TBPN - Amazon Earnings, Saquon is a Superhero, Iraqi's Deserve Sesame Street, Real Founders Use Catheters

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the Temple of Technology in beautiful downtown Los Angeles. It's Friday, February 7th, 2025. This show starts now. Jordi. What are you got for me, John? We got some amazing breaking news. We got first up.

Massive news out of Y Combinator. We got to ring the size gong for a bunch of developers, a bunch of founders, from Overlap. They are part of YC summer 20204. They build multimodal AI agents that can understand search and edit videos and they raised a $1.9 million seed round. Let's ring the size gone for them. Congratulations to everyone over at Overlap. We wanted to highlight this because this honestly seems like something we need. Yeah, I would 100% demo this. We'd probably be power users. We are creating more content in tech than anyone has ever even tried to do before. Yeah.

Our goal, for people that don't know, we're trying to get up to doing 120 hours a week live streaming. We're at about 15 hours a week right now, so we've got a ways to go. But overlap seems like a tool that would help us better utilize all the content that we're creating and make it, you know, right now we have a team of, you know, we have Ben, our producer, then we have a team of editors that help us take the content that we create and repurpose it for other platforms. So this looks like exactly like something that we would use.

And I'm sure their sort of long-term strategy is to completely displace all podcasters. And so it might be one of those things where we're kind of like funding our own demise. But impossible. Impossible. We are built different. I will fight the AI apocalypse personally. And I will go toe to toe with any ASI, AGI systems. you can't create these takes in silicon it's impossible it's impossible we're going on record

we're going on record to see i'd like to see uh don't uh a i drink don parion uh to celebrate growth milestones i just don't think it's going to happen but uh these guys deserve a little sip of uh champagne for this moment uh it's obviously day one for them still but i'm excited to try out the product and congrats on a nice uh nice little round nice little round coming out of demo day let's Let's break down their announcement. Their seed round came from a bunch of different investors. They got Y Combinator Collab Fund, Transpose, Orange Collective Pioneer Fund and the 23 Fund. We're proud to welcome angels and operators from Amazon, Figma, Anthropic, Loom, Netflix, meta, and Open AI.

What they do, this is how they describe it. Overlap builds multimodal AI agents for media companies and video creators. That's us, baby. Our first AI agent, a video marketing agent, can autonomously understand search and edit videos. this agent now helps dozens of companies and creators by instantly transforming their long videos into clips for social media. This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to be everywhere. We got to get on LinkedIn.

We've got to get on Instagram. This takes a lot of work. LinkedIn is not ready. LinkedIn is not ready for us. We are going to flood LinkedIn. And I really do think that we can bring some great content there, have a lot of fun, and ultimately get a lot of views and have a big impact, which I'm excited about. And they said over the last few months, our customers have seen a 10x increase in engagement while saving over 20 hours per week. I love that.

We are working 120 hours a week. If we could make it 140 with the help of AI, I would do that immediately. And so what's next? Their seed round accelerates their mission to define the role AI will play in video workflows. With this capital, they're gearing up to accelerate product development, expand the team, and scale their impact. Stay tuned for more updates as they push boundaries of what's possible. at the intersection of video and AI. So congrats to the overlap team.

We love to see some big funding rounds happen out of YC Demo Day. Well, let's move on to our next story. We have some breaking news out of Figma. They announced a new product improvement. Aspect ratios can now be locked in Figma. People have been asking for this. Let's go. And it sounds like a minor thing.

But look at the response. This is, they're promoting what, you know, a slight product revision. The designers went crazy. This was not only, not only did this post get 4K likes, but it was also a trending topic on X. Like I went into the X like search feed and it was one of the top topics. The streets of Brooklyn have been absolutely begging for this, John. I mean, they've been, they've been campaigning, protesting, hitting the streets,

you know, cold calling, trying to get Dylan to make this happen. rolled it out. And it's just cool. You know, as big of a company as Figma is, as many people that use it, there's still things that they can do to meaningfully improve the product. And to be honest, I'm very excited about this. Like, I had kind of a workaround to do this like aspect ratio lock, but it wasn't something that you could do in the canvas. So very excited about this. And I think they probably, if they were public right now, that you can imagine the stock would have jumped easily five, six percent off the news. This is absolutely. massive for the design community and, you know, startups everywhere. So congratulations to Dylan

and the team. Yeah, we're huge fans of Figma here. We used it to design the pitch deck for our, for TB that we send to everyone that we partner with. We're using it to design the show overlays that you'll see coming soon to the live stream. And so it's an incredibly versatile tool. We're using it to design our new website. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And fun fact, when Jordy makes a meme, he actually makes it in Figma. I do. I do. He's one of the most advanced meme makers.

I'm not using any of those slop meme generator apps on the phone. If you want to do numbers, you got to be in Figma, grinding, you got to have your whole workspace. You got to have good images to pull from. You got to have good fonts ready. So it's a craft. You got to respect it. It's almost a full-time job for me.

If I'm not streaming, I'm meming. and thank you to Figma for making that possible. I love it. And let's stay with Figma and talk about the CEO, Dylan. He's an absolute dog. We've talked about before on the show. He's a beast. He is breaking down the impact of Figma.

Responding to Sahil from Gumroad, Sahil says, many have confused design with knowing Figma. And this is, again, Vigma is just a tool. You've got to be a crack designer. You got to know the tool, but you've got to know how to use it.

And so Dylan says, always liked RSMS's framing. Figma is like a staircase. The first step should be easy to take and further steps should lead you to build mastery over time. We're on a mission to make Figma more accessible than ever.

The craft of design still takes decades to perfect. Couldn't agree with it. Yeah, so I would use my own personal experience with Figma. I started using Figma without any real design, you know, education, right? totally self-trained. I think I had good taste, but I didn't actually know how to use the tool at all, and I wouldn't have considered myself a designer at all.

I still don't really consider myself a designer, but I am so competent with Figma that I can create pretty good-looking designs, at least like MVP's for ideas that I have. And that's like really accelerated my sort of design timelines and really help me work with designers. And so, yeah, I think it's amazing that Figma is not, Figma is easy to use. It's not incredibly easy to use, but if you just start using it, you'll figure it out quickly.

And it's, you know, it's fairly intuitive. So just because you're not a designer yet doesn't mean you shouldn't be in Figma using it. It's a super powerful tool. And I think that framing is great because, yeah, it is a staircase. I figured out how to drop a picture in and add text over it. And then suddenly I was, you know, making websites or product screens or things like that. So very powerful. It doesn't take much to get started.

Figma's staircase, and let me tell you, Jordy's calves are absolutely jacked. They're bulging out from all those stair climbs. He's been doing. But seriously, Figma is an incredible company. They went through this, I mean, really long grind. It took him three years to launch the product. Dylan started billing the company in 2012. They didn't go, they didn't actually launch the product until 2015.

They've raised a bunch of money. Then that crazy Adobe deal happens, gets broken up in antitrust. Now, Founder-led company, super well capitalized, absolutely on a mission. And think about the timing with all these new generative AI products exploding. They have the distribution. They have the users. There's so many of these features that they can add.

I, there was a company called, what I'm blanking on the name, diagram, diagram by Jordan Singer, Sarah, my wife invested in the company. and they actually were acquired by Figma because they were doing a bunch of stuff around generative AI. So Figma is extremely well positioned to roll out a lot of these tools and just embed them in the existing software. Yeah, they're 100% going after the developer community now.

And this in Figma pretty soon is going to be a tool that is integrated directly into just a full-stack developer's toolkit. And it's going to be something that even if they aren't a master of the previous iteration of Figma, it's going to be so much more accessible because of LLMs and just being able to orchestrate things like you would cursor in the IDE, like you would Devin in a Slack channel

working on GitHub pull requests. It's all going to be the same flow. And so that's going to create way more versatility for a CEO who codes and does design. It's going to be all over the place. It's going to be amazing. Really excited for them. So stay tuned for more updates.

We'll have to have Dylan on the show soon. Let's go to another breaking news story, massive product update from Palantir. They have partnered with XAI and they've integrated GROC into the enterprise. It's now officially available in AI, the artificial intelligence program. Spearheaded by Shamsankar over at Palantir. We're huge fans of Palantir. And it's great to see that there's even more options for what foundation model you want to use when you're building these data-driven workflows for the government.

I love how they just threw this graphic out. It's very unclear what's happening, but it looks awesome. This is a video. We're working on showing videos. We haven't figured it out yet. But the video, I think this is a before slide. The video guys don't know how to put video on a screen. This is, we got a little bit of coffee. We are building the plane as we fly it here at TBPN. Stick with us. We will quote tweet this post. You can go and watch the full video. I'm sure it's fantastic. Let's move on to Eliano, who is describing exactly what's going on there. There is an ontology of data that Palantir has created, these hierarchical workflows, organizing all this data, dropping AI on top of it, and nothing feels better than dropping a big word like ontology on someone.

You feel like a boss. Put in your vernacular. Put in your toolkit. Highly recommend using it. Fantastic. Yeah, and Eliana's emerging is one of this year's hottest posters. He's been absolutely on a tear. He's got the Palantirians behind him.

He's rallying them. The stocks rallying. It's just up only for the team over at Palantir. So I love to see it. Fantastic team. And great to see them partnering with Elon. I think just on yesterday's show, you said that you could imagine a world where Elon was a co-founder of Palantir.

It feels like that. It feels like an Elon-driven company. Carp obviously has so much of the same founder-driven energy. It's just a fantastic company, and we're excited to see them. Release huge products and integrate with more LLMs and really, hopefully, make the government more efficient, which is what we're all excited about. Yeah, and give them some, even the government should be able to make memes internally so they can use GROX image generation products as well. Just, you know, flip some stuff around Microsoft Teams. That'd be awesome as well.

dude i mean grok's image generation is remarkably good i i had it generated an image of sayquan barkley who's the uh who's the next top story that we're going to go to uh sayquan barclay and jeb bush are both investors in ramp and i needed an image of both of them at a business meeting at a share ramp shareholders meeting smiling and it nailed it it was uncannily good it was been fantastic the jersey was on point all the details were right the number of fingers was correct and it looked exactly like I was very satisfied. I got my money's worth. The finger test.

The finger test was passed. And all the other image generation systems denied it. They were like, no, I won't create an image of Jeb Bush, which like I think it's fair use. Like, you know, this is something I could have done in Photoshop. Just copy and pasting. So I don't know. But, you know, we're following up on the breaking news from yesterday. I don't know if you saw this, Jordy, but.

obviously Ramp is running a Super Bowl ad or as we think about it, you know, there will be a showing of the Ramp ad on Sunday and there will be some football to help promote that ad. Yeah. I think actually so, so Kendrick Lamar actually agreed to do the halftime show once he knew that Ramp was running an ad. That makes sense. Because he wasn't sure that football would be enough of a draw to really get people, you know, there packing out the stadium. But once he heard about the Ramp ad, easy yes from him. Yeah, I'll be there. I'll help create the right environment for people to be, you know, experiencing the ad.

So very, very excited that Kendrick Kamar decided to step up and help promote ramp on Sunday. Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. Well, Saquan Barkley is starring in that ramp ad. You'll be able to see it live on Sunday. And Eric Lyman, you know, we were joking. We didn't really know who Saquan Barkley was when they told us. But now we're super fans. you know, massive supporters, mostly of his investment portfolio, but he's also, I guess,

pretty good on the field, too. But an absolute goaded investor, future Hall of Famer in the Business Hall of Fame for sure. Yeah. In the TV, in the TV, probably has a bright future posting, too. He's clearly got, you know, good taste and good ideas. And that's usually what it takes to, you know, dominate the timeline. So after he's done dominating the feel on Sunday, I'd like to see a 20-part thread breaking down. Here's how the game went. Here's what we could have done better. Here's what we're going to be taking into the off-season.

And maybe a little bit of celebration as well. And looking at this picture, I could see you with a similar earring, but maybe like a podcast microphone just kind of dangling there. So even when you're off the air, when you're walking around the street, people know, hey, this guy's a podcaster. He's wearing a suit. I'm going to treat him with a level of respect. that a hardworking podcaster deserves.

Yeah, for sure. And I like the eye black. You know, that's to keep the sun out of your eyes, stop the reflections. There's a lot of light on the set. We might need to wear some eye black occasionally. Just make sure everything's dialed in. We're really focused in when we're podcasting. But let's go through this.

So Eric sent me some backstory on Saquan Barkley. There's a great profile on him. Sequin Barclay is a superhero for the Eagles. His origin story is straight out of a comic book, too. The man who has led the Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl run, the man who has been the most exciting player in football, almost quit the sport just before his career was about to take off. That was 14 years ago in eastern Pennsylvania,

before Saquan Barkley became Saquan, a hulking, hurtling blur with superhero-like muscles. I love it. I watched a highlight reel of him. I mean, I'm a super fan now. It is incredible. He has some of great plays. I looked up some pictures of some plays yesterday because I wanted a shot of him

running with the ramp card into the end zone, you know? There we go. Yeah. And anyways, an absolute dog. And so they have a bunch of quotes here to help tell the story of Seekwon. I thought it would be fun to go through this. Just because, you know, even though, yeah, he's dipping his toe in the business world for the first time, he's clearly an incredible.

incredibly inspirational figure and has done something remarkable. And studying greatness in the business world and beyond is something so valuable. There's a reason why David Senra has covered Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan on the Founders podcast. Sure. Or even one of Keith Roboy's favorite books is The Score Takes Care of Itself. Have you read that? Fantastic book. Fantastic book.

Yeah. And so Brian Gilbert, the former head coach at Whitehall, his high school. I don't want to exaggerate, but the varsity coaching staff and I literally brought him in because we'd heard after his freshman year of high school he was going to quit football. Barclay was frustrated struggling with his self-confidence. Some kids had matured faster than him. Sophomore year didn't. He didn't play varsity because his best friend was ahead of him.

Sequin had to work. That's how he's wired and that's why he's so great. I said, listen, you may not be the best one right now, but we see potential in you. We see how fast you are. You've got to give it more time. He said, coach, I'm so skinny. If I come up and play varsity football, I'm going to get broken in half. We said, just get in the weight room and get stronger.

