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VENTURE CAPITAL & PRIVATE INVESTING
Recorded: June 26, 2025 Duration: 1:01:27Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic week for the crypto and tech sectors, significant funding rounds were announced, including a $75 million acquisition in the oil and gas industry utilizing blockchain technology, a $15 million raise for AI startup Cluly, and a staggering $694 million for AI defense firm Helsing, reflecting the growing intersection of technology and traditional industries.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yo, what's up, Kyle?
What's up, everybody on the panel?
It's Jordan Ace the Kid.
I'm just covering for Amp, so just wanted to let you know it's me behind the account,
but excited to listen in on the great conversation.
Kyle, I threw you co-host, so it should be all good there.
Yeah, yeah. What's going on, Jordan? Thanks for...
How we doing, brother? I'm excited to listen in to this.
I don't usually get to be on this space, so it's nice to be able to be on it and listen in.
Yeah, well, look, I think it's a different vibe, a little bit at a different speed
than your typical public markets or anything like that discussion. Because here,
as everybody might know, we're talking about the private markets. These are industries that
are talking about huge money, big checks being written, but it doesn't quite move at the same
speed sometimes as the public markets, which can be a really good thing sometimes when things get crazy. I'm going to send a quick repost of the Twitter spaces out here.
If anybody wants to repost or reshare that would mean a lot or tag somebody
who you might want to have come up here as a host of the show.
That would be tremendous because we do this every week.
Thursday 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
Now, let me see.
We have Andy here, Zoo.
I'm going to invite you up.
Ravi, I'm inviting you up.
Chris, if you want to come up as well, feel free.
And I can introduce myself before we get started.
I sent out some invites.
If everybody could please reshare, repost this.
That would be tremendous.
My name is Kyle Sondland.
As we've talked about before,
I do all kinds of venture capital,
angel investing, private markets work.
I'm a second generation family office.
So that means that I have deployed
into about 12 plus portfolio companies,
meaning I've actually sat as an investor and invested.
I'm also a general partner on a few funds,
which means that I, amongst others,
have invested in companies.
I've co-syndicated deals,
which means that you bring businesses together
and then you bring investors together
and you kind of make that work
in a matchmaker style of scenario.
And of course, I am also an entrepreneur,
a founder myself, and I've raised five plus million dollars to date for my own ventures
that I've been a part of the executive team. So I've kind of done a little bit of everything.
And I'm really, really passionate about this industry and about what's going on here. So
with that, I do have a couple of speakers. So I'd like to invite Ravi, a recurring guest, a longtime friend of the show.
Ravi, please introduce yourself for the audience.
Well, hey, Kyle and everybody else.
It's great to be back here.
It's one of the best spaces to really know what's happening in the VC and PE world.
world. And so my background is very much looking at emerging markets. I founded something called
And so my background is very much looking at emerging markets.
Invest New York Forum, which is really looking at the US-India opportunity, which goes down
into billions. We are putting together a big event here at the Indian Consulate, about 40 to 50
roundtable only by invitation, and really bringing both these economies together
to look at dipping into both spaces.
My focus really when it comes to investments
really is on sunrise opportunities
such as a green hydrogen biofuel.
I also look at solar, but I did write a book last year
which is called AI for Food,
which has now been integrated in many universities, but also very much invested in that space. And now I'm working on a very
interesting initiative. It's called Air Water Generation, which is you actually can pull
water out of air. So looking at that as an emerging opportunity to really solve global
crisis of drinking water. It's fascinating what people are doing out there.
So working with an amazing woman
who's created this opportunity.
So Ray, looking forward to listening to all of you.
Awesome, awesome.
Thank you for being here, Ravi, as always.
We also have Andy here on stage.
Andy, how about you do a quick intro?
Yeah, I love investing in PE,
but I've been typically on the delivery side.
So you guys do the investing.
We work with all of the things.
We put together the packages.
We do the presentations.
And then they go, great.
Now we have to integrate these two companies together.
What do you do?
That's where they bring me in, in my team.
And we've integrated projects.
We've built new systems.
We've integrated prepaid, postpaid systems, inventory management structures, redone, all of that.
So I'm more on the implementation side of the delivery after everything's done.
But I also get pulled into those meetings about what about this?
What about these industries?
How does that work?
So I'm a reluctant founder. I
never wanted to be a founder. I wanted to be an employee and nobody would hire me except they
would hire me as a consultant. And so then that's what I've been doing for the last couple of
decades. Thanks for having me. Awesome. That's a cool perspective. And I look forward to hearing
your perspectives on some of the cool news that we have coming out. We also have Chris here on stage.
Chris, how's it going?
Hey, guys.
I have a four-year-old here, so hopefully he cooperates, but that might not happen.
I am an early-stage investor as an angel.
I've invested in, in fact, 180 founders at 100 companies, and the vast majority of those
are in Chicago. That's my
thesis. I'm now trying to help more people learn angel investing because we really need more angels,
specifically founders. We're trying to help founders learn angel investing earlier,
but it's really open to anybody. If anybody's interested, you can go to loftyangels.com.
I don't have a signup on there yet, but if you go later, we will have a place on there
where you can sign up to learn more information. But feel free to DM me. We're also putting together
I'm literally working on it right now while I'm talking. Our first Angel Summit here in Chicago,
which is mostly for local if somebody wanted to come in, they're certainly welcome to be an all
day thing. And we're just trying to help people learn more about angel investing.
It'll be on Monday, August 11th.
Awesome, awesome.
Well, thank you all for being here.
And Zuu, too.
Make sure you introduce Zuu.
Hey, Kyle.
I think Kyle can't see my mic, that's why.
Oh, Zuu, I can't see that you're on stage.
