Limitless: An AI Podcast

Josh:
Just three months ago, investors valued OpenRouter at $1.3 billion.

Josh:
And this weekend, Stripe agreed to buy it for more than $7 billion.

Josh:
That's a five times markup in just 90 days for a company doing roughly $140 million in revenue.

Josh:
That's 50 times their revenue, which is outrageous when you look at what other

Josh:
companies in this industry are trading at.

Josh:
It seems like a top signal until you realize that Stripe processed $1.9 trillion

Josh:
of volume last year and only kept 0.36% of it.

Josh:
Open router charges five and a half percent on everything that flows through

Josh:
it. So Stripe just bought this take rate of 15 times higher than what it's used

Josh:
to in the fastest growing industry on earth.

Josh:
And this would seem like a one-off pattern if we didn't also get information

Josh:
from SpaceX, also known as Cursor, who just launched a GitHub competitor yesterday

Josh:
while the GitHub platform was down.

Josh:
In AI, the attention is kind of moving from the model layer to the middlemen.

Josh:
And we have some proof that we're going to walk through today going through

Josh:
this open router acquisition and the SpaceX alternative to GitHub.

Josh:
These are pretty big deals.

Ejaaz:
So the number one question, I think, if you're listening to this episode is

Ejaaz:
why on earth should I care? And why do I care about some TradFi Stripe finance

Ejaaz:
company buying this other random company that I don't really care about, right?

Ejaaz:
I only want to hear about Anthropic. I only want to hear about OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
Well, firstly, what is OpenRouter?

Ejaaz:
OpenRouter is basically a platform that you can go to and you pay one subscription,

Ejaaz:
you pay once and you get access to 400 plus AI models.

Ejaaz:
This could be open models, this could be closed models, like from Anthropic,

Ejaaz:
from OpenAI, but they could also be the Chinese LLM open source models.

Ejaaz:
And the idea behind Open Router is as follows.

Ejaaz:
If you are someone that has a task or a project or a business that you want to build, or

Ejaaz:
largely anything. You want to figure out the cheapest way to do it,

Ejaaz:
the most cost-efficient way to do it, but also using the smartest models when

Ejaaz:
and where it makes sense.

Ejaaz:
But that's sort of confusing. You would need to get manually many different

Ejaaz:
subscriptions. You would need to kind of know which model to use at which different time.

Ejaaz:
And then the models get upgraded and then you don't know which one to choose.

Ejaaz:
Like, are you using Grok? Am I using Cursor's model? Am I using ChatGPT?

Ejaaz:
Am I using Claude? I don't know.

Ejaaz:
OpenRatter basically solves all of that problem for you.

Ejaaz:
So a simple chat box in the same way that you would in chat GPT.

Ejaaz:
And it has a smart route on the back end that determines which model to use at which specific time.

Ejaaz:
And it saved people so much money. And it's given much better answers on average.

Ejaaz:
Now, you mentioned they're using or they're processing around 30 trillion tokens

Ejaaz:
a week at this point, 100 trillion tokens per month.

Ejaaz:
This is up, I think, 15x from last year, and it's up 5x or 6x in the last six

Ejaaz:
months alone. These guys are like absolutely churning out money,

Ejaaz:
$50 million ARR every single year.

Ejaaz:
And so the idea here is why would Stripe buy a company like this?

Ejaaz:
Well, the answer is pretty simple. When you look at what Stripe does,

Ejaaz:
they basically looked at the financial system.

Ejaaz:
They looked at banks. They looked at how people transact money.

Ejaaz:
And they thought, hmm, this is really clunky. This is really siloed.

Ejaaz:
We are going to build on top of this and make it a really smooth process to

Ejaaz:
create a transaction, to pay for something, to sell your goods or service.

Ejaaz:
They then looked at AI and they thought, huh, AI is going to eat our entire business up.

Ejaaz:
And these tokens, these AI tokens that people are like prompting and using,

Ejaaz:
look very similar to money.

Ejaaz:
And I see that OpenRouter has pretty much the same business model that we have.

Ejaaz:
How do we get access to this AI world? We should just buy OpenRouter.

Ejaaz:
And that's pretty much what they did.

Josh:
Even in their own words, their stated thesis is to be the economic infrastructure for AI.

