TBPN Live - Wednesday’s Diet TBPN

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

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What's going on over there, Jordy? You got caught lacin? I was publishing an essay. You were publishing an essay. It's live on X now. You can go listen to it. You can also subscribe at tbpn.com. Our substack will email you every morning with the TBPN newsletter

and 500 words from me or Jordy. It's a lot of fun. Go check it out. The thing that got Jordy to learn to type was this video, this launch video. like, I got to write an essay. I got to lock in. I got to learn how to write because I got to respond. This is, this is, this is, uh, it's,

it's enraged me. Were you enraged? I wasn't enraged. I try not to let the internet make me mad. Okay, but they were trying to enrage to enraged you and the fact that they tried made you angry. I'd love to watch the Chad IDE BrainRot code editor video. First, I want to see, I want to see the video for myself. Let's play it. Okay. So, got some Newport cigarettes. He's packing, pulls out a cigarette. With the Stanford.

Lights it up. He's got the cutoff. Stanford cutoffs. What is this music that's playing? He's got the guitar in the background. And what is he playing? Some sort of plank. This is steak. Oh, this is steak. Okay, so this is gambling. So he's gambling. And he's gambling in the IDE. Okay, so I assume, I assume that means he's won something or other. I actually don't know what the stake UI looks like. Okay, so he's done winning. He has won the gambling session with steak, and now he's back in his IDE,

and he writes a prompt, and he says, test the code, and it pulls up some sort of mobile game that it's playing. This is Clash Royale. This is Clash Royale. Okay. Have you played? I have played in middle school, yeah. So I'll start by saying I think the video is funny.

Okay. And I'm sure the founder's, are smart. For a low-budget launch video, I think they did well. They broke through. That is a very low-budget launch video. That literally cost nothing. Yeah. Okay. So I think that's great. And I'm not, and I want to be clear that I'm not bearish on the founders at all. But yesterday, YC announced Chad IDE, aka the BrainRot code editor. Chad is an AI code editor that allows you to gamble, watch TikTok, and use dating apps while you work on coding tests. Their launch rightfully got a lot of attention. On one hand, it's funny. On the other hand, what are we doing here and why does this belong in the official YC account?

To understand Chad IDE, Clue Lee, icon, friend, and the new class of Gen Z startups, you have to understand the online environment that these founders grew up in. If you grew up on the internet and you studied how and why certain people would regularly go viral, you know that making people mad has and always will be an effective way to get attention. The feedback loop is simple. You make something that makes people angry and people comment, share, and dunk, and because feeds are optimized to show posts with high engagement the most, you get a lot of reach. Rage baiting for commercial purposes, in my view, was pioneered by course bros.

People like Ty Lopez realized that making the masses mad was an effective way to drive course sales. You could flaunt Lamborghinis, make a bunch of people angry. And as long as a handful of people found their way into their course, it was a viable, repeatable strategy. Historically on X, rage baiting was a marketing strategy, not a product strategy. Accounts like sweaty startup, aka Nick Huber, frequently post things. to get an angry reaction and the subsequent reach, but behind the scenes, Nick has always been running a pretty normal commercial real estate fund. In 2025, rage baiting has become a product strategy. Cluelly started as an app for cheating on coding interviews. Chad IDE's only known

differentiation from the other 100 AI native IDs is that you can gamble and swipe on dating apps in it. It's becoming clear that while rage bait might occasionally work as a marketing strategy, it really should not be employed as a product strategy. Running a successful VC-backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you win. Getting media, investors, talent, and customers on your side is not an easy task. Rage-baiting, whether at the marketing level or product level, is the most effective way to get people who could be potential investors, customers, or team members to actively prey on your downfall. YC has long provided some of the most durable, high-quality, generalizable advice for startups,