So I sent you a couple invites so i'm glad to
see you're up here thanks i was receiving them as to become a speaker and i already was i knew it was
glitchy thanks so much sometimes the app can be a little uh yeah thanks for saving me also uh andy
want to say hi to ravi kyle of course wolf uh pleasure to be here everyone and i go by zoo i'm
fluent in english french sp, Spanish, and Arabic.
If you need the...
I don't do translation, though.
And I've done management consulting in Saudi, Emirati, English markets.
So far, I'm the founder of Bluebird Invest.
And we're mainly sector agnostic.
And we're looking at kind of global south mainly.
We're matching real assets with institutional investors,
whether in the Middle East, USA usa and recently probably in canada and
europe and spain and that includes private equity family office sovereign wealth and high net worth
individuals or ultra high net worth in some cases and basically i'm looking at mining natural
resources in general automotive and real estate waste to energy maybe agriculture or agritech in some cases and of course tech but more from a not VC but PE
perspective. Pleasure to be here everyone thank you. Awesome awesome well we have a cool and
diverse group here with Zoo covering kind of our international focus Ravi being all about a lot of
the impact energy and all kinds of food and health and a lot of the impact, energy, and all kinds of food and health,
and a lot of the kind of dynamism style of things.
And Andy sharing your expertise from a consulting issuer side.
And then I love Chris's perspective, certainly on all things Chicago and emerging markets
and inside of the US, as well as some of those early stage startups.
So I think we have a really cool, diverse group of guys here on the panel. This is recorded as many of you may be able to see,
which means you can tune in later or you can share this with somebody that you know.
But to kick this one off, we have a bunch of research that we've done over news headlines.
We call it the tech pulse. This is always a fun way to kick off the conversation
and get things going. I did have a cool thing that I wanted to talk about really quickly,
if y'all are okay with it, but I actually completed a cool deal this week in the commodity
sector. I don't know how much work anybody on this panel has done in the commodity space.
Zoo, maybe you have some expertise here, but I actually, I'm based here in Miami, Florida.
And we completed with, you know, one of my portfolio companies that I'm a co-founder of is actually a blockchain layer one protocol that allows for international payment transfers
and does a lot of tokenization of equity, capital markets, cap stack stuff.
And so we actually helped facilitate a few family offices based in Latin America,
as well as in Miami, do a full on acquisition of an oil operator, oil and gas operator in Latin
America. And dealing with that type of a transaction was a $75 million deal. And the
whole thing was done on chain in a blockchain market. And so we've seen a ton of activity in the oil and gas space,
as well as in the gold, precious metals, a lot of the commodity sector.
And really my focus is trying to be figuring out
how we can leverage a lot of the venture capital economics,
a lot of the venture capital funding sources,
and a lot of the technology that empowers, whether it's fintech or even leveraging AI for a lot of the technology that empowers whether it's fintech or even
leveraging AI for a lot of the compliance management of KYC, AML, international payments
transfers, things like that. I've seen a huge opportunity in that market. It was cool to get
a deal done. And so that was something that I spent a lot of time focusing on, which was a lot
of fun. I wanted to kick it over to Zhu. Zhu, have you dealt with anything in the commodity sector recently?
How do you feel, especially with all the trade stuff going on?
Is that a space where you've seen more activity,
especially from the Middle East or Latin America, or is that just me?
Yeah, absolutely.
I can mention one deal where we worked with copper and gold,
and it's related to Oman, which is a country in the Middle East,
of course, you guys know.
And they're Muslim countries so it was kind of tricky to navigate the complex kind of deal because
we had two funds related to that they had a part that was bonds so the bonds were taken by Asians
and the non-bonds are kind of CAPEX OPEC side of it was taken by two funds one in Abu Dhabi one in
Dubai so there was kind of mixture of vehicles
we were able to put in total where it was 150 million and the project is online also the company
the APC is originally from like Europeans run by Europeans and they've done projects in Spain
so yeah for gold and copper we've done that but other than that not so much I've been kind of
passively on these deals where there's like secondaries related to that,
but not me personally as a company or, you know, as a CEO.
But interesting deal, you mentioned blockchain.
And one time we did mention this,
basically farm to table project in Dubai,
where you can see basically the fish on the blockchain
from, you know, farm to table,
basically on this project that was $150 million
funded by my group A investors in Dubai.
And it's done.
You know, they deployed in 2024, end of it.
Awesome.
That's really cool.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of supply chain opportunities as well for this deal, particularly.
The tokenization really was useful for the payments themselves, right? Getting the
money from one place to another can be incredibly difficult. And that's where we saw a huge benefit
in using digital assets. Even if you're using a digital Forex instrument like a US dollar stable
coin, that's much more efficient, especially when you're dealing with banks in Latin America
than using their local currency or trying to convince those local banks to use an
international currency in such a high demand. So I think that a lot of those things are pretty
interesting. And I have a prediction that you're going to see more in this space. I actually
really think that commodity trade finance is like maybe the biggest opportunity in the market right now.
It's really a sector of private credit, which is more private equity than it is venture capital. But I think you're going to see as these venture capital firms get so large, they've tried to kind of branch their strategies out because it is so difficult to deploy small checks into so many companies.
deploy small checks into so many companies, a lot of these large VC funds have kind of become
private equity shops in one way or another, either becoming pseudo hedge funds with respect to the
crypto market and doing all the trading and active management stuff, whether they're becoming even
like a Sequoia, where they're actually holding public market stocks of their companies, or in
some cases, as I'm expecting in the future, you're going to see them blend a little bit with
some private equity venture debt style of strategies where they're providing strategic
debt capital in the form of working capital. That's where I really think there's a huge
market because the commodity sector is obviously so huge. And now it's become such a politically
divisive sector. There's a lot more incentive to find new sources for precious metals, for example,
chip manufacturing components,
like whether it's cobalt or silicon, things like this in new places, as well as obviously oil,
for example, given that there's some straight up Hormuz questions in the Iran sector.
