TBPN Live - OpenAI–Microsoft Restructure, Winning Formula for AI Founders, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

(00:20) - Timeline Reactions (02:39) - OpenAI & Microsoft's For-Profit Restructure (19:07) - Anthropic CEO Weighs in on Future of AI (22:35) - GPT-5 Data Analysis (25:04) - Timeline Reactions (01:00:34) - AI Startup Founder's Winning Formula (01:31:41) - Timeline Reactions (01:40:02) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:56:10) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.ai/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. We are in an undisclosed location, so we will be a little bit quieter with the intro, but it is Friday. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. We will be back in the Ultradome soon. Don't worry.

But today we are still emotionally in the Temple of Technology, the Fortures of Finance, the capital, capital, and we need to kick it off with the level 100 performative tech bro final boss, Peter Diamandis. Are you familiar with Diamandis? An absolute legend in the game. Yeah. What is it? Singularity. Podcaster. Yeah.

I mean, he has a podcast. He's done a number of businesses. X Prize, I believe, Moonshot stuff. But, man, was he early to the singularity game? Yeah. Like, he was talking about that with the Kurzweil era. Yeah. And, but the whole reason he's getting called a performative tech bro final boss is because, of course, he is vibe coding on replit, over Starlink, flying himself.

up to the Bay Area the only thing he missed was sleeping on an eight sleep sleeping on an eight sleep he should have had the eight sleep in there and then he should have had infinite just printed out so it had some type of homegrown like autonomous flying set up actually flying the plane he should have had a ramp card in display that's right time is money save both easy use corporate cards bill payments counting a whole lot more all in one plane go to ramp dot com lot more um we are of course on the road we've been on the road a lot this week we hate being on the road it's It's not our favorite thing. It's very, very rough.

We know it changed the show. Hopefully we will get back in the swing of things and kind of bring you the show that you know and love. But we're doing our best. Of course, this stream's made possible. We stream one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience, wherever they are. And for our gracious hosts, we're able to loan us a whiteboard where we were able to piece together exactly what's going on in tech. We're going to take you through the stories today. open AI calling this out this is exactly someone's going to spend the next

trying to decide for yeah hours trying to put it together and what is it it will understand the real nature of tech how it all connected this is the current state of tech yeah right I like it is there are some connections there like Amazon Anthropic that red line is real the Hamptons and Patech also real there's a connection there well monitis we'll leave it up to the viewer. That's an exercise for the viewer to see how he's involved. We didn't get Figma on there. We should have been doing all this on a fig jam. You should go to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build

great products together. You get started for free. So the actual big story is that Open AI, the nonprofit is going to control its for-profit arm and own equity valued at $100 billion. I believe this will make it the most highly valued nonprofit or like the most profitable nonprofit in world history. The best. funded nonprofit, right? And it is remarkable to think about what that will be like. People have kind of written off the nonprofit as like, it's going away. Like it is not going away. Like it will continue to be a thing. It's incredibly back. Funded forever, essentially, to do a ton of interesting things. I think we're going to see interesting things about come out of that organization.

But anyway, the news, this is from the journal and we'll and we'll break this down. But Nick has it summarized here. Open AI LLC will be converted into a Delaware public benefit corporation. Open AI nonprofit retains control of the new public benefit corporation. The nonprofit will hold $100 billion plus of equity in the public benefit corporation. The PBC structure enables raising large amounts of capital for the mission, which obviously there are you doing. They're still aligned with ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity. That's good. Also, it's aligned with like your shareholders like if you're just a normal c corp i know they're public benefit corporation but if you're just normal c corp like shareholders are humans let's make sure it

benefits the shareholders that will by definition benefit humanity but specifically they're saying all of humanity even if you're not a shareholder a g i should still benefit you which is a noble cost um opening i and microsoft signed a non-binding mowu uh for the next phase of the partnership a definitive agreement is still being negotiated opening i says it's engaging remember as it stands Microsoft gets 20% of open AI's revenue and for the big man something like man satia something like that uh which it felt like a stretch to me that that that would be sustainable given the uh looming costs that uh open AI needs to incur obviously they're ramping revenue really quickly yeah but you have broadcom to pay you have Oracle to pay you have all these but it is

spend revenue, you know, it's not the same as being like, we're on the crazy fixed. Yeah, yeah, it's not a fig cut, exactly, um, but yeah, but still it's a lot of, you know, the, the, there's, these companies are under margin pressure already. And, and wasn't the original deal that it would, it would be 20% up until they paid a hundred billion dollars or something like that? There was something where like, it eventually ran its course. I believe it had an ending.

And I think that's what's justifying a lot of the underwriting because the lesson from Google, the lesson from Facebook, the lesson from, you know, Microsoft and the rest of the hyperscalers was that you needed your DCF models to be 20 or 30 years into the future, right? Yeah. And so if you just, if you, if you, if you didn't take into account the third decade of growth, you were undervaluing it. It was originally reported 20% through 2030. Okay. Which still is. I don't think a lot of investors are scared by thinking about value in 2035. I think they're fine with that now. I think they're saying, like, yeah, I have a 10-year fund and realistically all the best venture investments, SpaceX is still

hanging out in the portfolio 20 years later. They got continuation funds. I think that a lot of investors are actually fine to say, yeah, this company is going to be like, you know, maybe a financial mess for 10 years. But if I'm super confident it's going to be a money printing machine in 20, I'll do the deal all day. I think that's the wrap. It's still insane. to think that the deal ever got done in the first place. Is it a Microsoft deal? Yeah, if you were, if, if you talked to a founder and they were like, yeah, I was running a fundraise and like, you know, ended up taking this deal.

I got the valuation I wanted, but ultimately it gave up 20% of revenue off the top too. So not 20% of like profits, but like a 20% tax on gross revenue. Yeah, uh, just for the just still 2030. Yeah, that would be and the founder's like, well, it doesn't matter that much because I'm in this for like 20 years. You're really, you know, most, most companies do not get the pass on that. Yeah, very few businesses, very few businesses in the world,

especially like highly competitive, you know, categories, uh, can sustain a 20% tax off the top. Yep. Um, and still really produce any profits or be functioning at all. Obviously, I'll push you off. What if your, what if your businesses, uh, mobile games in the app store? You've been, yeah, yeah, Apple with 20%, 30% tax, um, off the top for everything.

There's a bunch of examples. Like, Nvidia could do this too, right? And they sort of are through that kind of deal. I don't know. I mean, I agree with you. Like it is a crazy, crazy deal. Unprecedented in a million ways. But everything about the entire Open AI story is unprecedented.

Unprecedented to start as a nonprofit. Unprecedented to have, who are the co-founders? Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. Like you have like seven different co-founders who have, a bunch of co-founders have gone off and start direct competitors. That doesn't happen very often. Usually people are like, I got bags in the category. I'm going to go work on something else.

Yeah. There's a bunch of weird stuff. Anyway, speaking of the nature of the industry and all the competitors, Sergei has a bit of a joke post here saying, Dario, Claude will take your job, but it will feel ashamed. Elon, look at this anime girl. She says the N-word and is almost naked. Zuck, super intelligence will help people watch more Instagram rails. Demis, Gemini recently calculated more precisely the motion of the heavens. Sam, excited to announce that OpenAI, Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement with OpenAI

LP and OAI Corporation and has signed MOUs with OpenAI Opco LLC and OpenAI Global LLC. It really sums up. It really sums up. And Sergei... They're all cooking. Yeah, they are all cooking. And they're all telling, like, slightly different stories. These are all real corporate entities, by the way. And it's, yeah, it's worth noting, it feels like Satya has definitely slow played the renegotiation of this deal. Like this has been, they've been trying to make this happen for a long time. It was reported a while back that Satya wasn't, wasn't budging. But it's good to see that the company is able to start moving forward.

So here's a story from Rohan Paul on what's actually happening with this Open AI and Microsoft deal. Microsoft and Open AI struck a truce to extend their partnership, clearing a major obstacle to opening a shift. into a for-profit structure. The new agreement is non-binding right now, but it sets the final stage for final terms to be hammered out soon. In the proposed setup, Microsoft and the Open AI nonprofit would each start with about 30% of the new company, with the rest going to employees and investors. The new company is the for-profit entity Open AI is trying to create as part of its restructuring. Open AI plans to keep nonprofit control and give that nonprofit an endowment stake valued at $100 billion. Wow, which would be huge on paper, but the timeline

to turn it into usable grants is unclear, although with the secondary markets, you imagine that that has to be like they're going to make payroll next quarter. They'd be able to sell some $100 billion and do a whole bunch of grants. California and Delaware attorneys are generally reviewing the plan and Open AI has told its investors it aims to finish the restructure by the end of the year or risk losing its $19 billion in funding. It's very funny that like for all this drama, all the books that will be written, the movies, like the end results like okay there's like three parties around the table how about we go equal

like Microsoft gets a third nonprofit gets a third employees investors gets the third like there's really like three key counterparties in the deal and there it seems like if this is what happens they kind of just all walked away being like yeah three equally three key parties on the on the effectively on the cap table but then you also have the california being like hey don't mess this conversion up. You know, you're a nonprofit. Yeah, California and Delaware attorneys general are reviewing the plan and Open AI has told its investors it aims to I'm talking about like the end result of like who gets what in the like there's a bunch of poker chips on the table right now and there's a bunch of there's parties around there that all

need to agree before anything moves forward. Right. Yeah. And it's just interesting that like what they wound up with was like, let's go equal. like let's split it equally yeah if you play this out what happens what is the what what do you think the nonprofit looks like 10 years from now open a i continues to execute very well becomes a multi-trillion dollar you know tech giant yep and you have a third of the company owned by this nonprofit what do you think how would happen buddy how would you how would you allocate what what happens when you get a ton of missionary a i genius scientists who'd don't want to optimize for profits they're just experimenting working on whatever ideas they want

there's no pressure because they don't have a user base they don't have an app store they're not competing with anyone they just get to go do pure research what do you think will happen so they're going to create a bang or consumer app will happen for sure oh another nonprofit is going to launch another company and they convert to for profit again well i don't know i mean you could you could you could last time the question is like okay what is the real relationship between the nonprofit and and opening I like the private you know for profit arm yeah because there's a world where they're just like okay we're just going to keep a lot of research and R&D happening at the nonprofit layer yeah and then like try to just

be the ones that commercialize every time even though you would have to argue if it's like this yeah I think I think over time like the two entities will actually separate and drift apart in we're hard to drift apart when we're you know they're sitting on on 30% of the cap table yeah I don't know that's not bad crazy like there are VC funds that own 30% of the company when it goes public and well yeah they'll drift up like the VC fund is like doff doing some other stuff right investing in competitors sometimes like just kind of looking for the next

thing getting out of the position slowly right is selling into the public markets so I don't know of course I'm kind of joking and it's like a little bit of a hot take to think that like there will be something but truly like like if you if you want that okay another interesting twist is like right now there is a there is a war for talent in a i and there's a war for for specifically for missionary talent right the true believers the folks who are just going to go grind and and explore and not be whole not be beholden to you know optimizing the like next quarters may use right so if you're opening i i and you don't want your direct competitors telling that story hey we're the

missionary AI lab creating a talent vacuum for that type of that type of that archetype of researcher with a nonprofit saying oh oh yeah well like we're a nonprofit like you can do whatever you want you can just do research and we'll match the salary that Anthropics paying you or or Zohzak made an offer yeah we'll match it just for you to come and hang out here can they give those researchers exposure to the private company shares Just being like, yeah, all of our directors at the nonprofit, like they get paid out a bonus based on, you know, there's plenty of histories of nonprofits being abused, right? Yeah. Like nonprofit. People get paid like high salaries. You usually talk like stock in a different company. Well, yeah, but it could just be like, you know, every year, uh, the stock appreciates some amount and they sell off a position to be able to pay. You would assume that they're selling down the position in paying cash.

such such a strange position it's extremely and um this is why when i talk to founders that are like uh i think more and more people have kind of like standardized around just like start your company on stripe atlas yep don't try to re Delaware seaco yeah Delaware Seacorp on strike atlas post Elon like sure you have that thing like that has not made its way down to startups yeah most startups are just and but every i mean i mean i i I have a friend of mine that I grew up with that had a breakout consumer product. He botched the cap table, didn't set up vesting, and it ended up costing him like millions of dollars. He would effectively be retired in his 30s if he had not, if he had done this correctly.