and I believe that it has had a tremendously positive impact on the companies that go through YC and even those that don't. launch now, make something people want, do things that don't scale, ignore your competitors, are just some of those. So as someone who believes that YC is one of the most important and influential institutions in tech, I believe it might be time to include this in their list of essential startup advice, rage baiting is for losers. But I do think it's notable that rage bait has moved from kind of a fringe marketing strategy to a marketing strategy within tech to now living at the product level, and I just don't think that's going to create a lot of enduring value for the companies that pursue that strategy. Yes. So the reaction to this was very negative, and I think there's

a few, it really has to do that layer of the stack. It ends up, it ends up, it ends up impacting the brands of the firms that fund these ideas. Of course. The most important thing in your piece that I liked was this idea that there is rage bait marketing, doing a stunt, doing something a little bit crazy, but then delivering a quality product is separate from making the product itself rage baity. And so I think a lot of people, when they saw this video, they wanted, they were wondering, what does the product actually do? Because all you've told me is that you created an April Fool's joke. And Google's been doing April Fool's jokes for years. The question for me and the question I had for Tyler was, what's actually under the hood at Chad I

IDE. The company is not called Chad IDE. It's called clad labs. The steel man here is that, hey, IDEs are boring. You got to do something funny. Film a funny video. Create a fake product, but then have something under the hood that is actually real, that does actually advance the conversation, and is maybe something that a real product would try to sign up and need a code. I think this would have been a brilliant kind of like stunt if they did it as a stunt. And it wasn't core to the brand. that they're building. It wasn't core to the product. If it was April Fools and Michael Truel at Cursor or Scott Wu with Winsurf, we're like, we're doing, we're doing a brainrod version of the IDE. Everyone would be like, that's hilarious. Okay, now back to using

WinSurf and Cursor, right? Yeah. So I go to the website. You can't download yet because it's still in beta. You need a code. I DM the founders, but they didn't get back to me. The company is not Chad Labs. It's Clad Labs. It's the Chad IDE, but like this is obviously a marketing stunt. I kind of Disagree. Yeah, but can you get a product from Clad Labs? Like, Google would come out with a joke, you know, pigeon-based algorithm or something like that. That would be out, or, like, Google Translate for Animals would be at, like, animals.com that day.

But Google Translate would still work. So, like, walk me through the Clad Labs product. Like, what is their core product outside of the stunt? When you go to the download page, there's the options, like, which brain rot do you want? Yes. And it's like, you know, steak or like Minecraft parkour or whatever. And then there's an option that says, I don't want brain rot. Okay.

There's obviously a product here. This is a marketing stunt. I believe that. Okay. Met a very successful founder who said, I chose fund, blank, because they gave me credibility when I needed it. Now the fund backs everything, including the dumbest ideas I've ever seen. I don't think the next wave of founders will pick them.

The credibility they had is gone. And I was thinking about how AUM-W-W-W-W-D-Rod or A-U-M-W-W-W-W-W-E-W-W-W-E-Rodd, AUM weighted slop is not an excuse for slop and controversial investments. If you put 1% of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the internet and be like, we're the most degenerate, we're the craziest, we're the most insane, we're the most fraudulent, like in your face company, even if it's only 1% of your fund, you're not going to be able to say, like, no, no, 99% of my investments are just like, you know, trying to cure cancer genuinely, or like actually trying to improve.

group developer productivity or like 99% of my investments are just reasonable down the fairway like good businesses. I took a flyer. One percent is a little bit crazy. Well, if that 1% gets a thousand times more views than your enterprise SaaS portfolio, like you're going to be known as the slop fund. So like you need to be careful about that. Yeah. You know, one of YC's challenges as an institution is that they can only accept something like, I think it's like less than one, isn't it less than one percent? Oh yeah. Okay. So super small, you know, very, very low acceptance rate. Yeah.

And so if you're a founder that applied with an idea that you think is, you know, world positive, and then you see them announcing this kind of stuff, those founders are going to be even more frustrating.

Say that I have some new way to do, you know, agents in my editor. And it's like, it actually works way better than cursor. It's way better than wind surface, but better than everything else. And I apply to YC with this thing.