Thank God he listened. And this guy, and this guy squats like almost a thousand pounds now. Just absolute dog. Absolute dog. And so the former varsity Whitehall quarterback, who he played with, Nick Schiffinsky, or Schifnicki says he was always the freakiest athlete and the nicest human. but it seemed like there was always someone a year or two older who was a little bit better. He was never The Guy, as crazy as that sounds, because now he's the epitome of the guy.

I love it. Let's go. Going back to Gilbert, he says he played a little varsity as a sophomore in 2012. At the end of that season, that summer we went to Rutgers as a team camp. His improvements that he made that offseason are different from any other athlete I've seen. He had a tremendous camp. Then Rutgers head coach Kyle Flood brings him in. him and me into his office and offers him.

He says it was based on what he saw that day in the film they'd watched, which was JV film because that's all we had. So sick. This guy just goes on a tear. One thing that immediately comes to mind. So, Sequin, freakiest athlete, nicest guy, right? That's his reputation. It makes sense that he would partner with Ramp and specifically Eric Blyman,

because when you meet Eric or or Kareem or or or the or the or the ramp exact team they're all genuinely the kindest people that and it almost is this is weird dichotomy because they're absolute savages in business and that yet Eric is just like the nicest like sweetest human right and so it's it feels like a really perfect partnership so he wasn't even the number one running back in the state of Pennsylvania no one on the staff looked at this high school film and thought this was going to be a generational talent. This guy, they thought, this guy is pretty good, let's take him, but we got to have Andre Robinson, the actual number one running back in the state of Pennsylvania.

As far as why he flipped so fast, he went up to a whiteout game in 2013, and I think he was like, oh my God, this is night and day from Rutgers to Penn State. One million percent, the whiteout game changed his life. Gilbert says, such a pleaser and I don't want to disappoint anyone and doesn't want to disappoint anyone. He asked me to how to tell Rutgers. I said, we're going to call Coach Wilson and tell him. He said, can you tell him? I said, no, you're going to tell him. You're going to feel better like you've achieved something by doing this. It's going to be hard, but you can do it. He was so nervous,

but I think that little step towards knowing that he hates disappointing people, but sometimes having to do what's best for your own good helped. It made him grow a little bit. A while later he called me. He said, I just got a call from Ohio State. Same with Notre Dame. Urban Meyer called him. Brian Kelly called him. Sequin didn't waver. He never went on another official visit, never went on another unofficial visit. He asked me if he could go on five official visits to Penn State because he didn't want to go to any other school. So he goes to Penn State. I would have loved to have coached him, but even now when I watch him, I root for him because he's a great kid. And so the Penn State head coach says, to be honest with you, even up

until his senior year he wasn't thought that highly of. He was a good player, but nothing crazy. Then he had a dominant senior year. Then he played in some East-West All-Star game, and they didn't even start him at tailback. He played fullback in the game. James and I went out to see him play early in his senior year. He had like 200 yards of offense and four touchdowns in the first half, and I was like, I think we can leave now. I was texting the pilot. Our job was done. He says, we're leaving. What do you mean we're leaving? The game started at seven, and it's only 738. I have a cool picture from me and Spence standing on the sideline. Our local photographer shot a picture of us from over our shoulders with him in the background. I have it hanging in my basement. So sick.

Cool, uh, cool little connection. So he was at Penn State, uh, at the same time as Bo Nickel technology, brother and, uh, future, uh, UFC middleweight world champion. Um, so anyways, a bunch of, also nicest, most, you know, humble guy. Uh, so Penn State's doing something right. they say have you heard the story about the track deal when he was in high school gilber says this story is legendary franklin uh he wouldn't miss opportunities to do something special i was at the district track meet when that white hall hosts every year at the hundred meter dash this girl ran and finished first but there was a mistake with the clock so they had to redo it and when they redid it she

came in second saquan witnessed all this so he went over and gave her his gold medal so amazing he said you deserve this people local pubs and restaurants will ask if it's really true yes Yep, it is. What a good guy. That's amazing. For me, realizing he was special, it was probably the first day we were in full pads at summer camp. He ran a basic inside zone play. He hit the A gap and then made a jump cut all the way back to the edge and went like 70 yards. Everyone's going crazy. He comes right back to me and says, should I have pressed it a little more? That's where the legend of Sequan started. I remember the run from the Oklahoma drill when the three O linemen basically blocked nobody and the three D linemen. came through and he shook them all. That was welcome to Sequin Barclay moment. Have you seen that? That's so good. In the first year, we kept trying to protect him. He had unbelievable physical tools, but we were conscious of throwing him to the wolves too soon because we didn't want to scar him. After that Buffalo game, we were like, okay, we got to play this guy. Then it was, how do we get him ready to play in the Big Ten without throwing too much at him? I went to our position room and went up

on the board. I wrote up the number 26 and circled it. My D-Linman asked what it was. I said, This is called the theory of 26. It means if any of you MFs hit this dude in practice and hurt him, you're going to have hell to pay. Don't touch him. He's like the quarterback. Leave him alone. I don't want one of them big dudes falling on him.

After his freshman year, he said he wanted to get, he wanted to be the best running back ever. What do I need to do to get better? He went back and looked at some of the long runs where he got run down. It happens against Rutgers, against Michigan. We went back and did a series of looking at winning

in open space, breaking tackles and making guys miss. Sequin Barclay says, you try to improve in every aspect of the game. I watched film on myself. I did self-evaluation. I wanted to get better at finishing the run, break loose and make another guy miss and get into the end zone. Eliminate the next play because any time you have to line up again, you give the defense another opportunity.

You can have a muffled snap. Anything. My freshman year, I was explosive, but I didn't have true speed. My 20 and 30-yard burst was really good, but when I got to go 60-year, or 100. I didn't really have another gear. I really wanted to increase my 40 time. So thick. I love it. Crazy. And so, yeah, this story kind of ends with Huff. Going into next year, I told them you've got to be prepared to have the biggest letdown season of your life. I said, now teams are not going to let you beat them. You have to be able to find success in the little

things. Maybe you don't rush for 200 yards and three touchdowns, but you can eliminate a few negative plays, improve your pass blocking, get better at catching the ball, coming out of the back, field develop other parts of your game and he was like okay I'm good with that I love it yeah what a beast so what a big fans now he um it was just awesome to see jab and sayquan on the timeline yesterday just dominating uh even jib jeb uh jab jab jab baited everybody little engagement bait he included uh you know what looked like a bullet point at the start of his post a lot of people said hey somebody sent him this post he chose from the bullet points and uh he was just copying, pasting it in. But, you know, people quickly pointed out, they said, hey,

Jeb is a master of the timeline. He included that to drive engagement so his post would go more viral. So I think so. You don't get to be someone like Jeb Bush without being an absolute dog and taking every little extra step to get that extra reach, to get that extra impression. And I love to see him, you know, performing on the timeline. Yeah. So lesson for founders, if you have somebody on your on your board or your cap table who's an interesting poster who you want to feed a tweet to let them include a bullet point maybe even include a little spelling mistake in there so people are like oh like this is this is artisanal quotes are good too if you include like one or you know quote at the start or the end people are going to say hey somebody sent you that

to copy and paste in but that's viral fuel yeah that's viral fuel so that's so funny so I don't think we talked about this post on the show, but I posted Carl Marx failed to consider that making money with your boys is the most fun activity on earth. And I posted, I like reviewed it like a few times. I posted it. I had a typo in the fourth word. Carl Marx failed or fifth word, Carl Marx failed to consider. I said considered.

And it's still got 14,000 likes. Oh my God. that's like how does that even work this is more organic it knows not slop and l l l lm would never make that type of mistake and i said i said you got to put a typo in every post to prove that you're human and i would never have the creativity to to think you know oh i'm going to try to trick people into you know thinking i'm human by put by making a mistake right so um anyways we got some uh fantastic with saquan barclay tons of great lessons for business there i mean the guy total come from behind story just absolute grinder works on all aspects of the game clearly

reviews every piece of footage really understands how to improve and spends a lot of time in the gym working on the fundamentals and that can be true in business so lots to learn from say on and off field i i'm generally against wearing you know jerseys with uh another dude's name on the back we're getting some tv jerseys made that'll be you know just cougan and hay but I'm almost inclined to, you know, try to get a Sequin jersey by Sunday and just be, you know, just be cheering, you know, not for the game, but for the ad. Yeah, for the end. Waiting for that 15 seconds to just, you know, just blow me away.

Can't wait. Well, let's move on. We got earnings presented by public.com. I'll have public up and you can run through this and I'll source any data we need to kind of support. Yeah. If you could look up what Amazon's done over the last five. days, 24 hours. I want to know. I want the update from you from public.com. But it's earning season,

boys. We covered Google. We covered Apple. We covered Facebook and meta. And now we're on to Amazon. And I don't think we have this slated, but I mentioned this to you yesterday, Roblox, which, which that, what's that research, Hindenberg research had done a takedown on? They reported a drop in sort of usage. And like 30% of the stock got wiped out. So if Hindenberg was still in in Roblox, they would have done, you know, pretty well off of that. But let's get into Amazon, stable, humble giant, although they are down 3% in the past week. So, I mean, that's a big move for a big company like that. So they just had their earnings. Their shares fell after sales outlook is weaker than expected.

The company is expecting to allocate a record amount of capital expenditure to AI. This has been an ongoing trend. Analysts are worried about overspending in the data center world. Some of those investments can be very good, but there is risk because cash is coming out of the balance sheet. And so let's go to the Wall Street Journal. They say Amazon's share slipped Thursday after the company projected lower than expected sales and operating income and said it plans to allocate a record amount of capital expenditure this year to build artificial intelligence infrastructure. Amazon is the latest large tech company to unveil big spending plans for AI, even as some investors are starting to question whether the spending spree is prudent. Virtually every application that we know of today

is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said on a call with analysts. Amazon projected net sales for the first quarter of between 151 billion and 155 billion, as well as operating income between 14 billion and 18 billion, the high end of each outlook came in below Wall Street's expectations. And so the company's net sales last quarter rose 10% from a year earlier to 187 billion in line with analysts' expectations. Net income rose 88% to 20 billion, higher than predicted. So very good year last year, a little bit rougher going forward. Revenue from Amazon's cloud computing unit, AWS, increased 19% to 28.7.9 billion, slightly lower than expected. Analysts said they were closely monitoring

this number after disappointing cloud computing results from Alphabet and Microsoft. What's you thinking, Jordy? I'm thinking that Amazon has been weirdly out of the headlines on all things AI CapEx. It's just not something that you're thinking about. And, and not really hearing about much. I mean, obviously people like Dylan Patel are spending a lot of time writing about it, but it hasn't been top of mind for a lot of people. But given how much of their business is in cloud,

you would think that they would be using that to drive the narrative and trying to build momentum around the narrative, the Amazon narrative, around AI. And it just doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel like that, you know, they obviously have like the actual like core data center infrastructure and cloud leadership, but it doesn't feel like there's no, they don't have their like SOT yet, right?

Like somebody who's coming out and, you know, going on CNBC, trying to get on technology brothers, likely, things, things like that. So they just don't feel like they're, while they are like critical and they're running a lot of this, you know, work, they don't feel like they're a big part of the conversation right now. Well, I think that's a great take. And I think there's mainly two reasons why we're not hearing that, even though AWS is the oldest cloud computing provider and I think by far the largest. But I think there's two things that are going on. One is that they don't have a like a direct consumer narrative around AI in the same way. So Google, everyone's saying, oh, how is AI going to affect Google search? You got to tell me about Gemini. They're launching

products that directly compete with OpenAI. They have the TPU. They've really talked about this. the transformer was invented at Google. So there's a whole bunch of history there around Google and AI. Everyone kind of expects that. Obviously, Zuck is doing the same thing. He made this massive bet. They've trained Lama. There's a huge narrative there.

Zuck's completely driving that. They did the huge AI capax, the massive GPU buy. And then even in Microsoft, which is a little bit less focused on AI productization, obviously they're stuffing, you know, co-pilots everywhere. But they have that massive position in Open AI. So anytime Open AI, eyes in the news, you can talk to Satya. Whereas Amazon, they have deals with Anthropic. They host a lot of stuff. Obviously, there's Alexa and there's AI in their products, but it's not as strong of a

narrative. And a lot of it comes from the fact that they're no, they're kind of no longer in founder mode, like Jeff Bezos is out. And I was trying to understand, do you think Jeff Bezos goes back in the next four years? You think he does as CEO? No, no. I just think it's a really interesting, you know, question and conversation to be had. I bet he wakes up some days just itching to be back, you know, behind the wheel of one of the biggest ships in the world. It seems like there's, there's quite a, you know, looking at the core retail business. I think it, there's lack of potential like real leadership in AI. And that's because you think about who goes on CNBC to talk about Amazon's AI prospect, and I can't name that person. And I talk about technology for three

hours a day with you here on the show. And so that's probably a problem. And it just shows there's not, you know, we've seen this with Satya, in many ways, he's going founder mode, even though he didn't start the company, right? Like he's clearly the face and the leader of that company. And if he decided to leave, stock would drop, you know, I'm sure, you know, in a meaningful way. Then you have Zach, obviously, doing his thing. The other issue is the entire retail side of the business. I actually pulled up a post from Sean Frank, who we've had on the show, probably 100 times now. He has been talking for a very long time about how little new interest there is in selling on Amazon.

You remember there was a time when everybody was selling courses on how you can make $5,000 a day selling on Amazon. You don't even need your own products. And so Amazon has gotten optimized and optimized and optimized, and they've just kept eating into the profits of the sellers on their platform. It's basically completely pay to play now. It's really hard to drive sales without spending a huge amount of your sales of gross revenue on ads. So I just pulled this up. There's a post.

This was from a little, a week ago, actually, Sean says, why is interest in Amazon businesses collapse? One, the overall e-com market has collapsed. Almost no deals are being done, and those deals are 50% of what they would trade for in 2021. Solo stove was worth $2 billion at one point. It's worth under 100 now. That sums up investor interest. Two, sales are stagnant.