And that's why it's like it's so key to get the foundation, the legal structure of a company set up properly. And so the fact that you had Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam, Altman, they all set up this, this, entity and and uh in the fullness of time it's like they botched it right like it it was uh it was a maybe a good idea at the time to try to create a non-profit for a i research but um uh just got kind of messier and messier and messier and messier and messier and and every single you know person involved is probably thinking i wish we just set it up as a yeah as a c corp from the beginning yeah completely agree good take the yeah this idea of like you know you like the folks who are on the founding team are not dumb they're like the

smartest yeah in Silicon Valley basically so maybe they were like overthinking it or like too smart and being like let's create an even more complex structure the other the flip side of like the steel man on like what happened is if you play it back and you go back to like 2015 you say like okay uh yeah they they raised they raised a lot of money and at the time AI was maybe to like there there wasn't an immediate commercial opportunity and so it's very they wouldn't have been able to raise like that the thing that they got I think they might have been able to raise the money but then my question is like what

happens in like 2017 when your share price is kind of stagnating you still haven't made revenue and everyone and the and the meme in Silicon Valley is like oh yeah like Sam raised a mega round a pre product market fit like that company is not really doing anything when are they going to ship right instead it was just like oh yeah like they have a research organization and they're like continuing to do cool like little projects here and there and like oh they got the they got a robotic arm to solve a rubik's cute we're like oh they won at chess or dota or like whatever they did um and so i bet i bet the vibes were better throughout that it's really hard to

see corp to keep because everyone's looking for a decade yeah when you're flat and then it's like yeah yeah i mean we've seen this with so many other companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars pre product launch and it's really hard to get out finally so i don't know the counterfactuals fascinating i wonder if it would have how it would have played out it's tricky yeah anyway yeah it's just interesting that almost every person around the table probably feels like they would have benefited from a more simple traditional structure i think you're right yeah and i think sam's even said that but yeah we kind of overthought this one and like yeah it would have been better just to come in clean um but you know it worked out anyway more or less and like they we got the yeah

Honestly, opening eye is the best example of like, if you have true product market fit, you can botch so many things and still be wildly successful. Great take. Anyway, automate compliance, managed risk and prove trust continuously with Vanta.com. Vantas trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first use by managing a complex program. Duolingo, Snowflake, Intercom, GitHub, Rangethe, Rangelo, Rangelo, RAN. All of our favorites. So I think we covered most of this. We can go through a little bit of the Wall Street Journal's coverage.

The Primigen, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, is putting Dario from Anthropics, claims about AI progress in the truth zone. He said, we are 28 months into six months from AI taking your jobs, four months into 24 months until cursor is obsolete. And six months into six months until AI writes 90% of your code, part two, the codening. So exactly six months ago, this is the report from Futurism. The CEO of Anthropics said that in six months, AI would be writing 90% of code. And so I think people, when Dario said this, people interpreted it as, okay, well, 90% of the software engineering jobs are going away. And that certainly hasn't happened. I mean, we're not seeing like fantastic job numbers broadly in the economy.

There are like rumblings about software engineers not getting hired as fast as they should. New grad struggling. New grad struggling. But I mean, we're talking about like what, a few percentage points, if anything. Certainly not 90% of software engineers are out of a job. Yeah. But simultaneously we're seeing folks like Brian Armstrong at Coinbase highlight that, what is it, 40% of their code is written by AI now.

There's a lot more code being written there. There are great companies that are internally not focused on hiring new people. And yet they're still ramping revenue. We talked about this part, right? Headcount. Yep. With Palantir headcount is like relatively flat. Yeah, revenues way up.

Couple thousand people. Clarna, right? Head count is way down. Revenues way up. A couple thousand people. And so you have these companies that are. doing well growing really fast and then not at needing to add a lot of people you know you could just make an argument that that's like willpower right or the other side of it is like you know

they're getting new efficiency and uh yeah there there's it's an interesting it's hard to tell what what's driven by increased efficiency due to AI versus just CEOs deciding like we're all going to do more yeah and you don't i'm not giving you we're not giving you budget to like for this new product you want to launch have two people launch it we're not going to give you know 20 people and and you know some massive yeah it is it is like if you had told me like artificial a GI is real will pass the Turing test AI will be able to write code at the level of a mid-tier software engineer maybe not total top tier software engineer but like you're gonna one shot a calendar and in

billions yeah you're one shot up a calendar app and billions of dollars will be spent on this like every month I would have like okay well like I would expect that like my my the app from United Airlines is less buggy and like I haven't experienced that I haven't I haven't been like walking around the internet using different websites and tooling and being like oh wow they did a complete rewrite on this it's so much faster or like oh well there's no bugs in this thing or that thing it's like it's still very incremental like we really do have a lot more software to write because I do believe

that the code's being written and like the product like internally every company is writing more code and doing more things but the amount Yeah, I mean, you have to do this to improve your experience. It's crazy. There's a lot of CEOs and CTOs and engineers that have come out and said 90% of my code is written by AI, but they're, they're still like, it's not like they suddenly only need to work for an hour a day. Yeah. It's not like, it's just like, okay, we just need to do. Yeah, we just need to do more.

Yep, totally, really. Well, if you're writing a lot of code with AI, you need code review for the age of AI. That's right. Graphite. graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster teams like RAMP figma asana cursor Shopify being you know like more we have a post from our kerasian came on the show earlier this week he has the data on gpt 5 he says gpt 5 was good actually after a launch that led that led Sam Altman to apologize

the latest ramp data shows opening i is growing business adoption faster than any other model company tracked by ramp AI index It's also not just tech manufacturing is adopting AI faster than any other sector, and it's why the consensus figures on AI adoption are probably wrong, or the census figures, which we talked about with ARRA. And he says, read his full analysis on substack. You can go to econlab.substack.com to subscribe to our Karazian, and you should, of course, go to TBPN.substack.com and subscribe to our newsletter. So the Ramp AI index, the model adoption rate, the share of U.S. businesses with paid subscriptions to AI models jumped significantly in, what is it? This is probably March was opening eyes, really crazy fast takeoff. And then in July, the data's up again.

This doesn't read purely as, this reads more as like people understanding O3. and reasoning models and starting to pay. Also, just more monetization tiers, probably. More ways to pay, maybe. But 44% of U.S. businesses now have paid subscriptions to AI models, platforms, or tools across OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI, Google, and Deepseek. And the Google number seems low since I would imagine

that some of those Gemini. subscriptions maybe get rolled into Google apps like because Gemini just shows up in the Google apps billing already we'd have to talk to our and dig in more but I mean it's sure like the year's piece of the data is that opening eyes on an absolute tear here in the B2B context which is interesting yeah and and it's not like we're not seeing like oh GPT 5 sucked so it's falling off cliff it's like no like the models are getting better it just like we talked about this with the iPhone like if it was a war if it was worse they probably

and release it they just stick with the best but yeah um anyway um this is crazy this other yeah this is another pro uh chat gpti's impact and open a i guess like i could put this loosely in the bowl case but yeah so isaac says i met someone this morning who's number one source of traffic is chat gpt supplement brand and has figured out how to get chat chbt to recommend the brand whenever someone asks about a specific problem crazy uh that is crazy i feel like i'm surprised we haven't seen more of this but it's just taken a while for not only tragedy to get adopted to the point where it's statistically significant but then also people to figure out how to make it happen i mean you live the podcast boom firsthand and how long was it like podcasts had existed for years before we

saw like AG1 become like the podcast supplement brand right yeah and and there were a few other brands where it was like this their whole growth strategy was more sigmatic do you remember that four sigmatic for sure that's a great example uh i yeah my friends uh my friends had a podcast and uh i was in college at the time they they were quite a bit older and when i met them they had one sponsor, which was like some random coffee company that just like happened, the founder happened to be in the audience, just reached out, was like, hey, let me like, hey, so they, they didn't, they started the podcast without any real plans to monetize or anything like that. Yeah.

And I, at the time, it still felt like I was late to podcasting because there was a bunch of podcasts that, I mean, you could say the same thing about, uh, direct to consumer advertising on, on on like meta platforms like the four-sigmatic I heard do we hear the numbers together someone was talking and saying that so much the TNC era was so crazy because it was like every you know a number of brands realized like hey you can buy like really cheap really effective advertising on Instagram on Instagram and meta platforms broadly and then and that allows you to scale a number of brands super quickly yeah was literally like if you had a decent product and you had funding you could like per you know scale overnight and that so many people realize

that yeah so many people realize the opportunity and just flooded it and it just peated away auction so so supply grew but yeah demand you know for the ad inventory yeah i think in the mushroom coffee category there are three or four different brands doing a hundred million plus in sales maybe like 300 million dollar plus in sales like there are some really really Yeah, there's mudwater. Mudwater, Four Seigmatic. There's two, there's two others that I haven't even heard of. And you just, every time you hear it, I heard it crazy.

Yeah, they went from, they went from zero to two hundred million dollars in five years. I, I heard a crazy story about a somebody interning at one of the mushroom coffee companies. Leaving, you want to getting and out and generate, this company was already a nine figure revenue mark. The intern left and started another one and then out grew the original. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of financial.

I do wonder what those companies look like in five, ten years. I mean, we've seen, when we talk to the Ridge guys, like, like, top line growth is not the end-all, be-all of D2C success. Like you have to generate cash flow matters and this takes time. And so when you hear one of those like crazy revenue ramps, especially in D2C, you should always ask this even in AI, but in D2C, you really need to understand, okay, is there, is there, is this? just the founders go to fundraising and they're losing money on every transaction and they're just going to keep this flywheel going going because they've figured out how to make their revenue steeper than everyone else and so they keep getting funded or is there something really special about the I always used to laugh something about unprofitable SaaS. I mean it's it's like

how are you going to sell software and lose money it's the funny but like selling physical goods it's like wait you sold this mattress it cost you money to sell this match to me could sell this mattress yeah yeah and obviously there's plenty of cases of of great companies that that were deeply you know unprofitable for for a long time but something about d to c companies you know running running in the red uh massively yeah it's like come on you should it you know at least uh i mean it's like lemonade stand stuff it's like as a kid you learn like buy the lemons buy the sugar, get the pitcher, and then add it all up, multiply it by two. That's how much you're charging. It's like cost-based pricing is like, you know, the most instinctual economic

force in the world that like a child can understand. And yet we justify all these different things. And sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it does make sense to lose money on SaaS for a little bit if you're building a, you know, some sort of network, some sort of locked-in thing, some sort of high-margin opportunity down the road. Anyway, if you're growing your business, you need to analyze some data, get on Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights

in seconds. They're loved by 2 million users and trusted individuals. Well, Princeton, BCG, and Zapier. Equally important, we need to talk about profound in the context of ChatchapD traffic. Yeah, I was not. I would not be surprised at the company that Isaac is talking about here

that's getting all of their traffic from ChatGPT is using Profound. Yeah, probably Profound.com. It's in the back. There you go. I put it up on the... Which millions of consumers who are using AI to discover your products and brands get your brand mentioned in ChatchipT.

