OpenClaw for normies is here

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com/splotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability, very 16-plus. We had a billionaire negotiate the price, and like Polk said, "Yeah, 136K a month." End of payment went through, yeah. He paid 136K a month. What? This week on the show, we've got Marvin von Hagen, the CEO of Polk, an AI that lives in your tax and can connect to pretty much everything. It's basically open-claw for normies, and as Marvin tells us, he thinks there's potential for this to be something that billions of people use. Which had about how he saw the AI agent trend early, charging a billionaire 136K a month for Polk, and suing Meta. But first, Ellis and I chat about OpenAI buying TBPN, a new TV show about the tech industry, and why people in AI are working so damn hard. Welcome to Access. It's Access Time. I'm bringing that back. Ellis, now that you're back from vacation, I have some news to share with you. I hope it's okay that this happened while you were out. I sold the podcast to Anthropic. You're joking. Yeah. Access brought to you by the Anthropic public benefit corporation. I'm so gullible. It's like genuinely a problem. This is why I wasn't a very good reporter. No. But obviously that's a joke. I'm joking about OpenAI buying TBPN, the amount of people who talk to me. No, dude. I literally like 35% believed you. Oh, well. Great. I mean, these days, you got to turn everything into content, right? It's like, well, I got to tell my co-hosts, but when better than on the actual show? I think the Mr. Beast content code of ethics would tell you to do so. Yeah. And look, I love our advertisers. We have great advertisers, but I think we found a new path, a new business path. What the podcast is, is flip it to a lab. So we should just do a short list of labs we'd want to sell to and then we can jump that up. Okay. I'm too to do a list. But you're back. You were, you spent a week in Mexico, hopefully with some my ties, some Miami vices. I saw your photos with the kids, looked great, looked like a good time. That first day back, which is when we're recording Monday, is always a tough one I find from these vacations. What's, what was the vacation like and what's it been like coming back? Yeah. I mean, coming back is often like the depths of hell, like punishment, especially coming back to a startup where everybody is quote unquote in the trenches and is just constantly annoyed that you were not up to date on everything and you have like 500 slacks to check. It can be absolutely brutal. And I mean, it could take a few days to even get back in the swing and then you're already behind again. And before you know it, it takes longer than your vacation to even catch up on where you were. And it's just kind of a sad state of feeling like you're being punished for your off time. But yeah, fortunately with most of my clients now, I'm on like five week sprints around there, you know, mission vision, manifesto website, that type of stuff. And it was really just as simple as skipping a week assuming that none of them had imminent launches. So, yeah, I had a notion AI triage some stuff for me, triage a few things myself. Sorry, if I haven't gotten back to you yet. But I actually, I feel okay, feel okay, lost a few brain cells, but uh, well, that's good. That's what it vacation's for. I really hold back on not texting you stuff because the open AI, TBPM thing was lighting up my tax. And I could tell you weren't fully disconnected because you were actually texting me a couple times about things. I mean, you could text me some things that are juicy and fun. But I wouldn't want is like, can you do the advertising upfront slate check in at 8, 16 a.m.? Yeah. Which would be a privilege to have, honestly. Well, I would, I should have texted you about TBPM then. But yeah, I don't think there's anything we can add to that at this point, except that, you know, I think those guys are, are geniuses, John and Jordy and they're going to really help open AI with its marketing and it's calm strategy. I think that's as much a part of the deal as TBPM itself. And you know, now the question is, can TBPM live on and continue to thrive as the open AI show? And I think that's a, that's a TBD thing. Yeah, I mean, I guess I have something to add. I mean, I've been witness to many first party content efforts through my years at Snapchat with the early days of Discover and yeah, and you know, even like someone like our friend, a Peter Hamby, right? Yeah. You know, Hamby? Yeah. I mean, he's still going strong. I think with his show and his content on Snap, and as far as I know, there's, there's not really been any interference from, from the headhunches. There was always very much a wall between the content side of Snapchat and everything else, I think, which was good, but almost always, it never really bears out. And so Godspeed to those guys, but it's just kind of an impossible situation because so much of content is about opinions and you will never have 100% aligned opinions as the people who own the company. I mean, I even saw some op-eds the other day in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post that were about the, you know, meta and YouTube lawsuit and they, to me, felt like very bought and sold, you know, like things that were very much fed by investors or owners, whether it's Jeff Bezos or otherwise, and it's just very, very, very, very hard to stand up to your owner or boss for lack of a better term over the long term. Though it, of course, feels like everything's aligned right now. So yeah, hopefully there is a long and fruitful honeymoon period of this, of this acquisition where things are going great. But it's just hard for me to imagine in any content, not, not just with acquisitions, but with first party content, whether it's the Robin Hood site or Casper's newsletter, or Casper's website where, where content, which is about being pointy and spiky and entertaining and interesting, is ever going to be perfectly aligned with, with corporate values, you know? The day the deal was announced, opening eye people were calling me and trying to compare this to Microsoft spinning up MSNBC, which is a thing most people probably don't remember, but Microsoft actually stood up that news channel, and I didn't know that. Yeah, it's like 30 years old at this point. And like as an example of this happening before, it's like if you just do a quick search, that was an utter disaster. And Microsoft fully dissolved its ownership in that after many tortured years. And it was a PR disaster. And yeah, there's, there's no example of this working well of like, well, there could even be a moment that is a crucible moment today. You know, with the Big New Yorker piece, Sam Altman, Ronan Farrow, yeah. That will be a good test is how do they cover that? Yeah. Regardless of how they covered it on the show today, it would have been different, right? And I think that is the slippery slope. Yes, but TBPAN has always been very differential to the guests. I can say this also as a guest, right? I did like a 15-minute segment on there about building the newsletter a couple weeks ago. And those guys are awesome, but they're not, they're not journalists. They don't claim to be and they don't say they are. And they are cheerleaders of the industry. You know, they're VCs, they're investors, you know, John, one of the co-hosts was co-founded Soilents. Like these guys who have startup experience, they worked inside Founders Fund. They're just, it's not the same as like buying hard fork or buying the access podcast, right? And I think that's fine. And I don't think they're pretending to be anything different, but, you know, I can tell you all of the rival labs to open AI were calling me going like, we're not putting our execs on this show anymore, at least, at the very least, they're all taking a wait and see approach and seeing who will stick their neck out first and see how it goes. And, you know, that's a sufficiently more booking opportunity for the access podcast, all of this. That's kind of how I view it. I think I'm hoping to frame this more, you know, objective than like opinion, but