Special Edition MOL with Josh Wolfe, Rachel Holt, Scott Belsky, Scott Stanford, and Peter Deng.

Transcript

It's a rapid evolution in an old paradigm. This concept of websites is going to disappear very quickly before we know it. NVIDIA is taking no balance sheet risk on this. The people that are being stuck with the risk, I'm pointing, but it's my mother, your parents, it's the pensioners. The liability outlives the asset. This isn't a toll road. How much money can you spit off versus the duration that these are useful for? No one's ever securitized compute. We have not answered the post-labor existential question. We just haven't. You can't vibe code a home health nurse to show up in your living room to take care of you post-surgery. Your financing risk is pretty low. Your talent risk is pretty low. And your upside is going to be way higher. Are you fucking kidding me? That person just raised how much and what? I would say AI is a lot more akin to something like GPS on the phone or a database, where it is a technology. Fake stuff is really helpful for society right now because it inoculates us and makes us realize we can't trust what we see anymore. Is it no or is it yes? We'll debate the tech that's best. When we get more or less. Dave and Britt plus Sam and Jess. Put it all right to the test. More or less. Hello and welcome to a ridiculous episode of More or Less, where my co-hosts, Dave Morin, Britt Morin, and Jessica did the terrible, terrible judgment error of letting me host without them. They're all actually on vacation, and I am actually also on vacation but pretending like I'm not on vacation. So I'm thrilled to be here. We have assembled a world-class community here. I think this group represents every flavor and every area of venture capital investing known to man, as well as every product experience you could have managed. So I'm very, very excited to have a great group here to run through. First, we'll start with Peter Dang here. Peter actually has a distinction. Peter is the one who brought me into Facebook in a lot of ways. He was running profiles right before I was. And so when I showed up on day one, he said, great, someone else can run this, and taught me everything I need to know. And then was very happy to peace off into his next project, which ended up being Instagram and then Uber and then Airtable and then a big role running product at OpenAI, and now is a dirty venture capitalist like the rest of us. So Peter, welcome. It's good to have you. You're GP at Felicis. Holt, Rachel Holt. I've actually known Holt longer than anyone on this call. I first met Rachel on our first day of Bain & Company orientation in New York in 2005, when she, we sat down at orientation, about seven of us in Bain New York. As soon as there was a break in our seven-person onboarding. You cannot tell this story, Sam. Why not? It's a great story. I know exactly where you're going. I knew that this was going to come up. It's my favorite story. And she basically, we have our first break at Bain & Company in a training. This girl, who is with six people she doesn't know, her new coworkers, takes the spider phone in the middle of the conference room, dials Comcast, and starts yelling at them. Just to set the tone. I was like, this is amazing. I love this. So, but Holt from there has done amazing things. She ran Uber North America. And first of all, I got my cable attached on day one. Did you get it that day? That was amazing. No one had their cable attached. Yeah. August 1st, 2005. Time Warner was there. Boom. Boom. So she took those operational chops to then run Uber North America, has started Construct Capital, represents the rare DC venture capitalist, but a breed that is growing. And I get to do a lot of business with her now. So Rachel, great to have you on. Scott Belsky. I mean, look, Scott's done everything. I knew him originally when he was running Behance and founded Behance, which he sold. He's now a partner at A24 and running A24, A Labs founded it. And it's thinking more about the future of creative than anyone I know. So I'm thrilled to have him here. Scott Stanford. I mean, you started out in an even dirtier job than venture capital, running Goldman or a big piece of Goldman for a long time on the TMT side. You can correct me on the details, but you somehow did that forever. And then have had an illustrious venture career. Now is the co-founding partner of Acme. And then Josh Wolf, who does, do you even need an introduction at this point? I need the longest introduction. No. Of course. So Josh, co-founder and managing partner at Lux, which has done, basically did the contrarian thing, which has now become consensus around defense and deep tech and hard tech, and is one of the men of the moment for calling things like Anduril, et cetera, early and backing up the truck when that wasn't cool, which is now very cool, which means hard to seed invest in anymore because these numbers have gotten so big. So we have an amazing gang here. And I have my topic list, which obviously I had my bot write, of what's going on to run through about what's going on with NVIDIA, this crazy balance sheet stuff. Peter, we're going to have to talk a little bit of Airtable, given the fact you ran product there for years, and I was an investor and things like that. But Scott, you started out when we were BSing before hitting record. We want to start with GrokBot. Well, yeah, I think that agents have been a topic that we've all been thinking about and talking about for quite some time, but we're just in this moment, it seems, where they're becoming really useful on a consumer level. And I don't know about a lot of you, but I've been playing with some of these. They're always a little scary, these startup agents, because they ask you to log in via Google and give it access to everything. And you get those crazy Google warnings of this is not an authorized, secure, blah, blah, blah, but you do it anyways. But I have to say, they're kind of blowing my mind. And seeing some of the demos that people have shared in the last 24 hours of their GrokBot. And I think it's a combination of obviously the agentic capabilities, but also the memory. And this notion of having the bot have a computer instance of its own, and even seeing their computer set up. It's truly this notion of someone with a screen. And then you get this consumer click of, oh, anything you can do on a screen, they can do on a screen, is a really fascinating turning point, it seems. It's a shift from help me do this to just do it. I'd like to point out that I'm so down the rabbit hole on this that none of this stuff impresses me. I have a persistent cloud instance running in DigitalOcean. I had it do its own analysis and math right now. I'm not talking about the AI. My bot is running about three grand a month of infrastructure, database, app servers, etc. Whenever I want something, it builds a new app for me. It runs its own databases, etc. And I actually interact with it through email. So I basically start email threads and I'll ask it 50 things, and then it dispatches them, build an app, analyze my health, send me this cron job, whatever. So I've given my bot so much infrastructure that I'm not that impressed with it has a computer. But I'm kind of curious if any of you guys, I mean, Scott, you built some crazy stuff with AI. You're not normal, Sam. So I think that, yeah, I'm curious what others think. But it does feel like there's a crossing the Rubicon moment for consumer accessibility and just the ease of onboarding and giving it authority for certain websites. And just, something seems to be clicking. But it's a rapid evolution in an old paradigm. This concept of websites is going to disappear very quickly before we know it. And this concept of help me do a bunch of stuff versus just do it. Predict I need it. Get it done. And I love the Comcast example, Rachel, of you having to call Comcast. Forget that. There's no humans involved anymore. I don't even need to tell it that my cable's out. It knows my cable's out. It will reach out to the agent at Comcast. It will sort it out. Not yet, right? No, no. But I mean, where were we last week, right? So we look at this with such a microscopic lens. This is going to happen before we know it. And then we're all going to be sitting around looking at each other saying, what are we supposed to do? But Scott, Comcast doesn't give a fuck. They're not going to solve that. This concept of websites is going to disappear very quickly before we know it. And this concept of help me do a bunch of stuff versus just do it. Predict I need it. Get it done. And I love the Comcast example, Rachel, of you having to call Comcast. Forget that. There's no humans involved anymore. I simply don't even need to tell it that my cable's out. It knows my cable's out. It will reach out to the agent at Comcast. It will sort it out. Not yet, right? No, no. But where were we last week, right? So we look at this with such a microscopic lens. This is going to happen before we know it. And then we're all going to be sitting around looking at each other saying, what are we supposed to do? But Scott, Comcast doesn't give a fuck. They're not going to solve that. The reason why they're going to give a fuck is when they get bombarded by a bunch of automated agents that are hitting them 24/7 saying, fix this. And they have to respond. And so then they rev up their agents, and then it's agent to agent, and we fish or we ride on Boston Whalers or we do whatever. So to me, that question, because when you said it's inevitable directional arrow progress, every one of us is going to have many, many bots doing many, many things from the trivial to the substantive. Which bots? And then it comes down to one key factor, which is trust. And we're screwing around with lots of different ones. And at some point, I do believe that the distinction between them will be who do you trust or entrust with your data? Who are you giving your APIs? Who are you giving your inbox to? Who are you giving your calendar? Who are you? Clearly, Grok. And whose answers do you trust? The upshot, right? Whose matrix multiplying are you willing to rely upon in what scenarios? But Peter, you worked at OpenAI. Give us the scoop. I think people's perception of AI is just going to change. We know it's continuing to change. And the idea of trust is actually getting people are just starting to trust a little bit more. In the beginning, everyone was so skeptical. Oh, it's going to steal all our jobs. Yes, it's taking some jobs. But the fear is going to be there until people really experience it. And I said this when I was at OpenAI. One of the best things that OpenAI