Josh:
Traditionally, when you are an AI agent going to make payments,

Josh:
you are subject to the traditional rails of a human being, which is 30 cents

Josh:
and 2.9% fees. So anytime you want to pay online with a credit card,

Josh:
that's what you're paying when you pay through Stripe.

Josh:
It's a serious amount of money when it's done at the scale that they're dealing

Josh:
with, which is $3 trillion of money per year.

Josh:
So how do you get around that? You have to build this infrastructure layer.

Josh:
And when Stripe's building the infrastructure layer, you could view it as small

Josh:
different parts of it. So they have Bridge, it's stablecoin infrastructure,

Josh:
it's crypto, there's much lower fees.

Josh:
Then in June of 2025, they acquire Privy, which is a embedded wallet specific for agents.

Josh:
Then in September, they acquire Agentic Commerce, and they start to build this

Josh:
Agentic layer on top of it. Then they build their own blockchain in March 2026,

Josh:
and now they are making a bid for OpenRouter. And the number is not final.

Josh:
We believe it's $7 billion.

Josh:
No one has confirmed. Stripe hasn't wanted to come out and say this is the amount.

Josh:
It was rumored to be $10 billion.

Josh:
Now the current consensus is seven there's a chance it may have been eight but

Josh:
regardless it is a huge amount of money that they're paying for this

Josh:
and it seems to be like the next layer the next step in building this agentic

Josh:
infrastructure situation that they have because when you believe in the thesis

Josh:
that agents are going to get more capable that implies that the spending that

Josh:
they're going to be doing is much higher and not only is it much higher

Josh:
but it could be much smaller perhaps you're trying to pay for sub agents to use

Josh:
um to do this really complex project and you just need to pay a couple cents

Josh:
for server hours it doesn't make sense to do that with a credit card there's

Josh:
no infrastructure built in place yet to

Josh:
have these microtransactions that agents may want to use and also it's kind

Josh:
of clunky infrastructure for agents to send money in large quantities like when

Josh:
you think about sending a wire transfer an ach transfer sometimes it takes days

Josh:
sometimes you're limited in the amount you could send

Josh:
that doesn't really work for agents and you kind of want something separate

Josh:
for these ai entities so that feels like this is kind of what that is building towards but

Josh:
the difference is that open router is a different piece of the stack open router

Josh:
serves kind of like the meter it's

Josh:
the point where the intelligence gets consumed and gets priced so they've bought

Josh:
this middle layer that on the surface appears pretty lame it's like oh they

Josh:
just paid seven billion dollars for a wrapper but in reality

Josh:
they just got the middleware that

Josh:
Tends to soon i'm sure hundreds of trillions of tokens are going to get routed

Josh:
through and the amount of data that comes through that on top of everything

Josh:
is huge so this feels like they the reason they spent 50 times earnings they've

Josh:
made such a huge multiple on this company

Josh:
is for that reason alone it's for having the right to be the middle layer of

Josh:
this new infrastructure tidal wave that's happening as it relates to ai agents and tokens

Ejaaz:
I've been trying to wrap my head around the $7 billion price tag because it

Ejaaz:
just seems like they're overpaying massively for what is essentially a company

Ejaaz:
that makes $50 million a year. You don't typically pay like 120X earnings for something like that.

Ejaaz:
But as I start to unpack it in my head, I think there's a few things going on here.

Ejaaz:
Now, one of them you mentioned is agentic payments. I think Stripe is basically

Ejaaz:
making a big bet that the future of payments isn't gonna be human at all.

Ejaaz:
In fact, it'll probably be 10 to one agents to humans.

Ejaaz:
So what a world looks like in that sense is you're never selling to a human in the future.

Ejaaz:
You're selling mostly to AI agents. AI agents aren't going to have big wallets

Ejaaz:
or big budgets. They're going to be making microtransactions.

Ejaaz:
Now, right now, the financial system sucks for microtransactions.

Ejaaz:
If you go on to like Bloomberg, for example, right? And let's say I want to read an article.

Ejaaz:
I don't have a Bloomberg subscription right now, but I would love to read one

Ejaaz:
specific article. I would love to just pay five bucks to read that specific article.

Ejaaz:
I can't do that right now. And Bloomberg probably just wants to charge massive

Ejaaz:
subscription fees annual, right?

Ejaaz:
But they're not able to do that. With this new purchase, Stripe is one step

Ejaaz:
closer to be able to enable this. You mentioned they have their own blockchain.

