play, I think at this price, I think you make money on Salesforce. But unless they get regrowth, you're going to make single digits returns and the overall EBITDA and small cap is 11. So are you going to underperform? I actually think the other thing you're wrestling with in terms of these stocks is the following. The weird thing right now is the public markets don't have access to growth, to the growth side of software.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  They have, so right now the trade is sell, sell SaaS, buy semis, which effectively means sell SaaS, buy AI, making AI. What you don't have yet In the public markets is AI native companies, starting with Anthropic and OpenAI. And therefore, you know, mythos is a wonderful word because in fact, you're comparing the practical values of owning Salesforce with the mythical values of owning this company that's growing 10x where you've never seen the actual financials. No one's seen Gap financials, but oh my God, it's amazing. And everyone's always going to want the myth. Pick your girlfriend boyfriend analogy. The practical realities of the person you're with now versus the mythical example of something that could be.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  So my other aha is these stocks aren't going to trade in the same fashion until five or six public of these two of the foundation models and four or five other AI native companies are public. And then you can finally, as a public market investor, say, okay, now I can choose, do I want Anthropic growing at that one probably 5x at 30x revenues with huge losses and big stock based comp? Or do I want boring ass Salesforce growing at 10% with 30% operating margins? And at that point, no stock based comp loss. At least now you can have a choice. Then what will happen is then we'll find out how to evaluate those two things. And that, you know, it's probably going to take six, 12 months after the IPOs. My point is until then, what you're dealing with is the mythical desire

• 35:33Speaker 01

  for the as yet unrealized relationship. So these stocks are going to trade for shit until then is my big aha. Because no one's going to be able to value them right. The only people that get out of that mess now are what Jason said. If you manage to claw your way to growth as a public SaaS company, then you do actually have some kind of chance of trading up. But if you've got to trade on fundamental value, you're always going to be chasing this kind of fear that the model companies can do everything you can. I don't think they can. I think when the model companies go public, people are going to realize, oh yeah, Salesforce in its current form, we're probably going to be there for the next couple of decades. It's worth its cash flow. But Jason is still right. Unless it gets its shit together and makes great agents, it's another IBM. And I don't even know the price of IBM because why would you? I believe that someone's probably made money, but it's not my problem.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  You just become a boring ass old thing. So you're right, Jason. And Wix is interesting because they've done what you suggested, Jason. They're trying to get growth and they're getting growth. And as yet, you're right, they did a buyback and the stock's down 20% since then. So my aha from that is-

• 36:31Harry Stebbings?

  They've done 1.6 to buy back nearly 30% as they bought it at $92 and the stock fell 23% on the week.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Whenever that happens, you got to say to yourself, that wasn't a good week. That's kind of like an inverse Bill Gurley. Instead of selling stock and then it goes up, you buy stock and then it goes down. That's like the IPO premium, but the other way. It's like, oh, my God, that hurts even more. It's talk about leaving money on the table. And I think the aha is, to Jason's point, they did one thing brilliantly, which is figure out they got to get product out the door. Maybe they should have set on their capital for another six or 12 months, kept it in reserve to maybe buy another AI product or invest behind their AI product. I think these stocks are going to bounce around in value trap land for a long time. So we may be wrong if they, if they really nail their growth on the new product and the kind of vibe coding product really accelerates.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  And you know, you look back six months from now and you know, growth's at 15% and the stock's way up. You'll go, oh, yeah, it was fine. It was just an X day reaction thing. But the point is fix the Jason problem, which is core growth, before you try and do financial engineering. Financial engineering is useful, but it's not the solution. In the end, if all you can do is grow at 8%, you can screw with your balance sheet to your little heart's content. You're never going to matter a damn. As I said, you'll be IBM. They've screwed around with that stock forever, but nobody cares. You got to do the Jason thing first and put all your effort on that.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  It is tough that, you know, Salesforce did a big buyback too, right? I think they bought 25, they did 25 billion of debt to buy its stock. On a spreadsheet, this looks brilliant, right? We can support it. Yeah, we wish the debt was a little bit cheaper, right? It was a little, but, but, but this is the simplest thing we can do. Retire a significant amount of our shares, right? Drive up our EPS and keep going our agentic transition. But arguably, you know, the market at best shrugged it off. At best, it already priced it before it happened. But in the short term, no benefit. All this financial engineering that looks great on a spreadsheet amounted to nothing in the short term, but 25 billion of debt.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  I totally agree, Jess, and not only that, but I think one of the big advantages you have as a public company with cash flow positive is your financial flexibility. I wouldn't trade that for anything because look, one of the two things that happens, if the AI wave rolls on without a blip, then your stocks and you don't have a growth story as a public SaaS company. Then your stock's going to be cheap two years from now. There's no Hurry to buy it.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Second thing is, if there's a blip, then the guy in the market with a public currency and 25 billion in cold hard cash, maybe you buy five big things in private land that allows you to compete. Maybe you buy not a topic, but a second tier of financial model. Maybe you buy one of the big apps companies.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  But if you can afford it. Salesforce is one of the few people that can make a big bet here. It's one of the few.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  My point is this, that's why I would have kept my 25 billion in my back pocket. Like it's what you said, fucking around short term with your stock and the number of shares. The only people who care about that don't matter. You got to win the war and there's some chance that in the next two years, there's a blip in the market. All these AI companies are burning money. And if you're sitting there with 25 billion dollars, you could have been saying, come to daddy. I got money. Let's talk about how I'm going to be an AI behemoth. And I think that would be a better use of your time.

• 39:39Harry Stebbings?

