Frontier Labs Threatened by Kimi? Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models & Stripe Buys PayPal

1. 0:00 – 1:08

   Intro

   1. RORory O’Driscoll0:00

      Is the open-weight, low-cost LLM business a good business? And if it's a good business, why can't some red-blooded American company step up and give OpenAI and Anthropic a run for their money?

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:12

      So kicking us off, China ships two near-frontier open models in a week, with Kimi absolutely crushing it. Next, Ada breaks, raising three billion, I love this, a Series M at a $188 billion valuation. And then on top of that, we have Ramp releasing an OpenRouter competitor just as OpenRouter are supposedly about to get bought. This, and so much more in the conversation this week.

   3. JLJason Lemkin0:37

      The quest for equivalent models at a cheaper price is just gonna keep going up.

   4. RORory O’Driscoll0:42

      At some point, the people spending a trillion dollars a year are gonna want some apps to pay for all this. If you're growing 10X year on year, and you have any kind of positive and improving gross margin, it just covers all the nut. Growth for the last two or three years has been a very attractive place to make money.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings0:56

      Ready to go? [upbeat music]

2. 1:08 – 7:14

   China's New Open Weight Models — Should the US Be Worried?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings1:09

      Guys, I'm looking forward to this. Uh, there has been a lot, as always, [chuckles] going down. I remember when, like, news cycles were so much shorter. I don't know if you remember this, but like, you know, 100 million round, and it would be like the thing for a week. And now it, like, days go by, and you're like, "Wow," we're forgetting the, the Stripe and the PayPal, which we'll get to, which is mega. But I'm gonna start on, uh, the two near-frontier open weight models that we saw in the last seven days from China, um, one of them being Kimi, which has got a lot of attention and a lot of press, and then the other being Qwen from Alibaba. Um, how significant were the two model announcements that we saw today, and what should we be taking from their seemingly catching up or close to with the frontier models we have in the West?

   2. JLJason Lemkin1:56

      I mean, an eval is just an eval, so let's not take a bunch of folks on X who had someone in their, uh, in their engineering department look at some evals and write a tweet for them, okay? Like, it, we're not-- Saying something, uh, is similar in performance maybe, but- but- but let- let's prove it in the field. Having said that, I mean, we can't even sign up new as consumers for Kimi 'cause it's blocked. They have so much demand since this happened, right? Demand is, is literally... I don't know whether it's geometric or exponential, but it's so high we can't even, we can't even, we need-- We, we can come back to this next week when it opens up, and I can use it on the consumer side even better. But, I mean, I, I think it, uh, there's a lot going on, and there's a lot on politics, and there's a l- it's an aha moment and a wake-up moment. On the other hand, it's not new. It's not new, right? I mean, if you look at, uh, you know, if you look at OpenRouter data, half the traffic's through China, China-created models. Even China models is a confusing term, right? They may well be hosted on, uh, yeah, they may be hosted in the US, right? And when they have open weights, they may be, they may be, for all intents and purposes, truly open-source models hosted in the US. Uh, but it's not new. It's just gonna accelerate this, and that's why you see the stress. It's just, it's, it's accelerating. Um, and, uh, 50-- that 50%, instead of being niche or for tech-forward folks or venture-backed folks, you know, i-in a year it could be everybody, and that, that is, that's material. Just being in the zone and even materially cheaper, it's just gonna get more and more attention.

   3. RORory O’Driscoll3:24

      I totally agree with that actually, Jason. I was curious to see what you'd say, is that there wasn't a, you, you, you, Harry, you kind of led with the what do these new models mean? I think Jason's cut's exactly right. It's exactly what you'd expect. It turns out the five wily and the five main Chinese, um, kind of LLM companies and a bunch of followers, it turns out that, you know, aggressively funded companies with smart engineers are just gonna keep cranking through and building new models. And, um, you know, they're, they're not state-of-the-art compared to the frontier models, but they're, you know, six, nine months behind, depending on how you measure it. So yeah, actually no new news about that. But Jason's right, quite a lot of fun news about how kind of parts of the US responded to that. We had the small P political response. So that's one dimension. You know, the, the policy advisor for OpenAI, formerly from the Trump administration, making some comments on Twitter leading to a wonderful firestorm that we'll absolutely talk about. That's one thread. And then another thread is just talking about what these models start to reveal about the economics of a model company. I mean, Jason hinted at it. We lump all these models in together, right? But we're inclu- let's take two. W- some of the DeepSeek models you can run on your PC, or your, or your, or your Mac, or your, at, on a laptop, right? Conversely, Kimi K3 is, I think, a two point eight trillion parameter model. It's a huge honking thing, and you know you need millions of GPU just to run it. So they're not, quote unquote, the same thing. That's much more comparable in size and therefore in terms of compute capacity US mo- frontier models. So there was a, we can learn about... W- I think we'll kind of talk about the politics first and then maybe oddly enough talk about the, the inference in- implications and kind, as that goes into the opportunity for fireworks. So lots of kind of downstream implications, but zooming out, nothing amazingly surprising in the news that after three years of competent execution along a pretty defined trend, we now have three years and three months of competent execution along a pretty defined trend.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings5:25

      If we dig into the, like, the small P in the political, how should we analyze that? We can talk about the tweet that you mentioned, which was as, I, I can't remember his exact title. Um-

   5. RORory O’Driscoll5:36

      Yeah

   6. HSHarry Stebbings5:36

      ... Rory, you go.

   7. RORory O’Driscoll5:37

      No, you know, you keep going.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings5:39

      No, no. Uh, and then ML Michael obviously latched onto it, and I'm trying to remember. Is it Dean Buell, his name?

   9. RORory O’Driscoll5:45

      It's Dean Buell, and he is current- I think it's either policy or communications director for OpenAI. He just started there two weeks ago. Before that, he was at the Trump admin- uh, part of the administration, kind of on AI policy, and before that a bunch of Hoover Institute type stuff. And he, you know, he set off a firestorm with the tweet, and then he did a little bit, "Oh, I can't really post 'cause I'm now at Open- everyone was mean to me because I posted a bunch of stuff." And I think that was a frankly a little naive comment, 'cause the, two comments about the tweet. One is you're in a senior role at OpenAI. One, there was a hysterical tone to it, right? He used the word Um, AI Communism and, yeah, it was very kind of over-exaggerated. And then secondly, you know, when you start even hinting about-- I mean, we saw this with Sarah Fine, when you start hinting about significant regulatory, hinting at regulatory changes that will massively benefit you, you got to expect that everyone's going to say, "Dude, of course you're going to say that. You're-- You know, that's your side." And if you start, if you make the expensive closed source product that sells for, you know, ten, twenty bucks, and the Chinese are shipping something for two bucks, and you say, "Well, totally independently, just speaking as a common citizen, I think they should ban this shit," you got to expect that a whole bunch of people are going to say, "Dude, you're not talking as a common citizen. You're talking as the provider of the company who will jock up our rates the minute this stuff gets banned." So, you know, it was, it was a little naive not to expect that level of blowback.

3. 7:14 – 13:45

   OpenAI's "AI Communism" Tweet Causes a Firestorm

   1. JLJason Lemkin7:14

      We-we'll see. At, at some level-- First of all, I think that guy at OpenAI had been there, like, two weeks, right? Um-

   2. RORory O’Driscoll7:18

      Yep, two weeks

   3. JLJason Lemkin7:19

      ... whe-whether this was, whether he used that a-as a reason to go on this [chuckles] or whether, or whether-

   4. RORory O’Driscoll7:24

      As they say in the meme, Jason, two weeks so far.

   5. JLJason Lemkin7:27

      Yeah, so far.

   6. RORory O’Driscoll7:29

      [laughs] We'll see.

   7. JLJason Lemkin7:30

      Um, listen, I, I can't-- I'm not a total expert. It's difficult for me to imagine the federal government's ever going to use a, a, a China-built model at this point in the US, right? It's difficult and, and, and anything adjacent to that, it's difficult to imagine. Uh, just, just simply... I mean, there's always, in our whole history at tech, the ability of Chinese technology to penetrate many US buyers has been limited, right? It has cer-certainly been limited in telecom and other spaces. So I think the ques- Stepping back for a minute, the real question is how limited is it going to be, right? How limited are we going to-- 'Cause it's, it's going to be limited. The availability of China-built models to penetrate the US is going to be limited. The question is just how much. You know, Jesse Zhang had a, had a, had a Twitter article today or yesterday, I think today-

   8. RORory O’Driscoll8:19

      Yeah, that was good

   9. JLJason Lemkin8:19

      ... and it was pretty good. I think people might have missed it because it's real data, which is what I like. But he said, "Here's one of our most regulated companies. We have highly regulated folks. Just our token use here has gone up what looks to be about two point five X since January."

   10. RORory O’Driscoll8:33

       Yeah.

