New Delphi Podcast with Michael Arrington (@arrington), founder of TechCrunch and Arrington Capital Michael broke the news of Google buying YouTube, worked with Steve Jobs, and backed Uber and Airbnb early We get into the Fourth Turning, why the AI race won't slow down, what separates great founders from everyone else, and why he still believes Bitcoin is the hard money the world needs He also opens up about selling TechCrunch, burnout, reinventing himself through crypto, and learning to play to his strengths 00:00 Intro & the Fourth Turning 07:00 AI, China & the Race to AGI 17:00 Founder Psychology & Investment Red Flags 29:00 Building TechCrunch & Lessons from Steve Jobs 44:00 Selling TechCrunch & Backing Uber and Airbnb 53:00 Moving Into Crypto & Navigating Market Cycles 1:00:00 Bitcoin, AI & an Uncertain Future 1:09:00 Advice for Founders: Play to Your Strengths Full episode

Huge congratulations to @NousResearch and team @dillonrolnick @Teknium @karan4d @theemozilla @gradyacc and many others on closing their $90M Series B at a $1.5B valuation. @Delphi_Ventures co-led their seed round, doubled down in their Series A, and participated again here. This marks us tripling down on Nous. Following Nous' journey over the past few years has recalibrated my view of top tier founders The team has always been months to years ahead at every juncture. They did synthetic model evaluations years before people got sick of benchmark maxing, distributed training runs before it was interesting, YARN to massively increase context length back when you couldn't dump endless text into LLMs and millions of downloads for their fine tuned Hermes Models. There were also a lot of fun projects along the way like WorldSim (massive world simulation) and FORGE. Fast forward to today and there are 24M+ downloads of Hermes Agent since February, #1 among apps on OpenRouter by daily token usage, and 250,000+ GitHub stars along with just mass virality. The Nous team estimates Hermes drives approximately 2.5% of all global token usage. Nous has created two things that I think are both foundational and sticky First, Nous created a religion and an authentic cult like following. They achieved this through grassroots interest and involvement from their community and users, and by actually embracing them. A recurring example is Teknium replying to users at all hours of the day, working with them and integrating their pull requests into Hermes agent. The project’s ethos is open source and against a totalitarian end state where a room full of folks controls AI and reality itself, and that resonates globally. The second reason is that Hermes agent unlocks a fundamental new spot on the AI optimization frontier as the open source non lab owned option. Every major competitor is owned by an AI lab (Muse owned by Meta, OpenClaw by OpenAI, Grok by SpaceX, Instinct which is closed source). With Hermes Agent you own everything you create around an AI model so you have that as a long term evolving asset (Business or personal) instead of getting IP farmed Also with Hermes agent you can drive differentiated outcomes versus using the same model as everyone else. Individuals and businesses have a comprehensive set of owned depth around the model (Evaluations, memory, interactions, data, private IP, variety of open or closed or fine tuned models, and more). This lends itself to an AI agent that grows with you that you own for life. Both @satyanadella and @PalantirTech’s have shared this view that corporations don’t want to give away their IP anymore and be farmed. They want to own it as an asset. I’ve shared my full thesis on this concept of owning vs renting your intelligence here: xitter.cf/Shaughnessy119/status/… Hermes Agent is not just a random spark, it’s the result of a team that has spent years building products, building systems and being fully enveloped in the AI world. The thousands of micro decisions and the culmination of the team led to Hermes Agent. So what comes next? When you have tens of millions of users already, they can become the champions within a business to bring their Hermes build to all employees of a company. They can start sharing skills, interactions, interop, data and more and build something truly multiplayer for enterprise. Having Nvidia, Microsoft and Samsung as investors doubles as enabling them to be extremely smart in potentially onboarding a massive enterprise user base to Hermes Enterprise. This isn't just private businesses using Hermes internally; it's Fortune 500 companies who can offer customized and unique agents to their customers and users built on Hermes Enterprise. Hermes' agent was not built to be a casual or fleeting personal agent and this lends itself to a larger business expansion. As Teknium shared “I fully intend and have plainly stated many times that I always built hermes to be the most powerful AI Agent. "Normie" consumers can leverage that and we do what we can to make it an experience they can approach (the mobile app will be almost exclusively focused on consumer) - but they are not our only demographic. I want the scientists, the cybersecurity engineers, the developers, the knowledge workers, the creatives, and everyone else to be able to have an agent that they can leverage that is maximally useful to them too.…” Nous has captured the hearts and minds of the smartest user base on earth and that's the wedge. Nous is building for a future where you have sovereignty over your AI stack. They are the center of gravity for Open source AI developers, users, investors and supporters. The AI discussion has been dominated by fear mongering driven by centralized labs to obtain a regulatory moat. This is very obvious. The safest path in my opinion is open source and acceleration. An entire world of agents pressure testing, building and dealing with each other aligned to the individual vs aligned to a centralized team of decision makers at a lab. Nous is the answer. Nous has now raised $158M to date to execute this vision. Internally we have people who have built insane Hermes agent builds including @KSimback and @pierskicks. I have built an insanely deep Hermes build that takes in 40+ private and public data sources and finds me new founders to invest in, helps manage my liquid portfolio, and tracks my entire historical journey as a VC (past founders, deals, much more). A few fun content items through the years has been our AMA with Teknium and our Podcast with Jeff AMA: xitter.cf/Shaughnessy119/status/… Podcast: members.delphidigital.io/med… Very excited for @robotventures (@tarunchitra and @rleshner) to lead the round alongside @nvidia @Microsoft @Samsung @usv (@fredwilson), @MenloVentures (@deedydas and team), @ycombinator and @1789Capital. Tarun is extremely deep on AI, inference (see his latest article) and open source and is the ideal lead investor in Nous. Also amped for the Hermes Mobile App Our goal at Delphi Ventures is to be the biggest supporters and investors of our portfolio companies. We are extremely excited for the future of Nous. wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/…