SPEAKER_00: hello and welcome back to twist today is wednesday june 10th 2026 and if it's a wednesday here on twist you know that means it's venture capital round table time the good news is that this week

SPEAKER_01: we have some of my absolute all-time favorite investors including mr tomas tungus of theory ventures tomas you've been on the show before you're brilliant what's new in your world and

David Friedberg: how are you i'm phenomenal thanks for having me on the show it seems like the world is changing every day excited to talk about it more yeah i feel like if we'd done this show a week ago it

SPEAKER_01: would have been literally an entirely different topic list which i think goes to show how fast

SPEAKER_00: things are moving along which is why i'm glad we have michael downing from castalia capital michael welcome to the show welcome back i should say how are you thanks very much alex thrilled to be here also i'm glad you're wearing a suit jacket like jason makes me that way i'm not the only person who looks like the waitstaff appreciate it i got the memo good i'm glad i'm glad i made it to your house all right and then we have uh once again we have page doherty from behind genius ventures latest fund was 8.9 million fund two making here one of the rare emerging managers that's really powering through and making it happen even in the era of mega funds page welcome back thank you alex i'm so

SPEAKER_09: happy to be here i'm excited to dive into the discussion okay so clearly we are sitting here

SPEAKER_00: two days before spacex will go public it's supposed to price at 135 dollars per share no range just a straight price elon's offering one number take it or leave it it's oversubscribed we also have recently seen uh confidential ipo filings from both anthropic and open ai setting us up for about 3.5 trillion dollars worth of liquidity if you add 1.7 plus 8 56 plus 9 50 whatever it is adds up to about three and a half trillion uh my question for you tamaz is pretty simple are we seeing three unique companies go out and possibly return a lot of money to investors and should not read into that about what it means for other companies that may want to find liquidity or is this more an indication

SPEAKER_11: that the exit market is finally um you know de-icing itself and becoming a bit more uh amenable to the

SPEAKER_13: venture capital cycle i think we're going to see broad liquidity i mean uh reuters announced i think

SPEAKER_14: this morning that the spacex ipo was two and a half maybe three times oversubscribed which was a stunning number just considering that the sum total of those three offerings that you mentioned spacex open ai and anthropic if they raise what they intended to would be greater than the sum total of all ipos dollars raised in the previous decade so it clearly is just huge demand uh for exposure to ai and space so i i think that's that's really telling and then you're starting to see some other s ones right bending spoons uh came out which is a holding company they bought aol which kind of blew my mind and that business is doing incredibly well on the back of ai they're uh i think about them as like an ai holding company where they buy legacy businesses and then reinvigorate them with a native coding practices and it seems like there's more ipos coming so broadly you know speaking broadly it looks like it will be a very good year 2026 will be an excellent year for liquidity i mean i'm here

SPEAKER_00: for the bending spoons ipo i didn't bake into the docket because it felt almost like um i don't know michael something akin to like a a pe roll-up but done under like a startup auspice it's kind of an odd

SPEAKER_18: situation did you read that s1 i i didn't read the s1 but i'm familiar with the company i mean it's

SPEAKER_19: a kind of iac type of model where they've you know found slightly distressed businesses out there kind of assembled them fixed them up you know did some kind of fixer upper work and uh and now taking it public i think it's interesting we'll see how that does in the public markets but i agree with tomas that you know the liquidity that's about to come into the market is uh is going to be

SPEAKER_18: enormous and there's a ton of companies lined up potentially to to try to jump through the window here

SPEAKER_20: there's so many companies i'm going to do an ad really quick for the live show watch this there's so many companies going public that you may lose track of all the names that are putting out ipo

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SPEAKER_00: wrist thanks plot all right page so i want you to weigh in on this because i think if one of your report codes uh exited to bending spoons it wouldn't be the outcome you're looking for no one wants to see a vimeo style acquisition from their own kind of leading lights so i'm curious what are you seeing in terms of uh inbound m a interest or founder interest in outbound uh m a from your own

SPEAKER_27: portfolio we're still early on so i started buying genius around five years ago so these discussions are starting to take place uh we saw the acquisition of one of our portfolio founders magna by kraken earlier this year in terms of inbound interest from our portfolio founders the ones that are getting the most interest are usually have a deep technology that incumbents are interested in acquiring before those companies get much larger i think what we're seeing is there's a lot more frenetic energy around how fast these companies can grow um so we're definitely seeing that from that perspective

SPEAKER_01: i know you're only on fun too but i think it's actually a useful kind of time frame a half decade

SPEAKER_00: is a long time in the ai era page yeah are you seeing just aggregate growth rates for your portcos at the same stage over time increase because it feels like from watching these companies that they've

SPEAKER_27: okay okay tell me about that yeah so i think one of our biggest learnings from fund one to two was going really deep on the markets and one of the things that we found in how the markets are changing is that the bar for ipos has continued to rise in terms of revenue across the last 100 most recent billion dollar plus exits the ipo specifically the average revenue is between 300 to 500 million in annual revenue and so as we look at earlier stage companies what we started underwriting to was asking those questions about the market much earlier on and i think that's true of most early stage investors as well but what that's resulted in is when we look across our portfolio especially at the ai native companies we're seeing growth rates at like 10x uh with like 100 100x plus in a year from a revenue perspective so we're definitely seeing that in our portfolio is that has well i guess like one of the core metrics look guys that used to be like you could go 3x and raise a great series a and now i feel like it's more you grow 10x in a year and raise great series a just to be clear you're saying

SPEAKER_00: that if you have a 3x a year behind you and you go into raise a series a you're kind of middle of the

SPEAKER_36: pack you might not get the best terms that you want to see yeah wow all right tomorrow's back in the

SPEAKER_00: sas era if you came to any of you see with the 3x trailing result and your cash burn wasn't you know pre-ipo box people would literally roll out a wheelbarrow full of hundred dollar bills um why why are expectations up so much higher than they used to be and is it a sustainable level of growth or are we in kind of a moment in time in which technology is shifting enough that we're going to get a a particularly strong crop of startups but this won't be the case in say

SPEAKER_40: five years the companies are growing faster i completely agree with page one of the reasons is

SPEAKER_14: many companies are selling to labs and the labs um the contract sizes to the labs are measured in tens of millions to hundreds of millions and so a single contract can can grow the business 10 to 20x to 50x and the dynamic there is a competitive dynamic access to a particular technology or a particular data set can meaningfully move share with a single model release and that can drive market cap by say 10 or 20 or 50 billion and so the willingness to pay the urgency associated with the procurement of those systems or data is extreme the other dynamic that's really important is corporate america broadly every board right this is not new every board is now pushing towards ai yeah the the and so the budgets are new um they're net new i think morgan stanley ran an analysis more than 50 percent of ai budgets are net new some of that is coming from future labor spend in other words we won't hire additional people uh and labor spend is three to seven times