   11. JLJason Lemkin8:34

       Okay? And the reasons are really interesting. I mean, I've lived this myself. The reasons are having supervisor models, uh, uh, track the agents, so the agents don't mistake running multiple agents parallel, so they don't make mistakes. The more regulated you are, the less forgiving you are of, of [chuckles] an error in an agent. And so it's like four times the agentic use just to have multiple agents regulating agents. If it's already grown that much in the first half of the year, you know, the, the quest for equivalent models at a cheaper price, it's just going to keep going up. It's just going to keep going up. And so-- But we've always had cheaper, pretty good solutions from other vendors. It's, it's not new.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings9:11

       Do you think Washington should move to restrict access then to these Chinese models? Or is Bill Gurley right in suggesting that we should let free markets do what free markets do best, and we should not put a-

   13. RORory O’Driscoll9:23

       I hadn't realized Bill had said that. There's something very pleasing about that, which I'll mention in just a second, right? Because one of the fun things about this policy dispute, it brings out the hater in everybody, right? And, you know, um, Dean Ball said what he said, and then two people who can be controversial came down strongly on the other side, and I support them both. The first was David Sacks, the former AI tsar, who basically said, "This is rubbish. Stop." And then the second one was Emil, whom you mentioned before, Emil Michael, I'm never sure of the pronunciation of his last name, who was the guy at the Defense Department who got totally sideways with Entropic. I mean, what I like about that guy is that man knows how to hate. And one of his biggest hates for the last decade and a half has, of course, been Bill Gurley from his time at Uber. So I really find it-- So if Bill and Emil are on the same side saying, "Don't ban these models," then you've got to know that there's got to be some truth in that. You've got to make you think, 'cause, 'cause that's an interesting lineup. But yeah, I think there-- And I actually just saw literally as I came on, and look, this is the Trump administration, so things change every day, but a political league today basically saying some version of, "We're not going to ban these things on any significant basis," which, as Jason points out, is very different than saying the White House decision support system will be run on Kimi, right?

   14. HSHarry Stebbings10:38

       Yeah.

   15. RORory O’Driscoll10:38

       Even if it's Kimi hosted in California, I think we can take it for granted it won't be, [chuckles] right? But look, conversely, if you're, if you're Decagon and you're a startup doing inference on, you know, customer support queries for a very boring consumer product, there is no reason why you should pay marquee prices when something 10X cheaper is available, and it would be horribly bad policy to ban that, right? So-

   16. JLJason Lemkin11:04

       Well, look, the one thing I will say, just add, and Bill Gur-- grouchy, another rich, grouchy billionaire. Grouchy Bill Gurley's got, probably got 30 IQ points on me, okay? And he's seen it all, right? And, and even his grouchiest point I learn something from, right? I always learn, learn from it. So having said that, I don't think you're going to convince me there aren't some data export risks with China-based models. You're just not going to convince me based on what I've done with all our agents in building. And if you're not going to convince me, I don't think you're going to convince ninety-nine percent of the world that there isn't some security leakage issue. It's already scary how much of our data we put into these closed source models in the US. It is scary. Here's Elon saying, "Scam Altman every day to create distrust," right? I-- There are-- We cannot understand what these models do. They are connected to the internet. We cannot-- Even, even if we have Fable read it and have it read it itself, I don't think you're going to convince most of us there isn't data export risk. And so I think that's going to lead to tighter constriction than this, you know, leave everything open so we can compete and my portfolio company's benefit, uh, argument.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings12:06

       I think every CIO is being told right now, "Oh, don't worry, if you host it on-prem, you remove any security risks and the backdoor then is removed that could potentially be there." Why would you not be alleviated by that reassurance if on-prem would solve that solution and- Um, why would you not be reassured?

   18. JLJason Lemkin12:25

       Rory's more of a historian here than me. You can, you can mock our regulatory bottles-- bodies, but they're here to answer those questions for us. Is it safe to drink that cup of coffee? The American Heart Association, I think, just said six cups are safe now, right, this week. Now I know. Now I'm cool, right? I was a little worried about my caffeine consumption-

   19. HSHarry Stebbings12:41

       No, you shouldn't

   20. JLJason Lemkin12:41

       ... when we did a lot-- No, no, seriously. I mean, I'm not sure they're right. Who has said my data is not being exported through the most complicated borderline self-aware software of our lifetimes? Who, who can say that especially, and I, and I, I admit there-- this is-- can be triggering. There is a history of data export risk with Chinese products. These are companies that are arguably run by the PLA. I'm not-- I'm just saying my lifetime of experience says I'm not confident there isn't. And, and just the internet telling a CIO I don't think is good enough. And if I were a CIO, it wouldn't be good enough to me unless... As long as if I thought my job was on the line, I don't want to take this risk, CIO of some Fortune five hundred global two thousand company, unless everyone to-- I don't, I don't know, man.

   21. RORory O’Driscoll13:24

       I don't think it's triggering to say that there are IP risks in this. I mean, I gen-- I, you know, just at the risk of being kind of level-headed here, the data is very clear that, you know, technically important US companies, Boeing, for example, suffer continual cyberattacks, many of which are attributable to sovereign state actors, including China.

4. 13:45 – 19:35

   Why Can't the US Build a Competitive Open Weight Model?

   1. RORory O’Driscoll13:45

      It's a thing. So we're not being, you know, we're not being sensationalist or alarmist. You know, it would be naive not, not to put it on the table, right? First comment. Second comment is, I do-- I'm thinking about can you-- I mean, the problem proving a negative is can you know. If you have an... And remember, these are open-- I occasionally say open source incorrectly. They are open weight, which means you can see the weights, but-- and you can run it yourself, but you don't have... Technically, the full definition of open source in the context of an LLM means seeing the underlying training data, which you don't, right? But you have the open weight. The question is, if the model is being run in a trusted US inference company, Base10, Firewalk, some of those guys, right? And, you know, you could get into a long technical question is, look, what can it really do? Could it initiate tool use on... I mean, it probably speaks-- Could it initiate tool use on the customer side whereby the model sends a command back to the customer to exfiltrate their data? You can imagine being able to use these models fairly comfortably and being ve-fairly secure that-- fairly certain that you have blocked access and this can't happen. So I mean, I, I, yeah, I think you could enlarge-- you could satisfy a technologist, right, that the risk is not there. Whether you can satisfy a politician, whether you can satisfy someone who's just afraid of what they don't know is, Jason, to your point, another question, right? I mean, a-and I think you're right. You have seen things like Huawei has effectively been prevented from selling to US-- to any cellular networks in Europe and the US because of this, you know, as yet un-- yeah, unprovable fear. So it's not crazy that there will be some level of, I think, on the government side, some restrictions. I think a blanket ban would be massive overkill, to be very clear, right? But I think the interesting question it raises is this. Uh, well, two, two questions. First of all, it's also worth pointing out that while we're talking about banning Chinese open weight models, the Chinese administration are talking about preventing those companies from selling those models to the US. Like, just like we don't let them buy Nvidia, they're not going to let us buy their open source models. So which is kind of totally zany. We think they're trying to sell it to us, and we don't want to buy it, and they think they're trying-- w-and they think they shouldn't be selling it to us because it's so powerful. So we can-- That's kind of just weird in and of itself. But I think the really interesting question here, and it gets to Thinking Machines, is, is the open source LLM, uh, open weight lo-- let's call it o-open weight low-cost LLM business a good business? And if it's a good business, why can't some red-blooded American company step up and give OpenAI and Anthropic a run for their money? And Jason, it's the point you made. If this is a-- I mean, where's Grok? Where's Gemini? Thinking Machines had an announcement last week. I-- They announced a model. They didn't, they didn't position it as, you know, state-of-the-art frontier, but they kind of-- I think they made a comment on something that you can build upon. Inkling, I think it was called. So one of the q-- And, you know, at one point, Meta looked like they were going to go down this route, right? Is there a business... Ca-- Yeah, how can you make money? Uh, it's an interesting question. Can you make money as a maybe not op-completely open weight, but a low-cost US provider of these models and be competitive with those guys? 'Cause, you know, the, the open weight models in China are getting fifty, seventy billion dollar valuations. Like, it's not Anthropic, but I wouldn't turn down a fifty billion dollar outcome if someone could make a convincing case to me that a US company could do this. So I think that's one of the interesting questions here. Now, maybe it's because the dirty little secret is a lot of their advantage is distillation, which you can't legally do if you're US-based. So I, I do wonder, Jason, to your exact point, if there is a market for eighty percent cheaper intelligence, and that's roughly what we're looking at in terms of when you take into account the cost of inference, the difference between the bundled product that is a frontier model, you know, IP plus inference, and an open source model where you dissociate the IP from the inference cost. If you're looking at an eighty percent cheaper opportunity and there's the mass demand for that, w-where is someone going to try and fill that demand in the US? I just, I don't know.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings18:10

      I've asked so many people on, on why we don't have leading open models in the US. No one's actually given me an answer. Uh, we're still waiting for models from Reflection, which I think is kind of one of the-

   3. RORory O’Driscoll18:20

      Yeah

   4. HSHarry Stebbings18:21

      ... uh, hopes that we have. Um- I completely-- I was, I was offered Kimi today, by the way, Rory, at twenty billion. Um, [chuckles] this was the... It fell into my inbox. "I have an SPV for you. Do Kimi at twenty billion. We're oversubscribed, but we'll make room for five million for Harry."

   5. RORory O’Driscoll18:37

      Yeah. That's 'cause we say such nice things about them.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings18:40

      [laughs]

   7. RORory O’Driscoll18:40

      Thank you for your check. Um, but no, I, I... Gen- uh, look, it's... We're, we're gonna glass by it, and I don't have an answer, but it's a huge freaking question, right? There's this new category, two c- um, called, you know, LLM intelligence, two companies in existence as premium products. Their combined market cap is two trillion dollars. Their combined revenue at this point is probably one hundred billion dollars, plus or minus. There are four or five other companies in the US that are capable and have proven their ability to build something roughly comparable. None of them are taking advantage of this. And there's five Chinese companies that have proven their ability to build something roughly comparable, and they're, you know, cranking night and day to take advantage of it.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings19:21

      Yeah.

   9. RORory O’Driscoll19:21

      Where are you, Google? Where are, you know, where are you, Reflection? As you say, where are you, Thinking Machines? Where are you, Lab? I mean, the fact that there are four or five potential comp... It's just fascinating.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings19:31

       Rory, are you asking them to dance?

   11. RORory O’Driscoll19:33

       I'm asking them to ship.

5. 19:35 – 31:27

   Open Router in Talks to Sell

   1. HSHarry Stebbings19:35

      You know, a story, and I'm kind of throwing it in here as a wedge, but when we talk about all the different models that we have on offer, one of the big kind of gossip stories or breakouts this week in terms of news stories was the information suggesting that OpenRouter is in talks to be bought, several different acquirers. And then on top of that, we have Ramp introducing their router, routing model provider product. How do we assess these-

   2. JLJason Lemkin20:02

      I think it's a great time for OpenRouter to sell. I think it's, I think, I think them leaking the story was very, was very savvy.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings20:08

      Why is it a great time for them to sell, Jason, so I'm naive?

   4. JLJason Lemkin20:10

      Because the market's in flux. E-everyone's figured out they need this. OpenRouter, like a lot of folks, was, was, was, was early and benefited from it and deserves it, right? This is a repeat founding team that saw that there would be value to having a, a, a fairly heterogeneous mix of models that when we started this pod, probably made no sense at some level. It probably seemed too nerdy and too niche and too cool cat developer. Who, who's gonna nee- Like, yeah, sure, there's a li... It's cool, but, uh, you know, guys like Rory and me, we're, we're gonna stick to the big guns, right? And, uh, it... Everything broke well for them, but it's still a niche product that more and more people are gonna build variants of themselves. And w- is this the plumbing they will pick? Will, you know, i-if you're on a lot of platf- if you're on adjacent platforms, if you're using Databricks Gateway, they'll fi- they'll, they have their own harness. They'll figure this out for you. There will... I don't know whether Ramp's competitor even makes sense. Like I, uh... But, um, it's, my point is it's something that's gonna become embedded in so many vendors, that if I could sell for a lofty multiple of my last round, I, I, I mi- I might check out a five or six billion. Like it, it just, just, it's just because the next... You, you, you've achieved a certain amount of victory in a market that's going through radical change and becoming part of everything. I might, I m- I might, I might, I might take the offer.

   5. RORory O’Driscoll21:31

      Jason is answering the question, why is it a good time to sell? And, you know, frankly, as you've, you yourself, Jason, have said, you know, and I say it too, the private market liquidity window opens so rarely that it's always a good idea to pay attention when it does. So I think it's easy to understand that side of it. I actually think the interesting side of the discussion is the other side. Why would someone wanna buy, right? And I think when I saw that article, I was like, "Yeah, that makes sense." If you think about the last conversation we had, you know, what's in the zeitgeist right now? It's this whole idea of d- can I get escape model dependency, manage my costs, have a whole load of alternatives easily available to me, right? If I'm someone, like, who makes my money as a hyperscaler hosting, especially someone that doesn't have their own in, just one in-house model they're pushing, like Gemini. If I'm maybe Amazon in particular, who's made a business of saying, "I'm gonna support all the models." If you had maybe even Microsoft now that their divorce is coming through from OpenAI. You know, maybe this would be a great product to own if I was a cloud hyperscaler. So I will admit I had that moment of... And, uh, 'cause you often see it, and it's, step back, you often see this in, in this kind of market. You have these businesses where intellectually over a 10-year period you can say, "Hey, margins are gonna be tough in that business. It's going to be compressed, and maybe it won't at scale in the end be an amazingly valuable business 'cause it won't be able to extract margin." But on the other hand, when growth is so quick and people's urgency to adopt technology is so fast as it is right now, if you have a crucial piece of the plumbing at just the right time when two or three people need that piece of plumbing, you can find yourself in a very interesting position in terms of M&A, right? 'Cause it may well be that, and this is kind of a, this is where the finance guys miss it. It may well be that the NPV of the company on a standalone basis is, you know, a couple of billion, not huge. But the value to it right now to a hyperscaler, if they could shift ten percent market share in the enterprise to them over the next half a decade by saying, "Dude, we are the cloud ag- we are the model-agnostic people and we'll make it easy," could be interesting. So I remember thinking, "Shit, I was, I wish I was in that." I mean, th- which is always how you know what a venture guy really thinks. It's like, "Damn, I bet you they could get a good offer right now." It's just interesting. So yeah, I'm with you J- I think it's an interesting, and a, an interesting time to sell, an interesting time to buy. I mean-

   6. HSHarry Stebbings24:00

      Rory, if you were on that board, would you sell at five to six billion dollars?

   7. RORory O’Driscoll24:04

      You know, it's always hard to s... I mean, my first comment is whenever you get an offer, I always do the same thing. I say to the founders, "One, m- the window's open. It doesn't open often. We should take it seriously. Two, I'm gonna support you whatever you wanna do. Three, if there's c- if there's concerns that you have that you've been sitting on and not telling me, now would be a good time to share so we can make an informed decision," right?

   8. JLJason Lemkin24:26

      [laughs]

   9. RORory O’Driscoll24:26

      "And then go away and think about it," and have a whole process of how you, you know, talk to them about it, right? I don't think you should pressure people into selling. I think your job is to give them whatever experience you have to bring to bear, and then they'll make the decision. 'Cause, you know, in the end- And it's so funny 'cause founders agonize about this when they think about control, and they think, "Oh my God, these people are gonna make us sell." Even if, as the VCs, we have board control, 70% ownership, and a drag along for the founders, Jason knows this, if the founders who are core to the business don't wanna sell, it's not gonna happen. So one of... the first thing I tell the founders is, "It's your decision," which I think is very empowering because it takes it away from people are gonna make you... You know, that's the beauty of being private, unlike being public, where you don't have that degrees of freedom. We could come back to that later. Um, so yeah, I, I, I would say to them, "Take this seriously. Do you think you can be worth 3X this in three, four years? Do you think that's worth it?" But yeah, I would definitely say take a day out of your life and think about this long and hard.

   10. JLJason Lemkin25:27

       The way Harry phrased his question was very VC-centric. "Would you sell at 6 bil-..." What... I can't do the accent. "Would you sell at 6 billion?" Okay?

   11. RORory O’Driscoll25:34

       [laughs]

   12. JLJason Lemkin25:35

       I, it, it, that is... I, I hate the term triggering. That triggered me. That, that's, that, that triggered me because this is a very VC-centric way to think of it. I've got an asset. What am I sitting at in my last round? 1.8 billion, okay?

   13. RORory O’Driscoll25:47

       Yeah.

   14. JLJason Lemkin25:48

       There's gonna be dilution. I ha- there's time value of money. There's IRR impact. The 6 billion worth, is it worth it for me? I think for a founder, when you start to get into nosebleed offers in absolute terms, it has to be 10X to go for it. It's not worth it for 3X. It is not... Okay, let's say I own tw- 15% of OpenRouter, okay, for the money, okay?

   15. RORory O’Driscoll26:10

       Interesting.

   16. JLJason Lemkin26:10

       It's not w- how much am I gonna take home, okay? It's 4 billion. I'm gonna take home 600 million, okay? I got... Now, one of the founders, I think, is super rich, right? But, but put, put that aside. I got 4 million in the bank, 400,000, 40,000. I'm gonna walk away with 600, 700 million. 3X for you, it doesn't... Like, maybe later in life. It's now 10X. And building something, and this is another try to, uh, uh, VC-ism, building something truly generational, y- you kinda know as a founder when you're on that path, okay? And so the VC, the... What, should I do it for 2.8X on my last... You know, it's just, it's the right way as a financier to think about it, don't get me wrong, but it's a terrible way for a founder to think about it because there's way too much risk for not enough money. Like, going from f- again, going from 40,000 in the bank to 400 million versus 800 million, it's, it's, it's irrelevant if there's risk. This is... And, and, and sometimes... Then there is a handful of work. There is a handful of work in those next three years. It is a handful of sweat and a handful of market change and a handful of people that quit and move on and a handful of competitors that they're, they're looking pretty good and they may pass you. Three, 3X, not good enough, man. Gotta be 10X.

   17. RORory O’Driscoll27:24

       Now I- I'm confused. What are you saying? Are you saying to sell at six or are you saying not? Which is odd because-

   18. JLJason Lemkin27:30

       I'm saying s- if it's financial, sell at six. If the mo- if the... A- 18's not enough. It's gotta be 60 to be worth the risk for most founders.

   19. RORory O’Driscoll27:40

       I understand what he's saying.

   20. JLJason Lemkin27:40

       It's not enough gain.

   21. RORory O’Driscoll27:41

       I, I understand what he's saying.

   22. JLJason Lemkin27:42

       It, this, this isn't clearing the prep stack.

   23. RORory O’Driscoll27:44

       No, no, no, no, no.

   24. JLJason Lemkin27:44

       This is clearing my life stack.