Amazon marketplace sales are down single digits. That means the average merchant isn't growing all that much. No growth stories, so there's even less interest. He says three, all the big buyers went bankrupt. So you remember companies like Thrasio, and then you have. like kind of other alternatives like open store that are playing more on the Shopify space. They aren't buying the same number of companies. And then the big thing is the fees have increased so much that even if your revenue has doubled since 2021, your EBITA is flat or down.

So you've doubled revenue, but your business is maybe worth less than what it was a few years ago. And so that is creating, you know, it's definitely like seemingly like a lack of real, real leadership, right? Because if they had proper leadership place and the proper narrative in place, if they said, hey, we are going to be a real player in AI, we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars on new infrastructure, then that might be a bulk case, right? That might say, hey, they're going to take one of their core business lines and there's a real world where they, you know, multiply it. But we don't have that. And then we don't have on the retail side, all the sellers are upset. No seller on Amazon is saying, I'm so happy.

I built my entire business on Amazon, right? They're getting competed by, you know, Chinese sellers. They're being knocked off. There's a bunch of trademark infringement that happens. I, one of my portfolio companies, Element, LMNT, you know, had a copycat product on the platform that was the exact packaging, different name, but a carbon copy of the product. And Amazon let it run up to, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of sales. I think they've dealt with it at this point. but it's a very hostile environment to be a seller.

And we're not seeing, you know, real leadership on the on the cloud side. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know what to think. I think it's still a pretty good user experience on the platform. I think it's a great value exchange as a user from I pay. I don't know how many couple hundred dollars a year. And I get a bunch of content and free shipping. And that's great.

But I think there's trouble. on the retail side. And because ultimately Amazon's, you know, they're not, you know, now they own inventory, but historically it was a very, you know, inventory-like model. And that's what one of the reasons it made it such a great business. And that's why TEMU, it does like a meaningful amount of Amazon's, you know, net income, you know, profit from the retail business despite being a fraction of the size. And so I'm interested to see how it plays out.

but if you're Bezos and you're looking at all of this and you say, I have this juggernaut, the thing that is, you know, the thing that he put his entire life into. And I could see him getting tired of yachts and, you know, hanging out with his wife who seems to be enamored by every celebrity that, you know, cross it, cross, they cross paths with, which has to be a lot. So eventually he might just decide, you know what, it's time to go founder mode. I also think that he clearly has more interest in Blue Origin now.

And I like the fact that he and Elon seem to be more more positive sum now and supporting each other, which is great to see as well. So who knows. But yeah, it's a great, great American company for the most part. And I'd like to see them, you know, really take the reins and capitalize. Yeah. I would love to see Bezos back at the helm. He clearly has an incredible amount of soft power at Amazon still and probably could step in.

I think what's very interesting, I mean, I'd love to get a polymarket up on does Jeff Bezos go back this year and then roll that over to next year. I know Polly Market doesn't do long-dated things, but if you look at the timeline, Jeff Bezos stepped down in 2021. This was just almost immediately once Lena Kahn came in and the Biden administration came in. and you could maybe read that as he was studying the history of Bill Gates at Microsoft. He lived through that. He was in Seattle when it happened. There's actually a ton of overlap between their families, I believe, and investors because of the Silicon Valley business community.

And what happened in the Microsoft case was Bill Gates was the richest man in the world and had a target on his back and became kind of a scapegoat for monopoly power and then dealt with this like really rough monopoly case. And even though it didn't destroy the company or really break up Microsoft in a meaningful way, I mean, they had to kind of disaggregate internet explorer from, uh, from Windows. The company's still been massively successful. It's one of the biggest companies in the world. They got through it. But, uh, when you, when you listen to Bill Gates talk about it, he says it was like incredibly distracting and it really ruined the job for him. And then he spent the next and then it kind of broke his brain because,

he spent the next 20 years just trying to kind of rehab his image through all these crazy philanthropies. And so you can imagine. He's still trying to rehab his image. And the most effective thing I've seen him done lately is he did an interview and was photographed in a Batega Veneta suit. I thought he looked fantastic. I thought he looked cool. And so more of that and less, you know, running experimental vaccine programs on, you know, India. He's also a big Porsche guy. Really? Oh yeah, huge Porsche guy. He, he was he it was maybe like a little shot across the bow to Elon, but he was always like, I'm a take I'm a Tycon guy. You know, oh, I don't do Model S, which I think is a miss. But I think he also has like like a Carrera GT, a 959, a 918, probably he'll get the new one. And it's, I've been I've been, I've been driving a Tycon this week while I'm in South Carolina at TurboS. Yeah. It is a very fun car. That's great.

It absolutely rips. Yeah. But so I can see that. Yeah. And so what I think about Bezos is 2021, Lena Kahn comes in. And remember, Lena Kahn wrote her senior thesis, like her dissertation on Amazon as a monopoly. And Amazon was not thought to be subject to antitrust legislation because of the fact that it acts as an aggregated. aggregator, as Ben Thompson described, in the sense that competition is only one click away.

Their strength comes not from cornering supply, it comes from cornering demand. And what that means is that Amazon, they might be able to raise prices, but they never have. And so it's impossible to, it's really, really difficult at least to prove consumer harm, which has always been the definition of, we got to break up this monopoly. It's one guy owns all the steel or all the railroads, and then because he owns all the steel, he can say, I'm doubling the price of steel, and everyone still has to buy. And you can imagine that that's bad. It makes sense why we have antitrust legislation to prevent that type of stuff. In the case with Amazon, it's seller harm.

And so sellers are pissed off. Sellers are still able to eke out of business, but their businesses aren't growing in value. Yep. And so that's a major, you know, again, it doesn't mean that that there's a strong antitrust case to be built there because as a consumer, I'm sitting here and I'm like, well, I pay 200 bucks a month or 200 bucks a year to Amazon. I get a bunch of content. I get, you know, free whole food delivery. It's, you know, it's a pretty, it's a pretty good exchange. So, yeah, yeah, we'll see how it plays out. But with that. And so 2021, Bezo steps down. This is like, you know, within days or within a year of Lena Khan coming in.

And then two years later, the FTC files an antitrust lawsuit formally. And so I think of it as the writing was on the wall. The Biden administration is going to be very rough on me. If I duck out now as CEO, there's no scapegoat to go after. And it'll be much harder to rally public support for an antitrust lawsuit because we won't be able to say, look at this multi-billionaire, look at the richest man in the world. He's extracting value.

Everyone needs to support this. And that support, even though FTC lawsuits are not voted on by the American public, there is pressure that happens through various elected representatives to the FTC. And it's a lot easier to go after someone who looks like a, you know, Lex Luther than Andy Jassy, who's just a guy who no one really knows his name. And he's just there being like, yeah, we're obsessed with cloud computing. it's actually a very hot market, very competitive. And look at Amazon, yeah, we might be the biggest in cloud computing, but Google Cloud

is huge, Azure's huge, and Facebook's also investing in data centers in a massive way. And then there's a million other providers. So it's a complete, perfectly competitive market. Yes, we have great margins, but it's not a monopoly. Yeah, now you have a bunch of new players like Stargate, and you can point to them, be like, look, they're investing $500 billion in their own, so we're not vending new players from entering this market. It's still going to be very competitive.

And so with Lena Con out, it kind of creates a space where Bezos could go back in if he wants. And I've always been interested in, I always love when the founders have been able to set up their businesses in a way that they can do everything in the one master bucket. Zuck is the master of this. He has the super voting shares. And so when he wants to do the Metaverse, that goes in the Meta bucket. When he wants to do AI, that goes in the meta bucket.

Elon's taken a much more decentralized approach, but then he's re-centralized with things like Solar City getting bought by Tesla. XAI is integrated with X and Tesla has some people over there. So he's kind of creating this Kretzu of different companies that all have intertwined stakes. There's a lot of overlapping investors. People actually think about the portfolio of Elon companies as like Elon Inc. now and that's happening. It's not all one company. It's it's crazy to think that he could take just his personal positions public independently and create an index. Oh yeah. Elon. And it would probably

trade at a 5x premium to book value. You know, something ridiculous. Yep. But Bezos has always, he's never been able to justify that fully. Like he, I think Amazon did one satellite internet project, but they weren't, he wasn't able to go to the Amazon shareholders, even though he has an immense amount of control, he was able to go to them and say, look, we could be making money on retail, but instead we're going to invest all of that in AWS and we're going to have this amazing second business. He wasn't able to do that a third or fourth time. He could have said, hey, look, we have a lot of delivery trucks. We want to make electric delivery trucks. And so we're going to build electric vehicles in-house. But that's not what he did. Instead, he funded Rivian.

And Rivian is kind of his Tesla. And that stock's been up and down, but Amazon built a position. and Bezos helped with that a little bit, but he wasn't able to just do it inside. If Zuck needs trucks, he's going to build them in meta. He's not going to start a second company. And same thing with Blue Origin. Like, if Zuck wants to build rockets,

it'll probably happen within Meta because he has so much control and so much voting power there. And he's been very good at convincing the shareholders. So it'll be interesting to see, I mean, I would be most, I would honestly probably be more excited about Blue Origin and Rivian

if they lived within the Amazon holding structure. And Bezos was, at the top of that and could really choose how to allocate capital because this this business even though you know it's down a couple percent it's throwing off so much money that they are going to invest a hundred billion dollars in capital expenditure next year like that's probably way less than rivian needs or blue origin needs these could be within think about how good that would be for users if you could be driving in your rivian and click for to do an amazon hall and buy a $13 guitar or $13

couch, right? $20 couch. That's what users want, right? They want slop products while they're in their slop EV. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the same time, it makes sense my shareholders are like, wait, like I wanted to, like, Zuck,

I'm here as a shareholder. I just want like add dividends. Like, why are you open sourcing LLMs? Like, I don't care about that. And Zuck has to make the argument that, oh, well, it'll help with talent. And it helps with our, it's commoditizing our compliment and oh, we'll be able to stuff this and everything and we'll have a, you know, a stake in AI.

And it's obviously gone very well. But even as a CEO who controls a massive public company, you do still have to make your case to shareholders. You can't just say, I have a wild idea. I have no idea how it connects and I'm going to do it anyway. People have to say, hey, it's going to make money for the core business. But Amazon, I mean, it really is interesting. Your point about them not being like leading the AI names. narrative because they are leading the AI narrative. They're spending $100 billion in

CAPEX this year as part of a push to build generative AI services. They're they're leading the investment in CAPX. They're not they're not they're not leaving the narrative. Yeah. And I think that narrative just matters so much for a company, you know, that that, you know, every company is in the game of we want our, you know, for the average, you know, retail. investor that owns Amazon, they want the, you know, they want the, everybody wants the price to go up. And so I think that they're not getting credit for that Cappex from a, you know, market cap standpoint. 100%. And so let's just break down how Amazon compares to the other hyperscalers. It really is fascinating. You know, Sata has that quote, I'm good for my 80 billion. Well, now that has actually increased.

Amazon, Microsoft is expected to top 90 billion in Cappex. this calendar year. Google is spending $75 billion and meta is spending $65 billion. And so you add all that up, you're in some huge, huge territory, $350 billion, something like that. Pretty, pretty crazy numbers. But, you know, it's a lot of data centers. I'm excited to see it. And it's the meme. Another trillion to one, another trillion to NVIDIA. Woohoo. Yeah. We need to do a data. We need to do a data center, you know. For sure, for sure. And so U.S. tech stocks tumbled last week after the surprise success of a new generative

AI model from China. That's, of course, deep seek. The free-to-use model was built at a fraction of the cost, although very debatable at this point. The latest number I saw was like they spent $1.5 billion, which is like more than it cost to train GPT4. And so now we're in like weird territory. Yeah, they spent $1.5 billion while.

horrifically stealing from OpenAI in order to, and then, and then, you know, lying about it. I'm actually very confused about the real number here because it started as $6 million. Then people said, well, they have other stuff and it doesn't include R&D. And even DeepSeek admitted, like, we didn't include all the cost. And so people were like, okay, maybe it's 50 million, maybe it's 100 million. It's still impressive. They clearly did a bunch of optimizations to make the code run faster. And there's just no question that inference is cheaper.

like that is true. We know that. But now we're getting these crazy estimates like actually Deepseek has invested $1.5 billion in AI as a whole project. But then on the other end, you're hearing like, oh, a couple kids of Stanford rebuilt it for $50. And so we're now like in the bands of like Deep Seek spent a billion, but Stanford can do it for $50. I don't know what to believe anymore. It's crazy. I love how they just inspired America to grind harder. Everybody, everybody was like, oh, it's possible to train a model like this for, you know, very, very little comparable cost. We should just do it and then they do it. I love it.

Well, and so obviously that shook markets. Amazon CEO, Jassy wants to make Amazon an AI leader as the world. He needs to do more podcast, though. He needs to start setting the narrative. Call Lulu. Go direct. As the world's largest cloud service provider, the company is in a good position to profit from AI.

Amazon created special teams, created special teams to, let's see, created special teams to drive generative AI innovation and has released a flurry of services, including an AI shopping assistant. First time I'm learning of that. I've heard that they have an AI chat bot that you can chat with. It's so funny, their shopping assistant for the consumer is, yeah, we're just going to find you the products that you really want. And then on the back end, they're just telling all the retailers, yeah, you're going to have to give up 90% of your margin to get this customer and you're

going to love it. Otherwise, you know, somebody else will pay for that slot. And so the Wall Street Journal highlights Amazon's competitiveness in the e-commerce business with new rivals such as Timo and Sheen. Both of these companies offer low prices to source products extensively from China. President Trump suspended a trade exemption known as the day minimis. provision that Sheen and Timu and other Amazon competitors have used to avoid import duties on low value packages from China. We've covered this before. And honestly, we never thought that it was putting a dent in Amazon's revenues because a lot of the slop products that were bought on Timu and Shian were incremental and it was seen more as gambling dollars than really replacing or

displacing Amazon as a staple of the American consumer habits. So, unclear how big of an issue, Timu and Sheen have been historically. They're certainly on their back foot now. And it seems like Amazon's even better positioned. I mean, a lot of this, although the stock traded down, there's a lot of bullish stuff in here. Like they've, they've, they, like, there's no more FTC risk with Lena Con out. They, they're, they're potentially killing off Timu and Sheen.