I think my advice would be to try and iron out how the incentives will continue to work and the decision rights on certain things so that nothing is at all fuzzy to keep that magic going as long as they can. I mean, it's one thing, you know, come out like every time they say whoever is acquired says we're going to retain editorial independence. How can we go a lot farther than that and cement this stuff while the vibes are good? Well, this will be the test. Next time I drop a open AI scoop, I'm going to text John and Jory to come on the show, and if they don't want me on the show, then we know. know what's happened. Otherwise, while you were gone, I had a very L.A. week. I went to a screen while I was gone. You came and went to San Francisco 11 times. No, I stayed in L.A. But I'm going to San Francisco this week, of course. But I stayed in L.A. And I went to a screening of the Audacity, which is a new AMC show about Silicon Valley. I would say it's a it's a more serious adult spiritual successor to Silicon Valley. The show, they old HBO show that has a fun spot in my heart. And I know a lot of people have been yearning for a sequel to that. And I do think this fits that mold, although it's different and it is more of the moment, really dials in on like the money and the corruption and the power of this moment in a way that feels fresh and could not have existed, I think, in the more campy years when the original Silicon Valley show came out. But that was super fun. We're actually going to have the show runner Jonathan Glatz around the show, hopefully in the next few weeks here. So that'll be fun. Our first Hollywood guest. But yeah, it was fun to do an L.A. thing and the fact that there's a screening in L.A. too was fun. The rumors of L.A.'s demise have been greatly exaggerated. I know. Well, what I'm wondering, I know the tech consultant for Silicon Valley was like famously, I think his name is Dan, something or other. He was the like fake Steve Jobs account in early Twitter who was known for kind of like skewering the industry and always had a really interesting but, you know, veteran take on Apple. Someone who'd covered it for a long time. Is there some consultant this time around the swish sitting in on writer's room? What are what are we? Yeah, swisher gave it her thumbs up. I think they kind of satirized the code conference in the show, I think. So that makes sense. Caregave it a thumbs up. I don't know. We're going to have to ask. This is not everyday knowledge to know like the funny nuances of this world. No, no, no. And you could tell he really did some research and really got under the hood of some things. So we're going to have to say that for when we have them on the show because I'm curious about that. But yeah, otherwise I've got a crazy travel week again this week. Characteristically, I'll be at human X by the time this episode drops will have already happened, but interviewing Dave Bazooki, friend of the show, a former access guest. Human X. Is that a supplement? It could be. I'm going to need a supplement to get through it. It is a massive enterprise AI conference that is at Muscoly Center in SF this week with like 6,000 people. And I'm interviewing Brett Taylor and Dave Bazooki, the Roblox founder there on the main stage. And then I'll be doing another thing in New York with human ventures. So again, keeping the human thing going, but separate. I mean, that's not going to be so hard to satirize in whatever version of audacity or Silicon Valley comes next in 10 years. We literally had conferences called human X and human ventures as we automated all the humans away in the same week. Yeah. And then only other little news item I guess is because I feel like whenever something big happens with a former guest, we should we should notice if we can Fiji Simo, a recent guest. This is a little sources thing while you are out is going on leave due to her health condition, which she talked about a little bit on the pod with us, but she's running basically most of open AI or has been especially the product stuff and has a very rare neuroimmune condition called pots and has been struggling with that and is going to take some time. And obviously her case is different. It's unique and it's obviously our thoughts are with her. We hope she recovers swiftly, but I've had a few people ping me since she announced that and go, man, is there a trend of working in these AI companies just destroying people's health because there was stuff about XAI, one of the XAI co-founders had like Lyme's disease resurfaced because of he attributed it to the intense culture of working in AI. You do hear these stories anecdotally of like, you know, Fiji said it in her note, like I have not taken a day off since I started this job and she started like in the summer of last year. And you know, these are people that have all the options in the world, right? Many of them are already independently wealthy. And there's something about this moment, the gravitational pull of it where people are just working their asses off. And it is something that I do feel like the industry will start talking about more. At least I hope so. Well, I think what's different with this style of startup work is that there's a very heavy responsibility and maybe even a feeling of impending doom that you may have some agency to affect, you know, I mean, having been early at a couple startups now, lucky enough to work on fun products. I mean, spending day and night working on that stuff can be fun because you're hanging out with your friends, making features better that turn someone into a puppy dog. But when you're in the trenches on these Frontier AI labs, not only where there's just an unbelievable horse race going on, but where you're reading every day that you may be the best thing or the worst thing to ever hit plane at Earth, you could absolutely see how the executive's health could be affected. Yeah. Well, thoughts and prayers with Fiji. Yeah, how about Fiji? I guess last thing, very last thing here that I have is Devin, friend of the show, sent me this thing called the rock camera. Have you heard of this? I was looking at your film photos. And I think I might get you this for, you know, your birthday. Oh my goodness, capture verifiably real moments in the age of generative AI. We were talking about film photos and how they kind of were counter-positioned AI Slop last week, and you're obviously a film photo nerd. And I think I need to get you this. It uses zero proof cryptography and an integrated Raspberry Pi in the camera to verify beyond a shadow of a doubt that the photos you take are real. That's all daddy ever wanted an integrated Raspberry Pi. Thank you, Alex. It seems like you're shit. I mean, I haven't gotten it yet, but I think I may have my poke get it for you. Pretty interesting. Yeah, I do believe that cryptography is going to come in handy for for stuff. Just like this, maybe less so the fun version, but someday the the serious version, whether it's for documents, photographs, videos from governments, etc. Finally, crypto is going to have its day. Yeah. Well, otherwise, we've got Marvin Von Hague and CEO of the interaction company of California and poke on the show. And I really enjoyed this convo, should we kick it to him? Let's do it. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com/spotify. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Marvin, welcome. Good to meet you. How are you? Great. Great. How about you? Did your pokes send that email that you were going to be 10 minutes late? Or was that a human email? Well, it's actually because I was on my laptop, it was to be honest, a human email, but yeah, I could have also. I should have probably asked for, usually I asked for these things. Marvin, that wasted approximately 11 seconds at your time and over the course of your life. You know it does add up. Yeah, it does it up. Yeah. Poked cannot yet do your podcasts for you. That's going to be still a human thing for a while. We actually had that. We had an article that I can show you afterwards off a journalist that just did the whole interview with Poked. I think it's like Israel's largest newspaper, like Israel Daily or something. And the journalist never reached out to us. He just did interview with Poked and he actually published the interview in like Israel's largest newspaper. And do you condone this? I think it's actually pretty funny because the answers were surprisingly good. It was actually like, yeah, like I think they were like basically zero factual arrows and like it could talk about where the company is from, where the product is going and like it was actually like very, very solid. And like the nicest part was that usually journalists would ask you what what you use Poked for, but Poked just explained what that journalist was using it for. Okay, so he was an interviewing Poked thinking it was you. It was very clear that this was Poked talking. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was very funny. Wow. Was there some type of repository of company knowledge that it could reference or was it all public information that it was referencing about itself? There's some stuff Poked knows. It might not be like that we haven't actively published anywhere. Like I don't think we actively published anywhere that like Patrick Collison enjoyed in us, but like Poked knows about it. I guess this is like a public mention now, but like yeah. How? I think it's just like in, in like the information podcast, so it's, uh, you, you put the cap table in to poke some of this. I can ask about how much equity you own and all that. Some of it. Well, so, uh, first we want to poke the bear. I think you're the first Forbes 30 under 30. We're having on the show. How are you going to avoid the Forbes 30 under 30? I hope you have good lawyers. Yeah. You're going to avoid the curse. I don't know. Like this is a lot of, just be very, very careful, um, especially in the last, uh, and last week or two, I, I think we kind of regret that we didn't block them from putting us there because I think like the bad part about it is that I think at this point, the meme of like 30 and 30 is so strong that people actively, I think like actually, like the whole dove thing would have been less big if they wouldn't be 30 on 30 because like so many of the memes are just about them being 30 on a 30 and fraud. And I think like, yeah, you might want to avoid being on that list at all costs. Oh, yeah. I mean, it means you're going to jail at some point. Did it drive any meaningful traffic of any kind? Uh. Just bots. Yeah. Yeah, it's like nothing, nothing too interesting from that. I mean, we are in a lot of lawsuits, right? Like in a lot of different jurisdictions, fortunately, almost all of them. We are on the right side. We are on the sides, um, suing meta in the European Union and Brazil in like, uh, different jurisdictions. But I don't want to hear about the ones that you're on the right side of. What are you on the wrong side of? Um, there's one person who owns like, like, I don't know if like any of that should be so complicated, but like some dude owns like a trademark in like, for like a fake product. I don't know if I should say it or not, but like, it's like, you know, patent trolls. Yeah. Um, you have like a similar situation like that, but with like a trademark. You have the domain. I was going to, that was going to be one of the questions, but how in the world did you get poke.com and how much of your seed round did that cost? It was like around half a million. Yeah. So the top URL on the show remains friend.com for close to $2 million. I, I con.com was even more. Yeah. I like how you're talking about these lawsuits as kind of like a side project. Oh, yeah. On the side, we have some suits against meta. You know how it goes. I mean, it's interesting though. I mean, how proactively did you want to undertake these? Because it's just resources, you know, as a startup with so few resources, you're kind of usually trying to stay out of trouble as much as possible unless folks doing the litigation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, some of it's sometimes like when there's any updates about stuff, poke textiles and it's like celebrating your two and that's pretty, that's pretty funny that you have someone on your side there. But, um, yeah, I think, I think you just got to, you got to do it like if we, if we want to get to billions of people using poke every day, right? And there are only so many people on iMessage on SMS on Telegram, like WhatsApp is just globally incredibly big with like billions of daily actors. And so, yeah. So when, when we saw those news in October, like we did, like meta didn't even tell us. And we just, like, we just got tagged on Twitter that like, there was like a news article about, you know, poke is getting kicked off of WhatsApp and like some others. We would just detect there and we're like, what's, this seems pretty anti-competitive. So we decided, let's do something against it. For people who don't know, you can text meta AI through WhatsApp and they had it with open AI for a little bit where you could text chat GPT-2. I think that went away, but you had poke in there and you were, you're sitting or you have already. Have you successfully won this? Where is this at? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But first in Italy, then the whole European Union, then Brazil now, and like now we're looking at California, America, other markets. And the annoying part right now is that in the European Union, you want to meta said, hey, we are going to 100x the price, basically, like it's a bit more complicated, but like the exact number, but like it's basically 100x, and in Brazil, they said, now, hey, also like this 100x in the price is malicious compliance, it's basically kicking them off. And so we are now. This is the API price for you to work through WhatsApp. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And because they are not allowed to banners anymore, they just increase the price as high enough that you cannot operate anymore. But Brazil also forbid that and we are hoping for the same to happen in Europe very soon. I'm just waiting for the day where we have the first AI agent, first AI agent legal showdown. I mean, it would be pretty interesting to pit poke against the biggest meta AI, Tom Brady, also known as bro fake Tom Brady. If he still exists, that would be a really interesting. I don't think that still exists, but that was a good one. They already deleted digital Tom Brady. I think digital Tom Brady's already gone, but that would have been great. Too bad. I mean, especially when it's not clear that like anyone uses that product on purpose, or is that just my impression? There's a lot of bad UI patterns, like dark UI patterns, to make you accidentally use it, like put it at the top in the search box. Yeah, exactly. In the search box, you just want to search for something for like a chat and suddenly you were talking to AI. But now like it's up like same happens with Google, right? Like people just want to Google for something and like suddenly they are in AI chat and now they can say, "Hey, Gemini has billion daily, like we deactivate." You brought up the API cost thing, I'm so fascinated by the plumbing of this because, you know, I signed up over the weekend and it's iMessage and I've done enough reporting on Apple and iMessage over the years to know that Apple doesn't take too kindly to companies using iMessage this way. So how are you doing this? Are you running like massive phone farms where you've got like phones hooked up and you're routing through them for iMessage? Like how are you actually doing this? I'm using Link and they've been a great partner and I think that like it is good for WhatsApp for us to be on that. This is why WhatsApp was having like what's happy having other customers, right? Like WhatsApp is becoming a better product if people can not only use like the shitty meta AI but if they can only use better products, if they can choose what they want to use. That's WhatsApp as platform. Yeah, exactly. And I think the problem with WhatsApp is just that it's part of meta and while it's good for WhatsApp to like have us on our platform and like the experience of WhatsApp and like the usage of WhatsApp is going up, it's just not good for