SPEAKER_00: third category of rights we're developing is what we call transformative rights. I think this is where it gets really exciting. So let's say you want to take a book and you want to use AI to transform it into a children's book or transform it into a short video, or you want to take the style of the author's voice and write new books with their voice, or you want to take a book and personalize it for you. I mean, there's this whole world of stuff that could be done that combines AI and copyrighted content. And there's right now just no legal framework to make that possible.

SPEAKER_03: Actually, I really like that. I'm curious now, like, if I could put myself into a Dostoyevsky novel, I guess that's why not copyright protected, but you know what I mean, put my daughter's into a Harry Potter book or whatever, and see what would come out the other end. That's really fun, actually.

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SPEAKER_03: months. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. This is This Week in Startups. And Jason, my co-host, is out sick. So I am taking point today. We have an absolutely incredible interview coming up in just a few minutes. But before we do that, I want to hit on two news topics that I think are very, very important. So number one, Mistral, the French company that is known for its work in the realm of AI models, has told the media that it does intend to pursue an IPO in time. Now, that's not an enormous shock because, well, we presume that all major AI model companies will list, at least at some point in the future. But what this does do is set up a little bit of a fun parlor game for us. So who do you think is going to go out first? Will it be OpenAI or Anthropic, which is doing quite well, XAI, which is a lot of money this year, or Mistral? I actually kind of wonder if the French company is going to beat the American companies to listing on the domestic exchanges because, well, I think it probably needs the money. That's something I can't wait to see unfold this year as we unpack what 2025 will bring to us in the realm of AI. And one of those things that is for sure going to happen is more capital. Anthropic, which we just mentioned, is raising another $1 billion from Alphabet. Recall, of course, that Amazon has also put a lot of money into the company. And Anthropic is working on raising $2 billion more from venture capitalists. So quite a lot of funds for a company that not everyone puts in the top tier, but I think absolutely deserves a seat at the front of the AI table. The biggest thing that's going on today, and I'm sure everyone's heard of this by now, is Project Stargate. And this is a $500 billion net project that was announced with President Trump, Sam Altman, I think Larry Ellison was there, and Masa's son from SoftBank. The gist is that there's going to be a new company called Project Stargate that will start with $100 billion to build out infra that's going to support OpenAI and its development. Now, you were thinking, Microsoft, what about them? Well, Microsoft will no longer now be the exclusive cloud provider of OpenAI, but they will retain right of first refusal, and they have longstanding commercial agreements with OpenAI. That means that Microsoft OpenAI partnership is not broken, but it's certainly a little bit diminished now that this new product has come online. So just to give you a quick rundown of who the individual players are in this and what to expect from them, OpenAI is doing equity funding, and they're the lead partner on operational responsibility for the project, and they are, quote, a key initial technology provider. SoftBank is doing equity funding, and they're going to be the lead partner on the financial side. Then you have Oracle, which is putting money in and also got key initial technology partner. Then you have ARM, NVIDIA, Microsoft, tech partners, and then money from MGX, which is an Abu Dhabi-based AI investment vehicle that claimed a $100 billion mandate, though of course we don't expect all of that money to wind up in Project Stargate's coffers. So how much of this is kind of real is the question. Whenever you see a headline number like $500 billion over time, it's good to sit back and go, okay, that's the pledge. What will actually happen? And we've seen this with a Foxconn plant. I think it was in Wisconsin. Questions about how chip money will get spent and so forth. Headline numbers always need to be vetted to make sure they comport with reality. And there's been a lot of people, including Elon Musk and Gavin Baker, who have been casting a little bit of doubt on these numbers. But the market is not that concerned. Today, before we jumped on live, ARM's stock, part of the overall package of companies, is up about 18%. Nvidia's up 4%. SoftBank gained 10%. Oracle was up 7.2%. And Microsoft gained about 3.4%. So clearly, the public markets think that this is both real and happening as promised. There was a little bit of interesting nuance in having a senior White House advisor the next day after a major White House announcement, casting a little bit of doubt on it. But I think we can just kind of file that under the politics in 2025 are going to be very, very different than what we had seen in the preceding eras. So if you were expecting this to look like, I don't know, what we saw under Trump 1 or Obama 2 or Biden's administration, stop thinking that way. It's all going to be done live. It'll all be done on Twitter. And there's going to be a lot more, I think, internecine conflicts, even if that does lead to a secondary kind of like slew of headlines that might not be what the White House wants. Well, this is the way things currently work. Now, on the front of money, arm holding CEO, Renee Haas did say that they're still working out the financial details. That's a public comment. So clearly, I think the back half, the $400 billion that's not in the first $100 billion tranche is being sorted out. But if there's any group of people out there who could put together this kind of capital for a project, Sam Allman's famous for his dealmaking, Masa's son and SoftBank have done some of the biggest investment vehicles in the history of investment, as far as I can recall. Don't forget, Vision Fund 1 and 2 were ambitious, but Masa likes to do more and go higher. Larry Ellison, of course, wants to make sure that Oracle has a big place at the cloud and AI table. There's a lot of money, a lot of market cap here. And so I'm less skeptical that the money won't become apparent. But the nice thing is Sam Allman and OpenAI said very specifically that the first $100 billion is being put to work now. So we're going to be able to tell, and probably pretty quickly, if this is hype or if this is substance. All we need is to see the shovels and the dirt, the cables being laid, pick your construction-based analogy, but we're going to be able to vet this. So all the chatter right now is just kind of that. It's just chewing on it. We're going to be able to actually go to the sites and see. So who wins here? Well, clearly, OpenAI does. I mean, they now have an enormous project, essentially presidential backing and more capital to go out there and build the stuff that they want to basically support their own AI work. Good job. Well done, Sam. I think NVIDIA and ARM, also part of this overall package, they're going to sell some chips. Good for them. Not that they were struggling with demand, but it never hurts to be name-checked in a project of this size with this level of, I think, national security context, let alone economic context. SoftBank, Masa loves podium time. He was once again up there with Trump in front of the podium, talking his book. There's nothing he loves more than doing deals and getting publicity, and he's doing a huge deal with a lot of publicity. So I'm sure he's happy. SoftBank investors, probably happy. After all, if you don't like Masa, would you really hold SoftBank stock at this point in time? Oracle definitely did well here. And I think MGX, that Abu Dhabi-based investment fund, I think this is pretty good for them because it means not getting allocation into, as we said, a national security critical deal. And there has been questions about G42 and just how AI in the Middle East will sit in the broader China-US AI dominance conflict. So I think this is a pretty big win for them. The loser side of the coin is pretty clear. Microsoft no longer the exclusive cloud provider of OpenAI. OpenAI did say they're going to use more Azure. They're going to spend more with Microsoft. Okay. But this definitely feels like a slight pivot away from the absolute bromance of Satya and Sam. So I'm going to put them in the loser column very loosely. And Frank Shaw, if you're watching this, please don't yell at me. And then the other group in the loser column, I think it's just OpenAI's competitors. If you are Anthropic or XAI or Mistral, it probably doesn't feel great to watch your arch rival get this amount of publicity and capital and access to compute, especially if you're scrambling for compute, as we've seen Anthropic recently say. Now, Anthropic's revenue grew, I think it was 10X last year. So they're doing very, very well, but they're still a little bit constrained on this straight up GPU side. So this is going to ensure that OpenAI isn't. So if you are a competitor to them, I don't think this is your favorite day, unless you can lever this to get more money from your existing backers. Back at the top of the show, we talked about how Anthropic is raising more money. Well, I wonder if this is not a catalyst in that direction. Just to go ahead and kind of like close this off. We heard about this project