And, and they're spending the most on AI data center. So if you believe that. having a lot of data centers and a lot of GPUs is valuable. They're in the best position. Now, not by a lot. They're only spending 10% more than Microsoft, but it's still a lot. And they got a lot of stuff on ADUS. It's great.

And to be clear, the stock is not underperforming by any means. They're down on earnings, but I'm on public, and they are up 5%-ish in the last month. So not a bad spot to be in. I think they're up 40% last year, which is crazy for a company that big. Yeah, they were not a, they were not a trillion dollar company in 2020. Wow. And yeah, so right at yeah, if you bought, if you bought Amazon the day that the NBA, you know, basically went offline, it was like a $900 billion company, right? Wow. So anyways,

still doing well despite Bezos, not at the helm. But imagine the move if Bezos did join the company, the pop would be biblical. For sure, for sure. And so separately during the important holiday quarter, Amazon grappled with threats from one of the largest U.S. labor unions. And I love their name, although I'm not a fan of them personally. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters. I know the Teamsters union. I didn't know that it was their full name.

we should start an international brotherhood of technologists. They tried to disrupt holiday deliveries to pressure Amazon to negotiate with its warehouse workers. At the time, the company said those attempts had fallen short, I guess. And so Amazon got through that. I also wanted to go back and look at a little bit of older earnings analysis from Ben Thompson. This is from 2023 talking about Amazon and AI. and Ben Thompson is highlighting the lack of clear narrative. And so Jassy at the time back in 2023, he says generative AI has captured people's imagination,

but most people are talking about the application layer, specifically what OpenAI has done with chat GPT. It's important to remember that we're in the very early days of adoption and the success of generative AI and that consumer applications are only one layer of opportunity. And so three of the five big tech companies have a clear AI story at this point. Microsoft has its partnership with OpenAI. Google has its own AI models and Google Cloud Platform. And meta is pursuing open source strategy in conjunction with seeking partnerships with large cloud providers, starting with Microsoft.

That leaves Apple and Amazon, who have way underperformed on the narrative front. Yeah, and so here's the thing. Amazon made its bet on Anthropic, and Anthropic is built a great model. People love Claude, but is kind of irrelevant on the consumer side. they have, you know, a fraction of the downloads and the engagement that Open AI does. Yep. And they don't have a reasoning model right now. They do.

It's just internal. They haven't launched it. That's what I'm saying. I don't care. They don't have a, they don't have a, you don't get credit for, oh, yeah, we got, we got a great, like, the whole thing with, with all these, you know, foundation model, you know, companies is they're launching products oftentimes before they're really ready for production, right? They launched deep research and you didn't even have access to it, right?

So everybody's sort of running. I believe that Anthropics model was actually competitive. They would have launched it already. Yeah, it is clearly a very difficult. And the other thing is they may, Anthropic made a clear bet around AI safety. And a lot of other firms ignored that, Deep Seek, one of them. And so that seems to be in the short term, the wrong bet to make. And so that was Amazon's real, you know, player in the race.

And I think that or at least consumer narrative. And it's turning out that Anthropic doesn't seem to have a strong consumer narrative right now, even though people love the product. Yeah. I haven't personally. I haven't personally used Claude in weeks. So, yeah. I mean, it seems like it has popularity amongst the developer community.

But beyond that, it hasn't really broken through. And it's fascinating to see how. how aggressive Sam has been at OpenAI about responding to just any developments. You know, every time Google has a keynote, Open AI has a keynote two days before. And Deep Seat comes out. What's the name of the product he launches? Deep Research. Like he wants the Google Auto-filled AI deep something.

Oh, yeah, deep research. Go over here. And you can tell the deep research. I mean, I've been enjoying the product and I think it's getting a lot better. But you can tell that they're not ready to scale that for a few reasons. First, it's not available on mobile. So the button is just not available there. So you have to, if you're on your phone, you have to open up a web browser and go to chatGPt.com and then click the deep research thing to do a query on mobile. So they're clearly cutting the amount of deep research queries that way. And then also, it always asks you a clarifying question to slow you down. And I'm sure there's some sort of churn rate between, oh, I'm I was about to kick off this deep research thing, but it asked me a bunch of clarifying questions.

Maybe I'm not going to do it. And if that saves them 50% of the queries, that's a lot of compute because clearly it's very, very expensive. But it shows that they're willing to push it out and get the data they can and do as much scaling as they can, even though they're not ready for this to be free for everyone, ad-supported, and billions of inferences that are just burning up data centers every And atropic, all of this stuff deep seek coming out and people responding to it. And, you know, it's kind of showing that we may be at least a few models away from the sort of asymmetric risk that Anthropic has been, you know, focused on.

And so it seems to have been so far, at least for these early reasoning models that aren't fully, you know, agentic. it does seem that they kind of made the wrong bet there. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Maybe Bezos gets in there and puts some pressure on them and puts their feet to the fire and says, give me the models. They're going out today. But let's close with Ben Thompson's analysis. This is again from two years ago talking about Amazon's play and AI, and he has an anecdote.

Ben writes, I'm wrapping up my usual summer stint in the U.S. in a metro area that started receiving same-day deliveries earlier this year. Speaking personally, I absolutely agree with Jassy's characterization of consumer behavior. I both found Amazon's delivery speed to be astounding and also recognized a significant shift in my own behavior because of that speed. The truth is that buying something locally in person still requires a trip of some sort with the risk that what you want may not be in stock is in almost all cases it was actually faster, particularly once you incorporate the realities of life.

where you can't actually go to the store this very minute because things come up to simply order from Amazon because you'll receive your item in a matter of hours, not days indeed. I felt this summer marked the largest shift in my purchasing behavior since the launch of Prime. When I needed something like, say, a mic cable, which happened last Sunday, I simply bought it on Amazon the moment the need arose. The cable arrived four hours later. What I find so fascinating about this, though, is Jassie's argument that this actually results in lower unit costs. because there are fewer touch points for the delivery. This does not make intuitive sense in that it is a classic tech tradeoff between marginal

cost and fixed cost. It is also a tangible expression of why I thought it was so important for Amazon to push for this level of delivery speed in the first place. Amazon is at its best when it's realizing advantages that no one else can match because of its willingness to invest in the real world. This is what Amazon does best. Yeah. And focus on long-term moats and instead of short-term,

profitability, that's what leads to increased profitability in the long run. If you're patient enough and confident in your position with consumers will endure, Amazon's renewed interest in its logistics is a perfect example, and an encouraging sign that the company will retain its greatness without its earnings call skipping founder, because Bezos didn't go to the earnings call, which I think is funny. Anyway, Jordy, what you got? Yeah, I would just kind of close this out by saying Amazon generally seem is very well positioned for a lot of the trends that we're seeing right now. Some of these other companies that are more pure play software companies that aren't existing in the real world, there's some real threats there, right? Software development timelines are changing so dramatically.

It's becoming so much faster and cheaper to make software. That threatens a company like Salesforce in a way that Amazon, which is selling physical products, selling content, selling, you know, they have their logistics network. They have their data center business. They should be, people should be tremendously excited about Amazon's positioning for the next 10 years. And yeah, they're somehow not getting that through. So anyways, excited to keep covering it. Yeah. It's an interesting story. Seems mostly narrative and communications based. But we'll see. Fortunately, you know, stocks up 40% over the last year. Minor, minor bump in the road with this earnings, a little bit of scared on the CAPEX, a little bit of deep seek threat, but we'll see where it goes.

Let's move on to our next top story. We have a Technology Brothers exclusive. For the first time in Technology Brothers history, we're covering an Eric Newcomer exclusive on General Catalyst's fundraising. And so we have slides here from Eric Newcomer showing how General Catalyst has performed, how they've scaled, and Eric Newcomer has the firm's Q3, 2023, fundraising documents. And General Catalyst is on a tear. They are just going big, ultimate size lords. Let's hit the size gong a couple times for them. They're just massive. I don't think

this article would have caught it, but they came out yesterday announcing they have a new Fund of Funds platform to fund other emerging managers. So they're just going, I love, we love when people get aggressive and they are certainly doing that. Yeah, I mean, the narrative around General Catalyst has been It was a VC firm, then it was a growth stage firm, then it was a private equity firm. Now it's just an asset manager in every sense of the word. I think they also launched a wealth management product, right? Yeah. Did you see that?

Yeah. And so they have a hospital, consumer value financing, a wealth manager under the leadership of CEO, Hamon Tanaja. The firm has grand ambitions. Newcomer got his hands on documents that show how General Catalyst has presented. itself to prospective investors documents. He obtained or admittedly a little dated from 2023. That's a bit old newcomer.

Got to step it up. Got to be hanging out at the Sandhill, the Sandhill Rosewood a little bit more. Yeah. Or the Nobu. Hanging out. I want to see, I want to see, I want to see a tech journalist, go to Japan, study how to make sushi for 10 years, and then go get a job at Nobu. and just sit at the sushi bar,

and you're just making sushi, everybody thinks you're just, you know, making a nice hand roll. Turns out you're listening for scoops. You're picking up every single thing that they say. You're yelling Eroshma, say. But then you're really,

you got your ears, both ears here because you've got a bunch of allocators right in front of you. You know, you're picking up this round's happening, that rounds happening. Maybe a faster way to do that would just be to go pay off the individual, you know, the weight staff,

the sushi chefs. et cetera. But there's alpha everywhere, folks. And there's certainly alpha in the Palo Alto Nobu. Yeah, newcomer. Become a janitor at Amon. And then just go around and just sweep up all the slide decks that are laying around the pool and the jacuzzi and the spa and just scan them, throw them up on the newsletter. You're going to triple subscriptions. You're going to be printing $5 million next year in EBITDA. You're playing small ball right now. Yeah. Yeah. And so the investment memo provides a detailed look at General Catalyst's and performance as it was raising its last suite of venture funds. And so let's go through some of these.

They are absolute doggs, general catalyst. Billions raised in October 2024. The firm announced $8 billion of new funds for its fund 12, been around for a long time, including $4.5 billion for the firm's core VC funds, $1.5 billion for its creation strategy, and $2 billion for separately managed accounts. One and a half billion for, I'm reading that as incubations. Is that correct? I think so. Billion for incubations is insane. That's just an insane number. Given how capital efficient incubations can be, because sometimes firm will put a founder as an EIR, so they have a bit of an income and benefits while they figure out what to build. I have no idea how it's actually structured, but, um, well, their latest incubation was a rollup. And so they wound up

buying a lot of existing firms. And so you can imagine if you're, if you're buying, uh, like a mid-sized business dropping AI on top of it. Yeah, it's going to be a hundred million equity check and then a couple of million, 100 million in debt maybe. Uh, that's going to go pretty quickly. That's 15 deals. If you're doing 100 million dollar checks to kick off these like incubation roll up type things. Yeah. I have no idea how they're, how they're sizing their bets. But I'm sure we'll find out more. Let's go to the evolution in 20 in two in two in the year 2000 the firm started in Boston founded by serial entrepreneurs David Falco and Joel cutter during the dot com bubble general catalyst established credibility. Let's see. They hatched winning companies resulting in

kayak demandware and vertu fund five in 2007 was seven hundred twenty two million dollars already pretty big during the global financial crisis they expanded to silicon valley in 2010 and new york in 2012 uh they did a fund six of five hundred million dollars fund seven was 676 million every uh every fund is just getting bigger and bigger uh Ken chanolt who i've actually interviewed ramp investor uh former CEO of amex he joins the chairman uh and then in 2018 general catalyst solidifies a full stack platform by raising multiple funds segmented by stage. This is the Fund 10 group. Fund 10 comes in at $2.9 billion. General Catalyst raises its first sector-specific fund, the health assurance fund.

Hamont becomes CEO. They open a London office in 2021 post-COVID and Fund 11 clocks in at $5.4 billion, baby. And so there's a little bit of a breakdown here for Fund. 12. They have their creation fund, which hatches companies, transforming companies with a catalyst advisor and executing venture buyouts. Okay. So that's interesting. So it's their creation fund, but it's a venture buyout strategy. So that makes more sense. And they're trying to own 25% of the business when they're trying to deploy it one and a half billion when you're creating you know, pre-seed companies and presumably making room for other investors to.

Yeah. Impossible. Difficult. But they're going to buy, they're going to buy companies like their private equity firm, but where they think there is VC like opportunity and venture scale. And so they have the ignition fund. This is where they do their core early stage work. Another $1.5 billion there.

They focus on seed, series A, series B. and of course they focus in 10 to 25% ownership target there. They have their health assurance fund, which is targeted at digital transformation of the healthcare industry. 750 million, early stage seed series A, series B, and healthcare, 10 to 25% ownership targets. And then they have their endurance fund. That's their growth in later stage investments,

$2.25 billion. And this is all out of fund 12. And so they've taken this full stack approach. You can look at some of their leadership here. focus on basically everything, healthcare, fintech, global resilience, technology, consumer, and enterprise. And we can go through more of the slides, but you might just want to subscribe to newcomer. The guy gets scoops, even if they're a year and a half old.

Always scooping. Always scooping. Yeah, an absolute dog. Is there anything else we should talk about with regard to General Catalyst? We got some boys over there, some absolute dogs, writing huge checks, making plays. We'll see them at the time on. You know, every time a venture fund comes out and announces multiple billion dollars of new AUM, there's always naysayers, haters, saying, oh, this is not, you know, this is not real venture capital or, you know, how are you going to actually put up returns like this? but you have to just give people a little bit of credit.

If somebody's raising $8 billion, unless they're Masa, son, they have probably planned things out pretty precisely. They probably have a very coherent strategy because that kind of money doesn't change hands and get invested without, you know, the people that are investing those dollars are sophisticated. And, yeah, they're taking a portfolio approach. they don't need every fund they invest in to outperform. But yeah, got to give credit. And I like to see that General Catalyst is getting aggressive and evolving venture.