  Come to daddy, I got money on that topic. Alex Wang, founder of Scale, obviously now at Facebook, following the acquisition of Scale. Meta debuts Muse Spark, first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, which obviously Alex runs. I mean, the candid like truth is I did okay. It was decent. My question to you on the back of this, it was decent, not quite as good as the others, but good enough. Is this Facebook back in the game? And is this a encouraging sign for Facebook where you feel more optimistic post it? Or less, given it didn't blow anything out of the water?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  I think it's a win. If you're not in the game and then you get back in the game, that's a win. So if you're fifth, you win the game. I mean, you read all the reviews, you know, I haven't got hands on the model. I don't have the level of sophistication to evaluate, but I did read a lot of the reviews of people who did. And you're right, the summary is eh, good in some of the things that they were working on at Scale AI a year ago. Not so good at some of the newer things that the advanced labs have been developing for the last 12 months, which totally makes sense. You took your knowledge from a year ago and you implemented it, right? But leaving aside the question of, does it make sense to be in this game at this level? Leaving that aside, if you, if you decide as Mr. Zuckerberg that you want to be in this game, then you achieved your mission. You spent 14 billion dollars and you're back in the game. Now you gotta move up the league.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  But yeah, I felt this was a few because, you know, had you done all this and you did a Llama 4, which was disappointing where people are like, it's not even, you know, credible, then you'd have felt like a moron and you don't. So I think it was a win. Also worth noting that they're talking much, being much more closed source, which is a significant thing because at some point someone's going to need the American version of open source and Llama was that. And now they're pivoting more to be more closed source, which has implications across the ecosystem and is a bit of a bummer. But yeah, no, I think it was like a few exhale. Not sure why we're playing this game, but if we're going to play it, I'm glad we're not losing anymore.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Stepping back though to where we're going toward the back half of 2026. I don't think if I'm Zuck and I'm looking that Google owns its own models, which have become extremely competitive, right? That's one of my big direct and adjacent competitors. If I want to be in the big leagues, maybe I just have to own this. Like I don't, I'm not Apple. I don't want to be stuck buying tokens from Anthropic or OpenAI. I'm Meta. I have one of the dominant consumer advertising and other platforms on the internet. I have the dominant social networks and I sure better own this. It turns out it is not a commodity and maybe it's way too much money down the drain, but this is, this is core to our existential existence, just like it is for Google. And I don't, I don't want to wither. That may not have been where this all started, right?

• 42:19Speaker 00

  But the goal of Facebook is not to provide API tokens like Anthropic. This is, this is not the, the direct goal, right? Or it certainly isn't to encourage the open source community to rise up and use Meta products. This is to stay in the top echelon of consumer software companies. And it's worth 14 billion. It's worth 14 billion, right? If you just don't want to be, become Apple and dependent on everyone else's models, you just don't want to be that, right? You know, if you can just do better than the, the Kimi open source, et cetera, stuff Curse is doing, it might be worth it just for that. Just, just to be in that zone between what I can just rework purely from open source into what I can buy from Anthropic. If I'm close enough and this is my core, it might, it might be worth owning. Ruthless, this is as competitive a company as exists on planet earth, right?

• 43:02Speaker 00

  This might be the most competitive company on planet earth is Meta, right? Ruthless.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, if you look at the big play scoreboard for that, it's like better billion. On Instagram, win a hundred billion plus, maybe four hundred billion.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Bet seventy billion on Meta and V R A R, lose it all. Bet fourteen billion on this and clearly have a win and somewhere in the middle between those two outcomes and you feel good. I agree.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  The other thing, just, and again, it's not totally my expertise, but when, when I, and when I look back, when we started this show, a lot of folks thought A I would kill Google Search and maim Facebook, that Facebook was dying as a platform. And that why Google Search was of course dead, Chat G P T was going to destroy Google, right? Fast forward today, these are record growth businesses now. Google Search, we started the show talking about A I overviews and other things. Google Search is a better business than it's ever been, as is Facebook and Instagram. So it makes sense to, to, to triple down there. This is not a time to retreat for either of them. It is not a time to retreat. It is a time to get that lance out, go straight into battle, just knock, knock those other guys off.

• 44:00Harry Stebbings?

  Meta surpassed Google, I'm sure you both saw, as the largest ads engine in the world. I think Meta now two hundred and forty-three billion dollars.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  I didn't kill it yet.

• 44:07Harry Stebbings?

  I hope that stock price comes back. Speaking of ads engine, Open A I projects two and a half billion in ad revenue for twenty twenty-six. The ads pilot was a hundred million annualized in just six weeks. There were six hundred advertisers. We touched on it before. But they're guiding to eleven billion in twenty twenty-seven, twenty-five billion in twenty-eight, fifty-three billion in twenty-nine. Is ads the great comeback for Open A I in H two twenty twenty-six? Is this the shining light that we should be directed towards?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  It's both obvious and inevitable that a consumer product like Open A I, Chat G P T is going to have to be ad-supported. So yes, they're making the moves, exactly the moves you'd expect. And yeah, the, and the little chatter of, oh my God, that's a bad idea, or it's not doing enough, that we saw from before a few weeks ago, it's all silly. This is just going to happen. Three people have done it at super scale already. Google has done it in two thousand and four on. Meta themselves have done it in two thousand, probably seven and eight on, and two thousand and twelve in mobile. And then Amazon, we always forget, Amazon, I think, got to about a hundred billion plus on ad revenue in the last, you know, kind of half a decade or probably seven or eight years at this point, right? So the movie is clear, right? They're talking about getting to a hundred billion dollars in four years.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  It all makes sense. The funny thing is, and I looked at all that and I thought, yep, that take. And I'm, you know, it's funny, I'm mentally giving them a hundred percent credit for getting that. Opening eye is typically not unaggressive in its projections. So let's assume this progression is aggressive. Yeah, and it's gonna sound really awful and I hate even saying it. Oh, my God, a hundred billion is amazing, but it's not enough relative to the market cap. So the bigger half for me is you can build a hundred billion dollar ad business in chat GPT, which makes sense. And in the context of a total trillion dollars of total ads with Meta already having three hundred of that, Google already having two hundred of that, Amazon already having one hundred of that, and TV's got to eat too, you know, right? That's probably a realistic high end estimate. What it means is you need another hundred billion plus from your enterprise business.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  That was the bigger half for me is consumer alone ain't going to be enough to feed this beast. Because your competitor who's all in on enterprise is already at thirty. I almost feel like a jerk saying it's like, hey, congratulations on your hundred billion dollar ad business. Probably one of the three or four best ad businesses ever, one of the best launches ever. But it may be that corporations want to buy more intelligence than consumers do and that a hundred billion consumer ads won't support your burn. You need more.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  The hundred billion is what, fifteen percent of ad spend, right?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Yep, with ten, ten at a trillion worldwide.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Ten something, fifty. I like this as a goal for 2030 because it's clear what people should be doing. We can't just dilly dally. We can't just add a hundred million of ads to chat G P how it goes. We have to build something that is essentially as big as several of our competitors. It's well understood why it works. We're not directly in commerce. We don't have the advantages that Amazon does, right? But can we achieve the scale of Facebook and others? Yes, this is our job. This is our job, guys, and every week we're going to iterate on it. We're going to improve it. We're going to make it better. It is mathematically possible. This is not as aspirational as the enterprise stuff, right? It's mathematically possible. This is our F'ing job. We're going to review it every week. We're going to put some of our best team on it and it's doable. And if it comes up short a year or two, like Elon, I mean, it would suck for the IPO, but it's not the, it's doable. It is achievable, right?