meta because they all accept meta AI. They're putting billions into that and like for Apple, that's different, right? I think we are actively making the experience of an iPhone better and like people want to stay on a platform if they can have the best assistance, if they can have the best experience. Apple, it's making money with hardware, not with some data, data AI things. So I don't see a reason for Apple to do anything against that. There are many tombstones of founders that have told me similar things about Apple and why Apple should allow them to do what they're doing. That's curious. Like from an iMessage perspective, like do you think this is going to continue? Do you think you're doing this in a way that like Apple can't shut down? I would be very, very surprised if Apple would have like a problem with it in the long run because it is just a much better experience. Like the only case where that would be the case of like if Apple suddenly decides maybe want to make more money with this than with like the hardware or if we do anything shady and like we don't. So like yeah, I think I think it's really really working in like in line with Apple brand values. I was even just wondering from a philosophical point of view if Apple would ever announce Siri as someone you could text. Oh, I think they will. You think they will. I think they will this summer. No, I mean literally in the messages that because I was thinking like oh, that would be strange. You know, Siri's already its own experience. But I mean snap has 400 million daily users seeing the my friend AI in their feed. And I'm not sure how many others have adopted that paradigm for thinking about this stuff. So reporting is there's going to there's going to be a Siri chatbot this at WDC this year. Well, right. But like as its own app or whatever. But I think I feel like what Marvin. Part of the whole insight and you correct me if I'm wrong, Marvin is that it's where you already are communicating thinking that it's like all right. This is the space where I chat with things. And having it be a separate app is like maybe kind of a big problem. I mean, I feel like that's what you've been implying with your design. Yeah. I think AI is just much more human than people think. Like when we started out, a lot of people were saying, yeah, chat is that now AI needs to go into your eye, whatever, but I don't actually think so. I think AI will just be on the same mediums, like communication forms that humans are. Like people always thought, hey, you have to ask a question to judge a bit and then you get a long response, one question, long response, one question, a long response. And that's not how humans communicate. Like maybe sometimes email trains are more robotic, but like normal humans, like we just like to text. And if I notice more, I'm going to text another message. And the other human can also text me first, right? And so I think that was kind of the thesis that we noticed that just works for AI on the go. How people like to use it. I don't know how you guys have managed your beta program, but it's been very successful at me just consistently seeing people saying, "Here's what Polk is doing for me." Here's this awesome automation or connector that I've built or whatever. And that's been pretty steady in my X-feed for the last few months and it keeps reminding me that I wanna have you on the show so I was really happy when you responded to my cold email. But I've been very interested in what you guys are building for a while, especially since that big video, the launch video you guys did last year. And also just the fact that you got to this idea so early. I mean, I was checking an open cloud and come out 'til around November and you had already raised the first round in September, done the launch video, which meant you had been working on it for months before that. How did you see this kind of more proactive agentic AI chat paradigm coming then? 'Cause it wasn't obvious then. - Yeah, so we started noticing how much data there is in your email, like every product you've ever used, every work you've ever done, every deadline you have, like this is like so much every travel you've ever done. Like it's just all in your email and like this stuff constantly popping up every day, right? And we basically thought like no one was really using that. And then we started out and talked to a lot of people how to use their email and they'd say if you can actually afford it, you don't want to use in UI, like the client doesn't get better but what happens is people get an executive assistant. So how does that interaction look like? And we then spend like a lot of time on making like an executive assistant for your email, for your calendar, as human as possible, that like it can text you multiple times, it can text you first. It can not only text you, it can also take actions and all of that. And when we get to first people, beta access around a year ago, what we noticed was people want to use it for everything. We spent so much time on making it more human that people just preferred this interface so much, not only over Gmail, but also over chat chat tea, also over Google. People asked about sports results. People asked, product to remind them to take the medication every day. And like we didn't have any of these things. We didn't have cron drops. We didn't have any other integrations. People wanted, like they were like, hey, the Woop app has a chat bot. But the Woop app doesn't know why I haven't slept with. The Woop app doesn't know about my calendar. The Woop app doesn't know what I ate. The Woop app doesn't know about any deadlines. And like it just makes a lot of sense to consolidate all of that and build something that's actually much more again to Jarvis. And yeah, like so we basically decided against the conventional wisdom of the best bookstore and then expand to become Amazon. But before we even finish like the email experience, we haven't fully replaced Gmail yet. I use Gmail as a chat at the beginning, like even sometimes I send emails manually. But you already still want to use it for everything. Like I think there is just like such a pool for people to integrate everything to have everything in one place that's more human, yeah. - Yeah, and I know the tone has also been something that has resonated with people which probably doesn't give off too much of conventional EA, right? And even the storytelling of the product has not, to my knowledge, talked about executive assistant like so many other startups have over the last couple of years. How did you think about what the right tone was for that omnipresent being that literally knows your heart rate to your flirtatious emails with your ex? - This is also kind of where we want to go with like this concept of recipes, not that in consumer you only one hand, you have like these smaller things like hey, nutrition tracking, hey, Bible apps that like millions of users every month, right? And like, we gotta get a Bible app on here, Alex. Can we get one of those in the pipeline? I know they're popping off right now. - Yeah, good note. I'll get my poke on that. Yeah, at the same time you have, you have like these big vision things. You have like hey, an AI browser, an AI Google, an AI assistant. And on the one hand, these create a lot of value while these are like rather narrow, but like they just seem very heavy weight. And getting people to actually use it it's much harder than getting people to notice it. Everyone has heard of all these AI Google competitors, but people don't actually want to use them so much. Like every month there's more people in like this narrow small things that like get a sign up then like for these like 10 billion dollar companies that build like AI Google's or whatever have ever signed up for. Because it just seems like hey, if I want to try this out, how do I get back? How do I switch back my default browser? How do I switch back my default search engine, right? Whereas like there's now more narrow things like intuition tracking. It just seems so lightweight. Like I can try this out if I don't like it, I just stop using it, right? And I think the same is true for assistants. Like