Podcast appearances and mentions of Brian Armstrong

Join Danny, Molly, Zakk and Dave for industry-led opinions on important Bitcoin stories from the week.This week's topics:00:00 - Intro02:54 - IMF says El Salvador to make efforts to stop Bitcoin buys08:19 - Reform UK now accepts donations in cryptocurrency13:33 - Paris Saint Germain announces Bitcoin treasury reserve16:15 - Brian Armstrong: "Bitcoin will take over as reserve currency if US doesn't reduce deficit"22:00 - Meta shareholders vote to not buy Bitcoin25:15 - CoinCorner News: Bitcoin Golf Day30:46 - Dear Dave: Is the Bolt Card now referenced in Guinness World Records?34:30 - Dear Dave: Is Nigel Farage's SBR announcement enough to win over the plebs?38:10 - Dear Dave: Will Dave be keeping his Trump Coin in the Trump Wallet?Britcoiners is a Bitcoin podcast by CoinCorner (https://www.coincorner.com) - a global leader in Bitcoin and Lightning services.Join our Telegram:https://t.me/britcoinersFollow Britcoiners on X:https://x.com/britcoinersFollow CoinCorner on X:https://x.com/coincorner#coincorner #britcoiners #bitcoin #bitcoinpodcast #bitcoinnews

Eric Yuan turned a simple belief into Zoom, the platform that kept the world moving through a once-in-a-century shutdown and redefined modern work. On this episode of Grit, the Zoom CEO shares why velocity beats size, how a family-first ethos powered his leadership during COVID, and why the coming wave of AI dwarfs the original internet boom. He details how he's refreshing Zoom's culture for 7,500 people, opting for virtual deal calls over in person meetings, settling into life as an empty-nester, and keeping Zoom nimble enough to outpace Big Tech and the next wave of AI startups.Guest: Eric S. Yuan, Founder & CEO of ZoomChapters: 00:00 Trailer00:44 Introduction01:47 Walking with swagger03:48 Extremely exciting moment10:05 Classic innovators' dilemma12:59 Laser-focused bandwidth17:56 Family first: lead by example22:09 Everybody was doing their road shows25:34 The entire world was dependent28:04 Community care31:57 Valuation and a co-founder35:17 A lot of unhappy days39:25 Building Zoom for consumers46:57 Holograms?52:01 Home53:23 Huge competition, high velocity1:00:33 Where companies get wrong1:04:52 Giving back1:13:12 Who Zoom is hiring1:13:24 What “grit” means to Eric1:14:24 OutroMentioned in this episode: Webex by Cisco, Glean, Apple, HP, Netscape, Yahoo, Brian Armstrong, Emilie Choi, Coinbase, New Limit, Elon Musk, Windy Hill, Magic Leap, Rony Abovitz, Jony Ive, OpenAI ChatGPT, Bill McDermott, ServiceNow, Carl EschenbachLinks:Connect with EricXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comLearn more about Kleiner Perkins

In this episode, Kaila and Kyle discuss the viral Steve Madden interview and debate whether CEOs and corporations should be expressing their political views, as well as how to navigate politics in the workplace. 00:00 Intro 01:24 Steve Madden's viral Cutting Room Floor interview 06:26 Lulu Cheng Meservey on “going direct” as a business leader 07:29 Stats on how different generations feel about companies voicing their political beliefs 09:53 Ben & Jerry's vs. Target 15:07 Brian Armstrong's “mission-driven company” blog post 21:31 How should you as an employee react to your CEO's public political statements? 27:23 Should you share your own political beliefs at work? 35:49 Kaila's work rant Want to get all of Kaila & Kyle's career resources? Subscribe to Per My Last Email: https://www.permylastemailshow.com/  Watch Per My Last Email on YouTube:   @PerMYLastEmailShow Follow Per My Last Email Instagram: @permylastemailshow TikTok: @permylastemailshow Twitter: @permylast_email Have a question for us? Send us an email or voice note to permylastemail@morningbrew.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Each week on Per My Last Email, Morning Brew's resident career experts Kaila and Kyle – whose careers have collectively spanned the corporate, government, nonprofit and startup sectors – debate the trickiest challenges in work life, and share tactics on how to overcome them. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The future of AI needs a new internet. Coinbase is laying the foundation. In this episode of The Index, host Alex Kehaya talks with Nemil Dalal, Head of Coinbase's Developer Program, about how Coinbase is building crypto-native infrastructure to power the next generation of applications, starting with autonomous AI agents.Nemil shares his background in crypto, from meeting Brian Armstrong at Y Combinator to helping scale USDC from $10 million to $1 billion in market cap. Today, he's focused on making blockchain development more accessible by reducing friction around payments, APIs, and onboarding.A key part of that effort is X402—Coinbase's implementation of the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code. X402 allows AI agents and applications to autonomously pay for API access using cryptocurrency, without the need for API keys, credit cards, or manual account setup.We break down how X402 works under the hood:API requests return a 402 response when payment is requiredAgents can immediately respond with a signed crypto transaction to unlock accessJust one line of JavaScript is needed to enable itThis simple standard opens the door to a wide range of use cases—from AI agents accessing paid services to developers integrating crypto-powered paywalls with minimal overhead.If you're building in Web3, working with AI, or developing APIs, this episode offers a practical look at how Coinbase is creating tools that make decentralized development more seamless and scalable.

Over the past two decades, Bret Taylor has quietly helped shape the arc of Silicon Valley.From co-creating Google Maps to steering Facebook, Salesforce, and OpenAI, he's been behind some of the most consequential products in tech. Now, with his new company Sierra, he's starting from zero—again.In this conversation, Bret opens up about how founders navigate identity, why the best ideas often come from everyday friction, and how staying relentlessly focused can unlock real momentum in AI.Guest: Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of SierraChapters:00:00 Trailer00:49 Introduction01:57 Saving OpenAI09:15 Overwhelming yet capable of a lot13:36 Father and founder16:49 History is written by the victors22:13 How you price matters35:58 Stickiest piece of software49:48 The first realtime social network55:34 Facebook CTO who rewrote Google Maps1:02:10 Least known, most impressive1:11:39 The best way to predict the future1:16:22 Most personally passionate1:21:22 Currency of reputation1:27:17 Away from work1:28:35 Who Sierra is hiring1:28:58 What “grit” means to Bret1:29:18 OutroMentioned in this episode: Google Maps, Salesforce, OpenAI ChatGPT, Meta Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, Marissa Mayer, Excite, MSN, AltaVista, Amazon, Harvey, Airbnb, Coinbase, Apple, John Doerr, Cursor, Codeium Windsurf, Perplexity, xAI, Kleenex, Amazon Web Services (AWS), FriendFeed, Tumblr, Kevin Gibbs, Google Maps, Yelp, Trulia, iOS App Store, Blackberry, Facebook Messenger, Marvel Avengers, Slack, Quip, Leonardo da Vinci, Clay Bavor, Microsoft, Eric Schmidt, Alan Kay, Brian Armstrong, Brian Chesky, Shopify, SiriusXM, Patrick CollisonLinks:Connect with Bret TaylorXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comLearn more about Kleiner Perkins

In this episode, Jon Grinnell joins Jarrett Carpenter to dive into the rapidly evolving world of cryptocurrency and digital finance. They break down Bitcoin and Ethereum's price trends, the growing influence of stablecoins, and what a future without traditional banks might look like. The conversation takes a provocative turn with an in-depth look at the Worldcoin project—its bold vision for universal basic income, global identity verification, and the ethical dilemmas it raises.They also explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping crypto, trust, and digital identity. As bots and automation blur the lines between human and machine, Jarrett and Jon discuss the urgent need for innovative tools to verify humanity in an increasingly AI-driven world. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of crypto, AI, and the future of financial sovereignty—especially in emerging markets where technology adoption has the power to redefine opportunity.Watch on YouTube - https://youtu.be/nSGFHsq4DaMEPISODE CHAPTERS00:00 - Episode Intro00:09 - Jon Is Back On The Pod01:00 - Jarrett Has Joined Blockworks - FUTURE10 for 10% off Permissionless - https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless-iv02:13 - Bitcoin Is PUMPING!03:15 - Will The ETH / BTC Chart Grow Wider Or Revert Back To Older Trends? (Jon Is BULLISH On ETH)08:08 - Ethereum's The Future Of Decentralized Finance08:51 - Ethereum Is A Mullet12:20 - Coinbase Bitcoin Loans Via Morpho Are On Ethereum15:00 - US Crypto Sentiment Has Shifted A Ton In Last 6 Months16:00 - The Future Of Stablecoins (USDC & USDT)17:07 - USDC On Base Is TOO CLEAN - https://youtu.be/flq1bxH9Lqo?si=2DKZFqes5BtZ-GAF18:48 - Brian Armstrong's Crypto Vision Is Here20:22 - Use Cases For Stablecoins = Sending Money Globally (Overseas)20:55 - The Future Of Crypto & Social Media21:48 - Venmo & CashApp Are Just Middlemen Soon To Be Replaced24:08 - What Does The World Look Like Without Banks?26:18 - Will Crypto Follow The Internet's Ease-Of-Use Trajectory?27:30 - What Are The Future Signals For Crypto?28:28 - ZK Proof Identity & Acct Abstraction Is The Future Of Crypto29:50 - Is WorldCoin Good Or Bad? Is It The Future?46:00 - Should Coinbase Replace Its Customer Success Employees With AI?53:55 - Crypto Content Creators Leaving Every Halving54:45 - AI's New Video Upgrades Are Wild59:20 - We All Need To Protect Ourselves Against AI Ransom Videos01:04:42 - Stay Curious To Learn About Tomorrow's TechnologyJon's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jongrinnellsf/Jon on X - https://x.com/jkg_ethFuture Signal is a podcast hosted and produced by Jarrett Carpenter that explores tomorrow's tech today.All of Future Signal's content is not financial advice but rather edu-tainment. All of our episodes are available on YT as well as wherever you listen to podcasts.Please follow us on social media and check out our website:X - https://www.twitter.com/futuresignalxyzInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/futuresignalxyz/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/futuresignalxyzLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-signal-xyz/Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/futuresignalpodFor more info on the podcast, please check out https://www.futuresignal.xyz/To learn more about Future Signal's Host - https://www.jarrettcarpenter.com/

Momo and Ziya break down what went wrong at Coinbase, who's to blame, and what needs to change—fast.00:00 – Intro00:40 – Brian Armstrong Refuses to Say “Bitcoin”02:23 – Just How Bad Was the Coinbase Data Breach?03:26 – Brian Armstrong's Cold Response to the Breach04:38 – The Alarming Power of Coinbase Support Agents07:15 – What Momo Learned Working Inside a Social Media Company09:53 – The Hidden Dangers of KYC Nobody Talks About13:25 – KYC Fails to Protect Law-Abiding Citizens20:38 – How Momo Found Out About the Coinbase Hack (It's Funny!)22:38 – Your Data's Already Out There – Exploited by Scammers25:10 – Mark Cuban's Seed Phrase Gets Stolen28:32 – Real-World Attack on Two Women in Paris29:22 – A Growing List of Physical Bitcoin Attacks30:22 – The Psychopath Who Pulled a Deadly Prank on Hal Finney33:48 – What Exactly Got Leaked in the Coinbase Hack?36:44 – How Coinbase Is Spinning the Truth39:07 – Will Coinbase Actually Compensate Its Users?42:14 – Why Coinbase Offered a Bounty Instead of Paying the Ransom---

En el Radar Empresarial de hoy analizamos la salida a Bolsa de Coinbase: la mayor empresa de criptomonedas del mundo se estrena hoy en el S&P 500. Esto es un hito dentro del mundo cripto ya que es la primera compañía de este mundillo en entrar en el Standard and Poor's. La noticia hizo que el pasado 13 de mayo sus acciones subieran un 24%. Lejos eso sí, quedan sus máximos de 340 dólares, en plena fiebre por los cripto activos que desató la victoria de Donald Trump. De hecho, su entrada se puede entender desde los cambios desatados por la Administración Trump: con él se produjo la llegada de Paul Atkins. La Comisión de Bolsa y Valores siempre había sido muy reacia a la incorporación de empresas cripto a la Bolsa y sobre ellas siempre pendía una regulación que muchas consideraban como “hostil”. La llegada de Atkins trae un soplo de aire fresco a estas compañías. De hecho, empresas como Gemini, Bit Go o el exchange Kraken se están preparando para su salida a Bolsa este año. Las malas noticias le han llegado a Coinbase en forma de ciberseguridad. El jueves un grupo de hackers sobornaron a empleados de atención al cliente para sacar información para conseguir datos de los usuarios de la empresa. Ahora los piratas informáticos exigen 20 millones de dólares para que los datos de más de 10.000 usuarios no salgan a la luz. Tal y como le dijo la empresa a la Comisión de Bolsa y Valores el ataque le podría costar entre 150 y 400 millones de euros. Brian Armstrong. Mayo ha sido un mes muy movido para la compañía, ya que a principios de mes anunció la compra del grupo dubaití Deribit por 2.900 millones de dólares. Es la mayor operación realizada en el mercado digital. Greg Tusar, director de producto institucional de Coinbase, afirmaba entonces que “las criptomonedas están a punto de experimentar una expansión significativa”. Coinbase es una plataforma de comercio de criptomonedas con sede en San Francisco, California. Gestiona activos digitales en 190 países en todo el mundo. La compañía fue fundada en 2012 por Brian Armstrong y Fred Ehrsam y solo dos años después la plataforma creció a un millón de usuarios. Uno de sus problemas más recurrentes es también bastante irónico: los usuarios siempre se han quejado del departamento de Aten

At Stripe's Sessions conference this week, Mark Zuckerberg pitched what he calls the “ultimate business machine”: a fully automated, end-to-end AI ad engine promising to replace agencies, creatives, and media buyers. You just need to connect your bank account first.  Zuckerberg claims this could be one of the most valuable AI systems ever built, generating thousands of image ads and testing them in real time, but it raises a bigger question: is this the future of advertising, or just another wave of AI slop flooding your feed? Today, on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff and Anthony Ha are unpacking why Zuckerberg's vision could be a marketer's dream or creative agency's worst nightmare, and what else caught our eye in tech this week. Listen to the full episode to hear about: How Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro managed to beat Pokémon Blue. Max was unimpressed, but the Equity crew thinks gamifying AI benchmarks might be the way to go. The countertop robot that handles some parts of cooking for you, with emphasis on some Uber's continued push into autonomous vehicles and what Waymo's doing in the mix A new venture from Brian Armstrong that just raised $130 million to develop cutting-edge age-reversing treatments, and who else is using AI to help us live forever Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned! Equity is TechCrunch's flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