So I actually think you're going to see a lot more venture debt and a bit more aggressive
nature of deploying into debt structures from venture funds. And I think a lot of that's going
to stem from commodities trade finance, which is where I've spent a structures from venture funds. And I think a lot of that's going to stem from commodities trade finance,
which is where I've spent a lot of my time. So I think that's a fun conversation.
I don't know if anybody else has any thoughts there. Feel free to put your hands up,
but it's a little bit niche. So I can kind of pull the conversation back a little bit to a
slightly more venture style of conversation. There were two interesting sets of funding rounds that I wanted to talk about. One was the heavily discussed company Cluly. That was the AI company that had
that pretty viral campaign on X where they released that commercial ad that was kind of like
cheat on all your tests or cheat on any first date you're on by wearing these glasses that,
you know, answer all the questions for you and give you insights. And it was kind of all about
really fast, real time, highly specialized AI software. And then they just raised a $15 million
fundraise led by A16Z. And then also on the other side, there were the betting markets companies. I think both Kalshi and Polymarket raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a multi-billion
dollar valuation. So I wanted to kick it over to either Ravi or Andy or Chris. If either
any of you guys have any thoughts around either on the commodity side, feel free, or as we
transition into the next topic, what are your thoughts around either AI or gambling? These are clearly the two market winners of the last few years. And so we see some big
deals. Is this a market that still has room to go or do you guys think that we're starting to
kind of get a little bit running a little bit too hot? Well, I think the AI space is just in its infancy.
I don't think that we've applied AI tools in almost any significant way that is anything close to saturation at all.
And I also just you guys know that AI, John and I do an AI for business show every day at noon.
So we talk about this every single day if you guys want to join that.
It's called the AI Biz Hour.
Feel free to join that earlier in the day tomorrow or whatever.
But as far as the cheat codes, I think, you know, it's like the Star Trek Universal Translator.
They speak to you and it talks to you in the way you understand.
And I think we're kind of missing the point.
We're broad rushing it by saying you're going to do dating or cheating on a test or whatever.
I think you're missing it.
I think the way it's going to work is that it will know me and the way I like to hear things and the way I like to process things better than anybody else.
And the device that I use to resonate the information that I'm capturing to me
will be unique to me and will resonate with me more than anybody else.
I think that is the super secret way the next generation thing is going to happen.
Yes, you have an earbud and somebody speaks to you in Arabic and you hear it in English
and you speak back in English and it pops out Arabic back to the person you're
talking to. Okay, that's a cool thing. But here's the thing, that nuance of what they're actually
saying, I think that's going to matter. And how it means, right? If I said, she's going to the
store, or she's going to the store, she's going to the store, right? In English, we use that kind of emphasis to change the nuance.
Other languages do it different ways.
And I think that in the AI space, we're just touching the tip of the surface, let alone
that.
I also think if you start turning this toward the capital markets, using AI to determine
those debt strategies you were talking about before, I think they're going
to come up with financial instruments that are so complex, we can't even really recognize how they
work, but that they actually do work. And I think that we'll be able to use those things
in the future to deploy capital in ways we haven't considered yet. So that's my thought.
That's a really cool idea. I'm super bullish on that idea of thinking about four-dimensional structures in the financial market, right?
Like something that we can't even really comprehend in the mind, but theoretically is sound according to all laws of physics or laws of geometry or whatever you want to say.
There's definitely room for some of those things. It obviously creates concern because you now disintermediate the observation of risk
evaluation of those types of things. It becomes very unclear how over leveraged the system might
be if you don't even understand what the system is to begin with. We were already pretty overwhelmed
as a society with credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities in 2008. If we now add incredibly complex, multi-dimensional collateralization
structures into the play, it now becomes a really, really interesting system that requires, I'd say,
much more enhanced security and much more enhanced modeling to determine where the risk factors lie.
But I think what you're describing makes total sense,
and there's got to be a lot of juice there for the Jane Streets
and boutique shops of the world that can figure it out.
I love your perspective.
I'll give you an example.
Banks that finance, let's say, multifamily, large multifamily,
300-unit multifamily.
The 300-un unit multifamily collects whatever
security deposits, right? So they collect them, they put them in a big bucket, they put them over
here, they keep track of them. But you know what the banks are doing now? The banks are actually
taking each one of those deposits, creating a little sub account, using that sub account to
do trading and incremental growth. And so they're getting the two, three, four, tenth of a percent
each day on whatever they're using on their back end side of the bank.
And then using that to just keep that fund populated and then use that to help leverage the debt or reduce the risk of the large family, that property itself.
itself. So in other words, they're using the deposits of the people to offset the risk of
the initial loan because of whatever depreciation and costs in the property itself. So because I
know that because I have friends in the banks that actually were working on those projects.
That's crazy. But now you take that same thing, Amplify at times AI, and now maybe that bucket
of money, instead of just sitting there
and earning 3% or whatever it is, now it's being used in a trading mechanism that can be leveraged
in other ways. And like you said, starting to complicate things in a way that either mitigates
risk or increases it one way or the other. So there's all kinds of opportunities there.
I don't know where it's
going to go, but it's definitely going to be crazy. Yeah, interesting. I can just add, you know,
I mean, Kyle, really, I totally agree with Andy. We've not even scratched the surface because,
you know, I'll just tell you like the five deals that are working on AI side,
there's AI in filmmaking and they're looking at scripting. They're looking at all the different
aspect editing and you're looking at agents coming into that realm. You know, and they're looking at scripting. They're looking at all the different aspects.