it's not necessarily immediately clear what an assistant would be useful for you personally, right? It's like hey, it would be cool, but like what if it's annoying? What if like I don't have something immediate, right? And so I think with these recipes now we found a way where people can immediately like build something like hey, you can just natural language say create a poker recipe that adds the user Strava runs to their notion every night. And you can share this link to other people. And these people that don't need to know what big product poker is, they can just use that. They just get asked, hey connect your Strava account, connect your notion account. And then every night their Strava runs get added to their notion. And they just have to narrow use case. And over time it shows more and more. Hey, if you connect other stuff, I can give you feedback on that. Hey, like for intuition tracking, hey, if you connect your calendar, I will know that why you had to like drink so much coffee because there was a stat line. I think it just makes a lot of sense to consolidate a lot of these things. And get people with like a more narrow use case and like show them white more over time. I almost over the weekend pulled the trigger on Athena. It's like a virtual assistant company. The all-in-guys talk about it constantly and I was listening to last episode and we were talking about it and it's like 3,000 a month. And I'm like, well, if like the other option is I hire an employee, it's gonna cost more than that. And I just need kind of a narrow set of functions. I need like the EA function. And there are so many startups to Ellis's point that are trying to do like AI to replace EA's. And this seems like poke is in that vein. But I guess I may still do Athena. I'm like, I feel like I'm on the edge. I feel like I'm trying everything. And nothing is like as good as a human who is proactive with context and that special touch with access to everything. So I may pull the trigger on it. Like when do you think what you're building actually gets to that level of quality? 'Cause I think that is the bar, right? - Yeah, that is the bar. We're just why I think you should get it right now. And two things about it, you should tell us what things Athena can do that poke cannot do. And second of all, get a monthly subscription, not an annual one. - Oh, yeah, okay. 'Cause you're just bad at it. It's gonna keep getting better. - Well, so I mean, I don't know if you know this. Ellis actually worked with Athena a couple of years ago. - Of course he did. - And I like to-- - Marvin, this is a joke of the show 'cause I constantly find out that Ellis worked on something cool that I'm like looking at and he's like, oh yeah. (laughs) - Yeah, and I think like one of the things that they had mentioned was just how hard the onboarding is and they've gone to very far lengths to not only prepare the assistance, but even prepare you to make the assistant as successful as possible and make that whole experience as seamless as possible. But that's still not the same as just saying plug in your Gmail, right? All that said, I'm not a believer yet, given the current state of search and context windows that having access to your Gmail means that you get me. You still need to like run very specific searches with very specific prompts on a regular basis to try and understand what is salient about me that you might wanna pull in. How are you approaching that part? - Ellis is special. He has a lot of context you're not gonna get as what he's trying to say. - I mean, we run real-time inference on everything, like every email that gets in, we don't only search for email when there is a question about it, but like every email that comes in, we read and then see, okay, it's just something important, this is something where we can take an action. - So you have like a rubric against every email? - Yeah, yeah, so for example, last week, we added like a Devon recipe, right? And now for every email that comes in, it checks like is there something that like might have like an indication? So for example, I got an email by an anthropic that like one model was out of beta and we should release, like we should remove like the beta attack, the beta header, and I got that email from an anthropic with that line and then Paul immediately put the deadline on my calendar and texted me, hey, we should do that. And I just gave it thumbs up and then it actually created the PR. It just told Devon then from reading it in my email, I told Devon, hey, do it. And then within 14 minutes of receiving the email with just a thumbs up, it created the whole PR and took like a couple of minutes to review and it's approved and then it was done. - I do like the form factor being so agnostic with poke. I mean, that's been one of my favorite AI things lately is just notions AI filters. And I just say put all my bank statements, access episode pitches, all the things that aren't urgent into this one folder. And that goes from the World War II. people if you have, you know, know how to use Gmail, create filters, but then it's just terrible, like they haven't changed it in 15 years to be coming something that's more natural language. The question is though, to what extent are the companies going to allow you to play with their services? I mean, I know there's been this question of like, are you stealing the Aura app usage? You're asking for insights from MCP or instead of their app that they've worked very, very hard on, so that they can't just get cloned by some, you know, Chinese commodity exercise ring. What's the current state with companies in MCP? But you can clone the Sonos app to be clear, and I think everyone would appreciate that considering how horrible this. But otherwise, yeah, there are other apps that I'm sure we should be concerned about. Yeah, I think on the one hand, it might reuse usage of an Aura ring app, right? On the other hand, people might buy Aura rings because now they become more useful and they see their friends use them more. And like I use Aura, right? And it just is more fun. It is more useful if it is integrated with everything. And yeah, I think that's with every technological advancement. Like there's always like short-term losses, like some people who drop some people like maybe the app gets used less, but it's also becoming more useful and more people might even use this product category, right? How do you not leak our shit? Because that's that's the thing that I was a little freaked out about with the interface initially. And then I saw I know you have like an external auditor and your investors are legit and all that stuff, but like it is pretty crazy to just give something like this that is just over text like access to everything. And when I did onboarding over the weekend, I did Sonos first because I was like, well, if my Sonos login gets leaked, that's not that bad. I'm going to wait on everything else. And then I was like, well, I don't actually want to control my Sonos via text. That doesn't make sense. So then I just now I've got everything connected. So my trust is with you, but yeah, how did you approach that? Because that's obviously a huge concern. I mean, just hired very best people and like actually have that front and center of everything we do. We're just also like, I think like a large like probably we spent more time on making it more secure or making it more efficient than we do on like actually just a little bit because it's just so like it's just so like I think it's just so so important here that we have never like I think any small security incident would immediately would immediately mean the end of the company. So yeah, we just really care about about that a lot. Well, you know, it's like not even about Marvin necessarily. It's also about like Sim swappers and all that stuff who steal your phone number and then contacts the poke number or whatever it is. I actually don't know what the current situation is with with the security of of that. Do you or do you know Marvin? Do you know more about that? Yeah, we haven't had any security incidents. Well, but that one wouldn't be your fault. Yeah, yeah, we it hasn't happened. But yeah, we