Yeah. Whether you're doing, whether it's consumer product that you're selling or enterprise software, you need to get on it. We kind of like, we kind of took the conversation in like an almost like negative situation, talking about like the long-term durability of these businesses, but I mean, really... Well, this is just fantastic. It's organic. Yeah, exactly.

uh SEO is sort of like faded in terms of of importance of relevancy if you can if you can be the first brand to go and find the the correct strategy on instagram and dominate like that's that's such a huge advantage and it's the same thing with like how did Airbnb get to scale quickly old school SEO right they just had landing pages for every single uh you know rental homes in tulsa right yeah and when you google it you go really good at SEO uh there's a whole bunch of other Drew Houston at Dropbox he was like we we copy pasted the entire like web 2.0 growth handbook which was like give 10 get 10 PayPal model of like you know incentive based viral growth and with Dropbox it'd be like I give you five gigs of storage I get five gigs of storage we add it all up and it just went super viral and they he said something like all of the uh he said something like all of the uh all of the viral like the viral growth it's like you can go way deeper with that metaphor which is basically like as an internet SaaS company you need to be sneezing on as many people as possible which i think is hilarious he's like he's like you know to get the viral coefficient up you need to be sneezing a lot and not washing your hands what does that mean in the dropbox context well it means when any so whenever someone clicks a drop box link there's a little prompt hey do you want to sign up hey put your email let's just grab your email before you view this

pdf oh oh hello sign yeah we acquired them let's bring them in and oh if you want to sign a document like set up a drop box account right it's like these are sneezing all over the internet is what he'd like referred to it as i thought it was brilliant yeah yeah angelist has done this well with with uh their roll up vehicle product right every time every time you know somebody gets invited to a roll up vehicle they create an angelus account they may maybe make their first investment And then Angelus can say, like, hey, do you want to invest in this fund? Do you want to do this? Yep.

Yeah. Do you want to read through this journal article at all? Do you think we covered it? I think we covered most of this. Basically, the journal's asking about Open AIS funding challenges. We ran through this yesterday. And basically, my conclusion was $300 billion to Oracle is a staggering amount of money. But it does, it is in line with what it takes to build.

all the data center capacity for an amazon dot com a facebook and instagram like meta platforms internal a google.com not the cloud businesses um and so i can see i can imagine the spreadsheet that that that they that they used to develop the model the question is will the growth continue i think they're on a fantastic growth curve it feels like this will um that they will wind up paying a lot of this and that's certainly what the market's pricing in based on the the the pop in the oracle stock it's not like wall street looked at the the oracle backlog and was like oh that's fake this is bearish we need to sell the stock no they were like yeah that money's coming it 300 billion's coming in over the next over the next half decade or something so like let's

uh i think that was i think i think you can i think you can think that it may not materialize but still think it's a good investment in the short term sure but i mean they missed like purely yeah yeah but purely momentum maybe that's a i think that's kind of odd it's kind of like a circular logic um because i mean then you get into like you could say that about like anything like like yeah i would say like a bunch of people a bunch of people are like wow yeah oracle's going to generate hundreds of billions of revenue from i i want to own this stock and then i'm just saying there's a category of people that are going to say like okay the stock's going to run yeah at least in the short term but maybe it's 1999 and and uh you know we're we're we're we're going to see some

type of you know correction here so we will we will find out we'll see i mean we'll probably have more data on i mean as soon as oracle's next quarter prints we'll see exactly how much they're pulling down exactly how much they're building um open ai in the nas in the last nine months has committed to spend around $60 billion a year for computing from Oracle. And this will really, I mean, if this pencil's out, like this will drive a radical transformation in Oracle's business. Like you, we saw the chart in the journal where their core business, like everything that they've built up so far is basically expected to decline over the next five years as they

switch to pure cloud computing. Like they want to be a hypercalor OC. Eric newcomer this morning said, being a 48 year old database company, suddenly grow by more than the size of sales force over the course of a trading day is one of those occurrences that makes you wonder about the moment we're in it's at once incredible and cany and terrifying like your grandfather during a family reunion gathering everyone around tossing off his walker and doing parkour um uh good uh very very funny bit um uh eric Eric Newcomer also was bearish on, he was bearish on Open AI at around 30, or at least like very skeptical.

Yeah, maybe a year or two ago. He wrote kind of the bear case. But I think this is a very, very fair. Yeah. Open AI loses billions of dollars a year and has told investors it is on pace to make 13 billion in revenue this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. Less than three years since the launch of Chatchipti, Open AI is tying its fate. to a belief that companies and consumers will increase their spending on artificial intelligence at explosive rates for years to come. And I do, I do wonder, like, you have to believe in

the agent of commerce story to really see another like 10x in revenue. How do they get to, I mean, the projection that people are underrating open ad, I believe is 200 billion in revenue in like 2030. and and it's hard to imagine like am i going to pay two thousand dollars hard to exist is everyone going to pay to my sound board would i pay yeah yeah i want to hit the air horns so bad yeah uh yeah i i think you got to criticize the three users yeah you got them you can't get all on twenty dollars and two hundred dollar month plans maybe the two the example that i always give is like the average american if they don't have a show they like on your streaming platform they will just cancel it yeah yeah like i mean i mean

like they're like sorry I don't care really just haven't upgraded haven't I mean people are just starting to experience like the reasoning models I don't know like I if the if the if the if the paid plan stick around like it could be they could get a lot more people it could ever especially if it's if it goes through your business if you're expensing it if like you know how much how much how much money is spent on like email subscriptions across yeah it'll be interesting an interesting pop is like do you think that Netflix or open AI will have more subscription revenue in 2030 let's say open

AI by mile yeah and you think that's because people will pay to have this like all-powerful assistant that can yeah I mean I guess I the only the only question is just like is there a better way to monetize like can you get $20 or $200 a value out of someone by just handling their purchases and just doing the agent of commerce thing and yeah Yeah, and Open AI is not, Open AI is completely aware that they're driving a ton of economic activity. Right. They're like, I'm not happy that you're making millions of dollars from our product.

Yeah. How exactly did you? Yeah. Like I'd like, you want to keep this relationship going? Let's get cut. And that's super valuable. That's how meta generates so much money and Google too. The scale of like internet commerce and taking a cut of all of internet commerce is extremely.

extremely, extremely, this is an extremely huge pool of capital to draw from. It's a huge, it's a massive Thanksgiving plate to eat off of, right? And so opening eye deals that came to light in the past week have added up, have added more than $400 billion to the market value of two companies, chip designer broadcom and cloud provider Oracle. They also put Oracle chairman Larry Ellison in striking distance of becoming the world's richest person. Oracle's stock market value jumped over $240 billion. on Wednesday after the company revealed a giant backlog of computing orders.

Most of that is derived from a roughly 300 billion five-year computing deal with OpenAI. Well, if you are generating media, you've got to go to fall.aI, generative media platform for developers, the world's first, the world's best generative image video and audio models, all in one place, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. don't get caught writing a $300 billion check to Larry Ellison, just going to fall about it. Not today. Adobe, Shopify, Canva, Cora, and many more are on.

And you should be there too. We want to tap through this. D.D. It was highlighting Apple's a interesting story. It's so crazy to look back at these incredibly strategic acquisitions from, you know, a couple, two decades. 2008 so in 2008 Apple acquired Palo Alto semi fantastic name really ahead of the curve if anything if anything they were they created the trend let me conduct a company of Palo Alto really yeah

the silicon company of Palo Alto it's funny is there's also Palo Alto networks and so I wonder if Palo Alto semi was directly inspired and like oh well like we're in Palo Alto and we're doing something similar anyway you actually like this formatting they've just Palo Alto semi Palo Alto network more than the blank of blank so you'd just be New York browsers the New York browsers it sounds like a sports team the Palo Alto Semiconductors the Palo Alto Networks yeah the Palo Alto Networks we should we should just rename our C-Corp to Hollywood Content Inc but anyways anyway with a DD says few people know about Apple's acquisition of Palo Alto semi in 2008

arguably the highest RY acquisition in tech history the 270 million dollar price for 150 engineers laid the foundation for all the Apple silicon chips you see today that have generated over $500 billion in value to Apple. And anyways, he's highlighting an article from 2008. An Apple spokesman said Apple has agreed to buy boutique microprocessor design company called PA semi. The company, which is known for its design of sophisticated low-power chips, could spell a new feature for Apple's flagship iPhone and possibly iPod products as well. That is crazy.

These kind of acquisitions have created this set of circumstances that allow CEOs to justify these, like, absolutely insane. Because when you get an acquisition, right, the return can be as good as a, you know, seed to unicorn, you know, venture investment. Yep. And so, but when you think about, like, the Instagram acquisition, the YouTube acquisition, Palo Alto semi, right, these were different. I just feel like there is.

an alternative scenario where they don't they don't buy PA Semi instead they're just like poaching and and hiring 150 people and it takes them like three years to get there but they eventually wind up doing it but maybe there's like important IP I don't know I wonder what do you think 278 million dollars is in today's startup economy like if you go back to 2008 278 million dollars fields like a blockbuster acquisition to me this is totally that's what I'm saying yeah but but is that is that a 10 million 10 billion dollar acquisition like yeah it's funny that like emma has like actually outstripped like inflation well 100% when you look at scale yeah right is a 20 almost 20 billion dollar

deal um for half the company yeah and so i so i so i wonder like we have we really had a hundred x increase in in valuations basically um yeah this makes me want to go dig into apple's recent acquisitions because remember on the earnings call tim cook said hey yeah we're actually acquiring a company like every few weeks like we've done basically one a month this entire year yeah and everyone's been like oh it's boring like who cares like these they're not doing they don't they're not buying anthropic or they're not buying perplexity for 10 billion um but if they have to take you back pa semi in the in the portfolio right now and we just haven't like clocked it like that's going to be

amazing yeah so biggest mna i'm on uh jemini biggest mn a of the uh of 2008 2008 was HP acquires electronic data systems okay is the biggest 13 billion dollar deal like a huge merger of math companies oracle acquires BEA systems uh which was a business software company i'm not familiar with love i love business software me too 6.6. billion uh google acquired double click for 3.1 billion that was the huge acquisition yeah which in hindsight like you know it became a background incredible incredible yeah um and uh business objects was acquired by sap i like business objects that's a good name you don't make yeah it's like we don't know how to name companies like this anymore that's so good so the business company there was yeah a ton of like multi

billion dollar emma that year but uh it does feel like if apple were to acquire make a super strategic acquisition uh today i mean they were who knows how real like the perplexity rumors were right they were you know apple was under pressure to make an ai acquisition but it didn't feel like apple would ever get to the point where they would buy perplexity for 18 billion or whatever they wanted out of it was just odd for it was like when you look at an application layer company they really don't buy a lot of applications. I mean, they bought Shazam, I believe, but a lot of times they're, what they're buying are these underlying hardcore teams that are going to create the foundation of the next hardware wave for them. Like in the lead up to the Vision Pro, they acquired, I mean, you know,

you know someone who sold a company to them that went into their VR portfolio, correct? Like, like, that is the Apple Playbook is we have a vision. We're going to do VR or augmented reality in a decade or we're going to do car or we're going to do custom silicon and so let's start hiring acquiring little investments here and there here and there and here and there they're not just going to go out and be like we're trying to buy waymo or like we're trying to buy the the best asset they're kind of the opposite when they bought beats for yeah point three billion beats was doing like 1.4 billion of revenue sure trailing 12 months yeah yeah exactly again it was a very you know so Running through the B-Day Semi-acquisition, D.D. has the story.

