TBPN

When using Claude for the first time, Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. Co-Founder and Co-Chairman Howard Marks was “absolutely dumbstruck.” When Marks’ son encouraged him to update his latest investment memo with Claude, he didn’t expect much. But then the response came back: “It felt like a note from a colleague or friend. It was personal. It was warm. It drew analogies to my 35 years of memos.” And when he asked Calude to be hyper critical, it cracked back with a joke “Do you want me to be hypercritical or hypocritical?"  Marks was surprised by AI’s judgment, tone, and ability to elevate the work he’s spent a lifetime mastering. He predicts that though AI might not replace those who are best at what they do, it has the potential to raise the bar and weed out those who don’t add value.

Salesforce Co-Founder and CEO Marc Benioff made a bet on AI for 2026: Stop hiring engineers and hire 20% more salespeople. Benioff joined the show to discuss his reallocation strategy when reshaping the Salesforce headcount: “I was allowing the productivity from the coding agent to give me the extra capacity that I needed for the year… But I did hire almost 20% more salespeople… We have more demand than ever." While many debate whether AI will replace workers, Benioff shows what adoption actually looks like at the Fortune 500 level.

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If Stripe had followed the MBA playbook, it probably wouldn’t exist. Co-Founders Patrick and John Collison came onto the show and spoke about how Stripe approached new products in its earliest days, and why traditional MBA frameworks would have killed their best ideas before execution. John gives advice that most founders eventually learn the hard way: “You can't get too MBA-brain about new products.” Stripe didn’t start by calculating the percentage of global GDP they could capture. They started with real pain points from actual founders. And the rest is history.

J.P. Morgan coined the “HALO” (Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence) for things that can’t be easily vibe coded away. Mike Annunziata, Founder and Managing Partner at Also Capital, came on the show and talked about a thesis he’s been betting on for years: “Things that are very difficult to replicate — these kinds of things are much more resilient than your traditional B2B SaaS product." He used the examples of chemical plants and aerospace production companies that are largely AI-immune because their moats are physical, regulatory, and operational. A nuclear reactor can’t be replicated with Claude Code. We’ve covered this topic on the show last August with Slop Vs. Steel, when we brought on Everett "Ev" Randle and Delian Asparouhov to discuss high-margin software vs. capex-intensive reindustrialization.

Collison Brothers Join, Bill Gurley Joins (Gurlin' Down A Dream) TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Okta - https://www.okta.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Sentry - https://sentry.io Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co

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Anduril Industries, Erebor, and ModRetro Founder Palmer Luckey reveals who’s getting the most out of vibe coding (hint: not software engineers). Luckey put it bluntly: “The biggest beneficiaries of vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be the shape rotators, not the wordcels.” The public narrative is that AI has the power to wipe out developers. But it also has the power to elevate those who were once blocked by their inability to write software. And Luckey would know better than anyone. He built Oculus VR at 19 in a trailer. While he wasn’t great at programming, he had great optics and an eye for hardware. And he estimates that he would’ve been 2 years ahead if vibe coding had existed then.

BREAKING: Erebor a bank founded by Palmer Luckey, Trevor Capozza, Aaron Pelz, Jacob E. Hirshman, and Owen Rapaport, has officially received its charter and become operational. Palmer Luckey joined the show live from NYSE to tell us about why he saw the need for a new kind of bank for technology businesses. He told us that Erebor will use dollar-backed cryptocurrencies to enable 24/7/365 settlement of payments, something many businesses need but few get. Luckey saw the need for “a real bank for real companies doing real things” and built Erebor with that in mind.