SPEAKER_11: a little bit before. So back in April, there was rumors that OpenAI and Microsoft were putting together a $100 billion computer. Okay. We all said at the time, sure. Sam Altman's out there talking about how he needs trillions of dollars. So why not? But that was called Project Stargate.

SPEAKER_03: So now we're seeing Project Stargate again, but with some extra stuff brought into it and then handed to the new president, essentially as a thing for him to announce as a shiny object. But just keep in mind that this is not something that was put together in the last two days, let alone since the election. This has been an extension of an ongoing project,

SPEAKER_11: but I don't think that we should give the new president too much credit, if that makes sense.

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SPEAKER_17: So that's the big money news here on Wednesday. Now let's talk to our guests. There's a really cool

SPEAKER_03: company out there called Scribd. You may have heard of it. Well, its founder has a second project. It's called Created by Humans. And I want to welcome Tripp Adler to Twist. Tripp, hey, how you doing? Hey, it's great. Great to be here today. Good, man. So I am a big fan of books. I am a big fan of AI and I am a writer by trade, which means that your company is at the absolute intersection of all of my interests. Because as I understand it, you are building a platform that allows people who have written books to license that IP to AI model companies. Yeah? Yeah, that is what we're doing. This issue of how

SPEAKER_00: copyright works in the AI world is a very messy, complicated issue. And there's a lot of conflict around it. And at Created by Humans, we are trying to solve this problem once and for all. And we're doing this by building a marketplace for AI rights for content. We're starting with books because we

SPEAKER_22: think books are really important. There's a lot of things to be solved and then we're going to expand

SPEAKER_03: other kinds of content from there. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I was going back and prepping for this. You guys raised $5 million last year. That hit a big press cycle, but you hadn't launched yet. But in fact, I think in the last week, the platform has actually come online. So my first

SPEAKER_00: question to you, of course, is how is the first week gone? Yeah, it's going great. So we announced the company in June of last year, got to work on building the product, built out the team, and then the product went live last week. And we've had a terrific response from authors. We're now getting a new book being AI licensed about once every five minutes, which considering that just a few months ago, there was pretty much zero activity in AI licensing for books, we think that's a major step forward. And we're really just getting started. I mean, this is just the very beginning. We expect this to really kind of pick up as we bring more pieces of this together. So yeah, we're off to a really great start raising more funding and just have Yeah, I have a lot of momentum. It's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_03: So I know you guys had Walter Isaacson as kind of a founding author. But I'm curious, how many total books are now available on the platform today? I know it's growing very quickly. But I'm just curious

SPEAKER_29: if it's dozens, hundreds, 1000s, or whatever the number is.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely in the 1000s. We put a number out yet. I mean, we're a brand new company, we're just getting started. But you know, we aspire to pretty soon have, you know, millions of books all available for AI purposes. And we want when AI companies need books for training for rag for whatever use cases, rather than using these pirated services, we hope they just come to us and they get legitimate licenses for these books. And we want this to be a shared resource that the whole AI world can use, and just

SPEAKER_22: sort of reset this dynamic between human creators and AI companies.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah, no, I think I think it's a great idea. And as someone who's written, you know, honestly,

SPEAKER_03: let's be honest, millions of words online, I too would love to have some sort of, I don't know, recompense from all that being ingested. But one thing I'm really curious about is the price point. So very recently, today, actually, Ashley Vance, who's a writer over at Bloomberg, shared this tweet, which I know is a little bit small. So I'm going to explain to everyone watching the live stream. And the tweet says, What you think, guys, $2,500 to have one of my books sucked into an LLM? Yes, or no, this was a Harper Collins deal with some unknown tech company, offering that amount of money, and he was collecting, you know, feedback from his audience. And I'm curious how much work needs to be done to smooth over tensions between AI model companies and authors and publishers, because it feels like there's a lot of bad blood. And so authors who might be skeptical, how are you going out there and reaching them and getting them to say, Okay, I'm willing to try this, I'm not going to get

SPEAKER_38: burned by new tech?

SPEAKER_30: Well, I think that what we want to do is both solve the licensing problem and the protection problem.

SPEAKER_00: So we're going to create the tools that allow these books to be easily licensed, which right now is very difficult to do is because the rights are so complicated. And then also, we're going to be building tools that allow monitoring of the services to make sure they're being they're being used appropriately. So you kind of need a third party here to sort of manage the relationship. And in terms of like how this is priced, I mean, that's what you need to figure out right now. I mean, there's, there's one perspective out there, which is that, you know, human data is the most valuable resource in the world, and it should be at this extremely high price. The other perspective is that all human data should be free, and all the training should be free. We think the answer is somewhere in the middle. And, and this company is going to try to is going to find that market price. And that's what we're trying to do. So I don't know what it's going to be yet. I mean, $2,500 a book, that was kind of one of the first day licensing deals done in the book space. That was between Harper Collins and Microsoft that was in the in the press. But, you know, we can be a lot more of these kinds of deals. And I think one of the keys here is that we think there's, there's going to be made potentially many a licensing deals. I mean, there could be hundreds of AI companies licensing books in the future. So if you even if each deal is relatively smaller, what one author

SPEAKER_22: would like to see if you add that up across many, many ideals, the numbers could get really, really big.

SPEAKER_42: So essentially, the pitch to author says, Sure, some folks are worried about AI eating human

SPEAKER_03: creativity. But let's be honest, we're going towards an AI future. Don't you want to have your books have the best possible chance at monetization in this new era? That to me is a very compelling pitch, because I am a capitalist. But I'm curious, has anyone complained about what

SPEAKER_44: you guys are doing? I like it. But not everyone is as technology forward as you and I are.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, everyone's pretty, pretty positive. We're doing we're kind of building a building a bridge here that makes sort of everyone happy. And for authors, we have both licensing and copyright protection. So yeah, if you want to just put your books up and not license them, we do that too. So we kind of it kind of works for everyone. So we're getting a pretty good reaction overall. On AI, it's very mixed with authors. I mean, you have some authors who are concerned about it, worried about it, you have some who are really enthusiastic, and we're right now focused on the most enthusiastic ones. I mean, when I started pitching this to a few authors, I knew I, you know, I texted it to Walter Isaacson, I just texted the pitch deck and said, I know for my script days, I just said, Hey, what do you think you want to get involved? And he got back to me in like five or 10 minutes and was just ecstatic about this idea. I just really want to get involved within like a day or so. We had signed him up to be involved. And now we're working closely with him. So there's definitely authors like that who are really enthusiastic. So, you know, Walter then led to Doug Preston getting on board, which led to Susan Orland, which led to Sylvia Day,

SPEAKER_22: and it's just kind of, you know, it's sort of like the movement is growing.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And you guys said that when you emerged from beta, you had the support of quote, over 50 bestselling authors. So definitely some folks are showing up. Now, the other side of the marketplace is, of course, AI companies, the big model companies and so forth. We've seen a lot of deals between, you know, I don't know, OpenAI and Axios recently. There's been a lot of individual kind of one offs assigned between major companies and model companies. Do you think that they're going to be, you know, very excited to engage with what Created by Humans is putting together? I'm not sure how much the demand is ready for this. And I'm curious if you could just tell me, like, what have you heard from AI companies regarding what you have on offer? So yeah, we've been in conversations with,

SPEAKER_00: with, you know, most of them at multiple levels in the org. And in overall, I think folks are really excited. I think that they they're not happy with all these lawsuits and all these, you know, perception issues with creators, and they want to solve it. They also, they also want to get more data. They're, they're trying to scale their data acquisition efforts. And right now they're doing it through these these big deals involved, like, you know, with large media companies, lots of lawyers, the idea that we can just make it plug and play for them. I mean, that's really exciting for them too. So overall, it's been it's been it's been really positive. And you know, we're just getting started. So we'll we'll see where it goes. But yeah, it really feels like the market is kind of pulling this sort of product into existence.

SPEAKER_03: I definitely think so. And, you know, for full transparency, I talked to the folks from Tolbert last year, they're doing, it seems more kind of like web content versus books as their initial focus. But they also described a similar sentiment that there's going to be an absolute need for this. So let's go build what everyone needs and solve some of these tensions. How, how do you guys handle essentially copyright? Because I know that authors have copyright publishers probably have some sort of play in that. Do you often end up having to help negotiate that sort of licensing side of things? Or is that kind of off your plate and that lands more in the author's

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SPEAKER_00: netsuite.com slash twist. Well, we think that we're going to we're going to solve copyright by creating this shared resource of content that's available for license with all the appropriate licenses in place. You know, we actually have different categories of AI rights. So we started thinking this mostly for training, and we built rights to allow, you know, copyrighted for training. But we realized another big, big type of license is for what we call reference rights, which is basically a license for using content for RAG. So let's say you're, you're, you're writing a prompt, you want some information, and the answer is on page, you know, 293 of a book, we have a reference license would allow you to access that information. And then the third category of rights we're developing is what we call transformative rights. I think this is where it gets really exciting. So let's say you want to take a book, and you want to use AI to transform it into a children's book, or transform it into a short video, or you want to take the style of the author's voice and write new books for their voice, or you want to take a book and personalize it for you. I mean, there's this whole world of stuff that can be done, that combines AI and copyrighted content. And there's right now just no legal framework to make that possible. So we're building both the legal framework, and sort of like the product and the repository to content to like to kind of unlock

SPEAKER_03: this opportunity. All right, there's three levels here. One is information for AI model training, the thing that everyone kind of understands when we think about this type of deal. The other one is rag effect effectively. How do you improve how AI models work when they need other information? Love that. And then the third one, super crazy transformative. I didn't know you were doing that. And I, I can see how some people would be worried about that. But then again, when you take someone's IP and make a video out of it, you're doing a transformation. So this sort of IP use is not novel, even if the technology use case is okay. Yeah, actually, I really like that. I'm curious now, like, if I could put myself into a Dostoevsky novel, I guess that's probably not copyright protected. But you know what I mean, but my daughters into a Harry Potter book or whatever, and see what would come out the other end. That's really fun. Actually, I like that. I think this conversation is often a little bit fraught. And instead, talking about what's gonna bring joy,

SPEAKER_38: what's gonna be unlocked by this is much more, frankly, entertaining to me. Huh? Yeah. Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: well, I think I mean, some authors are excited about this idea that their readers can like personalize the book, or they can use AI to change the ending or that kind of stuff. And some authors are not excited about it. So we're basically working with the authors who are excited, and who want to kind of pioneer this. And I think that once you know, once we build out the framework for this is actually happening, I think all authors will come on board eventually. But it's just you know, it's a pretty big step forward for the world of content creators. So we're trying to just take it one

SPEAKER_60: step at a time here. I'm writing a book right now for fun, to be clear. But I just kind of I'm

SPEAKER_03: writing it as a purely creative exercise, I do not expect whatever I publish in book format is going to make me more than like lunch. But if I wrote something that was useful to an AI model, I had a whole different monetization stream, that would honestly encourage me to do more of it. And so instead of worrying about AI, if there's money here, I think this sort of setup could actually encourage more human creative output net, which is good for the species, the planet, and hopefully our,

SPEAKER_62: you know, our future. That's why I'm optimistic here, if that makes sense, Tripp.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean, in the past, you know, books are always written to be read by other humans. And there's now this future where, you know, robots are gonna be reading books, too. And you could potentially have a hit book that's that was never read by humans, but was really popular with with all the AIs, right? Like we could be entering or we will be entering a world like that. So so who knows, maybe your book will be a be a robot, a robot hit.

