Charles was hired at OpenAI from Instagram to help build creator love for OpenAI products, ChattyPT. They held a retreat in upstate New York. Creators were posting their wildflowers and nature baths and things like that. And then all the new AI things they were learning. The internet got real mad. The internet got so mad. They were so mad, so mad. AI sucks, just hating AI. And why would you take money and go to this $2,000 retreat when the world is burning and AI is taking up all this compute? Elon Segway, breaking news. Nikita, head of product at X, Elon's company, is leaving. What? I just saw that. Oh, that's sad. What's gonna happen to X, you guys? What's gonna happen?
Is it all right to the test? More or less.
Why hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less. I'm singing this week. We're singing the text song. I noticed that. Can you give us a little more? Where did that come from? Well, I'm actually happy at the moment because I have a plan for this episode. Oh, we like plans. I was gone last week. I noticed you tried to lead the horses to the water, and they went in their own directions. Also, guys, I was wrong. I was so critical of the setup of last week, Dave being in a car and Sam being on a porch, but it worked out really well. And so- Why do you say that? Did you get good feedback? We did get good feedback. We had such nice comments on the pod. Yeah. What?
They were like, it's my favorite podcast. We appreciate it, everybody. We really do. It warmed my heart, actually. I got a little emotional, but it also encouraged Sam to literally do the podcast from the beach because those watching on YouTube will notice our Boston Whaler behind him. My original plan was to do it on the Boston Whaler, but it's a little too windy for it. So I'm just hanging out on the beach, buying shit on Instagram. I thought Sam had a Zoom background up, and then I noticed the water was moving. Sam, although that Boston Whaler that I found for you is pretty awesome. That is awesome. I might have to buy a red Boston Whaler. I have an extra mooring,
so we can do double-mooring Boston Whalers here. Dueling Whalers. Can the moorings go mooring with you? Well, yeah. Sure. My only problem with that, for any listener, I do have a problem on the Boston Whaler, which is it's rained a lot here. Not now, but earlier. And my aux pump for pumping the water out of the boat, somehow the circuit's broken. So I had to bail it a little bit manually. So if anyone out there likes Boston Whalers- We had to change the battery on the boat. It's called a bilge pump, Sam. Thank you. My aux bilge pump. The main bilge pump seems okay, but the aux, which is supposed to always be on, it didn't quite work. So I got a bilge pump problem.
And bilging and pumping. This is great. I love how Sam is bilge pumping on the East Coast, and Dave on Friday went ranching and herded cattle here in Montana. Guys, no, Dave, which ranch did you go to? We have to compare notes. I'm planning a trip where I'm going to learn to barrel race. Not Yellowstone Ranch. My lifelong best friend, Terrell Hibbard, who is both a rancher and a- I love that guy. The king of pastoral rap. Yep, pastoral rapper. And he also makes single malt whiskey in Helena, Montana, called Gulch Distillers. So this episode is brought to you by Gulch Distillers. He's a fifth-generation Montana rancher. They have one of the largest ranches in Montana.
Ranching with him every summer. But he's a first-generation pastoral rapper. Yeah. Here's the deal. I just love how I was hearing Dave on AI calls in the morning talking about the OpenAI ecosystem, open source. And then he left at 4 p.m. to a ranch with no service, brought his Starlink with him, and then herded cattle on foot, even. Not even on horseback. Yeah. No, I've got to get herding cattle. There's a metaphor in here. I'm very excited by it. I got you. We will come to Montana. Anybody who's interested, we will set you up with the real experience, not this dude ranch. Wait, don't give everyone the invite, Dave. It's like more or less ranching or bilge pumping.
Okay, guys, while we were ranching and bilge pumping, there was some tech news this week. There are actual things happening. We have an AI shakeup. What kind of summer is this? It's proof of AI because somehow the business continues while we're all on the beach. So clearly the AGI has taken over. Okay. And that's the only reason there's like the computers are just talking to each other on Techmeme now. It's true. This is a good point. Some of us are working, but there's also such a thing as vacation. Some of us are vacationing, but we have a Google AI shakeup. We have the Airtable acquisition by Vending Spoons. We have some Airtable investors present to talk about this
and what it portends for the industry. Indeed we do. We have a great story out of The Information about Apple and iCloud and how it relates to the OpenAI lawsuit. And we have SpaceX earnings, SpaceX tanking, SpaceX lockup soon upon us. And we have some rants. So let's start with Google. Who paid attention to the news? Who needs a recap? I paid attention to the news. Okay. Britt, tell us what happened at Google. No, I mean, I feel like The Information reported it better. I actually quantified. I was in the top 5% of all Google employees who joined Google. So, which means they've had a lot of employees, but- By time, by skincare, by what? Top 5%? Like number of employees.
I was in the first 5,000 employees of Google. So I feel like- Not to imply it would only be by tenure. It could also have been by brilliance, Britt. I've just tried to- But Britt, didn't you also win the Google award for like, you won the million-dollar special Googler award when you were a child, right? She did. Guys, I don't want to toot my own horn here. I just- Toot it, Britt. All people do on this pod is toot their own horn. Go for it. I'm just saying, top 5% early Googler. Yeah. Always give Britt an opportunity to say she got a straight A. I like to win things. I like gold stars. I'm going to leave it at that.
My point being, I was at Google when Jeff Dean was at Google because Jeff Dean's been at Google even longer than me, 27 years. Well, he's still at Google for two more days, but yes. Yes. Okay. I'll recap the news for everybody. So obviously the context has been, there's always a lot of questions inside Google about their AI strategy. Are they falling behind? Is Gemini competitive? What's the strategy? They've had a lot of different leaders in typical Google fashion. And the latest iteration is that Demis Hassabis, who's been the leader, obviously the founder of DeepMind, as Sundar says, stepping up,
but really stepping back from the day-to-day management of Gemini and the AI efforts and taking on a broader AI research role. So Corey, and I'm going to pronounce Kovachulu, Kovachulu, I'm going to pronounce his name wrong, who has been actually running Gemini and team had an awesome profile of him recently. And The Information is sort of the clear leader of the AI efforts. And then Jeff Dean, who was there when Britt was there, but also actually was in many ways the godfather of Google AI, because he led Google Brain, which was Google's AI effort until they bought DeepMind. And then they were both their parallel AI efforts, is going on to start something new.