did for AI was just make it free and usable by anyone. To be like, oh yeah, you could try it. Well, Peter, can I push you on that? That is maybe your MI narrative. But there was a study I saw recently that said that AI is so hated, it's actually hated more than Jeffrey Epstein by the general public, right? It is the worst brand you could possibly imagine. No one trusts it. I'm not disputing that. What I'm saying is that that barometer is going to shift over time. I was just on a call with a bunch of creatives. And maybe, Scott, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this because you're in the thick of it, who, they're writers who just started saying how awesome it's been for them to build portfolios for their friends with cloud code that they were unable to do before. That's not a conversation I would have had with them six months ago. I'm not saying where the trust is right now, Sam. I'm saying that that shifts as people get more comfortable with it. And it's just a matter of time. Do you trust all models equally right now? Are there some brands where you're like, I'm not giving it my data? No, I have an irrational distinction between what I use Claude for and what I use ChatGPT for. But is that on trust or on performance, Peter? Because I think you're basing it on something different than a lot of other people. It's actually based on what has my history, to be honest. It's like, oh yeah, it has all my work context on Claude, so I'm just going to, it's easier. It's like back in the day when we got iPhones, we had too many apps on our app screen. We started just choosing icons to compartmentalize things. Right. You got to say, in terms of where this actually plays out, one, this idea that AI companies will be able to lock in your data makes no sense to me. You're going to self-sovereign your identity in some way, shape, or form. I do it by owning all my own infrastructure. And then I just point at different models for different types of tasks. It's like etc. But this idea that, with a consumer app, you're going to lock people in because of their data, I just don't believe it. It's one of the only things the Europeans did well with GDPR. GDPR is a piece of shit. But, well, wait, but some significant portion of the average population, which again today is probably just on ChatGPT, is not anywhere near sophisticated. Sort of like what Scott said about you. You are special, you are unique, and you are advanced user. And the vast majority of people do get habituated and will just use what they've always been used. Sure. And that's why lots of people still use Yahoo.com for search. Yeah. So it's not about, I never said that there's lock-in, Sam. I didn't say there's lock-in. I just said that there is an irrational preference. Can you take us back there and ask, what's the ideal customer experience that would be most likely to be successful? That is work from a tech and trust lens. It's one thing. But for a consumer, they get the new version of their iOS software, and they get a magic text message that's like, hey, I'm the Apple agent. I've got all access to everything on your phone. Don't worry. It will never be in the cloud. It will never be exploited by a third party. What do you want me to do for you now? And you just go through and give it connectors and access as you need certain things. It saves your login as you need it. Why wouldn't they just win this? Well, I think Apple might win it. But I think the interesting thing is I don't think you want to be the one who takes on that liability. If anything, I think the goal is to radiate out risk to other people and be like, well, we're not, to keep yourself safe and be the one that's aligned. Because the reality is you're like, Peter, you're saying that you think the band is going to go up. The reality is the hacks are only going to continue to grow and scare people more and more and more, right? Not less and less and less. Everyone's going to have them. And so I just wonder if the real thing is going to be, if you really want to win in the new economy, in this AI thing, you have to somehow figure out how to hoard the data and the trust and build the trust. But then when things go badly, always have a third party to point at to blame. I'm with Scott on this. He's got the name advantage, number one. But number two, Gemini just hit a billion users. It's pretty obvious. It's friction. You get rid of friction, and most consumers are going to gravitate in that direction. People are lazy. I would question that metric. I think they're probably counting the people who are just typing the search box and maybe clicking expand. There's many ways to game the metric, but I think distribution is a good part of it. But I do think consumers' taste and their bar go up in terms of what they want to use. They have to really like using it. There's many examples of this in the past. Why certain apps win in the App Store and why others, why Instagram took off and a bunch of the other ones didn't. Consumers have a discerning eye. Wait, sorry. Just to be consumer, they're also really cheap. Consumers want free, and they're lazy, and they're locked in. I mean, it's one of those things like, is it really better experience, or is it cheap, accessible, free, and habituated? Okay. So let me ask you this, Siri's available. When's the last time you trusted it with a question? Well, Siri's crap. That's not a thing. That's not even the same class. That's why they hired Google to build a real AI agent, which will be here yesterday. I was just going to, I want to go back to Scott's thing because it was a sort of profound declaration that Apple wins and how you define that. But they have not spent the capex that everybody else has, which is an advantage. They have waited. You could argue that what they did in search, which is effectively get paid to let Google be on search bar and Safari and in ecosystem, they could do the same thing in AI. Now there are two facets of my phone that are probably the most used today. is it really better experience or is it cheap, accessible, free, and habituated? Okay. So let me ask you this: series available. When's the last time you trusted with a question? Well, series crap. That's not a thing. That's not even the same class. That's why they hired Google to build a real AI agent, which will be here yesterday. I was just going to, I want to go back to Scott's thing because it was a profound declaration that Apple wins and how you define that. But they have not spent the capex that everybody else has, which is an advantage. They have waited. You could argue that what they did in search, which is effectively get paid to let Google be on search bar and Safari and in ecosystem, they could do the same thing in AI. Now, there are two facets of my phone that are probably the most used today. And Sam, you can enlighten me if there's something that you found for MCP plugins or others that across your agents are working that are the highest-frequency utility. And to me, the least surface area exposed to AI productivity are my WhatsApp chats and my text messages. It can ingest my Gmail. It can ingest my calendar. It can do search. It can query all of our internal docs. It can use my Google Drive. Luke Gromenon- Location is pretty key too. No one's exploiting it the way it will be exploited, but location is key. So add those three things, because each of those are today sandboxed: Meta with WhatsApp, Apple with messages, although Claude can access if you're using it through your laptop, and then you can use, which a lot of people don't trust, ScreenPipe, which does constant DVR recording of your screen. And if your WhatsApp is open on your laptop, which is probably 10% of my utility, 90% on my phone, then it'll record your WhatsApp messages. But those two things, to me, to Scott's point, feel like Apple could win on those. Add two more: payments, so Apple Pay, so they're seeing where you're spending your money. And then the second thing is location. And I don't want to underestimate that. I created an app called Dippity, which I wanted to be like snap maps for old people. So you can't see where people are, but you know if they're near you or if they're in town. So I built this thing, and it's pretty good. But as I dug in, Apple and Google or Android have both locked Wi-Fi location. You cannot access it as a developer. And that's why Find My is so fricking accurate. But me, the independent developer, I can't get near it. I'm looking at pinging towers. And it's just stuff like that that I think Apple keeps a lock on. I don't want them to win. Let's be clear. Look, to be clear, I think there are certain things that Elon has said that I actually really grudgingly completely agree with. And one thing I think he said several times, I'm not sure if it's his or someone else's, but I think it's true, is that the most hilarious outcome is usually what's going to happen. And Apple winning is the most hilarious outcome, right? So I think that's a very good chip in the factor of Apple wins by doing nothing. And actually, it's not even because they tried to do nothing. From everything I've heard, Apple internally is extremely confused organizationally on AI. There are a lot of reasons they're having trouble moving forward on it. So in some ways, organizational dysfunction creates the buffer for them to be highly successful by doing nothing, which is hilarious. That's the Apple thing. Here's the thing I want to ask about: are we all just arguing about what has APIs and what doesn't? Ironically, the reason that iMessage and WhatsApp have some defensibility or lock-in to them is they don't have APIs. Forget MCP. MCP is stupid. You can just use API. I don't really understand why MCP is a big deal when everything has an API and just rip through it with Fable, right? So there are things you can access programmatically, which have no barriers and therefore go into the hive mind. And then there's this interesting exception to it, which is Apple as a platform order, which can enforce API rules, right? And they can have effectively APIs to things that no one else can have APIs to, right? So was the real story just it turns out that openness and API is bad, right? And that what you really want is let's close the stack with valuable data you can have uniquely. I mean, this is literally what's going on right now in the industrial and the physical AI world. This data is not readily accessible. You can't commoditize it nearly as quickly. And so it gives startups a chance to actually gain distribution in a more methodical way before the mega platforms can swallow it up. This is exactly what we're seeing play out. And I think digital and physical are two totally separate things. It all has to do with the availability of the data for the mega platforms. It is really closed. In some cases, it's not even accessible by anyone. It's on a PDF somewhere, right? It's literally the opposite. Will that continue more so, or you think that will? Well, I think it creates choice around who gets the data in the continuum and the race that exists between startups and mega platforms. In some ways, you think it actually gives startups a chance, right? Because if they can gain distribution faster than a mega platform can innovate or a hyperscaler could commoditize it. But those factors actually favor startup maybe more so than what you're seeing in the digital world. It definitely evens the playing field. There's just a lot of data that's not even in a PDF somewhere. No, the factories weren't connected. And that becomes their defensibility. Yeah. A good example is we have a machinist population that's retiring, and a lot of the knowledge is actually in their head. And I think that companies that can go and figure out what does it sound like when a tool bit is going to break, and what is the path that you take, those are bits of data that I think, in some ways, Sam, I think you and I saw this at Facebook. It's like, what did Facebook do? It just digitized the information that was in our head. Who's your friend? Yeah. No, a hundred percent. I mean, we used to talk about the composer in the Facebook era. It was a data pump, right? It was an efficient, free data pump to bring data online that couldn't exist anywhere else. And the reality is, if you go way back in the Facebook history, the real story was on day zero, internet's scary, so no one wants to post on it. You're never going to put a real photo on it, da da da da. Facebook created the trust and security for people to take a bunch of real-world data, photos, relationships, messages, et cetera, and bring it online, right, for the first time, and created an enormous amount of value doing that. And so now we're in this weird multiverse where it's like the internet has all been scraped to hell, right? Good luck, New York Times, with their lawsuit, right? But that has been copied a thousand times and distilled a thousand times. You have personal private digital information: what's in Gmail, what's embedded, where people have some say in theory, as opposed to it all being dumpable effectively. And so that's where we were talking about the trust, things like that. There's then the whole class of companies that are out there trying to, in some ways, build new data sets, the Handshakes, the Scale AI, where you just pay a ton of money and you turn financial capital in some form into unique data. And then there's all the offline stuff. And so I guess the question for me is, assuming that multiplying big numbers is a commodity and will be, right, is the story really that you go back to day one, which is if your data isn't unique, you're not going to be valuable long term? I think there's also a class of data that you didn't talk about, which is just something that periodic labs is doing, which is science data and material science data that doesn't even exist yet. You have to actually do a lab experiment to get that data. So absolutely. Finding those bits of data has always been, I think, the name of the game, going all the way back to Facebook. And you and I used to talk about this in those small little rooms about how we're just trying to extract a bunch of data and how obsessed you were about buying the DMV. Not just trying, obsessed. I didn't know that is true. Peter, we used to have meetings for what we should buy, and my pitch was always that Facebook should buy the DMV. The DMV. if your data isn't unique, you're not going to be valuable long-term. I think there's also a class of data that you didn't talk about, which is something that Periodic Labs is doing, which is science data and material science data that doesn't even exist yet. You have to actually do a lab experiment to get that data. So absolutely. Finding those bits of data has always been, I think, the name of the game, going all the way back to Facebook. And you and I used to talk about this in those small little rooms, about how we're just trying to extract a bunch of data and how obsessed you were about buying the DMV. Not just trying, obsessed. I didn't know that. Is that true? Peter, we used to have meetings for what we should buy. And my pitch was always that Facebook should buy the DMV. The DMV. Peter, it used to be a big one. Can I ask, can I pivot the conversation a little bit? Unless people want to go further on that? There's another tack I'm curious about people's take on, which is open router. Talk a little bit about enterprise and things like that. If we're saying that your data is so valuable, right, but at the same time, enterprise really cares. Oh my goodness. A guest visitor. Jessica. Wow. How's it going, guys? How's Sam doing? We're so deep in it. I am so jealous. Continue on. I'm just here. I'm just in a taxi listening. Jess, just to get you up to speed, we've got two Sams and we've got two Scotts, but there's uppercase and lowercase Scott. Guys, I am so happy to see all of you. I just came back from the big city of Manhattan, so I'm en route. But dive in, dive in. I'll add a little bit. Wait, are you in, I just want to, for dinner planning, are you in Massachusetts or in New York? I'm in Massachusetts. I'm in the back. Oh, you are? Oh, great. I'll see you soon. I was in Midtown at 3:30. It's really a miracle I'm here. Open router, routing. Everyone wants cheaper stuff. AI makes multiplication a commodity. There's no reason to pay a PhD to fold your laundry, but you also don't want to give open router all your data, or do you, or do you not care? How does that play out? I do think that the bigger question here, which is going to also bifurcate, it's not going to be one-takes-all, is open versus closed. And I am saying this, obviously, with a bias, as I've said in the past, that where you stand on the issue depends on where you sit in the cap table, and where large investors in Hugging Face, which made a lot of news over the past few weeks. But I think that the future, for the more sophisticated users who serve the enterprise, is going to be your longitudinal proprietary repository silo of data that is yours. That is exactly as we were just talking about, not ingested by the machines. And if you have that and can run open-source models on that time series of data that is exclusively yours, whether you're a pharma company, a finance company, insurance company, a retail company, a venture firm, increasingly you are realizing that to get the benefit, you're giving a benefit. And you're going to say, I'm not going to give that data, especially if I'm not going to give that data and watch as one of the closed labs competes me away. And you saw that first with Figma, which was scary. And I think the push now from Anthropic and OpenAI to go into pharma, and pharma companies saying, well, do we want to do this? Do we want to give them our data and then potentially open up competitors? And I think there's a big move right now for them to try to ingest as much information from as many non-internet sources as they can. And I think that there's going to be a movement underway, whether it is industrial, manufacturing, defense, pharma, biotech, and all of our personal data, where we're going to say, you know what? The models are good enough. They are performative enough. And I'm going to retain the sovereignty of that in the same way that Sam does, and I'm not giving it over. So I do think that that's where the value is going to accrue. So where are we in terms of people waking up versus the door closing? Do you think that these guys are going to get away with getting enough data before people wake up that they're going to be competitive, or do you think that the game is too obvious? I think that this past month, since the OpenAI-Hugging Face moment, which I think, there are probably three or four factors. That's one: companies waking up to the token economics and realizing, how much are people spending, and what's the productivity gain we're getting? The rise of the Chinese models, and then the combination of fear-mongering and regulatory capture, or attempt thereof, against the contrast of people that have been in the White House and been the AI stars that are worrying about this and saying, no, no, no, if you use these cutting-edge Chinese models, but you use them on software, hardware, and instantiations that are effectively air-gapped, you have nothing to worry about. So where are we? I think that still, going back to the first point about habituation, the vast majority of people are just going to continue to use closed labs and trust it more. And they're going to try to ingest more and more and more. And you have whole teams, particularly at Anthropic, but increasingly at OpenAI, that are trying to make big pushes into every enterprise. Scott, I'm not sure if you can reveal, at 824, but a lot of proprietary data and information on everything from every pitch that you've never greenlit to the ones that you have that never got made, that's a trove of valuable information. Not only anyone wants to share their company data with a company. I do know a number of startups who were using Claude individual accounts and using their Ramp card-type stuff, and then now have to, for whatever reason, because of scale, go to the enterprise plan. And they realize that it's like 10x more expensive. And then they're realizing that they're using a lot of tokens for things that are pretty mundane. And then someone on the engineering team is like, I think we can do this with this open model that we can, as Josh said, there's no risk. It's local. We can mess with the weights and do whatever we need. And so there are now the next questions, okay, what router should we use? And it seems to me like there's a lot of router options out there, and it's going to be probably pretty commoditized pretty quickly. And so you're going to all have routers that direct all sorts of spend to more local, more efficient models. This is going to become the default. My question is actually, what more opportunities do routers have to not become commoditized? I thought you were going to go in that direction. Routers can start to carry logic around which models you should use. Well, they're all going to do that. They're all going to do that, right? And they're already doing that. I think the question is, I think, what Peter started with, which is, at some point, you do have to expose something to them, or you just build your own. But who do you trust, right? A