SPEAKER_60: I really doubt it, given that it's kind of schlocky trip, tropey fantasy type stuff. So I

SPEAKER_03: don't think it's going to be that helpful. But I brought up the whole human creativity point, because you guys have a very interesting part of your kind of like corporate manifesto. And for those who are not watching the video version, I'm going to read this, I pulled this from the site, building upon Isaac Asimov, three laws of robotics, we have developed and are advocating for a new constitution. And the first point of this is quote, the fourth law, which you describe as when AI robots use or learn from human behavior or human creative output, this must happen symbiotically to benefit both humans and robots. So first of all, I take it you're an Asimov fan. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, me too. So I saw this and I was like, ah, and if you don't know the three laws of robotics, look them up. There's also the zero with law if you want to get super technical about it. But here, you're essentially saying that when AI is taken from humans, there should be a symbiotic positive benefit to both sides, which is interesting, because how does the human stuff benefit the robots, which are non living? Is that more like a quality of output point? Or is that we're going to give them value to? Yeah, so the way we came up with this was,

SPEAKER_00: we first wanted to solve this problem, we started talking to, you know, folks in the content industry and in the industry. And, and there's this big debate about whether training is fair use or not. And folks in the in the content industry, we're all saying, Well, no, of course, it's not fair use, this is copyright infringement. And then folks in the industry were saying that, you know, because a human can read unlimited books, learn from those books, robots should also be able to read and learn from unlimited books. So just kind of like, two fundamentally different views on this matter, which was leading to all the lawsuits. So so we wanted to try to kind of come with a new philosophy to bridge these two perspectives. You know, we're not we're trying to like bring everyone together here. So so the way we bridge these two sides is we, you know, we looked at what Asimov had said, which is that there should be certain rules that that, you know, describe human robot relations, that we need special rules as rights to how robots learn from humans and train on their data. That's a perspective that basically everyone in the content world in the world basically can agree on. And then from there, we're able to kind of build the company around this around this, this, you know,

SPEAKER_03: this philosophy. Okay, that helps a lot. I'm gonna pull this back up. And I'm gonna translate this to my understanding of it now. So I would say and I'm just riffing here, I'm not trying to be critical of your, you know, corporate verbiage. But when AI robots user learn from human behavior or human creative output, humans get to say yes or no, and the human is compensated for helping the robot is another way of saying that. Yeah, it's another another way of saying it. Okay, cool. I fully got that because if we're doing science fiction references, I have to go all the way to the bone to understand what we're talking about. There's another thing you guys are working on that I thought was super cool, which is a almost like a like a favicon or an icon. And you want to show people give people a way to demonstrate that something that they've built is done by humans versus AI. And you had this little icon a bit like the copyright symbol. What was the reason behind this?

SPEAKER_30: We imagine that being the new copyright symbol. So we think what might be even more powerful than

SPEAKER_00: copyright in the future is this idea that something is created by humans versus then by AI. So the idea is this symbol is, you know, you could you put this on your book or whatever human creation you have indicate that it was created by humans and not by robots. And, you know, we as a company believe that, you know, human creativity is invaluable, and we want to make sure it is protected in the era. But the same time, we don't want it, you know, siloed off from the world of AI. And that's why we're

SPEAKER_70: trying to, you know, get this working relationship going between human creativity and AI. And that's

SPEAKER_78: really the broader mission. Well, then I think we need, we probably need three, then we need one

SPEAKER_03: that's pure human, one that's augmented, like, I don't know if I use, if I use Grammarly to edit something to help me find a missing comma. I don't think I'm writing with AI, but AI is helping me write. And then we probably need a third one that's just like, a robot wrote this, just so you know, because it feels weird to only mark off one section of writing as a thing and then not categorize the

SPEAKER_29: other, other areas of work. Or am I being overly pedantic here?

SPEAKER_20: No, I think I think you're right. Yeah, I think it's we probably should create multiple badges.

SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, it's good. Yeah, we will we'll work with that way. I mean, as I said, we're just getting started. So that was our first our first approach, but we'll, we'll build on that.

SPEAKER_03: So just before I let you go, a final question about synthetic data, because you and I are talking about really the most handcrafted artisanal words that you can think of books, which are a big labor of love by both authors and editors and publishers and so forth. But I've also heard about synthetic data becoming increasingly important in LLM training. Does that represent a risk to the underlying thesis of the company? Or do you think that even in a synthetic data positive era, we're still going to absolutely need to pull from the great human library?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this is the question that I ask everyone in the AI community, like where they think this is going between synthetic data and AI and human data? Um, just because it is it is like a core question to this for how this company is gonna is gonna work. When I talk to portfolio founders about what's

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SPEAKER_88: slash startup slash twist for complete details and eligibility. Again, that's Atlassian.com

SPEAKER_30: slash startups slash twist. I haven't heard anyone say that human data is going to go away entirely.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's some people are more enthusiastic about synthetic data, some or less. But the general consensus is going to be, it's going to be a mix of synthetic data and human data. And human data is going to be really important. Regardless of everyone's opinions, I mean, our company, we are built around this idea that human data is invaluable, and it always will be. And I mean, that'll be true for a million years, there's still something fundamentally unique about humans. And that's what we need to protect and preserve in the era. Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see how it plays out between the dead and human data. I mean, we'll be keeping a close eye on that. So so if I ever, you know, come back on the show in the future, I might have some, you know, new thoughts

SPEAKER_22: to share on that.

SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm glad you said if I come back on the show, because I was just thinking about what your next major newsy event might be that'll bring you on. Are you guys going to announce commercial deals with like, for example, I'm just picking a random name out of a hat, open AI, or are those agreements going to be quieter and not something that you'll make noise about as a as a company when they happen?