Again, you're looking at agents coming into that realm.
You remember there was a very big Hollywood protest, but it's happening.
As we speak, it's happening.
It's making filmmaking very, very efficient.
I'm working on another deal, which is in Australia and New Zealand,
which is using drones and applying AI.
It's called the AI Twin, which is using drones and applying AI. It's called the, you know, AI twin,
which is looking at dairy and looking at cattle farming
and making it much more smarter, healthier.
You know, you're looking at, you know,
we've not even got into agentic AI
and you saw the back and forth, which is happening
because you want to look at education,
skilling of humans in the future
from a very, very different perspective, you know,
and the agents which are being deployed.
And that's another deal I'm looking at in Canada right now, in Toronto,
which is looking at, you know, the whole agentic AI almost replacing paralegal,
but really making, you know, the whole legal system much more efficient
because there's going to be a super intelligence really helping you get justice.
So there are so many use cases.
And then you will have an amalgamation of many others.
And if you look at our own market perspective, I think it's going to be totally a very, very
different world. And it's moving so fast. And the last one, which I'm really working on totally in
is the AI and smart manufacturing, which is totally changing the way we look at manufacturing
forever. So it's actually really, like Andy said, we've not even scratched the
surface. And this is our generation, right? But the generation which is going to come in 10 years
from now, which is going to be applying AI into everything in their life, right? It's going to be
another set of innovation and entrepreneurial opportunity that I don't even know how to define
it. So that's what we're looking at. It's a very big, and if anybody who's fighting it, who's fighting AI, it's like, you know, getting into that word, first word phase, right? That way
we were like not using the word documents. Now everybody uses it. So it's really interesting.
And then the last one was the AI and chemistry. And you're looking at some very crazy ideas by
these amazing folks, some of my, my you know folks in MIT which are
really creating some breakthroughs so we will look at this is completely a sunrise opportunity
but in terms of you have raised a very important point there is a saturation there's some kind of
pause people are you know going back and looking at you know what could be the other opportunities
so where money will be invested will will be the adaptation and integration,
AIT into different realms and opportunities in life.
So AI and biofuels,
another very big biofuel formulation,
another very big opportunity coming through.
So I want to ask Andy,
and again, Zoo or Chris,
let me know if you want to speak.
Chris,
I don't see you on stage or zoo either.
I don't see either one of you on stage.
So if I don't see your hand up or,
or you have some thoughts that I don't call on you,
either the panel helped me out or,
or just feel.
I think they're there.
Yeah.
Cool.
I just wanted to let them know that.
But Andy,
I had a question for you just with respect to the news today that Facebook poached, I think, four OpenAI employees offering them like a $100 million signing bonus.
And then, you know, you know, nine figure salaries in order to, you know, I'm sure a lot of that is stock, but Facebook stock's pretty
dang liquid. So I don't think they're going to have a problem cashing that out if they wanted to.
Can you walk me through the logic here of where that value is? Is it more about hurting the
competitor? Is it more about preventing someone else from getting these employees? Or do some of these people, you know, I obviously, I think that we all recognize they're incredibly
brilliant individuals and they have unique insight.
But is it really that valuable that you're seeing these companies that are raising
multi-billion dollar rounds for their first round of funding?
rounds for their first round of funding, whether it was Ilya Skutskiver, whether it was the
female executive from OpenAI that just did the $2 billion round. How are these early stage
engineers that valuable in the market? What are they bringing to a company? Do you have any insight
on some of that stuff? Well, I have a little. I'll share what I think I know. And, and, you
know, just with a caveat that we're not, we're not there. Exactly. Give me your, give me your
best hypothesis. Okay. So my, my hypothesis goes like this. Facebook has more users than any other
system in the entire world, except for like Outlook. Okay. So they have more users than
every other social network combined. More people go to Facebook than LinkedIn and X and everything else.
They need, and their LLAMA model is falling behind.
It's just an acquisition process.
Is it worth it?
Well, it's worth it for them to engage.
They get a big splash.
They get a lot of news.
But the real problem in AI is very simple. The token windows
are limited by the size of the physical hardware. The inference models are not. The inference model
is where it can make the connections in the back end, kind of like when you're talking about,
well, we did this in this commodity over here, and we're working in the back end, kind of like when you're talking about, well, we did this in
this commodity over here, and we're working in gold and silver, but that's really just mining,
but there's all these other things here. You're making all of those connections because of
your knowledge and ability to see things. The AI is just a computer. It'll only work on the stuff
you feed it. And so you have to keep feeding it all this information
and then have it create the inference
of how to collect, capture, and organize that data.
And so is it worth it if they win?
Yes, right?
If Meta's model comes out,
right now, think of it the other way around.
Would it be a big deal if they said Apple did it?
Nope.
We'd go, oh, well, Apple's got a $3 trillion in freaking cash dry powder sitting there doing nothing.
Why wouldn't they spend $100 million?
It doesn't, it's not a blink to them.
Everybody would go, oh, well, that's good.
Apple sucks on their AI.
They're way behind.
They're trying to buy perplexity.
Who cares, right?
But if they buy perplexity and then
they poach four or five guys out of Germany, well, all of a sudden, now they've got the makings of
the beginning of a team that might have enough juice to overcome the stuff that Sam Altman's
doing and the stuff that they're doing in Memphis for the Grok. But I don't know. The bottom line
is, look ahead five years.
In five years, AI is going to be ubiquitous in every single device we have.
How?
I don't know.
I speculate.
I could be totally wrong.
But is it worth it?
If you win, it's a trillion-dollar market cap.
