Amazon Ban Hammer, Seedance Strategy, Amazon Blocks Muse | Vinod Khosla, Augustus Doricko, Ben Hylak, Aaron Levie, Lucas Shaw

John Coogan (0:00)

You're watching TBPN.

Jordi Hays (0:02)

Today is Monday, September 21st, 2026 We are live at TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance.

Lucas Shaw (0:11)

The capital of capital.

Jordi Hays (0:14)

How many days till Christmas? TBPN's Road to Christmas started weeks ago. We got 94 days until Christmas. Double digits. We're so close. Every day, one day closer to Christmas. So get excited, start shopping for presents, start picking out that Christmas tree. Let me tell you about ramp.com.

Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more. They got musicals. I guess they do in musicals now, and I guess we do in AI safety now. We'll get into that later.

Lucas Shaw (0:46)

Doing a bit of a show today. Yeah. We got Augustus Doricko coming in with a $100 million Q&A.

Jordi Hays (0:52)

Tipping the hat for $100 million.

Lucas Shaw (0:55)

We have Vinod Khosla.

Jordi Hays (0:56)

Vinod Khosla is coming on. Come back.

Lucas Shaw (0:59)

Aaron Levie breaking his silence on the SaaS rebound, new model drops, the latest on open source and more. We have Ron from iConnections. They are putting on an incredible show in November that we're going to be at called Tomorrow X.

Excited to talk with him about that, and then we'll round it out with none other than Ben Hylak coming in with a new round of funding as well.

Jordi Hays (1:24)

For Raindrop.

Lucas Shaw (1:25)

Raindrop.

Jordi Hays (1:26)

How was your weekend?

Lucas Shaw (1:27)

Drop top.

Jordi Hays (1:27)

Yes.

Good name for a company. How was your weekend?

Lucas Shaw (1:32)

It was, couldn't have been better.

Jordi Hays (1:34)

Yeah, it was good. We were off on Friday. We went to Boston and back basically the same day.

Sort of a brutal flight back and forth, a little tired. But I got completely one-shotted by the new AI video model. Seadance 2.5, gone are the days of face swaps. I remember when it was called Dream Booth. This paper came out from Google and it allowed you to very realistically swap your face into a photo. Now, this is something you can just do with a single prompt today. But back then, you had to go and take 10 or 20 different photos of yourself at different angles, different lighting, usually just dug through your camera roll, got them. Then you had to feed that into a Python script that was either hosted on, what's their notebook? Their hosted IPython notebook?

John Coogan (2:23)

Google Colab. Colab.

Jordi Hays (2:25)

And then the Colab thing was weird because it was luck of the draw what GPU you got. So you would sign up and create an instance. And then sometimes it would just be like, you got a 1080 TI. And you'd be like, I can't do what I need to do because I need a lot of memory to do a particular thing. And then sometimes it would be like, you got an A100, brother, like lock in. Like it was just random provisioning. And people would be like so excited when they got one or the other.

But there was this musician who was like a guitarist who implemented the paper and then basically distilled it down and figured out how to run. This is a crazy thing, but this guy who's just like a hobbyist machine learning engineer figured out how to get Dreambooth running on like basically commodity gaming hardware. Then you could go and you could take your face, fine tune it and then be able to generate new photos in the style of whatever. It was all built on that open source one, not mid-journey. The other image generator, Ahmad Mustak was the stable diffusion. It was like stable diffusion as the base and then this Dreambooth thing on top. It was super cool because if you actually went through, if you jump through all those hoops, you basically had access to the magic avatar thing like three months before everyone else and you could like send one to a friend and be like, oh, this is cool. And then it was just completely commodified. It became an app and then it just became available in every chat app very shortly after. But the AI video has been moving a lot slower.

It's very compute intensive obviously since opening I had to shut down Sora and it just feels like none of the major American labs are as focused on this. So I got completely addicted to this, had a lot of fun doing it. I'll walk through everything that we did.

But also I would like to-