P.A. semi-specialized in power-efficient chips with power PC chips that delivered 300% more performance per watt than Intel Zion at the time, which I believe was their server chip. Founded by the late Dan Dauberplu, DEC Alpha and Strongarm Legend. In 2003, the team had expertise in low-power architecture that Intel couldn't match. The acquisition gave Apple the dream team. that would create the A4 chip in 2010, launching Apple Silicon Dominance. Key engineers like Jim Keller, G. Williams III, and Johnny Serugi, architected the A-series that powers two plus billion devices today, crushing Qualcomm's monopoly. This philosophy evolved into the M1's 20-plus-hour battery life that's powering this laptop right here.

Do you get 20 hours out of that, bad boy? I'm plugged in right now. I'm not risking it while we're on the stream, but I think we could maybe get 20 hours if I was you know low low dim screen brightness and maybe not connected to the Wi-Fi and maybe just in a text editor with dark background the whole time and it also had a 3.5x faster performance at Intel at one-third the power the M line of chips today powers max iPads and Vision Pro without PA semi there may never have been an iPhone processor independence iPad dominance no

Apple Silicon Max the small investment a series a round a series B today has generated 500 plus billion in value strategic acquisitions like this can make the break make or break the future of a business and if you what else turbo puffer it's on the schizzo we puffin we're puffing search everybody serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely extremely scalable pretty much used by every cursing company we've been able to find

there's a bunch of logos that they have that are absolutely crazy that they don't even they're not even listing on the website so a lot more to come from a turbopuffer in the near future but for now

get on it did you want to go through this post by Ajny Midd and Jason yeah I thought this was I thought this was a couple things you could read into this so many V he says

many VC firms are being asked by their LPs how they so utterly missed the entire 20 to 25 cohort of frontier AI startups that are now category winners worse they're being asked by the same by next gen founders i've never seen so many traditional investors become obsolete so fast it was like if you think about if you think back like the 20 2020 through 2025 you had zirp where just every category was going crazy and then you had like like fintech was super hot. Crypto was super hot. It was easy to get kind of like, if you were a generalist VC,

a lot of generalists decided, I'm going to go just be a crypto investor. Or I'm going to focus really heavily on fintech. And then you also had the sort of American dynamism boom, which people were drawn to in different ways. But when you look back at when you look back at when some of these leading AI companies were started, it really was like 2022 during like a time where, if a lot of ECs were like trying to do like basically damage control on the on their portfolios right they had funded a bunch of companies like at insane multiples we started seeing um you know a real kind of like correction in uh in venture and and uh if if you just like weren't really didn't have your eye on the ball and weren't like seeing kind of the future you missed a lot of yeah and when i see when i think

about the cohort of Frontier AI startups, who do you put in that bucket, in that cohort, 2020 to 2025? Like, if you're a, if you're a traditional investor that doesn't want to become obsolete, what logos do you want on your portfolio page? Well, so that signal to the next generation of founders and LPs that you did not utterly miss the entire 2020 to 2025 cohort of frontier AI startups uh first example that came to mind was like listen laps right six billion dollar company now uh started in 2022 uh seems like it you know seems very obvious in hindsight but if in 2022 you had like funded you know 15 fintech companies and we're trying to figure out what was going to happen to them as interest rates were spike you know spiking uh and and you were distracted by

crypto you just like didn't you know you weren't there were people that were locked in on AI right the people that I the people that I that come to mind is like people like a lot Gill who are in a lot of these companies right that a lot of the platform funds like I mean obviously on Jané at uh at Andreessen is is there in a lot of these companies but they're multi-stage right so it didn't matter you didn't have to catch them at at uh Series A or Seed, although they caught plenty. And so, and then the other thing is, like, if you're not in, if you're a platform VC and you weren't in any of the winning foundation models, like, what were you doing?

So POSLA has a fantastic story around early open AI. Thrive has a fantastic story around early open AI. Then there was that first, like, pre, like, right around the, right around the moment chat GPT happened. i remember there was a big round and a lot of investors got in there and it was around uh it was in the tens of billions and it was a crazy valuation to kind of come out of the gate with there was already this microsoft deal it was a complex thing you had to take a ton of risk on the non-profit for-profit conversion but yeah there was there was there to be clear there was

plenty of reasons not to do open a i 100% not like whether it was pricing the structure there there was playing a meme about the model the foundation model layer will commoditize right yeah and so if you fell for that meme you are not in and then there was all the meme like the application layer there's no value that there was a period where people they fell for both me you felt there was like mid curve both of them and then you're sitting here you've got no foundation model bets no no application layer bets and and you're like well even the new foundation models are too expensive i can't do those and then this company is just like trying to fast follow that company that already broke out so I mean when I think about the the 2020 to 2025 cohort of frontier AI startups

yeah I think 11 labs fits in there I think mid journey no one got into I think I would put deep mind you couldn't invest because that was at Google but it's got to be open AI anthropic or a few of the other major like like application layer companies that have done very well and if you're in those even if it was a growth round and you got in later if you at least built a position and have something going on there it seems like you kind of check this box but it is it is an interesting it is an interesting question to phrase you got a you got to buy fifth avs sometimes that's right linear linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products meet the system for modern software

development streamline issues projects and product roadmaps i think i think all the breakout AI companies are already running on linear and you should too well we have some news from dylan patel uh over its semi analysis another giant leap invidia rubin cpx specialized accelerator and rack inference pre-fill specialized GPU uh dylan says invidia has widened the gap for inference rack scale architecture yet again pre-fill specialized inference chips massively lower total cost to own per million input tokens on long context transformers. As usual, other AI chip upstarts will follow this with pre-fill specialized chips, but later.

And so yet another bullish take for Nvidia. Everyone's competing. Following the AMD story has been interesting. Dylan's been pushing AMD to fix some of the bugs, get more serious about AI, really talk to the developer. community engaged with the developer community and AMD was doing that was seeing some some positive some positive early signs of being taken more seriously George Hots was on the team a little bit but but his sense like pulled

back and you know Jensen sees semi-analysis too and can see oh AMD is coming for my lunch I'm gonna step on the gas and it seems like yes so congrats to everyone over at Nvidia for putting on a putting on an absolute clinic in Radh Gfields says well he's quoting Sam there's not a single person in the world who needs a two terabyte iPhone 17 Pro Max

Jack Field says slaps car roof this baby can fit so much other in it is that a thing yeah if you look at if you look at like storage there's like a category called other and is it big is that just I usually I wear it usually is a bad sign

if I have other going on I have one terabyte iPhone and I don't have any other I have no other my my my phone is applications and then other I think I'm looking now I don't I don't have system data I don't have it anymore but there used to be a little throwback it used to be the other it used to be a much bigger well they've been a lot better exposing where the data is actually stored I think you know the two terabyte phone that feels like it's for someone who just Mr. Beast, filming, you know, his entire.

Yeah. And specifically the new phones, 48 megapixel cameras, gen locks, you can run them for a long time, better heat management. So you can probably record for 10 hours if it's plugged in, no problem. And then you're saving all that footage. And you can record in raw video now, raw, so that those are huge files. So there is a world where if you're using this as a production tool, I saw another take that was like the iPhone 17 Pro gets.

you ready for the two thousand dollar iPhone like the like mentally that's a that's a threshold that's a rubicon that everyone has to cross and and and and maxing it out and offering that level of performance and saying hey look we put pro on it like you have to be using this in a professional context yeah you should be expensing this and for someone like mr. Beast who says yeah I want to funny every every every camera company just being like where Apple's not you know threat like they're really they're really you know he might be placing that with the iPhones I think the watch out Sony watch out Sony so sure

Tim Cook wants your lunch he's cooking he's cooking he's cooking Navine Rao is leaving Databricks a little bit of a trade deal 100 billion dollar startup to build a next generation computer to shrink AI compute costs and Databricks plans to invest that's bullish Databricks sits around 100 billion dollars and just raised one B they're also at a four billion dollar run rate congrats to data bricks which we had our gong the core problem for the AI industry is that large models are limited by memory bandwidth internet interconnect latency and power so every token can be

produced can be too expensive a purpose-built computer may tackle those costs by bringing memory closer to compute wiring chips with faster links is this data center focused or or or something that would actually sit on your on your desktop does this is this a george hot's tiny box competitor i'm not exactly sure but uh congrats to nevin row on the new gig we will be following the story and monitoring the situation. Big move. We'll try to get them on. When you tell those computers, make sure you're on numeralhq.com, Navine, sales talks on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Uh, Otto van von Tweethmach. Quitmark, auto says, uh, can you short an entire country? Referring to

Albania. Albania is, uh, appointing an AI generated government minister to govern the country's finances. Apparently they've had so many issues with, uh, with, with like, uh, corruption and fraud they're just like let's just like make an AI yeah no one's gonna no one's gonna the top comment is uh their their alternative is now I don't I've never really I don't I don't think I know many Albanians and I don't know Apple says some wild stories about going to Albania I believe I don't want to docks too much but here's some here's some funny stories hopefully we can get them to share them on the show um it's yeah the idea of like let's just

use an AI for to to like clean this up it's like that's who's prompting it like are they reliable well what if they're i mean miramarades albanian yeah about albanian american so they could get thinking machines there would be a pretty crazy story of uh what what's it called sovereign a i would be a sovereign i i don't know i don't know if uh they're claiming that it's that it's that it's their national champion you actually not yet albanian americans yeah um well if uh if someone in Albania needs to chat with someone about their tax return maybe they could get on fin a i the number one AI agent for customer service number one performance benchmarks number one in competitive bakeoffs number one ranking on john i've been i've been informed that back home in

the studio the whole team is clapping along with us during the during that during hopefully we could be audio mix in and everyone yeah everyone goes for it uh gary tan had a post uh a i startup founders tout a winning formula no booze no sleep no fun but gary tan disagrees about the no fun though and this is from the wall street journal um san francisco this is the vibe right startup founding and we talked to a few of these folks one of these guys came on the show uh just uh at yc demaday actually so uh fascinating and and this was uh this was a second uh this is clearly like a a story that was inspired by that previous story of that that founder who said that the vibes 996 no run hard, lift heavy, Mary early, that whole, that whole viral quote. This is probably like

downstream coverage of that. But in San Francisco, startup founder Marty Kausus was at the office on Sunday. Where else would he be? Kausus, 28 years old, recently posted on LinkedIn that he put in three 92 hour weeks in a row. He went on vacation once, he said, but flew home early because he was too stressed about work. His goal is to build a $10 billion company in 10 years. The motive isn't purely financial. There are easier ways to make money. This, uh, it isn't part of a social mission either. We built customer support software. Uh, it's not like this grand vision that we're saving the world somehow. He compared his pursuit to a board game, one he wants to win. I could be a programmer working at a big tech company, he said, but that doesn't sound cool. Instead, he raised 51 million

dollars for pylon on AI startup he co-founded. Congrats. I was gone for that. Um, yeah, I was just reflecting on this this this whole vibe and the coverage of this vibe and thinking about when I got to Silicon Valley and what was similar and what was different and so you didn't have a PR person working over coverage that was your mistake John I know you only raised like 17 grand in your first round raised 17,000 dollars and there was no concept of going to the office because the office was my bedroom and my co-founder lived in the same bedroom as me so we had two beds in the same room And we would wake up and go sit at the same desk next to each other. That's like a real lock-in because you don't even have a private life, right?

There's nothing, you have nothing. Nothing. It's purely like there was, there's one local bar that we went to once in Sunnyvale because there was nothing to do. But we would go outside and we'd throw the football. Bigskin. The pinkskin. We would go outside and get some sun and throw the football back and forth and then go back inside and just program. And my, and my day was literally like wake up at noon and because you don't have any calls, wake up at noon, program until 4 a.m. fall asleep, do the same thing the next day, seven days a week. And there was no, there was no alternative. And there's other, like, we are also in this weird. I mean, also I wasn't 28. I was 21 at the time.