Ejaaz:
This is kind of like a stablecoin thing. This is like digital money.

Ejaaz:
If you combine both of these things together, you suddenly unlock agentic payments.

Ejaaz:
And that is basically Stripe's main vision.

Ejaaz:
The second thing, and I think the real reason why they're paying $7 billion for Open Router.

Ejaaz:
Inference specifically. Now, inference is basically the cost or the ability

Ejaaz:
to serve customers requests or prompts for their AI model. So you route it to

Ejaaz:
an AI model, you get the answer back, and you serve it to them.

Ejaaz:
Now, inference over the last, I think, year and a half has basically 10 to 20x.

Ejaaz:
It's become a more valuable moat than training your own AI model.

Ejaaz:
And this has been the case for like all Frontier Labs as well.

Ejaaz:
They've realized that post-training is way more valuable.

Ejaaz:
So in a world where anyone and everyone is using AI for pretty much anything,

Ejaaz:
any conceivable kind of like task, you can expect to be able to have high volume

Ejaaz:
transactions. Like money basically just flows through this entire thing.

Ejaaz:
Everyone's doing every single bit of work through inference.

Ejaaz:
And Stripe wants to be the Rails that owns all of that. I was reading this really

Ejaaz:
interesting case study.

Ejaaz:
Josh, do you know where Visa came from or like how Visa came to be? Not a clue.

Josh:
It was in 1958.

Ejaaz:
They came out of Bank of America

Ejaaz:
They were a pet project inside Bank of America. They were incubated inside another bank.

Ejaaz:
And they built basically this network to make Bank of America more compatible

Ejaaz:
with other different banks, except no other bank wanted to use this thing because

Ejaaz:
it came from a competitor. So what did they do?

Ejaaz:
They spun out this thing called the Visa network, and it became super popular

Ejaaz:
because it was like a neutral platform.

Ejaaz:
And then everyone started using it, and Visa itself became a bank.

Ejaaz:
Now, we see the opposite thing happening here, where Stripe has basically acquired

Ejaaz:
open rights and so the question is allegedly if it's true will they keep it

Ejaaz:
separate to their current business or will they kind of keep it as like a neutral good.

Josh:
Yeah i don't know well you could you could tell bill ackman about that visa

Josh:
story i'm sure he'd be stoked that's a nod to yesterday's episode if you haven't

Josh:
watched go check it out i do have to ask you a question which is have you ever

Josh:
heard of openc like remember openc oh yeah

Ejaaz:
That one called back to you.

Josh:
For those that aren't familiar openc and we'll get to the reason why i'm mentioning

Josh:
this but openc was the largest nft marketplace in the world.

Josh:
And for those who were participating in the crypto space, if you ever bought

Josh:
an NFT, chances are it went through OpenSea. Now it had a meteoric rise and

Josh:
then unfortunate fall because, you know, the attention just kind of faded away from the space.

Josh:
But the reason why I mentioned that is because the founder of OpenSea is named

Josh:
Alex Atala, and he just so happens to also be the founder of OpenRouter,

Josh:
the company that just got acquired by Stripe.

Josh:
And we have his LinkedIn here open on screen and like, wow, what a run.

Ejaaz:
Dude, he was a forward deployed engineer before it was cool. Back in 2012.

Josh:
Between 2012 to 2014, which means he probably got equity and that equity is

Josh:
probably up a tremendous amount.

Josh:
Then he was lead front-end engineer, chief technology officer,

Josh:
and then co-founder of OpenSea

Josh:
for four years and seven months. And now co-founder and CEO of Open Router.

Josh:
So two multi-billion dollar businesses.

Josh:
And it's about time he got his exit because man, what a generational run he's been on.

Josh:
And if you are not familiar with Alex Atala, we actually had him on the show.

Josh:
We interviewed him on Limitless a while ago. This was back from, when did we do this?

Josh:
August 4th, 2025. So just over a year ago, we had Alex on.

Josh:
At that time, what was Open Router valued at? It must've been like what,

Josh:
one 10th or less of what it's valued that today?

Ejaaz:
I think it was a, I think it was max, like a hundred mil. I think he had just

Ejaaz:
raised, which is why we got him on.

Josh:
Oh my God. And, and even just in the last three months, why didn't we raise?

Ejaaz:
We should have invested.

Josh:
We need the limitless fund. Someone give us a limitless fund.

Josh:
That would have been our biggest exit to date with this guy,

Josh:
but that's the story of Alex Talos.

Josh:
So clearly this guy is a pretty focused founder. He's pretty cracked.

Josh:
He, this dude understands where the puck is going. I'm really curious to see

Josh:
what he builds next, but I found that to be a really interesting story.

Josh:
And not only is he following trends, but he has like some pretty interesting

Josh:
theses that are behind these companies.

Josh:
The one with OpenRound in particular is it's kind of, there's another plane

Josh:
analogy. I've been liking these plane analogies where nobody really holds loyalty

Josh:
accounts with 10 different airlines.

Josh:
You normally either have one or you search by the cheapest flight.

Josh:
So for me, I like flying Delta a lot. I have a Delta membership.

Josh:
If I'm not flying with Delta to increase my membership status or to really use their product suite,

Josh:
I will go to Google flights and I will buy the cheapest possible flight

Josh:
and that's all i want i just want to get from point a to point b open router

Josh:
serves as that layer open router is the company that will sift through 400 different ai models and

Josh:
ingest your query and tell you exactly where you can go to get the best outcome

Josh:
for the cheapest price and that was the thesis that

Josh:
really resonated and that's what

Josh:
worked so i mean congratulations to alex this is a pretty amazing exit

Josh:
uh by any means and to exit to stripe again who still is not public for some

Josh:
reason stripe seems to be like the last large company that needs to file their

Josh:
s1 hopefully we'll get that soon but pretty amazing run by by open router and

Josh:
the company and i'm like really stoked to see where stripe takes this next

Ejaaz:
I think it's also worth pointing out that open router isn't operating in like

Ejaaz:
a silo there are many other companies that are rumored to be building their

Ejaaz:
own routing platform look no further than open ai so open ai has a bunch of different models their

Ejaaz:
most recent model release has about like three different versions.

Ejaaz:
They have a routing feature that enables your prompt to go to the right model

Ejaaz:
at the right time for the cheapest possible way.

Ejaaz:
And then if you look at Meta, Zuck saw the rumors about open routing potentially

Ejaaz:
being acquired and launched a project codenamed, I believe it's Switchboard,

Ejaaz:
which aims to do the exact same things with Meta's own models,

Ejaaz:
as well as a bunch of new open hosted models.

Ejaaz:
And then if you look at the financial system itself, Ramp, which basically does

Ejaaz:
something similar to Stripe, processes a lot of transaction volume.

Ejaaz:
They created an internal routing platform that saved them, I think it was 40%

Ejaaz:
of their annual spend, not AI spend, but annual spend in general.

Ejaaz:
And they're now creating that or externalizing that as a product for anyone

Ejaaz:
to get access to. So we're seeing this growing trend of people realizing that

Ejaaz:
there's not just going to be one or two models that you're going to be using every single day.

Ejaaz:
You're going to be using multiple and you don't need to pick and choose which

Ejaaz:
ones. They're going to be hundreds.

Ejaaz:
So just get a routing or aggregator platform to do it.

Ejaaz:
And again, Alex Zatala has a history in building aggregator platforms.

Ejaaz:
OpenCU is exactly that for NFTs.

Josh:
You have to imagine that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are seeing this

Josh:
and they're thinking to themselves, well, hey, wait, we just have like a suite

Josh:
of models from high to low, very cheap ones, very high end ones.

Josh:
Why can't we create our router ourselves?

Josh:
So I imagine, like you just mentioned with Zuck, we're going to see a lot of

Josh:
that, mostly just due to the nature of agents and how these agents are working.

Josh:
Not all of them need frontier tokens.

Josh:
But for the once that do, we have a company for you. And it is called Ledger,

Josh:
the sponsor of this episode. Thank you, Ledger, for sponsoring this episode.

Josh:
If you are building with AI agents, chances are you're worried about security.

Josh:
There are break-ins all the time and increasingly happening.

Josh:
Ledger has a three-step process where the agent proposes, the humans approve,

Josh:
and then the Ledger signer enforces.

Josh:
It comes equipped with Ledger stack, which is an open source framework filled

Josh:
with tools that you could use to help you navigate the way that you use your

Josh:
agents. It works with Cloud Code, Codex, and Cursor. It is open source and available

Josh:
today, linked down in the description. Thank you to Ledger for sponsoring this part of the episode.