47e6GvjL4in5Zy5vVHMb9PQtGXQAcFvWSCQn2fuwDYZoZRk3oFjefr51WBNDGG9EjF1YDavg7pwGDFSAVWC5K42CBcLLv5U OR DONATE HERE: https://www.monerotalk.live/donate LINKS: https://x.com/GergelyGombai TIMESTAMPS (00:00:00) Monerotopia Introduction. (00:11:20) Monerotopia Price Report Segment w/ Bawdyanarchist. (01:03:11) Monerotopia News Segment w/ Tony. (01:03:54) South Korea might demand personal wallet reports. (01:04:50) Lotte world tower mines XMR? (01:05:28) Retoswap's monthly XMR volume. (01:06:03) Hey Alexa, where is my privacy? (01:08:25) Meta and personalized ads for UK. (01:10:59) US treasury removes sanctions on ETH mixer. (01:12:34) Tornado cash addresses removed. (01:15:05) Brian Armstrong on privacy. (01:19:57) trump's address at the Digital Assets Summit. (01:38:05) Monerotopia Guest Segment w/ ComradeBlin (01:54:35) Monerotopia Viewers on Stage Segment. (02:59:38) Monerotopia Finalization. NEWS SEGMENT LINKS: US treasury removes sanctions on ETH mixer: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/s/x41fQXHWfh OFAC removes tornado cash contract addresses: https://x.com/jpthor/status/1903106555643564403?s=46&t=mVZ0A2C1bwwnAvgawJjlw Tornado cash addresses removed: https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20250321 South Korea might demand personal wallet reports: https://it.chosun.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=2023092136381 Lotte world tower mines XMR?: https://x.com/jb0x/status/1901242842791768243?s=46&t=mVZ0A2C1bwwnAvgawJjlw Retoswap's monthly XMR volume: https://x.com/retoswap/status/1902694299361304626?s=46&t=mVZ0A2C1bwwnAvgawJjlw Trump's address at the Digital Assets Summit: https://x.com/bitcoinmagazine/status/1902739072671498557?s=46&t=mVZ0A2C1bwwnAvgawJjlw Trump and dollar backed stablecoins: https://x.com/l0lal33tz/status/1902750576422551574?s=46&t=mVZ0A2C1bwwnAvgawJjlw Brian Armstrong on privacy: https://x.com/brianarmstrong/status/1903111218086441413?s=46&t=mVZ0A2C1bwwnAvgawJjlw Where is XMR Brian?: https://x.com/douglastuman/status/1903456476363972964?s=46&t=mVZ0A2C1bwwnAvgawJjlw Hey Alexa, where is my privacy?: https://www.cnet.com/home/security/amazon-is-canceling-this-alexa-privacy-feature-on-march-28-should-you-worry/ Meta and personalized ads for UK: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/22/meta-confirms-it-is-considering-charging-uk-users-for-ad-free-version Michael Saylor on BTC's future: https://x.com/saylordocs/status/1903461791872716968?s=46&t=mVZ0A2C1bwwnAvgawJjlw SPONSORS: PRICE REPORT: https://exolix.com/ GUEST SEGMENT: https://cakewallet.com & https://monero.com NEWS SEGMENT: https://www.wizardswap.io Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE! The more subscribers, the more we can help Monero grow! XMRtopia TELEGRAM: https://t.me/monerotopia XMRtopia MATRIX: https://matrix.to/#/%23monerotopia%3Amonero.social ODYSEE: https://bit.ly/3bMaFtE WEBSITE: monerotopia.com CONTACT: monerotopia@protonmail.com MASTADON: @Monerotopia@mastodon.social MONERO.TOWN https://monero.town/u/monerotopia Get Social with us: X: https://twitter.com/monerotopia INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/monerotopia DOUGLAS: https://twitter.com/douglastuman SUNITA: https://twitter.com/sunchakr TUX: https://twitter.com/tuxpizza

Today on Upstream, we're airing Erik Torenberg's conversation with Jon Askonas. They explore the emerging coalition between MAGA supporters and Silicon Valley tech leaders, examines the underlying political realignment, the tensions and fault lines within this coalition, and the potential future conflicts surrounding issues like immigration and transhumanism. This episode originally aired on Moment Zen (February 22, 2025) —

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner break down the biggest stories in crypto. This week, we're joined by special guest Laura Shin to dissect Trump's Strategic Crypto Reserve fiasco. Why did he name-drop XRP and Cardano first? Was this real policy or just a market pump? Meanwhile, Crypto Twitter is melting down over Trump's crypto summit guest list—who made the cut, and who got snubbed? Plus, another SEC lawsuit bites the dust, and memecoins look deader than ever. Let's get into it. Show highlights

Have you been involved in another week of absolute crypto chaos? Episode 103 is packed with wild headlines—Alexis Ohanian wants to put TikTok on-chain, Dogecoin just got the ETF green light, and the SEC is suddenly not interested in Yuga Labs anymore. Meanwhile, Trump's late-night tweets are sending Bitcoin and Ethereum on a ride wilder than a meme stock rally. Is this market manipulation at its finest, or just another day in the digital asset circus? We break it all down—strategic reserves, power plays, and why Brian Armstrong is out here acting like the only adult in the room. Grab a drink, this one's a trip.

Unfiltered Chat – Weekly Crypto, Blockchain & AI

Unfiltered Chat – AI Review of the Conversation

Have you ever gone on the internet and stumbled onto this combo of words, or perhaps non-words?: “Dogecoin.” “Shiba Inu.” “Hawkcoin.” “Bored Ape NFT.” If that sounded like gibberish, don't worry—we'll explain. And also, time to start learning, because these terms come out of a new financial ecosystem—the world of crypto, a market that started 15 years ago and is now worth about $3.3 trillion. This new world has caught the attention of none other than President Donald Trump. Since coming to office, Trump has appointed a crypto czar and floated the idea of a national crypto stockpile. And shortly Trump took office, he launched his own meme coin—as did Melania. Trump's coin has reportedly generated $100 million in trading fees so far. And to top it all off, Trump is taking calls from the biggest names in the business. One of whom is our guest today—Brian Armstrong. Brian is a 42-year-old San Jose native who changed the nature of commerce not only in America but all over the world. He co-founded a cryptocurrency platform called Coinbase in 2012. Now, it's the largest crypto exchange in the US. To some, he's doing something as revolutionary as building rocket ships to Mars. To others, he's growing an industry riddled with scammers, grifters, and criminals. Armstrong says those stories are the sideshow and that Bitcoin—or perhaps another cryptocurrency—will prove itself to be as essential as the dollar. Today on Honestly, Bari asks Brian why he thinks crypto is the way of the future, how he navigates eager regulators, why he's been so politically active, how MAGA's "America First" ethos gets along with the borderless, decentralized crypto zeitgeist, and if crypto is really as dangerous as some make it out to be. We also talk about the DOGE, his recent meeting with Trump, and how he once stuck his neck out against the far-left mob. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Get $10 for free when you trade $100+ with code HONESTLY: www.Kalshi.com/Honestly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The makeover of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission appears to be well underway following news that the agency plans to dismiss its years-long case against Coinbase. Guest: Tim Warren, Host of Investing BrozInvesting Broz Youtube ➜ ‪‪https://www.youtube.com/@investingbrozFollow on Twitter ➜ @tims_ta  ~This episode is sponsored by iTrust Capital~iTrustCapital | Get $100 Funding Reward + No Monthly Fees when you sign up using our custom link! ➜ https://bit.ly/iTrustPaul00:00 Intro00:16 Sponsor: iTrust Capital01:43  Brian Armstrong talks Coinbase win04:37 Bitcoin $108K next?09:22 ByBit hack dumps ETH13:42 Solana users decline17:54 SOL vs ETH chart19:00 XRP ETF countdown begins22:33 Why isn't DOGE flying?26:44 AVAX... not looking good29:51 Poly-GONE32:37 Is Tim Bullish?33:30 Outro#Crypto #Bitcoin #ethereum~Coinbase v. SEC Over!

Erik Torenberg and Jon Askonas talk about the emerging political realignment in tech, specifically how Silicon Valley has shifted away from Democrats. They discuss the "tech right," its relationship with MAGA and "MAHA" (Make America Healthy Again) movements, potential tensions within this new coalition, and how Democrats might respond to their 2024 electoral defeat. Check out the interviews Erik mentions in this episode: Ezra Klein on Supply-side Progressivism, Polarization, and What Silicon Valley Misses About Politics: https://open.spotify.com/episode/36vTPPcpisMVXSgq9bnj1w The Future of Crypto with Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1EeTFGKxYuDojR5kvqpCyt —

Welcome to Crypto Today with Connor Sephton — your easy-to-understand look at the top stories.In today's episode: an interesting theory on why Bitcoin is flat as a pancake — as XRP rallies after an ETF breakthrough.Coinbase profits surge as Brian Armstrong predicts mass adoption by 2030.GameStop hints it may start investing in Bitcoin.And NFT marketplace OpenSea confirms it's launching its own token.Give our show a follow wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on X: @ConnorSephton and @CryptoTodayPod.