lot of companies are building their own. It's not rocket science to build it. And, Josh, I'm on the same side as you, a board member at Arena. We see every week the models change in who's the leader. And not only that, Arena has great insight into exactly, for each use case, accounting or whatever, what is the actual leaderboard for it? And quite frankly, you don't need to drive a Ferrari to do the task of a certain smaller job. You're going to see a lot more of this. I believe in a multimodal world, and I believe there's going to be a lot of customization and tuning. And you've got companies like Applied Compute doing this, and many others as well. So I think it's going to be a pretty tough road for something like a router. I just feel like either roll your own or you've got to find another way to make a model your own. Okay. This is a great bridge. Can I bridge this? Let's talk about the crazy shenanigans NVIDIA is pulling with financing these things. Because the question you've got to ask yourself is, okay, multiplying big numbers is a global commodity. You're not going to have PhDs folding your laundry. You're going to route smartly over time. What percentage of things do you actually need an edge model for? It seems like you have these machines that can compute numbers. You have people who can use numbers being computed. I believe in a multimodal world, and I believe there's going to be a lot of customization and tuning. And you've got companies like Applied Compute doing this, and many others as well. So I think it's going to be a pretty tough road for something like a router. I feel like either roll your own, or you've got to find another way to make a model your own. Okay. This is a great bridge. Can I bridge this? Let's talk about the crazy shenanigans NVIDIA is pulling with financing these things. Because the question you've got to ask yourself is, okay, multiplying big numbers, a global commodity. You're not going to have PhDs folding your laundry. You're going to route smartly over time. What percentage of things do you actually need an edge model for? It seems like you have these machines that can compute numbers. You have people who can use numbers being computed. And then a lot of stuff in the middle, right? And it seems like OpenAI, I'm sorry, NVIDIA, with this new 500 billion Wall Street crazy alliance with everyone, is propping up, putting a lot of computers in places. Discuss. Do you guys remember Lucent? I know I'm dating myself. Give us some history lessons, Scott. So Lucent, yeah, sorry, old guy. And hey, for the record, Sam, I'm now in my 13th year of independent venture capital. I was in Goldman for 13 years. So at least. Oh, so you're 50-50. Well, no, no. And then I was at a startup in the dot-bomb trying to beat Google, LookSmart, for four years. I used LookSmart. There you go. Why just look when you can LookSmart? So, okay. Lucent. Did you come up with that? Was that your contribution, Scott? Yeah. That explained the bust right there. '99 captured. Lucent put, what, 8 billion? 9 billion? I can't remember what the number was. Into fiber. So, like a series A. Yeah, exactly. Your next series A. No, they put like 8 billion, which was a big number back in 2001. And they put it on their balance sheet, right? So they basically did vendor financing. They said, okay, everybody's going to need fiber. And they were right. What they were wrong about, which is exactly what you were just talking about with Open Router and some of the other developments, is the whole concept of wave division multiplexing. Multiplexing, nobody baked that in, and all of a sudden you get 100x improvement on fiber. And so your demand and your pricing fall through the floor. Let's just assume for a second it doesn't fall through the floor. And we've got a half-a-trillion-dollar financing facility, thanks to the six amigos that lined up to lend their balance sheet. None of this goes back to NVIDIA. This is why Jensen's brilliant. He basically set this up as SPVs that will borrow against the take-or-pay agreements of the offtakers, of the NeoCloud guys that are saying, we're all going to need $3,000 a month for our personal agents. And they are signing take-or-pay agreements. So independent of whether or not, Sam, you keep your $3,000 agent alive, they still have to pay for the demand. So for a couple years. To be clear, the $3,000 is just for databases and app servers. The agent costs something else. But yes, point taken. Sorry. I don't want to cause any marital issues when you talk about shopping and budgets. The take-or-pay agreements give some security. NVIDIA is basically saying vaguely we're good for 25% collateral. But the real onus falls on BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Asset Management, all the guys that lined up. And those are pension funds, right? Those are assets they're managing for the public. So, okay. So is this even worse, Scott? Are people going to be like, not only is AI using all the water and have the wrong answers and all that stuff, but it also is going to make most people poor in the process of NVIDIA stockholders getting well off? I mean, it's still a drop in the bucket for overall assets for these guys. But you have to assume a double collapse, right? You have to see price collapse and you have to see demand collapse, which is basically what we saw in the mortgage crisis, right? If you see both of those collapse, then you have a systemic issue. Otherwise, it's idiosyncratic, and it just will compress margins if it's price. The way NVIDIA set it up was they said, look, we're going to make these generic so anyone can use them. So if I have a default from one offtaker, I can just move it to the other offtaker. And so there are some good protections in there, but it's fascinating. But not if Apple wins, not if they're doing it on device. I don't necessarily think Apple means on device. I know, I know, I know, I know. I'm just messing with you. Scott, I think, nailed this because the big difference, whether lesson learned from Lucent, Lucent actually from their balance sheet lent the money to their customers so that the customers could buy Lucent. NVIDIA is taking no balance sheet risk on this. They're basically just convening the lenders, and the lenders see that there's opportunity in the spread. But to your point, yes, the people that are being stuck with the risk, I'm pointing, but it's my mother, your parents, it's the pensioners, because that's the capital that's in those large funds that are aggregated. And then you have duration mismatch between the hard assets and the financing. So the chip, depending if you look at Meta or Amazon, debate whether it's a three-year or five-year depreciation, but let's call it three. The debt amortizes over 10 years. The power constructs and contracts are 10, 15, 20 years. And so by any measure, the critic would be right to say that the liability outlives the asset. And anytime you have a mismatch, forget about bubbles. That's the problem. That's the problem. I mean, they're assuming these are going to act like any asset that's going to spit off cash for an extremely long duration. And this isn't a toll road. This isn't something that inherently is going to have value 30 years from now. And I think that's, to Josh's point, the fundamental risk and question in that: how much money can you spit off versus the duration that these are useful for? Although just to push on this, and this is a place I don't actually know the answer, but I'm sure someone on this call knows better than I do. In terms of it being real, how long the duration is and the value, how much of this is financing power and shells and things like that versus the racked GPUs and connectivity? Because I would argue that the shell and the power and things like that actually do have a longer duration. No, this is chips. This is just pure chips. Yeah. And look at the H100, right? The H100 used to be eight bucks or something like that per hour two years ago, and now you can get it for two bucks. Well, it was 170. It's back up to two-something or whatever. But yeah, that's it. Two years. Yeah. Yeah. Rachel. Yeah. Rachel and Josh nailed it right on the head. You've got a mismatch of duration. It's a duration mismatch. And so you have to assume you can stretch the longevity of the chips longer than what we've seen so far in the life cycle. And there's correlated risk here too. And the interesting thing, I wonder how much this, I mean, look, it turns out that in traditional data centers and big hyperscalers, the computers have actually stayed valuable longer than expected, is the upshot. People are still using, whether it's spinning disks or whatever. People model it one way, and I think everyone's, over time, been impressed that actually there's more of a tail on it than people realize in a lot of ways. How much of the story of actually this is better than we thought is being carried over into multiplying big numbers in this new era? And is that part of the story that Blackstone and Apollo are swallowing? Or is that above our pay grade, which it might be because I'm talking in half-truths? Or is it just they have so much money to deploy and they need asymmetry? I think it's a macro bet they're making. And that's it. I think we're probably overthinking it. Fitch is doing the rating work right now, and they have an open consultation, which basically means they're trying to figure out which end is up because no one's ever securitized compute. It is fascinating to think about securitizing compute. That's basically what's going on. And Jensen's a genius, right? He pitched Wall Street on this. How much of the story of actually, this is better than we thought is being carried over into multiplying big numbers in this new era? And is that part of the story that Blackstone and Apollo is swallowing? Or is that above our pay grade, which it might be because I'm talking in half-truths? Or is it just they have so much money in order to deploy it and they need asymmetry? I think it's a macro bet they're making. And that's it. I think we're probably overthinking it. Fitch is doing the rating work right now, and they have an open consultation, which means they're trying to figure out which end is up because no one's ever securitized compute. It is fascinating to think about securitizing compute. That's what's going on. And Jensen's a genius, right? He pitched Wall Street on this. Wall Street did not go to Jensen and say, hey, we have an idea. He went to Wall Street. So the guy's a genius. And to securitize compute is pretty cool because no one's done that. We've securitized other things. However, I have to do a shout-out to my last piece about Americans