It's a trillion-dollar upside for five guys.
trillion dollar upside for five guys. They didn't buy a 500 resource team and move them all from
Cincinnati to Denver or something, right? They just went, yeah, we got five guys, bring them in,
give them access to a whole bunch of GPUs and let them go at it. At this point, it's entirely academic research.
It might as well be searching for cancer.
They're figuring it out on the fly.
Don't believe that we got it all squared away.
They're still figuring stuff out.
And I know that because one of the guys I know is a blockchain crypto
multi-millionaire, right?
He called me the other day
and said, yeah, in my house I created
a million token context window machine
with just the stuff I have in my house.
And I was like, what?
How can you have enough hardware
to create a million, a token is about
a syllable,
a million syllables in an input process and then can output a million syllables work it's like a full book right three
300 page full book as you can just say here read this whole book and then revise it so it sounds
like whatever and then give me the output the The answer is yes, it's worth it
if Zuckerberg paid it and they
win. I mean, how much money did Zuckerberg
build on the virtual reality thing
or whatever hell, what was that virtual
world he built? Billion dollars on
that? He didn't even spend
a billion dollars to get these guys for AI,
which definitely will have direct impact,
not a virtual world that they're trying to teach and sell everybody. So that's what I think.
Interesting. Very, very interesting perspective. Does anybody else have any thoughts on this kind
of poaching war? I'll give just a quick insight. And this is not anything groundbreaking, but
it's really a supply and demand curve.
When you think about the supply of this kind of talent and the demand for it, it's like a crazy bidding war.
And there's a very high degree of confidence right now that this is going to be, whether it's a winner-take-all or winner-take-most environment,
whether it's a winner take all or winner take most environment,
if they've got resources, they're going to put them towards this
because they really feel that this is their future.
And if they don't do it, they're not only going to be non-competitive,
but it also strengthens their competition.
So this is just like simple economics.
It's crazy because these dollar amounts seem insane. But when you think about
the overall potential of this whole thing, it harkens back a little bit to... I turned 50 in a
month. So I lived through... We were building one of the first e-commerce platforms during the first
dot-com boom in 1998. And it was, you know, the term that
Alan Greenspan used back then was irrational exuberance. And that was more based on the
public financial markets investing in anything that had literally just dot-com in the name that
was going IPO. This is a similar kind of thing. It's just around talent now with the very few companies that have the kind of dollars that can throw at the engineering talent.
We've definitely seen this in the past, but I don't know if we've seen it to this degree.
So, you know, I don't think I'm sharing anything that's new. It's just the obvious observation of this is a perfectly inelastic supply and demand curve.
this is a perfectly inelastic supply and demand curve.
I also, hey, Kyle, I also think that it's, you know,
the numbers they're throwing around are kind of like the signing bonuses
of, you know, an NBA player.
It's a $200 million deal, right?
Yes, it's $25 million now.
Oh, and by the way, you have to do all of this stuff for five years.
They're locked in for seven years.
They have the payout at the end.
They've got all kinds of performance bonuses to hit in order to make the full nut.
So yeah, you know, it is what it is.
I mean, first of all, it's a lot of money.
And it's a big number.
And sign me up if they want to, you know, give me a call.
I'm ready to sign up and, you know, go wherever they want me to go.
Interesting. Interesting.
Interesting.
Those are all really good perspectives.
I appreciate everybody that shared some thoughts there.
I certainly know that the employee wars,
it's hard to hire in general.
So I get how there's only 20 people in the world
that can do what you feel like you need them to do.
I get you pay whatever it takes.
It's just some of these numbers being thrown around are pretty insane.
But pivoting to a conversation topic we've covered so much here on the show,
it's defense.
Defense was alongside the two industries we talked about earlier,
the two industries we talked about earlier, AI and gambling. Defense was number three
AI and gambling.
for sure in 2024, 2025 in the VC space from an industry perspective. And this new AI defense
company in Berlin called Helsing raised $694 million at a $14 billion valuation as Europe is expanding with NATO, their defense spending by 2030 to 2%, 3%, potentially 5% according to NATO.
And a lot of that likely goes into startups solely because a lot of the old war military technology just doesn't cut it anymore.
old war military technology, it doesn't cut it anymore.
And so companies like Anduril and others seem to be raising boatloads of money
that's actually probably coming right from the governments.
Do you guys think that Europe could have potentially found a totally new opportunity
for unicorn companies to be built in those jurisdictions
because of some of the changes geopolitically?
Ravi, do you have any thoughts there?
You know, it's so interesting you ask this because, you know, Colonel John Spencer, somebody
I know, he's actually on his way to study the DRDO, because this is a surprise.
You know, in the last about five to 10 years, I've seen this as sunrise opportunity in India.
And you remember the recent war between these two countries, the two weapons that were used
were actually made in India. And we see a complete new opportunity. And then you also
raise Europe because that's really critical because where we are, whatever the world situation
is, but one thing you definitely see is new startups in Europe, in Africa, and other parts
of the world by looking at making these weaponry defense equipment
linked to space tech. And I think we had a fantastic space long time back here
on space tech too, which is again linked to defense as another opportunity. So there's
something which I'm watching very closely. I'm not an expert, but I'm very curious to see
to see where this will take us.
where this will take us.
Interesting.
Yeah, no, I've been pretty bullish on defense spending.
It's actually maybe the newest hardware market,
but it is fascinating just because of how
all these industries really do start to blend together, right?