It's funny because saying like I put in like three, like obviously respect to Marty, but saying I put in three 92 hour weeks is another way you could say like for the last three weeks. I've slept and ate and done normal human things for about 12 hours a day. Yeah. And the other 12 hours I spent working. Yeah. It doesn't hit the same as three, you know. Yeah. It is, it is wild.

But I don't know. I mean, in general, like if this is a, if this is, there was, there was a time in Silicon Valley also that you could raise enough money that you could just immediately be on like a party circuit. And like clearly this is a step in the right. direction away from that. It's like actually taking business seriously. So hugely bullish overall. It's just funny like thinking about like like the money flowing like there were not that many companies that in 2012 that were raising like double digit millions. But then there weren't that many companies making money. Like we certainly weren't. We had no users. So like who was going to fund us like $17,000 was the right amount of money to give us like. And also like it's

not like we were being recruited by big tech. Like if I tried to get a job there, I'd be like no. the capital markets were efficient they were they were like I didn't deliver 17k I wasn't that experienced like I was just trying to you know like do something build some build it is a is it you know it's very real that like a lot of founders would benefit from like having their first fundraise be like a hundred thousand dollars which is just enough for them to like hack for two years and not have to get a job yep but the current the current state of the capital markets means that if you're like talented and charismatic and compelling and you have an interesting idea you can get at least a million

probably well beyond that um you know at demo day like it was very obvious yeah for the most part when i you could tell i pretty much was guessing every time i was like let me guess your rounds closed yeah um i mean yeah in in in 2012 like i think they were probably like five or 10 teams that like raise solid rounds coming out of like an 80 team batch like It was not, it was not, snap your fingers and the money shows up. The, I mean, the hottest, like most overheated round was done at like 60. And everyone was like, this is a bumble. This is insane.

There was one company. Well, a company was a company called VIROL. And they were actually really good at viral videos. And they were great at video production. And they built an ad network and were doing sort of like some programmatic ads. So it was more like an ad business than like, I don't think they ever fully stuck. the landing on like becoming like a major platform like I don't think that they IPO or anything I know the founder's done quite well and has I think a number of

businesses but they they launched a few like extremely great launch videos they I feel like they almost you could almost go back and credit them with like creating the original launch video you should look up VIR O O L like launch video on YouTube VIR OOL by rule yeah V-I-I-R-O-L and the whole idea was like they would get you to go viral and so you'd pay them and then they did still a come I mean it's still still going it's still cooking well Alex double love I believe is the founder great guy um so I don't know this company looks pretty dead okay well I mean oh it's it's now called I guess it was a I mean the founder it was super young and and I met him in college and it you know was just like he really was the type of person that you would want to fund at 60 because like he was making money in his dorm room like handover fist too like had actually scaled the ad network and was like bringing in real revenue and real profits it was just maybe like it wasn't necessarily

going to turn into like you know ad words because he didn't have like a Google attached to the front of it's still like super impressive business right um but they had worked with this video production company called glass and marker which I wound up working with later sort of like a precursor to sandwich video a precursor to a Jason Carmen production and was particularly good at at creating this like just super cinematic like Hollywood level video production for like a launch video and they they put out a few that were really good I remember that like SWAT team going in pulling in like this like blue this like blue goo that was like radioactive and it was like

you got to get the formula to go viral it was great are you throwing them on there they're throw it on there by rule v i r o o'll alex debilov if you want to come on the show and tell us the full story uh hit me up uh the moon probably the moon well yeah they were they were going to the moon um yeah the the other funny thing that i like is this uh so like uh you know the the these teenagers that they interviewed the uh the brass ring is a trillion dollar company with global user base to grab it they rarely drink scoff at work life balance in our in a 24-7 competition to be or appear to be the most obsessed there's a framing

there's a one framing which is like I don't drink because like it's like I've done the research and it's a carcinogen it's bad for my health there's another one which is like I don't drink because it's like sacrificing because like I care about work like for me and my friends is like we would drink every drop of alcohol that we could afford it was just not that much so we had like three beers a month because like that was what we could afford And we, and we did not, it was like, yeah, like, if we're going to Costco and getting like a huge box of ramen, like, it's going to be a consideration if you take the 30 rack in the, in the bag. That's going to hurt your burn rate.

When you're on $17,000 for six months, like an extra $30 in beers like material. Yeah, it's, it's a serious. Yeah, it was hacking Chipotle, you know, with the like double beans, double rice because it didn't add anything and then. And then you're not being like, yeah, throw a Corona in there with my with my meal at Chipotle. no way um but i used to go to i used to go to um this is will be funny to you now but i used to go to the the first like 20 trips i took to air one i didn't go in the building yeah i would just bring jugs of water to fill up in this thing outside and i'd pull up with my car that had like two hundred thousand miles on it and just like just be like you know carrying these huge jugs

of water yeah fun memories here's here's the trade-off um why would i go to drink at a bar if I can be building a company. I mean, it is the right trade-off and it is the thing that you don't want to lose as the capital markets loosen, right? This is such a, this, all the people that are screenshoting this article, why would I go drink at a bar if I could be building a company? That is a really. Yeah, there is a little bit of this that's like, that's like, the whole, the whole question the Wall Street Journal is clearly asking here is like, I don't even like, I don't like bars and I don't like drinking. but this is still a funny quote yeah yeah no i i understand what you're saying and i understand what people are are screenshoting it about but the the the interesting thing is like if the money starts

flowing in silicon valley like the thing that you would definitely not want to lose is like the time in the office like the time actually working like that's the worst thing to lose um and so and yeah even if you have to justify it in this like you know psychological way yeah uh it's it's good not to lose that yeah uh because as soon as you actually go to the bar every night like yeah definitely not building yeah i was thinking i was thinking like i've always felt i had you know somewhat of a balanced life right i have we we realistically we work like 60 hours a week and that like we leave home at yeah somewhere around five it's pretty balanced get home around 530 um and then obviously working randomly on on you know nights weekends etc but i was thinking you know people say like social life

work like you know family like pick two yeah and i realized recently took me a while to realize like how much i sacrificed like my uh i like social life right because i feel like i have a social life at work and and i'm lucky that a lot of the people obviously consider every person on our team a friend and and the people that I invest with are friends and the people that I work with are friends. But yeah, you do have to, this is just this culture of like sacrifice everything. But the company works really well when you're 20, when you're in your early 20s, mid-20s, depending on when you. I think we found the ultimate killer in this article. Hasab Ula, he works out of Founders Inc.

a waterfront campus in Fort Mason that provides desks, a hardware lab, game room, stage area for hackathons. He lives on one that really eats meal per day to save time and avoid cooking. Ulaah pays $700 a month to live at a former office building that was converted to a living and workspace for about 20 residents. The beds, which are clustered in a common area, are fully enclosed pods. He literally lives in the pod with a privacy curtain, similar to a trained sleeper. car with the curtain shut his pod gets pitch black letting him sleep days after working all night

this guy is a killer i'm betting on him i absolutely dog this is not a larp seven hours a month is so little to live on in san francisco i assume that's where this is founder's ink port mason he's living in the pod he's locked in it is funny it is funny to do to do out to this guy you would think he could maybe eat two meals if he didn't do uber eats and he just walked to to grab some food but maybe it's too locked in too locked in yeah i i think it's probably worth the trade off um but yeah i mean this is still i got to put i got i got to i got to say like getting delivery is still an extreme luxury it's still a luxury back in back i would not when when we used to when when i would not let i was

like on a like once a week like treat yourself to to chipotle type of thing and otherwise it was like yeah there's we have like chicken breast and rice at home yeah no no no no like You know, I think my own head being like, you know, the quote, the meme of like, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, you know, X, Y, Z at home. But that was like in my own head. I'd like, I have food in the fridge. I'm not. I'd be, and I'd be guilty.

You know, being, you know, ordering, uh, ordering, uh, ordering. No, I, I, I remember one, one, one night I was up like really late working. I boil some water in a, in a, in a pot to make ramen. And I, and I, and I, got sucked into a coating problem. and i let the water boil and evaporate and it destroyed the pan and it was like that's our capax out the window right we're just devastating hit to depreciation like we were expecting to depreciate that asset over two years and now we have to buy another pan like what are we going to do we don't have a pan pans are expensive money doesn't grow on trees where you know we

have 17k it's rough um cowsus the the guy uh the original guy from pylon is on the brian johnson diet okay so well he's raised 51 million dollars to be clear i do think that like all of this is proportional like if your business has grown to the point where you can raise 10 million or 50 million like you do not be you do not need to be living in the pot or like pay yourself a reasonable wage as soon as we raised real money and we're making real revenue like we were in like decent apartments with cleaning and like with like it's amazing to feel like you have like a relatively the lifestyle of like a corporate athlete or even just an injury level corporate athlete but it still feels like a massive luxury 100% like my my

800 square feet in a when i when i when i first moved to l.a i had a apartment my apartment it was a it was a um two-bedroom apartment that i had a roommate so i felt lucky to have my own room but i had no windows in the room because the window opened up to like a common area at eye level so if i had my if i didn't have like i literally put cardboard up if i didn't have cardboard up people would just see into my bedroom i was like yeah and then this this quote is hilarious he said his ideal employee for a sales role at the startup is a quote unquote phd poor hungry and desperate i like that that's good grinders you're going to get grinders people people that want to be on the on the ups that that risk yeah there should be a term for

somebody who's fast until their next like steak sales dinner it's like they only eat oh during their closing i only eat what i'm closing like a real hunter on the this is this is pretty crazy nico lockwuff 25 years old wants to build a trillion dollar company uh with the goal of replacing traditional insurance companies his father is a lawyer from the insurance company so he only hires people willing to work seven days a week of his 40 plus employees around 30 are ex-founders that is a crazy stat just because like it really speaks to the to the amount of founders that exist in the bay area now like in in either you could not i mean this happened like are are you familiar with the y scraper instead of the sky skyscraper there was there was a this is

in maybe 2008, 2010, there was one building where all of the YC companies lived after they graduated from Mountain View and went to San Francisco, called it the Y scraper. And there was enough of, so you have stories about like Coinbase working right next to the Airbnb guys. I don't know if that's exactly right, but like you could imagine a few different big companies coming. And it was like, if one company failed, it would just be like, okay, come over to this company, like join forces um but but you couldn't necessarily do that to the tune of 75% of the workforce in the first 40 that's that that that feels new and it feels like a uh uh an example of how totally how much more popular entrepreneurship is these days um it says he lives at the

what he lives at the office laqua said who considers himself the most hardcore of his peers employees share similar feelings uh though not a work requirement laqua said The two-thirds of our early employees got Corgi tattoos. That is hardcore. Wow. That's great. I have no tattoos. I've never been big into that world, but that is certainly a commitment.

Hopefully you own the IP. Do not. So interesting. This company, I'm on Nico's LinkedIn and this is a stealth startup still. Well, he's not, but you're not, you're in the, you're in the journal and you're tat. tad it up i think you're safe to come out of stealth yeah hopefully you have the ip locked up uh i went through yc with a with a company called pair that was a uh i think it was like an app for you and your significant other and so it was imagine a social network basically all the features of i

message you know how now in i message you can like see all the photos that you've shared between you and one person so i can pull up like our i message and i can go into that info panel and see like here are all the links that georgie sent here are all the images i can send you little stickers and all sorts of different stuff pair was that for like a romantic couple so you could like draw to each other had all these like fun little games and stuff um and pair wound up getting sued by pair networks and they were like whoa whoa like we are a consumer dating like messaging app for like a husband and wife to share their life together you're a networking company pair networks like you sell into data centers yeah like why are you suing us and they were like

no you're a technology company we're a technology company you have to change your name yeah and so they did and they became couple and it was like this huge huge difficult thing so uh anyway the importance of getting your name ip lockdown before we gotta get the tattoo we have an important so center is in the in the youtube chat okay cool can we get founders podcast on the board absolutely we didn't add you because this was so schizo yeah but you are really the godfather of podcasting created the cat i don't think i don't think we can see up there i don't know we'll have to have to see you up there uh you have a ton of space to your left though so get down and go keep going to the left past vibe coding and past discord to the left past larry ellison that whole area you got like

three feet to work with over there you can draw massive stuff there we go here we go oh yeah this is good going downwards this is perfect okay i'm i'm seeing everything we're good uh lockwell regrets getting his columbia university degree he said because he wasn't solving societal problems in class i always want to do the maximally ambitious thing i can think of and make the biggest impact possible uh yuan the corgi co-founder said her life two centers around work which across the startup is populated largely by men from a personal perspective i don't mind it as much but it does suck to see not that many women in startups jared friedman uh partner ycombinator said the work ethic and energy of san francisco's young founders feels like a return to the early days of the internet and i

agree with this this is a great take um when people slept under under their desks at companies such as as paypal i actually see it coming uh as a as a full circle moment ai is probably 10x as big uh Friedman said the tech yeah I mean it's very helpful if you have you know five to ten other heavily funded companies in your category and so capital is not really a constraint for anyone yeah and it just comes down to raw execution do we just conference center in right now on this yeah we got to ask him about I got to call center and and get him getting get him tell us about the sleeping under your desk should I give him a call

Senra let's see let's see if he's available I'm I'm calling on him I'll put him up if he's available he's in the YouTube chat so hopefully you can come on the show I totally emphasize hey how you doing you're live yeah yeah you're live we saw you in the we saw you in the chat we got now Eliasson we're doing uh we're happy Friday yeah we're doing a whole deep dive on this Wall Street Journal article about the young founders in San Francisco who are working 12 hours a day six days a week there's a bunch of examples yeah so we wanted to ask you is hard work important or is it overrated we'll go to an article about people working for time no no working hard really hard and the article

focused on the job the article is framed as like is like are they working too hard a little bit or like is this a larp are they pretending and uh we wanted to go to the source and get the get the final answer they do with the other that's what jordy says that's what i said it's like put differently they're they're spending eight hours a day sleeping four hours a day you know what we're doing whenever they watch Netflix I guess I'm like what would I what would my what would our lives look like if we didn't have five kids it's crazy like and wives that we I don't know yeah dearly sorry that's part time buddy 996 is part-time breaking David Senra has called it working 996 is considered part-time in the founders podcast world is good I know you're into

like bodybuilding did you ever read the education of a bodybuilding builder by Arnold Shrestneger. No, I should. Sounds fantastic. So somebody posted like the great lock-in and it's just like nine episodes of founders. Yeah. Oh, I saw that. So one of them I think is Arnold's, so Arnold wrote two autobiographies.

One we used a 70, which is fine. Yeah. But the way more extreme one, he wrote when he was 30. Oh, wow. That's young. So the first half of it is really like 110 kind of 10 page biography, right? right and then the second half is like his workout routine which like another hundred pages but uh basically he would you know people were just like yeah i worked 12 hours a day he's like

so what else did you do with all the fucking time it's like you're not well yeah that's awesome i i don't want to get kicked off stream but uh he tells sir i'm going to do the pg version of this this is before he made it to america right yeah so he would go to like him and his other bodybuilder friends they do they'd go to like this forest out in austria or maybe in germany and they would bring a bunch of women and they'd bring a bunch of like beer and food like schnitzel or whatever that is schnitzel okay yeah and they would essentially like go out there they'd strip off their clothes and they would like lift like tree trunks and they'd swim in the uh lake or something in the lake and they were just essentially just work out all day uh i was like this guy's Who's the hardest working founder purely by hours working, hours spent working on a single company that you've ever studied? Elon probably, because if the how Elon, thanks for reading and covering that episode.

It was so good. You guys did a good job on it. He was awesome. So they actually had a really interesting conversation recently with somebody, everybody knows who's been a founder for multiple decades. And he came up in the technology industry. he's been there forever and i actually asked him that question i was just like who's the greatest like entrepreneur you ever dealt with or you like you knew about and uh he's like listen you might not like him you might not like working with him but it was undoubtedly without hesitation

a young bill gates young bill that would be my other answer if it wasn't Elon yeah shifts from the time they started Microsoft in that little strip that little um strip mall I'll work in New Mexico, the guy, until he left the company. Like, I don't think he did a single other thing. Do you think about Bill Gates, hardcore founder mode era was defined by his ruthlessness with regard to deal making or actually the amount of hours he spent in the office? Like, have you heard stories about early Microsoft being this 996 culture working 12, 13, 14 hours a day or was it strictly that when he went into every single negotiation he was willing to do

anything to win so like he's not working 12 hours day he's not so i'll give you a preview okay um the next episode i'm working on right now is about a young bill gates it's got the title has to be something with hardcore because sure the favorite word yeah so he would work 36 hours straight until he couldn't literally stay awake and then he just crash and sleep in his office for like a few and pop back up that's hardcore that's i don't want to hear about oh i slept i got a good night sleep but i'm a grinder but i got a great night sleep last night yeah so like let me oh you're a grinder let me see your sleep score better be in the single digits be in the single digits let me tell you one of the funniest stories about bill gates so the

best book written about him is it's called hard drive bill gates in the making of microsoft empire so the same guys that wrote that essentially it's a biography the first 35 years was like then they it was so successful they wrote a follow-up the follow-up book is not good but there is a story in the follow-up book that is one of my favorite bill gates stories of all time and the thing i the thing i would say about bill gates is like he has a ruthless competitive drive that would terrify people and so one of his main competitors is this french guy i can't remember his name uh they would like you know they were going to war over and over again and they would go they would go they would the only time they'd like interact they'd find themselves at the same like computer conferences and so

he he sees bill gates sitting on a folding chair in the corner of this computer conference alone looking at something and remember this they're like head-to-head competitors you know now this guy's completely disappeared and so he goes over and he wants to say hi to bill and then he walks up to him and he realizes that bill's in the corner by himself staring at a picture of the guy of his competitor he's obsessed yeah yeah yeah next time i see you i'm going to make uh you know my profile picture when i call you your phone's background remind you remind you of me constantly you hard drive the way i described him in the first episode i made about him on episode like is that Bill Gates is a Genghis Khan in a Mr. Rogers costume.

Yeah, that's wild. There's a few ways to do that. That is, that's hardcore. That is that that is hardcore. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for giving us more context on what it means to hardcore, be hardcore and grind in an entrepreneurship context. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Thanks for calling me, and I'm just going to say publicly what I said to you guys yesterday after seeing what you did in New York Sanctrine. I'm super proud of you guys. Thank you. Uh, you're absolutely crushing it. Thank you. I don't think you'd have any kind of lemon at all. I'm very curious who you take this for next years. Thank you. We'll catch up soon. Love you. Bye.

And always good. Back. Yes. Even when you thought we weren't going to have a guest. They said we couldn't do it. They said it was impossible, but you just got two random mics in the conference room that you could have a guest on your show, but you can. Anyway, honestly, congrats to everyone who got mentioned in this article. I think there'll be some snarky takes. I think there'll be some supportive takes. Overall, it seems pretty high leverage to throw up a flag that says, hey, I'm working hard on my startup. Get mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. They probably had to take, what, half an hour off to do a little phone call for this. And overall, probably pretty high leverage effort.

So congrats to all the young grinders in San Francisco. in 80 hour weeks. Good luck to you all. And, uh, and congrats on your first Wall Street Journal mention. Not many, hopefully. And if you want to help grow your startup, get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Um, did you see that, uh, Polymarket is getting offers set up to 10 billion? Whoa, ho ho ho ho ho ho. Polymarket is, of course, a sponsor. Um,

What is volume just going through the roof isn't aren't most of polymarkets metrics kind of public? Because you can just look at the chain, right? Yeah, check is that driving growth. That is I mean, you know, they're about to be they're about to be, you know, launching their app in the US. Yeah, everything to date has been international. That is a big catalyst. Yeah. Um, no going on. They're there. They're obviously, uh, duking it out with Kelchie, but, uh, it's great to see Shane on. Uh, it's great to see Shane on. Uh, it's great to see Shane on. an absolute run and put more put more put more put more put more put more put more cash in the coffers more opportunity to to build and and scale the business it's been a fantastic data source for us of course polymarket powers the ticker that you see on the show all three hours long every day and it's been it's been a source of insight for us through our entire partnership so thank you to polymarket for sponsoring us yep um uh rehat has a funny uh screenshot says design is not just what and you can't really see it because this or this is no way

this has to be fake uh i think he's uh meming some liquid glass nonsense and some poor design mixing up the design but he got 6k likes potentially with the fake news i don't know if this is real there's no way there's no way this is real right uh anyway uh we'll leave it because you're going to figure out it's the good jokes anyway uh in other good news casz over over at Shopify. Now Open Door is replying to random posts on Twitter saying, email me. I'm still at Shopify until tomorrow. Here's my email. And Fahd says, bro, this guy would be grinding to the last minute. Love this level of dedication. You know, open doors all over the place. The stock's way up. It's become this meme stock that is fascinating because I was talking to Brand

about this with uh he was saying like there's something interesting about the open door story that is this like retail army driving a new stock uh the valuation is basically i mean keith was actually steel manning it saying that uh as a as a revenue multiple uh it's not that crazy it's in the same territory as some other big public companies i think he cited robin hood at 31x revenue or something like that and so wait what company uh so open door he was saying that like open door is not disconnected from the financials if you if you if we can deliver on the growth and we can deliver on a revitalization plan right that was the that that was his pitch and and so and so but but he won't he wanted to fix it on the revenue multiple i think it was the revenue multiple

okay you can go and look at his reply but basically uh i i don't think anyone anyone disputes the fact that open door is trading very differently than it was trading last year. Last year he was trading like a company that was in manager mode with a new CEO and had gotten kind of hit in the post-ZERP era and had not done particularly well across a couple quarters and was, I mean, the stock was, you know, Jim Kramer would probably say the stock's in the dumps, but the stock is no longer in the dumps. It's been on an absolute tear. People have been making fortunes off of it. And the question is, you know, what do they have to deliver? Well, they clearly have to go, you know, they have to kick it into a completely different gear and it's just exciting to see Kaz take the CEO role and be cut from a very different cloth. Like I've interacted with Kaz. He's been, I've actually emailed him at this email and he solved a problem for me on Shopify in like two seconds. He almost basically saved my business. So I mean, he is he's a remarkable operator. Yeah, very aligned comp structure as well.

totally yeah he's really all based on only make money if the market appellary that like a dollar yeah exactly and so people will debate the valuation um it's clearly trading a on the back of a completely different narrative with a completely set of investors that are setting the valuation uh it's now valued it was it was valued very low now it's valued very richly um but it's it is interesting to see uh some real legit folks in silicon valley step in and say hey we're going to do that the turnaround thing. You don't often see this most times when a VC incubates or backs a company and it gets out into the public markets and they're able to distribute the shares and they're able

to sell their position down. If that company does not do well over the long term, they are looking for the next startup to go in and take a second run at that business, right? So if I'm not going to be able to think of a perfect example, but I mean even just think about like like the story of square like square was key through boy as well right he was in that it's like he wasn't saying like okay I sold PayPal I need to get back into PayPal to do more fintech stuff he was like no like I'm fine to do another startup and there's and there's a variety of stories where someone's someone's taking a company taking it to acquisition or taking it

all the way to going public and then the VCs and some of the entrepreneurs and some of the early employees say, hey, we still really like this, we like this industry. I mean, maybe the best example is ramp and Paribus. Like Eric Lyman and Kareematea took a run at, at, you know, understanding like the financial credit, you know, how people spend money, saving people's time and money. On the consumer side with Paribus, sold the company, and we're like, there's more opportunity here. Let's keep going. And so I feel like that's the default playbook in Silicon Valley is that once, once you've bet on an industry, you've bet on a category and you've backed the right founders, you've

gotten your return, you've returned capital to our LPs, either through an IPO or an MNA process, you're not saying, let's go back into that same structure. You're saying, let's start again. Let's start a new company. But this is an interesting twist in that is that you could imagine Kaz saying, hey, I've been at Shopify for a while. want to start a real estate technology company yeah and so Keith is going to write me a check coastal is leading the series a I got a couple people that I've worked with

before it no he's coming into open doors actually turning around so it's a little bit it's a little bit different although the the game stop story was somewhat similar because the the CEO of GameStop had founded Chewy I believe and was a very successful entrepreneur and it was a similar example of like someone there was still a lot of questions about GameStop like can they turn that company around but the stock performance was obviously crazy but it was not a it was not a purely financial person stepping into the role it was an experienced CEO who built a real company to like at real scale yeah anyway I don't know if you have a I don't know if you have more of a take on

open door or Shopify or anything like that but I've been yeah I'm excited to see what cast us doing it in it will be interesting uh how did you sleep last night did you get to catch up we need the soundboard because i would i got a 92 how did you pull that off i got a 92 i got to get to bed really early uh how's your how's your sleep experience i'm using an eight sleep by the way eight sleep dot com five you got a seven at risk file free returns we got only six hours and 27 minutes i'll leave a five-star review for eight sleep the app i love the app it is I am you're currently

potentially you're going into a big weekend. I'm currently ill. Yeah. I have the HRV of a dead person. It's terrible. Well, lock in this weekend, get some sleep. We will be fortunately home later this evening. This is fun.

iPhone Air Bend test on Tom's guide. Icon says an Apple exec casually throwing their product across the room and not flinching at all when the host misses and it clanks off of the wooden table is insane Apple is extremely confident in the during this one up I looked this one up because I was like again it's like a parody account it looks like yeah it looks like it's fake

video but it's a real real they're confident they've I mean the do you remember Bend Gate do you remember this with the iPhone I think was iPhone sick no they went it was the thinnest iPhone ever and it got truly thin like well way thinner than this back then they went they were thin maxing so they they were with meaning I don't know is that they went super thin and the problem was that if you applied a little bit of pressure you could actually bend it and break it like pretty easily like you could do this and it would now it's titanium it's thicker there's more structural sport inside but the

question with the iPhone error was obviously like hey you're back to being super thin is this thing going to bend and they just toss it across the the conference room and the and the host tries to bend it and he's unsuccessful and I think they figured it out. Anyway, they probably designed it in a Avengers themed office. Did you see this article in the Wall Street Journal's mansion section today? Of course I did. 4.4 million dollar renovation helped one Winnipeg couple turn their 12,000 square foot home into it into an experience and a story. The Wall Street Journal says an Avengers office in a Frank Sinatra garage. They built their own Disneyland. I love this. I love when people go crazy with the the rentos and make

the homes their own. Some Disney fanatics get their fix by visiting theme parks. Tech entrepreneur Jeff Fetz and his husband, Chris Fetz, wanted to live in their own Magic Kingdom. The setting for their dream home, a 12,000 square foot traditional style home built in 2009 in the tuxedo area of Winnipeg. What is that? We got to ask you, I'm going to scare me right now. What's the the, what's the area of Winnipeg. And so here he is standing next to what looks like a very fancy luxury car with the biggest Cardier Santos on his wrist, I believe. He is an absolutely beast of a watch. If you want a Cardier Santos, head over to getbezzled.com. Your brother with concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Such a good transit.

So they brought the, they bought the brick stucco and limestone house for around $4 million in 2029. Then they spent $4.4 million in a three-year renovation to actually upgrade the house. wanted to elevate the design to the level of fantasy Chris who was a full-time cast member dancer and parade performer at Walt Disney World Resortes he just is this like extremely recruited crazy no no no no so so the so the so the his husband so there's us and then there's also Jeff and Jeff Fetz has it has a startup as a business that does actually service and has become very successful from that he co-founded a customer service

tech startup now and called in touch CX after seven years they moved to Winnipeg to be closer to the family they met in 1997 so they've been together almost what 20 years they're both students at the University of South Florida and yeah they figured it out they have some crazy crazy stuff going on here let's read about the um this shot of the the cars in this entryways the car inside i mean this art deco stuff is wild but we wanted each room to be experiential uh who grew up going to Disneyland would regularly go to christish shows and they were first dating the garage mahal as they as the couple have dubbed it is a garage that was renovated to as a shrine to frank sinatra it houses a peacock blue

rolls royce silver shadow sedan that's that sonatra bought as a well wedding present to his wife Barbara, which Chris won an auction, the jazzy room with lacquered wood paneling, oversized backlit frame photos of Frank and Barbara, and a curved blue sofa is where Chris hangs out, listening only to Sinatra records and drinking cocktails with friends. It's way sexier than a man gave. It's crazy. Jeff's downstairs office is nicknamed Avengers headquarters, and the windowless room has the feel of a spaceship to enter you, touch a panel, and a pocket door swooshes open like in Star Trek. There's a long metal mission control station aka desk the walled the walls are clad with stainless steel and covered with

television monitors and adventures logos and there's room to store much of jeff's 40,000 comic books on display as a full-size iron man costume it makes me feel very in touch with my childhood uh they call one of the bathrooms the spa and uh the story goes on you can read it in the journal but what a wild house um you love when uh when someone makes it big and just just blows it all on a crazy reno i texted jeremy said that uh studying for their dream a 12 000 square foot traditional style home built in 2009 in the tuxedo area of winnipeg i said tuxedo area question mark he said enforced by law actually do not go to the tuxedo area of winnipeg without wearing a tuxedo you will be you will be uh taken into custody anyway let's move back to the timeline

Nader Khalil says, friendly reminder that multiplying revenue by 12 is not A-R-R. It says a lot that this goes viral in the year 2025 for 2.2 over 2,000 likes. Yeah. What about Harry's asking the important questions? What about multiplying daily revenue by 365? No, take, if you've got lumpy revenue. That you processed your biggest invoice and then multiply that by the number of hours in a year I've multiplied by 24 then you have your hourly actually taking a step further to find the

exact minute that you got the largest payment ever and multiply that by 60 and then by 24 and then by 365 and that is the way to think about minute we just had our biggest minute ever ever like people talk about their quarterly earnings we just had our biggest minute ever put us on a 20 trillion Here's the proof. Here's the stripe dashboard. Here's exactly what. Here's the exact minute. Well, if you want to bet on some companies that are subject to GAF regulations and need to actually deliver in quarterly reports that are SEC regulated, head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks, public. com also emily sunberg breaking news she has commissioned donald boat's work um do you want to know this is a crossover i was not expecting do you want to know the very first sensation i felt while attempting to eat this spasm my jaw cramped an inward violent shaking i cried out in pain

burgers shouldn't be this tall that was instant divine comeuppance i was punished from above for even trying to place in my mouth so is donald boat so i'm interested see what Donald Boat does obviously he's a very creative mind very schizo he he's mastered like he's we have this you know schizo red string uh diagram behind us but donald boat takes it to a completely different level with his collages um which i have i've enjoyed he's he's done some fantastic posting um morning brew has a story uh yesterday larry ellison's fortune grew by one hundred billion dollars and today uh larry ellison's son his media conglomerate is getting ready to buy Warner Brothers, normal family things.

These two, this father, son duo is on a generational run. You'd love to see it. He is running around, acquiring companies, becoming a media mogul. Pretty fun. Crazy. I actually have not dug into what's going on with Warner Brothers, what's going on with discovery. I know that there's like a merger and the free press is involved somehow.

I'm hoping we can get Barry Weiss on the show at some point to kind of break it all down for us because I Warner Bros is up you up 53% in the past five days yeah I do think it's interesting that at least in the least in the dot-com boom like the primary investment bank desk that would watch tech companies would also watch telecom companies and also media companies tech media telecom like if you wanted to get Goldman Sachs and you wanted to analyze what we think of as like pure technology companies you would be TMT tech media and technology and it's because they all have the same they all have very similar zero marginal cost business models

yeah so if you create if you create Mickey Mouse or you own a telephone line or you have a website and you're selling SAS those are all financially modeled somewhat similarly and so it made sense to put them all under the same coverage group of course now like there's a dedicated desk just for semiconductors and just for, you know, social apps and just for SaaS and just for enterprise. Yeah. Anyway, imagine, imagine being able to run around buying companies knowing that you have the full backing of your father,

but you're buying company. I mean, Warner Bros. is worth 46 billion. That's a lot more than I would have guessed. Wow. Is preparing a majority cash bid, meaning that, like, they're going to spend at least put up at least Ellison's into debt. I feel like he's not afraid to lever up.

He's not afraid. Maybe that'll happen at some point. But yeah, put the cash together, get the company. I don't know. It'd be cool. I feel like I've never met Larry Ellison's son, but I feel like I would trust him to make the next Superman and Batman film. And Warner Brothers owns the DC universe, I believe.

And I feel like he would have good instincts. I'm also excited about the Jeff Bezos James Bond. I feel like it's going to be good. I don't know. I know you know nothing about movies. What, uh, who's the, who's the, who's going to be Mr. Bond? I have no idea. But, uh, I just, uh, I, I think a lot of people, a lot of the true James Bond fans are,

are worried about this idea that, um, that, uh, now that Amazon owns the rights to James Bond, they're going to, like, franchise it like they did with Star Wars. So it'll be like a James Bond show and a James Bond kid's show and a James Bond kids show. If you see Star Wars, it used to just be like, there's three great movies, then there's three prequels, and then Disney was like, let's do three sequels, and then two extra movies, and then spin-off show, like, there's probably six or seven different shows for the Mandalorian and the Boba Fett and all the different spinoffs, and there's kids versions. I think that's kind of fine. Yeah. I think Star Wars has been kind of like, yeah, there's like some mediocre stuff in there, but like you can just not watch it. And overall, there's like there's enough to pull off the shelf.

So, like, if you want to watch something with a four-year-old, you can. If you want to watch something with an eight-year-old, you can. You can get into the original. The original trilogy still exists there. You can still watch it. So, like, I don't know. I've been happy with that. I would be happy with more James Bond content.

Let Bezos cook on Bond, in my opinion. It's so funny people being like, oh, they're going to spend $200 million on the free press. Meanwhile, it's, like, such a rounding air. When you talk about, like, there's a totality of deals that they're looking at doing. They're looking at buying a $50 billion public company. He's a lot of majority cash. Yeah. And you want to turn around these assets and improve them.

And you need great talent. And if you need, if you got to spend a couple hundred million to get somebody to, you know. I think it makes a ton of sense. If you're just thinking about it through like those Mark Zuckerberg mindset of like, who do I want around the table right now? I want a bunch of great people who are entrepreneurial, who are super connected, live players who really care about this stuff. Yeah, you got to go spend some money to get them, but it's going to work out.

Anyway, apparently there's a company called Math Inc. And Will Brown... If they really, do you think they actually got Math Inc? I don't know. Maybe. Like, because these aren't... Mathematics Inc. There's a certain flex to getting... I mean, you can get the domain.

The Christian says, excited to share that I'm starting a new company dedicated to the creation of verified superintelligence via auto formalization. So is this a competitor to, is this a competitor to Vlad's thing? Building on the amazing R.L infrastructure that we developed at Morph Labs, Mathematics Inc. has already achieved a breakthrough result. And their hiring page says, we call a date a square if all its components day, month, year. are perfect squares I was born in the last millennium and my next birthday will be the last square date in my life so there's a very hard math problem here and you just have to in order to apply for their jobs you have to solve a math problem so I don't know you want a job and you're good also I feel like this is this is an odd question because I feel like if you copy this and you

ask it like of a frontier model it's that the whole I imagine that's the whole point I doubt it I do you think it can we should try if well if it would pretty I mean I I have yet to see like a like a hard math problem out there that that hasn't been pretty easily one shot by most of the like this type of like concise question is typically handled by a frontier model with reasoning maybe not but we'll see More importantly, a video game entrepreneur has just paid $31.5 million for an oceanfront. Hampton's home. You got Hamptons up on the board connected to Paw Tech. The deal marks the latest in a string of luxury transactions of the busy East End market. So, Carch, this is Matthew Carch. It's a circa 1970s home in East Hampton.

He's the co-founder of Sabre Interactive, a video game developer and publisher. and I dug into them and they do a lot of porting and platforming so a game will be put out by one publisher and they'll say like we would love to get this Xbox game on Nintendo Switch and Matthew Karch

will pick up the phone and say my team would love to do that we will do the hard work of making sure your game works on the Nintendo hardware or over here and they do a lot of other stuff but he has some great video games in the portfolio and obviously it's

it's provided for a wonderful life. And he is now in the position where he can buy a $31 million home. He's also, I believe he sold the company and the company changed hands again. So it's unclear exactly who owns what. But it's a cool story. And now he has a wonderful, stunning house. The house literally sits on top of the ocean. The property is so amazing that I wanted to buy it and figure out the details later.

He said, so he's talking to the journal. He'll love to see it. If the journal calls you about your home, you got to pick up the phone. The seller, an entity linked to Norman and Helene Stark, bought the estate for $4.7 million in 1994. The property first hit the market in 2017 for $75 million. Wow, that's high. It'd been off the market for years. The most recent asking price with $39 million. Property contains five bedrooms, roughly 7,000 square feet, main house, as well as a guest house, tennis court, and pool. The Hampton's real estate market, like those in many vacation destinations, soared during the pandemic.

But the number of Hampton's sales hit a 14-year low in 2024, mid-tight inventory. and rising mortgage rates. And there's an interesting dynamic where renting a house in the Hamptons is like a massive multiple of what it costs to buy, pay the mortgage on a house, because people really only want to be there in the summer. They don't necessarily want to buy or live there. So there's the kind of an odd disconnect between the rental and purchase market where you might not see that in LA.

Yeah, at the same time, I don't, I don't think it necessarily mass out to buy Hampton's house right now and just rent it in the summer. totally just given given where rates are yeah makes sense uh in the second quarter of 2025 there were 26 home sales in the hamptons at or over 10 million dollars compared with 22 in the second quarter of 24 and six in the second quarter of 23 23 was really slow uh carch also owns two properties nearby sag harbor that he uses for vacations he's considering selling one of them anyway another keep a couple homes nearby deal there's a series a

financing for a new company that just came out of stealth brain company we saw math company now there's brain company brain company emerges new meta today we're getting somewhere we're seeing a trend I like it brain company emerges from stelt today and we are announcing our 30 million dollar series a led by elad gill and jared kushner's affinity partners

brain company provides an AI platform and applications for the world's largest and most important in you were getting this company what did we yeah we we were connected I believe we'll hopefully have the founder on soon a lot gills also coming on the show soon so we can talk to him about this so go check it out if you're looking to get in early go work there potentially meanwhile the profound team is using out-of-home advertising to try to find an office in Union Square driving around a driving around a advertising

truck a box truck trying to find their I think they did scale this campaign they should get on ad quick out of home advertising media easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe I mean seriously they should put some of their testimonials or like case studies on like billboards and airports like that makes a ton of sense if you're just like a general business and you're interested in getting your brand mentioned on chat GPT, just flashing the profound name in front of people, that's a pretty high value. Powerful.

Anyway, did you see the knockoff Bugatti? I did not. This is, uh, but this is offensive to my. This is extremely offensive to, uh, Bugatti is Italian. We, Bugatti is an interesting company, right? Because they're like, it's German, but then they have a, they have a, uh, their manufacturing plant is like on the border and it's like changed hands a few times or something. But, uh, anyway, most people know the bigotti, uh, Veyron, Shiron.

on, but German and then French. Is a top, yeah, that's right, it changed hands. But then it was acquired by an alley. Slash home cleaning robot maker, and it's showcasing the photo of its first car, a Bugatti-like luxury battery electric vehicle. So it's a, is this a Chinese company? So, T.R. Taxes says a vacuum cleaner robot company, founded in 2017. Wow, they're literally a Dyson knockoff.

They're a Dyson knockoff. That's now knocking off. Value to $3 billion is making a luxury EV now. Apple gave up after 10 years of trying, burning $10 billion. This is no offensive in my culture. I know. It's crazy how much it looks like. I mean, it wasn't even.

It even has a weird diffuser on the money. Well, yeah, so they're knocking off like the Veyron, but then also the new one, which I've Turbion. Yeah, the Turbion is the latest one. Although, are you talking about some of the one-offs? because there is a one-off that looks they've done like convertibles but there's only

I believe there's only three major platforms there's the valetre the solitaire is there so they this knockoff is using the front end of the solitaire yep I mean it basically the back end up the Veyron

closer to it's just like a solitaire knockoff yeah really really dark never do this if you're if you're running dream tech stuff contact your lawyer and uh you'll be worked with them to wind down the company please um just shut it down close up shop

you guys had a good run you're out of ideas and uh just just close it up how do you think this sells i mean china's knocked off the taikon successfully they've knocked off a few other cars successfully um i wonder what the yeah i do you think it i the the the humor here um is that they will probably make a pretty solid car and it will cost like they can start selling boudis for a couple hundred dollars probably yes you imagine no but like you could imagine they sell this for like it's probably a couple hundred grand 150 or something which is why and then if these i could see this making it into america where somebody's like wait i can drive to make it to america this will get caught at the ports for sure you mean you mean like yeah ip

trade dress like it'll be easy to lock this up it's not making it to america um but people will be driving around in china i mean i've i've heard about fully fully counterfeit cars before. Like in China, they have the ability to set up like it's a G-wagon factory and it makes cars that look like G-wagons and that are bad. And it badgeed everything is trying to be as perfect as possible, a true knock-off. And then they work their way to other countries, you take it in the dealer and they're like, we can't work on this engine. This is not a Mercedes engine. Well, yeah. And the reason that knock-off cars are not as big as knock-off watches is like there's no regulatory framework for watches right you're not going to hurt someone else by driving

wearing a fake Rolex yeah yeah yeah this was big this was big uh two of the cluelly founding team have broken off pretty crazy guess they're doing running the same playbook yep uh gris says life update left cluelly to start our own thing already at 1.2 million arr seven days in stealth had no idea making money was this easy announcement soon instinct ink uh this post is fascinating fascinating because doesn't say what the business is 1.2 million ARR what is the subscriptions of some sort it's written to and then it's written to trigger yeah had no idea money was this easy yes you did have an idea that making because you were saying that absolutely you said making money was easy. I know how easy money is, but here we are talking about it. Anyway, good luck

to that. You baited us. You baited us. No, but yeah, wishing them, wishing them luck. And I wonder if they will start beefing with their former employer to, uh, from a WWE perspective, that is going to be unmissable content. If they are constantly chirping at each other and fighting and going on podcasts and debating each other and taking shots and running. And, and running. adversarial billboard ads against each other like there is a world where that generates more views than anything they've done before that might be the final state of of startup media and marketing the real question is like what is what what what does this say something about like whether or not clearly has hit product market fit we demoed the product we we were not very

sticky Tyler it seemed like he enjoyed the product and thought there were some glimmers of hope but he was not really he did not become a really user audience well when we talked to Roy it was it was wasn't clear who the day who the target audience was it was maybe the college kid who wanted to cheat on an exam or you want to cheat on an interview but then that was probably illegal and risky so you don't want to do that then there was like maybe it's enterprise sales then Roy was talking about brain computer interfaces and VR and so like there were just like a bunch of different ideas clearly throwing spaghetti

against the wall unclear what was sticking and so I'm I'm I am interested to see what instinct ink winds up building and I'm wondering if they have done more work to make sure that they're building on top of a solid foundation because the big question that was looming around clearly was just masterful marketing lots of clearly breaking through the noise cutting through the noise getting downloads but was it a leaky bucket and so have has this team now that they're on their own own have they built a less leaky bucket with this because what happens if you stop going viral does that 1.2 million dollars in a r turn into nothing over 14 days because everyone unsubscribes who knows yeah anyway i i i would go out and uh guess that they're just starting a creative agency which would probably make a lot of money really fast i think so so that would make a lot sense anyway uh one five find your happy find your happy place book a wonder with find it views hotel great amenities dream beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks

uh we will close out with this 25 years ago uh there was an article in the newspaper in the daily mail tuesday december 5th 2000 internet quote may just be a passing fad as millions give up on it and of course recontextualized max the vc is obviously drawing a comparison to the AI narrative. I don't know if anyone's gone out and actually said AI is a passing fad. People have kind of said, like, maybe we're over our skis on CAPEX, or maybe we're over our skis on, you know, enterprise value. Or maybe the promises are too grand. Yeah, maybe we're not getting ASI tomorrow. Yeah, 27. But I don't think anyone is out there really saying, yeah, in 10 years, like, we're not going to be chatting with L.O.

It's funny to try to, I mean, it's very difficult to, like, this article is especially funny because internet may just be a passing fad as millions give up on it. It's like, well, are those millions of people benefiting from other people using the internet? If so, then like, it's, it's, uh, has enduring value. Crazy. Researchers found that millions were turning their back on the worldwide web, uh, Frustrated by its limitations and unwilling to pay high access charges. They say that email far from replacing other forms of communication is adding to an overload of information. Experts from the Virtual Society Project, which published the result, the report, say predictions that the Internet would revolutionize the way society works, have proved wildly inaccurate. Many teenagers are using the Internet less now than previously.

they conclude. James Chapman, I would love to know where James Chapman is now. He was a science correspondent at the Daily Mail. And it's interesting. I mean, you can't really say like he got this wrong because he's just publishing the facts, which is like these researchers found this data point and kind of leaving it up to your interpretation. But less. Yeah, and that's like all these articles come out like AI adoption and the enterprises dropping. Yeah. Or what? What was the MIT report? Like 95% of Gen A.I pilots are, I mean, that, that, that, that meter report was like the most bearish take on cursor possible. Because it was like, cursor is slowing people down. That was like the, and yet, the basic. And yet demand. But you dug into it. And there was a lot of different ways that it could actually speed you up in certain, in certain contexts, in certain.

Well, yeah. And then all the products is getting better. If you just look at the demand for. Exactly. Yeah. incredible the apparently cursor in the secondary market is trading closer to 30 billion than 20 that's up there man that's up there it's great though incredible time to be alive incredible time to be alive well thank you for tuning into our remote live stream today we will

see you we did it they said it was impossible they said we proved them wrong and uh next week got some travel in the middle of the week, but we will be back in the Ultradone Monday and Tuesday. Very excited. And get out there this weekend and touch grass, be with your loved ones, log off. I'm excited to log off. I think Charlie would. Watch you doing the same thing. It was known for logging off from Friday night to Saturday and we'll be doing my best to do the same.

and thank you so much for tuning in thanks for tuning in this week we'll see you Monday goodbye love you