getting equity in the AI thing. If it's securitized, it makes it even easier for a dividend for all Americans. But that's for those of you who read my newsletter, all one of you on this call, Sam. My bot's opening it. I'm kidding. American participation in all of this, I think, is a great virtue. I think the Trump accounts, I think what Michael Dell has done, I think what Brad at Altimer, I think is awesome. Because you have a generation of young people that either are apathetic or feel left out, are driven to socialism and communism, or are graduating with a higher unemployment rate than the average American. All of that, I just think it's good. It'll take time. And the political entrepreneurs that are trying to co-opt these people, it's like a race. But Scott's point on the collateral and this compute not having been collateralized before, we don't know the depreciation. It may be that new models, new algorithms are able to take older compute and find great utility out of it. The GPU boom that benefited first from crypto mining, that then fell off and then regained again from AI, was saved. But these words are dangerous words, right? Just like this time is different are dangerous words. Collateral, debt, collateralized debt obligations. That was, let's say, 20 years ago, roughly. So for the average 27-year-old today, they were seven years old when this shit was happening in housing, which was an asset class that we assumed could only go up. And then it was arguably, if you read the academic literature of John Ginkopoulos, it was a collateral problem. It wasn't just the bubble. It wasn't debt. It was the proverbial Merchant of Venice, pound of flesh. It was the collateral. And the collateral became worth less, and the debt became worthless. The analogy there, that moment from the film where— Margot Robbie in the hot tub? Yeah, in Florida. And she's like, I've got seven houses. And is that as gent in her? No, because he's not as good-looking. Yeah, the jacket doesn't do it for him. I always say, Rachel, I'm not sure if you agree with this, but I always make the point. It's been wildly successful. I actually credit it to the housing crisis. Because if you look at the seven or eight people we started being in New York with in 2005, we were all coming up to private equity jobs exactly as the economy was falling apart. And so everyone who was going to go into private equity, because that's what you did, got kicked out of private equity because there were no jobs, right? And everyone started companies. And a huge percentage of them have been massively successful. And so, as much as we were young, it's very much in my mind what happened there. And I think some of the weird unintended consequences of it. Why we have the best three-year being New York class ever, right? It's why, I frequently say, I think it actually is demonstrably true. No, no, I'd also say I'm the least successful person from that. And I've done okay. So it's been fun. Hey, Sam, I wrote my social studies thesis on affordable mortgage lending in 1993. So I actually am the one to blame for the financial, the housing crisis, in case you're looking. I knew it was your fault. Yeah. I knew it. What happened to the whole report of these big AI labs giving equity to the government? Did that just disappear? Does that not happen anywhere? That was the most cynical bullshit I've ever heard, from my perspective, even though I do actually like Trump accounts and the idea of the index. But yeah, what did happen to it other than my personal take? I just don't know that AI lab equity is the right thing to distribute. For obvious reasons. But I do think that something like the collateralized compute actually might be better, or some sort of instrument that exposes you to the cost of the rising reputation of energy and compute. And I don't know, how do you get exposure and distribute it like Norway did to oil proceeds? Address what Dosh was saying. This was the op-ed I just did with The Information. And then the little interview that Sam, Sam, what'd you accuse me of being, a mercantilist or something? You're a mercantilist. You're a mercantilist. You're not a capitalist. And so then I came out with a newsletter post of the reaction to my idea was way more interesting than the idea itself. That's usually how it works. Of all the ideological battles. But the title of the post was, I don't have property in New Zealand. Because that's where all these conversations end. Everyone throws their ideology around and they go, what's your escape plan? And I don't have an escape plan. I'm with you, Scott. There's merit here. We have to rethink the social security system. We have to rethink— Let me push on this for a second. Then I want to talk. I really do want to talk about one or two other topics before we wrap on the day. I hear you, and I totally think it would be great to have Americans more dealt in in a lot of ways. I think, obviously, I believe deeply in capitalism and would love people to be more pro-capitalist and feel part of the story. Here's the problem. Historically, appeasement never works. Right? It just doesn't. Whenever you appease, you're like, okay. And the reality of capitalism, right, is that the story is supposed to be, hey, if you work hard and get lucky, you do really, really well. It's not a social security net story, right? And it's the American story, I would say. Now, we had a lot of benefits. First, we had a country which, unfortunately, all the people who lived here originally died from plagues and then wars. We had a huge amount of space. We had natural resources. We had Western expansion. We had the internet. We had all this terra nova, which meant that historically, if you're an IQ 100 person and worked hard, you'd do fine. If you had a shovel, then it was like, oh, just go to school and you'll do fine because there was so much demand for intellectual jobs. Those stories have run out. On the capitalism side and the American side, it's not clear what the next story is. But the story of, hey, here's a thousand bucks, hopefully it compounds in the market, I don't think solves the underlying problem of how do you create opportunity for people. And the American story of capitalism, free enterprise. Two distinct challenges. One is an existential meaningfulness question. Ah, that's been my essay. And then the other one is how we fund this. How do we put food on the table and police on the streets and kids in school and all of that? So they're linked, but they're very different. And I agree with you. We have not answered the post-labor existential question. We just haven't. We don't need more poets, I don't think. I think there's a question of parents can have money saved for their children and screw them up, or they can have money saved for their children and not screw them up. I've seen both instances happen, and I don't think that there's a rule against one or the other. It's more about how it's done. So it's like culture and values and all that stuff is what matters. I wonder what the instrument should be. What should the instrument be of these savings accounts, which I think I'm also a fan of, that are being created for kids that are now being born? Why shouldn't they get some exposure to them? So they're linked, but they're very different. And I agree with you. We have not answered the post-labor existential question. We just haven't. We don't need more poets. I don't think. I think there's a question of parents can have money saved for their children and screw them up, or they can have money saved for their children and not screw them up. I've seen both instances happen, and I don't think that there's a rule against one or the other. It's more about how it's done. So it's like a culture, and values, and all that stuff is what matters. I wonder what the instrument should be. What should the instrument be of these savings accounts, which I think I'm also a fan of, that are being created for kids that are now being born? Why shouldn't they get some exposure to them? Some of them will become the deadbeat kid that got a silver spoon and screwed it up. But I feel like a lot of them will also not graduate with college debt or debt for whatever education ends up looking like in the future, and have a little startup capital to take a risk in their lives, and all the other stuff. So we're not going to solve it for everyone. But isn't that net better? I'm very pro the Trump account. I think it's good and smart. I'm pro it. I'm not convinced that the picture of how it compounds is so certain, especially as we're talking about resets and all this other stuff that we're trying to figure out right now. But I'm certainly pro it. I just accept, with the exception of when people start lobbying for regulatory capture by giving 500 bucks of stock to someone, right? That seems insane to me. And we got to figure out how to not have that happen. I want to pivot one or two more times before I lose you guys. And I really appreciate you joining for this fun conversation. OpenAI exec exodus. Brad Lightcap out. Kevin Wheel, who we used to work with, out. Peter, you've been out for years. So you were a forbearer on this. Why, and what's going on? My take on this is it's actually a feature, not a bug. It's a feature of having insanely great talent. I think Sam is N of one at recruiting really ambitious, talented people. And in a time when you can build anything, you should expect the churn. These are people who want to go and build something really, really insanely great. And that's not a talent problem. That's just a natural output of what he's optimized for. You're seeing this everywhere. And also, the other thing is that it's not just having the models. You have to point the models, with a sense of obsession, at a problem. And something like Periodic Labs, Liam left OpenAI. We were the first check investors into that. They're doing material science. It requires a different level of obsession on building a wet lab that just doesn't exist at a bigger company, right? So the companies out there like Applied Compute, Core Automation, other neo labs, there's a point of view that you want to go chase. And if you're ambitious, you're going to go out and chase that. But that's largely what I see from this. You have to point the models, and it's a great time to build. And so that's what everyone is really doing. Is it because there's this sense that these generalized models are old news and specialized models are the future? And it's going to be specialized models plus all these open local? I think it's a great question. I think there's a lot of stuff. And Rachel, you and I lived this in Uber. The last-mile problem is a real problem. You can't just drop GPS on phones and be like, okay, all right, let's give rides to people, right? One of my analogies I use is you can't vibe-code a home health nurse to show up in your living room to take care of you post-surgery. There's a company I'm working with called Adaptive, based in New York. They're doing exactly this. They're like an AI health care provider delivering health care. And that delivery, Rachel, you and I know this from Uber days, is not easy. There's a lot of stuff that goes on to make sure that value can be delivered. And that requires an obsession that goes beyond, oh, AGI is going to solve everything. So I think that's what it is. It's like when you're obsessed over a problem like that, you're going to go make a company and make it great. I've got a quick cynical take, which is, Peter, how long were you at OpenAI? A year and a half or so. Okay. And Kevin, I think, was there maybe four years, maybe a little bit less, three years? I think he was there for less than that. But yeah. Two. But my cynical take was going to be: you go, you're there at a valuation, you get stock, you vest, the stock appreciates, maybe appreciates very rapidly. And then you're looking at the incremental upside from where you are and what you're doing in an ever-growing thing, and having to deal with more people and more politics and more knife fights and all that kind of stuff. Or you can take the cachet of having been where you've been, and you have a robust market that will finance you. Kevin is going to go. He's going to start something. He's going to get funded. We're probably all going to be involved with whatever he funds. And I think that that's the simple calculus, is you believe in yourself. Your financing risk is pretty low. Your talent risk is pretty low. And your upside is going to be way higher. And so the incremental return on the incremental expenditure of your time is worth leaving. So I don't think it says anything. And I've been critical of every one of the labs at some point for whatever. But I don't think it says anything about OpenAI. But Josh, can you build a company that way? With people coming in, stamping the card, getting infinite free capital for their next startup? Does that work? So far with OpenAI, valuation has gone from sub-hundred million to trillion and plus. And you've had six diaspora companies that have all achieved tens of billions of dollars that have spun off of it. And I think everybody looks at that. And by the way, the number one motivator that I've always found is somebody looks and sees a peer that they work with and being like, are you fucking kidding me? That person just raised how much and what? And then that becomes the catalyst moment where they're like, I'm going to do that. Well, 100%. The top 10 is usually, and that guy's an idiot. Look, I think your point of view could be true. My point of view could be true. I don't think they're directly contradicting. I'm not saying that you think they are. But you're right. When you are able to take the risk to go build something bigger, that's my point. And what I'm saying is that these people are ambitious people who are like, okay. And implied in that is, okay, I can stick around. And the way I'll put it is the physics of a big company, Sam and I, we've had big companies. The physics are just different. And the people who are wired to go, or Sam Altman has assembled a set of really great researchers who have these big ideas, you're going to want the freedom to do that elsewhere too, right? So again, it's just a natural consequence. The two directions of it, we're just in jump ball. One direction is, sure, I agree with that. But the early OpenAI pitch was, we're building AGI, winner take all. You're either on our train or have fun staying poor. It was a one-thing. That has evolved into a lot of people who are really smart being like, oh my God, this is the moment where everything matters. Cost of capital is zero. I got to take my shot. And by the way, I've already punched my card four times. If it does turn out to work, I'm protected. I've got plenty of stock. How different was it in the Facebook days? Because you had the same dynamic. I think, first of all, it's kind of funny because by historical standards then, it was an incredibly meteoric rise. Facebook's valuation grew unbelievably slowly compared to the labs, right? And there were obviously generations. I would argue I was, Peter, you were kind of generation one and a half maybe. I was generation two at Facebook. There's now been generation three and generation four. But there's not 20 generations, right? There was a set of people who worked for four years, did great work, and then passed the torch. And that's happened a few times. And actually, the core leadership team at Facebook has been unbelievably stable now for a decade, right? Which is a very different dynamic. If it does turn out to work, I'm protected. I've got plenty of stock. How different was it in the Facebook days? Because you had the same dynamic. I think, first of all, it's funny because by historical standards then, it was an incredibly meteoric rise. Facebook's valuation grew unbelievably slowly compared to the labs, right? And there were obviously generations. I would argue I was, Peter, you were generation one and a half maybe. I was generation two at Facebook. There's now been generation three and generation four. But there's not 20 generations, right? There was a set of people who worked for four years, did great work, and then passed the torch. And that's happened a few times. And actually, the core leadership team at Facebook has been unbelievably stable now for a decade, right? Which is a very different dynamic. And Josh, the other thing to look at, not to be too cynical, is that Facebook had great network effects. So if you wanted to build anything in social, that's where you stayed. I got to say that if you take a look at AI, again, being on the board of Arena, it just changes every week. It's like, well, who's up there this week at this point, right? And I would say AI is a lot more akin to something like GPS on the phone or a database where it is a technology. But again, you can't just vibe code an Uber. You have to deal with all the real-world problems. You can't just vibe code a home. Your network effect is actually a profound point because I think that Meta has actually done an extraordinary job in their acquisition strategy. And I think part of the pitch that Mark has made, at least in two of our companies, is the scale that we can give you to deploy your product, whether it's a brain-machine interface like Control Labs, is enormous. You're going to reach billions of users. And I don't know that OpenAI has done that. So that actually is a good point. Yeah, I learned how to do acquisitions from my time at Facebook. That's exactly the story. I don't want to keep harming me. I want to ask Peter one more thing, and then I want to pivot to a few other people, if we could close. Peter, and I have not, he's a friend, but I haven't spoken to him about this in months. Is the Airtable Howie story, I want to work on AI? Or what happened? I haven't spoken to him in a few months either. But let me tell you a few things. You talk about Airtable, the exit, Bending Spoons, etc. I think there are two truths here, and both truths are true. Number one, I think founders are built differently. Founders are going to continue to build towards AI, like you alluded to. Howie pivoted to Hyper Agent long ago. I think Scott, you know him well, right? He made that pivot, and he's been pivoting. And the thing is, that acquisition, I think this is public knowledge, had Hyper Agent carved out. So that was really the legacy business that was acquired. So great founders who have founded all these companies, like Howie, are going to continue to build because that's what's in their DNA. And in fact, builders are going to build. The second thing is there's a real shift, and both of these things are true, right? And we're seeing that at Felicis too. So in our last couple of funds, over 20% of our capital has been deployed to global resilience, energy, manufacturing, defense tech, all stuff that you all are investing in as well. In science, I mentioned we were the first check in Periodic Labs because we believe that there are actually more real-world problems to be solved. So I think both are true in terms of what happened with Airtable, and Howie's, from what I understand, is just to build. He's a fantastic builder. Okay. I agree. I want to go lightning round and call it a day because this has been awesome. And this is fun, by the way. I think we should do this again sometime. Rachel, I'll start with you. DC regulation, all the heavy stuff you're involved in. What are you thinking the most about right now that we have not discussed? I don't know about a DC regulation piece, but- Or just life. Or just life. I'll just go there. We happen to live in DC. I just think of you as my DC person now. No, I do live here, and sadly that's becoming- No, I mean, look, I think- Peter just brought it up at the end. We're spending, they're putting 20% plus of their fund into these areas that, Josh, you've been investing in even longer than we have, but we've been focused on. And in 2020, when we started Construct, a whole bunch- Now, that was mostly LPs that we were talking about at the time, but people were like, you're crazy to go- The same people who said it, by the way, I was crazy in 2011 to join Uber because taxis are- You're never going to get a venture outcome. Weren't you at Clorox before that? What about, you were working on charcoal? One year. One year. Yeah, exactly. Salad dressing. But you're crazy to go join a taxi company because it's slow moving, it's heavily regulated, it's high capex. And those people just didn't spend two brain cells thinking about what Uber was actually building. And I feel like it's the same thing that people were saying to us in 2020 when we went out and started Construct. First of all, there's a lot of software companies. Secondly, there's a lot of physical-world companies that don't need to look like really slow-moving, high-capex companies. And the only way we're going to get productivity is putting software into these spaces. And if you looked at the signals even four or five years ago, the crisis was mounting. We appreciate the markups that come from everyone piling into these spaces. Also, now the prices are going up to a crazy amount, obviously, on some of these early-stage stuff, because a lot of people who would never give these spaces a second look are now devoting half of their, I don't know, billion-and-a-half-dollar funds to them all