Like AI is a consumer product,
but an enterprise product,
and also is certainly going to be used in the defense space. And then you've got these hardware
companies that are building robotics, which are certainly going to be consumer products are
probably enterprise products from a machinery perspective, and of course, are going to be
government products. So, you know, to the conversation earlier, we discussed this at
length in some of the earliest spaces on this topic. We may have some loyal listeners from
the beginning of the year that might remember. I talked a lot about the consolidation of venture
capital, and it seems like we keep seeing these rounds that are absolutely bonkers. They're
enormous funding rounds. And it seems like
there's just from an anecdotal perspective, less early stage startups getting funded and more
late stage startups that are potentially stealing that capital base and raising these big, absolutely
mega rounds. And with the fact that AI can be multi-purpose in that way, with the fact that
hardware can be multi-purpose that way in the robotics kind of space.
Do you guys think that that trend is going to continue where you're going to have one
market leader, let's say OpenAI or XAI for AI software, and then next thing you know,
they're going to permeate pretty much every sector and there's not going to be as much
room for other localized,
specialized tooling and companies? Or is that kind of more of a doomerism style of question?
What are anybody's thoughts?
I know Andy probably has some thoughts on specialized models
versus generalized models.
Does anybody else have any ideas as well?
See, Kyle, it's a really critical question that you raise here because you know the whole
thing with AI is you know who's managed to bring all the data in process it bring it very clearly
into use cases so there is that definitely a question mark because you know if you look at
Salesforce right and if you look at the way they're also now looking at CRM systems and others
and looking at AI integration. So definitely, but at the same time, I feel maybe this is being a
little crazy, but I feel that there are these amazing young entrepreneurs out there who may
crack this. So we are still waiting for the first AI unicorn, you know, one person staffed.
And I really believe it will happen. I think we are seeing a lot of folks
who are using agents very correctly
and adapting them into something.
And we've also now at the onset of the super AI,
you know, revolution,
and probably that'll be the next wave.
So, but definitely I agree that there is an issue,
but also, you know, countries like China,
we don't know what's happening out there, right?
We know something comes out because uh but not everything comes out i think india is
still i must say struggling it could have done better but i think india definitely for me it
was quite a shock to see that nothing really big came out it's still in the service mode
but there's a lot of push happening right now in IITs in India to catch up and do something crazy.
And I've been in constant touch with some young entrepreneurs who are looking at some breakthroughs.
I like that, Ravi. I really appreciate your perspective.
You have such a breadth of understanding of these really complex and dynamic topics.
topics. Andy, what are your thoughts on this subject?
Andy, what are your thoughts on this subject?
Well, I think the scariest thing you can
imagine is an AI-powered drone with a camera and an explosive
with an intent to
find something and then blow up when it got nearby that.
Whether that is a thing that looks like
a dog or a thing that looks like a flying
quadcopter, I think the whole face and the whole kind of interface of war is massively
going to change with that kind of stuff. how would you defend against 50 of those devices coming after you?
They all have your face programmed, uh, with facial recognition, which, you know, we put on
police cars and they can identify somebody while they're driving by at 35 miles an hour.
I think that, that type of utilization of AI because its ability to reason is pretty scary.
However, I also think that, and by the way, I don't know if you know this, Kyle, but I
spent about 10 years doing the stuff I mentioned overseas.
I've worked in Egypt and Romania and Greece and France and all over Europe and all over
the Middle East and Turkey and other places.
So I don't just bring this perspective today,
but I also have done the implementations all over the world.
So it gives me a little different perspective sometimes.
I think that the interesting part about AI is that we don't know.
We don't know.
We know what it's capable of doing because you can sign up for ChatGPT and you can ask
it questions and it gives you answers that are reasonable.
Okay, cool.
Take that, extrapolate that 10 steps.
How does that work in an enterprise?
I don't know.
I do know that everything we think is safe and stable, everything we think from a risk
profile management perspective is understood, can be blown up by an AI almost instantaneously, because it can identify connections and variances to different risk profiles we haven't considered yet.
And so think of every application you've ever built as something somebody sat down and thought through and tested every step.
But they only tested the steps they were given, right?
The parameters they were given.
They work within the box they were provided.
AI doesn't have a box.
It has, here's all the data I have.
Can I make any weird connections?
Yes.
Here you go.
Here's some weird correlations you never considered, which may or may not be true. But the point is, AI will infuse itself into everything, and it will infuse itself into
all of the capital rounds.
It'll infuse itself into all of the enterprise spaces, whether it's a unicorn, some dude
sitting in his house, and his name's Chuck.
Whenever I hear that, I always think of the quote from Ready Player One know, like his name's Chuck. I always want to, whenever I hear
that, I always think of the quote from a ready player one. Yeah. His name is Chuck and he's
living in his mom's basement. I, yeah. One of those guys is going to be a trillion dollar
company. He's going to be a unicorn. So who knows some 14 year old kid right now is building
something that we're all going to end up using in a couple of years. We, we have no idea. I,
I, I agree with that a hundred percent and I don't know Kyle where're all going to end up using in a couple years. We have no idea. I agree with that 100%. And I don't know, Kyle, where it's going to go. I wish I did.
Can I just, Kyle, just on Andy. Andy, I want to tell you that in this war between India and Pakistan,
there was a drone which was called the Sky Striker, which was developed with Israel and India
coming together with Adanis. I'll DM you details. That's exactly what it did.
And also, with the drones, you're also looking at air-powered defense systems, right?
And that's why the precision that it brings in, right?
And that's the insane beauty because you can't...
It's unfortunate, but the reality is that with defense,
and especially if you're the one who's striking,
you can actually be so precise that you don't hit civilians.
And that's what you're looking like.
Of course, you're looking at the kamikaze drones,
which, you know, in Turkey is developed.
I also invest in a drone company, right?
In India, which does Agri drones and others.
But this is definitely a very big sunrise piece.
It's interesting, Kyle, you're bringing up
because I spoke to a colonel yesterday.
We had a long conversation about something similar.
I'll just give two, getting close to the end of the hour.
So two fun pieces here.