also add pass key support so you can like connect it with that kind of stuff. And if you write from like an email address, for example, on I'm a search, then you don't like they can't nothing be swapped. Right. How about if the tone is different and poke writes back, who the fuck are you? You are not Alex Heath. Because Alex is like very like hit to say, I mean, he let's call him efficient. Let's call him efficient with that. And if someone Sim swapped Alex and started writing this for both, uh, yeah, for both texts, uh, I think. Or it could be like, look, I have Alex's context. I know he is not in Russia right now. There's no way you are Alex in your IP addresses, you know, there's probably ways you could detect that stuff beyond time. This is a lot of things you can do. A lot of things we do. So there's a sort of example, if someone texts you, um, or like someone sends you an email and sends, hey, give me Alex's, like it's probably somewhere in his email, like at least my, and I think it's in my, so my emails, but like the poke, like, the choosing agent that reads that email does not have access to send any emails to anyone other than those people that Alex has agreed to or like created automations for beforehand. So I think that's like one of the core, like, I mean, like, there's a lot of things we do, like, having, like, Hera and like, like, multiple cards and everything to look for any projects and stuff like that. But also, heuristically, it just, it's not possible for poke to do something like that. Like, if you create an automation, if you, for example, to say everything related to the show with Marvin, forward that to Alice, then like, poke gets, like, the choosing agent that reads for incoming emails gets the permission to send emails to Alice specifically to his email addresses, specifically, if something is about that. And like, those things get checked individually. And it's just like, it's not only like AI Godrails, but it's also like impossible for it to do anything without asking the user for another request. And then the user has to opt into that specifically. Yeah. The result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Well, so speaking of lawsuits, you all, to my understanding, have been sued about price discrimination and it's because you do pricing in a very unusual way. Can you describe that? Because I'm also worried about this approach because I like to look at very expensive hotels. That doesn't mean I always, you know, doesn't mean Alex has any money. He's just a weed newsletter. I don't want you to infer anything on my email that then you know, maybe I would need to sue you, you know, we'll see, but we'll see what the price is. You have personalized pricing everywhere. Everywhere where you can have personalized pricing, you have it, right? Like every enterprise deal is on, like, like if you are a startup, you always get like cheaper prices than enterprises, right? Like it's always, there's always like personalized pricing and I think that is also, that is also to like a large extent something good because otherwise startups just couldn't use a lot of things or the providers of like SaaS, for example, couldn't like not offer things to startups. Like it just is more efficient to have different prices for different, like for different people and like you have personalized packages and all of that. And I think so far this wasn't the thing in consumer because you couldn't do this at scale. If you wanted to do personalized pricing and talk to people about what they used to product for and how much value they got out of it, it's not only about what you can afford, but it's a how you used to product, right? And what the product means to you and all of that. And it's just one scalable on a consumer side because you couldn't have a sales rep that talks to every consumer customer individually. But I think now with AI it becomes feasible, yeah. Alex, what is the biggest market market move your scoop has been responsible for? Oh, I mean, billions and billions of dollars. That's not a joke. But you should not price me based on that. No, I was going to say that's the cost of the work. That's the value of the work that's transpiring through poke. If you're doing your work, I poke. If poke infers that a user is a billionaire, how much is it going to charge the billionaire? It's personalized. But like, what's the max? Do you have like a ceiling? There's no ceiling, no. There's no ceiling. We had a billionaire from another country, like a negotiate the price and like poke said, yeah, 136k a month. And he was like, and poke said, this is yes, dollar. He was like, there's no way. Then he actually did subscribe because he thought like probably it just didn't like, there's no way. It actually is that expensive. And the payment went through. Yeah. He paid 36k a month. So yeah, we then like, yeah, we then reached out and we're like, like, what's this action on purpose? Like, what? Here's here's how you get to the next big round, Marvin. You say, well, we are the we are the new intent capture layer. And our user network is so high that when you're doing all of your grocery shopping through poke, we will then charge all the VCs $50 per gallon of milk, the ones who have kids because it's an inelastic demand. They need to give their kids cereal every day. And we're going to get just a sliver of that. And then you're the next trillion dollar company. Okay. So hold on 136k a month is the most that poke is charge someone? Is that right? Yeah. We refunded him until the time Hey, it's sure. And then like we gave him like a cheaper price, but oh my God. - Okay, well, that's wild. - But his car got panicked and went through, so that's pretty solid, yeah. - You're based in Palo Alto, right? Is that where the headquarters are? My understanding of startup, especially these days that decide to base in Palo Alto, is that you do it for really one reason, and it's because you want people to work 24/7 because Palo Alto is a desert of culture, anything else to do, and like XII is down there right, and it's infamous, like how much they work there. - It is pretty nice. - Yeah, it's nice, it's beautiful, believe me. Like it's beautiful, but you know, it's, you're not like hitting the club, you know, in Palo Alto, there's not a ton to do. What was the decision to base a company of young AI-pilled people in Palo Alto? - I think it is just pretty nice. Like if you walk around, within five minute walking distance, like the sushi place, you go to like, have what's the first Facebook headquarters are, right? Like within five minutes, you have, the first Palo Alto headquarters, the Boba shop was the first Google headquarters. You have like, you have not only XII, but also X, the original X, and the original PayPal, and like, you just have all of these things. Like we just moved, and after signing, the new house, our landlord told us, oh, yeah, Patrick Collison and John Collison lived here together with Greg Brockman, actually, when they found it striped, because the wine room was the first striped quarter. That's also like a block away. Like it's just all very close, and I think the history has spoken for itself, like how many great things happen within like a couple blocks, and I think SF doesn't have anything like that, right? - It has restaurants, it has culture, you could argue. - But yeah, but I mean, there's no density of that sort. And even now, there's like half a dozen pre-training labs within walking distance, right? Like there's now Axium for Math, that's also on University of, there's like all of these mistral neighbors. Like there's just like all of these things, and I think, I think SF definitely has a larger share of like hundreds of YC startup and whatever, and like everyone is flocking there, if you want to start something, go there. But I think like this, it is just more beautiful and more dense down here. - Well, so you're officially in the arena of tech as it has been for a long time, and you want to be taken seriously, and your name is Poke. How does that work out? - I don't know, we're Ellis. It's the interaction company of California. - Yeah, this is kind of the idea that we don't want to. Like