SPEAKER_43: larger than than software spend so both of those dynamics are at play all right we're going to get

SPEAKER_00: into more about the the realm of corporate ai spend in a minute but i want to go back to what you said about these startups are able to sell to the ai lives and therefore drive you know a low eight figure contract dramatically increasing their growth rate that makes me slightly worried and i'm not a

SPEAKER_09: person i was going to say that's actually like not where we're seeing growth happen it's more like in

SPEAKER_27: companies that either like got skipped over in the software waves before that are now interested in buying ai applications i might preface this with like we mainly invest in application layer companies so i think that's true of some of the more like infrastructure developer tools um even perhaps like chips and energy but it's happening on the application layer as well and i know you've invested

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SPEAKER_19: seen is especially in ai infrastructure and kind of application infrastructure these companies that grow to like a hundred million in revenue really quickly um it's incredibly frequent is what we've seen so for example one company um that we're working with now they only raised a four million dollar seed round they're at 120 million revenue run rate right now and uh for those founders you know they're like should we raise money do we need to raise money you know should we go through that process and you know it's a totally valid question like at that point i think they're making 750k a

SPEAKER_00: month in free cash flow okay but i do hear from some people that raise quick successive rounds that they weren't looking to raise but they went ahead and did it anyways so so michael when you're kind of worried about dilution versus maybe capital that could accelerate that already impressive growth rate where do you kind of come down on the advice side of things well i mean this is where the kind

SPEAKER_19: of balance of power has shifted right i mean ai has created a lot of different uh impacts in the in the landscape but one of them is when you can scale a business that quickly and you've only raised four to six million dollars previously i mean you control your own destiny quite a bit and so of course you have people coming in to preempt and offer crazy terms and so on uh but it feels like founders have become more savvy and just uh more wise about what they want to do i mean obviously some are jumping in and taking the you know 75 million dollar round on a 1.1 billion dollar valuation but we've seen more and more of them really think about are there other ways we can

SPEAKER_58: go about this and maybe not the traditional route i mean i would sell six percent of my company

SPEAKER_00: for 75 million dollars i mean that that doesn't break my leg or pick my pocket and i can afford to buy uh goldstrom 600 so yeah i would love to do that yeah it's a great time to be a founder with a hot company i gotta say um i want to get to the founder point in just a second but before we move on from the the ipo week i'm curious if anyone here who doesn't already have exposure to spacex

SPEAKER_01: shares is going to go ahead and try to get allocation in the ipo uh i'm only asking because the audience wants to know and by the audience i mean me so let's start with tamaz and go around

SPEAKER_62: i think i'm going to wait i'm sure there'll be a huge surge and then it will come back down and

SPEAKER_64: trade so i'm going to uh to give it a couple quarter or two before getting some exposure all

SPEAKER_66: right michael yeah same um i'm gonna wait until the midterms just after the midterms and uh and then

SPEAKER_19: i'll buy in and and put some you know hopefully anthropic open ai and spacex and in my kids accounts

SPEAKER_71: basically what what hinges around the midterms that you think could impact the spacex business because i i can make a joke about why i think that might be the case but i'm curious if you can kind

SPEAKER_73: of put that into more concrete terms for us without getting in too much trouble well without getting in

SPEAKER_74: too much trouble uh you know the number of my friends are kind of close to you know some of these

SPEAKER_19: companies and particularly spacex and so the expectation is that uh historically you know midterms and shifting of kind of political views can certainly impact the public markets and i think in this case uh they're expecting that there may be a little bit of a reset and so um i personally

SPEAKER_01: think that's pretty likely all right that was see you didn't get in trouble and you got your point

SPEAKER_00: across that my friends is media training in action 10 points all right page over to you spacex how

SPEAKER_27: much are you buying i think i may wait i mean i guess what i've seen in the public markets is there's an incredible amount of volatility based on narratives like we've seen this play out um but as i was reading the s1 one of the things that was that surprised me was the focus on energy as the core bottleneck of ai and i guess like i hadn't learned that they were like one of the core points was we're going to use the sun to make energy for ai and i thought that was really interesting um so i think i'm gonna gonna wait until the lockup period or maybe earlier we'll see wow wow i really thought it was

SPEAKER_35: going to be two i'm going to put in like a flyer on this and one conservative not all three of you

SPEAKER_00: if if i lowered the price to one trillion would your answers change no doubt maybe okay all right so it's a pricing question and the thing is i don't even have a dog in this fight i'm not trying to cast stones or anything i don't know how to value an elon musk company so i don't even know if there's a right or wrong answer because having watched tesla over the years people are valuing it the way they want to and that's fine uh it doesn't track fundamentals the way you know tamaz and i used to track you know sas multiples right so it's a little bit more esoteric you might say but i'm very very curious um page though sticking with you if you had to pick you know you had x dollars to put into one of the three ipos spacex open eye open ai or anthropic which one would you pick

SPEAKER_87: um anthropic i've i've like moved so much of my ai workflow over to claude and been like super

SPEAKER_27: impressed by claude code um so i i mean that's like my personal does anyone disagree with what

SPEAKER_00: the page said because i think that's probably going to be the answer but i figured i would give you guys a chance to say no tamaz michael i have a little bit different answer there which

SPEAKER_19: is and i i love anthropic and i of course use you know the product but i also use open ai's products and chat gpt etc you know we're obviously in this kind of you know to quote jeffrey moore we're crossing the chasm with ai right like all of us in silicon valley love these tools we think it's cool we can keep up with the two or three announcements per week of new releases nobody else outside of 25 miles from here even knows you know what it's about and what's happening i mean it's it's it's you know a different world out there and so between open ai and anthropic i think one of the most interesting things that we'll see is you know what is going to be required to fully cross the chasm and get adoption going you know amongst a broader set i do think what open ai is working on this you know potentially a headset or earbuds or something that's a consumer device may if it works and if johnny ive and the team that's working on this if that actually drives adoption beyond all of us nerds um that could be super interesting obviously it's a big bet um but it could kind of change the velocity of you know how these two are competing all right tamaz a billion weekly active users or a

SPEAKER_00: chokehold on every enterprise cfo which one delights you more oh i think well i think open ai i get really

SPEAKER_14: excited about them if they develop an ads model i think you know google is generating about 120 in our poop average revenue per user per year i think the information on top of chat to pt could get you a multiple of that a whole number multiple of that and so i'm excited to see what happens with some of these trials but in the short term i'd probably take anthropic i mean i'm a b2b guy at heart and so