• 47:24Speaker 00

  And so I think because it is achievable, it will be achieved.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  You're exactly right, Chris, and it's clarity. A bunch of things they've been lacking.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  On the enterprise side, I will say one thing. You know, there was this memo from this week that leaked from Denise Dresser, right? Who's the CRO president saying, wow, well, first of all, Anthropic's overstating their revenue. We're still ahead. And saying, hey, we have all, you know, we have the capacity. They're out of capacity and blah, blah, blah. Okay. At first blush, this memo to me, it seemed like a flashback to something that Marc Benioff might write, who I love, but more appropriate for Salesforce than for OpenAI when I first read it, right? And her last gig was CEO of Slack, right? So at first blush, I thought it seemed out of place at an AI leader. But then I thought about it and I'm like, this is the exact type of messaging you want to win traditional enterprise customers. So I'm pretty bullish actually on OpenAI and the enterprise because all this enterprise DNA they have,

• 48:15Speaker 00

  which probably didn't help a snail's inch the last 12 months. In the future, when all the models are so powerful and big enterprises are trying to make decisions between a couple of top brands, the ability to sell this directly to enterprise versus coming in from the bottom, coming in through the CTO, coming through the other, coming in from functional groups is going to be very powerful. So I think it may be, OpenAI said they're going to double in size, right? And a lot of it's around selling motions to the enterprise. I think it's going to work. I think they're going to run a lot of the traditional playbook, which is going to work better and better in 2027 than when it did when the last year was ask your developer. That was the land and that's why Anthropic won. Ask your developer. I want, I don't want Copilot. I want Opus. And your developer picked everything. Developer picked it for your app.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  And I'm using the old Twilio mantra because it worked for years until it didn't. And I think it's going to work for LMS until it doesn't, until the bud, until you go deep into traditional enterprises. And if OpenAI, which is, you know, it's going to be the number one or number two brand for as long as we do this show, I think they may be able to outsell it versus, hey, the world's going to end from Dario. Thanks for letting me in the lobby. Everyone's going to be unemployed next week. That one made cast a chill in the CIA's office. Thanks, guys, for having me. Most of you won't have a job next week.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  I would have two comments because I'm not quite in that place, maybe three comments, right? One aha I had from this is that the comment on compute is the ballgame is, whatever about the long-term overinvestment, and I still angst about that, there's no doubt in my mind that right now, everyone is compute scarce and there's going to be no restraint. No one's going to blink on their investments for 2026. You actually know the next four quarters of Nvidia announcement, you know the next four quarters of every one of the infrastructure advantage, which is every single thing we can make. If you can count the way for starts at TSMC, you can predict Nvidia's revenues. Everything is going to be sold out from now and for the next 12 months because if the rate-limiting constraint is compute, then everyone's just going to buy compute. So that was the first big thing.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  And yeah, they've got some interesting position relative to Anthropic in that they were more aggressive, so they have more compute. So yeah, that's one thing. The second consequence is people are going to start allocating tokens to the highest, effectively the highest bidder. You're going to see a lot of throttling, you're going to see these plans, like that's why they shot Sora, you're going to see some of the Claude plans get throttled down. You know, that's what money is for, it's to allocate scarce resources. It's actually the definition of economics. It's the study of the allocation of scarce resources. And they're going to start allocating those scarce resources of compute via price. So that's one big trend. The second one, I don't know if you're going to see that level of flip from, oh my God, it's all Anthropic to, oh my God, it's OpenAI. I think it's a two-way fight. Anthropic has the advantage of clarity and focus.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  OpenAI has the advantage of the consumer business and they're going to have to slug it out. I think Anthropic has the little, just the way they've played the last 12 months, have a slightly better lead right now, both in terms of perception and in terms of developer friendliness, but OpenAI is not going to roll away and die. I think I want to come back to the point I made earlier, which I've only processed through now, but sometimes it's important to say the big shit very clearly, right? If you do consumer versus enterprise, typically the biggest things have been a, I mean, if you look at Google, Google's consumer business and ads is two-thirds of the value and maybe the cloud is maybe one-third roughly. And the Big money has been in consumer. Bear with me when I say the obvious, but consumers actually don't want to. They want really great chat GPT.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  There might be some models like, you know, kind of friends and companion models. But fundamentally, when I go home, I want to buy Netflix. When I go to work, I want to buy intelligence. The zoom out comment from all this shit is enterprise is two thirds of the ballgame in AI and consumer is one third or less, which is the flip of the last time. Because you would have thought two years, three years ago when chat GPT exploded, that that was a really great launching point. But if, in fact, enterprise is the better place, then yeah, you're going to have a good consumer business. But the ballgame may be compute, but the ballgame from a customer's perspective, maybe two thirds enterprise, one third consumer, which is the mirror opposite of the internet. And that's just one of those, huh, big picture comment. Because I realize I don't go home and want to do cognition. I go home and I want Netflix. I go to work and I want thinking and they're selling thinking.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  It's an enterprise business. And by the way, you get into a really fun and interesting discussion, which is above my pay grade, but I started to see comments about it is, do the things you do to make the model consumer friendly? You know, the happy, like, does the same model continue to work really amazingly well for both? You know, if the enterprise wants clarity and precision, if the consumer wants a little more friendly answers, do you find the tone and the persona of the consumer model and the enterprise model start to become different? I don't know if that has implications. It's above my pay grade, but it's in a category of something to think about.