I think Poke sounds like very fun, and like not that smart. So we kind of wanted to separate the company branding a bit from product branding. Yeah. - Well, where does Poke come from? - I assume the domain, I was like, you need a four-letter domain and you got one, right? - No, we like, we didn't know if the domain was free. Like we just, we just talking like what should we do and I was like, what this poke? And like, I think like probably the most core thing other than being like very human is that it's proactive. And then Felix was poking me, and I was like, yeah, what if like it's just like, you poke someone, like poke other pokes you, and then I found it funny. Like we didn't realize when we talked about it, but later we noticed that we were actually eating a poke ball when he had that idea. He was actually eating a poke ball. But. - I thought it was Poke given like the palm tree logo and everything. - Yeah, we also noticed like it's actually like a pretty good fit from all of these things. - It is, I don't know if it's unfortunate or fortunate that like Facebook also had this poke feature back in the days and now we are suing them, but yes. - Yeah, I think you and I are the only ones who remember Facebook poke. - No, come on. - Well, I mean in today's world, it's not, it doesn't come up all the time. Exactly. - They brought it back. Poke is back in Facebook. Oh fact, I'm not right now, but I'm pretty sure. Something for you to suit trademark over here in Marvin. - Well, I'll say, I mean I work on a lot of namings of various shapes and sizes and it is 1,000% better to be funny and a little provocative and even a little stupid than forgettable, right? And so you are very much on the correct end of the spectrum with that. And yeah, I mean, even just coming back to kind of the stuff that y'all were doing earlier than others, I mean the proactivity piece, I feel like you are, I mean it's so crazy, I feel like the old days, it's like, oh, you were years ahead. Now it's like you were months ahead. - Everything is moving so fast. Like everything is becoming so much more like poke, like the whole industry, everything is becoming more and more personalized, more proactive. - What you're building is, I mean I just spent a bunch of time with the OpenAI and Codex team and I wrote about in the newsletter last week. What you're building is exactly what Chatch BT is gonna be in like six months. - ScoopDropSources.News heard to hear first. - I mean, I mean, Anthropics gonna do it with co-work, they're gonna make co-work the front end of Claude and chain together all this stuff and the coding in the background. I don't know how much coding you're doing if you're doing like multiple coding agents in parallel, like co-work or Codex, but yeah, this direction you're going, this proactive assistant connected to everything and a chat interface is the future of all this stuff. - If we now join one of the labs, it would just be worse. Like same day the product would just get immediately worse because you cannot use, like you need so many different things. You need the best embedding models. You need the best models for behavior. You need to bust Cua models and that changes all the time. Like every other month we change like who has the best Cua model and if we just join one of the labs immediately, it would get worse on like most aspects, right? Like Anthropics doesn't even have an image gen model and like other labs are better at image understanding. Like it's just, there's so many different things and I think you just need the big application layer company to build the best product in the space. They will just never be one lab that's best at everything. - At the same time, I'm sure some of the offers have been tempting, no, right? - Yeah, but there is, there's a lot more of your face right now, Alex. - You look like it, you look like it's evil monopoly man as you nod and smile waiting for his answer about tempting offers. - I know how it goes. - I know how it goes, right? - Hey, that's what VCs are for though, right? - Yeah, I think VCs really want us to stay independent and become really big because there needs to be a big application layer player here. And it's not that many players actually. Like most competitors are just really like big tech and labs that are all tight to models from like one provider, even meta noise MSL. I think there was maybe not that smart, like to be dependent on that, not because meta AI sucks. - Well, yeah, the closest I would say is perplexity, to what you're saying, the multiple model orchestration, focus on consumer is how Arvin talks, that's the closest thing I could see. But I mean, to that point of the VC thing, we got a shout out offer rock for people who don't know, this is an anonymous VC account who regularly scoops deal flow very early and said, you guys had raised and undisclosed round and I think you just confirmed it on X this morning, right? You wanna share the scoop here with us? - Yeah, I don't know how he gets, gets a stop. But VC's like to gossip, Marvin, I'll tell you that. - More than anything. - Yeah, it's interesting he hasn't gotten fired over that. And still getting more and more info. - Yeah, so you raised more and I imagine there's a lot of interests now that you're out. So the product was in private beta and very recently you opened it up, so anyone can sign up. - Yeah, so we raised, like when we raised a couple of months ago, since then we've like more than 10 X, basically all our numbers. So yeah, it's just like very good space to be in. Like it's just like everyone is looking at us. Everyone wants to just, I think everything is going up and up, yeah. - What he wants to be poked. - Everyone wants to be poked. - In the crisis of loneliness, we all just wanna be poked. - Speaking of that, I was looking at one of your job descriptions and it said that to be a member of your technical staff, you need to talk more to GPT or a cloud than your parents and I just wanted to know what that's been like screening those people and the kind of stories you hear. - I think I wrote that, not I think, but I wrote that before I poked was a thing. Like I wrote that before. - Before you could talk to poked. I should probably update that. - Okay, so that's no longer a screening requirement for the interruption company. - Not anymore, I know it's poked, no it's poked, yeah. - Now it's poked, okay. - Well, so going back to the raise and the metrics, I know you said 10X, I know at one point you had said you have quote near perfect retention. What does that actually look like? - That like, modern half the people that try out poked, just use it forever and like it flattens out about 50% which is just very cool. Like people just really like it and like they like it for different reasons. Like I think the most surprising thing about poked that there is no ICP, people always ask you who is your customer and it's like everyone. Like our retention is the exact same across age cohorts. Like 18 to 24, 25 to 34, people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 65 plus. There's virtually no difference in retention. Like young people might just talk to it all day. Like whereas people in their 20s, 30s, use it for productivity stuff. People at 65 plus just get medication reminders every morning. they need to take their medications. people just find different things to use, yeah. - There is still no way to set up a recurring thing like that simply on your freaking phone. I mean, is this not, you know, wood one thing, a big part of the OS of the future whenever it arrives? I mean, however the form factor is. - This is the super app that OpenAI is building is this idea, yeah. - Well, they're gonna try. How do you look at the like user's success, though? I mean, is it a time spent thing? Is it the number of different use cases they do? Is it the number of chats per day? Yeah. - I think a lot of it is just also how much people like it. I think one neat part is about putting in consumers at the hiring season because people join because they wanna make it better. And I don't need partners. You don't need to motivate them by saying, "Hey, our enterprise customer just picked bank. They just requested this feature. They just have that back, fix it, and then you need to like top down, put pressure on people, but like people get pressured by their friends. Like a friend of an engineer says, "Hey, I want this, a friend of an engineer says, "Hey, I have this now. "Hey, a friend of an engineer says, "I would love this." And then we just build it, right? We just build to have the best experience ourselves to have build the best experience for people around us. And I think, I think we would never want to go by how much time you spend on thought because there's no point in wanting people to spend more time on something, but like it's rather you want people to spend less on something but achieve more. I think it's very good that we have not said, "Hey, we just care about user sentiment. "We just care about time spent. "We just care about numbers of messages "with centers or something like that." But we just like much more care about like the holistic picture. 