SPEAKER_20: I think it's to be determined. And more likely, I mean, we're pretty open, transparent companies,

SPEAKER_00: I think we would like to like to share share these things. And we think it's, it's better if we're given the level of conflict, and we're trying to, we're trying to improve things, we think that, you know, being more open about this is gonna gonna lead to better outcomes. I think we're, you know, we'll be pretty open as a company, but but we will see, we'll, it's, we'll see how it plays out.

SPEAKER_35: All right, well, we'll have you back on in maybe six months to see how the marketplace is growing. And I'm very curious to see where prices net out, because I don't think really anyone knows right now

SPEAKER_03: what the stuff is worth. And it'll also be very interesting to see down the road, maybe in two years time, what fraction of author revenue generated by your platform is for model training, versus rag versus transformation, because each one of those to me could become the leading driver of demand. But I have no idea which one it's going to be, you know, given enough time for this to kind of mature. So thank you so much for coming on, man. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_41: Yeah, thank you. This was this is great. And hope to come back sometime.

SPEAKER_06: Before before you go, where can people find both the company and yourself on the great wide internet?

SPEAKER_41: Well, the company is just created by humans.ai. So that's our URL. And as for me, you can find me

SPEAKER_00: there. You can find me on right Twitter, which is probably good. So I mean, you mean the platform formerly known as Twitter now x.com xx.com. Yeah, I gotta get used still getting used to that. But yeah, my Twitter handles trip Adler, you can find me there. Our follow created by humans too. So hope

SPEAKER_98: to see you there. All right. Thank you, trip. All right. Next, we're going to go into our twist 500

SPEAKER_03: bag and talk to the CEO and co founder of Sela. If you don't know battery technology and why they matter to the modern world and are improving at a slow but perhaps accelerating rate, this is for

SPEAKER_11: you. Let's have some fun. Did you know that the Nobel Prize in chemistry back in 2019 was awarded to three people? John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Wittenham, and Akira Yoshino for their contributions to the lithium ion battery. It was actually just back in 1991 that the first lithium ion battery was used in kind of an everyday consumer electronics. We're very accustomed to lithium ion batteries today, and you could actually argue that they have made the modern electronic world possible in a great many ways, especially in mobile, but they're actually still relatively new and they have been getting better over time. But as the entire world begins to think more about lower carbon energy, renewable energy and energy storage, we're going to need to take our current battery technology and make it quite a lot better. So there's still work to do. And that's why companies like Sela, I think, are particularly interesting because they are trying to take the humble batteries that we know and love and squeeze more out of them so we can go further, faster, and in more comfort. So please welcome

SPEAKER_99: to the show. It's Gene Berdashevsky. He's the co-founder and CEO over at Sela. Gene, how are you? Gene Berdashevsky I'm good. Thanks for having me, Alex. So I'm prepping for today's show. I am not a chemist, nor a physicist, nor an electrical engineer.

SPEAKER_11: I am a big old fan of technology that's going to make my life better. And I think that's you. But I do want to start with some basics. So prepping, pretty clear that Titan silicon anodes inside of batteries is what Sela is working on today. Those are a number of words that I think most folks listening don't understand. So could you start with just explaining to folks out there

SPEAKER_100: what you guys have built and how it's making batteries have more energy density today?

SPEAKER_102: Yeah, let's break it down. Maybe let's just start at your cell phone or your electric car. And inside of one of those, you've got a battery cell. Now, everybody sort of thinks about that and says, okay, that stores energy, but very, very few people ever take one apart. If you take one apart,

SPEAKER_104: there are two really important components in there. One is the anode that stores lithium when the battery is charged. The other is the cathode that stores lithium when the battery is discharged. Those two components take up probably 80, 90% of the space inside the battery. At Sela, we make one of those components. We make the anode and the anode we make Titan silicon is about half the size and about five times lighter than the anode that's in your battery today. And it doesn't matter if it's in your car or your phone. Ours is dramatically better. And so as we integrate our anode material into these batteries, they shrink or they can store more energy. So that's what we do. The actual material, the actual anode is a, is a black powder. You know, we sometimes talk about as black magic dust. I mean, it's really, you know, fine powder. And it goes into the front end of a gigafactory where your battery cell is assembled. And this is a, it's a nanoparticle,

SPEAKER_99: I think technically by the size of the actual materials that are used, correct?

SPEAKER_102: So, so our materials are actually micron sized, but they have nanoscale features

SPEAKER_104: in order to make the technology work. It's one of the sort of critical things. It's why, you know, this technology that we're, that we're bringing to market, it's scientists have been working on silicon anode 20 plus years, and no one's ever cracked the code. And we actually went through about 100,000 iterations synthesizing different materials with different compositions and different features. And once we got that right, you know, it was through a critical set of kind of nano properties that, that made it work,

SPEAKER_11: that we're able to commercialize this. Actually, I, I read that number as 80,000 when I was prepping, I was going to bring it up. I'm glad to know that it's actually now into the, the a hundred thousand realm, but it reminds me a little bit of what Edison did with light bulb filaments, trying to figure out what would work. I mean, admittedly, I don't think he ran a hundred thousand tests like you guys did, but you know, there's a history in electrification of just straight up experimenting until we find the right material. Now, when it comes to this Titan silicon, which is how you've branded it, you've said that you're looking at today at about a 20% energy density boost, and you're hoping for, I think up to 40% in the future. So first of all, how impactful is 20% and how far from doubling that is SELA today?

SPEAKER_102: So 20% is a massive amount at the chemistry level. What the chemistry that's in your phone today

SPEAKER_104: started plateauing, probably finished plateauing right around 2008, 2010, hasn't really improved. And every little percentage point that's been squeezed out any kind of phone runtime improvements or laptop runtime improvements, those you can really attribute to the improvements in microchips, not the battery, certainly not the battery chemistry. Today, chemistry improves maybe 1% per year. So think of this as like two decades, two to four decades worth of breakthroughs. I mean, this is as significant a chemistry change as when we went from nickel metal hydride to lithium ion in the first place. It's as big a deal. And so it's a really big deal in the business. As far as getting from 20 to 40%, you know, we think kind of end of the decade is a reasonable timeframe for that. So once you kind of unlock this new chemistry, you can pretty quickly advance it as long as you have the investment in R and D to kind of continue to push it forward. So we feel pretty good about that.

