00:35:04 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:35:04] S0: I know. But, yes. They they... Malaysia seems to be going so long. [00:35:07] S1: Yeah. Also, Malaysia is interesting because it's sort of like the the AI industrial hub to Singapore. So Singapore is the the global financial hub, the port city. So everything's coming in there. You get stuff delivered through Singapore, and then you set it up in Malaysia, just a hop, skip, and a jump over, like, a small river or a small, I don't know, small waterway to get to where you actually need to deliver the final product. So, interesting. But, yes, I imagine that a lot of Chinese AI lab compute. If they're doing training, they're probably using like a Malaysian neo cloud that's racking NVIDIA chips. And they can because there aren't as many trade restrictions, I think. Something like that. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social marketplaces, and now with AI agents. I know you. [00:36:00] S0: Two Sequoia Capital portfolio companies [00:36:04] S1: Okay. [00:36:04] S0: Citadel Securities and OpenAI have teamed up with Sequoia. That's a true sentence. Very... It is unbelievable. Yeah. [00:36:13] S1: It doesn't read like that. It reads like we're Sequoia and we're brokering a deal between two large important institutions. [00:36:20] S0: No. These are just portcos.
00:36:20 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Mark Gurman
[00:36:20] S0: No. These are just portcos. [00:36:21] S1: These are just portcos. They're just like we got a portco collab going on. We made the intro at our CEO summit. Yep. Ken, have you met Sam? You should... You guys should do something. [00:36:30] S0: You guys really gotta talk. [00:36:31] S1: You guys gotta talk. Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll intro you over email. [00:36:34] S0: Sequoia announced no limit, a bot building tournament. [00:36:37] S1: It's cool. [00:36:38] S0: Hosted by Citadel and OpenAI and Sequoia. Teams of one or two get sixty minutes to build a poker bot from scratch. Agents play thousands of games across six scored rounds. Open to university students in recent [00:36:49] S1: Are they taking a shot at Tyler with that? [00:36:52] S0: Absolutely. It's brutal. Because he's neither a recent grad or a university student. Neither. He's neither. That's crazy. He specifically set this up. [00:37:01] S1: They could have just said [00:37:02] S7: Not allowed dropout. [00:37:02] S1: They could just said young people. Open to young people. [00:37:04] S0: They literally are like [00:37:05] S1: Open to young go [00:37:06] S0: No. No. They specifically don't want dropout. [00:37:07] S1: They specifically don't want dropout. [00:37:09] S0: They're like, anybody that, like, had a bright future in academia and quit to work on a podcast is absolutely not welcome to to to compete in this. We don't want you. [00:37:19] S1: I'm I'm sort of offended. I love Sequoia. I love OpenAI. I love I love Citadel Securities. But, yeah. Rough. Give us a break.
00:37:19 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:37:19] S1: I'm I'm sort of offended. I love Sequoia. I love OpenAI. I love I love Citadel Securities. But, yeah. Rough. Give us a break. [00:37:29] S0: No. It's... It is really funny. Dropouts, not welcome. [00:37:32] S1: Not welcome. Also, probably [00:37:34] S0: No. I'm sure I'm sure they do I'm sure they do allow that. [00:37:37] S1: Yes. But but, yeah, this is this is gonna be very fun. I, yeah, I wonder I wonder where where you could go with that. That's interesting. Sixty minutes. That's pretty quick. And I wonder what what tools you'll be able to use, how much prep you can do, and and also, like, what the actual API is. Because I... I'm I'm increasingly interested in in building these types of bots, but doing it with computer use and and having it only see what the human sees. I want, basically, a camera pointed at the screen with, like, a button clicking. I I want as much friction in the system as possible. And I... I'm I'm unimpressed now. I've moved the goalpost since you could just interact with the API. But who knows? This is still very, very interesting and will probably be superhuman as I as I anticipate. Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Can I talk about Turbo Puffer for a second? Yeah. Okay. [00:38:40] S0: So Please do.
00:38:40 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:38:40] S0: So Please do. [00:38:41] S1: So Turbo Puffer, you've probably seen the puffer jacket that Jordi has worn on the show a number of times. It is now available for sale, I believe, or... I think There we go. It's only gonna cost you a $100,000,000 of contracted value with them. Need... I think you might need to be a customer, or it might be for sale. But it's a beautiful puffer jacket from Turbo Puffer. There's a great profile on Turbo Puffer in Colossus Mag today. It's really cool. It frames Turbo Puffer as, like, the only normal tech company in the world while everyone in San Francisco is, like, crashing out and like being like AI doom like the Turbo Puffer folks are just like [00:39:17] S0: They're just puffing. [00:39:17] S1: We're building the business. Yeah. Yeah. We're building the business. [00:39:19] S0: It's beautiful. We... Yeah. We started working on that probably over a year ago. [00:39:23] S1: Simon's been on the show a couple times. [00:39:25] S0: No. I'm talking about... [00:39:26] S1: Oh, Oh. Oh, yeah. The puffer jacket. [00:39:27] S0: Started working on it. Yeah. Making clothing is very, very hard. [00:39:30] S1: It takes a long time. [00:39:31] S0: It's very, very, very hard. But but, finally...
00:39:31 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:39:31] S0: It's very, very, very hard. But but, finally... [00:39:36] S1: AI will never get a product in Target. It will take so long. They'll just be like, ugh, I lost my context window. I can't I can't get it. Yeah. Turbo Puffer is profiled in Colossus. There's some interesting there's some interesting strategies that Simon's in in... Employed. He he has this term, a coinage. He calls it ambition bullying. So early investors kept asking Simon, how are you gonna build a unicorn? You only worked at Shopify before. But he thought it was ridiculous to pretend he could know whether the business would become a billion dollar company. Spoiler alert. It's well on its way. But he calls the pressure ambition bullying. So VCs come and they'll they'll bully you into being more ambitious than necessarily you wanna be, distracts you from actually just putting one foot in front of the other. Finally, Lockheed Gurman was the investor willing to accept the founder's actual plan. The Lockheed Gurman. Locked it down. He said, work hard to find product market fit, but shut the company down if it's not working after a year. And Lockheed said, that's fine. I accept your pitch. And he invested 700 k at a $14,000,000 valuation. What a great investment. [00:40:53] S0: Printing.
00:40:53 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:40:53] S0: Printing. [00:40:53] S1: They also they also bought a fiber line just to avoid seven milliseconds of latency. Like, that's how obsessed they are with performance. So they discovered that traffic was traveling through Seattle, like talking to AWS and then getting back to their servers or something like that on Google Claude, and that... This created a fifteen second mill... Fifteen millisecond round trip. So instead of accepting the routing problem, one of the employees at Turbo Puffer located a private Internet exchange and purchased a direct fiber connection, reducing the round trip to eight milliseconds. And, yeah, I mean, this stuff matters because Turbo Puffer does a lot of search products. It has to be fast. It's it's it's a vector database, but it's it's it's effective not for, like, the big inference where you're cooking a pro query, deep research query. It... It's much more important that it's very quick in terms of knowledge retrieval. You can't be waiting for it. So every millisecond matters, and that's what the Turbo Puffer team prioritizes. And so now they're doing over 100,000,000 in ARR with roughly 50 employees, and so they've been crushing. Congrats to the Turbo Puffer. [00:42:00] S0: Fifteen milliseconds additional is too high. That's the type of ping that'll get you killed in