'Cause as soon as you like, you know this law, as soon as like something becomes like the primary goal, as soon as like one measure becomes the primary goal, it ceases to be a good goal because you just optimize for something. And I think there's like also another, besides being able to use all models and being agnostic and being able to integrate with our services, another good part of being independent is we are small and we can just actually build the best thing. And we don't need OKRs. We can just build what we think is good for the world. - What is the craziest like most complex thing someone has built us about that, do you know? - I think it's like crazy things all the time. Like before you could really build stuff someone, like build automation where a poke would just water his plants and like had like a camera to look at the plants and like water them and like also look at the weather and like stuff like that, that was pretty cool. But yeah, that's just a lot of bottom up stuff. It's like surprising how much people like to build stuff and in the hindsight, we should have probably released like an open source cell phone version last fall because then somebody else built an open source version and released it and it went pretty big. So I think that would have been a good idea, yeah. - Well, yeah, you're talking about open claw, right? I mean, that's the thing like this is open claw for normies and I haven't done open claw because I'm kind of terrified of setting it up. Even though I've like talked to Peter about it, he's tried to assure me it'll be fine. But like, yeah, I mean, when you see what he's done in open claw, what is, yeah, are you doing open claw for normies? Is that the idea? - I know, he, he, like I think around the time when he started like the open claw repository, he tweeted that he was like doing the get things done company of Vienna. - So I don't know if we had an open claw for normies or he's like the Vienna version. - But when you see the success of open claw, right? And it's like the thing Jensen's talking about on stage at GTC and all that stuff. Like, what do you think? Like, what is going to happen to open claw and what you're building? Can they coexist? - Yeah, I think it is pretty cool that there is no source set for version, right? It is just, like it's especially because like, there's no real profit motive behind it. It's not like someone was like doing anything bad. It's just like, I think it's generally very good for the world that it exists. Like, the one thing that might be bad is just that people became more like more afraid of the security implications because there have been a bunch of incidents with open claw because it was just vibe coded by like a dude or two. Like, it's just, there has just been like much, much, much, much, much less work on that stuff. And we also saw because of that, users of us asking more of that. Like, I feel like if open claw hasn't hadn't been a thing, I just would have asked a few questions about security, you know? And I think that might be probably the worst aspect of it. - Well, it's nice that, I mean, yeah, open claw, you know, there's no profit motive. And I mean, yeah, they're not charging a VC or a billionaire, 136,000 a month for access. And, you know, that'll, that's an incredible story just because it speaks to like what you've built and that someone was, I mean, it's a billionaire but was willing to fork over that much money. I'll be very curious to get my poke bill after this because I haven't gotten it yet, so. - Open claw's key performance metric is how many users have self-immolated using the tool, destroyed all their emails, destroyed all their documents, destroyed all their photos. - Marvin, with the limited time we have left, your background is fascinating. You have a background in tunneling, is that correct? - Yeah, like the biggest thing we did before was building a tunnel boring machine, yes. - So this was not part of Elon Musk's boring company but it was part of like a hackathon or something that he judged? - There was a competition that's the boring company and space I exhausted where people around the world built their own organization. So we saw, I saw like a tweet from Elon, hey, he's trying to bring people around the world to build their own tunnel boring machine. So I'm not commercial, but without profit motive, just build something for the sake of it, the fastest tunnel boring machine with like exact specifications, just for the fun. And then I called Felix and we said, hey, let's do it and hire within the first 10 weeks of seeing the tweet, we hired an onboard at 65 people full time. So that was like a much faster moving thing than anything in startup world because we just said, hey, let's do it on profit. And because of COVID, politicians wanted to reduce like the unemployment rate. So there was basically you be eye for students on the recent grads if you don't do anything that pays you. So we had 65 people that like worked for free for a year, building a 20 to tonne, 40 foot long tunnel boring machine, which was like a crazy experience, yeah. - Well, my camera has overheated. So I guess I'm using this. - Yeah, absolutely. - An adventurer. - That's okay. - I'm not even kidding. - That's a great way to say bye. - Yeah, these color bars are, yeah, not planned, but this is our queue, I guess. Ellis, anything else? For those who can't see and are just listening, Alex Heath is currently symbolized by a no signal. - We're gonna keep this in the show. You know what? I've just decided. But yeah, Marvin, we appreciate your time. I will keep playing with poke. Again, I'm looking forward to that bill. Please do not read too much into my hotel emails. - We cannot see any of that. - Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. - Also famous last words. - Thank you, Marvin. - Thank you, Marvin. - Thanks a lot, see ya. Bye. (upbeat music) - That's it for this week's show. Thanks to Marvin for coming on. I've got some things to poke at. - All right, if you like this show, don't forget to like and subscribe everywhere. You get podcasts. - We are access.show online, and you can find us in video at AccessPod on YouTube. - If you really like this episode, we'd love a five star review, a share with a friend, or even pay Alex for his newsletter. - That would be awesome. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. - And you can find me @Hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company for your startup storytelling needs. - Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and the show is produced by hooked creators. - Bye. (upbeat music) - Booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise, to a state surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on, book it. It's easy. Booking.com, booking.yeah. - Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at $50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates, and more, whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving or sharpening your hedge trimmer blade with an angle grinder. The Home Depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list. Shop Labor Day savings at the Home Depot and gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving.