Aug 21, 2026 · 33 min · 10 segments
Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Chris Brandt, CEO of UpSurge Baltimore — the innovation arm of the Greater Baltimore Committee — and Managing Director at Audacious Capital, to unpack a growing…
These are big conversations, but these are also big conversations that are potentially leading to regulations around things that may, you know, slow us down.
At some point earlier, you mentioned the P&L and the finance decision that finance departments and IT departments are starting to have.
This brings us to one of the big benefits of open weight models, which is this whole thing around tokenomics.
I've used this example a few times, but this is my way of explaining tokenomics.
Today, for a lot of us, we're used to using these AI models as an all-you-can-eat plan.
You get all the tokens you can eat, and there are different levels of the amount of tokens that you get.
And that allows you to use these things, for the most part, as much as you need to.
At least right now for the business enterprise plans, and potentially this will hit other plans as well, most of these companies have moved to a pay-as-you-go model.
And then they move to a weighted system where you have to weigh your salad.
And suddenly, the way that I approach building a salad changed overnight.
um it's because the cost was different right and this is what's happening with with companies right now they were used to the build whatever salad you want you could be super wasteful with your token usage and now they're like all right i gotta figure out how many mushrooms i'm gonna put on here because i gotta worry about the weight and the cost of each one of those things And so when these companies start changing and start charging in this way, you get into what I like to call the classic buy versus build.
I'm sure that you have this conversation with your portfolio companies and you have this conversation all the time.
Do we pay as we go for tokens or do we invest and we build a open weight model platform where we can use this thing as much as we want without paying for the tokens versus paying anthropic or open AI? And I think this goes back to what you were saying around the regulatory malt earlier, too, right? This is this is that thing.
These are big conversations, but these are also big conversations that are potentially leading to regulations around things that may, you know, slow us down.
At some point earlier, you mentioned the P&L and the finance decision that finance departments and IT departments are starting to have.
This brings us to one of the big benefits of open weight models, which is this whole thing around tokenomics.
I've used this example a few times, but this is my way of explaining tokenomics.
Today, for a lot of us, we're used to using these AI models as an all-you-can-eat plan.
You get all the tokens you can eat, and there are different levels of the amount of tokens that you get.
And that allows you to use these things, for the most part, as much as you need to.
At least right now for the business enterprise plans, and potentially this will hit other plans as well, most of these companies have moved to a pay-as-you-go model.
And then they move to a weighted system where you have to weigh your salad.
And suddenly, the way that I approach building a salad changed overnight.
um it's because the cost was different right and this is what's happening with with companies right now they were used to the build whatever salad you want you could be super wasteful with your token usage and now they're like all right i gotta figure out how many mushrooms i'm gonna put on here because i gotta worry about the weight and the cost of each one of those things And so when these companies start changing and start charging in this way, you get into what I like to call the classic buy versus build.
I'm sure that you have this conversation with your portfolio companies and you have this conversation all the time.
Do we pay as we go for tokens or do we invest and we build a open weight model platform where we can use this thing as much as we want without paying for the tokens versus paying anthropic or open AI? And I think this goes back to what you were saying around the regulatory malt earlier, too, right? This is this is that thing.
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