If you're in SF, join us tomorrow for a fun meetup at CodeGen Night!If you're in NYC, join us for AI Engineer Summit! The Agent Engineering track is now sold out, but 25 tickets remain for AI Leadership and 5 tickets for the workshops. You can see the full schedule of speakers and workshops at https://ai.engineer!It's exceedingly hard to introduce someone like Bret Taylor. We could recite his Wikipedia page, or his extensive work history through Silicon Valley's greatest companies, but everyone else already does that.As a podcast by AI engineers for AI engineers, we had the opportunity to do something a little different. We wanted to dig into what Bret sees from his vantage point at the top of our industry for the last 2 decades, and how that explains the rise of the AI Architect at Sierra, the leading conversational AI/CX platform.“Across our customer base, we are seeing a new role emerge - the role of the AI architect. These leaders are responsible for helping define, manage and evolve their company's AI agent over time. They come from a variety of both technical and business backgrounds, and we think that every company will have one or many AI architects managing their AI agent and related experience.”In our conversation, Bret Taylor confirms the Paul Buchheit legend that he rewrote Google Maps in a weekend, armed with only the help of a then-nascent Google Closure Compiler and no other modern tooling. But what we find remarkable is that he was the PM of Maps, not an engineer, though of course he still identifies as one. We find this theme recurring throughout Bret's career and worldview. We think it is plain as day that AI leadership will have to be hands-on and technical, especially when the ground is shifting as quickly as it is today:“There's a lot of power in combining product and engineering into as few people as possible… few great things have been created by committee.”“If engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be small teams who deeply understand the customer need that they're solving, who have a maniacal focus on outcomes.”“And I think the reason why is if you look at like software as a service five years ago, maybe you can have a separation of product and engineering because most software as a service created five years ago. I wouldn't say there's like a lot of technological breakthroughs required for most business applications. And if you're making expense reporting software or whatever, it's useful… You kind of know how databases work, how to build auto scaling with your AWS cluster, whatever, you know, it's just, you're just applying best practices to yet another problem. "When you have areas like the early days of mobile development or the early days of interactive web applications, which I think Google Maps and Gmail represent, or now AI agents, you're in this constant conversation with what the requirements of your customers and stakeholders are and all the different people interacting with it and the capabilities of the technology. And it's almost impossible to specify the requirements of a product when you're not sure of the limitations of the technology itself.”This is the first time the difference between technical leadership for “normal” software and for “AI” software was articulated this clearly for us, and we'll be thinking a lot about this going forward. We left a lot of nuggets in the conversation, so we hope you'll just dive in with us (and thank Bret for joining the pod!)Timestamps* 00:00:02 Introductions and Bret Taylor's background* 00:01:23 Bret's experience at Stanford and the dot-com era* 00:04:04 The story of rewriting Google Maps backend* 00:11:06 Early days of interactive web applications at Google* 00:15:26 Discussion on product management and engineering roles* 00:21:00 AI and the future of software development* 00:26:42 Bret's approach to identifying customer needs and building AI companies* 00:32:09 The evolution of business models in the AI era* 00:41:00 The future of programming languages and software development* 00:49:38 Challenges in precisely communicating human intent to machines* 00:56:44 Discussion on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its impact* 01:08:51 The future of agent-to-agent communication* 01:14:03 Bret's involvement in the OpenAI leadership crisis* 01:22:11 OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft* 01:23:23 OpenAI's mission and priorities* 01:27:40 Bret's guiding principles for career choices* 01:29:12 Brief discussion on pasta-making* 01:30:47 How Bret keeps up with AI developments* 01:32:15 Exciting research directions in AI* 01:35:19 Closing remarks and hiring at Sierra Transcript[00:02:05] Introduction and Guest Welcome[00:02:05] Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co host swyx, founder of smol.ai.[00:02:17] swyx: Hey, and today we're super excited to have Bret Taylor join us. Welcome. Thanks for having me. It's a little unreal to have you in the studio.[00:02:25] swyx: I've read about you so much over the years, like even before. Open AI effectively. I mean, I use Google Maps to get here. So like, thank you for everything that you've done. Like, like your story history, like, you know, I think people can find out what your greatest hits have been.[00:02:40] Bret Taylor's Early Career and Education[00:02:40] swyx: How do you usually like to introduce yourself when, you know, you talk about, you summarize your career, like, how do you look at yourself?[00:02:47] Bret: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we, before we went on the mics here, we're talking about the audience for this podcast being more engineering. And I do think depending on the audience, I'll introduce myself differently because I've had a lot of [00:03:00] corporate and board roles. I probably self identify as an engineer more than anything else though.[00:03:04] Bret: So even when I was. Salesforce, I was coding on the weekends. So I think of myself as an engineer and then all the roles that I do in my career sort of start with that just because I do feel like engineering is sort of a mindset and how I approach most of my life. So I'm an engineer first and that's how I describe myself.[00:03:24] Bret: You majored in computer[00:03:25] swyx: science, like 1998. And, and I was high[00:03:28] Bret: school, actually my, my college degree was Oh, two undergrad. Oh, three masters. Right. That old.[00:03:33] swyx: Yeah. I mean, no, I was going, I was going like 1998 to 2003, but like engineering wasn't as, wasn't a thing back then. Like we didn't have the title of senior engineer, you know, kind of like, it was just.[00:03:44] swyx: You were a programmer, you were a developer, maybe. What was it like in Stanford? Like, what was that feeling like? You know, was it, were you feeling like on the cusp of a great computer revolution? Or was it just like a niche, you know, interest at the time?[00:03:57] Stanford and the Dot-Com Bubble[00:03:57] Bret: Well, I was at Stanford, as you said, from 1998 to [00:04:00] 2002.[00:04:02] Bret: 1998 was near the peak of the dot com bubble. So. This is back in the day where most people that they're coding in the computer lab, just because there was these sun microsystems, Unix boxes there that most of us had to do our assignments on. And every single day there was a. com like buying pizza for everybody.[00:04:20] Bret: I didn't have to like, I got. Free food, like my first two years of university and then the dot com bubble burst in the middle of my college career. And so by the end there was like tumbleweed going to the job fair, you know, it was like, cause it was hard to describe unless you were there at the time, the like level of hype and being a computer science major at Stanford was like, A thousand opportunities.[00:04:45] Bret: And then, and then when I left, it was like Microsoft, IBM.[00:04:49] Joining Google and Early Projects[00:04:49] Bret: And then the two startups that I applied to were VMware and Google. And I ended up going to Google in large part because a woman named Marissa Meyer, who had been a teaching [00:05:00] assistant when I was, what was called a section leader, which was like a junior teaching assistant kind of for one of the big interest.[00:05:05] Bret: Yes. Classes. She had gone there. And she was recruiting me and I knew her and it was sort of felt safe, you know, like, I don't know. I thought about it much, but it turned out to be a real blessing. I realized like, you know, you always want to think you'd pick Google if given the option, but no one knew at the time.[00:05:20] Bret: And I wonder if I'd graduated in like 1999 where I've been like, mom, I just got a job at pets. com. It's good. But you know, at the end I just didn't have any options. So I was like, do I want to go like make kernel software at VMware? Do I want to go build search at Google? And I chose Google. 50, 50 ball.[00:05:36] Bret: I'm not really a 50, 50 ball. So I feel very fortunate in retrospect that the economy collapsed because in some ways it forced me into like one of the greatest companies of all time, but I kind of lucked into it, I think.[00:05:47] The Google Maps Rewrite Story[00:05:47] Alessio: So the famous story about Google is that you rewrote the Google maps back in, in one week after the map quest quest maps acquisition, what was the story there?[00:05:57] Alessio: Is it. Actually true. Is it [00:06:00] being glorified? Like how, how did that come to be? And is there any detail that maybe Paul hasn't shared before?[00:06:06] Bret: It's largely true, but I'll give the color commentary. So it was actually the front end, not the back end, but it turns out for Google maps, the front end was sort of the hard part just because Google maps was.[00:06:17] Bret: Largely the first ish kind of really interactive web application, say first ish. I think Gmail certainly was though Gmail, probably a lot of people then who weren't engineers probably didn't appreciate its level of interactivity. It was just fast, but. Google maps, because you could drag the map and it was sort of graphical.[00:06:38] Bret: My, it really in the mainstream, I think, was it a map[00:06:41] swyx: quest back then that was, you had the arrows up and down, it[00:06:44] Bret: was up and down arrows. Each map was a single image and you just click left and then wait for a few seconds to the new map to let it was really small too, because generating a big image was kind of expensive on computers that day.[00:06:57] Bret: So Google maps was truly innovative in that [00:07:00] regard. The story on it. There was a small company called where two technologies started by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who are two of my closest friends now. They had made a windows app called expedition, which had beautiful maps. Even in 2000.[00:07:18] Bret: For whenever we acquired or sort of acquired their company, Windows software was not particularly fashionable, but they were really passionate about mapping and we had made a local search product that was kind of middling in terms of popularity, sort of like a yellow page of search product. So we wanted to really go into mapping.[00:07:36] Bret: We'd started working on it. Their small team seemed passionate about it. So we're like, come join us. We can build this together.[00:07:42] Technical Challenges and Innovations[00:07:42] Bret: It turned out to be a great blessing that they had built a windows app because you're less technically constrained when you're doing native code than you are building a web browser, particularly back then when there weren't really interactive web apps and it ended up.[00:07:56] Bret: Changing the level of quality that we [00:08:00] wanted to hit with the app because we were shooting for something that felt like a native windows application. So it was a really good fortune that we sort of, you know, their unusual technical choices turned out to be the greatest blessing. So we spent a lot of time basically saying, how can you make a interactive draggable map in a web browser?[00:08:18] Bret: How do you progressively load, you know, new map tiles, you know, as you're dragging even things like down in the weeds of the browser at the time, most browsers like Internet Explorer, which was dominant at the time would only load two images at a time from the same domain. So we ended up making our map tile servers have like.[00:08:37] Bret: Forty different subdomains so we could load maps and parallels like lots of hacks. I'm happy to go into as much as like[00:08:44] swyx: HTTP connections and stuff.[00:08:46] Bret: They just like, there was just maximum parallelism of two. And so if you had a map, set of map tiles, like eight of them, so So we just, we were down in the weeds of the browser anyway.[00:08:56] Bret: So it was lots of plumbing. I can, I know a lot more about browsers than [00:09:00] most people, but then by the end of it, it was fairly, it was a lot of duct tape on that code. If you've ever done an engineering project where you're not really sure the path from point A to point B, it's almost like. Building a house by building one room at a time.[00:09:14] Bret: The, there's not a lot of architectural cohesion at the end. And then we acquired a company called Keyhole, which became Google earth, which was like that three, it was a native windows app as well, separate app, great app, but with that, we got licenses to all this satellite imagery. And so in August of 2005, we added.[00:09:33] Bret: Satellite imagery to Google Maps, which added even more complexity in the code base. And then we decided we wanted to support Safari. There was no mobile phones yet. So Safari was this like nascent browser on, on the Mac. And it turns out there's like a lot of decisions behind the scenes, sort of inspired by this windows app, like heavy use of XML and XSLT and all these like.[00:09:54] Bret: Technologies that were like briefly fashionable in the early two thousands and everyone hates now for good [00:10:00] reason. And it turns out that all of the XML functionality and Internet Explorer wasn't supporting Safari. So people are like re implementing like XML parsers. And it was just like this like pile of s**t.[00:10:11] Bret: And I had to say a s**t on your part. Yeah, of[00:10:12] Alessio: course.[00:10:13] Bret: So. It went from this like beautifully elegant application that everyone was proud of to something that probably had hundreds of K of JavaScript, which sounds like nothing. Now we're talking like people have modems, you know, not all modems, but it was a big deal.[00:10:29] Bret: So it was like slow. It took a while to load and just, it wasn't like a great code base. Like everything was fragile. So I just got. Super frustrated by it. And then one weekend I did rewrite all of it. And at the time the word JSON hadn't been coined yet too, just to give you a sense. So it's all XML.[00:10:47] swyx: Yeah.[00:10:47] Bret: So we used what is now you would call JSON, but I just said like, let's use eval so that we can parse the data fast. And, and again, that's, it would literally as JSON, but at the time there was no name for it. So we [00:11:00] just said, let's. Pass on JavaScript from the server and eval it. And then somebody just refactored the whole thing.[00:11:05] Bret: And, and it wasn't like I was some genius. It was just like, you know, if you knew everything you wished you had known at the beginning and I knew all the functionality, cause I was the primary, one of the primary authors of the JavaScript. And I just like, I just drank a lot of coffee and just stayed up all weekend.[00:11:22] Bret: And then I, I guess I developed a bit of reputation and no one knew about this for a long time. And then Paul who created Gmail and I ended up starting a company with him too, after all of this told this on a podcast and now it's large, but it's largely true. I did rewrite it and it, my proudest thing.[00:11:38] Bret: And I think JavaScript people appreciate this. Like the un G zipped bundle size for all of Google maps. When I rewrote, it was 20 K G zipped. It was like much smaller for the entire application. It went down by like 10 X. So. What happened on Google? Google is a pretty mainstream company. And so like our usage is shot up because it turns out like it's faster.[00:11:57] Bret: Just being faster is worth a lot of [00:12:00] percentage points of growth at a scale of Google. So how[00:12:03] swyx: much modern tooling did you have? Like test suites no compilers.[00:12:07] Bret: Actually, that's not true. We did it one thing. So I actually think Google, I, you can. Download it. There's a, Google has a closure compiler, a closure compiler.[00:12:15] Bret: I don't know if anyone still uses it. It's gone. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of gone out of favor. Yeah. Well, even until recently it was better than most JavaScript minifiers because it was more like it did a lot more renaming of variables and things. Most people use ES build now just cause it's fast and closure compilers built on Java and super slow and stuff like that.[00:12:37] Bret: But, so we did have that, that was it. Okay.[00:12:39] The Evolution of Web Applications[00:12:39] Bret: So and that was treated internally, you know, it was a really interesting time at Google at the time because there's a lot of teams working on fairly advanced JavaScript when no one was. So Google suggest, which Kevin Gibbs was the tech lead for, was the first kind of type ahead, autocomplete, I believe in a web browser, and now it's just pervasive in search boxes that you sort of [00:13:00] see a type ahead there.[00:13:01] Bret: I mean, chat, dbt[00:13:01] swyx: just added it. It's kind of like a round trip.[00:13:03] Bret: Totally. No, it's now pervasive as a UI affordance, but that was like Kevin's 20 percent project. And then Gmail, Paul you know, he tells the story better than anyone, but he's like, you know, basically was scratching his own itch, but what was really neat about it is email, because it's such a productivity tool, just needed to be faster.[00:13:21] Bret: So, you know, he was scratching his own itch of just making more stuff work on the client side. And then we, because of Lars and Yen sort of like setting the bar of this windows app or like we need our maps to be draggable. So we ended up. Not only innovate in terms of having a big sync, what would be called a single page application today, but also all the graphical stuff you know, we were crashing Firefox, like it was going out of style because, you know, when you make a document object model with the idea that it's a document and then you layer on some JavaScript and then we're essentially abusing all of this, it just was running into code paths that were not.[00:13:56] Bret: Well, it's rotten, you know, at this time. And so it was [00:14:00] super fun. And, and, you know, in the building you had, so you had compilers, people helping minify JavaScript just practically, but there is a great engineering team. So they were like, that's why Closure Compiler is so good. It was like a. Person who actually knew about programming languages doing it, not just, you know, writing regular expressions.[00:14:17] Bret: And then the team that is now the Chrome team believe, and I, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm pretty sure Google is the main contributor to Firefox for a long time in terms of code. And a lot of browser people were there. So every time we would crash Firefox, we'd like walk up two floors and say like, what the hell is going on here?[00:14:35] Bret: And they would load their browser, like in a debugger. And we could like figure out exactly what was breaking. And you can't change the code, right? Cause it's the browser. It's like slow, right? I mean, slow to update. So, but we could figure out exactly where the bug was and then work around it in our JavaScript.[00:14:52] Bret: So it was just like new territory. Like so super, super fun time, just like a lot of, a lot of great engineers figuring out [00:15:00] new things. And And now, you know, the word, this term is no longer in fashion, but the word Ajax, which was asynchronous JavaScript and XML cause I'm telling you XML, but see the word XML there, to be fair, the way you made HTTP requests from a client to server was this.[00:15:18] Bret: Object called XML HTTP request because Microsoft and making Outlook web access back in the day made this and it turns out to have nothing to do with XML. It's just a way of making HTTP requests because XML was like the fashionable thing. It was like that was the way you, you know, you did it. But the JSON came out of that, you know, and then a lot of the best practices around building JavaScript applications is pre React.[00:15:44] Bret: I think React was probably the big conceptual step forward that we needed. Even my first social network after Google, we used a lot of like HTML injection and. Making real time updates was still very hand coded and it's really neat when you [00:16:00] see conceptual breakthroughs like react because it's, I just love those things where it's like obvious once you see it, but it's so not obvious until you do.[00:16:07] Bret: And actually, well, I'm sure we'll get into AI, but I, I sort of feel like we'll go through that evolution with AI agents as well that I feel like we're missing a lot of the core abstractions that I think in 10 years we'll be like, gosh, how'd you make agents? Before that, you know, but it was kind of that early days of web applications.[00:16:22] swyx: There's a lot of contenders for the reactive jobs of of AI, but no clear winner yet. I would say one thing I was there for, I mean, there's so much we can go into there. You just covered so much.[00:16:32] Product Management and Engineering Synergy[00:16:32] swyx: One thing I just, I just observe is that I think the early Google days had this interesting mix of PM and engineer, which I think you are, you didn't, you didn't wait for PM to tell you these are my, this is my PRD.[00:16:42] swyx: This is my requirements.[00:16:44] mix: Oh,[00:16:44] Bret: okay.[00:16:45] swyx: I wasn't technically a software engineer. I mean,[00:16:48] Bret: by title, obviously. Right, right, right.[00:16:51] swyx: It's like a blend. And I feel like these days, product is its own discipline and its own lore and own industry and engineering is its own thing. And there's this process [00:17:00] that happens and they're kind of separated, but you don't produce as good of a product as if they were the same person.[00:17:06] swyx: And I'm curious, you know, if, if that, if that sort of resonates in, in, in terms of like comparing early Google versus modern startups that you see out there,[00:17:16] Bret: I certainly like wear a lot of hats. So, you know, sort of biased in this, but I really agree that there's a lot of power and combining product design engineering into as few people as possible because, you know few great things have been created by committee, you know, and so.[00:17:33] Bret: If engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be small teams who deeply understand the customer need that they're solving, who have a. Maniacal focus on outcomes.[00:17:53] Bret: And I think the reason why it's, I think for some areas, if you look at like software as a service five years ago, maybe you can have a [00:18:00] separation of product and engineering because most software as a service created five years ago. I wouldn't say there's like a lot of like. Technological breakthroughs required for most, you know, business applications.[00:18:11] Bret: And if you're making expense reporting software or whatever, it's useful. I don't mean to be dismissive of expense reporting software, but you probably just want to understand like, what are the requirements of the finance department? What are the requirements of an individual file expense report? Okay.[00:18:25] Bret: Go implement that. And you kind of know how web applications are implemented. You kind of know how to. How databases work, how to build auto scaling with your AWS cluster, whatever, you know, it's just, you're just applying best practices to yet another problem when you have areas like the early days of mobile development or the early days of interactive web applications, which I think Google Maps and Gmail represent, or now AI agents, you're in this constant conversation with what the requirements of your customers and stakeholders are and all the different people interacting with it.[00:18:58] Bret: And the capabilities of the [00:19:00] technology. And it's almost impossible to specify the requirements of a product when you're not sure of the limitations of the technology itself. And that's why I use the word conversation. It's not literal. That's sort of funny to use that word in the age of conversational AI.[00:19:15] Bret: You're constantly sort of saying, like, ideally, you could sprinkle some magic AI pixie dust and solve all the world's problems, but it's not the way it works. And it turns out that actually, I'll just give an interesting example.[00:19:26] AI Agents and Modern Tooling[00:19:26] Bret: I think most people listening probably use co pilots to code like Cursor or Devon or Microsoft Copilot or whatever.[00:19:34] Bret: Most of those tools are, they're remarkable. I'm, I couldn't, you know, imagine development without them now, but they're not autonomous yet. Like I wouldn't let it just write most code without my interactively inspecting it. We just are somewhere between it's an amazing co pilot and it's an autonomous software engineer.[00:19:53] Bret: As a product manager, like your aspirations for what the product is are like kind of meaningful. But [00:20:00] if you're a product person, yeah, of course you'd say it should be autonomous. You should click a button and program should come out the other side. The requirements meaningless. Like what matters is like, what is based on the like very nuanced limitations of the technology.[00:20:14] Bret: What is it capable of? And then how do you maximize the leverage? It gives a software engineering team, given those very nuanced trade offs. Coupled with the fact that those nuanced trade offs are changing more rapidly than any technology in my memory, meaning every few months you'll have new models with new capabilities.[00:20:34] Bret: So how do you construct a product that can absorb those new capabilities as rapidly as possible as well? That requires such a combination of technical depth and understanding the customer that you really need more integration. Of product design and engineering. And so I think it's why with these big technology waves, I think startups have a bit of a leg up relative to incumbents because they [00:21:00] tend to be sort of more self actualized in terms of just like bringing those disciplines closer together.[00:21:06] Bret: And in particular, I think entrepreneurs, the proverbial full stack engineers, you know, have a leg up as well because. I think most breakthroughs happen when you have someone who can understand those extremely nuanced technical trade offs, have a vision for a product. And then in the process of building it, have that, as I said, like metaphorical conversation with the technology, right?[00:21:30] Bret: Gosh, I ran into a technical limit that I didn't expect. It's not just like changing that feature. You might need to refactor the whole product based on that. And I think that's, that it's particularly important right now. So I don't, you know, if you, if you're building a big ERP system, probably there's a great reason to have product and engineering.[00:21:51] Bret: I think in general, the disciplines are there for a reason. I think when you're dealing with something as nuanced as the like technologies, like large language models today, there's a ton of [00:22:00] advantage of having. Individuals or organizations that integrate the disciplines more formally.[00:22:05] Alessio: That makes a lot of sense.[00:22:06] Alessio: I've run a lot of engineering teams in the past, and I think the product versus engineering tension has always been more about effort than like whether or not the feature is buildable. But I think, yeah, today you see a lot more of like. Models actually cannot do that. And I think the most interesting thing is on the startup side, people don't yet know where a lot of the AI value is going to accrue.[00:22:26] Alessio: So you have this rush of people building frameworks, building infrastructure, layered things, but we don't really know the shape of the compute. I'm curious that Sierra, like how you thought about building an house, a lot of the tooling for evals or like just, you know, building the agents and all of that.[00:22:41] Alessio: Versus how you see some of the startup opportunities that is maybe still out there.[00:22:46] Bret: We build most of our tooling in house at Sierra, not all. It's, we don't, it's not like not invented here syndrome necessarily, though, maybe slightly guilty of that in some ways, but because we're trying to build a platform [00:23:00] that's in Dorian, you know, we really want to have control over our own destiny.[00:23:03] Bret: And you had made a comment earlier that like. We're still trying to figure out who like the reactive agents are and the jury is still out. I would argue it hasn't been created yet. I don't think the jury is still out to go use that metaphor. We're sort of in the jQuery era of agents, not the react era.[00:23:19] Bret: And, and that's like a throwback for people listening,[00:23:22] swyx: we shouldn't rush it. You know?[00:23:23] Bret: No, yeah, that's my point is. And so. Because we're trying to create an enduring company at Sierra that outlives us, you know, I'm not sure we want to like attach our cart to some like to a horse where it's not clear that like we've figured out and I actually want as a company, we're trying to enable just at a high level and I'll, I'll quickly go back to tech at Sierra, we help consumer brands build customer facing AI agents.[00:23:48] Bret: So. Everyone from Sonos to ADT home security to Sirius XM, you know, if you call them on the phone and AI will pick up with you, you know, chat with them on the Sirius XM homepage. It's an AI agent called Harmony [00:24:00] that they've built on our platform. We're what are the contours of what it means for someone to build an end to end complete customer experience with AI with conversational AI.[00:24:09] Bret: You know, we really want to dive into the deep end of, of all the trade offs to do it. You know, where do you use fine tuning? Where do you string models together? You know, where do you use reasoning? Where do you use generation? How do you use reasoning? How do you express the guardrails of an agentic process?[00:24:25] Bret: How do you impose determinism on a fundamentally non deterministic technology? There's just a lot of really like as an important design space. And I could sit here and tell you, we have the best approach. Every entrepreneur will, you know. But I hope that in two years, we look back at our platform and laugh at how naive we were, because that's the pace of change broadly.[00:24:45] Bret: If you talk about like the startup opportunities, I'm not wholly skeptical of tools companies, but I'm fairly skeptical. There's always an exception for every role, but I believe that certainly there's a big market for [00:25:00] frontier models, but largely for companies with huge CapEx budgets. So. Open AI and Microsoft's Anthropic and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud XAI, which is very well capitalized now, but I think the, the idea that a company can make money sort of pre training a foundation model is probably not true.[00:25:20] Bret: It's hard to, you're competing with just, you know, unreasonably large CapEx budgets. And I just like the cloud infrastructure market, I think will be largely there. I also really believe in the applications of AI. And I define that not as like building agents or things like that. I define it much more as like, you're actually solving a problem for a business.[00:25:40] Bret: So it's what Harvey is doing in legal profession or what cursor is doing for software engineering or what we're doing for customer experience and customer service. The reason I believe in that is I do think that in the age of AI, what's really interesting about software is it can actually complete a task.[00:25:56] Bret: It can actually do a job, which is very different than the value proposition of [00:26:00] software was to ancient history two years ago. And as a consequence, I think the way you build a solution and For a domain is very different than you would have before, which means that it's not obvious, like the incumbent incumbents have like a leg up, you know, necessarily, they certainly have some advantages, but there's just such a different form factor, you know, for providing a solution and it's just really valuable.[00:26:23] Bret: You know, it's. Like just think of how much money cursor is saving software engineering teams or the alternative, how much revenue it can produce tool making is really challenging. If you look at the cloud market, just as a analog, there are a lot of like interesting tools, companies, you know, Confluent, Monetized Kafka, Snowflake, Hortonworks, you know, there's a, there's a bunch of them.[00:26:48] Bret: A lot of them, you know, have that mix of sort of like like confluence or have the open source or open core or whatever you call it. I, I, I'm not an expert in this area. You know, I do think [00:27:00] that developers are fickle. I think that in the tool space, I probably like. Default towards open source being like the area that will win.[00:27:09] Bret: It's hard to build a company around this and then you end up with companies sort of built around open source to that can work. Don't get me wrong, but I just think that it's nowadays the tools are changing so rapidly that I'm like, not totally skeptical of tool makers, but I just think that open source will broadly win, but I think that the CapEx required for building frontier models is such that it will go to a handful of big companies.[00:27:33] Bret: And then I really believe in agents for specific domains which I think will, it's sort of the analog to software as a service in this new era. You know, it's like, if you just think of the cloud. You can lease a server. It's just a low level primitive, or you can buy an app like you know, Shopify or whatever.[00:27:51] Bret: And most people building a storefront would prefer Shopify over hand rolling their e commerce storefront. I think the same thing will be true of AI. So [00:28:00] I've. I tend to like, if I have a, like an entrepreneur asked me for advice, I'm like, you know, move up the stack as far as you can towards a customer need.[00:28:09] Bret: Broadly, but I, but it doesn't reduce my excitement about what is the reactive building agents kind of thing, just because it is, it is the right question to ask, but I think we'll probably play out probably an open source space more than anything else.[00:28:21] swyx: Yeah, and it's not a priority for you. There's a lot in there.[00:28:24] swyx: I'm kind of curious about your idea maze towards, there are many customer needs. You happen to identify customer experience as yours, but it could equally have been coding assistance or whatever. I think for some, I'm just kind of curious at the top down, how do you look at the world in terms of the potential problem space?[00:28:44] swyx: Because there are many people out there who are very smart and pick the wrong problem.[00:28:47] Bret: Yeah, that's a great question.[00:28:48] Future of Software Development[00:28:48] Bret: By the way, I would love to talk about the future of software, too, because despite the fact it didn't pick coding, I have a lot of that, but I can talk to I can answer your question, though, you know I think when a technology is as [00:29:00] cool as large language models.[00:29:02] Bret: You just see a lot of people starting from the technology and searching for a problem to solve. And I think it's why you see a lot of tools companies, because as a software engineer, you start building an app or a demo and you, you encounter some pain points. You're like,[00:29:17] swyx: a lot of[00:29:17] Bret: people are experiencing the same pain point.[00:29:19] Bret: What if I make it? That it's just very incremental. And you know, I always like to use the metaphor, like you can sell coffee beans, roasted coffee beans. You can add some value. You took coffee beans and you roasted them and roasted coffee beans largely, you know, are priced relative to the cost of the beans.[00:29:39] Bret: Or you can sell a latte and a latte. Is rarely priced directly like as a percentage of coffee bean prices. In fact, if you buy a latte at the airport, it's a captive audience. So it's a really expensive latte. And there's just a lot that goes into like. How much does a latte cost? And I bring it up because there's a supply chain from growing [00:30:00] coffee beans to roasting coffee beans to like, you know, you could make one at home or you could be in the airport and buy one and the margins of the company selling lattes in the airport is a lot higher than the, you know, people roasting the coffee beans and it's because you've actually solved a much more acute human problem in the airport.[00:30:19] Bret: And, and it's just worth a lot more to that person in that moment. It's kind of the way I think about technology too. It sounds funny to liken it to coffee beans, but you're selling tools on top of a large language model yet in some ways your market is big, but you're probably going to like be price compressed just because you're sort of a piece of infrastructure and then you have open source and all these other things competing with you naturally.[00:30:43] Bret: If you go and solve a really big business problem for somebody, that's actually like a meaningful business problem that AI facilitates, they will value it according to the value of that business problem. And so I actually feel like people should just stop. You're like, no, that's, that's [00:31:00] unfair. If you're searching for an idea of people, I, I love people trying things, even if, I mean, most of the, a lot of the greatest ideas have been things no one believed in.[00:31:07] Bret: So I like, if you're passionate about something, go do it. Like who am I to say, yeah, a hundred percent. Or Gmail, like Paul as far, I mean I, some of it's Laura at this point, but like Gmail is Paul's own email for a long time. , and then I amusingly and Paul can't correct me, I'm pretty sure he sent her in a link and like the first comment was like, this is really neat.[00:31:26] Bret: It would be great. It was not your email, but my own . I don't know if it's a true story. I'm pretty sure it's, yeah, I've read that before. So scratch your own niche. Fine. Like it depends on what your goal is. If you wanna do like a venture backed company, if its a. Passion project, f*****g passion, do it like don't listen to anybody.[00:31:41] Bret: In fact, but if you're trying to start, you know an enduring company, solve an important business problem. And I, and I do think that in the world of agents, the software industries has shifted where you're not just helping people more. People be more productive, but you're actually accomplishing tasks autonomously.[00:31:58] Bret: And as a consequence, I think the [00:32:00] addressable market has just greatly expanded just because software can actually do things now and actually accomplish tasks and how much is coding autocomplete worth. A fair amount. How much is the eventual, I'm certain we'll have it, the software agent that actually writes the code and delivers it to you, that's worth a lot.[00:32:20] Bret: And so, you know, I would just maybe look up from the large language models and start thinking about the economy and, you know, think from first principles. I don't wanna get too far afield, but just think about which parts of the economy. We'll benefit most from this intelligence and which parts can absorb it most easily.[00:32:38] Bret: And what would an agent in this space look like? Who's the customer of it is the technology feasible. And I would just start with these business problems more. And I think, you know, the best companies tend to have great engineers who happen to have great insight into a market. And it's that last part that I think some people.[00:32:56] Bret: Whether or not they have, it's like people start so much in the technology, they [00:33:00] lose the forest for the trees a little bit.[00:33:02] Alessio: How do you think about the model of still selling some sort of software versus selling more package labor? I feel like when people are selling the package labor, it's almost more stateless, you know, like it's easier to swap out if you're just putting an input and getting an output.[00:33:16] Alessio: If you think about coding, if there's no ID, you're just putting a prompt and getting back an app. It doesn't really matter. Who generates the app, you know, you have less of a buy in versus the platform you're building, I'm sure on the backend customers have to like put on their documentation and they have, you know, different workflows that they can tie in what's kind of like the line to draw there versus like going full where you're managed customer support team as a service outsource versus.[00:33:40] Alessio: This is the Sierra platform that you can build on. What was that decision? I'll sort of[00:33:44] Bret: like decouple the question in some ways, which is when you have something that's an agent, who is the person using it and what do they want to do with it? So let's just take your coding agent for a second. I will talk about Sierra as well.[00:33:59] Bret: Who's the [00:34:00] customer of a, an agent that actually produces software? Is it a software engineering manager? Is it a software engineer? And it's there, you know, intern so to speak. I don't know. I mean, we'll figure this out over the next few years. Like what is that? And is it generating code that you then review?[00:34:16] Bret: Is it generating code with a set of unit tests that pass, what is the actual. For lack of a better word contract, like, how do you know that it did what you wanted it to do? And then I would say like the product and the pricing, the packaging model sort of emerged from that. And I don't think the world's figured out.[00:34:33] Bret: I think it'll be different for every agent. You know, in our customer base, we do what's called outcome based pricing. So essentially every time the AI agent. Solves the problem or saves a customer or whatever it might be. There's a pre negotiated rate for that. We do that. Cause it's, we think that that's sort of the correct way agents, you know, should be packaged.[00:34:53] Bret: I look back at the history of like cloud software and notably the introduction of the browser, which led to [00:35:00] software being delivered in a browser, like Salesforce to. Famously invented sort of software as a service, which is both a technical delivery model through the browser, but also a business model, which is you subscribe to it rather than pay for a perpetual license.[00:35:13] Bret: Those two things are somewhat orthogonal, but not really. If you think about the idea of software running in a browser, that's hosted. Data center that you don't own, you sort of needed to change the business model because you don't, you can't really buy a perpetual license or something otherwise like, how do you afford making changes to it?[00:35:31] Bret: So it only worked when you were buying like a new version every year or whatever. So to some degree, but then the business model shift actually changed business as we know it, because now like. Things like Adobe Photoshop. Now you subscribe to rather than purchase. So it ended up where you had a technical shift and a business model shift that were very logically intertwined that actually the business model shift was turned out to be as significant as the technical as the shift.[00:35:59] Bret: And I think with [00:36:00] agents, because they actually accomplish a job, I do think that it doesn't make sense to me that you'd pay for the privilege of like. Using the software like that coding agent, like if it writes really bad code, like fire it, you know, I don't know what the right metaphor is like you should pay for a job.[00:36:17] Bret: Well done in my opinion. I mean, that's how you pay your software engineers, right? And[00:36:20] swyx: and well, not really. We paid to put them on salary and give them options and they vest over time. That's fair.[00:36:26] Bret: But my point is that you don't pay them for how many characters they write, which is sort of the token based, you know, whatever, like, There's a, that famous Apple story where we're like asking for a report of how many lines of code you wrote.[00:36:40] Bret: And one of the engineers showed up with like a negative number cause he had just like done a big refactoring. There was like a big F you to management who didn't understand how software is written. You know, my sense is like the traditional usage based or seat based thing. It's just going to look really antiquated.[00:36:55] Bret: Cause it's like asking your software engineer, how many lines of code did you write today? Like who cares? Like, cause [00:37:00] absolutely no correlation. So my old view is I don't think it's be different in every category, but I do think that that is the, if an agent is doing a job, you should, I think it properly incentivizes the maker of that agent and the customer of, of your pain for the job well done.[00:37:16] Bret: It's not always perfect to measure. It's hard to measure engineering productivity, but you can, you should do something other than how many keys you typed, you know Talk about perverse incentives for AI, right? Like I can write really long functions to do the same thing, right? So broadly speaking, you know, I do think that we're going to see a change in business models of software towards outcomes.[00:37:36] Bret: And I think you'll see a change in delivery models too. And, and, you know, in our customer base you know, we empower our customers to really have their hands on the steering wheel of what the agent does they, they want and need that. But the role is different. You know, at a lot of our customers, the customer experience operations folks have renamed themselves the AI architects, which I think is really cool.[00:37:55] Bret: And, you know, it's like in the early days of the Internet, there's the role of the webmaster. [00:38:00] And I don't know whether your webmaster is not a fashionable, you know, Term, nor is it a job anymore? I just, I don't know. Will they, our tech stand the test of time? Maybe, maybe not. But I do think that again, I like, you know, because everyone listening right now is a software engineer.[00:38:14] Bret: Like what is the form factor of a coding agent? And actually I'll, I'll take a breath. Cause actually I have a bunch of pins on them. Like I wrote a blog post right before Christmas, just on the future of software development. And one of the things that's interesting is like, if you look at the way I use cursor today, as an example, it's inside of.[00:38:31] Bret: A repackaged visual studio code environment. I sometimes use the sort of agentic parts of it, but it's largely, you know, I've sort of gotten a good routine of making it auto complete code in the way I want through tuning it properly when it actually can write. I do wonder what like the future of development environments will look like.[00:38:55] Bret: And to your point on what is a software product, I think it's going to change a lot in [00:39:00] ways that will surprise us. But I always use, I use the metaphor in my blog post of, have you all driven around in a way, Mo around here? Yeah, everyone has. And there are these Jaguars, the really nice cars, but it's funny because it still has a steering wheel, even though there's no one sitting there and the steering wheels like turning and stuff clearly in the future.[00:39:16] Bret: If once we get to that, be more ubiquitous, like why have the steering wheel and also why have all the seats facing forward? Maybe just for car sickness. I don't know, but you could totally rearrange the car. I mean, so much of the car is oriented around the driver, so. It stands to reason to me that like, well, autonomous agents for software engineering run through visual studio code.[00:39:37] Bret: That seems a little bit silly because having a single source code file open one at a time is kind of a goofy form factor for when like the code isn't being written primarily by you, but it begs the question of what's your relationship with that agent. And I think the same is true in our industry of customer experience, which is like.[00:39:55] Bret: Who are the people managing this agent? What are the tools do they need? And they definitely need [00:40:00] tools, but it's probably pretty different than the tools we had before. It's certainly different than training a contact center team. And as software engineers, I think that I would like to see particularly like on the passion project side or research side.[00:40:14] Bret: More innovation in programming languages. I think that we're bringing the cost of writing code down to zero. So the fact that we're still writing Python with AI cracks me up just cause it's like literally was designed to be ergonomic to write, not safe to run or fast to run. I would love to see more innovation and how we verify program correctness.[00:40:37] Bret: I studied for formal verification in college a little bit and. It's not very fashionable because it's really like tedious and slow and doesn't work very well. If a lot of code is being written by a machine, you know, one of the primary values we can provide is verifying that it actually does what we intend that it does.[00:40:56] Bret: I think there should be lots of interesting things in the software development life cycle, like how [00:41:00] we think of testing and everything else, because. If you think about if we have to manually read every line of code that's coming out as machines, it will just rate limit how much the machines can do. The alternative is totally unsafe.[00:41:13] Bret: So I wouldn't want to put code in production that didn't go through proper code review and inspection. So my whole view is like, I actually think there's like an AI native I don't think the coding agents don't work well enough to do this yet, but once they do, what is sort of an AI native software development life cycle and how do you actually.[00:41:31] Bret: Enable the creators of software to produce the highest quality, most robust, fastest software and know that it's correct. And I think that's an incredible opportunity. I mean, how much C code can we rewrite and rust and make it safe so that there's fewer security vulnerabilities. Can we like have more efficient, safer code than ever before?[00:41:53] Bret: And can you have someone who's like that guy in the matrix, you know, like staring at the little green things, like where could you have an operator [00:42:00] of a code generating machine be like superhuman? I think that's a cool vision. And I think too many people are focused on like. Autocomplete, you know, right now, I'm not, I'm not even, I'm guilty as charged.[00:42:10] Bret: I guess in some ways, but I just like, I'd like to see some bolder ideas. And that's why when you were joking, you know, talking about what's the react of whatever, I think we're clearly in a local maximum, you know, metaphor, like sort of conceptual local maximum, obviously it's moving really fast. I think we're moving out of it.[00:42:26] Alessio: Yeah. At the end of 23, I've read this blog post from syntax to semantics. Like if you think about Python. It's taking C and making it more semantic and LLMs are like the ultimate semantic program, right? You can just talk to them and they can generate any type of syntax from your language. But again, the languages that they have to use were made for us, not for them.[00:42:46] Alessio: But the problem is like, as long as you will ever need a human to intervene, you cannot change the language under it. You know what I mean? So I'm curious at what point of automation we'll need to get, we're going to be okay making changes. To the underlying languages, [00:43:00] like the programming languages versus just saying, Hey, you just got to write Python because I understand Python and I'm more important at the end of the day than the model.[00:43:08] Alessio: But I think that will change, but I don't know if it's like two years or five years. I think it's more nuanced actually.[00:43:13] Bret: So I think there's a, some of the more interesting programming languages bring semantics into syntax. So let me, that's a little reductive, but like Rust as an example, Rust is memory safe.[00:43:25] Bret: Statically, and that was a really interesting conceptual, but it's why it's hard to write rust. It's why most people write python instead of rust. I think rust programs are safer and faster than python, probably slower to compile. But like broadly speaking, like given the option, if you didn't have to care about the labor that went into it.[00:43:45] Bret: You should prefer a program written in Rust over a program written in Python, just because it will run more efficiently. It's almost certainly safer, et cetera, et cetera, depending on how you define safe, but most people don't write Rust because it's kind of a pain in the ass. And [00:44:00] the audience of people who can is smaller, but it's sort of better in most, most ways.[00:44:05] Bret: And again, let's say you're making a web service and you didn't have to care about how hard it was to write. If you just got the output of the web service, the rest one would be cheaper to operate. It's certainly cheaper and probably more correct just because there's so much in the static analysis implied by the rest programming language that it probably will have fewer runtime errors and things like that as well.[00:44:25] Bret: So I just give that as an example, because so rust, at least my understanding that came out of the Mozilla team, because. There's lots of security vulnerabilities in the browser and it needs to be really fast. They said, okay, we want to put more of a burden at the authorship time to have fewer issues at runtime.[00:44:43] Bret: And we need the constraint that it has to be done statically because browsers need to be really fast. My sense is if you just think about like the, the needs of a programming language today, where the role of a software engineer is [00:45:00] to use an AI to generate functionality and audit that it does in fact work as intended, maybe functionally, maybe from like a correctness standpoint, some combination thereof, how would you create a programming system that facilitated that?[00:45:15] Bret: And, you know, I bring up Rust is because I think it's a good example of like, I think given a choice of writing in C or Rust, you should choose Rust today. I think most people would say that, even C aficionados, just because. C is largely less safe for very similar, you know, trade offs, you know, for the, the system and now with AI, it's like, okay, well, that just changes the game on writing these things.[00:45:36] Bret: And so like, I just wonder if a combination of programming languages that are more structurally oriented towards the values that we need from an AI generated program, verifiable correctness and all of that. If it's tedious to produce for a person, that maybe doesn't matter. But one thing, like if I asked you, is this rest program memory safe?[00:45:58] Bret: You wouldn't have to read it, you just have [00:46:00] to compile it. So that's interesting. I mean, that's like an, that's one example of a very modest form of formal verification. So I bring that up because I do think you have AI inspect AI, you can have AI reviewed. Do AI code reviews. It would disappoint me if the best we could get was AI reviewing Python and having scaled a few very large.[00:46:21] Bret: Websites that were written on Python. It's just like, you know, expensive and it's like every, trust me, every team who's written a big web service in Python has experimented with like Pi Pi and all these things just to make it slightly more efficient than it naturally is. You don't really have true multi threading anyway.[00:46:36] Bret: It's just like clearly that you do it just because it's convenient to write. And I just feel like we're, I don't want to say it's insane. I just mean. I do think we're at a local maximum. And I would hope that we create a programming system, a combination of programming languages, formal verification, testing, automated code reviews, where you can use AI to generate software in a high scale way and trust it.[00:46:59] Bret: And you're [00:47:00] not limited by your ability to read it necessarily. I don't know exactly what form that would take, but I feel like that would be a pretty cool world to live in.[00:47:08] Alessio: Yeah. We had Chris Lanner on the podcast. He's doing great work with modular. I mean, I love. LVM. Yeah. Basically merging rust in and Python.[00:47:15] Alessio: That's kind of the idea. Should be, but I'm curious is like, for them a big use case was like making it compatible with Python, same APIs so that Python developers could use it. Yeah. And so I, I wonder at what point, well, yeah.[00:47:26] Bret: At least my understanding is they're targeting the data science Yeah. Machine learning crowd, which is all written in Python, so still feels like a local maximum.[00:47:34] Bret: Yeah.[00:47:34] swyx: Yeah, exactly. I'll force you to make a prediction. You know, Python's roughly 30 years old. In 30 years from now, is Rust going to be bigger than Python?[00:47:42] Bret: I don't know this, but just, I don't even know this is a prediction. I just am sort of like saying stuff I hope is true. I would like to see an AI native programming language and programming system, and I use language because I'm not sure language is even the right thing, but I hope in 30 years, there's an AI native way we make [00:48:00] software that is wholly uncorrelated with the current set of programming languages.[00:48:04] Bret: or not uncorrelated, but I think most programming languages today were designed to be efficiently authored by people and some have different trade offs.[00:48:15] Evolution of Programming Languages[00:48:15] Bret: You know, you have Haskell and others that were designed for abstractions for parallelism and things like that. You have programming languages like Python, which are designed to be very easily written, sort of like Perl and Python lineage, which is why data scientists use it.[00:48:31] Bret: It's it can, it has a. Interactive mode, things like that. And I love, I'm a huge Python fan. So despite all my Python trash talk, a huge Python fan wrote at least two of my three companies were exclusively written in Python and then C came out of the birth of Unix and it wasn't the first, but certainly the most prominent first step after assembly language, right?[00:48:54] Bret: Where you had higher level abstractions rather than and going beyond go to, to like abstractions, [00:49:00] like the for loop and the while loop.[00:49:01] The Future of Software Engineering[00:49:01] Bret: So I just think that if the act of writing code is no longer a meaningful human exercise, maybe it will be, I don't know. I'm just saying it sort of feels like maybe it's one of those parts of history that just will sort of like go away, but there's still the role of this offer engineer, like the person actually building the system.[00:49:20] Bret: Right. And. What does a programming system for that form factor look like?[00:49:25] React and Front-End Development[00:49:25] Bret: And I, I just have a, I hope to be just like I mentioned, I remember I was at Facebook in the very early days when, when, what is now react was being created. And I remember when the, it was like released open source I had left by that time and I was just like, this is so f*****g cool.[00:49:42] Bret: Like, you know, to basically model your app independent of the data flowing through it, just made everything easier. And then now. You know, I can create, like there's a lot of the front end software gym play is like a little chaotic for me, to be honest with you. It is like, it's sort of like [00:50:00] abstraction soup right now for me, but like some of those core ideas felt really ergonomic.[00:50:04] Bret: I just wanna, I'm just looking forward to the day when someone comes up with a programming system that feels both really like an aha moment, but completely foreign to me at the same time. Because they created it with sort of like from first principles recognizing that like. Authoring code in an editor is maybe not like the primary like reason why a programming system exists anymore.[00:50:26] Bret: And I think that's like, that would be a very exciting day for me.[00:50:28] The Role of AI in Programming[00:50:28] swyx: Yeah, I would say like the various versions of this discussion have happened at the end of the day, you still need to precisely communicate what you want. As a manager of people, as someone who has done many, many legal contracts, you know how hard that is.[00:50:42] swyx: And then now we have to talk to machines doing that and AIs interpreting what we mean and reading our minds effectively. I don't know how to get across that barrier of translating human intent to instructions. And yes, it can be more declarative, but I don't know if it'll ever Crossover from being [00:51:00] a programming language to something more than that.[00:51:02] Bret: I agree with you. And I actually do think if you look at like a legal contract, you know, the imprecision of the English language, it's like a flaw in the system. How many[00:51:12] swyx: holes there are.[00:51:13] Bret: And I do think that when you're making a mission critical software system, I don't think it should be English language prompts.[00:51:19] Bret: I think that is silly because you want the precision of a a programming language. My point was less about that and more about if the actual act of authoring it, like if you.[00:51:32] Formal Verification in Software[00:51:32] Bret: I'll think of some embedded systems do use formal verification. I know it's very common in like security protocols now so that you can, because the importance of correctness is so great.[00:51:41] Bret: My intellectual exercise is like, why not do that for all software? I mean, probably that's silly just literally to do what we literally do for. These low level security protocols, but the only reason we don't is because it's hard and tedious and hard and tedious are no longer factors. So, like, if I could, I mean, [00:52:00] just think of, like, the silliest app on your phone right now, the idea that that app should be, like, formally verified for its correctness feels laughable right now because, like, God, why would you spend the time on it?[00:52:10] Bret: But if it's zero costs, like, yeah, I guess so. I mean, it never crashed. That's probably good. You know, why not? I just want to, like, set our bars really high. Like. We should make, software has been amazing. Like there's a Mark Andreessen blog post, software is eating the world. And you know, our whole life is, is mediated digitally.[00:52:26] Bret: And that's just increasing with AI. And now we'll have our personal agents talking to the agents on the CRO platform and it's agents all the way down, you know, our core infrastructure is running on these digital systems. We now have like, and we've had a shortage of software developers for my entire life.[00:52:45] Bret: And as a consequence, you know if you look, remember like health care, got healthcare. gov that fiasco security vulnerabilities leading to state actors getting access to critical infrastructure. I'm like. We now have like created this like amazing system that can [00:53:00] like, we can fix this, you know, and I, I just want to, I'm both excited about the productivity gains in the economy, but I just think as software engineers, we should be bolder.[00:53:08] Bret: Like we should have aspirations to fix these systems so that like in general, as you said, as precise as we want to be in the specification of the system. We can make it work correctly now, and I'm being a little bit hand wavy, and I think we need some systems. I think that's where we should set the bar, especially when so much of our life depends on this critical digital infrastructure.[00:53:28] Bret: So I'm I'm just like super optimistic about it. But actually, let's go to w

Russ Vought halts CFPB operations, earning praise from crypto leaders like Elon Musk and Brian Armstrong. Coinbase, facing 7,600 complaints, stands to benefit. Kraken lists Portnoy's JAILSTOOL memecoin, CAR's $CAR token raises scam concerns, Proton launches a Bitcoin wallet, endowments invest in crypto, and Brazil expands Bitcoin options and futures.RESOURCEShttps://www.theblock.co/post/339663/coinbase-gemini-ceos-cheer-as-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-chief-defangs-agency?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rsshttps://www.theblock.co/post/339671/kraken-lists-jailstool-memecoin-adopted-by-barstools-dave-portnoy-boosting-200-million-token?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rsshttps://www.theblock.co/post/339680/central-african-republic-launches-memecoin-as-experiment-according-to-presidents-x-account?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rsshttps://www.theblock.co/post/339709/proton-wallet-bitcoin?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rsshttps://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/02/10/u-s-endowments-are-leaning-into-crypto-fthttps://cryptonews.com/news/brazils-b3-stock-exchange-to-launch-bitcoin-options-and-futures-for-eth-and-sol/?feed_id=11422&_unique_id=67a9eb7ccd7b0Secure your Business & Digital Life with Cyber Strategy Institute https://www.thegrowmeco.com/course/https://cyberstrategyinstitute.com/warden/https://csi-store.samcart.com/products/wardenvault-personal-managed-1device-annual?coupon=DCN_Warden WHERE TO FIND DCNhttps://substack.com/@dcndailycryptonewshttps://twitter.com/DCNDailyCrypto Trader Cobb X: @TraderCobbEMAIL USmatt@dailycryptonews.net——————————————————————***NOT FINANCIAL, LEGAL, OR TAX ADVICE! JUST OPINION! I AM NOT AN EXPERT! I DO NOT GUARANTEE A PARTICULAR OUTCOME I HAVE NO INSIDE KNOWLEDGE! YOU NEED TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH AND MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS! THIS IS JUST EDUCATION & ENTERTAINMENT! ©Copyright 2024 Matthew Aaron Podcasts LLC Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify, a $130 billion business that powers over 10% of all U.S. e-commerce. Starting as a snowboard shop in 2004, Shopify has become the leading commerce platform by consistently approaching problems differently. Tobi remains deeply technical, frequently coding alongside his team, and is known for his unique approach to leadership, product development, and company building. In our conversation, we discuss:• Why complexity kills entrepreneurship• How to develop and leverage your unique talent stack• How specifically Tobi approaches thinking from first principles• The importance of focusing on unquantifiable qualities like joy and delight• Why Tobi works backward from a 100-year vision• Why metrics should support decisions, not make them• The power of following your curiosity• What Tobi believes it takes to be a great product leader• Much more—Brought to you by:• Sinch—Build messaging, email, and calling into your product• Liveblocks—Ready-made collaborative features to drop into your product• Loom—The easiest screen recorder you'll ever use—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook—Where to find Tobi Lütke:• X: https://x.com/tobi• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiaslutke/• Website: https://tobi.lutke.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Welcome and introduction(04:17) The Tobi tornado(07:10) Maximizing human potential(11:05) Education and personal growth(16:47) Operating without KPIs(25:00) First-principles thinking(40:04) Remote work(45:59) Why Tobi never stopped coding(54:46) Embracing disagreement(01:01:27) The 100-year vision(01:09:29) Balancing tactics and positioning(01:17:15) Encouraging entrepreneurship(01:19:34) The power of good UX(01:28:42) The talent stack and unique opportunities(01:34:30) The role of passion in product development(01:36:39) Final thoughts and farewell—Referenced:• How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-shopify-builds-a-high-intensity-culture-farhan-thawar• Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/shopifys-growth-archie-abrams• The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/performance-marketing-timothy-davis• Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brandon-chu-on-what-its-like-to-build• IRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC• Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law• Glen Coates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glcoates/• How Shopify builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-shopify-builds-product• The Last Dance on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80203144• Autoregressive Models for Natural Language Processing: https://medium.com/@zaiinn440/autoregressive-models-for-natural-language-processing-b95e5f933e1f• Archimedean property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedean_property• Tabula rasa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa• Daniel Weinand on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielweinand/• World of Warcraft: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com• Harley Finkelstein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harleyf/• Monorepo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monorepo• The Sarbanes Oxley Act: https://sarbanes-oxley-act.com/• Shopify builds Shopify Balance with Stripe to give small businesses an easier way to manage money: https://stripe.com/customers/shopify• Stanford marshmallow experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment• Brian Armstrong on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barmstrong/• We are the Web: https://link.wired.com/public/32945405—Recommended books:• Finite and Infinite Games: https://www.amazon.com/Finite-Infinite-Games-James-Carse/dp/1476731713• The Infinite Game: https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Game-Simon-Sinek/dp/073521350X/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

It was a placid weekend for Bitcoin and most of crypto until yesterday afternoon, when there was a sudden spike in volatility caused by the viral Chinese AI app DeepSeek. This impacted stock futures and, in a growing correlation, BTC, which fell 5% in 24 hours to below $100,000. Nevertheless, most prominent traders aren't concerned. Then, outside of Bitcoin, one debate stole the conversation this weekend: a report that Elon Musk is looking at utilizing blockchain technology to track and reduce government spending in the US. Could this move for transparency and accountability be a step forward? Alongside this discussion was a conversation around Coinbase's token listing practices, with the exchange's CEO pointing out that over 1 million new tokens are created every week. However, Tron's Justin Sun believes the problems run deeper at Coinbase.Further reading:DeepSeek rout costs bulls $100K — 5 things to know in Bitcoin this weekWhy is the crypto market down today?Musk exploring blockchain use to curb US government spending: ReportBrian Armstrong says Coinbase needs to ‘rethink' its token listing processRise'n'Crypto is brought to you by Cointelegraph and is hosted and produced by Robert Baggs. You can follow Robert on Twitter and LinkedIn. Cointelegraph's Twitter: @CointelegraphCointelegraph's website: cointelegraph.comThe views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast are its participants' alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph. This podcast (and any related content) is for entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, nor should it be taken as such. Everyone must do their own research and make their own decisions. The podcast's participants may or may not own any of the assets mentioned.

Will Trump's regulations pave the way for Bitcoin to reach a million, as Brian Armstrong predicts? And will the SEC's new crypto task force accelerate the adoption of digital assets? Join us as Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart breaks down the latest whirlwind of executive orders, ETF filings, and the potential for a TradFi-DeFi convergence. ~~~~~

Guest: Emilie Choi, president & COO of CoinbaseAfter the collapse of FTX in 2022, “the whole industry was tarnished,” recalls Coinbase COO Emilie Choi. “Politicians came out criticizing crypto, saying it was a fraud.”But unlike FTX, Coinbase was a public company in the U.S. So when the SEC served it a Wells notice, announcing its intent to charge the company with violating securities laws, the executive team took an unusual step: They went on the offensive, publicly calling BS on the agency.“Well-regarded CEOs from TradFi, they were like, ‘You don't do that,'” Emilie says. “'You don't antagonize your regulator.' ... It was a combination of chutzpah and maybe desperation that we were like, ‘We have to go tell our story, because if we don't, nobody else will.'”Chapters: (01:14) - Working with founder CEOs (04:12) - Mission first (07:16) - Reviewing candidates (09:48) - Unusual hiring (11:22) - Crypto after FTX (16:29) - Operation Choke Point 2.0 (19:19) - Grin and bear it (21:24) - Channeling negativity (24:21) - Going to war with the SEC (26:20) - Donald Trump and Gary Gensler (28:38) - Was it worth it? (31:19) - Shipping challenges (34:03) - OKRs and personal goals (36:41) - Brian Armstrong and structure (40:56) - The COO guidebook (43:30) - Removing bureaucracy (46:50) - Investing in crypto (49:41) - After Coinbase (53:03) - Constantly on (54:53) - Favorite interview questions (56:28) - Who Coinbase is hiring (58:28) - Standing for something Mentioned in this episode: Google Chat, executive coaches, Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, speed reading, Warner Bros., Elizabeth Warren, Sam Bankman-Fried, Wells notices, Paul Grewal, Chris Lehane, Airbnb, OpenAI, FOIA requests, Balaji Srinivasan, Dan Romero, Kevin Scott, Microsoft, Patrick McHenry, Ritchie Torres, Fairshake PAC, A16z, Ripple, Stand With Crypto, Dogecoin, Robinhood, Charles Schwab, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Paul Ryan, Faryar Shirzad, Kara Calvert, Elon Musk, Earn.com, Ben Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Claire Hughes Johnson and Scaling People, Directly Responsible Individuals, Fidelity, BlackRock, Yahoo!, Stewart Butterfield, Brad Garlinghouse, Alibaba, Flickr, cognitive tests, and Loom.Links:Connect with EmilieTwitterLinkedInConnect with JoubinTwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com Learn more about Kleiner PerkinsThis episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Nemil Dalal is the Head of Coinbase Developer Platform, a suite of tools designed to simplify and secure blockchain development. CDP aims to make building onchain applications as accessible as traditional software development, helping developers and creators of all skill levels innovate within the onchain economy.Nemil joined Coinbase in 2019 as Director of Crypto and has since been a key part of creating the building blocks for developers to build onchain experiences for a billion users. Before Coinbase, Nemil served as CEO for CryptoFin where he developed one of the earliest DeFi protocols.In this conversation, we discuss:- Getting into crypto - Brian Armstrong giving Nemil 0.1 BTC in 2012- Coinbase Onramp: Simplifying Global Stablecoin Adoption- Coinbase Developer Platform: Building the Onchain Future- AgentKit: Bridging AI and Blockchain- On-chain AI- The role of AI agents in crypto- Crypto opens the floodgates for AI agents- AgentKit powers the Virtuals ecosystem- How the developer landscape will change in 2025- We will tokenize everythingCoinbaseWebsite: www.coinbase.comX: @coinbaseFacebook: CoinbaseNemil DalalX: @nemildWebsite: nemil.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This episode is brought to you by PrimeXBT.  PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. Traders of all experience levels can easily design and customize layouts and widgets to best fit their trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions to all customers.   PrimeXBT is running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions.  Code: CRYPTONEWS50  This promotion is available for a month after activation. Click the link below:  PrimeXBT x CRYPTONEWS50

Let me guess: you listened to our previous episode with Brian Armstrong and got interested in what the numbers look like in that real estate syndication opportunity for engineers. Correct?

En este Navegando, Ab y Lalo hablan sobre las noticias más importantes de los últimos días en el ecosistema Cripto; Bitcoin supera los 100k de dolares, se anuncia nuevo presidente de la SEC, XRP por encima de Solana, Brasil envuelto en polémicas y muchas más Para encontrar alfa: https://espaciocripto.substack.com/ Para discutir el episodio: https://t.me/espaciocripto Si usas TikTok, checa: https://tiktok.com/@espaciocripto Compra criptomonedas FÁCIL en: https://bando.cool/ 00:00 Intro 02:43 Website de Espacio Cripto 05:16 Bitcoin en 100k y precios de la semana 21:41 Ad 22:51 El nuevo Czar de Estados Unidos 28:16 Paul Atkins nuevo presidente de la SEC 32:55 Los activos más valiosos del mundo 35:46 Brian Armstrong amenaza a ex empleado de la SEC 41:35 Ad 43:18 XRP supera a Solana 48:50 Alex Mashinski culpable 49:51 Brasil propone prohibir transacciones de stablecoins a monederos de autocustodia 50:26 Brasil: Reunión anual de Drex se enfoca en gobernanza y expectativas piloto 53:35 Crecimiento inicia aceleradora 55:10 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

En este Navegando, Ab y Lalo hablan sobre las noticias más importantes de los últimos días en el ecosistema Cripto; Bitcoin supera los 100k de dolares, se anuncia nuevo presidente de la SEC, XRP por encima de Solana, Brasil envuelto en polémicas y muchas más Para encontrar alfa: https://espaciocripto.substack.com/ Para discutir el episodio: https://t.me/espaciocripto Si usas TikTok, checa: https://tiktok.com/@espaciocripto Compra criptomonedas FÁCIL en: https://bando.cool/ 00:00 Intro 02:43 Website de Espacio Cripto 05:16 Bitcoin en 100k y precios de la semana 21:41 Ad 22:51 El nuevo Czar de Estados Unidos 28:16 Paul Atkins nuevo presidente de la SEC 32:55 Los activos más valiosos del mundo 35:46 Brian Armstrong amenaza a ex empleado de la SEC 41:35 Ad 43:18 XRP supera a Solana 48:50 Alex Mashinski culpable 49:51 Brasil propone prohibir transacciones de stablecoins a monederos de autocustodia 50:26 Brasil: Reunión anual de Drex se enfoca en gobernanza y expectativas piloto 53:35 Crecimiento inicia aceleradora 55:10 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