   25. RORory O’Driscoll27:46

       No. It, it was weird. I didn't think you were going that direction, J- But as, as often happens with you, when I listen to the whole thing, I'm like, "I get it." I think what he's saying is this, Harry. Right? You know, when you face that sell decision, um, y- y- you don't not sell 'cause you think you can make twice as much in a year, right? Because you just never know, and it, like, you know... I- I... And I... So in, in the end, even though I, I didn't think I'd agree with him, in the end, I did. It's like, what I think he's saying is, let's leave aside the what do you want to do with your life questions. From a return perspective, you know, don't think incrementally. If you have a chance to sell a company for 6 billion and make 600 million, and you, you have a... you think you can run it another three years and get, you know, 1.2 billion, that might, i- that m- risk-adjusted, that mightn't be worth it if your current net worth is $40,000. And that's actually good, good financial advice. I mean, it doesn't... In other words, if you turn down a big-ass offer, you better be sure it can be way bigger. You better have high certainty and high bigger-ness. I, I think that's a fair comment.

   26. JLJason Lemkin28:49

       Yeah. If it's 10X, this is my net advice. If it's 10X, if you know in your heart and soul you are building a company 10X bigger than this, right or wrong, like, like, I, I don't know, then go, then f- and say no and go for it. Here's a few more shares, in fact, friends. Let me reload you. But, but they only vest-

   27. RORory O’Driscoll29:05

       Oh, I get you

   28. JLJason Lemkin29:05

       ... at 10X.

   29. RORory O’Driscoll29:05

       It's no simple.

   30. JLJason Lemkin29:05

       Right? Go for it.
6. 31:27 – 36:32

   Fireworks AI Raises at $17.5B

   1. HSHarry Stebbings31:27

      Which is Fireworks?

   2. RORory O’Driscoll31:28

      Yeah, and inference in general. Yeah, I mean-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings31:30

      Take it away, Rory. I'm gonna butcher whatever context that you want to take it on.

   4. RORory O’Driscoll31:34

      No, no, you do, no, you do first because I'm, I'm just-

   5. HSHarry Stebbings31:37

      Are, are you sure? Uh, the-

   6. RORory O’Driscoll31:38

      Yeah

   7. HSHarry Stebbings31:38

      ... I'll lay the framework, and then you can just-

   8. RORory O’Driscoll31:40

      Yeah, sure, go for it

   9. HSHarry Stebbings31:40

      ... destroy it. Steamroll away.

   10. RORory O’Driscoll31:42

       I will-

   11. HSHarry Stebbings31:43

       So Fireworks, uh, a leading inference provider, uh, announced their latest round, which was a one-and-a-half billion dollar round done by, um, uh, Index, uh, Gavin Baker, uh, NVIDIA, Lightspeed 20VC. Amazing firms. Um, they're incredible. Uh, thank you very much. They're, they're, they're really fucking good. Lynn is amazing. Uh, doing over a billion in ARR, got there in three and a half years, and they announced around forty trillion tokens a day, up from fifteen.

   12. RORory O’Driscoll32:16

       I mean, I think the story is inference- Uh, yes. Uh, first of all, I agree. Yeah. Inference is a hu- And it goes back, uh, ironically, to the prior comment on open weight models. It, this kind of standalone inference is a big business, right? And you know, obviously, you know, inference is but something that's done within the front- the frontier model companies where they do their own inference, and people like Microsoft and Google provide the CapEx, provide the compute for that. But people like Fireworks and Base10, they, and File, they all make their money offering a variety of these open, open weight models to third-party developers and enterprises that wanna use open-source models to do AI, right? And as I said, the two trends go together. They're exploding 'cause the open-source trend is exploding. So if you're Base10, if you're File, uh, More Media, if you're Fireworks, if you're Together, this is your market and your moment, right? So yeah, I, I... Th-this is, 'cause this is how you access those. 'Cause I can tell you one thing. We can-- Going back to the discussion about open weight models from China, it's, it's one thing to decide to use an open weight model on Fireworks in the US. What you're not gonna do is be using the API back to China even if they'd let you, right? So this is a one-to-one linkage between the open source, the open weight trend, right? These are the companies that are benefiting massively from that trend, and it's not the only kinda route for inference. There are, you know, inference for US-based models, et cetera, et cetera. But the vast bulk of it is, "Oh my God, I'm sourcing Qwen. I'm sourcing Ki- I'm hosting Qwen, Kimi. I want to use it as Cursor. I want to get someone to provide me some inference." These guys exist, and you know, they have lots of customer SKU at the high end. I believe, you know, companies like Cursor are probably big customers of all these guys, or at least they were until they were acquired by, um, acquired by-

   13. HSHarry Stebbings34:06

       Still are. Still are

   14. RORory O’Driscoll34:07

       ... and probably still are, right? So yeah, I mean, it's a great... Candidly, I think, you know, it actually goes back to the point I made earlier. There's some businesses where, and I think, you know, you can look at it and say, "Oh my gosh, the cost cons-- you know, you have margin compression in your future because you're buying your compute from the neo clouds, and you know, you're offering this product, and are you gonna be scrunched?" And margins w- you know, were probably slow for a while, but now the beauty of it is demand is massive. So whatever compute you have today, whatever compute you've already signed up for, and these guys sign up for compute from the neo clouds in general, are bui- are, are starting to build their own. Whatever compute you own now, you can charge way more, which means what looked like a grow- a low-ish gross margin business has now probably become a very attractive business. So not only are they probably going, growing five X to a billion, but they're probably going five X to a billion with expanding gross margins.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings35:00

       And, and just, and just to add some details there, Lynn said specifically that they were at mid-thirties in margins, and that would move up as they eat more of the stack, and they do plan to move into the data center, uh, layer themselves.

   16. RORory O’Driscoll35:13

       Yeah, and just to be clear for people what that means is, yeah, and that's exactly where I thought they'd be, and good on them, right? Thirty percent. In other words, what they're saying, and this is gonna be an int-- and this, and I agree with that sentence. It also means the, the challenges I hinted at are there in the future, right? Because what they're saying is, if I'm buying data center compute and then effectively selling data center compute with hosted LLM, at some point, I'm gonna wanna own my own data center assets to have more control of my destiny, which means vertically integrating downwards, which also means a ton more CapEx. So these are gonna become way more CapEx-intensive businesses. There is a risk of commodification here, even though, even with massive complexity and massive CapEx.

   17. JLJason Lemkin35:55

       There is one, one thread of the Twitterati who has said for a while, like, um, all this stuff's interesting, but ultimately it's the a- you know, the application layer is gonna be the most interesting. It's gonna benefit from all this. Everything's commodified, right? Um, all the good investments sure seem to be in the infrastructure. [chuckles]

   18. RORory O’Driscoll36:10

       Absolutely.

   19. JLJason Lemkin36:11

       Even the ones that look good in software, the numbers pale in comparison anyway, right? The, the absolute numbers pale. So I'm waiting for the, for the, for the, for the era of the application layer in, uh, AI and, um, making bets and seeing some good stuff, but I don't believe it's here yet. I actually don't believe-

   20. RORory O’Driscoll36:30

       I know

   21. JLJason Lemkin36:30

       ... the application layer is here yet. [chuckles]

   22. HSHarry Stebbings36:31

       Le-

7. 36:32 – 52:28

   The Application Layer Still Hasn't Arrived

   1. HSHarry Stebbings36:32

      To, to put again, Lynn said in the show she expects to double by the end of the year.

   2. RORory O’Driscoll36:37

      Totally.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings36:39

      Two billion.

   4. JLJason Lemkin36:39

      Yeah, yeah, and that's, and that's just a slice of the market. Listen, people have gone all back... You know, when we started this show, uh, it felt like, uh, vibe coding applications run amok. Everyone thought you'd replace your Salesforce. We even had a guest the other week w- who was, I forget, who was saying how great it was he replaced Salesforce. Who cares, right? Um, didn't kill software, but where, where, where is the software renaissance? Uh, I mean, the revenue's there. We've talked about leaders, right? But it, it's so trivial compared to the infrastructure. It's so trivial. It's almost a rounding error, uh, the application layer. [chuckles]

   5. RORory O’Driscoll37:07

      And just to dimension that, because I agree, Jason. I mean, look, I'm an app investor. It hasn't... You know, you look back and you- What's going on here? You've got companies like, you know, um, Fireworks doing a billion dollars. There's ve- there's very few apps companies doing that. And, you know, zooming out a million miles, you know, my mental model is I divide the AI world up into three buckets. It's the making AI, the infrastructure layer, right? And you're right, the spend there is eight, nine hundred billion a year. Then there's the two foundation model companies themselves, and they're doing plus or minus a hundred billion dollars a year, right? And then taking those guys out, rounding up every other apps company, right, you struggle to make forty or fifty bill. You struggle. You know, you start with Cursor at four, 'cause I think coding is an app. You know, you, by the time you're chucking in Harvey, you're adding two, three hundred million, right? It's amazing. I mean, just the difference in spend. And, you know, at some point, the people spending a trillion dollars a year are gonna want some apps to pay for all this, right? But right now, the volume has... It's been front-end loaded on the infrastructure side, and at some point, the revenue has to match it. But right now, infra's been the place to be. Like, there's probably more money being spent on training data for the foundation models, you know, the Merco, Surge, and that, than pretty much any app company outside of Cursor. In fact, probably the sum of all the apps companies [chuckles] outside of Cursor, right, you know, are probably less than the amount that Anthropic and OpenAI are spending on training data, which is just amazing.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings38:38

      That I can guarantee you when you look at Merco hitting two billion in ARR.

   7. RORory O’Driscoll38:41

      Yeah, two billion for Merco, or Surge, another billion. You get to four or five billion and, you know-

   8. HSHarry Stebbings38:45

      Surge is three.

   9. RORory O’Driscoll38:47

      Yeah.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings38:48

       Handshake's one. I mean-

   11. RORory O’Driscoll38:49

       I mean, yeah, maybe if you start throwing in on the other side the, the consumer products like Higgsfield, you get to roughly the same place, but it's astonishing. The scale of the investment versus the scale of the apps at this point means that all the action's on the infra side for now.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings39:04

       If we bring this all together, we, you know, we mentioned Fireworks at the start. Lynn said in the show, the future would be every company having specialized models with their own data. Um, we mentioned Harvey there, who've been building their own models. Jason, I'm just intrigued. In the last week, you spent time labeling data, building your own model through that data. Any lessons, reflections from the last few days labeling data and going through that process that you've been through?

   13. JLJason Lemkin39:32

       I've been building this agentic recruiting app just to recruit from the SaaStr community. It's been fun. I've learned a lot building it, right? Hopefully, it can ship in the next week or two. But, but to really get it great, it needed a, a, it needed labeling to make it... Now, I'm gonna put model in quotes, right? It, it uses Sonnet and Opus, but... So there, there's different definitions of model. And it was good and... But man, once I started labeling all of this, it, it got exponentially better, right? Um, built my, built my own, built, built our own little labeling tool. And so you need your own micro model, whether it is some sort of reasoning layer that you build on top of, uh, Claude or, or ChatGPT or Kimi or Schimmi. Like, it, it's still your own model, even if it's not technically a model, right? Because you, you have your own reasoning layer with, with your, with your own rules, your own weights, your own... And, um, but w- you want more. You, if you have the resources, you want to go further than that, right? You want a, your big M model. As soon as you're at a certain amount of scale, and it's not cheap all in, right, you are gonna wanna have your own model, right, like, like, like a Harvey or Cursor. So some version of this, I think, uh, the folks that are gonna wanna u- at any application level, folks that are gonna wanna use just the, the generic models is just gonna de- decline to, to, to, to, to prototypes, right? Prototypes and proofing.

   14. RORory O’Driscoll40:51

       Yeah. Or absolute state-of-the-art, kind of, small parts of the overall task. But ag- ag- agreed conceptually.

   15. JLJason Lemkin40:59

       Parts, yeah, little parts, right?

   16. RORory O’Driscoll41:00

       Yeah.

   17. JLJason Lemkin41:00

       Yeah.

   18. RORory O’Driscoll41:01

       I mean, again, you're gonna wanna use the expensive tool for the expensive parts, right? And you're gonna wanna use the cheap tool for most of the parts and the customized tool to usage.

   19. JLJason Lemkin41:08

       But man, the outputs are just, uh, or- order, literally an order of magnitude better once you do it. So-

   20. RORory O’Driscoll41:14

       Wow

   21. JLJason Lemkin41:14

       ... ev- everyone wants your own model. Um, and, um, so I, I do think... Whether, whether that always benefits Fireworks or not, it doesn't matter as long as they pick up the, some of the bigger end, the bigger end, right, that scales. It's, uh, uh, it, it is, yeah.

   22. RORory O’Driscoll41:27

       Yes.

   23. JLJason Lemkin41:27

       The, uh... Don't... The, the generic models are great, but it is amazing how much, how much better you can do than them for any specific workflow. You can do ep- epically better.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings41:39

       Would that change your confidence on the data labeling market? A lot of shade is thrown at, at it. As an investor in Merco, I, I definitely see it. Is... Does that change how you think about it?

   25. JLJason Lemkin41:51

       Personally, I'm totally, I totally get it. Like, having a subject matter go in and answer 20 questions about a disease, about a history... I mean, it's a lot of professors and teachers that they have there, right? That, that model, right? The amount of power you can get in a domain by having a subject matter answer, answer just 20 or 30 questions, right? Five minutes, 10 minutes. The amount of power you can add versus the, the generic LLMs, which are a sea of mediocrity combined into one giant LLM, okay? Every mediocre history professor, every, every mediocre doctor that doesn't even know what, what, what caused your runny nose is in the LLM. But if you get the, the best people training it on the best answers, it's a step function. I'm less smart on the, the, the seeming low end of the model, right, this commodity thing that people made fun of Merco, but I ain't making fun of it anymore. I te- I tell you that much. Um, and these models are, are a sea of mediocre all combined in a giant soup that gets better. These domain experts are so powerful in tuning your model to get the, the better output. So powerful.

   26. RORory O’Driscoll42:53

       I, I, I think the answer, though, is really a derivative of the big question, which is, you know... 'Cause your, your statement, you know, companies are gonna want their own model is probably true, right? And the real question is not that. The real question is, will that be additive to the rough trajectory of the foundation models as it's established today? In other words, v- coming, you know, at or close to 100 billion combined revenue growing nicely, or does it start to take away significantly? 'Cause, you know, to answer your specific question, if- The foundation models continue to grow, and we just saw the article information that, you know, for m- for all the training data companies, the vast majority of their revenue comes from the foundation models to which your correct response is, "No shit." Of course it does, right? If that continues to grow and you have an additive market in enterprise of all these companies, you know, JPMorgan building the JPMorgan Morgan, uh, model on top, then, you know, it's net expansive, and net expansive is by definition good and reduces customer concentration. And I think that's what people like Mercker are forecasting, right? If, on the other hand, you know, which is hard to contemplate today, if these enterprise models, if these open weight models really impacted the growth rate of Anthropic and OpenAI, then obviously when your eighty percent customer slows down, it would have a significant impact on your growth rate, right? But, you know, if it's any consolation, Harry, if that happens, worrying about your Mercker valuation will be the least thing people are worried about, 'cause you'll see an implosion of much bigger market cap entities, right? And, you know, that's, that frankly is the billion-dollar question. You know, can these two foundation models maintain their growth trajectory, which has started to become profitable, at least in the case of Open-- uh, of Anthropic, in the face of all this open weight competition, in the face of this pushback, um, on costs and basically this kind of push for ROI? If they can maintain this trajectory for even another one or two years, then everything's fine and everyone's fine. And right now, the data says they are. If you start to see slowdown on those two ARR growth rates, then, you know, all bets are off because the pressure, because the amount of commitments they've made, assuming that ten X growth rate continues, will mean that even if it slips to a two or three X growth rate, there's gonna be a mad scramble.

   27. HSHarry Stebbings45:17

       Bets on, yes or no answer, will Open impact that trajectory for Anthropic and OpenAI in the next one to two years?

   28. RORory O’Driscoll45:26

       Yes, Harry, it will impact. It might impact at one percent or fifty percent. What you're really say-- What you-- The question you're really trying to ask is, does it produce a sustain-- You know, a-- Does it reduce that growth rate to sub a hundred percent within one or two years, right? And the answer to that question is I genuinely don't know, and if I did, I'd be trading that stock. Because let me be clear. If you know the answer to that question, that one question, you know the answer to the entire direction of the US stock market for the next two years. Because all the hyperscale RPO, all of it, is a function of the commitments they've gotten from the, the hype-- from the f-foundation model companies. And yeah, you can say if the open models, open weight models explode, there will be a demand for inference. And yeah, you will have this kind of transition from, "Oh, I sold it to OpenAI, but I should have sold it to, um, I don't know, Cursor or Ba- yeah, Baseten or someone else," and the CapEx will get repurposed. But it will be a big-ass dislocation. And I just genuinely don't know. I mean, it's the million-dollar question.

   29. JLJason Lemkin46:29

       I think the tough, the really tough part, I mean, it's captain obvious, right? Is, uh, can they afford for it not to? And what I mean is look at what's happened with Fable this week, okay? Fable went from, "You can't use it. It's not secure." Then the government lets you use it. Then, "Hey, we're gonna turn it off except for variable usage on June, July 15th." Now it can be fifty percent of your whole usage for the month. Why did they change when they don't even have enough capacity to serve it? Competition, right? Competition, right? So it, it-- Listen, if they price Fable at sonnet rates, I think they'll own the market. [laughs]

   30. RORory O’Driscoll47:03

       Yes.
8. 52:28 – 1:04:18

   Stripe & Advent Bid to Take PayPal Private

   1. RORory O’Driscoll52:28

      It sounds good. I mean, you gotta talk about it. It's, it's-

   2. HSHarry Stebbings52:30

      We've gotta talk about it. So this is a big deal. Um, was it inevitable Stripe would acquire PayPal? There were rumors of it a couple of months ago. This is obviously taking those rumors one step further with, with the offer. Um, Rory, how did you think about it?

   3. RORory O’Driscoll52:44

      I think that price clear as hell. I mean, I think it's, it's super interesting in a lot of different ways. One is just the diff- I mean, they both process kind of $1.9, $1.8 trillion a year, right? And as yet, Stripe, and we'll talk about revenues and profits in a second, Stripe is valued at, like, $150 billion, and I think... What was the offer for PayPal? I'm, I looked at it this morning but I didn't remember. Is it 50 bill- 35? Hang on, it's about-

   4. HSHarry Stebbings53:11

      I thought it was 58 or 60.

   5. RORory O’Driscoll53:12

      50-something billion, right? And rev- and, you know, rev- so yeah. I mean, it's like Stripe taking advantage of PayPal trading at sub 10 times profits and deciding to go for it here, right? I mean, it's, in one sense, it's, it's a ballsy move 'cause it, you're taking on a lot of operational complexity. On the other hand, it's a chance to really, you know, transform and double your footprint. 'Cause I think, as I say, the revenue, not the revenue, the payment process is roughly the same. Revenue is tricky 'cause Stripe supports revenue net, which is around s- 6 billion plus or minus. PayPal reports gross, and I think it was, and I, I checked it, but with my cold I'm a bit feeble-minded today. It was about, you know, twen- around 30 billion, so it was trading about 1.7 times revenues. So if you look at that 5 versus 30, I'm like, ooh, it's 5x, PayPal's 5x bigger. But it turns out on a like with like basis, PayPal is still bigger, but it's about one and a half times the size. It's still a company buying something one and a half times its size for what looks like, you know, a third less because it's kind of, they're doing a joint deal with Advent, a PE provider. So for, you know, a lot less of its market cap. If they pull it off, they will look back and go, "Wow, that was an amazing deal." Right? It also gives them, and you know, and their economics will be amazing. It's a little like the Dell transaction. You know, obviously the scary thing is it takes your perfectly wonderful company that's nice and running smoothly and, you know, is a desirable place to work, and all the positives that we all know about Stripe, you know, smartest guys ever, killing it, nice place to work, good reputation, and they're gonna have to do a lot of hard-nosed stuff to turn PayPal around. Then there'll be a lot more pushing and shoving in the future, 'cause, you know, you're probably gonna be looking at that place and saying, "We're gonna get rid of a lot of people. We're gonna rationalize a lot of stuff." So it's a different muscle, but I give them credit for it. It's a big, ballsy play to double your market cap.

   6. JLJason Lemkin55:18

      Yeah, the part that I struggle with a little bit, um, the, you know, listen, if, obviously there's, there's, there's at least a, a decent synergy here, right? And in, in a PowerPoint slide, there's a ton of synergy.

   7. RORory O’Driscoll55:29

      Yeah.

   8. JLJason Lemkin55:29

      Um, plus you get Venmo, you get a lot of stuff, but, um-

   9. RORory O’Driscoll55:31

      Yes, you get consumer assets

   10. JLJason Lemkin55:32

       ... the, the thing that is always a head-scratcher to me is blending something that's growing 7%, because no matter what you say or do, unless you can radically shove- Those products through your channel, your blended growth rate goes down. What's Stripe growing today? I don't know, thirty, forty percent?

   11. RORory O’Driscoll55:49

       It's, it-

   12. JLJason Lemkin55:49

       Fifty?

   13. RORory O’Driscoll55:49

       ... between twenty and thirty, so it's not that much bigger, Jason. That's why I-

   14. JLJason Lemkin55:52

       But seven, but seven-- So, okay, hold on. Help me. Rory, you're better at the math than me, but if I take thirty and seven, that's thirty-seven, and divide by two, I, I'm only growing, like, eighteen percent now. I've, I've fallen below the, uh, Mendoza line of twenty percent growth at scale.

   15. RORory O’Driscoll56:04

       There's no such thing as a Mendoza line for growth at five billion and above, 'cause you can get out, right? I mean, I think the real point is, but to take that point-

   16. JLJason Lemkin56:12

       But I found, but I found it stressful in M&A observation, not quite at this scale, mind you, but it is stressful when it-

   17. RORory O’Driscoll56:18

       Agreed

   18. JLJason Lemkin56:18

       ... meaningfully decelerates you, right? It will meaningfully decelerate them in the short term, even if... I'm not sure how the accounting works, right? Even maybe they only have to recognize half of it because of this Advent thing, but they're gonna have to recognize some of this revenue, right, as a joint venture, right? So it's gonna decelerate their growth. It's not stress-free. For, uh, plus you have the operational need. Plus, I mean, even all the layoffs they're gonna do, that alone may not re-accelerate growth. We've certainly seen this at a handful of portfolio companies, right? Um, that's just the stressor for me. I've learned over the years, uh, that when you have one messy code base and another code base, and you're like, "How the hell are you gonna combine these companies in different motions?" You figure, as crazy as it sounds, you actually figure that part out, and the answer is, you don't fix it. [laughs] You fix it over, uh, five years, or you have an LLM lift. But the real answer is you don't fix a lot of these things that seem like you can't rationalize them between the organizations. Everyone's got 11 products spaghetti'd together. Um, even tech leaders have it, right? It's just the nature of M&A.

   19. RORory O’Driscoll57:15

       My guess is this is one where you have, frankly, one well-won company for the last decade and a half in Stripe, and you have another company that, you know, ever since the PayPal Mafia walked out, has been just a revolving door of executives and is a real mess, and they've dissipated their opportunity. So yes. I mean, the interesting thing is normally this is kinda get to the public. Normally, this is the kind of deal you do after you go public, 'cause you have the market cap and you just price the deal. And you know, I was thinking, my first glance was, ooh, it's probably a lot harder to do this as a private company, 'cause you can't issue fifty billion of stock, right? So you have to look at debt, you have to do Advent. On the other hand, and again, I wanted to read the detail, I didn't get to it fully before this meeting. On the other, maybe they're using Advent to almost keep it slightly off balance sheet for a period of time while they rationalize it, right? So I don't know. It pr- it would be easier to consummate this deal and just be done as a public company, but obviously Stripe has chosen not to go public, so, um, at least yet. And so, but it may well be that even though that makes it less easy to do, it may also have pushed them to this kind of contained strategy with Advent, right?

   20. JLJason Lemkin58:23

       And so-

   21. RORory O’Driscoll58:24

       But yeah

   22. JLJason Lemkin58:24

       ... w-will this happen? I will slight you-

   23. RORory O’Driscoll58:27

       I don't know

   24. JLJason Lemkin58:27

       ... if it's actually getting done. I think it happens. Uh, the, the-

   25. RORory O’Driscoll58:30

       I think it does. I think it does too.

   26. JLJason Lemkin58:31

       No.

   27. RORory O’Driscoll58:31

       Because-

   28. JLJason Lemkin58:32

       Let me just step back. Rory's got even more experience than the two of us, but it's just a dance. The board rejected it, right?

   29. RORory O’Driscoll58:37

       Yeah.

   30. JLJason Lemkin58:37

       And the fact that the board rejected it means to me that they're going to accept it. You reject it because, uh, no, no investment bank will tell you you're allowed to make your highest offer up front. It's like not a, it's like you probably breach your fiduciary duty if you make your... You have to offer, like, uh, whatever. You have to have another five or ten percent to put into the deal, so it's a dance. They, they were, they're gonna accept it. They just, uh, and, and it's a bunch of mercenaries and a brand-new CEO who's probably gonna make nine figures for, uh, 10 or 12 months of work. They're go- by rejecting it, it means they're going to accept it.
9. 1:04:18 – 1:18:34

   Databricks at $188B: Private Companies Acting Public

   1. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:18

      cover, Rory?

   2. RORory O’Driscoll1:04:18

      Maybe, maybe the better comment, I, I will say that maybe the better comment is not, there's, there's more to li-... I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot, actually. In one sense, I wanna say there's more to life than talking about OpenAI and Anthropic, 'cause there are only two of 2,000, uh, 2,000 interesting companies. On the other hand, as you would be the first to point out, cap weighted, in other words, weighted by dollar, there are 2 trillion of 5 or 6 trillion of privately held market value. So on a cap-weighted basis, we should be talking 30 to 40% of our time on OpenAI and Tro- and Anthropic, boring as it is, if you are kind of trying to be representative of private tech. So I, I hear you, Harry. It, it's hard not to, but I just don't wanna be totally boring. I mean, you know, I thought that, you know, it, it, the other fun things, and the fun, the odd thing about... You know, we, you had a list of other companies, like, to talk about, and in a weird kind of way, every single one of them is a company that's being pulled by this trend. I mean, you had Valor Atomics down there to talk about, you know, yeah, new, new technologies in nuclear. Then you had kind of, um, TSMC and ASML, and the truth is all the dynamics for those two companies are about the insane demand for semiconductors, which is all about AI. So, you know, when you actually get to trying to talk about something that's not AI, I ain't got shit.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:34

      Yeah, exactly, and then, uh, Da- Databricks rockets to 188. Why? To buy GPUs.

   4. RORory O’Driscoll1:05:40

      To buy GPUs. Silly. No, which is, which gets back to my comment. The, [chuckles] the growth rate of those two foundation model companies, as Jason has pointed out many times, is a thing upon which your 401 [k] at an all-time high dependent, right? But I did think it was interest... Go.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:57

      One thing that I, I do find interesting is, like, an- another one, but it's, like, Emergent AI coding startup. Um, 120 million in ARR, uh, raised 130 million in Series C at a 1.5 billion post-money in July 15th. The thing that I find really interesting here is I'm seeing Series A is priced at 3 to 500 on 2 to 5 million in revenue, but I'm finding the B at 100 million in revenue priced at 1 to 1.5. It's a 3X price increase for a 50X revenue increase. I think it's just a very interesting market analysis today of where is a good insertion point for investors.

   6. RORory O’Driscoll1:06:41

      Ah. It's true.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings1:06:43

      And it's, like, risk-adjusted always now. Like, we did Factory at the one and a half round, and I think, yes, that was a worse deal than the 300 round. But the 300 round, they had next to no customers, very little product market fit, and well done to those investors. They saw what a lot of other people didn't. But risk-adjusted, shit, you're only paying 4X for incredible PMF and 70 to 100 times revenue scaling.

   8. RORory O’Driscoll1:07:14

      I think on those numbers, you're correct. The short answer is, is that would you prefer to pay 300 for no revenues or 1.2 billion for a lot of revenues? Absolutely.

   9. JLJason Lemkin1:07:24

      Well, look, I think for what it's worth, th- there obviously is, uh, we talked about the history show. There, there, there is real multiple compression even in the hottest, uh, agentic folks at scale, right? There's real mult- revenue m- uh, multiple compression. There's plenty of s- folks compressing to 10X revenues, right? Which is even far less than forward revenues, right? I mean, on a, uh, maybe unhelpful comment, I think the real pressure is it means anything below that growth stage, you better be a damn good picker. Because it used to be It used to be when Rory and I met, Series B, even into Series A, you actually didn't have to be a good picker. You just had to be good at math and good at assessing the team. Um, the picking wasn't, wasn't so hard as it looked. It was all the rest. Now, a seri- the, the, the, the, that gap, y- you better be like a s- you have seed investor skills at the Series B or the math's, math's gonna be tough with tho- with those, with that, right? It just, it just, it just, it... There's a lot of pressure on the picking. That, that's just what I think it is below the growth stage and so, so be it. That's the game, right? But, uh, y- you just, uh, that, that, that's how I think about it and it's har- it's harder it, you know, it's, it's, it's, you, you don't really wanna be a picker. You wanna be a pricer.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings1:08:34

       I, I, again, going back to my point, risk-adjusted here, would you rather be doing a Series A, $2 million in revenue at $300 million price which is the going rate for a hot AI company at Series A especially in the Valley? Or would you rather stick money into Fireworks which says they're gonna hit $2 billion by the end of this year at $17.5 billion? You're paying less than 10X revenue.

   11. JLJason Lemkin1:08:57

       Well, if you want it, it depends, I mean, Rory's better at the math. It depends on fund size and other numbers, but you wanna own the most you can of winners. Uh, you could argue at some point, I guess it doesn't matter. It's just putting the absolute amount of money you can in the last philanthropic round. But for most of us without unlimited capital, um, you know, if you, if you can pick better earlier, you end up, you'll end up owning more. It does pay off. That, that extra 3 to 4X isn't terrible. That extra 3 to 4X on the way to the, to the, uh, to the billion-dollar round. It's not, it's not a terrible bump.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:27

       I just don't think many people can pick and I think we are here to make money.

   13. JLJason Lemkin1:09:29

       They can't. It's hard. I mean, pick is a more complicated than it sounds, right? Pick sounds like, uh, everyone's waiting outside your office for four hours in the lobby like at a doctor's office and you get to pick like it's, uh, 2006, right? Um, but, um, but it is true and, and, and the, the change that the, that, that the biggest brands will pay the highest price in many cases, uh, is, is, is makes that in-between round tough, right? At least the growth round is sort of objec- like it is just, in many cases just priced by the company one way or the other, and you either, you either in the round or you're not, right? [laughs]

   14. HSHarry Stebbings1:10:01

       And, and, and you know what on top of that, and Rory you can forgive me for going off on this rant, but you know Brandon at McCaw has mouthed off, uh, I may say that nicely, uh, but mouthed off on Twitter about Sequoia's tranche rounds. I think it's brilliant marketing for Sequoia honestly. I would have retweeted it.

   15. JLJason Lemkin1:10:15

       Yes.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings1:10:16

       But the amount of tranche rounds I see, I saw a round the other day with four tranches.

   17. RORory O’Driscoll1:10:21

       Yes.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings1:10:21

       Four.

   19. RORory O’Driscoll1:10:22

       But the, I'll te- but, but those two-

   20. HSHarry Stebbings1:10:23

       I thought it was a multi-story car park.

   21. RORory O’Driscoll1:10:26

       Those two things go together, right? That y- that tranche comment goes together with your prior comment, right? Which is I'm gonna paraphrase it. It's like doing classic early stage C, A, A, A, B investing is really hard 'cause prices are high and you've got some really talented firms sort of win. You gotta have differential access, differential picking and you got on th- you're gonna be competing in every deal. Conversely, Harry's saying, "I look at these companies at $1.5 billion, they're doing a couple hundred million in revenue. Yeah, they're on an absolute basis they're expensive, but on a relative multiple basis they feel a little cheap." That's what you just said, correct?

   22. HSHarry Stebbings1:11:04

       Yeah.

   23. RORory O’Driscoll1:11:04

       And I think that's correct and I think there's no d- uh, what you're basically saying is growth for the last two or three years has been a very attractive place to make money, right? Because those kind of deals at one, two and three billion have been subsequently marked up a lot and I think you're entirely correct, right? I mean, look, we s- I shared a statistic before. We looked at every gr- I mean if you look at all the unicorns that were minted in Q1 or Q2 of 2025, by the end of Q2 '26 at least 40% of them will have had a subsequent markup. In other words, good things get more good things. We've been in the momentum side of the marketplace. So late stage, that kind of growth investing, to your point now and the reason you've been doing it, it's been a very good place to play and I think you've found that that's what you've seen in your portfolio. You've put, you know, $10 million in, pick a hot company at a billion and six months later you're getting a markup to $3 billion. You're like, "I'm a fucking genius. I haven't lifted a finger and I just made a 3X." It's been a great place. So now what you're seeing with these tranche deals is, you know, nature abhors a vacuum and Sequoia abhors leaving a dollar on the table. So what's happening is people are realizing everyone wants these growth rounds and this is how these trends end. Everyone, they're going, "Oh, everyone wants these growth rounds so now what we can do is do this tranche structure and effectively price the excess return away from Harry and back to us," right? So yes, because it's been such a good place to play that capital's rushing in. At some point it won't be a good place to play, right? But you are correct. I mean we, and we got, we talked about this last week. There's always the tension in do you stick to what you're doing 'cause you should do it or do you move around within the overall environment? And you know, and I know what you're gonna say. You think you should move around and I agree. From a pure, if you can pull it off, from a pure, like logically over the long term, over the long term and by long term I mean, you know, longer than you've been alive Harry, 30 years like, the truth is early should have a higher re- overall return multiple than mid, than late because otherwise cap m- you know, the rational market theory isn't correct and over the long term it is, Harry. But where you're absolutely right is there are these disconnects in the short term, I mean three or four years where you kind of go, "Oh wow," you know a combination of increasing equity valuations and a new trend means from 2022 on late stage has been amazingly good. Absolutely.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings1:13:24

       Y- y- yeah, yes. I completely agree. Obviously if you are in the best early stage firm it will obviously have better numbers than the rest. I completely agree. But I'm also fully cognizant that venture's a crap asset class for the majority and actually Thrive and many other very large funds will have much better numbers than the majority of early funds.

   25. RORory O’Driscoll1:13:44

       Agree, totally agree and I, I don't think we're saying anything different to be clear.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings1:13:48

       No. Yeah.

   27. RORory O’Driscoll1:13:48

       Right? I think that um, yes. I, 'cause I think that look, the, the earlier you go the more dispersion you're signing up for. When you get it right you get it very right and when you get it wrong you get it very wrong. The later you go, I mean there's two things. The later you go logically the less dispersion you should have, the more bounded the thing, but on top of that you have also this phenomenon which is you go late- At certain periods in the marketplace, you get this kind of equity rising tide perspective, which carries everything, right? And look, and, you know, since, since the crash in... not crash, small, small C. Since 2022, you know, you've just had tech lift and equity lift for three years. So yes, it's been a great place to play.

   28. JLJason Lemkin1:14:26

       I wonder if I was a founder, if I would really do, uh, contemporaneously tranched rounds. I don't know that I would.

   29. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:34

       Is it not a good deal for them?

   30. JLJason Lemkin1:14:36

       I, I think I would feel like, I, I mean, I might do it in the moment. I think we're all caught up in the moment. I don't know that I'd be comfortable charging one investor $1 billion and another $5 billion, uh, within the span of the same week. I, I don't think I would feel good about it. I, I, I, I, I, I think that it, it, it doesn't... it's suboptimal for my 40- 409A. It-- if, if it's a tiny amount of capital, I don't know that it materially changes the dilution. If it's a massive amount of capital, I would do it, right? Don't get me wrong. If I'm raising 100 at a billion and 500 at $5 billion in the, in the same 24 hours, I ca- I have to say yes to that as a founder, right? Because of, you know, I can't, I can't raise 500 at a, at a billion. But if it's, if it's, if it's pr- if it's, if it's all some sort of aesthetic, I don't know. I, I, I... maybe I, maybe I'm a fuddy-duddy. I just want my investors to make money, and I, and I want my investors to get, uh, not under, not... I don't want them to rip me off, but, uh, you know, 80% to 90% of a good deal to me al- always seemed to de-stress my life. Always just not taking that last nickel off the table always made me worry about one less thing. And, and maybe, and I just don't know if I would do it. I don't know if I would do four, four different prices in one week.
10. 1:18:34 – 1:27:28

    Nuclear Energy: The Quiet Progress Nobody Talks About

    1. RORory O’Driscoll1:18:34

       you know, Valor Atomic's looking like they're about to raise at a 3X step-up in, you know, four or five months. So it's interesting they're still private. But what's really funny, I did realize one weird comment. I had two weird... one weird comment on this was if you think about the kind of companies that should be private and the kind of companies that should be public. Companies trying to do, you know, next-generation nuclear products should probably be private. As yet, there's three of them that are public. They've SPAC'd, and they're trading like crazy, man, up and down 50% in one day. And then call me strange, a company that's doing 6 billion in revenues and wildly cash flow profit- profitable like Stripe or like Databricks should probably be public. As yet, here we are with Databricks and Stripe private. You know, s- Databricks doing a Series M, pri- Stripe doing some kind of acquisition that's kind of convoluted, which are typically bought public company stages. And then you got a whole bunch of these, not Valor, but the other kind of wild frontier tech companies being public. It's just a weird world. The SPACs are taking stuff public that should probably be venture-backed, and the very best venture assets are staying private long after they're kicking off cash and should be public. It's weird. I mean, there's nothing to say except weird.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings1:19:46

       Series M.