SPEAKER_99: Okay. You did a Reddit AMA recently, which was actually very, very interesting. And one question

SPEAKER_11: I was going to ask you was why just 20% because I'm so spoiled to processors getting, you know, much faster, very, very rapidly. I mean, Moore's law has been fantastic for a very long time. And just thinking about the software side of AI models today, I mean, it really feels like it was such quick progress. But you explained to people on Reddit, why this is hard. And you said batteries are a mix of every engineering and scientific discipline all going on at once materials, chemistry, physics, mechanics, and quantum. And then you have to scale it up. But you also said something that's really interesting, which is, you know, often in batteries, you can improve one thing and make other things worse at the same time. So it sounds like you found a way to increase density, but just going on your own argument, has there been any downsides to moving to the Titan Silicon anodes that might make it less exciting than it sounds on paper?

SPEAKER_102: So that's what we spent a decade in order to be able to say no, right? So there are no,

SPEAKER_104: there are no, there are no downsides. As a matter of fact, there's one other upside, which is we can, you can recharge batteries with Titan Silicon in about half the time of conventional batteries. So you can get much faster boost. The periodic table of elements is actually just quite small. And when you're talking about storing more energy, you're really talking about driving the voltage further apart. And there's only only so much more you can do there and going to smaller and smaller atoms, smaller and smaller elements. And we're already at lithium, which is one of the smallest. So really, from here, in terms of batteries, there's maybe a 2x improvement from today's state of the art on a volume basis. And that's kind of it. That's as far as we can see today. So it's unlike AI or unlike microchips, you know, we're not dealing in information, we're dealing in energy and we're bound by the laws of thermodynamics and what the universe gave us.

SPEAKER_11: So if we're at a 20% boost today, 40% by the end of the decade, how long would it take us to reach that theoretical doubling that you mentioned?

SPEAKER_104: I think it depends on the investment in R&D. I think, you know, you could, you could probably do it sometime in the 2030s. You need to improve the cathode as well, separate or a couple other things, but it's doable. And that's at the chemistry level, people are also optimizing the packaging and things like that. So maybe there's a two and a half x from where we are today. But that two and a half x would transform life as we know it. I mean, every single vehicle would be electric. You know, on a weight basis, you might be able to get three or four x, you know, airplanes would become electric for regional flights. So you would transform the face of the planet, as far as energy is concerned with those kinds of improvements.

SPEAKER_11: That's why I wanted to start with pointing out that lithium ion batteries are relatively new and they made, you know, the Diskmans that I used as a child and then my first cell phone and then my first iPhone. And then like all this stuff was made possible by this relatively humble battery chemistry that we've not been using for 35 years, give or take. But it sounds like we're not on the

SPEAKER_99: cusp of a similar revolution per se. We're just going to be improving the lithium ion batteries.

SPEAKER_11: I feel like you're about to jump in. So go for it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, uh, it, there's a little

SPEAKER_104: nuance. So, so the energy, the energy is carried by the lithium ion itself, but what it's doing, the key thing is, is how are you storing those lithium ions? How densely can you store them? And, and so when you say lithium traditional lithium ion, what you're really saying is you have an anode made of graphite, which has been the dominant anode for 33 years now. And you have a cathode made typically of a metal oxide, lithium, cobalt oxide, nickel, nickel oxide. You kind of hear NCM, LFP, LCO, those kinds of terms. Those materials are the host materials. And the, what we're doing is replacing graphite with silicon. And then over time we'll replace the cathode with something else as well. And again, those were not really just improving lithium ion per se. Those are complete chemistry revolutions. You might as well call today's lithium ion, you know, graphite nickel graphite batteries. And what we're doing is going to nickel nickel silicon batteries. These are really big changes that are not, you're not, you're not squeezing the chemistry. You're having to kind of unlock a whole nother dimension of science.

SPEAKER_11: That makes so much more sense to me. Cause I was, I was going through a lot of just, you know, background material on the industry. And it felt like you guys were making at least like lithium silicon batteries. I wasn't quite sure what to call them per se, but I think people best understand lithium ion is kind of a starting point today for battery tech. Now on the point about, um, the Titan silicon anodes, one reason why I'm excited about Sela is that it seems that you can take this technology you guys have built and put it into a host of batteries today and essentially unlock this performance improvement that we discussed across form factors, sizes, implementations. Is that a fair understanding of what you've built?

SPEAKER_102: A hundred percent. So you got it. So what, so the, the reason this revolution feels like

SPEAKER_104: evolution sometimes is I call it a revolution in parts, meaning we, we, we drop in this new component, but we, we put it into the existing gigafactories and that's by design. It's actually much harder to create a new technology. That's fully compatible with everything downstream, right? You, you don't have the privilege, you don't have the advantage of saying, well, if I just make the battery a little differently, then I can use this new chemistry, right? So we're, we're making all the components that we want to revolutionize. We want them to be compatible with existing gigafactories. And what that means is it can go into any form factor, any application, any factory, anywhere in the world today. Uh, and the same materials that we're now shipping in, in consumer devices where we're in, you know, several million products, uh, you know, around the world today, those same materials are the ones that we're scaling up to put into your electric vehicles. Um, and, and there's, you know, very little we have to do differently and there's very little the customer has to do differently.