So Britt, what's your take? And I, of course, will offer mine as well, but I want to hear yours first. Well, my insider sources, because we are highly interactive with Google and DeepMind right now on a couple of fronts, claim that Demis really wants to focus a lot on Isomorphic, the sort of spinout of DeepMind that's doing a lot in the drug development space. So I think he's personally really passionate about that. He's still going to continue to have- He also said that in a tweet, just so you know. Not that your sources aren't, but this is yes. It's real is what I'm saying. It's not just PR narrative. He's super passionate about it.
And he'll stay involved at the high level. And then they were both their parallel AI efforts are going on to start something new. So Britt, what's your take? And I, of course, will offer mine as well, but I want to hear yours first. Well, my insider sources, because we are highly interactive with Google and DeepMind right now on a couple of fronts, claim that Demis really wants to focus a lot on Isomorphic, the spinout of DeepMind that's doing a lot in the drug development space. So I think he's personally really passionate about that. He's still going to continue to have. He also said that in a tweet, just so you know, not that your sources aren't, but this is, yes.
It's real, is what I'm saying. It's not just PR narrative. He's super passionate about it. And he'll stay involved at the high level. And has been for some time. I mean, that was the whole thrust of the Nobel Prize-winning work with AlphaFold. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think the macro point is, there are just shakeups happening at all these frontier labs. I think a lot of Google employees might see this as a sign that maybe they should leave. Is it unstable? I think anytime that not only one, but two leaders like this leave, it creates some instability.
The world has changed a lot. You just think these AI things and the types of orgs required to run them, the leaders required to run them, have just changed a lot. A lot of these guys have been doing this a long time. They were great research leaders. They're not going to be the operational leaders you need to do it. By the way, half of them are so fucking rich, they don't want to lead some big team. That sucks. They want to work on frontier cool stuff, right? Which is health or things like that. So this is, we're in the cycle where, especially at big companies, the right people aren't the right leaders at different phases.
And I think it's good and healthy to recognize that and then reshuffle the decks when you can. The worst thing you want is to have some guy who's the wrong leader for this phase. They're not in it because they're too rich and they want to work on health. They're an amazing research leader, but they don't care about driving some random metric up. You want to cycle people out in healthy orgs. So I actually think turnover and these types of changes are good. Now, the interesting thing when you're at a really big company and you keep people around because you can afford to, it is sometimes comp-inefficient. You don't fire anyone.
You're just letting them get paid $100 million a year to do their pet project. But it is an interesting thing. I mean, Google not only didn't fire people, they created companies under their company for these people to keep them around. So Google is the OG of this strategy. Yeah, it's the OG of if you're a really, really, really rich company. First of all, you don't want to put your talent back out into the world. You want to hoard your talent.
And then two, it's much more pleasant because they built teams, there's loyalties or whatever, to let them have a bigger job somewhere else while recognizing the fact they're just not the right person probably to do the next phase of what actually has to be done for the business. Right. Is the way to think about it. Either because they actually would be great, but they just have no interest, or they're just the wrong person. The other take here is that if you believe that self-improving AI is coming, the current model is going to raise the next model that will raise the next model, and that we're on that pathway now.
We should call it by its name, Dave, recursive self-improvement. Whatever the current marketing term is. I love recursion. Who doesn't love recursion? I mean, who doesn't? It's like none of this shit. I love this. It's like personal superintelligence, recursive whatever. It's all just marketing nonsense. The point is, if these systems start improving themselves less than two years from now, the more cynical take is that if you're one of the 1,000 people who have the most coveted of all skill sets, which is in training, pre-training, the sort of raising of models,
then you need to get out the door now in order to capture the capital and the resources and the mojo that you need to start up another one of these labs. And you kind of see this happening. The last six months has just been lab after lab after lab after lab of people that were from one of the labs. Right. And now they're going out to build their own version because Anthropic and OpenAI are worth a trillion dollars. And so I'm going to go try to get my trillion dollars. You kind of have, I think, an element of that going on. This is the era of bag securing. Everyone is trying to get their bag right now.
And whether that's a big amount of private capital or selling your company or whatever, everyone is in a desperate. It feels like musical chairs. We're in a musical chairs era. Everyone gets it, and everyone wants their bag. It's the line from, I love, what is it? It's not The Big Short, it's the other one. The CEO of the bank comes in. He's like, I'm not paid because I'm the smartest. I'm paid to know one thing, which is what music is going to play. And right now I hear silence. It's a good one. So I agree with all of that. I also think Demis has the same chance of being CEO of Google today as he did yesterday.
So I don't think this is like he's going off on this parallel path to pursue unrelated interests. Right. So you can look at this news. And then because I'm a business journalist and I can't help myself, I'm always like, what does it mean for succession? What does it mean for succession? Not that this is imminent. I don't think Sundar is going anywhere, so I don't mean to say that. But it is a company where that's an open question that smart people have had for years. And again, it's not a burning question because Sundar isn't going anywhere. Why would he want to run Google? Do you mean, what does it mean for succession for DeepMind or for all of Alphabet? No, no.
For Google. Who's going to be the next CEO of Google? There's probably a deep bench over there. Why does he want that job? What did Sam say? Who wants that job? No, seriously, why? If you're him, why do you want that job? You know how many headaches and reports that is? Sundar? No, Sundar is fine. Sundar's already doing the job. If you're Demis, you're at the forefront of AI. You're with the future is no employees and you're self-improving. Guys, it's time for a bet. It's time for a bet. Who wants to take the bet? I'm going to bet it's Demis. Who's betting against me? After Sundar, it's Demis, you think? Yeah. No way. Why does he want that job? It's a terrible job.
I don't know. I literally am asking honestly. I'm going to ask Gemini. Oh, we should make a fun bet. To be clear, I obviously have no reporting and inside information, but I have for years believed, and I don't think it's imminent, it's a race between Thomas Kurian, who runs Google Cloud, and Demis. And the question of the next CEO of Google is really going to be a question of what type of company is Google however many years from now when Sundar moves on and Google's enterprise business is growing. Many tech behemoths have gone the enterprise direction, in which case it would be Thomas. But if AI in some form is still the prevailing dynamic, Demis is still the leader.
And I got to tell you, there are multiple aspects to Demis and his leadership and personality that I think go unmissed. One, he is incredibly ambitious. You guys should read Sebastian's book about him that he just published. The takeaway from that book is this is not a guy who just wants to win another Nobel Prize. OK, so he's incredibly ambitious. What is he ambitious for? Sam, some people want to run companies. Why? OK, but why can't they just sit on their beach? You can feel that way.
I want to let me finish my point because there will be a next CEO of Google, and listeners of our pod may be interested, in my opinion, in other people's opinion on who that's going to be, which again is grounded in reporting. When I saw Demis at Davos this year, he was talking like it was a CEO road tour. Google was trotting him out to every publisher, and he wasn't just talking about Gemini and he wasn't just talking about DeepMind. He wasn't just talking about ISO work. He was talking about Google Cloud. He was talking about regulations. You guys should read Sebastian's book about him that he just published.
The takeaway from that book is this is not a guy who just wants to win another Nobel Prize. Okay, so he's incredibly ambitious. What is he ambitious for? Sam, some people want to run companies. Why? Okay, but why can't they just sit on their beach? You can feel that way. I want to let me finish my point because there will be a next CEO of Google, and listeners of our pod may be interested, in my opinion, in other people's opinion on who that's going to be, which, again, is grounded in reporting. When I saw Demis at Davos this year, he was talking like it was a CEO road tour.
Google was trotting him out to every publisher, and he wasn't just talking about Gemini, and he wasn't just talking about DeepMind. He wasn't just talking about ISO work. He was talking about Google Cloud. He was talking about regulations. He was talking about all of this stuff. So I don't say this with super high confidence. I think this is actually a really interesting and open question in the technology business right now about what path Google goes on. But I don't think people should read this as Demis is totally out of that game. I think he is very ambitious. I think the platform of running what will be the world's most valuable company is interesting.
And I don't think it necessarily has to evolve like a lot of day-to-day management and people reviews, which I don't think he's interested in. Doesn't Sundar have like a hundred reports? Sundar has a hundred reports because every time someone gets poached, they report to Sundar. But a new CEO could operate differently. What about the guy taking over DeepMind? Cori? Cori is awesome, but he's very technical. He's a great AI leader. He can't speak on the world stage. He's a very impressive guy. I don't think he's usually mentioned in that context. It also could be unknown. Maybe Larry or Sergey comes back.
Larry is basically pulling all the strings he wants to pull, and that's just fine for him. I actually think he's way more involved than people realize. I guess my response to all of this is that's how Google has always worked. You go back to those old funny org charts that were made in the 2000s about how all these companies work, and Google's always worked like this. There's always been an amalgamation of leadership. It's like this emergent organism thing that has always been the way that that place has worked. Even when you worked there. Sundar became Sundar by winning Game of Thrones with Andy Rubin. Sundar had Chrome. Andy had Android.
Sundar was a big one of the most important things that he had to run. Ultimately, some person had to run both of those, and it was a battle. And Sundar won. And Andy got his whatever Alphabet company he got until he had to leave for indiscreet reasons. But yeah, that's all reported in The Information. There were some issues. But I was there in that era, and Sundar was the more magnetic personality internally. He could lead a crowd, had a business sense. That's a little bit of rewriting history. I'm a big fan of Sundar. I think he's actually been a much better CEO than people give him credit for. Magnetic is not a word I would use to describe his personality.
That was Britt's internal experience. Product managers loved him. My internal experience is the employees loved Sundar. Okay, so he was magnetic internally. The employees thought Andy was very technically interesting and smart, but Sundar had a little bit more of the gravitas of a CEO. Well, it worked. Just my take. Okay, guys. I just think it's really funny. Jess knows this. My favorite Sundar story is that if you unwind tech history 15 years, there was this dinner we were invited to where I was Sundar's peer at the dinner. We were put together. We were seated together.
It was pretty funny because if you unwind history and you look at divergent paths, I just always find that hilarious. That was where we were at 15 years ago. But happened to me once with Adam Grant. Could have been you, Sam. No, it could not be me because I need the whaler on the beach. And I don't understand why you'd want to run Google. Sundar could buy more than a whaler. But yes. Okay. Okay, guys. So I'd like to end this point, though. I like where you took it in terms of AI. The nature of this moment, the wealth attached to it, the predictions around the technology are actually driving really interesting personnel, structural, corporate changes.
That's one reason I actually continue to find this industry interesting, is that each era has common patterns, but then there's totally new dynamics. And I think the wealth dynamic and the technical race dynamic are playing out now in ways that probably aren't talked about enough. Britt, on the dealmaking front, you always predict more deals. Did you predict that Bending Spoons would buy Airtable for about a billion and a half dollars when it was once valued at $11 billion? Less than that. One three? One two? Yeah, I think it was one two, right? I wouldn't even round up to the half. Let me give some kind of sense.
So I put a $3 million check into Airtable at a 90 post in between rounds early on because this is now probably in 2012-ish, maybe that era. Is this a lick-the-cookie moment, or what should we prepare for here? Sure, I'll lick the cookie. I can partially lick that cookie too. Sure. Dave, but I think Dave was my second on the deal. But we had Howie over. We love the software that we were literally, when we were building Fin, we were using Airtable. This product's sick. We need to invest in it. Who's behind it? Turned out it was Howie at eTax from back in the day. I knew him from his first startup. So we put $3 million in at 90 post, which Dave did support me on.
It was very rule-breaking for Slow at the time because it was too far along. And what's kind of amazing. Too far along, way too big a check. But we did it anyway. The good news is we made a bunch of money on it because we did take a bunch off the table throughout the rounds. It is an interesting one because you think about all the dilution that's gone on between that $90 million valuation and the ultimate Bending Spoons exit, and it's pretty rough math on the core product. Now, the good news is Howie's a great leader and a great thinker and has an AI play that's coming next. I don't know that much about it.
So it's a split thing where it seems like the Airtable legacy business is going to Bending Spoons. By the way, I love Bending Spoons. I actually bought stock at IPO in Bending Spoons. I love Bending Spoons so much. So I'm a big Bending Spoons fan. Why do you love Bending Spoons? It's exactly the type of Sam thing with love where it's like take valuable internet assets that people are mismanaging and buy them and then operate them properly and make shitloads of money. So I'm very pro Bending Spoons as a company because they're bottom feeders. But aren't they taking the heart out of these companies? It's very P.E.-esque. There's no heart needed. You take Vimeo, you buy it.
It's a great business if you operated it properly. You buy it cheaply. You consolidate customer service. You make a shitload of money, right? It's awesome. I do think SaaS is crushed. It's cool they've negotiated this out. I actually don't know the details. I haven't spoken to Howie about it at all. My sense is that Howie gets to go operate the AI company he actually wants to operate. And as a Bending Spoons shareholder, I'm very happy. Now, as an Airtable shareholder, the write-down from where everyone had it marked, the big fancy people, is pretty brutal.
And I'd also say that the amount of capital it took them to get to this outcome is not my favorite because there's a lot of dilution. But it's something. Wasn't the scene, I mean, the perception was pretty negative, right? This is the SaaS apocalypse playing out in real time. These companies are all dead. They should exit now. At least they have an opportunity, even if it's just returning investors' capital. That was what I was picking up from across the web. Yeah. Do you agree? No, this is not good. But guys, it's also a people thing. Howie wants to work on AI because AI is cool. He actually wants to operate. And as a Bending Spoons shareholder, I'm very happy.
Now, as an Airtable shareholder, the write-down from where everyone had it marked, the big fancy people, is pretty brutal. And I'd also say that the amount of capital it took them to get to this outcome is not my favorite because there's a lot of dilution. But it's something. Wasn't the scene, the perception was pretty negative, right? This is the SaaS apocalypse playing out in real time. These companies are all dead. They should exit now. At least they have an opportunity, even if it's just returning investors' capital. That was what I was picking up from across the web. Yeah. Do you agree? No, this is not good. But guys, it's also a people thing.
Howie wants to work on AI because AI is cool. You're saddled with a thing that has hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but is clearly a SaaS business. And let's fix it. Let's just clarify this. Call a spade a spade. It's painful, but you're not in a place you can IPO it. I don't know. You're clearing the decks, and you let the people. This is so human-driven, right? What people want to work on, what teams want to work on. Bending Spoons will pick it up and make a lot of money on it. So God bless. What will Bending Spoons do with it, do you think? If anything, this is the right way to go about things when the dynamics that Sam has described have played out.
And oftentimes founders don't try to pursue a split, I don't know what to call this, a split landing. One where you're landing the former product in a home that is as good of a deal as you can find. But then you're keeping your team together, your core creative team together, to go pursue the new opportunity and giving your investors upside in that. And that's the other thing going on here, which is, as I understand it, investors are going to get a piece of Hyperagent. Maybe not the same piece that they had, but something. Well, but Dave, if you want to be cynical, because we've got to be cynical a little bit here. Here's the other way to look at it.
The reason this never happens is because big fancy investors, not us lowly seed investors, but big fancy ones have no interest in the write-down, right? It's a massive write-down for them. And they'd rather just stick it on their books and pretend like it's worth something it's not until the last possible moment. The fact that they can get rid of it, get a little bit of cash back, and then turn around and say, oh no, don't worry, we still have our AI upside. That's kind of what allows it to happen. So as much as it's a split landing and it's good for the team, it's also a thing big fancy investors who don't want the write-down can look at and be like,
all right, well, we can tell everyone that we took a write-down, but not really because of AI. I say that having not read the docs, to be clear, but that is certainly part of the dynamic. This is CYA all over it. But for sure. But I think that's what a split landing is. You have to be able to land the investor aspect of this in a way that's reasonably appetizing to everyone, right? Otherwise, this just doesn't happen. Wait, so Sam, do you get to invest in Hyperagent? And what is Hyperagent? I think we get some tiny piece. No, we get some kind of ownership in it. It's something tiny. This is literally because we're seed investors. We have no information rights on this.
Our firm thread yesterday was like, hey, Airtable's being, or whatever it was, Airtable's being sold. I saw it in a tweet. What's it worth? I don't know. This guy tweeted this. What's going on with it? We don't fucking know. We're so out of the information flow. But I assume at some point we get some Bending Spoons stock. Do you guys think there's more of this to come? Were you looking at the SaaS in your portfolios? For sure. That's what I'm saying. I think this is SaaS-bocalypse. That's why I'm a big Bending Spoons fan. I think Bending Spoons is so well positioned with a public currency to pick all this shit up for cents on the dollar.
I think it would be intellectual malpractice to call this a blanket statement about SaaS. The reality of Airtable and tools like it is that AI has made it, you know, there's other businesses that were really, really flying, like in the Airtable days, like Retool. And these lightweight UI layers that made it easier to interact with databases or build your own CRM, all these types of tools that were big in the 2010s, they no longer are needed anymore when you can just build whatever you want using AI. And so you've got a category of SaaS that's in trouble and is going to have to look for exits like this. That doesn't apply to everything, right?
Is, I don't know, is Rippling at risk? No. Well, some people would disagree with that. I think a lot is. My favorite "oh my God, everything's at risk" actually happened this week with this game that our kids play, this block-matching game. It's actually a fine game. Our kids play that game too. It was so annoying because it turns out, I was like, I hate the game ads. I don't want my kids ever seeing a game ad. And there's literally no way to buy your way out of them that I could figure out. So I asked my bot, I was like, hey bot, can you find me a version of this game? It's a pretty popular game that I can buy so that the kids don't have ads.
And unprompted, my bot responded. It was like, look, I looked into it. There's one that's like 14 bucks a month. That's too much. I just built it for you. It's deployed. And here's an iOS version. I think that's another example. Casual games are just going to get demolished because forget just connecting to a database. I'll just build my own game. I don't need the stupid ads anymore, right? Dave, we should make our kids pick their top three games and then rebuild them as their remainder-of-summer project.
So Sam, Britt asked a good question, which you didn't get to answering, which is what is it that you think Bending Spoons is going to do to economically unlock more value from all these assets they're picking up dirt cheap? Well, from Airtable specifically. Oh, it's easy. These things have big enterprise contracts. They're going to milk those. They're going to hack the CS, the customer support teams, to zero because they can consolidate it. Yeah, but isn't that just short-term revenue? This isn't a long-term viable product, I don't believe. One of my favorite companies ever is Constellation Software, right? It's a fucking beast. This is Constellation 101. Didn't it tank?
Didn't it go up and then down? Didn't it? Had one of the most beautiful public market stock charts in the history of companies until about a year ago. And then they had some transition problem, I think, and then there was a bunch of issues with, and then people just lumped it as SaaS and the stock got crushed. But they're so good at making money. And I just think that's the reality. I invested in the Yahoo buyout, which has been an incredible deal, right? Financially, that Apollo did. And so I just think there's all these ways. These are big old internet things that will continue to exist. Has it been? Has Yahoo had an exit? What makes it an incredible deal?
Because they sold off all the real estate and they got it for free. And so you can make a lot of money, and so it's just business. But have they made a lot of money or have they? No, they literally returned a bunch of money. Oh, that's interesting. So the basic point is that if you take out the tech people and their lattes and their $100 million comp packages and you're like, how about we just make a lot of money with this huge revenue stream? There are these awesome bottom-feeding business organizations that can do it. And people have tried evergreen funds in tech. People have tried this 15 times, but there are these operating groups that will just do it.
And I think Bending Spoons is a great example of one. I'm agreeing with Bending Spoons. I just don't see why people are using Airtable in five years and haven't gotten fully agentic. Because they sold off all the real estate, and they got it for free. And so you can make a lot of money, and so it's just business. But have they made a lot of money, or have they? No, they literally returned a bunch of money. Oh, that's interesting. So the basic point is that if you take out the tech people and their lattes and their $100 million comp packages, and you're like, how about we just make a lot of money with this huge revenue stream?
There are these awesome bottom-feeding business organizations that can do it. And people have tried evergreen funds and tech. People have tried this 15 times, but there are these operating groups that will just do it. And I think Bending Spoons is a great example of one. I'm agreeing with Bending Spoons. I just don't see why people are using Airtable in five years and haven't gotten fully agentic. Because they're thinking because they type A on their keyboard and it auto-completes to Airtable.com, they will keep using it. Why do people, like Yahoo, is still fucking huge. Huge. Yahoo is huge. Why is Yahoo huge?
The people that use Airtable are not the same people that use Yahoo. Mass normies use Yahoo. You'd be surprised. Okay. Yahoo Finance, maybe. I know a lot about Yahoo. There's a lot of mass normies that use Yahoo. And there's a lot of mass normies who use Airtable. I occasionally use Yahoo Finance. All right. Well, I'll be the less on this one. You guys can be the more. Let's check in in five years. What I will say is that the 10x write-down from max Airtable value to now, with all the dilution, is brutal. Right? Is what I would say. Yeah, for sure. And it does speak to the fact that it's good to be a seed investor. And again, this is...
The next version of this is going to be the lab write-downs. Oh, snap. Bending Spoons is buying OpenAI. Oh, snap. The open-source AI guy thinks the labs are getting written down. Say more, Dave. No. I mean, I think you have a similar dynamic playing out as the SaaS world in the 2010s, right? In the 2010s, when capital was cheap and Zerp was all just flooding the market with capital, you had an infinite recursion loop creating SaaS startup after SaaS startup all throughout the 2010s, right? Now that is coming home to roost. And you've got the same thing going on. It's a different dynamic this time around.
It's more the narrative capitalism thing that we've been talking about. But it's the same thing, where everybody's trying to go get their bag and create an entire set of these lab companies, which are not all going to work. We do need to do this important research, right? LLMs are only going to carry us so far into AI. But all of these labs are not going to find product-market fit and business value. It's just not going to happen. All right. So, Dave, here's the funny thing. One, it is narrative capitalism because the SaaS thing was a fucking narrative, right? The narrative is you acquire a user once and they'll pay you forever. So it's an infinite LTV.
And that was the narrative of the SaaS era, which collapsed. Okay, fair. The capital markets were different. I'm not done. I'm not done. Here's the even one part. You want to be really mean? Can we be mean for a second? Oh, God. What did you take? It's the same investors. It's exactly the same cap tables. It's exactly the same people. He's just so excited. And I don't know why. He loves it. He loves it so much. Literally, it's the same cap table. That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it that way, but it's true. Okay, guys, I want to mention something. Another quickly, we can end with SpaceX. But everyone's been paying attention, of course, to the lawsuit.
Apple suing OpenAI about employees who've gone to OpenAI and allegedly taken trade secrets. And The Information had a great story this week, pointing out that one of the key issues is iCloud and its shitty syncing. So specifically, what's happening is that former Apple employees are still getting corporate documents synced to personal devices via iCloud. And I just think this is very interesting and probably a broader example of the leakiness of information throughout Silicon Valley. But OpenAI is now saying these employees didn't even want to get the updated versions of these documents that were being synced to their iCloud.
I thought this was funny, maybe because I've had some iCloud syncing issues. But what do you guys think? I feel like it's only getting crazier. Now we have a million MCTs connected into stuff. When an employee leaves an organization now, you don't just turn off their email. You have to turn off all these connectors and all kinds of things that they might have had access to. I mean, it's even worse than that. It's like all of these new models can just hack everything. So nothing's secure anymore. What is document security in 2026? It doesn't exist. CESAs are freaked out everywhere.
I think both are almost certainly true, in that I am sure that it is true that people lifted a bunch of IP out of Apple on their way to OpenAI. I am also 100% sure that it's the equivalent of continuing to FedEx all your employees all your internal documents when they're no longer employees. And Apple, it's so leaky. Right? So both are true. Both are true. It's a great defense. I didn't even ask for this file. I believe OpenAI also responded to the lawsuit, saying your own employees at Apple reached out to their former colleagues for help understanding how some of these things worked.
And you were asking for documentation, them to look at documentation, because they forgot how things worked with the people now gone at OpenAI. And they showed some text messages. They're actually pretty convincing at that. So you're leaning towards you to win this. Well, that means they're being highly effective in their court case of public opinion here. Yeah, I actually have not engaged in the legal merits of either side. And I assume this sort of gets resolved and, you know, OpenAI launches its HomePod AI, Siri, Alexa device. And I think this sort of gets resolved. But, yeah, it was sort of interesting. I don't know.
Sometimes I turn on a new device and all these little iCloud things come in, and iCloud photo groups I've shared on, and iCloud sync, that I'm just like, what is going on? So apparently that is also an experience of former Apple. We could get into a technology discussion. On the flip side, I need that because I don't think I remember my core Apple password anymore. So my only saving grace is I have 10 Apple devices and just keep syncing them off each other. Not knowing your Apple password is pretty risky. You should know that. That's one of the only ones that... I'm not thrilled about that. But it is true. If it weren't for my Face ID, I could not get apps.
Wait, can we talk about OpenAI's creator summit that they hosted? Oh, yes. Let's talk about OpenAI's creator summit. Break, give us the lowdown. Set the scene. Sam might just take this. Would you like to take it? You can set the scene. But my number one question is, apparently they held the $2,000-a-night resort thing on the East Coast. My number one question is, what resort do I not know about that charges $2,000 a night on the East Coast? Because I'd like to attend. Walpole Farms. It's in the Hudson Valley.
Sam, I would like you to know that upon reading this article, I cut and pasted the name of the hotel and put it in my places-to-maybe-take-Sam-for-his-birthday-on-the-East-Coast-in-future-years folder. Perfect. So rest assured, I am on this for you. Because I agree, we have searched the East Coast far and wide for luxurious celebratory birthday excursions. For places we can spend too much money per night. It can't be that good because I have done exhaustive research on ChatGPT on this topic, and this resort never popped up. But, Britt, go ahead. Oh my God. First of all, I need to correct you. This resort is classic. A lot of people talk about it.
I am going there next year for a different event. And it's in upstate New York. It's part of the Aubertus collection, blah, blah, blah. Fine. Okay. Here's the scene. So we all know AI has a branding problem, right? People hate AI. Most people are not even using AI. And of course, OpenAI has its own branding problem. So they wanted to change this. So our friend, actually Charles Porch, gathered a bunch of creators and influencers. This was an Instagram creator summit, but OpenAI version? Yes. Wait, we love Charles. For places, we can spend too much money per night.
It can't be that good because I have done exhaustive research on ChatGPT on this topic, and this resort never popped up. So, but Britt, go ahead. Oh my God. First of all, I need to correct you. This resort is classic. A lot of people talk about it. I am going there next year for a different event. And it's in upstate New York. It's part of the Aubertus collection, blah, blah, blah. Fine. Okay. Here's the scene. So we all know AI has a branding problem, right? People hate AI. Most people are not even using AI. And of course, OpenAI has its own branding problem. So they wanted to change this.
So our friend, actually Charles Porch, gathered a bunch of creators and influencers. This was an Instagram creator summit, but OpenAI version? Yes. Wait, we love Charles. Don't use Charles' name. Leave Charles out of this. Sam, Charles is at the center of this. He has to be. We have to put him at the center of this. I know. Of course he is. But we don't have to say his name. Just say a person. Of course we do. Fine. Yes, we do, Sam. This is OpenAI. We like Charles. I'm not saying this is a bad move. Sam, Charles just did a Vanity Fair story about himself in this new role. We're good. We're good. By the way, I like Charles, okay? For the record.
I understand that it's obviously Charles. I was just saying we can skip. You call out people, we can call out people, Sam. Anyway, I understand why he wanted to do this. I get the brand is not doing well, specifically with the masses. Charles was hired at OpenAI from Instagram to help build creator love for OpenAI products, ChatGPT. They held a retreat in upstate New York. Creators were posting. They were like wildflowers and nature baths and things like that. And then all the new AI things they were learning. And the internet got real mad. They just started. The internet got so mad. They were so mad. So mad. Wait, describe the nature of the mad.
Just taking down these influencers. You AI people. This isn't AI sucks. Just hating AI. And why would you take money and go to this $2,000 retreat when the world is burning and AI is taking up all this compute and it's tone deaf? All the different things. So anyway, it backfired on OpenAI. So very much a Threads response. Actually. But more, a little bit. But nastier, to be honest. Was Twitter pissed about this? Or sorry, this was an Instagram. That sounds like an Instagram response to me. No, Twitter. I saw it on Twitter. TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. All social media. By the way, Sam Lessin here on our podcast hosted a similar creator retreat in San Francisco.
Not at a $2,000-a-night hotel. And I think the creators liked it. Yeah. Oh, you're talking about BotSchool? BotSchool is the opposite. This BotSchool was in a dingy basement. And we taught them how to use AI to crush things. And we actually had them use Claude, not any OpenAI stuff. I think it was the opposite. It was literally, we got them shitty bagels, and we negged them and taught them how to use GitHub and DigitalOcean. Well, then I guess the moral of the story is take people to lesser-known places. Yeah. If they had done it that way, would it have been better? I guess they should have asked them not to be posting on Instagram.
The whole point is that they're posting. That's the whole point of the retreat. They're teaching them how to use AI. They want them to post about their experience with AI. They do. And then all their fans hate them. I actually would be curious if the curriculum was, because I bet it wasn't that good. I think that's the real problem, is I can teach you a great how to be a creator and leverage these tools to make tons of money and build apps and stuff. And I am not convinced that you can do that at a farm. I think you do that in a dingy basement and teach people DigitalOcean and GitHub and how to run an instance of Claude in the cloud.
They were learning how to make websites and all kinds of things. The nuance here is that are you going to this event to learn how to use AI to make your creator business better? Or are you going to this event because the AI company wants you to do influencer things about your company? These are very different things. They were sponsored posts. So that's why it got shat on. And also it's very in line. This is OpenAI bought TBPN to try not to recreate a media company because of technology, but to basically counteract, just to have talking heads who were pro AI. The moral of the story to me is the masses continue to hate AI. And yeah, they do. This is not going to go away.
This isn't something you throw a retreat at. Not that OpenAI would have assumed this retreat would have single-handedly changed it. I'm sure they didn't do that. And at some point, if you're going to have a creator strategy, you have to start doing things with creators and give them some room. But this is a really, really tough one in terms of brand positioning. And you're going to go into epic wealth generation, Anthropic IPO, which isn't going to help the issue. And then same for OpenAI. So I don't know how you fix the image. I'm trying to think about what should you do. Okay.
You're the head of Anthropic or OpenAI or anything that's trying to make the brand of AI better among the masses, especially Gen Z. Don't even worry about it. Just do your thing. Just be honest. I think being honest is a really good approach. Well, be honest. But I think you have to lean into all the ways that's drug development, saving lives. If you cure cancer, that will help. I think you try to cure cancer. I think that's what you do. Exactly. Because that would be great. That would be awesome. I mean, that's pretty cynical, actually.
That implies that there is no way to make the current form of AI universally useful to all the people of the world, and that everybody is moving on to try to cure cancer in order to get some redemption. It's like the same thing as, I made $100 billion and now I'm going to do all this stuff for philanthropy to fix my brand. The cynical take here is that everybody's moving on to. What was the brand of dynamite? Because dynamite is super useful. You need dynamite. It also is pretty bad for wars. And then Nobel had to create the Nobel Prizes. So what's the dynamite history to learn? Nobel created dynamite, right? Yeah, yeah. That's my point.
Ultimately, the redemption was that, or for steel, Carnegie built a bunch of libraries. You generally have a redemption arc, but the thing you do is disruptive, right? That's why it always works. It's a great question, Dave. And I think I'm thinking about it because obviously I am a passionate user of AI and think it is useful. I think it comes back to what is AI. An AI search result in your Google search that appears like another Google search is very different. And I do think the population will obviously be using AI more and more. But I am struck by, I'm just seeing now smart people I know telling me or posting on the internet, we don't need AI. It's wild.
We don't need AI. We like AI. I think people are getting extremely sick of consuming AI slop in their workdays. You hear this refrain is really starting to kick up. Do not send me work slop. I literally don't work with humans so that the human can talk to the AI and then copy and paste what the AI said to me. Those conversations are happening more and more and more. And I would actually say, just as people, as we use a lot of social media, people started to really have an intuition about their feed being influenced by this influence or that influence. Or people started to get smarter about it.
It seems like that's also what's going on here, which is that the work slop isn't actually adding enough value to our daily lives, and people are just getting sick of reading the AI rather than what another human wrote. And so there's this undercurrent of that going on too, I think, which is much more simple than agents or any of the really sophisticated stuff that we talk about all the time. I'm going to move us to our last topic because we've done a nice job of not going all AI. There's those conversations are happening more and more and more.
And I would actually say, just like people, as we use a lot of social media, people started to really have an intuition about their feed being influenced by this influence or that influence. Or people started to get smarter about it. It seems like that's also what's going on here, which is that the work slop isn't actually adding enough value to our daily lives. And people are just getting sick of reading the AI rather than what another human wrote. And so there's this undercurrent of that going on, too, I think, which is much more simple than agents or any of the really sophisticated stuff that we talk about all the time.
I'm going to move us to our last topic because we've done a nice job of not going all AI. But I also think we can't forget, Dave, that AI is just being demonized as the source of every political problem in America and wealth. So there's that in addition to what you're saying. But OpenAI, perhaps have your next creator summit, I don't know, online, virtually. In a basement. Well, in a basement, in a bunker. Don't ask them to post. And don't, yeah. Sam's happy to host it for you, Charles. Charles and I do different styles of work. Sam will be one of the last people Charles would turn to. But guys, the SpaceX lockup is upon us. Let's see. By the time this posts. Yeah.
So I will tell you, I'm getting SpaceX shares out of the woodwork. Some will be free by the time you listen to this pod. Yes, Sam, go lick the cookie. Do what you got to do. I'm learning about all these extra SpaceX shares I have from random funds. Everyone had SpaceX. Okay. That's not really helpful to this conversation. But, guys, it's not going so well. They keep spending more money, which keeps taking the stock price, or saying they're spending more money. And the shares have been drop, drop, dropping. They're fine. They're doing exactly what you expected them to do. Yeah. The curve looks identical to what I think anybody would expect.
People expected them to be below-ish their IPO price. I don't know exactly where it is as of the taping. I think their IPO price was also just too high. They're just getting back to normalcy. Is this what we should expect with Anthropic and OpenAI? Yes. Probably. Guys, we have some big proclamations here. Yes. Why would number go up? This is, you know what it is? It reminds me of the Bill Gurley thing. You know how Bill Gurley always likes to talk about how bankers rob startups because they underlaid for the pop and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yes. His direct listing that did not take off. But yes. Blah, blah, blah. It's silly.
But the point is that this is just the opposite of it, which, if you're Elon, you're going to price to perfection because you can. You're going to get the headline number, the trillion number you wanted. You get a bunch of money for the company, I guess, or at a high price. And then who cares about how the stock trades within reason? It's fine. He got everything he wanted. He bailed out his xAI people. He bailed out his Twitter people. He bailed everyone out, right? So Elon gets to be the guy who makes everyone money. And if you're a SpaceX shareholder, you're like, whatever. You kind of got robbed on a few things, but number big.
Well, what if you're a SpaceX shareholder who bought on day two and is now down 33%? Well, that was a very silly thing to do. That was a silly thing to do. Honestly, those people who bought on day two are Elon cult boys. Yeah. And they'll be fine because eventually he'll figure out a way to make number go up for them because that's the cult, until it's not. Right? Yeah. The one-liner was that they have now moved up one year their $1 trillion revenue number. That was the kind of funny Elon quote from the earnings call, that things are going so well that they're going to hit $1 trillion one year early. I know how you do that.
You buy another company that has a lot of revenue. That's how you do that. That's exactly right. And that's how he gets his comp package, too. It starts with a T and ends with an S. Wait. Segway. Elon segway. Breaking news. Nikita, head of product at X, Elon's company, is leaving. What? Oh, that's sad. I saw that on TVPN. You guys just gave him so many props last week. He got all the flowers. What's going to happen to X, you guys? What's going to happen? What's Nikita going to do? I haven't even seen this news. Good for Nikita. Listen to this.
Nikita says, in the last 400 days, we've built almost every aspect of X, the timeline, Android app, onboarding, notifications, chat, and more. We launched 30 new products, and they also rose by 70 spots in the App Store from this time last year. So, I mean, he did turn it around. He did a great job. This was our whole convo last week. X is alive and kicking. I know. But maybe it's not anymore. But he didn't name a successor. Because there doesn't need to be one. Maybe there does. Gwynne Shotwell. I think Nikita played this brilliantly, personally, from a personal perspective. And I give him props for getting out and doing what he did.
It's like, look, I think it's a brutal place to work. I think he worked unbelievably hard if you looked at how he tweeted through the whole period. Yeah. It's got to be brutal. The guy probably had about 400 days of focus in him on this. And he's built his brand ridiculously. And he probably got a shitload of stock on it. So, good for him. In and out. Make it happen. Do the interesting stuff. And let someone else guard it. Either that or he really did go over the line when he started making fun of Mark a bunch. I don't actually know. That could be a good part of it. He's going to be an advisor going forward.
I don't think you get pushed out of an Elon company for making fun of someone. I think that's almost certainly true. I think, if anything, it probably gives you a promotion. Yeah, I mean, that wasn't out of character, Sam. Those were classic Nikita trolls. I know. That was a little cringey. The stuff where he kept banning spammers who were interacting with him was very funny, though. He's very good at media. Okay. Maybe he's starting a media company. Moran, give us something to look for. Have you guys seen the Odyssey? What's going on in your lives? We're almost back to school. What's happening? Travis Kelce is back on the field. Fall training has kicked off.
That means the NFL is around the corner. Very much looking forward to it. I'm in a sports drought right now between World Cup and NFL season. I know. I'm also between Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. It's a very, very tough period. Yeah, it's sad right now. Yeah. Yeah. Guys, I have one rant. I just have decided this pod is a good place to rant. Last week, I ranted about people who invite themselves to your... You just decided that? ...conferences via their EAs months before they're actually invited. Maybe the Morans can help me with this because Sam and I experience a lot of wonderful things together that we capture in photos.
And my problem is Sam posts the 20-person IG carousel of these events while we're at the event before I get a chance to. We're doing something fun that we want to remember. We want to share with our friends. And this man is so trigger-fast to posting, it leaves me with very little to share. I really want to know, what is the right etiquette here? Yes, you're playing it right. You need to show up in other people's Instagrams, not post on your own. Way more powerful move. Well, no, they're for children mostly. I'm an ancillary holding something. Occasionally.
I think you and Sam need to have a strategic content conversation, content strategy, about which topic areas does Sam get to own and which topic areas does Jess get to own, and you stay in your lanes. Can't cross-post about the same thing. You got to diversify. Or can we collab? Do couples collab or is that too weird? I know. Dave is reposting so much on Instagram. I don't repost. I don't know if you guys do this on Instagram, in the feed itself. We want to share with our friends. And this man is so trigger-fast to posting, it leaves me with very little to share. I really want to know, what is the right etiquette here? Yes, you're playing it right.
You need to show up in other people's Instagrams, not posts on your own. Way more powerful move. Well, no, they're for children mostly. I'm an ancillary, holding something. Occasionally. I think you and Sam need to have a strategic content conversation, content strategy, about which topic areas does Sam get to own and which topic areas does Jess get to own, and you stay in your lanes. Can't cross-post about the same thing. You got to diversify. Or can we collab? Do couples collab, or is that too weird? I know. Dave is reposting so much on Instagram. I don't repost. I don't know if you guys do this on Instagram, in the feed itself.
Everything I'm looking at, Dave is reposting. I've been experimenting. I just wonder. And it's possible no one feels my pain here because this is a very particular situation, right? I just normcore it. I just keep posting things that you see. Yeah. Sam's totally normcoring it. So I just post what I want to post. You post what I want to post. And our mutual followers get the same thing, and they get it from me two days later. I do. I do get a little duplicate of you guys. It depends on who your audience is. This is an audience problem. This comes down to classic problems that we dealt with at Facebook and Path and all throughout over the years.
It's a classic audience problem. It depends on Sam. You've got, I think if I remember correctly, a really narrow Instagram audience that's mostly real friends. We have the same Instagram audience. I just think if you're doing another version of Etiquette School. It's like Britt has an enormous Instagram audience. And so she's got a totally different problem set. I wouldn't say it's enormous. I'm definitely a micro influencer. I think this should come up in Etiquette School. My favorite audience I have is my Threads audience, which I don't know how this happened, but is raving left-wing people. And so anything I post, they get so mad about.
I don't know how I acquired this audience. You've talked about this before. My favorite audience is my Pinterest audience. I've got middle American moms. Why have you relocated? Did it get breezy Bayside? I'm just done. So I moved because I think we're about to end, right? So you're literally walking off this pod. That is your level of interest in it. Okay, you just got it. No, no, I brought you with me. Well, I think with that, should we preview next week for the dear listeners and have them have something to look forward to? Sam, take it away. It can be a surprise, but...