Josh:
Now, we did mention in the intro, I uttered the name of this company named SpaceX or Cursor.

Josh:
SpaceX just bought Cursor for $60 billion. And Cursor has been on this generational

Josh:
run so far where they released GrokBot, which was a Cursor product now under the SpaceX category.

Josh:
And just yesterday, something funny happened because GitHub was down.

Josh:
And for those of you who don't know, GitHub is basically where the world's code base is hosted.

Josh:
And there were a few hours during

Josh:
the day in which GitHub was having some outages. And during that time,

Josh:
Cursor the small little company that spacex acquired for 60 billion dollars

Josh:
the fastest growing company in the world um they released their own alternative

Josh:
called origin and origin is basically the github alternative now why are we

Josh:
talking about this now in this episode it's because the thesis is very similar

Josh:
to what we just talked about with the stripe acquisition a lot of the value is moving to

Josh:
being the middle layer the middle man you want to be the infrastructure provider

Josh:
for where all the tokens get generated so these companies aren't necessarily

Josh:
racing to generate the tokens, although in the case of SpaceX, they are.

Josh:
But instead, they're working towards this middle layer. And this cursor origin

Josh:
deployment is another example of how people just really want to be the tollbooths.

Josh:
They're building the place in which you have to pass in order to build with

Josh:
these AI agentic systems.

Ejaaz:
And the best part about this is you can get public exposure to this thing by

Ejaaz:
just buying one single stock, which happens to also own a rocket company as

Ejaaz:
well. SpaceX. Isn't that crazy? Yeah.

Ejaaz:
Unlike Stripe, unlike OpenRata, who are still private companies, SpaceX.

Ejaaz:
I still don't think a lot of people realize that they are very much so a frontier

Ejaaz:
AI lab. And the acquisition of

Ejaaz:
cursor will go down as one of the best acquisitions ever, in my opinion.

Ejaaz:
But yeah, like focusing on this, this particular launch, and why it's actually useful.

Ejaaz:
Code hosting platforms are used by pretty much any and every software engineer.

Ejaaz:
In the world. So basically allows you to upload your code repository and collaborate

Ejaaz:
across various different engineers to kind of update the code base,

Ejaaz:
submit kind of changes that you want to make.

Ejaaz:
And you can do so collaboratively online, securely, privately if you want, or publicly if needed.

Ejaaz:
And so GitHub had the moat on this entire thing. And Microsoft did the smart

Ejaaz:
thing years ago, and they acquired GitHub, except they didn't leverage that

Ejaaz:
at all for any of their AI products.

Ejaaz:
So now what Cursor slash SpaceX have is a fully integrated software stack where

Ejaaz:
they're building the models,

Ejaaz:
They now have the routing platform, which is basically Cursor for coding specifically.

Ejaaz:
And now they have the code hosting platform. So what does this mean?

Ejaaz:
Any future coding model that Elon Musk creates, so Grok Code,

Ejaaz:
Grok Build, will essentially have a really tightly integrated product loop.

Ejaaz:
And they'll be able to see what developers and engineers are building,

Ejaaz:
how they're behaving, and be able to iterate and build much better frontier

Ejaaz:
coding models, which makes me basically, I don't want to turn this into a SpaceX

Ejaaz:
ball episode, but it makes me incredibly bullish about the entire thing.

Ejaaz:
But the second really cool thing about this, which separates it from GitHub,

Ejaaz:
in my opinion, they've specifically engineered Origin, this new code hosting

Ejaaz:
platform, to be extremely high throughput.

Ejaaz:
And that's specifically not for humans, it's for agents.

Ejaaz:
So what I really like about this demo, I can't remember if it's this demo or

Ejaaz:
another demo I watched, they had about a couple, I think it was like 50 GitHub commits per second.

Ejaaz:
So they ended up having multiple agents. I think they had like 100 agents at

Ejaaz:
one point pushing commits to

Ejaaz:
this new cursor origin platform, which basically I think probably like 10x is

Ejaaz:
the speed or minimum 10x is the speed at which humans are able,

Ejaaz:
or the best engineers are able to push code.

Ejaaz:
So the point is they've engineered an entire platform around AI agents doing

Ejaaz:
the bulk of coding in the future.

Ejaaz:
So that means testing the code, reviewing the code, submitting the code,

Ejaaz:
making sure other agents can help review the set code.