Okay, there's like probably, what, like 10 other YC companies that are like literal YC companies in the same batch doing similar, you know, coding editor, stuff. How do I differentiate myself? I feel like this is like fairly reasonable. Okay, we get some users that think it's like funny to gamble in their ID, and then they realize like, oh, this is actually

a pretty useful feature. Jordi, if you were in YC and you had a coding editor company, how do you like recommend, like, instead of doing stuff like this, how do you, how do they differentiate? Back to what I said, which was separate out the rage from the core product and have it be like a marketing stunt, I still think you could have gotten the same amount of attention, but But then people would go in and they'd be like, wait, this is actually a really cool novel approach. I don't think we know for sure that they're not doing that. Like, there is no real product here. And that's what Jordi's risk is, is that they haven't built anything behind the scenes.

It's all marketing. It's all stunt. The product you're making is to help people gamble, and gambling is bad. And so if you are anti-gambling, you are anti this product that they built. And now they have the opportunity to say, no, no, no, here's the real thing. and they haven't done that yet. It would have been so easy if at that end of that video

been like, that's what people feel like Gen Z entrepreneurs built. But we didn't want to do that, so we actually built this, go down this video. But I'm not going to, I want to try the, I don't want to gamble,

but I want to see it actually like in the ID. That's like funny. Tips to apply at YC Batch Winner 2026. And I think, I think Shirav is a literal child. Good job. First tip, you should have some clear cold.

Like, what you should do after funding and you should have a piece of... I can barely hear this, but... Okay, we can pause it. But the reason I included this is because I think there's a lot of people like shirav and tons of young people that look to YC as whatever YC is promoting, they approve. And so I just, I want to avoid a scenario where the shiravs of the world think that they need to rage bait in order to break out in this industry. It's not the reality.

You can just build a great product. You can let that speak for itself. you can find ways to market it along the way. Alby, who is a 14-year-old applying for YC, went extremely viral earlier this week. Got 3.6 million views. Wow. It's a 14-year-old founder.

I'm Albi. I'm 14, and I'm based in Sydney, Australia. I've been building things ever since I was 6 or 7. Br. Don't get the joke. Really good editing. Well, I've been building things ever since I was 9. First writing code at code camps, then building Roblox games. And even launching a soccer gear brand when I was 12.

Wait, did he edit this? We got to hire this guy to edit for us. Where teens learn the real world skills that school forgot. This is a great roto. Coding, AI, content creation, etc. Instead of boring textbooks, you level up, earn XP, and unlock challenges as you go. All while learning from top founders, creators, innovators, and other young people doing amazing things. I started Finkel because school wasn't teaching me or my friends how to actually build, create, or launch something in the real world.

Teddy says my default reply to high schoolers. Getting me up for VC funding is put me on the phone with your parents. You're supposed to just turn on the webcam and basically just talk for one minute. That's how you apply to YC. One shot it. Yeah, you're supposed to just one shot at, no editing, because they don't want it to turn into, oh, to apply to YC, you spend two weeks doing an edited video. They're like, no, work on your product.

And then the marketing is like the last little cherry on top. Like, that's always been the YC mantra. And that's a little bit of like this Clyde Labs thing, although the weird thing is like the video, I love the video. It's funny, and it's cheap, and it's clearly just like a bit, and they did it, and it was two seconds, but then it feels like they didn't, they didn't give me the payoff of like, oh, okay, you guys are funny, and you're working on something cool and interesting and hard. Ev Randall, who's coming on the show on Friday, went on Harry Stebbing's show, 20VC, is putting the timeline in turmoil over some comments about other funds. I don't think, Ravi or Hamant, or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool. and say, hey, this basket of funds that we're making you invest Pari Pesu across,

we're going to get you 5x net on that. I don't think they can say that, or they at least can't say that with a straight face. And if you look at the recent return data, I think it suggests that. So I think they'll be able to make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis. But I think a lot of these LPs are in the business to make, or in venture, to make high money on money returns. Like they had P.E. for the low return stuff and they probably get better liquidity from P.E. They're here for the high money on money returns.

And this is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited about benchmarked competitive position in today's market. Because we can go to LPs. We can say, hey, we're shooting for higher than 5X net. We have the historical track record to back it up, and we have the fund sizes to back it up as well. I mean, you had Miles from Carnegie Mellon come on here and do the awesome math and the very clear math of, hey, do you know how hard it is to return 4X net on $8 billion, $10 billion? It is immensely hard, and it defies the laws of physics. So I think there's a difference between are they going to make a ton of money?

and are they going to produce the returns that LPs really want this asset class to produce? Two very, very different things. But for now, like, the rubber won't meet the road because, as you mentioned, there's just so much global demand from LPs for exposure to private technology and they are happy to take lower returns.

And so I don't think there's any end in sight, but I think on a relative basis between all of these different constituents and all these different GPs, there's a huge, huge delta and a huge differentiation between who can actually produce venture-like returns. Boo! He's not H.I. Pelled.

Boo, 10X. You're going to 10X the fund, just 10X it again. Just 10X it again. 10X the fund. All within a 10 year fund cycle. Just 10X it and we're going to 10X it again. No, obviously. F was on a little bit of damage control this morning.

Wait, wait, so I want to hear what exactly did he say the first line? He says, they cannot go to LPs and say with a straight face that they can do 5X net. Can we play the actual clip? Because I feel like that's not quite right. What do you say? I don't think, rather you're Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool, and say, hey, this basket of funds that we're making you invest Pari Pesu across, we're going to get you 5X net on that.

We're going to get you 5x. Yeah, because maybe they can go with a straight face and say we're going to get you 6x net. Part of the reality is I don't think no fund manager can really go to LPs and you can share that you believe there's a chance. we'll get a 5x net, but isn't it like 99% of funds just don't come anywhere close to that? I think the broader point that he's making is something along the lines of like, I saw some other post about like there will be fortunes made just by getting retail investors and the broader capital that's out there in the world into the private Mag 7,

the open AIs, the Anthropics, the SpaceXes, the annuals. There's a whole host of companies. There is a world where you set up a fund that has lower return expectations, but also lower risk, and it's a great deal, and LPs love it. I don't know that it's that hot of a take, but it certainly put the timeline in turmoil. Part of it is that benchmarks feeling pretty good right now. If you look at their 2020 fund, they have Merck 4, they have fireworks, what's the other one? They have a bunch of, like, multi-10 baggers at this point in that fund. so they're feeling pretty good about going to LPs and saying, look, we still got it.

Yeah. Still cooking. To be clear, I, slash, we love working with our friends at all of these funds. And this part was not meant as a slight, slash commentary on their quality as investors, just POV on fund strategies and the unique value prop of benchmark. I think it's a fair tweet. But it's amazing because everyone is coming out and just trash. Part of what made it feel super personal is that Harry tagged Robbie

totally totally and Ben yeah we act we actively try to avoid like tagging people if someone is talking trash about someone else or like sub tweeting them we don't really try and like handhold into drama since my former colleagues at A16 Z are RIAs and thus cannot legally comment on what they can slash cannot say with a straight face to LPs this sounds a lot like what crappy board members say, when as an outside observer, they have zero clue what actually happens day to day in the business. Ev thinks he understands Andresen's business, but in fact, he does not understand Andreessen's business. But I want to know, like, what is the misunderstanding?

Because the steel man, the bull case on the Andreessen strategy is that Ev is making the claim that they will make more money, dollars, total dollars, because they're investing out of a bigger fund size. They don't need to go and say, we're going to five-exit. So it's a different pool of LPs. Also, part of, part of, like, the major appeal of investing in A16Z is that you pretty much know that you're going to get in every important company. That's my point of view. I'm not an LP, but I happily would be, and it's because you know you're going to get some exposure to pretty much every important company, not necessarily always super early, but at some point in the company's life cycle, it's very likely that they will take a meaningful check from A161. 16-Z. What does I have said? He says, I think smaller constrained funds can produce higher returns in venture. Quote, this must be a shitty board member. Don't work with him. Incredible non-sequitur.

Thanks, Scott. Meanwhile, over on X, people are saying, calling me unk. They're saying I'm a boomer. Oh, yeah? For my post, which I think is fair. But again, there's more nuance. During the clearly heyday, I would imagine that 80% of the team's hours were spent on marketing and 20% were spent on product, maybe. Now I think it's flipped. And I think that's very bullish. I think that's good. But Tyler, you had a rebuttal?

This seems very different from, like, you see the gambling on your credit card statements or whatever, like from other accelerators. Like, this feels very different. Like, this is like the marketing. Like, I think people kind of tend to group all of this stuff together where it's like what growing gay in was talking about. yesterday where it's like some of these are like immoral companies that you could say sure i think this feels different than that what if the whole if the whole product is and this is all we've

this is always seen a vs code fork with minimal auto complete it they're always you know a year or two or five behind cursor and windsurf and yes it has the ability to add tinder and stake and sports betting in it and like that is the product that they are telling us their building is what they're building and they stay with it for five years. Like, what do you say then? Yeah, then that's not good. Okay. Dwar Keshe Patel, Dylan Patel, sat down with Satya Nadella,

and they got an exclusive tour of Fairwater, too, the most powerful AI data center in the world. Maybe this is wrong, but I think Colossus 2 will be bigger. It's just, currently, it's not big. Like, this is the current. Current biggest. It's the current biggest. Okay, okay.

So you had a chance to actually sit down and watch this whole interview before we started the show. Can you give me some takeaways? Where should people, are there any timestamps that we should pull up? Are there any takeaways that people should know before they go and watch it? It was pretty enlightening. I usually think of Satya as being very non-AGI pill. And I think this was a bit of an update.

So there's a bunch of reasons for this. I think so early on he, like in the very, I think it was one of the first questions. He's like, what is AI? AI is basically two things. This Satya is saying this. There's cognitive like enhancement. So this is like your like tools. or this is your auto-complete,

this is your co-pilot, stuff like this. And then there's like the Guardian Angel. And this is like the very AGI build where, I mean, it's like kind of lording over everything. And so he actually does like say these two things are like very possible. Okay, so the next thing he's talking about kind of how he thinks about pricing structures of AI broadly. So there's this kind of conflict between subscription models and usage model of pricing. I think he's broadly more kind of focused on,

at least in the short term on the subscription kind of thing, right? Throughout the interview, he keeps emphasizing the point that Microsoft is a hyper-scaler. And so that means, like, a bunch of things, that means that they're going to keep supporting multiple models. It means that they are going to, like, they want to prioritize the kind of long tail of, like, high-margin users. Compare that to Oracle, who you can think of Oracle as basically... Prioritizing one potentially low-margin.

Yeah, exactly. power user, you're giving bare metal, essentially, to one customer, Open AI. All the big hyperscalers have their own chip play, right? There's Traneum, there's TPUs. OpenAI is doing their own ship. And Microsoft does have their own chip. The actual production is way behind everyone else. And then Satya basically brings up that, like, Microsoft has IP to everything OpenAI has,

except for consumer hardware. Satya signaled that he's open to buying capacity from neoclouds, like Oracle, Nebius, Lambda, I. iron end scale. Isn't he already doing that? To fill the... Yeah, he is. But he...

Semi-analysis has a concept called like the pause, which is like basically a gap of like this like insane period of demand that you're trying to meet that demand. And Satya actually says specifically you're rightfully calling out the pause in the interview.

Interesting. The like chip question is also like very important because you can think of it like if you build a bunch of data centers right now, they have very specific power requirements that are directly based on the chip. If you're building based off the H-100 chip, that's different than if you're building a data center

based off GB200s. And it's like you can't really, it's not like fungible, like you can't just trade one out for another. So that's another one of the reasons why you don't want to basically have insane build out right now because you think, you don't think you know that chips are going to get much better. Sure, especially with like A6, right?

Yeah, exactly. InVVDivya is like constantly they're saying we got this next chip coming out. Yep, yep, yep. You want to build up your data center with those chips because otherwise they're going to depreciate and you're going to have these basically data centers in like five years that like are using you know the old gen chips or two generations back yeah anything on depreciation he gives like two reasons how you can justify data centers right because you think of data center basically depreciating in like five years or the chips which is a big part of the cost there's basically two ways to like justify the actual build out one of them is

basically you can think of like research as just being like r&D spend and the other is just like everything has to be like super demand driven. So that's also why he's not, it's like, again, in comparison to Oracle, Oracle is basically, maybe you could say that they're kind of skating to where the puck is going or trying to figure that out and then doing a bunch of debt, et cetera. And then Microsoft, Satya is saying, no, where is demand right now? How do we fulfill that demand? Yeah. Basically, exactly. If we're not fully built up, then we can, you know, lease from the, you know, neoclouds. Yeah, makes sense. Okay, one last thing. Dorcache asks, Satya, like, does he buy

basically the revenue growth of like when Open AI or Anthropics says they're going to be like 70, 100 billion in like three years? He's like, well, you know, they have to justify their fundraise somehow. And then he basically doesn't say much else besides that. Wow, Sautja, absolutely dog. I love him. He's the best.

Another thing that I was surprised to hear is that Sotia, he made a big point of saying that like there is a super intelligence lab within Microsoft. They're going to be training their own models. always felt like the dynamic between Open AI and Microsoft is so interesting because Open AI just has massive ambitions in the enterprise. They want to create. Sam, you know, alluded to a AI native Slack recently. Microsoft has teams. And imagine those competing. It's going to be

AI native. You can imagine Open AI having like word processing, Excel like product. You know, you can imagine them ultimately competing on like every single layer, including at the, eventually at the cloud layer. Have you ever done illegal drugs, Tyler? Answer the question No Answer the question Good answer Who's your favorite host

Me or Jordy? Answer the question Answer the question I'm my favorite host Oh Oh Taking shots An emotional and expressive robot

To reshape our attachment To technology Is this a CGI Vibe real or is this a real product? It's pretty cool I don't know It's weird It just feels cool

A cool thing to have There was Put a speaker on it I'm like 90% sure it's real There was a Apple research paper that came out like, I don't know, six months ago. It was all about like expressive robots. Sure.

And they had a bunch of like demos and stuff on how they could build this stuff. Wow. Okay. This is, this is very cool. I have been delight baited. I have not been rage baited by this. Raghetti, what an opportunity, kaching by IBM. What is that even mean?

Kramer posts like a crazy amount. I mean, he's got 2.3 million followers. He's posting like every half hour. That's our show for today. I do not tolerate Kramer's slander. Yeah, no, no. I think he... He's entertaining.

He's insightful. He's controversial. He's a total package. We love Kramer here. I took delivery of a beautiful, shiny, new HW4 Tesla Model X today. I like this hardware four. He cares about the chip inside that thing. He doesn't care about what the light bar on the front is or the door handles or whether

the doors go up. Andre Carpathic cares about the GPU inside. So I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive a bit like I used to do almost daily for five years. Basically, I'm amazed. It drives really, really well, really smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3, my previous car, and Elon's aeons ahead of the version. I remember driving up Highway 280 on my first day at Tesla nine years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped on city streets.

The car casually handled the number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars and tight lanes. It gracefully went around construction and temporary in-lane stationary cars. It correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides. It's a glowing review,

glowing review of Tesla self-driving from the man who basically invented it and started the whole process. We also missed it, but OpenAI released GPT 5.1 rolling out to all users this week. Chat Chb-T is officially in its Fiji phase now if you're wondering why the upgrade doesn't come with benchmarks. Have fun.

Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe for your email at tbPN.com and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.