• 52:55Harry Stebbings?

  I think very much so, and I think you've seen it on like consumer research studies. So they've seen that actually younger people like OpenAI because it's much more supportive of their emotional challenges.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And in you look at, and in, and in business, I don't want support. I want to be told these five things are good and these three things are bad. When we're doing investing, we don't want supportive. We want decision. It's almost the exact opposite. I want harsh critique. I want the AI to say, this is a stupid deal, Rover. You looked at this three years ago. It was dumb then, it's dumb now. Stop, you idiot. Here are five fact based reasons why this is wrong. And if you give that in a consumer app, you're not going to have great lifetime value or retention.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was interesting. You know, Aaron Levy had a, had a tweet this week about his latest roadshow meeting with CIOs from Box. And he talked about how so many of the CIOs meeting with now are, are token maxing. And what he meant was they are creating. Ideally fixed token budgets, really, you know, they're dollar budgets rather than numerically tokens for the coming year. And they're making the departments fight it out per project. Now, this is where I think the game is going to change again with the leaders because when most of the budget is essentially rogue. When it's developer teams picking Anthropic almost universally last year, when you're giving them the budget because the throughput is so intelligent. You're finding budget for that team. Or you're using discretionary budget to bring in little agents, that's one thing.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  When the CIO takes control again of how many tokens across a large enterprise. That's a very different calculus of which vendor I choose from. And if the CIO prefers to buy OpenAI because it's got a more traditional sales motion. It's packaged better. It's better used and there will be exceptions. There will be exceptions in departments, they will get exceptions. But overall, for the enterprise, I'm standardizing on OpenAI for 2028. It is the right choice for our Fortune 2000 company. It's just a different world when whatever the 60 billion in OpenAI and ChatGPT revenue, all the enterprise stuff is still in some sense rogue today. So much of it is rogue, it is out of budget, it is out of band. And as that changes, it will change which vendor we buy from.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  If you are correct, and I'm not sure you are. What it says is the people who should go into guidance counseling are Microsoft and OpenAI. Cause they need to get their relationship back together again. Cause who is the dominant path to every single enterprise in the world? It's Microsoft. They need to get some couples therapy. They need to accept that they're different, they have differences, but they can reconcile. Cause otherwise they're going to get the clock cleaned. And that frankly, as I think of, that's an indulgence that OpenAI can no longer afford. Because you're right, is that the other guys have stolen the march, have stolen the march on the kind of developer love. Microsoft can go top down. I don't care about your long-term competitive dynamics. You need to kiss and make up here, people.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  And if we agree that enterprise is two thirds of the game. Microsoft is the key and so, you know, figure it out. Go to therapy, talk to your issues and get this thing back together again. And then the other comment to make is I just want to give an advert for Aaron. It's that I read his tweet last week about his comments from the roadshow. And like I said, this Before we were lucky enough to back Aaron 16 years ago and many years later, in fact, last year, we had him back at our annual meeting just to talk. Aaron is a walking investment insight. I mean, I read his tweets and I'm like, literally, I send it out to the group and say, this is the latest thinking and what you should be thinking about, about what CIOs are thinking about. Just read this and then you'll know. It's just so, that was such an insightful tweet about agents. He's not a doomer on employment at all. He's like, people are going to be rolling this thing out

• 56:20Speaker 01

  and if you understand what they're doing, you will have a role here. And he has a really good feeling that, you know, he talked about token maxing. It's like, beyond Silicon Valley, there are going to be meaningful budgets, there are going to be constraints and this thing, you know, it's just a real sense of how CIOs on the frontline are rolling out AI. I just, I just think it's excellent. So I, I follow him all the time.

• 56:38Harry Stebbings?

  I thought it was so excellent. I actually messaged him and said, do you want to come on the show this week and do it? And he said, I would love to. Let's do it tomorrow. And that was this morning. So I'm actually doing a show with him tomorrow about this tweet thread.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  He's in that rare combination of frankly, grounded enough in terms of 15 years calling on CIOs, 15 years calling on CIOs to really know what they think. And at the same time, frankly, young enough and flexible enough to really understand what AI is doing. It's literally like an investment insight. It's like a, one of my colleagues even said it when he spoke last. It was like, he said, literally, it was just like an investment memo spewed out on enterprise AI.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, but here's the thing. Now, just the one tough thing, and I almost don't want to say it because I love Aaron.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  You can say it.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  If he can't re-accelerate Box with his incredible depth of like 10 out of 10, right? What hope is there for so many other leaders, so many other unicorns and others? If he can't get Box to 20 to 30% growth, I'm giving up on, on the rest of the world.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  It's a totally fair comment.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Giving up.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I, and I hope he is, I, I, look, I admire them so enormously and I really hope they can re-accelerate.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Cause he knows everything that's happening and he's not pretending. He's not like so many folks are pretending. He's as engaged he's ever been, right? As stressed as he's ever been. He can't work any harder. If he can't get this re-accelerated, good God, who the hell can? Who, who, who the hell can?

• 57:56Harry Stebbings?

  We had the financials for SpaceX leaked, a $5 billion loss on $18.5 billion in revenue. The reason it's so, I think, important for the Audiences, there are so many endowment funds and managers who hold SpaceX in some way, who are awaiting the IPO later this year. The loss is driven by the XAI acquisition, not by operations, important to add. But the $2 trillion potential IPO is a big number and the maths needs to be worked out. So 18.5 billion in revenue at 2 trillion is 108x. Did these numbers change your perspective? Did they confirm a opinion?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Didn't change, confirmed. But let's break it apart a little bit. The first is, okay, I'm going to go all technical accounting on you now, right? When did XAI close? Because pooled accounting is gone. Pooled accounting doesn't exist anymore, where you retroactively recast the financials as if the companies were together. So that's only the loss from when XAI was acquired. And I think it was late last year, early this year. So we actually don't know the actual run rate. Do you understand me? In other words, if the deal closed in October 1st, then that would only reflect one quarter of loss. So anyone hypothesizing on its profit or its profit excluding that, or it's, quote unquote, only a $5 billion loss, until I see the actual GAAP financials, I don't know shit. It could be 20. Right, exactly. $20 billion loss. But I think the rough trajectory of it will be something like the following.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  We have an amazing launch business with a near monopoly on cost effective launch, and that price could come down with the next generation rocket. We have an amazing business on Starlink. I think the whole XAI, in retrospect, I think you'll look back and go, I'm not sure I would have paid 250 billion for XAI. And then the question, as you say, is how do you value that relative 100 times revenues? And we've talked about this before. I'm not going to say it's right or wrong, because I think what I would say is, obviously, very few things trade at 100 times revenues for any extended period of time. Let's just say that. So it's clearly underwriting a level of growth. It's underwriting a re-acceleration of growth, even of the Starlink business, which is plausible based on the future things they're doing, but feels like a lot, he said gently.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  It appears to be the most expensive IPO at scale of all time, but as a based on revenue multiple. Yeah, it appears to have no one at scale that has IPO that has ever has ever IPOed at a revenue multiple approaching this, right?

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  And the case will obviously be all the future things. What is space? And you read the bull case. And as I say, as I say, I'm trying to avoid the, I don't believe it. And I try to express my concern rather than saying, oh, I think that's crazy. I just say, you have the existing business and then you have a series of new initiatives around direct to cellular and all of which, and then obviously data centers in space. You can articulate a massive market. The question, as I've said before, is, so you take these adjacent Tams. If you give them 100% probability of happening and 100% probability of them happening right now, in other words, no NPV because it takes five years to make it happen, then you probably get to $2 trillion. If on the other hand, you apply a probability of it not happening and a time value of money, you get to a lower number. And maybe that's a good way to reduce it.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  I mean, the Elon believers are saying, these are the future things and I ascribe 100% probability of success. And it's like, I'm going to give them credit for today, even though it's going to take three or four more years. So it's basically the Elon discount rate. The Elon discount rate is zero and the Elon probability of failure rate is zero to get to 2 trillion. If you put a more conservative number in both of those, you probably end up in a different place. You still have the upside, you still have the long-term story, but are you getting paid for the risk? And that's a way of framing it that's not, oh, I think it's silly because 100 times revenues is just too much. I think that's a reductionist argument. What you're really saying is, I'm looking at all the future time and perhaps be more sober about the probability of it happening. I'm revising my priors from, oh, 100 is crazy, which is just too simplistic, Rory, to what

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  are you saying about these other markets when you feel that it should be at 30 times revenue? You're effectively saying, maybe it takes four years for the data centers to happen and the direct to cellular to happen. And maybe the discount rate for that is 15% and maybe the probability of success is 70, but not 100. And pretty, you know, you multiply all that, you got to get paid for the risk.

• 1:01:56Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, what topic do you think we should discuss that we have left?

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Um, some private stuff.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  There's some private stuff.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Some private market stuff, simple humble ventureship.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  For what it's worth, the topic I put, but I actually don't think it's as interesting as a larger topic. Apple have an 898 employees. This is not a brand new AI company last week, 4.5 million revenue per head. I've been thinking a lot about this. You have, you know, the block memo and what Jack Dorsey wants to do. You know, every Andreessen chart of the week is showing how efficient the next generation is, right? How 11 labs and everyone's so efficient. Just the meta thing, my captain obvious learning from all the conversation I have is it's a choice. Everyone wants to be small by choice. And this is what I think is going to be disruptive for the next year and a half. As VCs, you get really excited when you see an efficient company because all things being equal, hey, they don't need to fundraise as much. I'm going to be diluted less. It's less risky, right?

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  Everyone loves, everyone wants to invest in the next version of Viva. We raised three, three million and got to 30 billion. That's the, no matter what anybody says, that's the venture dream. We raised three million and we're 30 billion. I don't care what you do.

• 1:03:05Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, whether it's bagels or healthcare software. And so we see hints of this in this employee thing. It's not quite that simple when the gross margins are lower, but I think what I'm seeing everywhere is everyone just wants to be smaller by choice. And AI is an enabler because it lets my best engineers do more. AI is an enabler because I can get rid of those SDRs, but.

• 1:03:27Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, I actually tweeted last night, the core test when evaluating a team is knowing what I know now about the person having worked with them. Would I hire them again? And you said, that's not the question. What did you say was the question?

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  Would I replace them with an agent? Would I rather work with them or replace them with an agent? It's the same thing. I'd rather, I'd rather have an agent than a mediocre person, right? Everyone thinks that, everyone thinks, not everyone says it out loud.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  But provided it wasn't a mediocre agent, as you articulated earlier.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I know how to build a good agent now, as will everyone in 18 months. They don't know how to today, everyone in 18 months will figure out how to build an AI. Because they'll get easier and easier to train. And we, we touched on this briefly, but like you don't need prompt engineers anymore, right? For fun, yesterday on Replit, I built a fully functional website in about six minutes that. Has video, audio and everything. My prompt was create a whole website around my theme of the recycled mediocre in this post. Recycled mediocre are when you keep hiring the same mediocre folks again and again. And it did the whole thing from that prompt. It created the whole site, pulled up, which make can't do. Pulled up all the context, created incredible horror image, then created the video out of it, then created the connection, then pulled up all the context.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  And so my point there is you don't need to, the most mediocre prompts in the world do magic now. You don't need to be a prompt engineer. Right now, getting an agent to work, you need, you need an FDE and it takes weeks or sometimes even months and lots of training. It shouldn't be true in 18 months, right? It should be as magical as prompts are today. So I think we're all going to be good at agents in 18 months. And so we're all going to say to Harry's point, do I want to work with that person again? Or would I rather replace them with an agent? We're going to, it's not, and it's not about the money. We're just going to choose to be leaner. We're going to choose to be leaner for many reasons.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  I think you are right on the directionality. I just want to make a kind of a business point, which is the simplistic revenue per employee is just not a useful metric because you can't compare the efficiency. Like someone like a cursor has very low employee count, but very massive gross margin count, right? Gross margin cost of sales, right? I mean, what's this cursor does 4 million per employee, Salesforce does 700, 700,000 per employee. Oh, cursor must be more efficient. Well, it turns out Salesforce has 30% operating margins and cursor is losing a lot of money. Why? Because they spend a whole ton on tokens. I mean, you can compare companies in the same business on an efficiency metric, but the one, the one shot. I mean, one shot fits all revenue per employee doesn't really cut it.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  That said, two comments. One is app lovers, one app lovers amazing business because they actually have fairly high gross margins and low employee count. They're just one, it's one of those businesses. You just have to go away and understand how it fits in that interstitial moment in mobile ad networks. And it just, it's, it's the only, at this point, given trade desk's downturn, it's the most successful ad network business by far. And we could digress on to why that is, but it's a one of a kind business. It's, it's a four and a half million per whatever it is, per employee business where unlike a tropic. Are opening up no capex, unlike Cursor, no token cost, it's just a money printing machine. I'm jealous. But Jason, the second comment is you are exactly still, you're still exactly right is that

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  the trend everywhere is grind down the headcount. Do you need them? What can be automated? So, you know, the truth, so maybe reflecting in my own mind, maybe the way to say it is, it's not fair to say to a SaaS company, hey, AppLovin' does four and a half million, Cursor does four and a half million, Unic 500,000. But what is fair to say is last year you were at 500,000, this year you better be at 600,000 per employee. Cause Jason's telling you, and next year maybe you're gonna be at 800. If you're not making progress on that metric, as a software company, you are not with the program. So on that basis, I think you're right. Obviously, I'm just sapping off the knowledge of smarter people than me. Would you buy AppLovin' today?

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  I don't know now. I mean, you always worry ad network businesses over the medium term get ground down. But it's been able to survive for the longest time. It's gotten rid of its game business. It's purely focused on this. And for some reason, it's found a way to exist in the Apple ecosystem with all the privacy issues as being the only way to do some of this targeting. So I need to know, I need to spend a lot more time thinking about it, but it's been an astonishing run for it. It's probably the standalone, the biggest beneficiary of mobile networks, clearly mobile ads, you know, after maybe Meta and that, yeah. Amazing win.

• 1:07:48Harry Stebbings?

  There's two that I just wanted to touch on. One was Tomo Bravo shutting down the growth equity business. Is this foreshadowing of a load of other growth equity businesses shuttering? Or is this just Tomo Bravo independent?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Well, first, before you guys answer, can you educate me? Cause I'm ignorant. I don't understand the whole Tomo Bravo empire and what it truly means they're shutting down growth equity versus the other vehicles. I don't understand it.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  I think it's pretty straightforward. The core business that puts 90% of the money on the table is buying controlled positions in software companies and, you know, with some leverage and running them, doing build and add on other companies to them and ultimately selling them either to another PE buyer. That's most of what they do. It's 90% of the money. They started doing non-controlled minority positions in late-stage high-growth companies. It's just a different business. But I just think it's different enough from the control, like in a controlled position business. You're trying to buy value now. We may look back and say many of the prices they paid for those controlled positions in 21 and 22 weren't value, but you're trying to buy value where you have control and you're going to be EBITDA positive and you're trying to pay down the debt and do all those things.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  You know, classic venture growth, you're still, you're hopefully growing 50 to 100% minimum per our discussions. You're probably still losing money. You're not in a controlled position as the PE investor. And in a period like right now where your core business is threatened, the first rule of threat is you retreat to the core. PE guys regularly come in to growth venture at the top of markets thinking this looks easy. And they regularly retreat from those markets when they discover it's hard. But shouldn't they be going back in in 2026? Is this a time to be re-entering? Possibly, but and again, but two reasons why not. One is your core business is under threat. The one thing you don't want to be doing with your investors is saying, we have this thing that 90% of your money is in,

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  but we're futzing around with this other 10%. Even if it's a good business, it doesn't matter, right? We gave you $10 billion to invest in controlled positions in software companies. And we gave you half a billion dollars to screw around doing something else. You're having problems in your core business. How about you fix that? It doesn't even rise to the level of is it a good opportunity or not? It's not the opportunity we have.

• 1:09:56Harry Stebbings?

  And you said retreating to core, Rory. I completely agree with you. Core is businesses, I'm sorry, I'm not, I'm never shitting on businesses, but challenged businesses like Cooper, like Anaplan, like Medalia. Can you help me? Like this feels like a clusterfuck of pain.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Separate comment, yes. I mean, I think, look, one of the things is that they're the same type of companies as were hit or two four in the public market. So the same discussion we had in the public market applies here. In other words, these are mature, plain vanilla SaaS companies with single-digit growth rates. They're just now traded every day and the public markets are traded in the privates. So the question is, what does that mean? The first thing is, these kind of companies are trading at two to four times revenues. So the same equivalent companies in a private are probably, should be called value today at that. And then they were bought at 10 times and have leverage, right? So that's a pretty tough place to be. The negative spin is if you apply the same math of three or four times revenues and then deduct the debt, you have little or no enterprise value. And that's terrifying.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  And that means you could, you could see big losses in some of these PE funds. Now, the positive spin that they would give, which kind of goes back to Jason's thing. I'm not sure I fully believe it is. If these software marks in the public markets are totally wrong and in two years from now they're back to eight times, then you know, it'll be a tree that fell on the forest. No one will know. And in two years' time, they'll be able to go public with Anaplan again at eight times. And maybe that happens and maybe not. But that would be one part of the why it's going to be okay. If I was articulating as Tom and Baba why it's going to be okay. The first comment would be it's way overdone. And these things are really worth eight times revenues because they're profitable. And in the end, things trade at 15 times cash flow and not nine times. We'll all be okay. That's one argument. And then the second argument could be some version of the Jason one, which is sometimes

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  the advantage of private ownership is acute clarity. And if you're going to make the transform to AI bet, I bet you these guys are going to articulate that we will make that happen because we will own these things. We will replace management if they're not capable of doing it. We will hire other people that can do it. Maybe we'll buy assets. I'm not sure I buy that, but that's probably part of the argument, which is PE's argument has always been transformation. Now, to date, the transformation has been about cutting costs and being more efficient. I don't know if they can pull off transformation where transformation is not adding a 60%. If you add a 60% agent as a privately held company, you haven't passed the Jason test. The question you have to ask these guys is can they add a hundred percent agent that you can charge for?

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  If they can and they rekindle growth to 20, then they'll have earned their massive carry. If they can't and these things don't bounce back, then you're right, you could have a train wreck. And that's the game. That's their ballgame right now, which is why they're all looking for AI experts. It's why on a going forward basis, they're pitching, buying new companies and kind of AI enabling them. But for their existing portfolio, it's all about, you know, what do you add to Cooper, our Anaplan to make it AI first, AI forward at least, not AI first.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  On the one hand, I think we're going to look back on this and see it's all a shame. Because if you have 10,000 happy customers, 50,000, 100,000. 150,000 who are reasonably happy, not thrilled, but reasonably happy. And you've had now 12, 18, 15 months to build them an Agentic product. You've had access to the LMs, you've been able to carve out 50 of your best engineers to work on it. And you didn't take advantage of your installed base for real, not in the moat way, not prisoners. But I mean, if you didn't take advantage of the fact that 90% of your customers are not at the bleeding edge of AI and sell them an agent. This is such a missed opportunity for the leaders. It's tragic. It's tragic because most folks have not made their decisions in agents. It is, and we're going to look back and we're going to see these teams were so mediocre and so paralyzed.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  And I got to tell you, when I talk with folks so out of ideas, people should not be asking me what they should do with their agents. They should be showing me their agents and asking me for constructive criticism on them, right? People are paralyzed with fear. They don't want to work twice as hard as they used to, and they don't know what to build. And it's a tragedy because even today, selling to the install base is much easier than finding a new customer. If they're happy, just call them up, they will take the meeting. And this is the great tragedy, and I think a lot of private equity firms are probably pretending, pretending their playbook's going to work. I'm going to hire this AI expert from Stebbings, Driscoll and Lemkin. It's 2 million a year. They're coming in with their ties and their checkered shirts, and they're going to teach us how to do AI and get us to a 60% solution by the end of the year. It slips a bit.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  It's a tragedy, and I'll tell you why it's a triple tragedy. This is something I didn't know, I mean, granted, in my brief tenure at Adobe as a VP, okay? And that was not a high point for Adobe. It was during the transition to the cloud. But I will tell you, and I never, you know, I never underestimate competitors or big companies. I got to be careful, right? But I will tell you what I learned at Adobe that folks don't realize. There were 100 surplus amazing engineers, either by design or accident. Either by accident, they were working on projects that weren't quite going to get there, right? Or they were available, they were available more. Now, sometimes they were on the back half of their career, sometimes they weren't quite as, as razzed as the top engineers at Replit or Lovable or Cursor.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  But I mean, great, my CTO is the toughest critic would actually say, let's go steal these five guys. They're actually great. They exist. So it is a crying shame. You can't take a team six at Anaplan, at Coupa, at whatever, build the world's best product and ship it to your 10, 20, 50, 100,000. This is, we're watching tragedies in the making and it's sad. It's sad because they're still deep down running the dated playbook of a big release every four to five years and a quarterly release, which changes a few pixels and adds some workflow. The deep down, all the companies I've talked to are still running that playbook. And it's a tragedy because they have, they have the opportunity, but Stebbings, Driscoll, Lemkin, AI consulting is not going to get them there.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  And that's who PE firms want to do. Bring in these guys. It's not going to work and everyone is right. They have the base. They have the opportunity. And, um, you know, and they're going to end up in these medallia death spirals where they're defaulting on, on debt and defaulting on billions of dollars and, and, and they can't, they can't afford it. And they know, and it's just, it's not too late to sell, sell to your installed base.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  To make the, to make the math work in the LBO, they don't need to attract a whole bunch of new customers. You know, they, they already, once you do the PE deal, you've already accepted that you're not trying, you're not a growth story anymore. But to Jason, Jason's exactly right. If you can upsell 20, 30, 40% more by delivering this, you know, 100% agent, it might be the next most amazing company, but you'll cash flow positive, you'll pay off your debt, you'll create enterprise value. And 5, 10,000 customers aren't going to have to do a migration in two years when you file for bankruptcy. So I, I agree. It's a, it's a bounded problem. It should be solvable, but it's not going to be in many cases.

• 1:16:35Harry Stebbings?

  I'm going to ask you two questions. You got the binaries on them. Who's going to go out first? OpenAI or Anthropic?