over the place. So anyway, it's an interesting time. People actually come through DC. It's great for our large conference room, which now gets used, and good for the existing funds. And the portfolio. Fair enough. Scott, we didn't really get into proof of craft, provenance, watermarks. You've been thinking about this stuff forever. Anthropic just is now watermarking text as of today. There's a lot of stuff going on. I assume you are still deeply on this train. Can you give us a quick update on that? The C2PA, it's the open protocol that everyone signed on to for these content credentials to be added to assets as they're generated or edited, by the way, for that matter. It has been widely spread. The problem is on the consumer experience side. These companies like Instagram and products that are surfacing media, for them, it's binary. It's like if it has a C2PA in it that says any AI was used, they report it as being made with AI. And then consumers are like, what the hell? I only used AI to remove a blemish from my face. Why are you labeling me as a slop maker? And so we're in this moment where there's a disconnect between the underlying efforts, which I think are net-net good to help people be able to discern the provenance if they want to, and the consumer interfaces that don't know how to surface this or merchandise this to the end user. So I feel like that's where we're at right now. I don't think it's going to go away, but I also think we're all going to be gradually inoculated. And I think, honestly, fake stuff is really helpful for society right now because it inoculates us and makes us realize we can't trust what we see anymore. It's all fake. Josh, Wolf, got anything you're excited about we haven't hit on, or you're freaking out about? Freaking out about the rise of socialism and communism in our country. Yeah, I've noticed on Twitter, you and I have that in common. Yeah. I've been a center-left Democrat my entire life. My party has just run far left. And I'm, yeah. Well, it's because no one has good, the marketing sucks on the center-left. There's no good marketing. But I grew up caring about the guy that lost the ovarian lottery in the Rawlsian sense and needs a leg up and social welfare. But I believe in the American dream. Inoculated. And I think, honestly, fake stuff is really helpful for society right now because it inoculates us and makes us realize we can't trust what we see anymore. It's all fake. Josh, Wolf, got anything you're excited about we haven't hit on or you're freaking out about? Freaking out about the rise of socialism and communism in our country. Yeah, I've noticed on Twitter, you and I have that in common. Yeah. I've been a center-left Democrat my entire life. My party has just run far left. And I'm, yeah. Well, it's because no one has good marketing on the center-left. The marketing sucks. There's no good marketing. But I grew up caring about the guy that lost the ovarian lottery in the Rawlsian sense and needs a leg up and social welfare. But I believe in the American dream. Yeah, but the veil of ignorance is bullshit. Let's not go Rawls. You're a Rawls guy. Yeah. Yeah. No, I believe that that's the right model for designing a society. You wake up tomorrow and you don't know if you're going to be born in Brooklyn or Bangladesh, black or white, male or female, able- Yeah, yeah. I agree with that part. But I'm more of a Nozick guy myself. I think that Europe is fucked. And there are bright lights of amazing entrepreneurs that are doing the very thing that Europe has historically not done, which is risk-taking. I think the floor for Europe is higher than the US. So people do not fall through that. But the ceiling has never been that high. And I think that there are companies that are breaking through that. But I think Europe is screwed mostly for demographics and influx, largely because political positions of people that are unwilling to assimilate. It is destroying society. I believe that there are bad foreign actors, whether Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or whatever, that are helping to foment that. And I do believe that the Sahel in Africa and the Maghreb, which is Mali, Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, you are one terror event away projected into Europe that that entire region becomes the West next to Afghanistan, all of which culminates in my conclusion that Europe needs very strong defense. It is very much a Tower of Babel of uncoordinated systems. But there needs to be an enormous expenditure, which they have all been under pressure of Trump and Rubio being chastised at Davos and Munich Security Conference. But Europe's got to spend. We're seeing some of our companies benefit from it. But Europe is at real risk, not just from Russia, but from violent extremists that are infiltrating the continent. And if you care about the West, you've got to defend it. So you have to go defend Europe again? Yes. Yes. I flew over. We were in France for part of the summer, and I flew over. It was actually really amazing. You're in a plane, you're flying over the beaches of Normandy, and you're looking at Ohio and Juneau, and it's just like 80 years ago. It's crazy. Americans. It's not that long. No, it's crazy. It's two generations, three generations. We stormed the beaches of Normandy against the Nazis. It's insane. And we're not fighting Nazis, but it's like, I don't know. It's wild, and it's important. And I think a lot of people, it's too weak to be felt until it's too strong to be broken. And a lot of people are really not appreciating how serious this stuff is. Fair enough. Well, on that uplifting note, anyone else have anything else, any jump ball they want to throw out before we call it? We're all going to die. First step is talking about it. Second step is doing something about it. No, the second step is funding. You fund these entrepreneurs that are taking it on. You're getting patriotic. I'm with you. I have my own takes on where the leverage and I can deploy on this stuff is. I do think I'm with you ideologically. I do think it's one of the problems of a Twitter or fun podcast with your friends who are all venture capitalists in different places, is we can all fervently agree with each other and feel really good about it. Guys, this was really fun. I appreciate you all joining. I hope you had fun doing it. Super fun. This is great. Thank you. Thank you all. I hope you all really enjoy the rest of your August, and I will see you around on the internet and in physical space. Make sure your bot gets the recipe from Jess for dinner. She's going to be there. She's here. She actually just walked in. If she's still around, maybe she's coming out. Are you coming out to end the show? Here she is. I was going to say, she checked in with us, wanted to make sure it was actually happening. There she is. There she is. Josh, I texted you a question based on what you said that I didn't understand. So if you could get back to me, that would be great. Me? Well, yeah. Yeah. She got a text from Jess. Okay. What should I eat for dinner? Tater tots. No, I don't know. All right. Later, everyone. There's also pizza. Bye, everyone. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes and follow us on social media by searching for at more or less, at Dave Morin, at lesson, at Jay lesson. And as for me, I'm at Brit. See you guys next time. I'm not saying that you think they are. But you're right. Like it absolutely, when you are able to take the risk to go build something bigger, that's kind of my point. And what I'm saying is that these people are ambitious people who are like, okay. And implied in that is like, okay, I can stick around. And the way I'll put it is the physics of a big company, you know, Sam and I, we've had big companies. The physics are just different. And the people who are wired to go, or Sam Altman has assembled a set of really great researchers who have these big ideas. You're going to want the freedom to do that elsewhere too, right? So again, it's just a natural consequence. The two directions of it, we're just in jump ball. One direction is, sure, I agree with that. But the early open AI pitch was, we're building AGI, winner take all. You're either on our train or have fun staying poor. Like it was like a one thing. That has kind of evolved into a lot of people who are really smart being like, oh my God, this is the moment where everything matters. Cost of capital is zero. I got to take my shot. And by the way, I've already punched my card four times. If it does turn out to work, I'm protected. I've got plenty of stock. How different was it in the Facebook days? Because you had sort of the same dynamic. I think, first of all, it's kind of funny because by historical standards then, it was an incredibly meteoric rise. Facebook's valuation grew unbelievably slowly compared to the labs, right? And there were obviously generations. Like I would argue I was, Peter, you were kind of generation one and a half maybe. I was generation two at Facebook. There's now been generation three and generation four. But there's not 20 generations, right? There was like a set of people who worked for four years, did great work, and then passed the torch. And that's happened like a few times. And actually, the core leadership team at Facebook has been unbelievably stable now for like a decade, right? Like, which is a very different dynamic. And Josh, the other thing to look at, just, you know, not to be too cynical, is that like Facebook had great network effects. So if you wanted to build anything in social, that's where you stayed. I got to say that if you take a look at AI, like, you know, again, being on the board of arena, it just changes every week. It's like, well, who's up there this week at this point, right? And I would say AI is a lot more akin to something like, you know, GPS on the phone or a database where it is a technology. But again, you can't just like vibe code an Uber. You have to deal with all the real world problems. You can't just vibe code a home. Your network effect is actually a profound point because I think that Meta has actually done an extraordinary job in their acquisition strategy. And I think part of the pitch that Mark has made, at least in two of our companies, is the scale that we can give you to deploy your product, whether it's a brain machine interface like Control Labs or, you know, like is enormous. You're going to reach billions of users. And I don't know that OpenAI has done that. So that actually is a good point. Yeah, I learned how to do acquisitions from my time at Facebook. That was, that's exactly the story. I don't want to keep harming me. I want to ask Peter one more thing and then I want to pivot to a few other people if we could close. Peter, and I have not, he's a friend, but I haven't spoken to him in, about this in months. Is the Airtable Howie story, I want to work on AI? Or what happened? I haven't spoken to him in a few months either. But let me tell you a few things. You talk about Airtable, the exit, bending spoons, etc. I think there are two truths here and both truths are true. Number one, I think founders are built differently. I mean, you know, founders are going to continue to build towards AI like you, like you alluded to. Howie pivoted to Hyper Agent long ago. I think Scott, you know him well, right? Like he made that pivot and he's been pivoting. And the thing is that acquisition, I think this is public knowledge, had Hyper Agent carved out. So that was really the legacy business that was acquired. So great founders who have founded all these companies like Howie are going to continue to build because that's what's in their DNA. And in fact, Builder's going to build. The second thing is there's a real shift and both of these things are true, right? And we're seeing that at Felicis too. So in our last couple of funds, over 20% of our capital has been deployed to global resilience, energy, manufacturing, defense tech, all stuff that you all are investing in as well. In science, I mentioned we were the first checking Periodic Labs because we believe that there's actually more real world problems to be solved. So I think both are true in terms of what happened with Airtable and Howie's just, from what I understand, is just to build. He's a fantastic builder. Okay. I agree. I want to go lightning round and call it a day because this has been awesome. And it's really, this is fun, by the way. I think we should do this again sometime. Rachel, I'll start with you. DC regulation, all the heavy stuff you're involved in. What are you thinking the most about right now that we have not discussed? I don't know about a DC regulation piece, but like- Or just life. Or just life. I'll just go there. We happen to live in DC. I mean, look- I just think of you as my DC person now. No, I do live here and sadly that's becoming- No, I mean, look, I think- I mean, Peter just brought it up at the end. We're spending, you know, they're putting 20% plus of their fund into these areas that, Josh, you've been investing in even longer than we have, but like we've been focused on. And in 2020, when we started Construct, a whole bunch- Now, that was mostly LPs that we were talking about at the time, but people were like, you're crazy to go- The same people who said it, by the way, I was crazy in 2011 to join Uber because taxis are- You're never going to get a venture outcome. Weren't you at Clorox before that? What about- you were working on charcoal? One year. One year. Yeah, exactly. Saladressing. But like, you're crazy to go join a taxi company because it's, you know, it's slow moving. It's heavily regulated. It's high capex. And like, those people just like didn't spend two brain cells thinking about what Uber was actually building. And I feel like it's the same thing that people were saying to us in 2020 when, you know, we went out and started Construct. First of all, there's a lot of software companies. Secondly, there's a lot of physical world companies that don't need to look like really slow moving, high capex companies. And, you know, the only way we're going to get productivity is putting software into these spaces. And like, if you looked at the signals, even like four or five years ago, like the crisis was mounting. You know, we appreciate the markups that come from everyone piling into these spaces. We're also, now the prices are going up like, you know, to a crazy amount, obviously on some of these early stage stuff, because a lot of people who like would never give these spaces kind of a second look are now devoting half of their, I don't know, billion and a half dollar funds to them all over the place. So anyway, it's an interesting time. People actually come through DC. It's great for our large conference room, which now gets used and good for the existing funds. And the portfolio. Fair enough. Scott, we didn't really get into proof of craft, providence, watermarks. You've been thinking about this stuff forever. Anthropic just is now watermarking text as of today. Like there's a lot of stuff going on. I mean, I assume you are still deeply on this train. Can you give us a quick update on that? The C2PA, it's the open protocol that kind of everyone signed on to for these content credentials to be added to assets as they're generated or edited, by the way, for that matter. It has been widely spread. The problem is on the consumer experience side. These companies like Instagram and products that are surfacing media, for them, it's binary. It's like if it has a C2PA in it that says any AI was used, they report it as being made with AI. And then consumers are like, what the hell? I only used AI to like remove a blemish for my face. Like, why are you labeling me as a slot maker? And so we're in this moment where there's a disconnect between the underlying efforts, which I think are net-net good to help people be able to discern the provenance if they want to, and the consumer interfaces that don't know how to surface this or merchandise this to the end user. So I feel like that's where we're at right now. I don't think it's going to go away, but I also think we're all going to be gradually inoculated. And I think, honestly, fake stuff is really helpful for society right now because it inoculates us and makes us realize we can't trust what we see anymore. It's all fake. Josh, Wolf, got anything you're excited about we haven't hit on or you're freaking out about? Freaking about the rise of socialism and communism in our country. Yeah, I've noticed on Twitter, you and I have that in common. Yeah. I've been like a center-left Democrat my entire life. My party has just run far left. And I'm, yeah. Well, it's because no one has good, like, the marketing sucks on the center-left. There's no good marketing. But I grew up caring about the guy that lost the ovarian lottery and the Rawlsian sense and needs a leg up and social welfare. But I believe in the American dream. Yeah, but the veil of ignorance is kind of bullshit. Let's not go Rawls. You're a Rawls guy. Yeah. Yeah. No, I believe that that's the right model for designing a society. You know, you wake up tomorrow and you don't know if you're going to be born in Brooklyn or Bangladesh, black or white, male or female, able- Yeah, yeah. I agree with that part. But I'm more of a nozick guy myself. You know, I think that Europe is fucked. And there are bright lights of amazing entrepreneurs that are doing the very thing that Europe has historically not done, which is risk-taking. I think the floor for Europe is higher than the US. So people do not fall through that. But the ceiling has never been that high. And I think that there are companies that are breaking through that. But I think Europe is screwed mostly for demographics and influx, largely because political positions of people that are unwilling to assimilate. It is destroying society. I believe that there are bad foreign actors, whether Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or whatever, that are helping to foment that. And I do believe that the Sahel in Africa and the Maghreb, which is, you know, Mali, Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, you are one terror event away projected into Europe that that entire region becomes the west next to Afghanistan, all of which culminates in my conclusion that Europe needs very strong defense. It is very much a tower of babble of uncoordinated systems. But there needs to be an enormous expenditure, which they have all been under pressure of Trump and Rubio being sort of chastised at Davos and Munich Security Conference. But Europe's got to spend. We're seeing some of our companies benefit from it. But Europe is at real risk, not just from Russia, but from violent extremists that are infiltrating the continent. And if you care about the west, you got to defend it. So you have to go defend Europe again? Yes. Yes. I flew over. We were in France for part of the summer and I flew over. It was actually really amazing. Just like you're in a plane, you're flying over the beaches of Normandy and you're looking at Ohio and Juneau and it's just like 80 years ago. It's like, it's crazy. You know, Americans. It's not that long. No, it's crazy. It's two generations, three generations. Like we stormed the beaches of Normandy against the Nazis. Like it's insane, you know? And we're not fighting Nazis, but it's like, I don't know. It's wild and it's important. And I think a lot of people, it's like too weak to be felt until it's too strong to be broken. And a lot of people are really not appreciating how serious this stuff is. Fair enough. Well, on that uplifting note, anyone else have anything else that jump ball they want to throw out before we call it? We're all going to die. First step is talking about it. Second step is doing something about it. No, the second step is funding. You fund these entrepreneurs that are taking it on. You're getting patriotic. I'm with you. I have my own takes on where the leverage and I can deploy on this stuff is. I do think I'm with you ideologically. I do think it's one of the problems of a Twitter or fun podcast with your friends who are all venture capitalists in different places is we can all fervently agree with each other and feel really good about it. Guys, this was really fun. I appreciate you all joining. I hope you had fun doing it. Super fun. This is great. Thank you. Thank you all. I hope you all really enjoy the rest of your August. and I will see you around on the internet and in physical space. Make sure your bot gets the recipe for Jess for dinner. She's going to be there. She's here. She actually just walked in. If she's still around, maybe she coming out. Are you coming out to end the show? Here she is. I was going to say she checked in with us, wanted to make sure it was actually happening. There she is. There she is. Josh, I texted you a question based on what you said that I didn't understand. So if you could get back to me, that would be great. Me? Well, yeah. Yeah. She got a text from Jess. Okay. What should I eat for dinner? Tater tots. No, I don't know. All right. Later, everyone. There's also pizza. Bye, everyone. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes and follow us on social media by searching for at more or less, at Dave Morin, at lesson, at Jay lesson. And as for me, I'm at Brit. See you guys next time.