00:44:39 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Mark Gurman
[00:44:39] S1: It's so unmarried. A 100%. Anyway, you can now text your dot. Yeah. So there are a ton of these AI agents that everyone sees. [00:44:47] S0: Anyways. Anyways. So the other thing with NSYNC is like so few people have real information around the business Yeah. That it's impossible to... Everyone can give a take Sure. Right? Because the number has... The valuation has grown so quickly, so fast. Mhmm. But it's just really tough when you don't have the information, right? So you're just... It's entirely... Investors are making a decision based on what they're seeing in the business. Everyone else is giving takes based on how they feel about the number going up really fast. Yeah. And, yeah, it's hard it's hard to it's hard to see exactly like what you can only imagine kind of the way that they're positioning the business, how they're... What what Noah's vision is and all that kind [00:45:32] S7: of thing. [00:45:32] S0: Yeah.
00:45:33 · John Coogan
[00:45:33] S1: But It also highlights, like, when new capability comes online from a Frontier lab, it can be at the frontier of that new capability. But unless there is a commensurate marketing push, it not... It's not guaranteed that it gets adoption because you only have so much screen real estate in the ChatGPT app, in the Claude app. Anthropic has Duet now. I saw the announcement, but I haven't seen a lot of advertising around it. And so there's plenty of people that are like, oh, yeah. I have clogged code in my terminal, but, like, I'm a Muse guy. Or, like, I use Grok bot in Slack, but then I use Codex for coding. And... Or I'm cursor over here and instinct in my personal life. And there's so much effort that needs to go in. And so instinct is at least focused on, like, let's get this value prop in front of people. And and I think that's sort of, like, the value of, like, maybe it's oligopolistic, maybe it's a big market, maybe there is a winner take all. Like, all the investors are still, like, piecing that together, but they're just seeing, like, incredible growth. Everyone we've talked to has been, like, the charts are incredible. Like, every every month is just huge growth, even on... Even while being attacked by Mark Zuckerberg, being attacked by Dot and and Duo. Like, there's a whole bunch of other companies going after this. I have to imagine Google is gonna do something soon. They've launched similar products in the past, and it's so in line with them. They already have your email. They have Google Maps that has all your reservations. They own they own the Michelin Guide, I think. Or it's not Michelin. It's the... Some some star rating service that's like Zagat. Is that it? You know that one?
00:47:12 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Ben Liu, S2, Mark Gurman
[00:47:12] S0: Yeah. I don't know if you know him. [00:47:14] S1: But they bought they bought like a like a restaurant review [00:47:17] S6: Yeah. [00:47:17] S1: Like brand. And so they have a ton of advantages there. They have Google Voice. They've done service to make calls on your behalf already, like years and years ago with AI. What what is Zagat. Zagat? Is that how you pronounce it? [00:47:29] S2: Z g a t. [00:47:31] S1: Yeah. And so they they have so much infrastructure, but they're always a little bit slower on the product side than like an Instinct, which is just a couple people moving really fast. So... [00:47:39] S0: Yeah. The crazy thing is compare Instinct. Yeah. Instinct, if they're raising at 30,000,000,000 to where Cursor was when they were raising at 30, which like massive competition from the labs. Yep. And some questions around how they would how... Yeah. How they would handle that that competition basically competing with their suppliers. Yep. Right? In some ways. But I believe at the time, Cursor had like north of a billion dollars of revenue. They're [00:48:04] S1: worried about the margins. [00:48:05] S0: Right? Yeah. Their margins weren't great, but at least people were giving them like billions of dollars. Totally. [00:48:09] S1: Right? And that's not [00:48:10] S7: happening. [00:48:10] S0: And so with instinct, part of what's jarring is that you have the same level of competition and potentially even more. Right? Because it's like you have the major AI players. There's like... You have the major AI players, then you also have Zach saying...
00:48:10 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:48:10] S0: And so with instinct, part of what's jarring is that you have the same level of competition and potentially even more. Right? Because it's like you have the major AI players. There's like... You have the major AI players, then you also have Zach saying... [00:48:23] S1: With Cursor, it was like Cursor was the lead IDE, and then you had Windsurf coming from behind nipping at their heels. But you didn't really have a product that was a direct competitor from OpenAI or Anthropic or Google, really. Right? In, like, the... [00:48:37] S0: Yeah. And so the ToClock code and codex. [00:48:39] S1: But those were those were terminal agents. And and they did disrupt. [00:48:43] S0: I'm saying they're ultimately competing out over the same Totally. Totally. You know.
00:48:43 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:48:43] S0: I'm saying they're ultimately competing out over the same Totally. Totally. You know. [00:48:46] S1: But, like, in terms of, like, the actual product experience, like, you wanted to at least review some of the codes, still be in that hybrid Centaur model, it was really... Cursor was far and away number one. And then Windsurf was kind of nipping at the heels, but no... None of the big labs had direct competitor products. And then all of a sudden, it was like... But flipping it around, if you're looking at the Cursor example, you might say, okay. Yeah. They don't have the revenue, but they have the the consumer adoption. And look at what happened with Cursor. Self felt crazy at 10 or 20 or whatever, but got the acquisition done. And you're looking at Amazon and Apple and saying, well, I see the money. They... There's the money to buy this company at a valuation above where I'm investing at 30, and so it could happen if Apple or Amazon make a crazy move. [00:49:37] S0: Yeah. [00:49:37] S1: I don't know. Maybe Google too, but the price is getting high. Yeah. You wanna... How would that [00:49:43] S0: work from an antitrust standpoint? Like, all these companies... [00:49:46] S1: It should it should 100% be allowed. It's the most competitive industry right now. It's like not a knife fight for the personal agents. [00:49:52] S0: Yeah.
00:49:52 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Mark Gurman
[00:49:52] S0: Yeah. [00:49:53] S1: Like like, you're going up against the monopoly guy, Mark Zuckerberg. Like, you're like, oh, wait. You're like Amazon. You're you're acquiring instinct, to to take a shot at OpenAI Yeah. Anthropic and Meta. Like, go go to town with that, I would think. But Yeah. Again, I can never predict Yeah. Antitrust. So, like, you might be right that, like, they might just say, no. You're big. You can't make a big acquisition. [00:50:18] S7: Yeah. Period. [00:50:18] S1: Yeah. Like, it it just... It it might be framed differently. But as a as a consumer, as an analyst of the industry, I see them as, like, this is the most competitive tech category we've had [00:50:30] S0: in the industry.... Out an upstart doesn't actually change the competitive... [00:50:35] S1: Yes. At the same time, we didn't see Perplexity get acquired. And that was a similar one where where Apple and and Amazon, they didn't really have, like, a chatbot experience. And, of course, Anthropic launched Claude, that app, and then Google launched Gemini, which was, like, a direct competitor to ChatGPT, the classic LLM experience, the chat app. Apple and Amazon never picked up. Just a consumer home screen chat app, period. So they might not jump at this category either. I don't know. But if they did, if they... Like, if if Apple bought Perplexity, I think there's other reasons why they might not. But if they did a year ago or two years ago, it shouldn't have turned antitrust heads. But, again [00:51:17] S0: Yeah. [00:51:17] S1: The FTC is very unpredictable on these things. Anyway, let