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Anthropic. SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI in that order.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  Well, look, obviously it appears that SpaceX has already filed and they're on track. So that we already know the answer there. The fact that Anthropic just added the Novartis CEO to the board, that's a sign they're getting ready to IPO as soon as they can. I mean, I'm sure he's going to add value in healthcare, but that means nothing, but we're trying to IPO very soon. Right? That and finding who the hell will chair the audit committee are clear signs you're going to IPO as soon as possible. So given that they have that and OpenAI is sending out warm memos, I'm just voting that, that they go out first.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not even a difficult question.

• 1:17:15Harry Stebbings?

  Sarah Fry, the CFO of OpenAI, be there when they go out? Yes or no?

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Look, I do know one thing, CEOs and CFOs, A, have to be widely aligned, and B, the CFO should probably report to the CEO. And right now, I believe the CFO, in this case, reports to the president, which seems an anomalous arrangement. And so maybe rather than kind of doing so and so's in or out, what I would say is this, if that IPO is going to happen, and if this team is going to make it happen, then they need to be in absolute sync, and they probably need to have a more traditional reporting structure, so that people don't have one more thing to think about it, why this company is weird. I mean, I always tell my CEOs, up and down the stack, dude, on the things where you're unique and different, you know, where you're changing the world, do as different as you like, but all the boring stuff, just give the market what it wants. It wants the CEO or the CFO

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  reporting to them. They want to be in sync. It makes everyone's head hurt if the CEO and CFO are saying different things about something as fundamental as when we're going to go public. Stop the leaking, stay in sync, you know, that's just not a thing. No one wants to hear that. No one wants to hear that, because those are going to be the two people on the road show. They should be able to finish each other's sentence. You should be able to put them in separate rooms, like a police interrogation room, and each of them should say exactly the same thing, and they should stick to their story. The idea that you have separate stories from the two, it's just palpably absurd. So rather than saying who's in and who's out, that's what you got to do. The same therapist that they're using for their relationship with Microsoft could actually do some internal relationships too. Interesting.

• 1:18:40Speaker 00

  But I will say two things. One, on the one hand, in isolation, if I'm running something like anything at scale, but especially at OpenAI, I want no daylight between me and my top lieutenants, no daylight. Okay? Now, you could argue a CFO's job is to create a little bit of distance, to be that objective person in the room, and there is some truth to that, right? But there can't be daylight, or it's not going to work. So if there is that daylight, and it were that simple, you make a change, and you make a change before the IPO, so it's least disruptive. Now, having said that, if you are running a company at scale, and there is already a ton of transition on the senior team, which there has been, ton of turnover, I've seen a lot of times roles like CFO and others, where you're like, listen, I just don't want to change one more thing. Yeah, there's some issues here, but Sarah is so experienced that things work.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  Like the workday finally works. We finally got all these things to work. This is not, I got 99 problems. This is not one that I want to tackle. So I have often seen something like this where you shouldn't have the daylight, but it's not, it's not, it's not Poltergeist-esque streaming through and it's just not enough of a problem. If your management team is super stable, you have time to work on these things. But sometimes islands of stability in your management team, even if they're not perfect, it's just not worth another turnover on the senior team. It takes it, every time you replace someone, it takes its toll on the team, especially if they're popular, especially if they're liked and respected. It just, especially if they're, if everyone thinks they're terrible, you move them out and there's cake and a party on Friday.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  But I wouldn't be surprised if she's pretty popular in her own way and it takes its toll.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  The one ingredients of success are there. The one ingredients of success are there to have OpenAI be an amazing mega IPO. And I say, Lilly, you get your therapist to make up at Microsoft, get your therapist to make up, get aligned with CFO, focus on the two big things, which are getting the ads product out and getting the enterprise cranking. Stay the course, you have the compute and get it done.

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  If you have an executive that's truly arguing with the CEO in public, in the media, and/or like Dario back in the day at OpenAI, going directly to the board with craziness, they gotta go. It doesn't matter, they gotta go. You cannot be out in the media arguing with the CEO and you cannot be Dario, no matter how smart you, going to the board and saying, I will only stay at OpenAI if I directly report to the board. Like it doesn't matter how good you are, and this is brutal. Sometimes you have to let some of your best people go because it's too dysfunctional. They gotta go in those situations.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Whenever you get a phone call as a VP from a board member, from a VP, you're like, okay, there's a problem. Now, maybe the CEO goes, maybe the VP goes, maybe there's a problem and you can solve it. I'm not going to be as absolute as you gotta go, but your antenna go up, you know, an entire notch when you get that call. And you're right. And as for briefing, I mean, look, most companies aren't interesting enough to have a media briefing. It's almost like these companies have become a political level drama. And I actually saw a fun tweet from Martin Casada, who was basically saying, enjoy all the drama, enjoy all the pity, backstabbing and all. It's because this is such an exciting moment that the media is focused on and because they're focused on it, you get all this is just what happens when you're in the center of the universe in terms of tech. So roll with it, but you are right, Jason.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  You want to be the tight run ship in this sloppy, sloppy world.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  And whatever, if any VPs get this far on the pod, whatever you do, do not reach out to your VCs to say there's problems with their CEO. You will, you're losing your job and not only are you losing your job, it doesn't matter if you're right. At some level, you're probably right. If you, if you're a passionate VP and you want, and you see issues in the company, you reach out to Rory or Harry on the board. Odds that you're a hundred percent wrong are zero percent like it's not worth it. What are they going to do? Fire the CEO over you zero point, unless there's fraud, zero point zero percent. You're gone. You're maybe in three months or it may be that afternoon, you're gone. Just don't do it, VP. Just resign, just resign with grace.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  What was the Shakespeare quote Rory? The world is a stage. All the world is a stage and each was play a part. Yes.

• 1:22:33Harry Stebbings?

  He had to finish on a Shakespeare quote incredibly cultured. Thank you so much, guys.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:39Harry Stebbings?

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