Ejaaz:
And so humans at the end of the day will just kind of sit back and manage a

Ejaaz:
fleet of these agents as they code. GitHub currently isn't oriented to do that,

Ejaaz:
but this platform is, and I think that gives them a major advantage going forwards.

Josh:
Yeah, some of the launch claims, 296,000 clones per hour, 22 commits per second per repo.

Josh:
For those who don't know, that's just a tremendous amount of code being pushed. This is superhuman.

Josh:
This is not something that GitHub ever built itself for because it was never

Josh:
expected that humans would ever do something at a rate this fast.

Josh:
So this is basically, if you were to redesign GitHub from first principles in

Josh:
the year 2026, this is what you get. It's just a tremendous amount of throughput.

Josh:
And this is coming at a time in which GitHub is really stressed.

Josh:
We showed a chart on the show a few weeks ago that shows the amount of commits

Josh:
to GitHub going basically in a vertical line. It's a hockey stick.

Josh:
They've never dealt with this much volume before. And as a result,

Josh:
they're starting to deal with some issues.

Josh:
One of which was the outage that happened yesterday was a global outage for

Josh:
six hours and 42 minutes.

Josh:
That is a tremendous amount of time for a company that hosts the Globes code,

Josh:
which meant that a lot of people couldn't push or deploy.

Josh:
During that time, ironically, is when this launch video came out.

Josh:
And it's funny, you know, the timing was a little bit rushed because there's

Josh:
not even audio in the launch video.

Josh:
I saw this great post online that said like, if your video, if your launch video

Josh:
has audio behind it, you've shipped too late.

Josh:
They didn't even get to processing audio. They didn't even put a song behind

Josh:
it. They just shipped it. they said here we're live go try it out i have to

Josh:
i can't help but think about microsoft in this situation

Josh:
because Microsoft, we know they've been struggling. They've been having a tough

Josh:
time. They haven't been able to produce really anything of value in the world of AI.

Josh:
They have all this open AI IP. They haven't really done much with it.

Josh:
Their flagship product, I guess, is still co-pilot, which no one uses unless

Josh:
you are forced to through your employer.

Josh:
Now their crown jewel GitHub has a pretty serious contender in cursor,

Josh:
or I should say SpaceX AI, the one of the soon to be the largest AI company

Josh:
or one of the largest AI companies in the world. So when I think about Microsoft,

Josh:
I'm like, man, what do they have going for them?

Ejaaz:
Dude, don't worry. They've only been flat year to date. Yeah.

Ejaaz:
Wow. I mean, let's see it like, let's see on the day. On the day we're looking

Ejaaz:
at, yeah, okay. Seems to be unbothered.

Ejaaz:
I mean, they did have a breakthrough earnings, quarterly earnings recently,

Ejaaz:
which their cloud revenue basically went vertical.

Ejaaz:
But again, if you just end up becoming a cloud provider in a world where you

Ejaaz:
could have owned the AI or Frontier AI Model Lab, you've fumbled the bag drastically.

Josh:
What does the five-year look like on that oh

Ejaaz:
Don't even how they've been doing for that's a whole 65.

Josh:
Not great for five years being one of the leading ai companies like that's that's

Josh:
tough and like you mentioned it's

Josh:
it's like okay the company will continue to do great right they have the infrastructure

Josh:
they have uh microsoft azure they're huge cloud service provider it has incredible

Josh:
margins it's growing very fast everyone needs cloud everyone needs these access to compute

Josh:
but other than that like what what do they have are they going to become a cloud-infra provider?

Josh:
Is that the end state of Microsoft after all these years?

Ejaaz:
Well, there is a counterpoint to this, which is,

Ejaaz:
pretty much any company that isn't a tech company in literally any industry

Ejaaz:
uses Microsoft's suite of services.

Ejaaz:
I cannot tell you the number of business meetings I've been on over the last

Ejaaz:
six months that have been on Microsoft Teams, and it makes me cringe, but listen, it works.

Ejaaz:
And that just shows the deep embedding that their software infrastructure has

Ejaaz:
for the majority of companies in the world.

Ejaaz:
Now, that is a very sticky moat. Now, Anthropic, OpenAI are trying to chip away at their moat, right?

Ejaaz:
Saying, hey, use our models, we'll deploy, we'll give you forward deployed engineers

Ejaaz:
and try and figure out how best to integrate AI because they can't really get

Ejaaz:
into the client's computer systems other than that way.