SPEAKER_11: So I, I want to put this into very, very, uh, easy to understand consumer terms. Um, I recently went out and finally replaced my iPhone 11. I got a 16. It's, it's fine. Um, but how long until I see, you know, Sela's battery technology in a device that I can go purchase at the mall? And I know you've had money from, from Mercedes-Benz. I think you worked with BMW. I think Panasonic was in there at some point. Um, but when can I go out and kind of like experience this? Uh, so you can experience it

SPEAKER_104: today. The, the one, uh, product that we're in that I can publicly say is, uh, the whoop fitness

SPEAKER_102: tracker. So if you're, if you use a whoop product, you use the mo one of the most advanced batteries in the world today. And I say one of, because we're also in another device that I unfortunately can't publicly say, but, uh, you know, like I said, millions of people are using our product today. Um, as far as a cell phone, it probably one to two years from now. So we're in the process of building sort of first, first gigafactory, if you will, really a single digit gigawatt hours, uh, facility

SPEAKER_104: in Washington state. And, you know, that'll be enough for kind of tens of thousands of cars. So we'll get into a few vehicles that you'll be able to buy at the high end, but it's also enough for hundreds of millions of cell phones or as much as many as a billion wearable devices. So we'll be

SPEAKER_11: sort of all over consumer electronics in the next couple of years. How, how hard is it to like set up this first single digit gigawatt hour factory? And then how much of that's replicable across the facility? As in, are you doing all the hard learning now to manufacture at scale and it'll be easier to

SPEAKER_102: continue that process as you go through it? It's insanely hard. Uh, so we, it's, uh, you know, it's several hundred million dollar investment. It's, uh, you know, first of a kind, everything is new. Everything is different. There's no one you can turn to and say, well, how did you do it last time?

SPEAKER_104: Um, so, you know, in many ways the organization is learning how to build these, these large projects. And, and so we, you know, as we expand, that'll be more like billion dollar scale investments. We'll be ready for that. I think where we are in our journey, you know, we're, we're shipping commercially today from Alameda. Um, so that's kind of how we got into the millions of devices. Um, this is kind of like our model S if you will, it's kind of our second go around. It's, it's,

SPEAKER_102: you know, a lot better, but it's dramatically harder. You know, the road store was kind of hand built. The model S was like a whole, you know, modern car. And then as we kind of go to the full scale, what I call world scale, um, uh, reactor sizes, uh, in the next cycle, a few years down the line, you know, that's kind of like the model three equivalent. So we're kind of in the middle of our scaling journey. I think it'll take us, you know, another four years before I can say

SPEAKER_127: we're a world class, you know, materials and chemistry company on the likes of a BSF or

SPEAKER_141: Yuma core reporting. I was going to ask about applications because when I think of looking

SPEAKER_11: at my own batteries, two things come to mind consumer electronics and electric vehicles. Right. But we also talk a lot about just like grid load capacity size batteries. And I know that there's different chemistries you can use for those because they don't need to cycle as often and they don't have weight problems and they can be huge because who cares? Uh, but I'm curious what C-less technology could do to increasing our ability as a species to store energy so that we can move

SPEAKER_102: faster towards a renewable future. So, so ultimately we will address, uh, that market. Uh, it has a lot

SPEAKER_104: higher cost pressure than even the auto market and the auto market is notoriously, uh, cost sensitive. So you kind of think about it as, as you bring any technology into the world, you really want to start at the high end and, and so, you know, that's us enabling you to have your phone run 20% longer or 30% longer. I mean, that's worth a lot. Right. And there's, there's, there's like 10 cents of graphite anode in the battery in your phone that we would replace. And so you tell me, is it worth five bucks or 10 bucks to have 30% longer runtime? And, and, you know, actually, I'm curious about that because

SPEAKER_11: if the graphite costs 10 cents, it's essentially free, even for an iPhone bill of sales, right? That's right. Uh, what does a similar battery equipped with Titan silicon cost? What's the, what's the differential there from the relatively cheap graphite?

SPEAKER_104: Couple bucks difference, right? Like, like almost free from, from a consumer standpoint, right?

SPEAKER_11: But, but we have to. So in terms of percentage difference, it's quite high, but it only scales up to a Big Mac. So it's just not that big of a deal. Correct. Not even a Big Mac, right? It's like

SPEAKER_102: inflation of a big Mac today. Half a big Mac. And that's right. And, and by the way, you know, faster recharge and the reason, by the way, when you got your iPhone 16 and you start playing with,

SPEAKER_104: you're like, yeah, this is a lot like the 13 I just had. I would, I just went through this upgrade. One of the reasons is that the processor speed is throttled in order to get you the battery lifetime you want. So what you're going to experience it like is it's going to be a way snappier phone when you can unthrottle some of the processor speed. And that's something all of us techies love, right? We love snappy, snappy, snappy. So I, I think there's, I'm optimistic as well as AI features. Those are very power hungry. So if you want AI at the edge, you're going to want these kinds of batteries. And we're seeing that we're seeing customers excited for this.

SPEAKER_150: You know, they're, they're, they're not worried about, you know, a couple of bucks on a device

SPEAKER_110: like that. I'm disappointed though, that we were already kind of running up against the limits of

SPEAKER_11: chemistry. Cause those feel very, uh, just immovable. Like, okay, hear me. I'm an idiot,

SPEAKER_109: but like lithium is the lightest solid. It's one of the lightest stuff. Yeah. I think that's right.

SPEAKER_11: Yes. Okay. Yeah. Cause it just, that doesn't give you a lot more space. There's not like three things that are lighter than we could try that are also solids. Do you think that we need something a bit more radical in how we think about storing electricity? And then maybe that the current method we've been running with for so long is just insufficient to meet our future storage needs.

SPEAKER_102: Not really. I think we underappreciate just how insanely cheap energy is and how much when you, when you think about the grid, I mean, our whole society is based on this. And if you make

SPEAKER_104: the foundation of an entire, you know, um, Salesforce tower level skyscraper, which is, you know, you can think of all of our technology stack is sitting on the foundation of energy. If you improve that foundation 20, 30%, and you can build 20, 30% higher or whatnot, you know, it's, you think about the technology levels you can reach. I mean, lithium ion itself, when in 2003, when GM crushed the EV one, they basically said, look, the batteries are just not good enough. And literally that year or 2001, they crushed it. And literally the next year, Tesla was incorporated because lithium ion batteries had gotten good enough. And that was only, you know, at that point, maybe a 50% improvement in batteries, right? And then it kept, kept going. First, we're going to focus on mobile consumer devices. You're going to, we're going to enable new kinds of AI devices that you've never seen before. I have some really cool customers that I can't even tell you what they're working on, but like we're helping the customers at the leading edge of AI sort of push devices that are going to be coming to market in the next couple of years. We're also going to support drones, some of these, um, aerial vehicles, some of these, um, EV toll type vehicles, right? So you can change society with a 2X better battery. When you talk about the grid, it's so cost sensitive. We'll get there. We will lower the cost of energy storage as well. And the reason we do that is the more energy you can store in a single cell, the fewer cells you can use to make a pack. So if you use half as many cells, you're mining half as much material, you're processing half as much material, you know, you, you, it costs you half as much to put on the grid. But, but a lot of that is, is, you know, there's regulatory reasons why it costs as much as it does. There's sort of, um, it's not the, the fundamentals of energy are incredibly cheap, which is also, it makes it really hard to compete. It's why you have to, you know, invest a billion dollars in R and D to get something that's better than what's out there in the world, because our whole society is built on it. And it's really

SPEAKER_118: hard to ring even 1% out of these things. Well, I'm really glad that you're going to get 20%

SPEAKER_158: that I've never been so excited about 20% to my life. I feel like.