It's not a cottage industry anymore. I think that the super, super early stage stuff will continue to be somewhat boutique. And there's always going to be opportunities for new managers. But the bifurcation venture from these sort of small $10 to $50 million funds all the way to these like five to $20. billion funds or five to ten billion dollar funds, that is seemingly the new normal. And I think it's overall healthy. It's important for early stage investors to know that, you know, if I invest in a company at a five to ten million dollar valuation, that if they do well, there's going to be, you know, 50 billion dollars of downstream capital that somebody like a GC or an Ereson or a

founder's fund or a Sequoia can deploy into that. So overall, I think it's healthy. I think there's to be, you know, an entirely, it's going to be cool to see the generation of, of investors, allocators that come out of firms like general catalysts that were there during the transformation and then can continue to innovate down the road. So overall, very cool. And, you know, look, they're probably doing a few hundred million ARR just on the fee side. Yeah. So the, the old model of two and 20 is gone. VC firms used to take 2% annual management fees and 20% and 20% percent. percent carry, but not a general catalyst, baby. The firm share profits on investments starts at 25 percent and climbs to 30 percent if the profits are above 133 percent in aggregate contributions.

And so a lot of these different funds have different management fee structures. The creation fund gets 2.5 percent management fee. The ignition fund gets 2.25. Endurance is their growth fund, so a little bit lower, 1.75% management fee, and the health assurance fund gets 2.5% management fees. So Eric Newcomer clocks it at $120 million a year just from Fund 12. And remember, they're raising these new funds every couple of years. And so that's going to fund a lot of employees, a lot of office space, and a lot of ski trips to Tahoe and Sun Valley. Yeah, and one thing to note yesterday, we will probably talk about this later in the show, but yesterday some news broke, I think from Bloomberg that Trump was exploring, eliminating

what has been called the carried interest tax loophole. And I think that loophole is a sort of not the best way to characterize it because what they're referring to is the fact that investors that are, you know, people that manage and deploy money that's not necessarily their own, they, get when they, you know, if you have a $10 million fund and it does well and you're in carry, that carry gets, you know, has historically been treated and today gets treated as capital gains. What they're trying to do is make it treated more like ordinary income. So instead of paying a, you know, 15, 20-ish percent tax rate, whatever it is, you might be paying closer to 50 percent tax rate on that.

And so for someone like G.C. who's deploying billions of dollars and presumably wants to make a great return on that, that's billions of dollars that they would be given to the federal government or the state government depending on their performance. So pretty would be pretty brutal for the industry in many ways, but it's coming from somebody like Trump who runs his own money. So as a real estate guy, he's using his money. I'm sure he has co-investors and using a lot of debt. But to him, it maybe is not so important how carried interest is treated. But if you're a fund manager raising billions or if you're a fund manager that's raising 10 million and really making money on the carry piece versus the fee side would be pretty devastating.

Yeah, the carried interest loophole closure, this whole discussion, that came up during the last administration didn't go anywhere. You said that if it goes through, VCs will make January 6th look like a baby shower. I think we can see lots of VC and private equity associates protesting on the national mall if this happens. It'd be very bad for the industry. And who else said something interesting? I forget who it was Dan Primack. Dan Primack says a source on the phone just now on the carried interest tax situation. It's like the red wedding. Trump collected all the VCs at the White House so he could more easily murder them. And so... Yeah, and, and, uh, to be clear, it's, it's not going to be the end of the world, but it does meaningfully impact, um,

you know, when I look at it as like, you know, from time to time, I'll do an SPV into a company that I'm excited about. And now I have to, if they do change the law and the tax treatment right now, you know, if I invest, you know, a million dollars being SPV, I take 20% carry on it. Maybe there's other partners in the deal. So I'm not actually getting the full 20% carry. After it's taxed 50%, it might not have even been worth my time to do the deal. I might have been better off just putting in, you know, 50 grand myself, letting it ride and knowing that it's going to be treated like, because putting together money like that being SBV, it's a lot of work. It's super time intensive. And so, you know, you're basically looking at the way that I've always looked at it is

you're investing in the deal with your time. And so from that lens, it's saying, okay, maybe it should be treated like ordinary income. But the payoff is so unclear and it takes so long to see a payout. only see a payoff, a payout if, you know, there's a meaningful return. And so I see a good argument to keep it as is. I don't think it should be framed as a loophole, but we'll see how it plays out. And so manifold markets, I don't know how up to date this is, but they are running a market on carried interest repeal by the end of 2026. It's at yes, 40%, no 60%. I imagine that's pretty low liquidity. Med Faber here, Meb Faber here, who actually follows me, says, we need a polymarket on the chances of carried interest, LOL, close the carried interest tax deduction loophole.

So everyone wants to know whether or not this will happen. It could just be one of those things where like Trump is doing with Canada, oh, we're going to make Canada state, this and that. Trump loves to open with a crazy proposal and then back it off and get something in trade. And so I could imagine this saying, look, I'm going to close the carried interest loophole, blow up your entire industry. But as this gets, now that I brought everyone to the negotiating table and people realize how serious I am, Trump will say, well, actually, I'm going to close the carried interest loophole on investments that are made outside the United States. And really his goal the whole time has been, I just want VCs to invest in American companies that make products in America. And you can see that being more aligned. and that's actually what he's going for.

But how does he get there? Well, he's got to come in with a hammer and get everyone waking up and saying, look, it's going to be the red wedding. There's going to be a bloodbath unless you play ball. And then, you know, he set the bar here. And so when he backs down,

he gets exactly what he wants. And so I could see that happening. And maybe that would be good for America. It's possible. Let art of the deal. Let art of the deal. Okay. Let's go through some timeline.

And Ben, if there's, there's any questions or reviews you want us to read, send those to the chat and I'll cut over to Jordy as we go through. But first, we got a promoted post from one of the favorite companies on the channel. I'll let you take this, Jordy. I'll let you take this, Jordy. I was a down now. I'm a co-founder of Rora. Rora makes beautiful, easy to use, highly effective water filters. I just thought this was a cool shot. Brian, CEO, posted this yesterday. It's just showing the same exact tap water coming out of NYC pipes, one on the left going through Aurora, one on the right, just sitting there, and you can just see the difference.

You can see the contamination of the water. So if you're drinking tap water, you've got heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, tons of stuff in it that you just don't want to be drinking. It's absolutely insane to drink tap water. I simply, I haven't, I drank tap water once in literally the last like five years. And it was actually at David Senra's event, not to throw David under the bus or anything, but I got back to my room and it was at a, you know, it was at this really cool retreat center. And I was like probably like a 20 minute walk from where I could get water and I didn't even know if it was open. So I drank tap water. I was like, it was, it was in Austin, which has notoriously bad tap water. And I was like, this is egregiously bad. Spit it out and just ended up, you know, it's going to bed. thirsty. But anyways, filter your water. Rora makes good filters. Highly recommend you check them out and feel free to DM me if you have any questions on it. Fantastic. And one, I've had multiple

calls now with technology brothers, listeners where I popped into the call and I already had their Rora in the background. So very, very awesome moment. Thank you for the support. You love to see it. Well, we got some major personnel news in the world of AI. Open AI co-founder John Schulman is joining Miramirati's startup after a brief stint and anthropic. The trade deals like the NFL. The Holy Trinity right here. Yeah, the Holy Trinity.

It really is like the NFL. I mean, these guys are bouncing around like crazy. And you never know if it's like, oh, it's AI safety. It was too dangerous. They were just too reckless. or it was just like, hey, I just didn't like working with those people or I wasn't getting comped right or, you know, something deal fell through. I wanted a different thing or I wanted to be more product focused or more research

focused. But everyone's excited about Mira. I mean, look at the pressure that Sam is under. Elon's attacking him to two of his former co-founders, Ilya and Mira, both have competing startups. He's competing with Anthropic, Deep Seek. It's not so often that, I mean, it happens, right, where you have a group of co-founders that build a big company and then one leaves and starts a competitor. But not in a while, and I certainly not in my memory, can I think of a time when a relatively new company that was already a multi-billion dollar company had two co-founders leave that each now have their own billion dollar companies that are generally competing for the same opportunities.

I think Ilya was in the news today this morning that he's raised. potentially raising new money at a $20 billion valuation. And so people are clearly bullish on the OpenAI founding team. And this is a big win for Mirror because you can imagine that John could have gone to Ilya's company as well. And so anyways, this is just a great time to be in the technology temple that is our studio and my remote studio. I love it. Yeah, it's fantastically dramatic. Like the weird thing that I never understood was like these departures are always framed as like indictments of open AI.

And yet it's like, okay, so you guys all don't like open AI, but you also don't like each other because otherwise you'd all just start a company together and you all started separate companies. And so clearly like the infighting at these companies is just crazy in many ways that we like the internal politics are much more complex than just like, oh, there's two sides to this issue. because like why, why aren't Mira and Ilya working together? Why did John Shulman leave Anthropic? Like, you would think that they would just be like the open AI and the anti-open AI. But instead it's like there's the anti-open AI and then there's a different one and this one's more about safety and this one's more about this and product and stuff. But either way, it's going to mean a lot of great AI products and I'm excited to try them all and let's see what happens. Yeah, it's really a crazy time.

I mean, when the pitch with AI right now, the reason to do. invest in a pre-revenue company at a $20 billion valuation is presumably because there's trillions of dollars on the line. And so that's causing individuals to say, hey, I could go join this company. I could go on a vacation or I could raise a one-on-five billion dollar pre-seed round. And that's go. That's pretty sweet. Let's go. And so I think there's actually somebody else that's joining Mirro's company. I know Dylan Patel was tweeting about this saying that he was very excited about the start up and thought that the talent aggregation was very impressive. Still, I'm mostly excited to see, like, how is the product going to take shape or be different?

Obviously, there's a lot of difference. There's already fragmentation at the model layer. Obviously, we see that within Open AI's model drop downs. There's reasoning models. There's web searching models. There's AI models, code models. Using Open AI right now is like opening up, you know, a drawer in your desk. that you just used to just jam a bunch of old papers in

and you're trying to look for one. And you're like just sometimes you want to just give up and slam the door back shut. But that's easier to figure out how to name your products than. I was thinking about how messy the naming scheme is. And I was like, this is bad. But at the same time, I think it could be worse, honestly, if they tried to give them all like cutesy branded names.

Like imagine if it was just like apple, pear, banana, like, sprinkles, like. you know ice cream and you'd be like which ones which at least i know like oh 1 03 like 03 like 03 is a bigger number therefore it's better and i can at least like click on that one and i'm sure open a i's plan internally is you won't pick the model yourself you'll ask what you you'll tell it to help you with something and it will just route it to the best model yeah based on the ask and so yeah maybe it's like you know very temporary yeah it seems very solvable that doesn't seem like an intractable problem whatsoever uh anyway

right we got some questions in the chat i just go through them what's you got for me uh Elliott elliott asked can you guys go over caterpillar earnings uh that's a good question i know nothing about caterpillar's business but i love uh i love uh i love the products that they make every time i i i've drive by one with my son he he calls it out so maybe we should do caterpillar earnings yeah yeah i love that in the group chat for uh for deep dives we'll be actually i would love to figure out how caterpillars benefiting from all the AI CAPEX because you could imagine if you have, you know, hundreds of billions of new data centers that need to get built, like that's potentially, you know, a big growth channel. So great call out, Elliot, we'll look and do it. And if it's

relevant, definitely cover it. A meet says when's the Anderil IPO? I don't think we can. They said not this year publicly. I think they said not 2025. But I'm sure there'll be plenty of exciting news between now and then. Stay tuned. And we promoted an Anderil job posting yesterday. So, you know, if you want exposure, pre-IPO, you got to put in the work. You got to just go to work there. The underrated way to get allocation into these companies is just go in and exercise your options immediately. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is probably easier right now to get a job at Anderill than buy anderil secondary. I was scrolling their jobs page. They have like a thousand jobs up. It's crazy how many jobs.

I thought it would be like, oh, like a quick scroll. It was like pages and pages and pages of jobs. So get on your grind, polish up that LinkedIn, polish up that resume, start, you know, being a reply guy to every. And in your cover letter, tell him the technology brother sent you. Exactly. Another question from F, S, F, F, F, R, which I presumably was he just slammed it in there to try to go to your username going. He says, is this live? And the answer is yes.

We're speaking to you live now. There's maybe a five second delay, but very live. We got another question from 5523. What are your thoughts on the UK's prospects for the future tech-wise? That's a better question for Harry Stebbings. He's on a mission to make Europe great again. So I'm wearing a shirt that looked, that had that on it. And yeah, I can't really.

like speak too clearly. I mean, I think that Europe has a lot of issues around tech regulation right now. I think part of the reason that the Figma deal didn't go through was they were facing pressure from European regulators, even though Adobe and Figma are both U.S. companies. They seem to have a number of issues, you know, looking at the data. There's maybe only a small handful of companies that have been started in Europe in the last like 50 years that are in the top 100 biggest companies in Europe. And so that just tells you that it's a tough environment to innovate in and create companies from zero to one. And so there's been some successes, the standout successes or the neobanks. I forget the name of the one that is done well over there. But overall,

you know, and the other thing is Indreason actually had made a big push into London around crypto because London was historically a financial center still is. And they, the UK government was making a push to create more friendly regulations around crypto and Dresen opened an office over there for that. But overall, I would say that if you want to build a high growth tech company and have the best chances of success, you're still better off, you know, moving to America or the Bay. Yeah. If you look at the, if you look at some historical data, I think from the top 20 largest companies by market cap, 100% of them have been created in U.S. and China. Yeah.

I think it's like, I think it's like 80, 20 U.S. And so unfortunately, Europe's just not in the conversation. You can certainly do entrepreneurship there and start companies, but in terms of these generational world-changing power law companies, they just aren't coming from anywhere but the U.S. and China. Yeah. Even China is making it difficult by, in many investment structures, the founders have to like basically,

put their house on the line where if the company doesn't work out, you know, the investors can can claw back. Yeah. And I mean, you can actually just go to Silicon Valley and start a company, raise money and grow and become an American citizen. This is a thing you can do. You just can't do that in China. Like there's never been a Chinese company that was not founded by a Chinese national. Yeah. Just impossible. Last question for now. And then I got a question for you, John. Also from FSFS. Is technology brothers, a VC firm? Great question. We are not. We are the number one daily show in tech. John and I do invest, though.

I've invested in 50 plus private companies. They're on my website plus a number that haven't been listed yet. And John's done a lot. And John also is an employee of Founders Fund, which is a small boutique venture capital firm based in here in the United States. So last question. This is for you, John. What's your sleep score? I heard you had a rough night.

but I got to put you, I got to put you in the spotlight. I don't have my eight sleep right now, and it's a real tragedy. Got to start traveling with it. Just take it on the road, but what do you got? So Thursday was fantastic. I was at 96, 100% quality, little low on the routine, but last night was rough.

90% quality for a final sleep score of 84. It's good, but it could be better. I'm trying to get to 100% every single day. day. It's good. It's probably, uh, probably better than the Doge team, which probably put up like three hours last night and, uh, you know, on the pods, but, but probably still not putting up big numbers on the sleep score side. But the experience has been fantastic. I've been super enjoying my wife's been loving it. It's just been amazing overall. And I can't say enough good things about it. I've really been loving it. Awesome. All right. Well, let's back to the timeline. Get back into the timeline.

line. We had a post from Wilmanitis, friend of the show, underrated how much of the success of early stage companies are determined by vibes and not fundamentals. Better vibes mean people will give you cheaper capital, work harder for less money, give your product the benefit of the doubts. Once the vibes go negative, I'm not sure we actually have the full quote. It's here. You are done. And then Lulu quotes it. This is timely because, so yesterday, Avi from Friend hosted a space because one of his competitors had a co-founder leave. And usually when a co-founder leaves early, people don't tend to jump off rocket ships. And so a lot of people were looking at that overall and saying, you know, hey, there's probably problems internally or maybe the,

products not doing as well as they hoped. And so Avi knows how to get attention. He immediately jumped on and hosted basically a space to kind of, I didn't, I listened for like two seconds, but imagine it was a little bit of dancing on their grave. But yeah, I think Lulu's been, like this is a part of her whole strategy with her firm. And so she's adding to this. She said, people think the purpose of comps is to release news and it is, but primarily it's for setting the vibes. And so I think that's very well said. It's really difficult to do. A lot of people associate vibes with taste because you have to have good taste to be able to consistently put out ideas and visuals and product releases and know how to leverage news and sort of make the story about

yourself in some way. And so it's very difficult to do, but it does give you a massive advantage. You know, I experienced this with my last company. I would have people DM me that were were incredibly talented. And like Dylan is a good example, who, who led our marketing and partnerships effort. He was at a bunch of great companies. He was very early at HQ Trivity, helped blow them up, then was at Postmates. And he reached out to me and said, hey, I want to talk. I haven't seen vibes like this since early HQ trivia days. And then I immediately, pretty much immediately, you know, gave him an offer to join. And he's still like a super close friend and went on to build a crypto company called Crypto the game and sold it. And so somebody like

that, he explicitly came because he was just like the vibes are good. I want to be a part of this. And so it's both Lulu and Will are very correct here. Yeah. And also, I mean, the important thing here is the early stage companies. In the late stage companies, once you've established the monopoly and the business and you're kind of Lindy, the vibes can go out the window and the profits can still print. Yeah, yeah, but, but, you know, we just talked about Amazon earnings. I would argue that Amazon doesn't have great vibes right now. The sellers hate Amazon, uh, users aren't excited about it. You know, like consumers are 40% is what I'm saying. Like, yeah, but I'm saying, I agree with you, but it just, it just matters a lot less. Like it matters less. Yeah, it matters. It matters so much

in the early stage. That's, like, sales force has terrible. Salesforce has terrible. vibes for our corner of X, but people like to go to their conferences and like listen to pop music. Let's go to Grant. He says, as a rule of thumb, you should spend more time writing the prompt than it takes the LLM slash agent to do it. I think that's a really good tip. And I think I got so burnt out on the here, 10 sick hack and amazing prompts and amazing tricks

to get something out of mid-journey or OpenAI or GPT-3, that I kind of got bored of all that and stopped paying attention. But with deep research, I've noticed that getting the prompt right really, really matters. But it's not just the actual instantiation of the words. It's the idea, like, what thesis are you bringing? What question are you trying to answer? What would require the agent actually to go and do a bunch of work and pull a bunch of data and then setting it up for success there, as opposed to just, oh, if you use

this word, you'll get a better result. Like for a long time, the prompting was like, think step by step or ignore previous instructions. And they were like these hacks. And I think we're kind of, we're kind of post that era and now into an era of, okay, you actually need to think critically, bring an interesting thesis. And in the AI agent, deep research or the reasoning model will help you substantiate that and support that with data. Yeah, I think I look at this and I draw a connection to when you're working with with junior uh junior level employees it's ends up paying dividends if you spend 10 minutes or a thoughtfully crafted email explaining exactly what you want how you want it done what success looks like and things like that and so you're just going to get a lot of better results out of that

and so i think what grant is saying here is it is a good rule of thumb i i also think that this will continue to change as the models understand you better and they just get faster, right? Yeah, totally. Because eventually it'll be like nearly instant where, you know, yeah, you're going to want to spend a minute prompt, you know, writing the proper prompt and then it'll do something that's like, you know, completely instant. So yeah. I mean, Dwar Khash Patel was talking about this too. He was saying that, you know, we don't spend, we will spend hours training a junior employee, but we refuse to spend 15 minutes really working on a fantastic LLM prompt. And then he shared a prompt

that was really robust, all for Gemini to help revise his show transcripts, and it gives bulleted lists of what he wants, what he doesn't want. It even includes an example of before and after exactly how to transform the data, and he really set the LLM up for success. And now he has a template that he can use for every single show, drop it in there and get a perfect transcript every single time. And that's just not going to happen if you just go in there and say, hey, clean this up because it doesn't really know what you want. And so, yeah, spend the the time to write a great prompt and you'll get great results. Let's move on. This is some drama in the hard tech world. Haas, the West's largest CNC machine tool provider was found in charge

for using shell companies to sell machines, parts, and services to China and Russia. And Cody James says, surprised to not to not see much news covering this. And Chris Power over at Hadrian gives it the throw up emoji. hit him with a throw-up emoji. I mean, so one, I saw this news and my first thought was, so this is why the Hoss F-1 team is absolute trash. It all comes back to karma, right? You know, they were trying to be worthy American team,

you know, cheer for us, you know, support, you know, support American F1. And meanwhile, you're selling CNC machines out the back door to our enemies. And I don't appreciate that. And so I will, you know, the next time I'm watching a race when they're getting, you know, 19th and 20th place and maybe not even finishing a DNF, I won't feel so bad. Maybe it's, maybe it's, but hey, I'm going Cadillac. Cadillac, Cadillac F1 team. It's happening. I'd like to see, I'd like to see Chris Power come in and, you know, LBO pass and,

And, you know, make Haskerate again. Yep, it'd be great to see. Yeah, we got to dig into this. I mean, it's pretty crazy to actually go and set up all these shell companies. Usually when this happened, it's kind of like we were more or less bamboozled by a shell company that was set up by a foreign adversary. We didn't do our homework. This is them proactively trying to sneak stuff out the back door. So bad.

So bad. So bad. Yeah. And, you know, if they keep doing stuff like this, I wouldn't be surprised of 10 years from now. Somebody makes a Haas, you know, cryptocurrency. Yeah, rough. Who knows?

I wonder how big the fine was. I wonder what the punishment will be. We'll have to dig into this more. Maybe do a full history of Haas. That would be a very interesting deep dive. I mean, at one point, certainly a fantastic hard tech company, probably lots of lessons to learn. Just got to keep the moral compass

at True North. Let's move on. We have a promoted post from Jeff Huber over at Croma. He's hiring a chief of staff to work directly with him. Highly recommend working with Jeff. Great guy.

They're launching Chroma Cloud and they're looking for chief of staff to help them build and scale the business. You'll work directly with Jeff, the CEO. This is Croma's first dedicated go-to-market hire your scope and responsibilities will reflect this. This is an exceptionally demanding high-velocity role.

He's looking for five years of experience in technical product, business operations or strategy roles, strong understanding of product-led growth principles, data-driven mindset, technical aptitude, excellent verbal and written communication and a great taste for design. Bit of a corporate athlete role, really. Love to see it. Jeff's also a smart guy looking at him, linking his, putting his link in the second post. numbers, that's the kind of guy you want to work for. You don't want to be working for somebody that's putting hashtags and links in their primary posts. Bad news. Not a lot of alpha there.

But anyways, great opportunity and great company. Yeah. So Chrome is a vector database, very useful tool in terms of AI and AI applications that maybe people don't often think of the really cool application that I was hearing about was the ability to just stuff a huge transcript or huge document into chroma and then run vector similarity with other documents. So you can imagine like there was a founder that was using this in a dating app. They have a huge intake form where they ask you all sorts of questions about what you're looking for. And then they can actually search over all that text for someone across the network who might be a good

match instead of just trying to match you based on height and you know whatever other you know hard coded metrics you you code in they can actually look really understand the responses who you are as a person what you're interested in your writing style and then match you across that and that's something that can that can happen in a in a rag retrieval augmented generation context very easily and so chrome has been on a tear they raised a bunch of money and Jeff's an absolute dog so I recommend hitting him up if you're interested. Let's go into some debate about Deepseek. I love this post.

Bojan asks, do people still use Deepseek? And Nikita Beer trimes in with some evidence. He says, yeah, my cousin Jimbo beer in West Virginia can really see the quality improvement over GPT. He heard about Deep Seek's performance from the town sheriff during Apple Appalachia AI Happy Hour. Appalachia, yeah. And I love it. And Prashat there says, can confirm I host the Appalachian AI Happy Hour.

And of course, Nikita is trolling. John, you normally leave me to botch words, Appalachia. Oh, yeah, Appalachia. But yeah, this is what we were saying the whole time. The chart was clearly not fully real. You know, I'm sure there was real. I'm sure there was people coming from TikTok, but I don't, I haven't heard anybody outside of teapot using Deep Seek, excited about it. I haven't seen on Instagram, haven't seen a single post about it or any type of content at all, really.

Yeah. And Nikita broke it down really well. TikTok's been warming the trend. They're doing a ton of promotion for this. They're trying to get more people to install the app. but they don't really have any viral loops yet. And it doesn't make sense that there would be a massive uptake that would be durable or sustainable. When you're going to be able to get similar results in WhatsApp and Instagram,

like you go to the Instagram search bar and you're talking to a pretty solid LLM in the form of Lama. And it's going to get better. The other thing that's interesting is I don't think the average chat GPT user cares about reasoning or would even really know how to really put it to use. Yeah. So for them, if you say, well, I have Chad GPT on my phone, I'm on the free plan, I get some value out of it. Oh, there's also a Chinese app that has Chinese characters as the developer name

in the app store that I can't even read. Oh, yeah, I'll just stick with Chad GPT, please. It's not a really good sell at the moment. Yeah. And as much as we make fun of the chat GPT app as being confusing with all the models, it is a more robust and better app than deep seek, just in terms of functionality. So image generation baked in and charts

and all these different PDF uploads we joke about. But it really is a more full-featured app just because they've been developing it for several more years. And so the deep seek is kind of like a rough clone, and there's a free version of the chat GPT app that it's going to be hard to get people to uninstall that. And then there's also Google AI summaries and AI is popping up in all these different places where there's already distribution.

So not super bullish on Deep Seek sticking around and breaking through in the way TikTok did. Yeah. Especially with all the pressure. Here's an interesting post from Cody James. He says, we should bring back how it's made. This show did more for America's skilled workforce than anything else. Post clearly resonated, 1.5K likes. And did you watch How It's Made Ever?

trying to remember it sounds really familiar but it might be slightly before my time as as an almost gen's year it was on uh i think discovery or one of those kind of the myth busters network and they would just show you okay we went to a factory that makes bubble gum and we're going to show you the ingredients going in goes into this machine gets extruded uh really nice cameras really uh like lots of slow motion, just really nice voiceover and some really cool music. And it was just really relaxing, really fun to watch. I loved watching this. And it actually came in super handy. When we were building the first, we were planning to build the first manufacturing line for Lucy Gum, Nicotine Gum. I literally watched how it's made on how to make gum. And I was like,

okay, taking notes. Like, okay, it goes in this machine. It goes in this machine. And it's remarkably like making pasta. You have a bunch of ingredients. You need it into a dough. Then you extrude it. Then you need to cool it and kind of bake it down. And then you coat it. And so and it's just like it's really just like four or five machines.

Each machine has a couple buttons. And yeah, you can hook it up to a computer. But really it's just like if you know how to turn it on, you know the right settings. You know that, oh, if you put this, you know, this flavoring in, you're going to run it for a little bit longer or you're going to need something else in there. And this is how like pretty much every product in the world is made. And I completely agree. We're getting a light version of this with the Jason Carmen documentaries. I got a chance to do a version of how it's made with George Hots because he has brought his entire manufacturing workflow in-house for comma AI, the aftermarket self-driving kit.

And so he has a machine that prints circuit boards and then a machine that puts transistors on the boards and assembles them. and then he takes it over to another place. We need George to get into the drone market. For sure. That would be amazing. Yeah. I mean, there's so many companies that need to be built. And unfortunately, it feels like far too few entrepreneurs that have the will and the ability to actually go and execute at scale and really get addicted to the grind of, okay, we're going to sell more and more and more and grow, grow.

We keep coming back to like, oh, there's a problem. like can Elon build a company around this? If not, we're screwed. Like Intel, it's got to be an Elon project or no one. And as much as I love Elon, it's like, it's kind of sad that we don't have like a deep roster of Elon's that can go and transform companies. But hopefully the next generation is it. Hopefully they get inspired by how it's might be too. Our listeners.