Again, I'm almost 50, so I've been watching movies for a long time.
There are two that speak directly to this that were very prescient.
One was called Runaway with Tom Selleck,
circa like 1985.
And Gene Simmons, who is the,
I think he was a lead singer or one of the guys in Kiss.
And it was about, it was called Runaway
because it was these like robots.
There was a division of cops in the police department
that would go after runaway robots.
And this guy, Gene Simmons was
like this evil mastermind. And he was creating these exactly what you just described, not sentient,
but AI infused killer robots that would find, they would be like literally attached to somebody's
face. And they would just, they would just keep hunting until they killed them in like a little
bit more of a drone way than Terminator.
The second one that is more like the potential future of drones that we have today
was a Chevy Chase movie called Deal of the Century.
And that was probably circa 84.
Both kind of fun, kind of interesting, sort of silly movies,
or at least Deal of the Century is much more of a comedy.
But if you want to find some
old campy sci-fi, that's a little bit of a peek into the future from the past.
Interesting. Very, very interesting. Zhu, what are your thoughts around the AI robotics takeover,
whether that's the horizontal gobbling from a small few
companies, or do you think that there's probably specialist room in different niche markets? Or
are we thinking about this all wrong altogether? No, I think we're stuck in a Chinese room.
And what I mean by that, it's a thought experiment in the 70s by a philosopher. He's American,
I forgot his name. And Chinese room is basically just an example where there's a thought experiment in the 70s by a philosopher he's american i forgot his name and chinese room is basically just an example where there's a you know supposed room in the
middle of two individuals trying to communicate one only understands english one only understands
chinese so they send a message into that room and from that room comes out a message that
translated perfectly so they cannot understand each other but But the thing is, inside of the room, there's a supposed individual that doesn't know either English nor Chinese,
and they just have a ledger or a list on how to translate these characters,
and they can do it perfectly.
So that's AI.
It doesn't have any understanding.
It has no understanding of the message.
It's really not reliable in calculations for the most part. And I'm talking about the
consumer market. I'm not talking about military
and strategy. For example,
I don't think it's not reliable AI
when we're talking about the
Pakistan thing that Ravi mentioned,
where India and Israel collaborate
to do a project that's high precision.
And I did see Iranian
and Turkish things that are more kamikazis,
and that does fit kind of in that section
because Chinese AI for military applications,
American also, they're super advanced.
And we had a conversation the other day about IBM
and how Watson was kind of the main one.
I have a friend, Sunny,
and I'm going to mention him right real quick.
And he was using that for like almost a decade
and that's reliable AI.
But I think all we're using today is kind of Chinese room.
And most of the Chinese rooms are going to be demolished.
And we're going to see that happen in the VC, in my opinion.
So I kind of have a bleak perspective on this.
Excuse me, but that's my opinion.
That doesn't mean things that are getting funded can get better someday.
But we do need to
solve the problem of the lack of understanding on these machines and how they pretend better and
better to to have understanding but they don't and once you have a machine that does understand
a message and i'm simplifying so much because of time uh then maybe we have a chance on like
super intelligence yes but we're super far
away and we're not even on the line that's going to be the vertical that will kind of save us and
go like to the godlike kind of machine learning. Interesting perspective. I really appreciate you
guys all sharing your thoughts here and we could probably rip that for a long time.
So, yeah, so that's kind of where I'm looking.
So, Andy, back to you.
You talked a lot about how you work with some of the deal flow side, supply side.
How do you see these trends going forward?
If people are trying to start businesses today, I think it's easy, especially on the AI front, to feel a bit discouraged because of just the general CapEx requirement.
To start an AI company, at least at the foundational level, is pretty much priced out for startups at this point because you're never going to be able to generate enough traction to raise enough money to build something like that.
And you're so far behind.
That being said, and you're so far behind. Now, the AI tools, I've been personally playing around
with Cursor and it's pretty astounding how successful you can be in using AI tools. Not
only am I using it for side projects, but I think all of my developers, most of the code being built
within my companies is being done by AI. I know Microsoft has said 80 to 90% of the code being built within my companies are is being done by ai i know microsoft has said
80 to 90 percent of the the tech that they build is done using ai these days from written code
um what is the what is the way to position yourself as a business in this market and
and how should we look at that from a vc perspective what are the startups that you
think are going to have success um in a in kind of a rainforest that's dominated by these super tall trees?
Well, you're right.
First of all, you can't compete with the billions of dollars that, you know, XAI is spending to build their Colossus data center and their second one they're building.
You can't compete with the huge amount of money that's being raised by chat, by open AI, or by Claude. I mean, but,
okay, so you can't go the foundation model. But you know what you can do? And I think here's the
biggest opportunity. AI does one thing that hasn't been available in the past. And that is it will
decrease your time to get something functional. You can go from nothing to a functional proof of concept
in hours instead of weeks or months.
And I think that if you go to a pitch space
and you just bring a deck to talk about your cool tool
that you're going to build, you're going to be behind
because the guy next to you is going to bring his laptop and finish the app on cursor or windsurf or whatever else,
you know, a cloud code or whatever it is right then and go, here's what it looks like. And here's
how it functions. Clickety, clickety, click right in front of the investors. And they're going to go,
yeah, okay. I want to buy that one. Um, because going the, the, the time from idea to MVP can be decreased with AI, 100%. And so whether or not
that turns into enterprise software, oh, that's a whole different story, right? You have to then
take your MVP and create enterprise software out of it. Because you can't create something that
will do a billion transactions a minute
like Visa does, right?
They process just voluminous amounts of data.
You can't just build that with Cursor,
but you can definitely build a new interface
or you can add a piece of functionality
or you can add something else on there.
Earlier today, I was talking that SaaS is probably dead.