✔ Sources: ► https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/trumps-crypto-plans-raise-alarms-over-conflicts-interest-a-26931 ► https://www.finews.com/news/english-news/65410-trump-administration-st-moritz-insider-eyed-as-crypto-czar-donald-trump-chris-giancarlo-cfc ► https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christopher_Giancarlo ► https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street_Reform_and_Consumer_Protection_Act ► https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_P._Brooks ► https://x.com/hoskytoken/status/1855388712789799000 ► https://x.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1859312190219862175 Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:03 - first possible candidate for crypto czar IOHK Charles Hoskinson 02:17 - Candidate number 2, Brian Armstrong? 03:47 - other industries larger than crypto don't have czars what's so special? 04:09 - What happened to industries in the past when a czar has been assigned? 04:29 - Candidate number 3 Brian brooks 05:00 - Candidate 4 Chris Giancarlo, could this be the top pick? 07:26 - Who do i think it will be? 07:35 - What does this all mean for your bitcoin stack? #Bitcoin #crypto #cryptocurrency #dailybitcoinnews The information provided by Pleb Underground ("we," "us," or "our") on Youtube.com (the "Site") our show is for general informational purposes only. All information on the show is provided in good faith, however we make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness of any information on the Site. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE SHALL WE HAVE ANY LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE OF ANY KIND INCURRED AS A RESULT OF THE USE OF THE SHOW OR RELIANCE ON ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED ON THE SHOW. YOUR USE OF THE SHOW AND YOUR RELIANCE ON ANY INFORMATION ON THE SHOW IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

0xDesigner is an designer, imagineer and self-described provocateur. He is currently working on Design Everydays where he shares design concepts that explore ways web3 can be more useful, exciting or easier to use. Follow him on Warpcast @0xdesigner and on X @0xDesigner. Mint this episode for free onchain on Base at ⁠⁠pods.media/pod-of-jake/187-0xdesigner For more episodes, go to ⁠⁠podofjake.com⁠⁠. Previous guests include ⁠⁠Mark Cuban⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Vitalik Buterin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Brian Armstrong⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Balaji Srinivasan⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Keith⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Rabois⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ali Spagnola⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Anthony Pompliano⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Raoul Pal⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Julia Galef⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jack Butcher⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Tim Draper⁠⁠, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like ⁠⁠OpenAI⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Coinbase⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Solana⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Polygon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠AngelList⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Oura⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and investors from ⁠⁠Founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Fund⁠⁠, ⁠⁠a16z⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Union Square Ventures⁠⁠, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to ⁠⁠⁠Chase Devens⁠⁠⁠ for the show notes and ⁠⁠⁠Yiction⁠⁠⁠ for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at ⁠⁠jake@blogofjake.com⁠⁠. Thank you!

Bitcoin and SOL are flirting with all time highs, Ethereum is lagging behind, and the next six months could define the trajectory of crypto markets.  In this episode of Bits + Bips, James Seyffart, Alex Kruger, and guest David Grider unravel the key stories driving the space: What could a meeting between Trump and Coinbase's Brian Armstrong mean for crypto policy? Could a new Treasury Secretary pick become the industry's biggest ally? And is Ethereum's underperformance hiding a major comeback? Plus, what crypto categories might be winners in the near future. Show highlights: What the potential meeting of Trump with Brian Armstrong shows Which pick for the Treasury Secretary position would be most positive for crypto Whether Michael Saylor has been driving the bitcoin market Whether rate cuts are coming in December and what impact it's having on the markets How tariffs are not as bad as people think, but massive deportation is, according to Alex Why a potential Treasury General Account (TGA) rundown would be bullish for the markets Whether traders will be taking profits at the $90,000 bitcoin level How ETH has been underperforming and why David sees a silver lining How the lack of institutional interest in ETH has changed dramatically since the election Why David is so optimistic about restaking across different ecosystems What the outlook for crypto regulation looks like in the near future and what will benefit the industry Why James believes that we'll have in-kind creations and redemptions for bitcoin ETFs under new SEC leadership What the future trajectory of bitcoin's price is and the role of a strategic bitcoin reserve How different categories within crypto will perform in the markets Hosts: James Seyffart, Research Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence Alex Kruger, Founder of Asgard Guest: David Grider, Partner at Finality Capital Links Trump and politics: Unchained:  Donald Trump to Meet Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong: Report Truth Social in Talks to Acquire Crypto Platform Bakkt Who Might Trump Pick for S.E.C. Chair? This Is Who Jay Clayton Hopes to See The Trump-Connected Brad Bondi Is a New SEC Chair Contender and Pro-Crypto A Degen Administration? Why the Crypto Czar May Be Allowed to Own Tokens Markets: Unchained:  Spot Ether ETFs See Record $515 Million Weekly Inflows Solana dApps See Massive Fees Amid Memecoin Frenzy Bitcoin ETF options: Unchained:  Bitcoin Hits New All Time High as IBIT's First-Day Volume Nears $1.9 Billion  Why Bitcoin ETF Options Could Unlock Massive Amounts of Capital for Crypto Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:31 What a Trump-Brian Armstrong meeting means for crypto 07:36 Who could be crypto's biggest ally as Treasury Secretary 12:43 Is Michael Saylor driving bitcoin's rally? 14:46 Whether December rate cuts will shake the markets 19:33 Tariffs vs. deportation: What's worse for crypto? 26:03 Whether a Treasury General Account rundown would be bullish for markets 30:19 Whether traders will take profits at $90K Bitcoin 35:50 Why ether's underperformance might hide a comeback 47:15 Whether institutional interest in ETH has turned around 51:49 Why David is bullish on restaking across ecosystems 54:09 What's next for crypto regulation and industry growth 1:06:55 Whether new SEC leadership would greenlight better bitcoin ETF structures 1:09:10 Whether strategic Bitcoin reserves could drive its price higher 1:17:25 Which crypto categories could lead the next rally Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Late last week, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler said that he was “proud to serve” the agency, which some are taking as a hint at an upcoming resignation. Gensler has faced heavy criticism for his crackdown on crypto, including a recent lawsuit from 18 states, and is likely to be replaced under President-Elect Donald Trump who has vowed to oust Gensler. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is meeting with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of crypto exchange Coinbase, to discuss potential personnel appointments. Today on Equity, we're bringing you an interview between Rebecca Bellan and co-founder and CSO of  blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, Jonathan Levin. The pair caught up at our Strictly VC event in New York shortly before the Gary Gensler news dropped to discuss: The imminent change for crypto in the wake of the US election Trends in crypto crimeChainalysis's choice to run its operations in the US How to build trust in cryptoEquity is TechCrunch's flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.  Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

The Daily Gwei Refuel gives you a recap every week day on everything that happened in the Ethereum and crypto ecosystems over the previous 24 hours - hosted by Anthony Sassano. Timestamps and links to topics discussed: https://daily-gwei-links.vercel.app/recent 00:00 Introductory song 00:10 Devcon7 recap https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1858128466115166380 https://x.com/ETHGlobal/status/1858086013576585678 10:01 New ethismoney website https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1857708231134687500 13:30 ETH ETF chat https://farside.co.uk/ethereum-etf-flow-all-data/ 15:33 Brian Armstrong to talk to Trump about crypto https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1858666464024391915 18:32 Blob discussion https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1858324611718611364 https://x.com/nero_eth/status/1858460235377336773 23:28 Justin Drake's Beam Chain https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1857650596783992936 https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1858492542981230919 29:38 EF formal internship program https://x.com/TimBeiko/status/1857746612023603397 30:37 Josh Stark's Year in Ethereum https://x.com/0xstark/status/1856547968729657433 33:53 Are blobs good for Ethereum debate https://x.com/EFDevcon/status/1858350926538645622 34:25 Anthony's talk from the Bankless Summit https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1858760375153676597 36:49 Online vs offline vibes This episode is also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SG9nPX4DJU0 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://thedailygwei.substack.com/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvCp6vKY5jDr87htKH6hgDA/ Follow Anthony on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sassal0x Follow The Daily Gwei on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedailygwei Join the Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/4pfUJsENcg DISCLAIMER: All information presented across all of The Daily Gwei's communication channels is strictly for educational purposes and should not be taken as investment advice.

Camila Russo is the Founder of The Defiant, a media company focusing on decentralized finance, and the author of The Infinite Machine, the most read book on the history of Ethereum. Previously, she was a markets and crypto reporter at Bloomberg News. Follow her on X ⁠@CamiRusso. Mint this episode for free onchain on Base at ⁠⁠pods.media/pod-of-jake/186-camila-russo For more episodes, go to ⁠⁠podofjake.com⁠⁠. Previous guests include ⁠⁠Mark Cuban⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Vitalik Buterin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Brian Armstrong⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Balaji Srinivasan⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Keith⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Rabois⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ali Spagnola⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Anthony Pompliano⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Raoul Pal⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Julia Galef⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jack Butcher⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Tim Draper⁠⁠, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like ⁠⁠OpenAI⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Coinbase⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Solana⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Polygon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠AngelList⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Oura⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and investors from ⁠⁠Founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Fund⁠⁠, ⁠⁠a16z⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Union Square Ventures⁠⁠, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to ⁠⁠⁠Chase Devens⁠⁠⁠ for the show notes and ⁠⁠⁠Yiction⁠⁠⁠ for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at ⁠⁠jake@blogofjake.com⁠⁠. Thank you!

19th Nov: Blockchain DXB Podcast

Bluesky has gained over 1.25 million new users in the past week, indicating some social media users are changing their habits following the U.S. presidential election. Meanwhile Coinbase BASE chain continues to explode.Guest: Timmu Tõke |  Co-founder and CEO of Ready Player MeCreate Your Avatar Now ➜ https://bit.ly/PlayerZeroAvatars00:00 intro00:05 BASE Activity Exploding00:55 BASE Revenue01:23 Twitter Losing Users02:10 TikTok Leaving Twitter for Bluesky04:24 Paul Not Leaving Twitter Yet04:37 Ready Player Me05:06 Player Zero Platform07:29 ROBLOX $180 Billion Opportunity08:40 Coinbase Listing Meme Coins10:29 $BRETT10:49 Brian Armstrong on Meme Coins11:44 Jesse Pollak on BASE Growth13:03 Avatars on BASE15:07 Meta Avatars17:06 Tim Sweeney on Interoperability18:32 When will we see mainstream?19:34 PlayerZero NFT Drop Coming20:23 Avalanche L1 Integration21:59 Readyverse23:21 outro#Crypto #nft  #coinbase~BASE Explosion As Users Flee Twitter?

W1NTΞR is the co-creator of BasePaint, a collaborative pixel art project built on Base. He specializes in unique smart contracts, user interfaces, and everything in between. W1NTΞR has built several crypto projects in the last few years and worked for FAANG companies and startups before that. Follow him on X @w1nt3r_eth and on Farcaster @w1nt3r. Mint this episode for free onchain on Base at ⁠pods.media/pod-of-jake/184-w1nt3r For more episodes, go to ⁠⁠podofjake.com⁠⁠. Previous guests include ⁠⁠Mark Cuban⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Vitalik Buterin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Brian Armstrong⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Balaji Srinivasan⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Keith⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Rabois⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ali Spagnola⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Anthony Pompliano⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Raoul Pal⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Julia Galef⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jack Butcher⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Tim Draper⁠⁠, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like ⁠⁠OpenAI⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Coinbase⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Solana⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Polygon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠AngelList⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Oura⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and investors from ⁠⁠Founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Fund⁠⁠, ⁠⁠a16z⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Union Square Ventures⁠⁠, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to ⁠⁠⁠Chase Devens⁠⁠⁠ for the show notes and ⁠⁠⁠Yiction⁠⁠⁠ for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at ⁠⁠jake@blogofjake.com⁠⁠. Thank you!

In this episode Ankur Warikoo delves into how to transform your passion into a profession without jeopardizing financial stability. He shares insights inspired by Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, who built his startup while working a full-time job. Warikoo outlines a three-step process: staying in your job until it's stable, working on your passion during off-hours, and considering quitting only when your passion income surpasses your job income consistently for at least three months. Tune in every Thursday for more valuable advice on careers, relationships, and personal growth. 00:00 Introduction to Woice With Warikoo 00:29 Brian Armstrong's Journey with Coinbase 01:24 The Pitfalls of Quitting Your Job for Passion 02:41 Three-Step Process to Turn Passion into Profession 03:47 Final Thoughts and Advice

Getting the PE does wonders for increasing your income. Period! But if you want to become financially better off, shoving that extra dough into traditional 401ks is..well, not the answer! ❌ In this episode, I chat with Brian Armstrong, a civil Structural Engineer turned real estate investor who's used his high salary as an engineer to build a passive income machine with real estate!

RAC is a Grammy award-winning musician, record producer, and pioneering creator in crypto. He is currently building Factory.fm (a music app) and Oscillator (a music protocol). Follow RAC on X @RAC. [0:00] - How RAC combined his interests in business and music to create a remix-as-a-service collective [13:56] - His discovery of and excitement about Ethereum [20:56] - Permissioned vs permissionless remixes [28:07] - RAC's early attempts to bring music onchain [37:10] - Creating a shared social graph for onchain music [50:57] - Why music requires a dedicated social graph [1:03:14] - RAC's creative process Mint this episode for free onchain on Base at ⁠pods.media/pod-of-jake/181-RAC For more episodes, go to ⁠⁠podofjake.com⁠⁠. Previous guests include ⁠⁠Mark Cuban⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Vitalik Buterin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Brian Armstrong⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Balaji Srinivasan⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Keith⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Rabois⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ali Spagnola⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Anthony Pompliano⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Raoul Pal⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Julia Galef⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jack Butcher⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Tim Draper⁠⁠, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like ⁠⁠OpenAI⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Coinbase⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Solana⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Polygon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠AngelList⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Oura⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and investors from ⁠⁠Founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Fund⁠⁠, ⁠⁠a16z⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Union Square Ventures⁠⁠, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to ⁠⁠⁠Chase Devens⁠⁠⁠ for the show notes and ⁠⁠⁠Yiction⁠⁠⁠ for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at ⁠⁠jake@blogofjake.com⁠⁠. Thank you!