    3. JLJason Lemkin1:19:46

       You know, the one, one, this, it's minor. If I had to... well, if I want to just, um... It's so minor, but the Csquare IPO is just mi- mildly interesting as a footnote.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings1:19:55

       Can, can you just give some context, Jason? What, what is Csquared? What's happening?

    5. RORory O’Driscoll1:19:59

       It's a data center.

    6. JLJason Lemkin1:20:00

       Yeah. So they're a C-tier data center, uh, leveraging AI. They're doing a billion-dollar run rate, growing 16%, right? Um, and they IPO'd Uh, at, with a $3 billion market cap. So if you kind of reach this slow growth in a, in a, in a, and you put a veneer and a wrap around it, it's still growing at a billion in revenue, and you're trading at... I, I mean, I, I, I need to know the enterprise value, not the nominal. Uh, uh, it's probably lower, right? The enterprise value. You gotta figure out the debt.

    7. RORory O’Driscoll1:20:31

       It's higher because they'll have probably debt too. They'll want cash for the IPO.

    8. JLJason Lemkin1:20:33

       Oh, higher. Yeah, you're right. But it, it... I mean, this is meh. Maybe Rory's gonna say $3 billion is a great outcome, but I, I bet it's not when you trace back the history in all of this. The lesson for me to C-Score is you gotta deliver. Like, the market may be exuberant, the market may, may go nuts, but it's not stupid. Th- this, this one wasn't, it doesn't have the, the big AI boost in it. Didn't get the, the, the, the revenue boost. It didn't get the multiple boost.

    9. RORory O’Driscoll1:20:57

       Yeah. No, I agree. It was like an eh, uh, public, but not... I mean, and, I mean, older assets, not as compelling. Agreed.

    10. JLJason Lemkin1:21:03

        You know, the counterargument to so many things, but yeah, these other assets can IPO. I mean, I guess. I guess you finally get to a billion in revenue with a bit of an AI veneer, and you're worth three times that. I mean, I guess it's okay, but, um, I, that's not why I'd wanna be a founder. You gotta go go- you gotta make it r- you, you have to deliver.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:21:19

        You guys done any deals in the last seven days?

    12. RORory O’Driscoll1:21:22

        Not in the last seven days. No, sir. No.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:21:25

        Good.

    14. RORory O’Driscoll1:21:25

        I do, I do wanna come back to, the one other thing that, uh, really struck me as interesting, you put them in there separately, right? But I've been thinking about this a lot, that you had the, you know, TSMC's announcement, ASML announcement, and th- and I was thinking, oddly enough, about different kinds of trusted supply chains, and I'm just gonna contrast two, 'cause it's quite funny, right? You have the Nvidia relationship with TSMC, which famously, they don't even have a written contract. They've dealt with each other for 30 years. Nvidia is now TSMC's largest customer, and, you know, it's, you know, there's, there's tensions because they're pushing TSMC to invest more. Um, but, you know, the, the, they're managing that rela- and then the same kind of relation, TSMC and ASML. ASML makes the machine that enables TSMC, and TSMC makes the wafers that makes Nvidia. And no one in that entire supply chain has ruthlessly gouged each other. ASML has raised prices gently. TSMC has raised prices gently. They're pushing people for forward commits, and it's a real, "Hey, we know we're gonna be dealing with each other for, you know, 10, 20 more years, trusted relationships. How do we cooperate for the long..." And there's tensions, but it's not all that crazy. And then you just compare and contrast that to the adjacent market for DRAM. There's three suppliers in there, right? You've obviously got the two, uh, Koreans and Micron, right? And they're selling to the same customers. They're selling to the Nvidias. They're selling to all the other things. They're selling to Apple, right? And there, the dynamic is totally different. It's like, "Screw you, we're raising prices 40% this quarter. Oh, next quarter, you still need our stuff. We're raising another 40%," right? It's just hilarious to watch. I mean, you see these huge margins. I mean, TSMC and ASML kinda thinking long term, "How do we position ourselves so that we're great and cooperative for the next decade or two decades?" Right? All the memory guys are like, "This is a commodity business. You all screwed us three years ago. We're gonna screw you now for every dime we can. We're gonna raise prices on you every quarter. We're gonna make 80% operating margins in what Harry would call a commodity, 'cause we know that two years from now you're gonna screw us." And it's just super fun to watch, 'cause they're, like, literally adjacent supply chains benefiting from the same kind of broad trends on AI, and one of them is just a super long-term oriented one with a single player at every level. And just once you get to three players, it's just brutal. So fun to, fun to watch. I mean, there's no action from it. It's like, unless you're trading DRAM, which is up on the day, which is, today is Tuesday, and, but who knows down on the month. It's kind of a crazy way to live, but just an interesting dynamic. And wh- when that, uh, the big aha for me is when that pricing breaks, it'll be brutal to the downside, but maybe that's a year, two years from now.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:24:11

        CoreWeave is just depressed for a long ass time, huh? Jeez.

    16. RORory O’Driscoll1:24:16

        Yeah. I mean, well, partly, I mean, one of the things no one ever says is the fact that memory prices are, the cost of building the product you're trying to build has gone up by 2X because the suppliers are charging you more, right? So it's getting more expensive to build stuff, and then, you know, obviously they have the big OpenAI commitment, and, you know, at some point people get worried about that. And also, I think there's an element of once you're public for a while, things kinda, gravity takes over and you start thinking, "What is this company?" It's still, you know, I think attractively valued on a sales multiple basis.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:24:51

        I'm, I don't, I don't understand why Kimi and why the open models don't make Nvidia a little bit more elevated. I mean, Jesus, I'm, like, just looking at my Nvidia position going, "How long are you gonna stay flat for?"

    18. RORory O’Driscoll1:25:02

        I think that what's happened there, it's interesting, 'cause again, it, it, I'm, it boils, I mean, I've been thinking about, it boils back to the same big question. I mean, Nvidia got this massive step up over the last, you know, three years, you know, the, the ChatGPT step up to plus or minus 200 bucks a share, right? And if you look at their projections for the next two or three years, they're basically saying, you know, CapEx, which exploded from, you know, 100, 150 billion to 700 billion, growing much more slowly over the next three to four years. So it's basically a, we had a one-off step up, and now it's gonna continue, but not amazing growth, right? And, you know, one of three things gonna happen. If, if it, it, it, if CapEx stays elevated but doesn't double and double again, stock stays roughly where it is and it grows into that valuation. If there's another uplift like the Claude lift that happened at the start of this year, you'll get your step, you'll get your next acceleration, Harry. And if there's any kind of slowdown, then even this valuation will look crazy. And it's kinda in that middle until you get a signal either way. I mean, I think Gavin Baker had a very interesting q- term. He said, cr- I think it was something like cross-sectional comparisons. I can't remember the exact phrase. He was basically saying, whatever assumptions you make to value Nvidia about the future of, to a rounding error, you should make roughly the same assumptions in valuing the DRAM providers, in valuing all the other beneficiaries of that, right? And, you know, a- and I think what happened is Nvidia got the step up first, and then every, all the bottleneck investors suddenly realized, oh my God, if Nvidia's gonna spend, if they're gonna spend $400 million with Nvidia or $300 million with Nvid- billion with Nvidia, they're gonna spend $300 billion with memory and all the other bits and pieces. And all those guys like SanDisk kinda popped up in the last 12 months when Nvidia, as you say, plus or minus, has been in that kinda 180 to 210 range. And now everyone's at the level that says, "Okay, let's see the next card." Going back to this first sentence, the only thing that matters is the OpenAI and Anthropic growth rate in '26 and '27.

    19. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:01

        I, I love that as a way to finish. You know what we did miss though, Jason, from this episode? We missed, like, a Shakespeare quote from Rory.

    20. RORory O’Driscoll1:27:09

        Mm.

    21. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:09

        Do you remember last week, Rory came out-

    22. RORory O’Driscoll1:27:11

        No, we had Dylan

    23. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:11

        ...with a quote. You don't have one for us, Shake-

    24. RORory O’Driscoll1:27:14

        It wasn't Shakespeare, I think. It wasn't Shakespeare.

    25. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:16

        No, no, it was, it was another intellect. Um, uh. [laughs]

    26. JLJason Lemkin1:27:20

        You have something, Rory? You got anything from The Odyssey? That would be great.

    27. RORory O’Driscoll1:27:23

        The Odyssey. Ah.

    28. JLJason Lemkin1:27:23

        I need a good one from The Odyssey.

    29. RORory O’Driscoll1:27:24

        No, I, I, I'm, I'm actually just really looking forward to seeing it, you know? Right?

Episode duration: 1:27:38