Bill different. Not ironically are. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Awesome. Let's move on. This is fantastic news. Palantir has officially reached mega, mega cap status today, surpassing a $250 billion market cap. The stock is absolutely ripping. It's massive. And Gary Tan

quotes it and says, I designed the logo for a mega cap 19 years ago. Overnight success sometimes takes two decades. That is so crazy. Insane. GT, GT, the absolute, absolute dog. And Ty Morris down there says time to update this thumbnail. It's a vlog of Gary saying that he, I believe he didn't stay at Palantir long enough to get all of his shares. And he says, it's the decision that cost him 200 million. Pretty sure Palantir was worth like 10 billion back then. And so you might need to add another zero to that.

But, you know, Gary has obviously gone on to do incredible things. and you know make it all back make it all back make it all back in the in the capital markets game and it's and it's still just like a fantastic story and a really inspiring story for early employees and a tale about joining a rocket ship identifying the right company getting in and and just riding it all the way to the top and so Gary's been super super generous sharing his insights on his YouTube channel now he's over at YC sharing more of those I'm sure sure he feels like he hasn't told these stories enough, but I'm glad that he's resurfacing some of these stories

because they are fantastic. Insane. Oh, this is some amazing breaking news. Saudi Arabia has asked the Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer to work on a new version of its national anthem. I am so excited about this. This is just incredible. It only happens to Saudi Arabia.

And I love that they're just like, yeah, we need a V2. Like no one should be so this this we should all we should commission new versions of the national anthem you don't actually have to be the actual country to commission a new version of your national anthem we could do we could do a you know we could create a Dow to make a new you know national anthem right let's get those crypto guys to put their you know dollars to work and create you know a hard asset like a like a like a banger version of the national anthem but I love it. I love that Hans is is a partnering up with the kingdom. It's gonna I cannot wait to hear this track. We'll do it live. We'll play it live on the show. React to it. Maybe, you know,

we're gonna be in the Middle East later this month. Maybe we could pop over and do a little listening party. Yeah. But it's great to see. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like there are plenty of national anthems that are iconic. You know,

people obviously know the American national anthem. but most people also know oh Canada and and there's a few others that stick out in people's mind Saudi Arabia hasn't charted top hasn't topped charts in a while most people can't sing it from heart and so get Hans Zimmer in there he did Inception he did the Dark Night he did Oppenheimer I think maybe yeah that was somebody else um black hawk blackhawk down too oh he did there's some crazy tracks on that uh yeah yeah i wanted to sound like inception really dramatic Saudi Arabia. Welcome to Saudi Arabia, Hans Zimmer.

I hope they play this at the airport just on repeat. What do you think the actual cost to get an okay track from Hans where he kind of looks in the bag catalog, he takes out some stuff that never quite got published. Yep. Because it'd be kind of cool to get the technology temple anthem, you know, a track that we could play while we're prepping the show and the studio. Yeah.

I think it's probably seven fags. It's probably up there, but it's doable for the right price. Hans Zimmer also, I mean, people, or John Williams has gotten a lot of criticism for kind of like remixing Gustav Holtz into Star Wars. And so, you know, a lot of it's just what, you know, you're standing on the shoulder of giants. What building blocks are you using to create the next classical banger? But Hans Zimmer's great. I think he did Dunkirk. And he's done a lot of interesting stuff with like burying.

the theme of the movie within the song. And so I'm genuinely very interested to see how he brings out the spirit of Saudi Arabia through. In the track. I'm excited. One thing that's interesting is so in UFC, when the UFC goes to the UK, fight on on like basically like Eastern Standard Time. And so the fighters have to fight at like 5, 6 a.m.

So they have to stay up the entire, imagine pulling in all. nighter and then having to fight a title fight. It's the most brutal thing ever. And there's a lot of English fans. And so people have complained about that and said, hey, we have a lot of fans here. You're making the fans and the fighters stay up the entire night to watch these fights. And when they fight in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, they fight perfectly at prime time and locally. Saudi time. Wow. So there was a UFC card. I think it was last Saturday. Yeah, it was Saturday and started at 9 a.m. Pacific. It was actually kind of nice for me. Yeah, that's great. It's like F1. F1, you're always up early and if you're in California.

But the Saudis absolutely mob the British fans by being like, no, when you have enough leverage, they'll do it at whatever time you want. It's a bad day to be a sports fan if you're not Saudi aligned. Didn't they take all the golfers to the Saudi? Yeah, that was, I guess, I guess a PGA and Trump are in conversations now. Bring you back? We'll see. Well, let's move on to a promoted post from Christie's real estate.

There's a breathtaking country chateau near Brantome set on 134 acres of tranquil, parkland, and forest. This would be a great pickup for anyone in the audience who's looking for a chateau. I really liked it because it has a lot of versatility. You can see massive turrets,

multiple stories, looks like a castle, and it has a pool. Great turrets on this one. I mean, not enough people take into account how many turrets they have when they're shopping for a home. And it's just such a amazing feature. One concern I have now even talking about this is that our friends over at Wander, Kyle and John, they listen to the show. And I'm guessing that they're listening live.

And I'm guessing that they're bidding on this thing already. And so if you're not listening to the show live, good luck picking this thing up because the wander guys are on a mission to get the best vacation rentals across the entire world in every single market. Yeah, so let's move through to the next slide. We got some close-ups of the turrets. We got the pool and you go inside and it's just loud opulence everywhere you look. Amazing.

It looks like it could use a little bit of a pick-me-up. A little bit of a maybe not a remodel, but a sort of refurbishment. I think you throw an eight sleep on the floor and you're good. What else do you need? Yeah. In your, there you go. All you need is an eight sleep and a dream. In your Renaissance castle.

A great place for off-sites. Great place to have the whole crew while you're building the startup. Get a chateau. The country chateau. So, yeah, if you're looking for a chateau, go to Christie's real estate. Tell them the technology brother sent you. And then, you know, while you're not there, throw it on wander. Make it a little couple extra bucks.

There you go. That's the real play. Yeah. All right. I threw this in. Okay. I'm tearing up right now. Okay.

Break it. Oh, yeah. It's rough. So, anyways, so the news is that every Quicksilver billabong and Volcom store in the United States will close. And it's very sad. We had a quicksilver in Malibu that shut down. And if you're a surf apparel store and you can't stay in business. on PCH in Malibu that just says that there's so little demand for surf apparel now.

And so to give some backstory, because I don't think I've talked about it on the show, I grew up an avid surfer in California, went to UCSB because the surf was good to be on the surf team. And so I competed on the team. And I actually worked at a surf store in high school. And even then I could tell that surf culture was fading. quickly from relevancy. It used to be that, you know, young kids in Ohio wanted to wear surf apparel because, like, surfing was cool. And then skateboarding really, uh, rug pulled surfing. That became more of the sort of dominant, uh, culture, at least in apparel. And then streetwear was really the death knell for, uh, surf, the surf apparel industry because kids now want to wear babe and, uh, you know, Supreme and, you know, Nike, things like that. And so, Anyways, the surf apparel industry is in a rough spot.

I mean, I'm sure the brands will survive. It's just more so. Athleisure is the other big trend, right? So dads might have been, you know, wearing Quicksilver shorts and shirts, and now they're wearing Blue Lemon or what's the other one that I don't wear athleisure, so I can't even think of it. Worry. Worry.

Worry is the other one. Yeah, those, those brands like just really dominate that. I mean, there's a beautiful Hawaiian shirt right there in that image. Palmer Lucky should pick this up. It can be his next mod retro. Yeah. He should pick up Quicksilver, Bilbaugh and Volcom, turn him around, just, you know, start printing. Make it great.

Yeah. I'd love to see it. Yeah, and it's this. I've talked about this on the show before. My roommate in, in college, Pierce, incredible. surfer easily could have gone pro, but his parents forced him to get an education and go to go to high school and college. But I swear he has, he now is able, he's in real estate. He's able to work all over the world. He's like constantly surfing in different places while having a

real career. And so he's getting the last laugh as a sort of surf industry collapses and a lot of the, you know, salaries that were paid to surfers historically for endorsement deals have dried up. And So anyways, sad, sad moment, but I think a lot of people saw it come out. Art Club says pouring one out for my seventh grade wardrobe. And Josh Steinman says, Jinko. Let's go to Catherine Boyle. She says, it's crazy how good the internet is right now. Best season ever.

And Carter says, X is the movie theater. Couldn't agree more. Having tons of fun on the timeline. never a dull moment and never a lack of content for our show. Yeah, I swear we've had consistently a new current thing every 48 hours this year and it's fantastic. I mean, part of that is the Trump effect. In 2016, I kind of, I was in college. I had like work in my business. I just kind of like tuned out a lot of that stuff. But this is exactly what happened back then where every single day he just sort of dominates mind share in the news cycle.

And it's been interesting now having JD there and Doge and some of these like bigger initiatives that, and having that you have the AI activity as well. It's just kind of creating this sort of vortex, this attention vortex. And yeah, I think I think many people are saying it's just going to keep accelerating. I completely agree. I completely agree. Let's go to Brandon Jacoby over at X. Jacobi, he's on the timeline.

He says, I can't say why exactly, but I need you to like this post. And it's a banger. He got almost 5,000 likes. Jacobi. You know, the steel man here is that, oh, he's a designer at X. He's testing the algorithm. He's testing some feature in prod. No, I think he's just farming.

He's just farming likes trying to grow his account. He's farming. Trying to, you know, get that greater monetization check going, print some Elon Bucks. Yeah, this is, this is a, this looks like insider trading on the, on the creator payouts. Yeah. I'm going to use my, I'm totally joking. It's funny. I asked Tyler and Jacoby if, if I could record live from the X studios or the X office in New York on, on Tuesday, they've yet to get back to me.

They said they, they said that it's pretty tight, security wise over there. So I can't have, they can't have newscasters. just stroll in the halls recording, you know, live shows. But we'll see. Maybe we make it happen. Yep. Well, whatever he did, it worked. And if you're ever in need of a pickup and a banger, just just copy paste this, throw in the queue. Your notifications will be popping off. And, you know, I think this is a tried and true format, almost like he was so real for this with a screenshot of a banger. It works every time. Let's go to Link. Link says day two. of my 1K to 50K challenge and the portfolio is down 99.75%. And Link, which started with 1K,

has $55.98. And so, you know, you just need a, you just need a thousand bagger now. Originally you need a 50 bagger. Now you need a thousand bagger. You know, dust yourself off, get back on the horse. I believe in you, Link. I want to see what happens. I know whatever's going on. I don't even know this app, but I know it's DGen just from looking at the UI design. I know you're trading some sort of coins. That's Phantom. Okay. Yeah, there you go. And you know that this is not, that this is not, that this happened very quickly. And this is his 10th account to be clear. Oh, yeah. Count 10. He's got a bunch of, bunch of wallets gone. So I mean, yeah, most people would say, oh, I'm down 99.75%. You know, it's hopeless. I should just give up now. But 99. 99.5%. You know, it's hopeless. I should

just give up now, but 99% of people actually quit right now. And so take your 55 bucks, write it back up. Hit the timeline and run it back up to 50K. I posted, I hadn't actually seen this until you shared it, but I posted today, we need a McDonald's challenge in crypto where a bunch of contestants, they each get 25K. They've got some amount of time to turn it into a million. And if they're successful, you know, great. If they, if they lose the money, they have to go get a job at McDonald's and just use those paychecks to pay back the 25K, which I imagine would take, unless you got a nice, a cushy management role. It'd probably take you a good year, just putting the fries in the bag, bro. Yeah, I like that. That's a good one. Hopefully that pops off.

Well, let's go to another promoted post from NASDAQ, good friend of the show, good friend of Ramp. run that wonderful billboard that partner with ad quick ad quick talks to nasdaq they own that beautiful billboard in times square they'll throw your brand up there so call ad quick if you're looking for some promotion out in the real world it's the way to make an impact online you go i'll say this you throw your brand on the big billboard you take a selfie with it Elon retweets it next thing you know you got 10k likes what you got jordy i will i'll put a little uh note out there if you want to run an ad quick billboard in Times Square at any point in the next year, DM me.

I'll spend 30 minutes with you on Zoom and work on the creative. I love doing out-of-home ads. And so a little free marketing support for you. And it's completely power law-driven. Like the difference between just what a few words on a billboard say completely change it from being, oh, there's a billboard there to I need to take a picture of that, put that on social media, and it goes viral. And so you really can't underappreciate and undercount how important dialing in the copy

and dialing in the messaging and the imagery and the design of that billboard. Because if your message is iconic and it resonates, it's going to go so far. And you're going to get incredible ROI on that out-of-home spend. And so highly recommend it. But the reason we're talking about this is because NASDAQ, they went to the World Economic Forum in 2025 in Davos. we've said that we're going to make Davos great again as soon as they give us a call and let us host it. Executives discussed the economic outlook and cutting through complexity with media and industry leaders across BCG Tenio, IIF and CNBC with special guests, Simone Biles, and Man United. You're only going to get that kind of lineup at Davos and NASDAQ is there to host it.

low tam banger at least at the time of screenshot four likes few retweets um i guess they're making it difficult to engage only accounts that nazac follows or mentioned can reply but i know why that is yeah coins you know that you know that anytime they post someone was like i let me put a pumped out fun on here uh you know if you want exposure to nasdaq w e f get this token not financial advice do not buy thing ever. But we love NASDAQ. We love companies on the NASDAQ. And we support

the NASDAQ. So thank you to NASDAQ. Let's move on to another Ramp post. This one, just from a fan. They say, I would love to see Ramp produce a Spotify-esque wrapped report. Some

ideas. Your top reimbursors for the year. Simon spent X dollars on his ramp card. the engineers expensed X dollars on Postmates. I think this is a great idea, not just to go viral, but actually to understand how the money's flowing around your business. A lot of times when you close the books, what you're doing digging into below, like, different cost line items on the P&L, it's to find weird things that are happening.

And a wrapped type product would be a great user experience to make it actually fun to dig into the different parts of your business and understand, oh, like, what's really driving revenue growth. Where's our marketing spend going? Where are we spending too much on travel and entertainment or, you know, office supplies? Any of that stuff could be really well surfaced through AI, through even just normal algorithms, just figuring out what's going on, showing me a couple trends, but just surface this, you know, ramp is, you know, I like to think of it as machine god in your CFO's Chrome tab. And we need more products that make it easy to understand what's going on in your business and that's why we love ramp here.

Ram. Ram. On to the next. On to the next one. Ready to do that one. Should we talk about Sahil, La Viniga? Levinga? Lavinja.

Let's do it. He says no longer hiring junior or even mid-level software engineers. And he breaks down how many tokens are in each of his code basis. Gumroad is just two million tokens. Flexile is 800K, helpers, 500K. if he's 200k and shortest is 100k. Both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and O3Mini now have context windows of 200K tokens,

meaning they can now write 100% of our iffy and shortest code if prompted well. It won't be long until AI will be writing all the code for helper, fixile, and gum road. My guess is by the end of 2026 when these models get bigger and their context windows get bigger. And so his new process, step one,

he sits and chats about what he needs to build, doing research with deep research as he goes. then he has AI record everything and turn it into a spec. Then he cleans up the spec adding any design requirements or other nuances. Then he has Devin coded up. We're big good friends with cognition. Love that Devin's helping out here. And then step five is QA, merge and auto deploy to prod.

And so he is just having a great time with AI tools. And it's great to see a CEO of a company that has a couple different products, a couple different code bases actually break down the workflow. One cool thing here. You talked earlier about how CEO like Zuckerberg just says like, this is my company. I have control. I'm just going to do everything that I want to do under this umbrella. Yep. Seheel is doing the exact same thing with Gumroad. He's basically built out a number of different products or business lines under Gumroad, which is, yeah, I'm sure everybody's familiar at this point, but an easy way to sort of buy and sell digital products.

online. And so he's now building out these other products that help him build gum road and then making those individual products available to everybody else. So they have some type of like contractor payments product. They have a help desk product that he's talking about here. So I'm pretty sure he raised VC money very early. He started the company very young. He was I think an all star intern at Pinterest and then raised a bunch of money. And then I think he was able to buy out the VCs at one point and of get more control over the company or something. And now he runs it kind of like a lifestyle business, but that's not meant to be a pejorative.

He just has control and he's been building exactly what he wants and growing the business in very interesting ways. Unfortunately, documenting it all right in public. He's not quite building in public, but there's a lot of good stuff that comes out of his account. Yeah, and he did a very high profile crowd fund, I think, must have been 2022. That's right.

Very small, very, very small shareholder in that. Oh, cool. So I was excited to see where he takes it. Well, let's move on to Tray Stevens, answering a very interesting question because Trey worked at Palantir with Alex Karp and Chase asks Trey, what was it like working day to day with Karp? I'm so curious. And Trey says, well, one time my buddy and I were who went to Notre Dame in Georgetown

respectively were with Alex Karp after a great customer meeting and during a moment of silence. He said, great job, guys. You think we should be recruiting more people like you from second tier universities? That's mostly what it was like. It's so funny. Carp's just talking trash, talking trash in the boardroom. But it worked out. He got great results from his crew. Yeah, and he's still talking smack this time from earnings calls. We love to, we love to watch. Yeah. And Tim Ronan, who is there, says Carpe Die him with a K. And Trey says, you remember this right? I don't think I was hallucinating.

Such a funny post. And just a great culture, you know, just guys, guys being guys talking trash in the office. I'm sure it makes everyone grind harder. Way better than, you know, my boss can't make fun of me. I couldn't possibly withstand that. No, you know, you got to have some sharp elbows. You've got to have some fun sometimes. So we love to see it.

Let's go to Phil Mickelson. Phil Mickelson said, I would, is this the actual Phil Mickelson? I think so. He says, I would just like to say Sesame Street is an excellent show. Iraqis deserve to have it. And although production costs were under 500K, shooting on site required $19.5 million to insure. Okay. This is from the USAID stuff, right? Yeah, there was a USAID payment for $20 million to produce a Sesame Street for, Iraq. Yep. And so Phil's just backing him up. He says Sesame Street's an excellent show and Iraqis deserved to have it. So I think, uh, yeah, standing up against. I talked about this on the Pirate Wire's show, uh, and, uh, and it's a pretty hilarious story. What's weird to me is like, why did they

need to shoot Sesame Street in Iraq? Like, why not just take our Sesame Street, translate it, and then just broadcast it over the air or just send them the files and be like, you, can distribute this now. It's in your language. Instead, they had to localize it and shoot it there on site, which is crazy to me. I like how he falls this up and says, because sarcasm is just completely lost on X. If you ever post something sarcastic, you'll understand. But Bill replies, I'm curious how many people will think I'm serious. And then he replies again, turns out quite a few. Yep. Wild story. But you love to see Bill Nicholson on the timeline dipping back in. Not your typical teapot poster, but still got it.

Got some good humor. Oh, got it. Having fun, waiting into it. Let's go to Coin Telegraph. Just in. Pump. Dot Fun hit with a cease and desist from Berwick Law ordered to remove 200 plus IP infringing meme coins. And, you know, I don't know, we could be a plaintiff in this case.

Someone made a pump dot fun meme coin all about us trying to steal our idea and our branding. Well, yeah, to be clear, they made. a coin, we had talked about LVMH being a good proxy for T.D because we think a lot of people in tech are going to be big LVMH buyers in the future. And it was said purely for entertainment, but somebody turned it into a meme coin. And then in the description on Pump.combe-Up Fun was saying that it was affiliated with us, which it clearly was not. But the funny thing about this post is that you can't just remove tokens from the blockchain. I guess Pump Fund could stop showing tokens that have IP infringement.

Yeah, they can block them at the web two layer, but not at the web three layer. Yeah, the tokens are still going to be there, still able to be traded. And yeah, it's just one of those things that companies have to. I mean, the NFT marketplaces went through the same thing where there were, you know, really crazy IP infringing NFTs and some were very offensive and there were a lot of NSFW NFTs and a lot of spam NFTs. And so OpenC and the other marketplace has created essentially views and filters on top of people's wallets to only show certain products. And then obviously only highly certain products in the store. It seems like that's something that

humpfond should do in the sense that there was a TikTok token and it had nothing to do TikTok. It was just, and you had a guy from Trump's team or some organization funded, you know, I don't know, part of that whole, that whole world. He was promoting it. So I think that there is a real risk for consumers to, you know, think that it's somehow associated with TikTok and maybe they're buying it. But that being said, people need to do their own research and think, hey, is a Chinese company that's under immense scrutiny right now in the U.S. launching a crypto token, even though they make billions of dollars a year? Probably not. Well, thank you to Berwick for your service, and we're happy to support you if you need

extra evidence of what's going on in the IP infringing meme token space. We will be on the witness stand. We'll call up, we'll call up Bernard Arnau. Yeah, get him in that. I would be happy to stand on the, take the stand next to Bernard in defensive, valuable intellectual property. Let's go back to GT, the man, the myth, the legend, the president of Ycombinator, Gary Tan. He says, that is merely the average at YC these days thanks to AI. He's quote tweeting, Yuri, who says, overheard from a series C founder. We are experiencing YC level growth numbers 10% per week. Let's go. I love it. insane.

Yeah, I posted earlier this week that YC is just such an obvious beneficiary of AI for a few reasons. One, you can just build things faster than ever, so the three-month period that YC typically takes place in, they can just make so, you know, these teams can make so much more progress. Two, teams need to hire less people because they can use AI to just be way more efficient. And then three, these companies are, so I'm going to give you. before actually, but one is that the potential applicant pool has exploded so much because people that didn't think of themselves as developers can now develop software. And then the last being that now that it's cheaper to build software, we're going to want more of it. So I talked to a team yesterday that's doing something in sort of retail more consumer packaged goods and they're

building software as part of their business because they now can do something with one engineer that would have taken them, you know, a pretty significant team historically. So very cool to see. That's great. And Gary, if you're listening, let the Technology Brothers host a live stream for Demo Day. We want to review all the all the startups, pump them all. Yeah, right now, they work with TechCrunch. Give us the press pass. Yeah. We want to be the press pass. And we will put the companies on. Yeah, it'll be great. I think we may get very entertaining. We'll stream it on Axe, YouTube. We'll bring a lot of entertainment to YC Demo Day.

Be great. Let's go to Zach. He says, if you're not coming close to being yourself at your desk, you are not obsessed with what you do. And this really resonated for me because oftentimes we'll finish recording. And it's getting hairy, you know, it's getting close. No, I think this is just a sign that you're working on something that you're really excited about. if you're working on something that bores you and you, uh, and you have, you feel like you need to go

to the bathroom, you'll just get up and do it. If you're working on something that's stimulating. Yeah. You know, you probably let it go a little longer than you should. So yeah. And Lucas here says, dude's so locked in, he got a catheter. Yeah. Zach says he'd consider it. Yeah. Yeah. I, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Doge boys got catheters in so they can just stay, stay in front of the computer you know grind never stops the grind never slops either perfect Freudian slip I suppose let's go to Josh Steinman friend of the show been on many times you know him you love him he says this exactly and the bridge from the idea to results the gap is being cool and the solution is being cringe and so you can't be afraid of

being cringe to grind towards your results. Yeah. They're only going to be, you're only going to be remembered by what you accomplished. So if you need to be cringe to accomplish something, that to me says that cringe is cool. Cringe is bad. I mean, the flip on this, like, cringe is like, it's such a charged word, but it's more just like putting yourself out there. Like, even just asking your first customer to go from a free trial to paid, it kind of triggers that. cringe feeling of like, oh, I'm putting myself out there. I'm asking for something. I'm asking for a favor. I'm asking for something that I might see. I might, there's, there's like downside personal ego risk. And so I think that's really the abstraction layer here of, of even just telling your

family, I'm going to start a company and I've never started a company before. That is in many ways, in some circles, like cringe, like, why don't you go be a lawyer? Why don't you go be a doctor? And you have to be willing to put yourself out there and take that that ego risk and that's what cringe is it's not necessarily actually just like when people think cringe they think like posting slop threads on X that is cringe but that's not what we're talking about here i think you nailed it you have to be willing to be successful you have to take ego risk yes all that long for years right a very small example is us transitioning from a recorded show to a live show it was a bit of a hurdle suddenly everything we say is is immediately, you know, public.

Thankfully, we never talk about politics or social issues, just purely about business. It makes it a little bit easier. But yeah, you got to be willing to be cringe. And Steinman even, he's notorious for posting the same idea over and over and over. And a lot of people would say, well, it's cringe to say the same thing over and over. But he made it part of his brand. And I actually think it's cool now because he's just saying these ideas are important.

to me. I'm just going to keep posting through it. Yeah, he's gotten results. The man has gotten results. It's fantastic. We got a couple more posts in the timeline. We got five more minutes. L.M. over at Klinea Perkins, one of the Holy Trinity firms in the Valley says product exec at startup in response to code gen tools. I told my PMs, we are done with specs or PRDs, prototypes only. And so you're on notice PMs. if you're not building prototypes, you're not going to be working for this product, exact at this particular startup, even though it's anonymized. Yeah, but interesting. Makes sense.

Yeah, I saw T.J. Parker posts that the entire time they were building, uh, it was, what was his company again? Pell Pact. Yeah. Yeah, Pell Pact. Sorry, I thought I was getting confused. The entire time they were doing that, they didn't have any PMS, it was just designers and engineers. Wow.

And so I think that there was, at, at some point, over the last 10 years, it was very, it was a, almost like controversial is to be like we're not going to have any product managers and i do think now um you know we still need people to um yeah it'll be interesting to see how it plays out maybe it's designers that code and then you have like operations people or vice versa but anyways the flip side of this is what do you do with your pms who can't build prototypes can't design can't engineer and my idea is you send him to the pool and you get them making tic-toks they go viral because it's insane rage bait and then everyone learns about your company and they're like wow this company so dysfunctional you're playing 40 chess your PMS are now marketers for your company

yeah your PMs just become your marketing budget so however much you're spending on PMS that's what you would have spent on ads and if they ate people properly uh you'll get way more impressions than you know whatever you would have so PMs either you're in you're in Devon you're in Windsurf building prototypes or you're at the pool and you're opening up TikTok. So there you go. Now in between. No in between. Stop writing PRD's prototypes only. And that concludes the timeline for today. We are on schedule two minutes early. This is a fantastic show. Leave us five star review on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Please leave an ad in your review. We will read it out on the show. And just thanks everyone who tuned in. Thanks for watching.

Thanks for being part of this community, the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood. International Technology Brotherhood. And we will see you Monday. We have five more days of content plan next week. Lots of clips going out. Follow us on X. TBPN on X.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Add it to your Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Review us everywhere. Send it to your mother. We specifically have eliminated swearing from the show so that, you know, your mother won't be, you know, embarrassed to hear you listening to people with a potty mouth. Yeah. I do have a rant about the free speech thing that's going on. There's a lot of people that are saying more and more aggressive things.

And then there's a question about, will there be accountability for this? What's the free speech thing? And I just think going back, I need to coin something around this, Kugan's Law, but I've been calling it the what would your mother think rule? And I think that in the age of truly free speech, you're not going to be, this is America. this isn't Europe, you're not going to be put in prison for your speech. And also the platforms are extremely forgiving. There's very little censorship now.

You might get community noted, but you can kind of say whatever you want. And so it's incumbent upon you as an individual and as an upstanding member of society to not police yourself, but just act with honor. And the heuristic that I think serves us best is what would your mother think? What would your mother say? And so that applies to the language. that you use to the ideas that you espouse. And just if you're being a nasty vitriolic person

and your mother wouldn't approve of that, maybe you shouldn't do that at all. Maybe you should be going golden retriever mode and trying to be friendlier. And so that's how I'll end the show. Well said. Thanks everyone for watching. Thank you.

We'll see you Monday.