Acquired
02:39:43 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:39:43] S0: And talk about a potential season ten. Yes. But listeners, before we tell that story, now is a great time to tell you about one of our favorite companies, WorkOS. You have heard us talk about this all season. Once you find product market fit, the fastest way to grow is upmarket, and enterprises won't buy your product until you have gotten enterprise requirements like single sign on, SCIM, that's SCIM, permissions, audit logs. WorkOS gives you all [02:40:11] S1: of those as drop in APIs. But the twist now is that it's not just your customer's employees who need to get into your app anymore. It's their agents, which brings me to Kramer. In the classic season eight episode, The Bizarro Jerry, Kramer wanders into an office and just starts working there without ever being fired. When he... Kramer finally does get fired, quote, unquote, for sloppy work, he says, I don't even really work here. [02:40:43] S0: This listeners is the situation for most agents today. People just hand out shared API keys to an agent or borrow human login credentials with full permissions, but obviously with very little accountability. It's really not that different from Kramer managing to get an employee badge.
02:40:43 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:40:43] S0: This listeners is the situation for most agents today. People just hand out shared API keys to an agent or borrow human login credentials with full permissions, but obviously with very little accountability. It's really not that different from Kramer managing to get an employee badge. [02:40:59] S1: Yes. So Work OS built the right infrastructure for this, a sign up form for agents. It's called auth. M d, and it's an open protocol. You publish one plain text file to your domain. Auth dot m d tells any agent how to register, what your service offers, and what it's allowed to do. An agent reads it, signs up on the user's behalf, and walks away with its own access token scoped exactly to what it needs and nothing more. [02:41:27] S0: A real world example is Neon, the database company that Databricks bought for a billion dollars. More than 80% of their databases are created by agents, not people. An agent reads neon.com/auth.md, spins up a database scoped to that project, and a human claims it later with one link. [02:41:45] S1: Nice and clean and much more secure. [02:41:49] S0: Auth used to mean proving you are you. Now it means proving your agent is allowed to do this specific thing as you right now with limits. That's how you get in the door with enterprises now, and it's why OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, and hundreds of other AI startups build on WorkOS. You can learn more at workos.com/auth-md, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.
02:41:49 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:41:49] S0: Auth used to mean proving you are you. Now it means proving your agent is allowed to do this specific thing as you right now with limits. That's how you get in the door with enterprises now, and it's why OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, and hundreds of other AI startups build on WorkOS. You can learn more at workos.com/auth-md, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. [02:42:13] S1: Alright. So Jack Welch invites Jerry to brunch at the end of nineteen ninety seven. They set it up in the then CEO of NBC, Bob Wright's apartment in New York City on the 38th Floor of the Trump Tower. In attendance from the NBC GE side are Jack Welch and Bob Wright, the NBC CEO. Helping prepare for the meeting were Warren Littlefield, president of entertainment, and Don Olemire, who is NBC's head of LA operations, which is the, you know, location of the operations of the show of Seinfeld since it's filming in LA, which I still can never get over that Seinfeld was filmed in LA. But [02:42:57] S0: Even some of the exterior shots of the apartment are recreations of New York buildings in LA.
02:42:57 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:42:57] S0: Even some of the exterior shots of the apartment are recreations of New York buildings in LA. [02:43:06] S1: I know. I know. I don't like to think about it because it feels wrong. Right. So that's the GE NBC side. And then Jerry is obviously there, and George Shapiro and Howard West, the talent managers, agents are are there too. They settle down to brunch, and the NBC GE team brings out slides, like presentation slides. Jack Welch starts giving the presentation to Jerry Seinfeld over brunch, making a presentation arguing that the show has not yet reached its peak. It can go higher. It can get bigger. You can do more. Jerry, we have the data. The audience wants you back. It's not over. You haven't reached the top. Wow. Jack concludes his pitch to Jerry with this line. You know, Jerry, I go all over the world. Everybody who talks to me, they only wanna know one thing. Is Jerry Seinfeld coming back for another season? [02:44:17] S0: And that line about it hasn't peaked, that is one of the things that is going through Jerry's mind, in addition to, like, exhaustion and having really not started his life because he's just been doing this for ten years. [02:44:29] S1: Yeah. He's 43 years old at this point in time. Right. [02:44:32] S0: There is the concern that the show will keep going past its peak, and he doesn't wanna see it. So the only way to go out on top is to go out before you reach your peak because you're not gonna time it perfectly.
02:44:32 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:44:32] S0: There is the concern that the show will keep going past its peak, and he doesn't wanna see it. So the only way to go out on top is to go out before you reach your peak because you're not gonna time it perfectly. [02:44:44] S1: Yep. Yep. Yep. All that's going through his mind. So Jerry starts demurring after Jack's pitch sales job here. He's not outright declining, but he's making noises. He's like, oh, gosh. Appreciate it, Jack, but I don't know that I really can can keep it going. He said, alright. Well, don't make a decision now. Don't make a decision now. The meal ends. Everybody stands up. Jack says, Jerry, come over here for a minute. I wanna talk to you one on one. He takes Jerry Seinfeld to a corner of the room. Jack takes out a piece of paper, and he starts writing some numbers down on the paper. He writes down $5,000,000. 22. 22 episodes. A 110,000,000. He hands it to Jerry. He says, this is a firm offer for your salary for next season. $5,000,000 an episode. [02:45:51] S0: If you come back and do a tenth season. [02:45:53] S1: Jerry is already the highest paid TV actor in history at $1,000,000, and Jack Welch is handing him a piece of paper. Not not not just, like, GE executive Jack Welch. Mister operational efficiency, six sigma black belt. Yes. People are replaceable. Go listen to our Home Depot episode about how cost focused Jack Welch and GE is is making Jerry an offer, a firm offer, to five x his already record salary. [02:46:25] S0: That 110,000,000 is 11% of NBC's total profit for the year Yes. That is being offered to
02:46:25 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:46:25] S0: That 110,000,000 is 11% of NBC's total profit for the year Yes. That is being offered to [02:46:32] S1: him. As salary to Jerry. Yes. Not as, like, budget for the show. [02:46:37] S0: Who already has the back end in the show. Yep. [02:46:39] S1: This is how valuable Seinfeld is to NBC, to GE. So Jerry says, well, alright. Thank you. I'll get back to you. [02:46:49] S0: Keep in mind, listeners, that Seinfeld is the only show in history from this last season to ever command over a million dollars a minute for advertising rates, a feat only previously accomplished by the Super Bowl. [02:47:02] S1: Yep. Yep. So the group disperses, and Jerry says to Howard and George, alright. Let's go for a walk. They go for a walk in Central Park. They stop, and they sit down on a bench at 81st Street and Central Park West. And Jerry looks at George, looks at Howard, and says, guys, when I was 21 years old, I sat on this same bench with my dad when I told him that after college, I was gonna go into stand up comedy as my career, and he thought it was a great decision. He backed me all the way. He said he wished he could have done it. So what do you think we should do? Howard looks at Jerry and he says, gosh, if it's me, I'd love to do one more season. George looks at Jerry, and he says, if it's me, I think it'd be great to go out while we're on top. Howard says, you're the guy making the show. It's your call. Couple days later, 12/26/1997, day after Christmas, The New York Times runs an article.