To start with Michael, I think it's best if you explain what you guys are building at Drip and also give a bit of information about your background.

Yeah, for sure.

So, well, first of all, thanks Sam for having me.

Definitely excited to be here.

I know we've been communicating over the past few months about Drip specifically.

Maybe I'll just start with my background.

So I previously, I studied finance and computer science in school.

So what is the biggest use case at the moment on the platform? Is it only like for, let's say, stock analysis or do you see some other use case that potentially help you guys in the future then expand beyond maybe current verticals that you have?

What are some of the major takeaways for you?

Something that I really appreciated about A16Z that I think is very different from other venture firms is that everyone on the deal team, we were all kids at the time.

Like I think I joined when I was like 21 years old.

Other people were like, the age range was like 21 to 27, 28 maybe.

We were all kids who had computer science backgrounds that played with crypto on the weekends.

And no one really had investing experience whatsoever.

They were just like crypto experts and people understood it extremely deeply.

And how are you thinking about competition? Because what's stopping someone to building something similar? Is it your proprietary LLM, the way you're summarizing content and things like that?

You were, you were jumping in.

I got two things to say.

One, to comment on what you just said, and something else, which is, who's the demand side today? I think the truth is, and I'll, I'll be the one to say it, is, like, these wallets are still pretty hard to use, okay? Even with, even with agents.

And people are doing a really good job of making the UX great, but most of it is, like, our nerd circle in this corner of the internet on X, right? That being said, there is a category of person that is going to be very, very willing to jump through the hoops of that friction, and it's gonna be the people who know that on the other side of that friction is just something that is an incredible use case.

And I think that incredible use case is, Kai, you said we're gonna talk about eventually, is trading and investing, right? Like, traders and investors have proven to be a audience that is very willing to push through friction to get access to more efficient tools to trade, make money, and invest, right? And so I think that category of user may be a very good initial source of demand.

That's to answer your first question.

And then the second thing about the, the token maxing kinda stuff, what's really interesting about that is the pay-as-you-go model existed already, right? It was pay-per-view.

I'm gonna get access to the right data and information to test that thesis." Like, h- how much is there, like, a real place for retail to play using these tools, or is it just, it's pretending like you're trading, but at the end of the day, it's, this is gambling and speculation like everyone in crypto is used to?

you know ready to receive this kind of new product

i think a few reasons first from a technical side the tech is kind of ready right like we're we have layer twos with like sub penny transaction fees we have stable coins we have really amazing sdks and wallet infrastructure where people can come to our site and we can give them a wallet with them not even knowing that there's a wallet.

They can just sign up with their email.

We can also sponsor their transactions.

So when you're using the Bond website, for example, normally you'll have to pay Ethereum gas to do a transaction.

You don't even know that there's an Ethereum transaction going on on the Bond platform because it's all hidden behind the scenes.

But that is because there have been many companies that have worked really hard to build really incredible infrastructure to enable such a seamless experience.

including at a