Ejaaz:
Microsoft knows that they have this moat. Satya Nadella wrote this really long

Ejaaz:
essay basically saying, hey guys, I know that you're trying to get into our

Ejaaz:
data moat and we're going to do everything that we can to protect it,

Ejaaz:
but I don't see how they can.

Ejaaz:
They're going to have to eventually hand over the reins if they can't come up

Ejaaz:
with a competitive AI offering. Copilot right now is that premium offering.

Ejaaz:
And I don't like to call it a premium offering because it's not that at all.

Ejaaz:
It can't even do the basics of like a GLM 5.2 Chinese open source model.

Ejaaz:
So again, it's hard for me to try and figure out how Microsoft improves from

Ejaaz:
here, but they do have the time. They do have the data mode.

Ejaaz:
And as long as they protect that, they have a shot. They have the cash balance. So we'll see.

Josh:
We'll see. We'll see what happens with all of these as the thesis play out.

Josh:
I mean, we have now it's clear like that there There is a shift upon us where

Josh:
the last two years were very much focused on like who was able to build the

Josh:
smartest model, all of the values occurring to that.

Josh:
Now people are looking further out that risk curve. Like where is next?

Josh:
We know that infrastructure is one of them building data centers,

Josh:
but we also know that the middle men, that middle infralayer is like a pretty good place to be.

Josh:
Stripe purchased the toll booth. We have cursor. I guess you could imagine as

Josh:
if they're like paving these new highways and the labs who are the ones who

Josh:
are actually building intelligence.

Josh:
So it's becoming more clear. Everyone's starting to learn their role in this

Josh:
stack and they're accelerating because not one company is able to do it all just yet.

Josh:
So that's where we stand on Stripe and on Cursor. And I think these are two

Josh:
really cool, really impressive exits on the Stripe front with OpenRouter.

Josh:
Like, congratulations, what an exit. We're going to see how that plays off.

Josh:
Clearly, they're very bullish if they had $7 billion to spend.

Josh:
And like, man, I hope one day Stripe decides to go public. They feel like the

Josh:
final one to publish in S1. So hopefully we'll get that soon.

Ejaaz:
I would love to own part of the number one AI finance lab.

Ejaaz:
And Stripe has all the potential to do that. Maybe some of these funds do.

Ejaaz:
Maybe Leopold launches one in the future. God knows. Yeah, I would love to get

Ejaaz:
access to different sectors that aren't just generalized LLMs.

Ejaaz:
And I think finance is a big one. And Stripe's acquisition is huge. So I'm not.

Josh:
Going to say how that works. And Stripe has just like this unbelievable team

Josh:
of builders who are just so talented and so good at what they do.

Josh:
And if I were to place a bet on anyone actually winning this next frontier of

Josh:
finance and what that looks like, I would certainly pick Stripe.

Josh:
So very bullish on the future of Stripe as it relates to the future of payments.

Josh:
And I think they're a company to look out for.

Josh:
Open routers just fuel on the fire. and that is the update so thank you all

Josh:
so much for watching if you made it to the end you are a real one we appreciate

Josh:
you sticking along for the journey if you enjoy this episode don't forget to share it with a friend

Josh:
that's how we grow which we've been doing so fast and the comments have been

Josh:
so sweet so thank you to everyone who has left

Josh:
a nice comment we read pretty much all of them i i wake up in the morning and

Josh:
like the kind of scroll first thing and just see all of the nice and sometimes

Josh:
not so nice things but i appreciate the feedback both ways it's important to keep us humble

Josh:
um he does any final parting thoughts before we head out of here

Ejaaz:
Uh no i think that's pretty much it. I'm curious what people's thoughts are

Ejaaz:
on an episode like this. Is this something that's interesting?

Ejaaz:
Is this something that's just boring for you? Do you want to just hear about

Ejaaz:
model updates in general?

Ejaaz:
Or is talking about different sectors and applications of AI in different sectors

Ejaaz:
useful to you? Let us know in the comments, DM us, we're available on X,

Ejaaz:
share this with a friend.

Ejaaz:
And yeah, wherever you're listening to us, if you aren't subscribed,

Ejaaz:
if you haven't given us a rating, please do so. It helps us out massively.

Ejaaz:
And we will see you on the next one.