SPEAKER_11: I love it. It's going to unlock, it's going to unlock so much. But when I think about the, the placement of seal in the market today, what we need as a society and what we're kind of focusing on, which is like hard tech and getting back to building things. It, to me, it seems like where your company is money should just be like raining down in huge bricks from the sky to land on your HQ in Alameda. You guys have raised, I think 1.4 billion that's publicly known. It's very hard to do what you're doing, but one way companies used to raise money was going public. They would go public and raise money. And that's gone out of fashion as more private capitalists become available. But I'm curious about you guys and if an IPO might be a fundraising mechanism for you versus a future

SPEAKER_102: eventual corporate capstone moment. It's fair. I mean, I think whenever we go public, the proceeds would be used to expand production capacity because that's how our business runs.

SPEAKER_104: The question is sort of how much production capacity, how much revenue, what kind of economics do we need in order for the street to kind of believe in us and bet on us for the next thing? And I think we're not quite there, but certainly, hopefully in the next few years, we'll get to a point where that makes sense. I think access to public markets is really important for industrial companies like ours because it brings down the cost of capital, right? It allows us to

SPEAKER_102: get debt, bank debt, just a much bigger pool of capital gets to rush in. So obviously we're going to wait, we're going to need others that have very strong economics to lead the way. And I'm surprised

SPEAKER_150: a lot of those aren't yet in the market, but hopefully that creates some tailwinds for folks like us to be able to raise additional capital and grow our business.

SPEAKER_11: So you've made it very, very clear that doing what you're doing is difficult versus today. It feels like making software is the easiest it's ever been to get on that train and start making something. So could you just as a closing riff here, uh, pitch founders to go out and build physical things that are hard versus software things that are easier.

SPEAKER_119: Look, I think most founders don't want to do things that are easy. That's not how we're wired,

SPEAKER_104: but you know, for me going into battery chemistry, I was at Tesla, I was working on the battery systems. We made amazing progress, unlocked this whole wave of electrification. My question was, as I, as I decided to do my own thing was what's even harder than that. And I found chemistry and

SPEAKER_102: physics, uh, and, and sort of what we're doing now. And it's incredibly satisfying to solve insanely hard problems. And, you know, look, startups are supposed to be risky. Yeah. Odds are, it's not

SPEAKER_104: going to work. So you want to be working on something that you're going to be satisfied with, even if the outcome isn't exactly what you envision, right? You're going to want to be satisfied that you were in there, you know, in the arena and the proverbial arena, you know, fighting a fight, you really care to fight. And, you know, to me, there's not a lot of things more important than, you know, changing the foundation of society and energy, uh, and having the opportunity to kind of rebuild the U S industrial base. I mean, to me, those two things are incredibly

SPEAKER_168: motivating every morning. Well, if you don't have a reason to get out of bed and you can just stay in bed and drink wine. So I'm glad that you're working on this and I'm really excited to

SPEAKER_11: eventually learn what that second device is that's currently using your technology and also getting it into my iPhone. So if you don't mind, call up Cupertino and tell them to get off their backsides and make a better phone. I'd appreciate it. All right. Uh, Gene, for folks who want to take

SPEAKER_109: another look at the company, what is the website? Uh, www.silanano.com. All right. Thank you very

SPEAKER_69: much, my friend. We'll talk to you in maybe a year and see how things are going when that factory opens up, take a video and send it to us. We'd love to show it on the show. Sounds good. Thanks for

SPEAKER_99: having me, Alex. Thank you. All right. And then to close out today, Netflix, Netflix is of course,

SPEAKER_03: the consumer streaming giant. It dropped earnings because we are now just getting into the Q4 calendar earnings cycle. So expect to hear a lot more in the next couple of weeks from both major technology companies all the way down to your smaller public firms. But Netflix had an absolutely Boko insane quarter and wall street is cheery. So why is Netflix up 11% today? Well, it's because they added 18.9 million subscribers in the last quarter, bringing them to over 300 million, about 302 million subscribers on a global basis. That was better than wall street expected. And the company dropped a $15 billion stock buyback while also boosting its outlook. So I'm not gonna lie. This has been a pretty smashing quarter for Netflix, a company that saw its value dramatically curtail, come down really, a couple of years back. It's rebound has been honestly pretty legendary. And if you read the company's official IR documents, they talk about how they have a number of hit shows coming out this year, or sorry, sequential seasons from hit shows. So they're pretty optimistic about 2025 calendar for the business. A lot of people thought that after COVID came and really helped a lot of companies grow, they pulled forward so much growth early that they were gonna have just kind of pathetic growth rates for the foreseeable future just hasn't really turned out to be the case in Netflix. So if you sold back when Netflix was what 250 a share, and now you're sad that it's about a thousand dollars a share. Well, sometimes patience really is a virtue. Get ready for a lot more earnings reports. We're going to cover just the absolute biggest ones here on twist, the ones that matter the most. For example, if Microsoft talks about OpenAI a lot in its earnings calls coming up, well, we will bring that to you. But we're not going to break down every single, I don't know, line item from Claude Fidler's own earnings reports. But that is twist for today, my friends, Jason will be healed up hopefully and back with us on Friday. More interviews to come and don't forget to check out thisweekandstartups.com slash docket if you want to see the information we put together for each show. We're making sure that goes out about an hour or two before we record so you can chime in, frankly. You can drop a comment if you want. And also twist500.com, that's where we're building the list of the 500 most interesting and potentially lucrative private market companies. My name is Alex, we'll see you soon. Bye.