02:07:54 · John Coogan, Nick Grossman
[02:07:54] S1: So take us through the Rebel Alliance. Who's in the alliance? Who's out of the alliance? Break it all down for us. [02:08:00] S7: Yeah. So the Rebel Alliance, we just put this up in the USV blog last week. It's an idea that's been cooking for some time for us. And it's basically the idea that if you think about AI and now agentic AI Mhmm. The opportunity is so much bigger than any one company. And that there is a a massive ecosystem exploding around these incredible magic core models, and there are layers and components and modules, and we're just beginning to start to see all of those get built out at an ever increasing rate, especially now that model capability is so good. [02:08:34] S1: Yeah.
02:08:34 · John Coogan, Nick Grossman
[02:08:34] S1: Yeah. [02:08:34] S7: And and that means that we believe there are going to be generational companies built up and down the stack, not just, you know and and really the, you know, I don't think that OpenAI or Anthropic are the Death Star. I do think they are these really powerful companies with that that have sort of a vertical vertically integrated approach, and Yeah. I think the meme in the market is like maybe, you know, Claude becomes the world's only employee and and all value gets sucked into those companies. Our thesis, the Rebel Alliance thesis, is that the opportunity is so big and so massive and so expansive, and there are so many forces pushing for this expansive motion that there are going to be companies, you know, in in all these components of the stack building around, including the models themselves, but also so many pieces around them. We're already starting to see it. We're making lots of investments around them. And to us, it feels like, you know, the beginning of the whole economy, but maybe the whole Internet getting rewritten on the agentic stack [02:09:35] S1: Yeah. [02:09:35] S7: And with an agentic approach. And so really the idea is that this that what's happening is is is bigger, is so freaking big. Yeah. And that the opportunity it's like a great time to be building. It's a great time to be building for builders, and there's a lot of big companies are gonna get built. That's really the core thesis.
02:09:35 · Nick Grossman, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[02:09:35] S7: And with an agentic approach. And so really the idea is that this that what's happening is is is bigger, is so freaking big. Yeah. And that the opportunity it's like a great time to be building. It's a great time to be building for builders, and there's a lot of big companies are gonna get built. That's really the core thesis. [02:09:54] S1: No. I I I love the thesis, thesis and we see it every day on the show where someone's coming on, not just with a big fundraising announcement, but a ton of revenue traction and a ton of customer love. I'm interested in the the down the stack feels maybe less contrarian to me just because I'll like you see announcements from the big labs where they're using Salesforce or they're storing all their data in ClickHouse and and Sure. And or or even going deeper into the semis and the memory and the energy, all of that feels really obvious. But the the bigger meme from a year ago was like, you going to get steamrolled by the next model? And there were some companies that were just sort of thin wrappers with some prompt engineering. But then you have companies like eleven Labs and Suno and these specific mid journeys doing really well. There's so many companies that have gone and carved out different niches and done really well. [02:10:46] S0: Yeah. Suno is one of my favorite examples [02:10:48] S1: Love it.
02:10:48 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Nick Grossman, Luca Ferrari
[02:10:48] S1: Love it. [02:10:48] S0: Because it's it's, you know, clearly a massive opportunity, already a multi billion dollar business. Millions of people love the product and yet it's not a good fit for the labs to prioritize because the size of the prize is just like, you know, I don't you know, Mikey is extremely ambitious, but like, you know, maybe it's a $20,000,000,000 business over time. [02:11:10] S1: And Right? [02:11:11] S7: Gemini app has a two [02:11:12] S4: Oh, go. Sorry. [02:11:13] S1: Oh, I was just like, the Gemini app has a make music button inside of it, and Suna has still carved out, like, this incredible niche. Anyway.
02:11:13 · John Coogan, Nick Grossman
[02:11:13] S1: Oh, I was just like, the Gemini app has a make music button inside of it, and Suna has still carved out, like, this incredible niche. Anyway. [02:11:21] S7: And I think there's two there's two ideas, like, just looking at example like Suna. Yeah. One is user experience. Right? And I think as we cover this, we rewrite the world of AI Mhmm. Whether it's in media or industrials or robotics or health or whatever, these experiences are going to need to be specific and tailored. Mhmm. And, you know, they're they're maybe you could call them niches, but they're really big, and I think that all doesn't collapse into a single app. And then the other thing or or an experience, and the other thing that we're seeing from everybody we talk to building at the application layer, whatever you however you describe the application layer is model competition. There's so many good models today, and as we move, you know, as more things move into production, we start being aware of the trade offs between model capability and model cost. Everybody who's building is thinking about how to build an abstraction layer to make those those best trade offs to deliver the best experience and to have margins. If you're building a product like Suno, you know, you need to have margins. If you're an enterprise adopting this stuff, you're thinking about your token cost. And I think both of those those sort of forces are, you know, are good for the Rebel Alliance, and at the at the end of the day, it's a core theme is competition among the models, but it's not the only one.
02:12:36 · Jordi Hays
[02:12:36] S0: Alright. Let's live workshop an idea that I have that I want someone I want someone to build. Over the weekend, was messing around with in chat with the image model on some furniture ideas that I had. I managed to make some stuff that I think is cool. I would happily pay like for this like chair that I made. I happily pay a couple thousand dollars to get a very great version of this chair. And I was thinking like it'd be great if I could upload it and then have like some combination of like an Etsy or Upwork style thing where Sure. Furniture fabricators could say I will make it this price. Here's the work that I've done. And basically like a marketplace to kind of manage that. Theoretically, if I made it and it's great, then other people could just buy that product and the order would go to the fabricator and maybe I could get a little bit of a cut. And I thought it was an interesting idea because it sort of like rides the tailwinds of like anybody can imagine and prompt a product into digital form and then like you need this network of people globally that can actually go make the products. I'm not sure if it's just like too small of a TAM, you know, like how many people really want to make furniture, but what's your immediate reaction?