SPEAKER_00: yeah gotta be true to your school well it's just amazing how you know i think it was last october i wrote a headline that was something like anthropic is catching up to open ai and it felt so weird to say i was like maybe i won't publish this maybe i'll change the headline i'm like no let's just go for it and then by december and then by march and then here we are today it's i think a testament to how fast things can change um and speaking of which michael was talking about founders earlier uh raising less capital and having more optionality on how they approach uh fundraising down there it feels michael like we've seen a shift in the power dynamics between capital and founders uh if you go back to the 2000 2021 boom era founders were king of the castle uh money is being thrown at them at 100x 200x revenue uh then there was a period of time in which founders had to cut burn and raise bridge rounds and come you know kneeling to sandhill road writ large and now it seems like we're going back so tell me if that's

SPEAKER_41: right or wrong and if it is right how far has power shifted uh back to founders yeah well it's totally

SPEAKER_19: true i mean i was just looking back two years ago um jason and i did a podcast with david weisberg where we're talking about these companies that had grown so quickly like mid journey and hadn't really raised you know any significant funding and we speculated that well will they even need late stage venture guys like why do you why do you need to raise this late stage venture and now i would say in the last four to five months we know why it's not to hire 500 people and get offices in downtown san francisco it's because your token spend is going to be you know massive and i've seen this amongst a few companies where they say yeah we're raising 25 million dollars i was like great what's the use of funds and they're like token spend yeah i was like oh you're not doing this you're not you know hiring these people and creating this division and whatnot it's it's all about the cost of uh applying ai within the business so it's a it's a really interesting kind of shift that's going on and how they're spending money and and also where that capital is going to come from uh the episode that you're

SPEAKER_35: referring to with uh with david weisberg who's fantastic is uh episode 1903 if anyone wants to go

SPEAKER_00: check that out i'll have a link to that in the show notes page jump on that and tell me if you

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SPEAKER_30: well i think one thing that can get swept under the rug when we're just talking about like valuations

SPEAKER_27: and capital into the business is the relationships that a fundraising round like that unlocks so if you were to work with a later stage partners help help predecessors go through ipos navigate challenging situations and companies history i do think there is something to be said for bring on board really great advisors through a later stage fundraising round that's what i would say to that point so

SPEAKER_00: essentially help is it's the it's the it's the capital and that you think still has a lot of value

SPEAKER_27: to those founders yeah like the the guidance and experience of folks who have been through that path

SPEAKER_00: before yeah tamaz without gassing yourself up how valuable is kind of the median vc what everyone this is a completely innocuous question stop laughing what is the what is the value add of the median vc that uh that a founder in a hot company might be able to access so not not your meeting vc period like you know people at the more elite firms and so forth how helpful are they really i think well i think

SPEAKER_40: they venture capitalists are really helpful in particular situations right uh the dynamics around

SPEAKER_14: acquisitions dynamics around ipos anything to do with capital markets i think broadly speaking they're a huge help because they're on the side of the company and can represent their interests and have as if should have as if all have a sophisticated view and then and then there's sort of um you know a gradient of what are the introductions you can make which customers can you introduce me to how do you fill out the board and then how do i navigate certain situations that arise within the life of a company but i think on the whole we've seen later stage investors be extremely helpful i mean and if you wanted to be unbelievably reductionist about it through an ipo you are transitioning from a private investor base to a public investor base and ideally you have crossovers that are investing

SPEAKER_122: in private and then are key members of the investor base through ipo and beyond so i think they serve

SPEAKER_35: an important function yeah i mean you can always notice when a company is going to go public because

SPEAKER_00: they've had fidelity on their capital for 24 months and then shockingly enough they file i mean who could have seen that coming uh i'm actually glad you said that tomorrow because i think it's actually a good point i think people get a little bit too productionist in their thinking about vcs and reduce the job to just capital allocation and then shutting up but i do think that a lot of founders go into this game not as a repeat founder they haven't done this dance before they haven't taken a company through acquisition offers dealing with board composition and so forth and so i think having a bestie that's done this before with you makes a lot of sense but that doesn't mean you need five of them i don't think and so i wonder back to michael's point about making you know capital decisions based on other third terms than just you know burn i wonder if we'll see a even more concentration of partnerships between founders and vcs and reducing the number of them as companies

SPEAKER_71: maybe need less money to scale unless they blow out their token budget i think it's a different

SPEAKER_40: manifestation which is the board and the voting construct where you see founders having tremendous

SPEAKER_14: voting control over a business rather than shrinking the size of a board you still need an audit committee chair and a nomination governance and then a compensation committee chair so there's just a certain number of people on a board but you definitely see it founders with with tremendous control over the board and that i think is you're going back to a point that we were talking about before a sign that echoes say 21 of how much control they have over a business alex you bring up a

SPEAKER_19: really good point though which is kind of interesting obviously we've seen over the last five to seven years the entry of new capital sources so the crossover funds some strategic funds even large sovereigns coming in and participating in the later stage rounds of these companies and so you know to tomas's point earlier it's it's you know it's possible that the the role of the vcs and or the composition of the later stage vcs you know is kind of a moment in time um when founders have the options to load up and and you know go to the next level of capital because there's more of those sources be it sovereigns or crossover funds or whatever whatever it may be but it may just kind of change the choreography of how they scale these companies and there's some pretty specific examples cloudflare being one of them where um it's a disproportionate amount of uh the capital

SPEAKER_129: that's come in is not from venture yeah we'll get into why that's the case in a second but you're

SPEAKER_00: telling me that essentially tiger is not dead and that the crossover story is not over because i feel

SPEAKER_130: like for 18 24 36 months there the idea of seeing all this quote quote tourist money coming into tech was

SPEAKER_19: written off again well there's the crossover guys there's your t-row price fidelities you know others that you mentioned there's blackrock blackstone and then there's the mubadala's g42s and you know the milieu of kind of sovereign funds and sovereign spin-outs that are getting wiser smarter and more aggressive about getting involved earlier um so i think that changes things a bit i'm glad you said

SPEAKER_00: mubadala because if you can't say mubadala or tomasek you pass the shibboleth test and therefore you can't come on the podcast you have to be able to pronounce them correctly and i learned that in a tomasek uh conference room once when i butchered it and it was corrected by every single person in the room so oh geez now you know if you're listening to this show all right here's here's the thing that if people are raising money to go out and amp their token budgets right to cover their token spend why do we need vcs at all why shouldn't dendropic and open ai just meter out tokens in exchange for equity

SPEAKER_30: cut out the middleman page i thought that that one of them was doing a program quite similar to that i mean like we have partnerships yeah yeah i think that's very interesting i think we're starting to see more experimentation around spend because it is like a more of a clear line of return i would say um so yeah i think it would be interesting to see open ai move more deeply into that i mean they also do

SPEAKER_27: have quite good partnerships programs like we have partnerships with open ai and anthropic and that allows our portfolio companies to access certain amount of tokens and i would say they've been pretty aggressive about that for a good reason as those companies grow larger and spend more on tokens later on it's a great acquisition for them the thing that i missed that everyone just reminded me of is the

SPEAKER_00: open ai pitch to y combinator companies offering two million dollars worth of tokens in exchange for equity on essentially it's a it's a saft a simple agreement for future tokens there's also i mean

SPEAKER_19: there's this notion of you know tokens ai tokens for equity the financialization of tokens but then there's also the financialization of pure compute that's happening and i don't know if you guys have seen this but there's been a couple of funds who announced that basically you know they'll say oh i'm investing 20 million dollars in a company but half of that 10 million is actually in the form of compute and so in a world like gpu hours michael like exactly gpu hours for equity and so you know this is really interesting because when you're kind of raw you know materials for what you need to actually build your product or deliver your product becomes the currency uh the financialization of compute and or tokens um you know that could create a very interesting environment and bring in some

SPEAKER_00: different participants for sure so then the closer to the metal you are the better of a vc you can be because if neolabs are going to dole out compute gpu hours for equity and open a is offering tokens i guess beneath that's offering electricity access for equity at some point in time like how far can

SPEAKER_18: we go down this rabbit hole yeah eventually if power is the uh bottleneck you know potentially

SPEAKER_00: this is what i love about the current moment in technology time everything seems completely unsettled and shifting and if you go back to the sass era it felt like it is entirely solved like you wanted to triple triple double double double you want to have rule of 40 blah blah blah blah and now everything feels upset and so i i guess tomas is that why we've seen founders recently airing a bit of their venture capital dirty laundry in a way that in all of my years of hanging around this world i haven't seen it feels like founders are almost less afraid than they used to be and i wonder if it's these dynamics that are leading them to be a little bit more fearless when it comes to sharing uh spicy

SPEAKER_14: anecdotes about your team yeah i think it's um it comes and goes right i mean we had valley wag and then there was gosh when i started there was a website where you could anonymously rate venture capitalists

SPEAKER_153: that was uh that was the funded yeah that was a dayo a dayo created that site in 2006 very spicy

SPEAKER_19: takes on uh bad behavior and meetings and so on i think he would get sued out of existence today if

SPEAKER_154: he did that like instantly yeah so i'm pretty sure he did get sued did he yeah i think it comes and

SPEAKER_64: goes you know it's kind of cyclical and i think it's there's a cathartic there's a catharsis that

SPEAKER_157: happens just kind of a big release of emotions every once in a while that's healthy for the ecosystem

SPEAKER_159: so this is just a dam breaks we'll rebuild the dam and everyone will kind of go back to normal if you're not using ai tools to make your team more effective and increase your productivity trust me

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SPEAKER_00: the stories surprised me and i i have friends who are vcs i i've been to lp meetings i've gotten to be in a lot of rooms and i've never seen people falling asleep in a pitch like that that blew my mind and the fact that it was like 10 different stories of napping vcs like someone asked is there like a a a a plague of narcolepsy going through the valley and i i don't know page it doesn't feel like that would fly with kind of the modern founder who's in a hurry and has their eye on a pretty big prize and so i'm

SPEAKER_129: curious how do you manage to keep your eyes open um when you're listening to the founders pitch you and

SPEAKER_09: your fund i know i'm usually pretty excited to be on the call so i don't think i've ever fallen asleep

SPEAKER_19: in a pitch meeting before yeah okay well i think you know in fairness when the markets are high and and cranking as they are now you you tend to hear these stories and when they're really low and the stories are slightly different like oh they asked for forex liquidation preference and they brought in participating preferred you know you so you get like the the unhappy peanut gallery when the markets are terrible and then you get the you know i'm feeling my oats and i'm going to talk about bad behavior you know when the markets are high it seems like the kind of natural flow of things so venture

SPEAKER_00: transparency is the uh it's it follows the nasdaq pretty closely then nasdaq's high everyone's doing well valuations are up vcs are on notice nasdaq is down everyone's poor founders are quiet okay so essentially this is peak uh share your story mode okay i want to click on one one story and no one here works at sequoia so we're we're totally safe uh brendan from merker one of those um ai data companies that's grown to 80 trillion dollars in revenue had him on the show a while back lovely guy episode 21 59 if you want to watch that uh he said the quote sequoia scam is worse than a single horror story in the last six months i've seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in two tranches everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation founders must represent this to their employees and then shop it to angels and he calls sequoias quote blended price as blatantly deceptive so i'm curious one not to pick on sequoia in particular but is this something that's happening broadly or is this a handful of examples being um aggregated into what appears to be a trend

SPEAKER_168: but actually isn't and tamaz you're the perfect person to answer this it's starting to happen more

SPEAKER_40: and more i think it recalls like 2021 where you would have three rounds of financing happen within

SPEAKER_14: a single year we're starting we see that i mean often you can look at it the infrastructure as the service vendors are starting to see multiple like the gpu i mean fireworks and base 10 there are many other companies because they're growing so fast and now because the anticipation is there if you're an aggressive mid to late stage firm um and you want to get in well you can structure it in a way where you can blend this valuation so i i don't think it's i mean i think it's like i would guess like still five percent of rounds but okay it's not um it's not a red herring anymore all right have you seen

SPEAKER_19: oh michael please i would just say it's you know this particular concept is is not really new i mean if you had been a entrepreneur starting companies even all the way back to the late 90s and early 2000s you know it was not uncommon that a lead investor would come and say great i want to lead the round here you are we noticed that your last round you know you had authorized a certain amount to raise but you didn't raise at all so do you mind if we take that last couple of million in the last round and then come into this round and their blended cost uh ends up being lower so i mean you know i've seen a fair amount of that over the years so it's not that just that generous

SPEAKER_124: michael or is that predatory i can't quite decide or is it both i think it depends on the situation if

SPEAKER_19: you're super excited to have that lead come in and lead that round and it helps consolidate and bring together other investors then you you may let them put in a small amount in that last round that

SPEAKER_00: didn't you know fully cap out all right page uh how often do you see this kind of activity and do you agree with tamaz that is no longer a red herring even if it's not a kind of the standard

SPEAKER_30: route once in a blue moon and i think the situations are usually one of two things happening

SPEAKER_27: like one it's like an incredibly exciting company and there's a lot of pricing power that the founder has and interest and they're interested in they negotiate with the lead on a certain valuation and then they have other folks who they want to bring in the round but don't want to take that dilution and then in other situations it might be like less advantageous to the founder and more pricing pressure from the lead saying like hey we want a discount on this round like we'll do some of it

SPEAKER_00: at a lower valuation but rare so founders probably won't run into this but you as an investor if you're being offered a round at a certain price how much transparency do you expect the founder to tell you

SPEAKER_30: if they have one of these blended leads let's say in the same round i i think it's like it's a very

SPEAKER_27: nuanced question because usually in your docs like you'll have information access and information rights and not every investor gets those information rights so i think it is like a nuanced question like obviously i would i would like to know and i i would like ask about how the round is structured at certain points we'll invest before leads involved and so then we'll be pricing our own but in any situation it's like i'm taking a look at is this a founder we want to work with for the next 10 15 years and then also is the valuation at a point that it makes sense based on what we think the potential

SPEAKER_80: outcome could be this week we saw finally anthropic drop a version of its much vaunted mythos model it's

SPEAKER_00: called fable five it's very expensive costs literally twice what opus 4.8 does uh first of all who here has not played with fable i'm just i presume we all have but has anyone here not touched it i have not michael okay so michael's the letter on today's show that's fine uh paige and tamaz uh first impressions of of fable i used it but i didn't really put it through its full paces so i'm curious uh if you think it's the step function that some people claim i think it's really impressive i mean

SPEAKER_40: okay so just to kind of set the context you have new model releases approximately every 41 days and

SPEAKER_14: most of those model releases on key benchmarks have one or two percentage points of improvement there's a 10 percentage point improvement so pretty fundamental i ran it through its bases i i had it analyzed three code bases last night okay and then it was using it to optimize performance and it did phenomenally well um absolutely there's the thanks for the model card um and so you have really some i mean the agentic coding going from you know 13.4 to 29.3 is just an enormous enormous leap uh so it is fundamentally much better it's a bit slower you can watch it like it will i think about it as a central coordinator where you give it a task and it will federate uh work to different agents and orchestrate them over long periods of time manage its memory it's incredibly effective um but also like you said extremely expensive it's not the most expensive model though if you look at open ai's pro models on a per token basis those are three to four times more expensive than fable but open ai argues that uh

SPEAKER_178: gpd 5.5 pro is token efficient tomas are you taking that into account i'm not taking that into account

SPEAKER_00: i'm just looking at the input and output tokens i thought uh gpd 5.5 was five per million uh in and 30 per million out versus uh 10 and 50. no that's right but there are there are pro my understanding is

SPEAKER_64: that there are certain pro models that are reserved for math and science and oh i see that are significantly

SPEAKER_14: more expensive and there there's a tremendous amount of thinking tokens that need to be taken into account so that but yes for general purpose models mythos or fable is the most expensive

SPEAKER_00: staying with you tomas you know we've talked a lot about how in the last couple of years ai has gotten better startups can do more with it either to improve their internal operations to make better products better services we see a step function here i'm curious if you think this is going to change the quality of what startups can bring to market and therefore possibly increase their growth rates and find

SPEAKER_197: even better product market fit faster i do there's no doubt and you look at the what you can build in

SPEAKER_14: a day or and have the models uh operate overnight and self-improve it's extraordinary so yeah i think the the pace of innovation the expect maybe put it the other way the expectation of the software buyer will be that the software is secure you're you're selling a suite not a point solution and the software is improving every two or three days this is one of the benefits of sas compared to package software was you were paying for an ever-evolving subscription you might see a release a month now the i think

SPEAKER_157: the expectation is oh there's a bug next tomorrow morning i think it'll be it'll be fixed i mean

SPEAKER_129: now when i see people talking about notion michael i mean they literally like ping the founders

SPEAKER_00: and they're like can you please fix this and they're like ii captain we'll get on it i presume that's something that's now mostly possible via agenda coding um but you know notion has been i would say uh one of the a leader in ai we use notion here at launch every day um what do you see from model improvements moving forward do you think they're actually going to help companies like notion continue to improve at the current clip or is this more of a it'll look the same

SPEAKER_19: but just be slightly more intelligent when i prompt it well i i think there seems to be you know breakout successes with companies like notion where they've been able to plug in so seamlessly to claude and kind of orchestrate and do things in really unique and helpful ways which sounds like it's how you're using notion plugged into claude and other kinds of tools and there to me it's like a separation you know kind of a tale of two cities there's the applications we're figuring out how to perfectly blend in um you know with the llms and kind of core models and make their product that much more valuable and then those who are struggling to figure out how they coexist and um and work with uh work with

SPEAKER_105: the larger models and it's um it's interesting to watch for sure yeah i'm curious to see what people

SPEAKER_00: will build i've seen the usual slew of demos like oh he built a horror first person video game in one shot oh look it did my laundry for me oh it you know took my boyfriend out to dinner for me just people are very impressed but i'm always kind of curious like what's the what's the second week of this coming back to you know tomas's wait for the ipo for spacex to see uh everything always looks really impressive day one so paige uh do you think that your port codes that use ai which i present most of them are going to be trying out fable in a production setting or is this more of a dear lord we can't afford that that would tank our margins and turn us into uh a shop selling dollars

SPEAKER_30: for 50 cents i have to ask them i i am curious about this question i think what we've seen in most

SPEAKER_27: of our companies is that there's like a hybrid approach where they would use a lower cost model for something that is is like more repetitive and then for higher level reasoning or orchestration

SPEAKER_11: they'll use a more expensive model so does that work as well as people say this because tamaz

SPEAKER_158: said orchestration is nodding he he loves to nod while on mute but um i don't want to interrupt but

SPEAKER_40: yes it works exceptionally well so unbelievably well tell me how it works yeah yeah so i'll give you an

SPEAKER_14: example so um let's say you have a repetitive process for like updating your crm or answering a particular email what you can do is you can have a cl like a state-of-the-art model create what's called a skill which is in markdown which is a text file this is how you do this and you can pass that from and i've done this and i've done this um i've done this where i can get 90 of the things i do with ai on my laptop to run on a local model on my mac and that has meaningfully reduced my overall token spend and as i add skills i've gone from 65 to say 91 as of yesterday in terms of local model inference and then stanford released a study yesterday the day before showing uh across a broad uh distribution of different skills this is this is very true so i i i'm a huge believer in this whether it's like model distillation or skill distillation this will be the architecture for most most applications

SPEAKER_218: so we're going we're going back on prem we're going back i mean maybe because i i think you know

SPEAKER_27: it's definitely happening because i i think also like if you look at the cyber security concerns of running some of that information in the cloud all the time it does make a lot of sense especially we're seeing that in in manufacturing use cases because they're one of the biggest uh targets for

SPEAKER_00: cyber threats so explain that to me in more practical terms are we talking about small language

SPEAKER_130: models running on air-gapped hardware or is this more just like we have a dell computer in there we can slap quin 3.7 on there and just have a good time um well so for example one of our portfolio

SPEAKER_27: companies is a company called maniva and they build applied ai for the factory floor and the founder was previously at deep mind studying embodied ai and so they use video to robotic action models which i'm i'm really interested in the continuing application of like multimodal ai so goes beyond just

SPEAKER_223: text to text input and output you use about five uh terms five big words yeah i'll use some smaller

SPEAKER_71: words no no you're fine i just want you to explain them for everyone listening who is too lazy to google them as we talk along so break that down into little person words please okay sure so a factory

SPEAKER_27: operator on the factory floor i'll give you an example from one of their early customers at a candy factory so originally there was someone who had to individually check every single candy bar for defects as they went down the line and then press a button if there was a defect and so what maniva does is they have agents that do one specific task really well on the edge so using off-the-shelf hardware um and they can use maniva software to basically do that task now and what's really interesting is the folks on the factory floor like that's great like that's not the task i wanted to do i wanted to help the factory run more efficiently and do higher level work and so they're actually coming up with new ideas of where to use maniva on the factory floor so we don't need to use fable

SPEAKER_71: five to see if the hershey's with almond bar is a rectangle or a circle is your point yeah well what's

SPEAKER_27: interesting is like when you deliver a model it's not going to be fully trained because you need that like actual in in real life experience to fully train a model to be great at something and this i have this like thesis run hyper specialized ai where you know these models are great at general intelligence but to get them really really good at a specific application task they need a lot of data that is stored you know somewhere in a company or on a factory floor in real life um so i'm who builds

SPEAKER_130: those because on one hand you think that the companies the customers who have the data would want

SPEAKER_71: to be able to take a model and then bring their data to it but also at the same time sas companies who sit on top of so much customer data want to build the ai workflows and therefore maybe also tune the models so page where does the value accrue in that setup i actually think that it's more new companies

SPEAKER_27: and startups like what we're seeing i think vertical ai is still very early on in the commercialization stage like we've been following the space since 2021 but as the models have gotten better there's been more and more applications so i actually think that a lot of this is accruing in startups we've seen some larger incumbents move into this space but ultimately it's challenging because you have to almost like retrofit that software to fit with your existing company so i think definitely like these ai native founders are having have a strong advantage i want to i want to get to michael in a second but i i need

SPEAKER_130: to ask tamaz a question tamaz does the the space that makes a skill.md file different from an agent

SPEAKER_40: eventually collapse to zero i don't think so i think that's the domain of the application layer i think if you're a like a sas application or whatever an ai software company today will be in the business of

SPEAKER_14: figuring out the managing a context database so like the standard operating procedures associated with something building the skills and the instructions and then selecting the models so that you a customer can operate with state of the art ai without state of the art ai prices and

SPEAKER_40: what do you remember that it's possible to run hubspot entirely through claude fable five you'll pay for it um but you don't want to pay for it so why don't we just condense that and then have an application

SPEAKER_14: company bundle that intelligence into a software application diffuse it across a whole bunch of different people i think i think that's the future of the the application uh michael weigh in here on

SPEAKER_130: where you think the value is going to accrue across the application layer models tune models and private

SPEAKER_19: data sets i you know it looks like right now there's so much assembly required to really get these verticalized solutions to work in specific scenarios it feels like um the companies the startups that can just create the kind of simplest easiest onboarding and packaging of the orchestration the workflows and package it in a way to where you know non-silicon valley people can apply it are going to be the ones who are moving fastest um and i i think it speaks to you know why is open ai and and uh anthropic spending so much time and money building out these like external consulting organizations with accenture and blackstone and all these guys it's because you know there's a lot of assembly required to get this across the entire business landscape and so i think you can't minimize that and silicon valley's been great at creating companies that just dumb down and make the experience much simpler and easier and i i think that's uh thematically going to be an important uh

SPEAKER_239: concept going forward do you think we're still going to have these um private equity dash ai lab

SPEAKER_71: partnerships in in 10 years time or is this simply just we're going to bridge this temporary chasm in um ai deployment that is simply a a artifact of a immature technology reaching the market before it's you know

SPEAKER_240: fully baked well i mean it looks like we're going to have it for some period of time but that period of

SPEAKER_19: time is really can we materially impact adoption right because the amount of capital that's been raised as we all know the amount of capital that's about to be raised from the ipos um you know you have to begin to create tangible roi at a certain point especially after your public right and so at that point there's a measuring stick people want to see the numbers and so i think they're on the clock to be able to prove hey there's tangible roi coming from this industry and this industry and these companies and so they're just doing everything they can to load up and increase the likelihood of of that adoption and kind of successful tangible roi being validated all right we're gonna we're

SPEAKER_71: gonna scoot through a couple of topics really quick before we run out of time because there's a lot more i want to get you guys on uh first of all uh tomas if you look at open routers data and you see what are the most popular models in the last week the names are deep seek v4 flash memo v2.5 from xiaomi hi3 preview from tencent and then minimax m3 from minimax uh i view that as startups being intelligent going back to our model routing question and kind of choosing what's the error model to to guide things that startups even though they're very ai intensive might already have in place ways to offload some compute away from these kind of frontier leading models and therefore they're not going to get whacked by the cost concerns between enterprise customers screen about

SPEAKER_245: for weeks now am i correct there or am i being too optimistic about where startups have been deploying their ai inference in the last six months no i think you're exactly right you're seeing a lot of shift

SPEAKER_14: to open source models i think it's why it's critical that there's a dynamic uh us open source model ecosystem google's pushing in nemotron rc nvidia i think nvidia's committed like 23 billion to open model so open models are incredibly important uh for the ecosystem i think they allow application companies to compete with the labs just like we were talking about and then if you look we were analyzing the data about six months ago looking at open source adoption the very first companies to adopt open source models were the ones with business models with small gross margins which makes you

SPEAKER_101: know it makes sense right like if i don't have a lot of money to spend on infrastructure i'm going to go and buy you know commodity ai let's call it wait wait negative gross margins are bad cursory

SPEAKER_251: talking those are great yeah it turned out pretty well uh but yeah so wherever you know when there's a need and the the market fills the beauty of capitalism right how about capitalism uh all right

SPEAKER_158: does anyone want to weigh in on this before i take us in an entirely different direction just one

SPEAKER_89: more point there which i i think tomas is right there's also one other part when you talk about