In today's segment of Mid Mic Daily Bite, the AI-generated versions of hosts Bunchu and Chamber dive into a groundbreaking development in the intersection of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Coinbase, under the leadership of CEO Brian Armstrong, recently facilitated its first-ever crypto transaction completely managed by AI agents. This milestone marks a significant leap forward in enabling AI to participate actively in the economy.The hosts discuss the details of this transaction where one AI agent used crypto tokens to interact with another AI, purchasing AI tokens designed to enhance algorithmic learning. This event showcases not just a technical achievement but also a conceptual shift in how AI agents can engage with financial systems, emphasizing the utility of cryptocurrencies like USDC which provide AI agents with transaction capabilities otherwise restricted by traditional banking systems.Further, Bunchu and Chamber explore the broader implications of this innovation, including how it can revolutionize tasks like booking services or managing promotional activities on social media, which AI agents can now perform more autonomously. They also touch on recent industry efforts, like those by Skyfire and Biconomy, which aim to expand AI agents' capabilities in executing transactions autonomously.Join the conversation as "Mid Mic Daily Bite" sheds light on how these advancements could change the way AI agents are integrated into everyday tasks and the potential for these technologies to transform economic interactions on a global scale.Follow Us:Website: https://midmiccrisis.com/  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@midmiccrisisInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/midmiccrisis/?hl=enTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mid.mic.crisis?lang=enTwitter: https://twitter.com/MidMicCrisisPowered by @dGenNetworkWebsite: https://dgen.network/Support the Show.

Jason is the Founder & CEO of Airstack, a leading Farcaster development company, and the creator of Moxie, a community owned, community-governed Farcaster protocol on a mission to grow the Farcaster GDP. [0:42] - Jason's experience working at the White House during Bill Clinton's presidency [3:30] - Becoming a highly successful tech entrepreneur [12:18] - Making the decision to go all in on Farcaster [15:47] - Moving from Twitter to Farcaster after a decade [18:52] - Flipping traditional social economics with Farcaster [21:56] - Moxie's careful approach to monetizing Farcaster [34:48] - The Moxie airdrop and rewards structure [41:02] - Moxie 101 and how to get started Mint this episode for free onchain on Base at ⁠pods.media/pod-of-jake/180-jason-goldberg For more episodes, go to ⁠⁠podofjake.com⁠⁠. Previous guests include ⁠⁠Mark Cuban⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Vitalik Buterin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Brian Armstrong⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Balaji Srinivasan⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Keith⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Rabois⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ali Spagnola⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Anthony Pompliano⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Raoul Pal⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Julia Galef⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jack Butcher⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Tim Draper⁠⁠, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like ⁠⁠OpenAI⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Coinbase⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Solana⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Polygon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠AngelList⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Oura⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and investors from ⁠⁠Founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Fund⁠⁠, ⁠⁠a16z⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Union Square Ventures⁠⁠, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to ⁠⁠⁠Chase Devens⁠⁠⁠ for the show notes and ⁠⁠⁠Yiction⁠⁠⁠ for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at ⁠⁠jake@blogofjake.com⁠⁠. Thank you!

Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, joins Erik Torenberg, Dan Romero, and Antonio Garcia Martinez to talk about the company's evolution and the broader crypto landscape. Following Coinbase's public listing and the recent regulatory environment, Armstrong discusses Coinbase's focus on product development, their efforts in Washington D.C., and strategies for increasing global crypto adoption. Armstrong also touches on his venture into biotech with New Limit, the changing media landscape, and the future of economic freedom through decentralized technologies. --

Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, joins Erik Torenberg, Dan Romero, and Antonio Garcia Martinez to talk about the company's evolution and the broader crypto landscape. Following Coinbase's public listing and the recent regulatory environment, Armstrong discusses Coinbase's focus on product development, their efforts in Washington D.C., and strategies for increasing global crypto adoption. Armstrong also touches on his venture into biotech with New Limit, the changing media landscape, and the future of economic freedom through decentralized technologies. --

Nobody (legal name: Nobody Special) is the founder & CEO of Theopetra Labs. Theopetra aims to build a network state where citizens collectively & equally own both the financial infrastructure of the nation and the real estate it encompasses. Nobody previously has spent several years working in residential real estate and experimenting with concept like microspaces. Follow Nobody on X @Mel_Anic. [0:42] - Growing up as an immigrant and early entrepreneurial experiences [4:45] - Introduction to crypto and early Web3 real estate projects [7:52] - Sourcing early interest in Theopetra [11:25] - Theopetra's approach to crowdfunding and community ownership [17:13] - Using micro spaces to bootstrap Theopetra [21:59] - Micro spaces as a minimal viable living space to reduce burn [27:24] - Lifestyles fit for micro space living [30:44] - The current state of Theopetra and benefits of being a member [35:55] - The importance of community within Theopetra [39:14] - Other projects building in the Network State space [42:43] - Attempting to break the longest live stream world record Mint this episode for free onchain on Base at ⁠pods.media/pod-of-jake/179-nobody-special⁠ For more episodes, go to ⁠⁠podofjake.com⁠⁠. Previous guests include ⁠⁠Mark Cuban⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Vitalik Buterin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Brian Armstrong⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Balaji Srinivasan⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Keith⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Rabois⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ali Spagnola⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Anthony Pompliano⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Raoul Pal⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Julia Galef⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jack Butcher⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Tim Draper⁠⁠, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like ⁠⁠OpenAI⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Coinbase⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Solana⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Polygon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠AngelList⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Oura⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and investors from ⁠⁠Founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Fund⁠⁠, ⁠⁠a16z⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Union Square Ventures⁠⁠, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to ⁠⁠⁠Chase Devens⁠⁠⁠ for the show notes and ⁠⁠⁠Yiction⁠⁠⁠ for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at ⁠⁠jake@blogofjake.com⁠⁠. Thank you!

This week in crypto we saw markets…stumble? Then recover? Is the 2024 bull run over?  Elizabeth Warren is targeting prediction markets and the crypto community is pushing back, obviously. Meanwhile, SEC Chair Gary Gensler also faces setbacks…more L's?  Zora's latest release promises to shake up the NFT world.  And in a surprising twist, Trump's children have reportedly taken a keen interest in…DeFi…? ------

Kris and David are joined by Beau James (@kingofkingsport) to discuss the week that was July 24-30, 1995. Topics of discussion includes:WCW trying to bring in top flight in-ring workers to fill out their roster before the first episode of Nitro and why it isn't working out like they hoped.Hulk Hogan giving one of the strangest interviews of his career on WCW Saturday Night.The real story behind the Col. Parker/Sister Sherri angle.Mitsuharu Misawa going over Toshiaki Kawada again for the Triple Crown at the Budokan.Lots of shows at Korakuen Hall as Japanese indie wrestling is booming.Issues between AAA and the AAA wrestlers' union, which caused problems at a TV taping.ECW running debuting in Middletown, New York in the middle of a lightning storm at the Orange County Fairgrounds with a memorable show that featured the debut of the Steiner Brothers.Beau giving us a detailed rundown on Ricky Morton's firing from both SMW and the USWA due to his issues with Tracy Smothers over and their respective girlfriends that led to Tracy being arrested.Buddy Landel cutting one of the greatest promos ever on SMW TV regarding his life story.Jerry Jarrett speaks candidly to the Torch about his son Jeff and Brian Armstrong walking out on the WWF at the In Your House PPV in Nashville right before our week.The insane plans that the WWF had for a tag team of Steve "Mongo" McMichael and William "The Refrigerator" Perry.You MUST listen to this show for Beau's stories about the Ricky Morton deal, plus we have lots of great clips as well!!!Timestamps:0:00:00 WCW1:21:32 Eurasia: AJPW, NJPW, Korakuen Hall, WAR, BJPW, FMW, Go Gundan, Michinoku Pro, PWC, Wrestle Dream Factory, AJW, GAEA, & CWA1:52:26 Other North America: Jacques Rougeau, AAA, CMLL, & Arena Naucalpan2:11:12 Classic Commercial Break2:16:15 Halftime3:02:41 Other USA: Missy Hyatt/Coast-To-Coast, NWANJ, ECW, ASWF, MTW, SMW, USWA, Ken Patera, Dallas, Johnny Valentine, CRMW (Oops), & NWC5:02:20 WWFTo support the show and get access to exclusive rewards like special members-only monthly themed shows, go to our Patreon page at Patreon.com/BetweenTheSheets and become an ongoing Patron. Becoming a Between the Sheets Patron will also get you exclusive access to not only the monthly themed episode of Between the Sheets, but also access to our new mailbag segment, a Patron-only chat room on Slack, and anything else we do outside of the main shows!If you're looking for the best deal on a VPN service—short for Virtual Private Network, it helps you get around regional restrictions as well as browse the internet more securely—then Private Internet Access is what you've been looking for. Not only will using our link help support Between The Sheets, but you'll get a special discount, with prices as low as $1.98/month if you go with a 40 month subscription. With numerous great features and even a TV-specific Android app to make streaming easier, there is no better choice if you're looking to subscribe to WWE Network, AEW Plus, and other region-locked services.For the best in both current and classic indie wrestling streaming, make sure to check out IndependentWrestling.tv and use coupon code BTSPOD for a free 5 day trial! (You can also go directly to TinyURL.com/IWTVsheets to sign up that way.) If you convert to a paid subscriber, we get a kickback for referring you, allowing you to support both the show and the indie scene.To subscribe, you can find us on iTunes, Google Play, and just about every other podcast app's directory, or you can also paste Feeds.FeedBurner.com/BTSheets into your favorite podcast app using whatever “add feed manually” option it has.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/between-the-sheets/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Jessica Livingston is a co-founder of Y Combinator, the first and most successful startup accelerator. Y Combinator has funded over 5,000 companies, 200 of which are now unicorns, including Airbnb, Dropbox, DoorDash, Stripe, Coinbase, and Reddit. Jessica played a crucial role in YC's early success, when she was nicknamed the “social radar” because of her uncanny ability to quickly evaluate people—an essential skill when investing in early-stage startups. She's also the host of the popular podcast The Social Radars, where she interviews billion-dollar-startup founders, and the author of the acclaimed book Founders at Work, which captures the origin stories of some of today's most interesting companies. In our conversation, we discuss:• How Jessica gained the affectionate title of the “social radar”• Why defensive founders are a red flag• How to develop your social radar• What she looks for in founders during YC interviews• How YC's early inexperience in angel investing led to the batch model• Her favorite stories from interviews with Airbnb, Rippling, and more• Lessons learned from hosting her own podcast• Much more—Brought to you by:• Enterpret—Transform customer feedback into product growth• Anvil—The fastest way to build software for documents• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-social-radar-jessica-livingston—Where to find Jessica Livingston:• X: https://x.com/jesslivingston• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalivingston1/• Podcast: https://www.thesocialradars.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Jessica's background(02:42) Thoughts on being under-recognized(07:52) Jessica's superpower: the social radar(15:11) Evaluating founders: key traits and red flags(21:00) The Airbnb story: a lesson in hustle and determination(25:57) A YC success story(28:26) The importance of earnestness(32:45) Confidence vs. defensiveness(34:43) Commitment and co-founder disputes(37:46) Relentless resourcefulness(40:00) Jessica's social radar: origins and insights(43:24) Honing her social radar skills(45:44) Conviction and scams: a Y Combinator story(46:50) The interview process: challenges and insights(48:20) Operationalizing founder evaluation(49:38) Advice for building social radar skills(52:08) The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” quiz(55:19) Jessica's podcast: The Social Radars(01:00:34) Lessons from podcasting and interviewing(01:09:58) Lightning round—Referenced:• Paul Graham's post about Jessica: https://paulgraham.com/jessica.html• Paul Graham on X: https://x.com/paulg• Robert Tappan Morris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris• Trevor Blackwell on X: https://x.com/tlbtlbtlb• Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/• “The Founders” examines the rise and legend of PayPal: https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/02/19/the-founders-examines-the-rise-and-legend-of-paypal• Patrick Collison on X: https://x.com/patrickc• John Collison on X: https://x.com/collision• Brian Chesky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianchesky/• Nate Blecharczyk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blecharczyk/• Joe Gebbia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgebbia/• Airbnb's CEO says a $40 cereal box changed the course of the multibillion-dollar company: https://fortune.com/2023/04/19/airbnb-ceo-cereal-box-investors-changed-everything-billion-dollar-company/• Parker Conrad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parkerconrad/• Zenefits: https://connect.trinet.com/hr-platform• Goat: https://www.goat.com/• Eddy Lu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddylu/• Drew Houston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston/• Arash Ferdowsi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arashferdowsi/• Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-1000-yc-startups•Bitcoin launderer pleads guilty, admits to massive Bitfinex hack: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/03/new-york-man-admits-being-original-bitfinex-hacker-during-guilty-plea-in-dc-to-bitcoin-money-laundering.html• Paul Graham's tweet with the facial recognition test: https://x.com/paulg/status/1782875262855663691• SmartLess podcast: https://www.smartless.com• Jason Bateman on X: https://x.com/batemanjason• Will Arnett on X: https://x.com/arnettwill• Sean Hayes on X: https://x.com/seanhayes• The Social Radars with Tony Xu, Co-Founder & CEO of DoorDash: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ja-tony-xu-co-founder-ceo-of-doordash• The Social Radars with Brian Chesky: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JW-brian-chesky-co-founder-ceo-of-airbnb• The Social Radars with Patrick and John Collison: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Kx-patrick-john-collison-co-founders-of-stripe• The Social Radars with Brian Armstrong: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/K3-brian-armstrong-co-founder-and-ceo-of-coinbase• The Social Radars with Emmett Shear: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/KM-emmett-shear-co-founder-of-twitch• The Social Radars with Paul Graham: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JV-paul-graham-co-founder-of-y-combinator-and-viaweb• The Social Radars with Adora Cheung: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/L0-adora-cheung-co-founder-of-homejoy-instalab• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days: https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788• Startup School: https://www.startupschool.org/• The Social Radars with Parker Conrad: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ky-parker-conrad-founder-of-zenefits-rippling• Rippling: https://www.rippling.com/• Carry on, Jeeves: https://www.amazon.com/Carry-Jeeves-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486848957• Very Good, Jeeves: https://www.amazon.com/Very-Good-Jeeves-Wooster-Book-ebook/dp/B0051GST06• Right Ho, Jeeves: https://www.amazon.com/Right-Ho-Jeeves-P-Wodehouse-ebook/dp/B083FFDNHN/• Life: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Keith-Richards-ebook/dp/B003UBTX72/• My Name Is Barbra: https://www.amazon.com/My-Name-Barbra-Streisand/dp/0525429522• Clarkson's Farm on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Clarksons-Farm-Season-1/dp/B095RHJ52R• Schitt's Creek on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/schitts-creek-a2e7a946-9652-48a8-884b-3ea7ea4de273• Yellowstone on Peacock: https://www.peacocktv.com/stream-tv/yellowstone• Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama• Justin Kan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinkan/• Alexis Ohanian on X: https://x.com/alexisohanian• Steve Huffman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shuffman56/• Breaking News: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Reddit: https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwired-acquires-reddit/• Charles River Venture: https://www.crv.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe