Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough.

And I'm Chris Masina.

And our guest today is long overdue.

The great Nat Friedman.

Hi, Nat, how are you?

Hey, yeah, Ryan, I don't know if I'm great, but I'm fine.

Thank you for having me.

Well, you're great, especially now in this AI era.

You're, you know, the investor that I hear about in almost every deal that we see.

Let's start off with some high-level stuff because the last week has been I mean it's always

crazy in the AI universe right now but let's let's do some high-level stuff on like

you know soymen going to Microsoft, everyone fleeing Stability AI, even the CEO.

Both companies cited difficulties in finding a business model for why they are doing what they're doing.

Does this suggest that there could be trouble for, you know, especially the consumer facing AI model companies that maybe they're largely undifferentiated, maybe they're

peddling commodities at this point, what do you think?

Well, there's a lot of variance in how well these companies are doing.

I mean, there are consumer consumer facing AI companies that are

some of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen and they are just doing

spectacularly well. I mean mid journey is a great example of a bootstrapped consumer AI company

that has just absolutely spectacular usage and revenue and product and so forth so I

think it's very uneven I think in the case of inflection, look there's

there's two sides to every transaction and I think if I'm Mustafa, and I'm you know I'm not obviously, but if I'm Mustafa I think there's a couple things I'm looking at one is you know I don't have a hit product, I have a decent product, but it has relatively

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