SPEAKER_19: where the value accrues which is we're all talking about models and which model am i going to use for this and that that's obviously going to be abstracted away for the vast majority of people and you're going to show up and say i have this job i want to do this thing and whoever that solution provider will be open router you know might say great this is the lowest cost and best model for you to use for that and by the way here's the compute that is the most regionally best placed and available and the lowest cost for you and so you know normal humans are not going to think about these things it's like what spark plug do i want in my car it's like i have no idea just give me a spark plug that

SPEAKER_71: works yeah well this is why i think that the open router value add or the moat that it has is its auto switcher that chooses models for you and service providers for you as an open router user i love that because it takes that off my plate but it also means that it becomes not just my gatekeeper but also my tour guide into the world of ai which i think is going to be a really important door to hold on to unsurprisingly they just raised someone help me out here 113 something like that yep in the last month i forget the exact number all right uh turning the page seed prices now i've been a journalist covering venture capital since i was in college which is getting to be pretty long ago and there's one thing that everyone agrees on is that for my entire career seed prices have been unsustainable too high they're breaking seed economics and no one can make money anymore in seed investing and then people still do it so if you take a look at this chart that i now have on your screen this is some data from our friends over at carta and as you can tell we have reached a new era of seed pricing if you're on the audio version imagine a chart that's kind of flat but trending up that then goes parabolic in the last couple of quarters and what it shows is that the 95th percentile for seed rounds in the us that carta can see and now have a valuation of 174 million dollars 90th percentile 94 million and those are up from about 66 and 50 back in 2022 so is this what finally breaks

SPEAKER_202: the seed market and page how are you managing to find entry prices into companies that actually are

SPEAKER_30: attractive enough to work for your fund economics great question um i mean i think like when i think

SPEAKER_27: about it i think about understanding valuations on a case-by-case basis so when we think about the exit potentials of some of these businesses there are markets where companies that may have been able to charge one price in software days because they're now doing the work can charge three to seven x um and so that means that down the road there may be an exit outcome that's three to seven x like what we've seen before so i'd say we we take like a very case-by-case approach to investing um i think if you're looking at companies in the same pools that everyone else is the prices will definitely be higher and we've seen

SPEAKER_71: them continuously go up in in the past yeah michael uh your your fund uh backs other managers to some degree so i'm curious how are your you know horses in this race dealing with seed prices that to me look not just unsustainable but just uneconomical for early stage investors yeah so here's here's what

SPEAKER_58: we're seeing at the pre-seed level which is we're mostly in these emerging managers that are writing

SPEAKER_19: the very first check at day zero into these companies from a pre-seed basis it's still you still see great managers getting in at low valuations at the seed stage i mean my take on this is if we track the companies and we see who's doing what is that you know that median valuation that you have on the chart perhaps is a little overpriced based on our seasonal you know place where we are in kind of history right now but i'm gonna take the slightly more provocative angle here that the that top one percent or top five percent is likely underpriced um because the scale you know the scale of the opportunity and where we are at this moment in time you know means that these outcomes are big we already know that these companies are scaling revenues you know unbelievably quickly with you know less resources than ever before well i didn't think that's most scorching take of the show

SPEAKER_130: will come from the other guy in a suit but here we are michael doing us all a solid uh okay so putting

SPEAKER_01: that in perspective page says that we're seeing outcomes get larger you're saying that the leading companies might be underpriced the implication being that the exit they're heading towards is going to be truly staggering and if i could take that one step further that the fact that we're looking at three roughly trillion dollar plus ipos this year therefore won't be an anomaly it'll actually

SPEAKER_58: become more the norm down the road well what we what we do know is that in each one of these movements be it the late 90s 2008 to 2015 or now where we sit at this moment you know the the kind of destination point in terms of valuation the outcomes are always way larger than what we anticipated

SPEAKER_19: or what we saw you know in the last run and obviously we're seeing this now with you know 1.7 trillion dollar ipo that's happening in two days and you know a 985 billion dollar round that anthropic just did and so you know we're seeing this in real time so you have to think that that you know valuations are going to level set to accommodate and or just reflect that the outcomes are bigger i would just argue the the bigger issue here may not be valuations and it may not be oh are we paying more for the same type of companies or the same kind of outcomes the bigger issue is with these ipos that are happening and all the liquidity that goes back into the market we know that you know the typical kind of lp and early stage uh vc funds in all of our funds family offices high net worths etc just spent a disproportionate amount of their vc allocation in late stage secondaries over the last two to three years they're now going to get generational returns for doing that are they going to reinvest in small early stage funds that you know go for 10 years or are they going to say hey this late stage pre-ipo thing is the way to go and i'm just going to continue to really look for those kinds of deals that i think has more of an effect on the market than the fluctuating valuation because it means the source of capital that kind of feeds that seed stage the pre-seed stage you know compositionally may not be there in the same way it was in previous

SPEAKER_204: years the numbers are getting so big i feel like what the like the the mendoza line for technology poor

SPEAKER_71: just keeps going up it's kind of staggering now what constitutes like wealth even even in my friend group like the people who worked for anthropic for a while like they carry themselves differently in group chats it feels like they just have more more swagger to them um but tamaz the idea that these highly valued seed rounds are not overpriced because of potential outcomes being so large really does put a lot of emphasis then on selection because if you back one of these and it's not one of those outcomes you're going to overpay dramatically so does this mean that we should see greater differentiation in seed stage returns based on essentially gp uh discernment well i think so i

SPEAKER_40: mean i think the venture capital market's evolving a lot like the public markets did where you have

SPEAKER_14: indexes and then you have uh you know concentrated funds we're clearly in the more concentrated category um both strategies can work very very well but yeah ultimately selection is what matters is the power law uh underpinning all of this and you know i agree with what michael said you look at i think ven cap published um uh i think nothing you know uh ven cap published a study you look at uh rolling five-year periods and the night 75th and 90th percentile or 90th and 95th percentile exits and you can see them going up in each in each year much faster than inflation or even venture inflation so i think that's that's definitely true that the the returns are there i think the and what we're seeing with this i mean these ipos is just the liquidity is tremendous i do wonder i wonder what happens to the secondary markets we've seen huge inflows into the secondary markets do the secondary markets actually shift to the next say top 20 companies and and will investors want uh access there and then the other question is around mna right mna has been historically very difficult within ai now you have a lot of national security concerns and so um you have many many companies with large valuations the total number of buyers who can afford say um 50 billion exit

SPEAKER_267: is probably fewer than 10 right yeah so what do those dynamics look like uh tbd okay um just for fun

SPEAKER_71: because you kind of brought it up uh do you think that we're going to see any nationalization of the major uh american ai labs this has been discussed by both um this is a great list bernie sanders sam altman and donald trump and i'm not quite sure if that's the coalition i expected to see forming but uh i'm very opposed to this i'll just be honest but i'm curious if i if if i should

SPEAKER_14: actually be afraid or not i i don't know what nationalization really means i mean do you notice this government took a position in intel and that's done very well right there's been some talk of a sovereign wealth fund we will see what that happen what will happen you know it's like nationalization the creation of government appointed monopolies like in the case of alcohol distribution and also telephone networks i really would not like to see that i think there's a ton of regulatory capture that exists there and you know the history of silicon valley is tied to the dual use technologies where there are technologies that are used both for the government and the private sector bell labs notably coming out of that so i do think it's important that these major labs do have relationships with government so i i don't exactly know what nationalization means but on the whole

SPEAKER_122: uh you know being capitalist i think less regulation and less government involvement in the evolution of technology is a good thing all right we can boil that entire answer down from

SPEAKER_71: tomas to hell no all right keep it on now uh i have one question for each of you because i picked out my favorite of your portfolio companies and i want you to brag about them for a moment this is your time to put the founders in the spotlight and uh oh michael you're first so there is a war going on in the middle east and there was a helicopter that went down and it was captured sorry the pilots were

SPEAKER_11: saved by a drone boat from seronic i believe it was a corsair and i believe you're an investor of this company so tell us why seronic is the coolest thing yeah absolutely we're an investor in

SPEAKER_19: seronic via one of our fund positions positions which is silent ventures an incredible pre-seed defense tech focused um fund seronic is just i mean incredibly impressive they've executed like nobody's business you can see in the valuation of the company um and the rounds they've done just how fast that business has moved so yeah it was pretty cool watching the news last night and they talk about the apache helicopter that was shot down and that you know immediately two of these autonomous boats were sent out to pick up uh the crew out in the uh straight of four moves i mean it's kind of a you know perfect uh sales video um for sironic so yeah we're thrilled about the company i mean it's it's a no-brainer you know um that kind of product but you can start to also see i mean just fyi how these defense tech focus companies who where the demand and the the instant revenue for them you know is coming strictly from defense how that application how that value proposition can be applied you know in

SPEAKER_70: in many uh types of ways so yeah it's a phenomenal phenomenal company shout out to them also um that

SPEAKER_71: and systems andrew makes some uh sea drones and blue water autonomy i think it's also in the mix so it's one of those sectors one of those startup niches that i think is really really awesome and more deployed in the battlefield than i thought i thought sironic was still bouncing around the harbors just showing off their cool tech i did not realize we had enough deployed that two of them could go save them pilots so i was very impressed by that shout out to them uh all right tamaz you're next um open source in the ai era you are an investor in mother duck which is the commercialized version of duck db i actually got to meet them at a recent um mcp event in new york i got to talk to their head of the ai i think so tell me about why mother duck is the right choice in

SPEAKER_245: the ai era and why open source will not lose all of its value to vibe coded uh infra from the as yeah

SPEAKER_14: great question so uh mother duck is a company that commercializes an open source technology called duck db duck db is a very small analytics database that can scale uh to just as big as the very large analytics databases but because you can have many small databases it's perfect for agents so you could spin up a million different agents each of them could have their own uh duck db or mother duck instance and

SPEAKER_226: then it's all controlled from a central layer awesome and how's the company doing my friend carly works

SPEAKER_14: there so i've been oh she's awesome we just had the event at snowflake summit where we had dancing ducks outside the jewish contemporary art museum in san francisco right outside of uh uh moscone and

SPEAKER_290: uh just a phenomenal setup company i know exactly where that is yeah you know where it is yeah the

SPEAKER_14: funny shape building yeah uh anyway so the company is doing phenomenally well we're uh products is expanding quite a bit we just launched um interactive uh charts and dashboards and have some more product announcements coming they're all ai native so

SPEAKER_71: i'm disappointed i i have a a mother duck swag item which is two mechanical keys together with ducks on them and i i brought them home for my kids to play with and i i literally set it on the counter to bring out so i can show it to you and i forgot it in the house damn it that fidget toy is so fun yeah dude i more startups should do that good marketing technique hand out fidgets to nerds with add because we will just we'll take six and we'll never let them go they're fantastic all right uh page to close us out i want to hear about the progress of actual american re-industrialization i know you're a backer of knox metals one of my favorite startups in the entire nation talk to me about how this is

SPEAKER_298: not smoking mirrors and we're actually going to get some damn cold rolled steel back in the country oh

SPEAKER_27: yeah we are uh going back to the factory floor so knox metals is a next generation next day metal servicing platform i had never heard of the metal servicing industry before i talked to the founder zane who i met four years ago and we reconnected when they went through ic but basically like there's multiple decabillion dollar businesses in the space both public and private and what knox says is they were like okay like if we're building this new defense technology space technology we're gonna need a supplier that is meeting the demands of these companies that want to move faster and innovating from a hardware perspective um and so yeah they are they have built an incredible suite of products that have helped them push metal out the door faster so they're in detroit they just expanded their facilities there and have been cutting steel if you check out zane's twitter it's it's really cool because they're posting like videos of their band saws and the team on the factory floor and they have a big announcement coming out next week so stay tuned for that michael thanks

SPEAKER_250: for coming i really appreciate it where can people find more about your uh firm in case they

SPEAKER_292: want to get in touch uh castalia dot capital very simple tamaz what is the theory ventures url theoryvc.com theoryvc why not theory.vc was it take them oh we have that one too and theory.ventures

SPEAKER_71: but theoryvc.com is the dot com man talk about traditionalism in the venture realm geez i thought

SPEAKER_11: tlds were free range now all right michael tamaz page thank you for coming on twist is back on friday my

SPEAKER_306: name is alex i'll see you then bye thanks for watching this week in startups if you liked this episode check out more if you're a startup founder founder university cohort 13 kicks off this fall it's a 12-week program that provides guidance on building your product launching to real customers and pitching to investors top startups receive 25 000 or 125 000 in investment apply now at founder dot university slash twist already have traction the launch accelerator invests 125 000 and connects you with 500 plus investors to help you raise your next round apply at launch accelerator dot co if you're an accredited investor looking to gain access to quality deal flow apply for jason's angel syndicate at the syndicate dot com we find two to three deals a month and check out this week in ai jason's jason's experts only roundtable with top ai founders and operators every week find it this week in ai dot ai check out the twist ticker our daily newsletter at this week in startups dot com ticker thanks again to our sponsors for making today's show possible follow the show on instagram follow the show on x dot com this week in startups publishes three days a week monday wednesday and friday at 5 p.m central time you can submit an audio or video file question by emailing it to this week in dot com