And what I mean by that is instead of having buying a SaaS product and adding it onto your other pieces you you can just replace what the
SaaS would do internally with a LLM and LLM studio on a laptop you probably can do the same thing
so I think that the big winners and and the way to position is if somebody says, I can make things go faster, we can implement in shorter timeframes because we have the right engineering team, we have the right delivery team, and we can add features functionality that our customers are looking for in at a rapid pace. Our sprints are days, not weeks.
I think that is something that would be very, very interesting.
Great perspective. Great perspective. Any, any final thoughts?
We've got six minutes left here. So Zoo or Ravi or Chris.
zoo or you know ravi or i'll share just on on the speed i think the the real value for me
I'll share just on, on the speed.
on the speed as um as an investor at at literally the earliest stage like when there is that first
check it's not as much about i need to see a a prototype so that i can better envision it
because i'm i'm very often talking with founders before they've got
anything physical. It's more that they're able to use those tools so that they can test quickly
because so much in the beginning is trying to figure out what your market actually wants.
And that really comes down to initially, it's just like doing customer interviews and it's a much more effective.
I don't think the investors need to see a full walkthrough to make them get to a yes when they're writing first checks and early checks.
product instead of having to go through wireframes or whatever kind of product projects or products
they've used in the past to do those customer interviews and get and get that early customer
feedback. It's a lot more effective to have something that is fairly functioning and then
even take that what you've got and bring that to market and actually have it be a an early MVP.
And if you can get to that early MVP quickly, iterate quickly, you can just be so fast
in terms of taking the data that you're receiving from the market and from your customers and
iterate right back. And you don't need a lot of people to do that. So I think that really early
stage is when this becomes incredibly valuable. And it's just, again, and going back to when we
built one of the first e-commerce platforms in 98, it cost easily eight figures for us to get started.
It wasn't, you know, we had to build a network operations center, which people don't even know what a knock is anymore.
So you've got AWS and all the other stuff. continues to compress the amount of dollars and time that it takes to test your ideas,
bring them to market, and actually get customers and traction and potentially really substantial
and meaningful revenue and customers from very, very few resources. So we're also going to be
going to be seeing a lot more entrepreneurs that don't even bother with raising capital because
they don't even necessarily need it. I mean, I've got a number of friends that are pissed off because they're starting their
second companies completely with AI and they're building AI on top of AI, you know, so it's AI
tools built on AI tools. So it's frustrating because I go, you know, I love you, Billy,
or whatever. I'd love to get access to your cap table,
but there is no cap table
because they're just going to keep all of it for themselves,
which is what they ought to do anyway.
I like that perspective a lot.
I really, really do.
And I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
Ravi, any closing thoughts for me?
No, I think it was very well said, right?
This is the future to really
look at these young entrepreneurs, like you said, you know, whether you're 18, 20, whatever. I mean,
these are, as we speak right now, they are building, right? And we will know. And I think
that goes back to the earlier statement you read. So you have these mega big folks, but then you
have this young folks who are cracking it right now, and they don't need a lot of people working.
So I think they're deploying agents right now.
They're creating agents.
They're looking at multilevel agents finding solutions
that we can't think of right now.
So the sooner we get it, and I always tell people,
you know, always you need to upskill yourself
because if you don't really want to look at investment,
you need to understand what AI-driven world will look like.
So I think we are getting
there, but I don't think there's so many, I really like what Andy said. He said there's a lot of
unknowns, but we want to make sure that we equip and look at those opportunities and investments
and really kind of demystifying those unknowns. And I think that's why I really love coming to
the spaces here, Kyle, because you always have these amazing conversations. I don't know anybody else doing this. So again, thank you to you and Wolf and everybody out there, because you
do this so well. And I think this is clearly telling us, you know, rather be reactive to what
will happen, let's be proactive and get into that point. We don't know whether we'll get into the
cap table. I hope we do. But we want to be there because we will find some very crazy solutions coming through.
Great, great.
Well, thanks for sharing. And I think that that's a pretty decent place to wrap.
As we've talked about here on the show, we cover everything private equity, venture capital.
I thought this was an amazing Twitter spaces.
We had at our peak over 100 listeners, which is really, really wonderful.
And I want to thank Zoo, Ravi, Andy, Chris for being up here.
You're all welcome to come back in the future whenever you'd like.
I thought this was a tremendous conversation.
And we missed Jared this week, my co-host on the show.
But I know he'll be back for next week where we have yet another great discussion
to be lined up if you are new here just know that we do this every week thursdays at 5 p.m eastern
that means that we're talking here next week that means we're talking the week after that means
we've done it every week of this year crushing it we're going to keep doing it and if you're
unfamiliar with the wolf financial channel or all of their media properties, they are always doing X spaces, talking everything,
public markets especially, but they have a Wolf Web 3, they have a Wolf Gaming, they have a Wolf
Sports, and they have a Wolf Trading on top of that. There's 12 plus hours of daily trading
sessions to discuss every single day. So you can tune in and follow them along
to tune into anything that your heart desires.
Just make sure you're back here at 5 p.m. Eastern
for next week.
So with that, I want to kick it back over to Jordan
to close out the show.
I'll talk to you all next week.
Kyle, great conversation.
Really appreciate the whole crew coming on tonight.
We're going to wrap it up for the night,
but I know the audience is always eager for more spaces.
So we'll be back to wrap up the trading week tomorrow morning,
bright and early on the Wolf Trading Account.
So if you're not following that Wolf Trading Account,
make sure you are as well as following all the other amazing speakers on the
panel. But, but yeah, that's going to do it for the night.
We'll see you guys tomorrow morning, bright and early to wrap up the week.
Enjoy the rest of your evening.
