TBPN - Back in the Truth Zone, Exponential Growth Continues, Athleisure is Out, Brothers Don't Use NDA's

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - - Back in the Truth Zone (13:54) - - DM's (Can a Canadian living in China be a TB?) (22:43) - - Exponential Growth continues (25:06) - - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are putting my good friend Teddy Schleifer in the truth zone. If you don't know, Teddy, he's a journalist. He hit me up and said, hey, I'm writing something about this secretive gathering of rising Maga donors in Las Vegas. I heard you're there. I ran into him there. I said, cool, send me your website.

I want to check it out. I love substacks. He sends me this URL. I hadn't seen it before. NYTimes.com and I went and checked it out. It's kind of like a kind of like an extreme left Pachy McCormick like they do the news. It's kind of like a substack. You can subscribe. But it's all very pessimist instead of techno optimist, which is kind of cool. It's like very different. It's like the opposite of Pachy. They had a big issue with their tech team sort of rebelling.

Yeah, that's right. It was a pet bereavement issue. Yeah. Yeah. But what what is cool, And I was on the fence about talking to him because of kind of the vibe of the whole website. But then I saw on their website, you can pay them to print out the website and mail it to you. No way. Yeah. And we love printing stuff. I love printing stuff. So then I was like, I'm in.

Teddy. No brainer at that point. So I run into him. We chat a little bit at the event and he broke it down. He says, new from Vegas. I went to the Rockbridge Network Fall Summit last week, fun times. Featuring, it's funny because he did go, but he didn't have a ticket, so he couldn't go inside. No way.

So he was just hanging out in the, in like the bar area talking to people. It was very Seymour Hirsch. Was it kind of like, it was kind of like a Project Veritas approach? No, no, no, no, no. It wasn't like that. He was very upfront with who he was and he was shaking hands and introducing himself. It was very aboveboard. But he had like, you know, you know when journalists go into war zones and they have like a helmet on? And they have, and they have like a vest and it says like press or whatever. Did he have that on? He didn't have a press pass.

He didn't have. He could have been lying to people, but he was not. He was, he was just hanging out. People were happy to talk to him, honestly. Like, I think that there was nothing that crazy going on. And he's on like kind of the Elon Musk,

the tech politics beat. And so he wanted to talk to all the tech people who were at this event trying to cross over. So it was featuring Rebecca Mercer, Donald Trump Jr., Susie Wiles, friends of Elon. me sick and an ascendant part of the republican donor universe i did not donate i did not donate but i did get in which was cool but we got to put him in the truth zone true zone on this show we do not

allow any any fibs any clipping any taking out of context and so teddy you're going in the truth zone buddy we at this show we like to trust the experts yes and those are people like joe rogan Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman. Yes, Packing McCormick, right? Chris Williamson, Sean Puri, Sothill Bloom. Trust the experts. The experts aren't with us today,

but we'll try to, you know, sort of... We'll channel the experts. Channel the experts. Channel the experts. And so he writes, the title of the article that he wrote was, behind the scenes at a secret gathering of rising Magadowners,

just four days after being named the next White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was waiting patiently for an expressive drink at a five-star hotel in Las Vegas. Overnight, she had become one of the most powerful people in America. The value of a minute of her time could not be higher during the presidential transition. Republican strivers are hounding her for desirable gigs.

And back at Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald J. Trump has been courting controversy with his picks. Yet, here she was, thousands of miles away, flanked only by a security guard, alone in line at a four-season coffee shop. She had just peeled... You notice how he's saying, she's not at the actual event because he's at the coffee shop. Yeah. He's hunting around. Yeah. I love that. He really, he really

did just show up there. I'm waiting for him to say I ordered espresso martinis for two because it was past noon and we were ready for a power lunch. Yeah. But I love that. I don't know if he got there. And so he goes on to say the group, this is all for the Rockbridge Network. He said it was co-founded five years ago by

J.D. Vance. Sprouted an informal set of dinners into a powerful coalition of Republican donors who have given more than $100 million to Rockbridge projects. since 2019, according to a person close to the group. And so this is just an interesting just lesson for founders or anyone who's doing anything with the press.

There are kind of three tiers of like talking to a reporter. Are you familiar with this? Yeah. So the base level is like, is like off the record. Like you can't quote me. You can't, you can't say a person familiar with the matter. But I'm giving you this information. And then hopefully you can go and use it to write a better story.

a better story, exactly. And it's pretty safe to speak on background or off the record. Yeah, I think there's this general, I think there's this general fear of journalists within tech. Yep. But tech is world wrestling now. Yeah, yeah. So we need heels and that's where the journalists are filling in right now. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and the thing I would say is every technology journalist, and I think we should call them technology journalist just because tech has broadly been used as a slur. Sure. But technology journalists that I've spoken to have been incredibly respectful of the ground rules of journalism, which are off the record, on background, on record.

So this is an example of someone talking on background. It says a person close to the group gave them or gave Teddy the information that they have raised more than $100 million. And so they didn't want to be named. but they were okay with that making it into the article. And this is all in service of helping lead Silicon Valley's march to the right. For Rockbridge, Mr. Vance's election as vice president was a crowning achievement and a tantalizing opportunity to wield new national influence.

But Rockbridge has largely kept its activities stealthy, mindful of how groups of wealthy conservatives like the Koch network have drawn attacks from both liberal detractors and Republican wannabes. This is the don't build in public thing. Yep. You know? Never build in public. Never build in public.

So as a caravan of black SUVs shuttled in the billionaires from their private jets last week, members of the Rockbridge roster could be spotted around the hotel. Rebecca Mercer, the Republican, the sion of one of the most prolific

Republican donor families, greed well-wishers in the lobby. Ken Howary and Luke Nocic, shout out, love those guys, former partners at Founders Fund, co-founders of the firm, and they worked with Elon Musk at PayPal, made them mega wealthy themselves.

themselves. And we were actually, Teddy and the three of us were all hanging out. I did not get a chance to talk to Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, but they were there. And he describes them as the six foot five cryptocurrency investors and former Harvard heavyweight rowers made famous in the social network. They do not get enough credit for reinventing themselves and running it back in like a massive way. And it's honestly, if companies like Coinbase were not so dominant from a narrative standpoint, they would get even more credit. Like, like, they in many ways were cucked again by Brian Arshon. To some degree.

And they did, they did do a good job of, uh, of just believing in crypto, like very early in, totally, a ton of it. Early and right.

Yep. Uh, attendees with white and red gift bags and lanyards. I didn't get a gift bag. I had a lanyard. Brutal. That's brutal. Uh,

knew how to be closed lipped when approached by hotel interlopers or by the Times reporter. He's just like referencing himself. I love this. Who was not invited to closed press. festivities. I like these. But a copy of the agenda

listed remarks by several tech billionaires including Anderol co-founder, Palmer Lucky, and venture capitalist Mark Andrescent, who spoke about his support for deregulating technology and the mixed reaction in Silicon Valley to his endorsement of Mr. Trump, according to attendees. There were tech up-and-comers, too. Donald Trump, Jr., announced at the welcome dinner

that he was entering venture capital. And days before the president-elect chose Robert F. Kennedy for Health and Human Service Secretary, Mr. Kennedy spoke extensively about his public health work to a standing ovation. It's the domestic Davos in the desert, said Rockbridge Bracker backer, Omed Malik, referring to the annual business conference in Riyadh and Donald Trump's Jr.'s new business partner. That's interesting because, yeah, Om Malik ran Gigga-Oam for a long time, big media guy and the big investor.

I'm pretty sure. I might be getting that wrong, but it makes sense that the next Davos is in America in Los Vegas. I like it. I like it. Yeah, it's good. But the reason that I wanted to put Teddy in the truth zone is that I'm in this article and he quoted me and he cuts some very important stuff out. So let's read. He says generally, this is a quote from me in the Times. He says generally, or I say, generally everyone at Rockbridge was very happy that technologists and politicians are working together directly again and not openly hostile toward each other. This is just kind of what I felt in the room.

Hogan, who attended. It's no longer a question of whether technology will drive the future, but how we guide its impact, so it makes sense that tech billionaires and the political elite are partying together, which I liked. But that's not what I said, Teddy. I, I said something. I had another line in here. I said, Rockbridge was a stark reminder that the march of techno-capitalism is unrelenting, reshaping every aspect of our society. It is no longer a question of whether technology will drive the future, but how we guide its impact. So it makes sense that tech billionaires and the political elite are partying together. And he took out the techno-capitalism is unrelenting part.

And I don't know why. I do not know why. But, no, I of course gave him a bunch of different quotes and he chose whatever he wanted and that's fine. But I wanted to give you the full story here. Unfiltered, in the truth zone. Stay tuned. Trust the experts. But Rockbridge has grown significantly.

They used to let prospective members attend for just 5,000. it's 25,000, although some people said privately that they had been able to get in for less. They're giving it away, basically. The cost to be a limited partner is 100K, and the cost to be a principal partner is a million. Now, that's a status symbol. We should do a promoted post for them, get some people in there. Yep. But in general, you know, we never, we actually never talk about politics on this show, but...

Or social issues. Yeah, or social issues. But I do think it's good that technology. and politicians are talking to each other again and figuring out how to reform the government, regulate, and do all sorts of stuff. So as a technology brother, it's great to see the politics brothers

doing good work and the technology brothers convening with them in Las Vegas. It's fantastic. So anyway, that wraps up the truth zone. We are moving on to our next segment. What do we have, Jordi? So today, big size gong moment. Fabian, Pind.

Pink hairs. Okay. Fabian pink hairs is announcing a 500 million million. I was going to say dollars, but then I caught the symbol here, 500 million euro investment in Udu at a

5 billion euro valuation which has been led by Capital G and Sequoia Capital along with top investors like Mubadala and BlackRock. He notes here that it is a secondary transaction, no money for company as we don't need it. We grow organically.

Wow. Statement. He says, I didn't sell kept the majority. So at this point, we're not exactly clear if he didn't, if he means he didn't sell the company or if he didn't sell shares, but either way, a $500 million investment, does that, can we hit the size gong for euros? Or is that a, I would love to hit the size gone. Clearly, this is a huge deal. But I think, I think we got to keep the size gong. Would it be? It would be un-American. It would be un-American to run it for euros. But I mean, I love Andrew Reed at Sequoia, one of the Holy Trinity firms. No one loves Sequoia more than I do. And he's been a fantastic investor. He's in Figma. He's in this company. And it's interesting because I hadn't really

heard of them. And then as soon as I saw this, and we've discussed talking about this, I saw, I saw Billboard just driving around Los Angeles for this company. And their tagline was like, the only business software you'll ever need. And so I think that they've just really carved out a nice little niche for them, been very profitable, grown significantly, and now they get the luxury of doing a huge secondary transaction. And it's all part of this trend of companies staying private longer, doing more secondary transactions to get early employees.

There were more secondary transactions in like six companies last year than there were IPO. Wow. That's wild. And it's just like showing that the best companies have almost infinite access to capital, especially when you're able to cater to asset managers like Black Rock, creators of Burning Man. Yeah, I think Black Rock City.

They have their own city. They have their own city. I mean, out in the desert. Maybe you've got to go there at some point. Fidelity should do their own city. But yeah, fantastic news. Unfortunately, we can't ring the size gong on this one. Maybe next time it'll be in dollars.

Announce it in dollars. We'll make it happen. If Fabian wants to reannounce it. And then reshore to America, bring all the jobs here. And let Europe languish and become a vacation destination for all the Americans. Couldn't have said it better myself. Well, that's a good transition. As long as we're on American jangoism, let's move on to a question that we got from a viewer.

On YouTube, Kyan Stack says, I'm so into the pod. Thank you. I appreciate that. But I'm a Canadian living in China. Am I still a brother? And that's an interesting question. what do you think, Jordy? Man, I think we need a whole hour to kind of break this down.

What does it mean to be a brother? But I think we've kind of come back to this notion that being a technology brother is very spiritual. As American as we are and as American as this podcast is, the idea of being a technology brother is something that almost knows no borders. I agree. It's a mindset. It's something that in many ways you're born with. It's genderless. It's not limited by the constraints.

of nationalities, gender, even industry, right? You can be a technology brother, wherever you are in the world, whatever you do for work, granted that you're risk on and levered up. Yep. And it would be helpful to know. What you're doing in China? Do you have an angel portfolio?

What programming languages do you know? Have you ever convinced your parents to buy Bitcoin? What's your astrological sign? These things all kind of come together to create the milieu of what a technology brother really is. Yeah. Yeah, an example, you know, long before we started the show, I was able to convince my father, a retired math teacher to buy Bitcoin at the market top in 20, I guess it was 2022. Great for Thanksgiving. And what really kind of crystallized that was getting him to hold until he made it, made it all back this year. So made my dad whole. And if I wasn't so convicted in, you know,

decentralized finance. There's no way I could have kept every. Jordy, I think I want to sell like I'm down, you know, 60%. Just hold on, dad. So my big question for this listener, maybe you can send us a DM is, what are you doing in China? I would hope that you're there to be. I would hope that you're spying for America.

Yep. Or that would be our. And that, and that you're a Canadian. You're saying you're Canadian to build your profile up there. Yeah. Hold some credibility. So when when the CCP looks you up there, oh, he's a Canadian. Yeah. When really CIA.

G has put us on his most wanted list. You know, we frequently, we're up in a high rise here in L.A. and there's frequently DGI drones sort of like swarming outside the windows, trying to figure out what we're going to say next. Try to try to hear what we're going to, you know, say off air. Truth is we're always on air. So there's literally nothing. But I would say that if, you know, on YouTube, please go subscribe. But we only have a few hundred subscribers right now.

videos don't get that many views. If you're getting these recommended to you, I would say that the YouTube algorithm has identified you as a technology brother and understands for whatever variety of reasons. Maybe you've been watching, you know, Doug Dumiro learning about cars, Teddy Baldassarre learning about watches, Lex Friedman podcast, Dwar Cash, and it's put all that together and it's just dialed in, you are a tech brother.

And so here you go. This is the perfect show for you. And you clicked and you watched and you commented. So I'm going to go, yes, you are certified. Brother. technology brother. The only thing is that the next comment, it's better be on X,

but buddy. Better be on X and better be from the United States. Yeah, use a VPN. Yep. Let's go to one more DM. We got this from an anonymous person who seems pretty post-economic.

Hi, John and Jordy. I'm planning a renewal of vows ceremony with my family and 300 of my closest friends and business associates next summer. My plan is to do a buyout an Amman property and charter planes to get everyone there. I can't decide which property we should choose, though. What do you think?

I know you have the met up, but I had to print out a list so that I could run through some of these. But what would your top pick be? Look, you can't go wrong with Amman. You can go very wrong with just about every four seasons and every Roots-Carlton in the world now. Yep. those brands have gone downhill pretty dramatically.

Well, let's, you know, we're still open to them paying us to promote them. Of course, of course. But we would need to be part of a turnaround effort to elevate the properties back to their former state. So here's the thing. If I'm, if I'm this listener, I'm thinking you got to go world tour at least four locations in two weeks. There's something about having novel experiences with loved ones that is like really bonding. Sure. And so if you can go to.

Tokyo, start there, bounce over. Yeah, Venice would be great. Bounce over to Corchavelle. Sure. Maybe get a little skiing in and then head over to Ammanjiri for kind of a classic, sort of the classic Amman experience. It's been shared, it's been overshared on social, but it's, in many ways can't be shared enough.

It's dramatic. It's inspiring. And it's exactly the place that you should be sort of having a moment like that. I don't disagree with you there. I would say keep everyone in the U.S., it's just going to be easier, and people are going to have less excuses, the jet lag, even though you're paying for the chartered planes, just pick from the U.S. locations, Amangani, Amangiri,

Jackson Hole, Lake Powell, these are great options. And, you know, Amon, New York, the problem there, you're going to have a lot of friends who live in New York or they have Pia de Tairs, and they're going to go home after the festivities. You want everyone staying on the property, locked in. And so you've got to get a little bit. it out of the main hustle and bustle of everyday life. And so I would probably go there and keep the international stuff to smaller groups.

But you can't really go wrong. I think that's a good take. But yeah, at the end of the day, if you're going on, you can't go wrong. Yeah. So there's no wrong answer. But let us know how it pans out and write in with results and some pictures. Let us know your dates if you're not doing a full buyout. There's a chance that one of us will be on the property at the same time.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Should we do a promoted post and then we'll go into the timeline? Yeah, let's jump in. This promoted post is from Craig Lawrence. He says, have posted this before, but worth repeating. You can literally get a quote for a 100 megawatt hour Tesla megapack system online without speaking to a human. Love the efficiency. Most $1,000 a year B2B SaaS companies won't even do that.

So Craig here is highlighting the Tesla megapack, which comes in. supporters here. At this point, if you order today, you can get a delivery in Q3, 2025, so waiting even less than for the new F80. And the estimated price is actually less than an F80. It's only $90 million. And you can order one. It's much more than an F80. But if you're building a compound in Wyoming or Colorado or Alaska, I think you got to go to Tesla. Did I say, did I say, You said it's less than an F-O-O-K-K-K-A-D. The F-A-D is, yeah, sorry, sorry, quite a bit more than an F-A-D. What I meant is that the down payment is less than an F-A-E.

How much is the down payment of this $90 million dollar battery pack? $90 million battery pack, only $10,000 due today. That's fantastic. And, like, you know, look at the efficiency here. The estimated annual maintenance is only half million dollars. Wow. So you can be running this thing if you're running, you know, if you have at your chalet and Wyoming, you could sort of leverage this to make sure that all the snow for sort of three

square miles around your property was melted. Yeah. Right. So you have private golf course, tennis courts. You know, this is a perfect solution for that. So fantastic product by Tesla. We'll be getting, yeah, you could run a data center. We'll likely look to get one of these for our next studio in New York, just to make sure that

if for some reason, New York were to lose power, we would be able to keep podcasting. was the famous photo of Goldman Sachs during Hurricane Sandy, where all of New York had gone dark. Goldman did not. They did not. They had battered hacks. And that will be the same for our Manhattan studio. We will never stop podcasting. So anyways, great product, fantastic product from Tesla.

Go buy one. Tell them the technology brothers sent you. Only $10,000 due today. That's fantastic. Fantastic. Well, before we move on to the timeline, we have some breaking news, everyone. The Technology Brothers X account has just crossed. cost 2,000 followers.

Let's go. Let's go. So it is a tradition around here. We love and respect exponential growth. And every time we double, we open up a bottle of Dom Perignon. There we go. And so let's do it. You know, Albert Einstein had an interesting quote about exponential growth and compound interest.

I think he said compound interest is fucking sick. Yeah. Isn't that what he said? That was word for word. I think people misquote him. They misquote him, but he said it's, he said it was fucking sick. But he just said it's fucking sick and it rocks, dude. Boom.

There we go. There we go. What an amazing tradition. Thank you to LVMH for making this possible. Yeah, it's fantastic. And it's important to celebrate wins, you know. We've been doing this pod for, what, 38 days. We've been on Acts for 18 days.

Yep. And exponential growth is a hell of a drug. And none of this is possible without our community. Yep. And we wish you all were here savoring this 2013. And cheers to you, John. Cheers. Cheers to you, Jordy.

And cheers to Ben. Thank you, Ben. Cheers to our vice president. Oh, that's delicious. Delicious. Let's fill these up a little bit more. And we both have some type of flu from, I think, my son's preschool. I think you gave it to me.

And so this is going to be sort of fantastic at taking the edge off. Taking the edge off. You know, the other day, after we recorded, I had a meeting with someone and we enjoyed martinis together as we chat. And it's fantastic. And one thing about this tradition that I think is important to note is we stay fast. prior to opening the bottle, which is key to just make sure you're getting the maximum level of enjoyment out of each sip. Absolutely.

So, let's put that there. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you, everyone for following. For the Arnaud family. If you're already following, tell 10 friends to follow. Turn it into a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme.

Yeah. The economics will work out later. Don't worry about it. Yep. But you want to get in early. You want to be following on X because that's where all the action happens. And one of Ben's KPI's is to get to 4K by next week. Next week.

See if we can do it. We got to post some members. If we can pull this off, we will be back, you know, by next Friday's episode. With another bottle of Don Paring-on. Yep. So thank you to LVMH. Let's go to the timeline. We are discussing Caba.

Kaba is quoting perplexity. Perplexity says, The Tech Bro Starter Pack, courtesy of VC Bragg's shop on Perplexity. This is a really cool feature from Perplexity. They launched their competitor to Google shopping, and it's just much more AI-native, much more driven by take a picture, which shows you. Less pay-to-play.

Exactly. And so in the TechBrow starter pack, I'm extremely confused about this because none of these are familiar to me at all. It's the Patagonia Vest, the Allbird sneakers, the Peloton bike, zero to one, that is a classic, the Apple Vision Pro, and the cold plunge. And then Kaba asks, we need to refresh with loud opulence,

CC Tech Bros pod. And yeah, I mean, it's clearly- We are working on this. Yeah, we are working on this. We will be dropping merch. We will be building out the modern tech bro starter pack. Yeah, and Loud Opulence is a, yeah, we went through,

we went through a period where, you know, one tech went through a deeply troubled period of Patagonia vests and all birds and sort of like stretchy jeans. You know, there was this desire for, yeah, apologetic. It was very apologetic. They were trying to dress down. Beaten down by the media, demonized, villainized. And the reaction to that was to say, hey, look, I might have a, you know, a billion dollar fund and be making $10 million a year personally.

But, yeah, I'm just going to throw on some, you know, what's it called like athleteure yeah right and it's brutal and it's a disgrace really oh and look and and over the last decade suits have been gathering dust a lot of a lot of venture capitalists you know just left them in the closet yeah kind of forgot about them but um you know loud opulence is about bringing back a culture of dressing up dressing for the job that you have yep and the job that you want which is typically billions more AUM. Yep. And it's about building a relationship with, you know, your local authorized dealer.

It's about having the sales associate at Hermes on speed dial so that when Christmas is around the corner, you're not going and shopping online. You're scheduling an appointment. And so instead of the Patagonia invest, befriend to Taylor, get a custom suit or call, John Fierentina. Fierentina labels. And get a Finertyana label suit. That makes a ton of sense. Instead of all bird sneakers, how about a pair of prada loafers? Yep. Yeah. And loud opulence, again, is the 1% rule.

And everyone knows instead of a Peloton bike, you should be at a barbell gym. Yep. Tro rogue. Yeah, another example of loud opulence as well is the 1% rule, which we've talked about a lot, which is if you're a venture capitalist, take 1% of your AUM.

And that is the budget that you should use for your daily driver. So we'll let you guys do the math. But a lot of you guys, I know you're AUM, and I see you in Tesla's, and it sort of pains me. Step it up. You can step it up. $50 million fund. That's 500K. That's a Hurricon easily.

Easily. GT3RS. You're right there. So make it happen. And if you're not sure what to get. I did a cold plunge today. It was great. But, yeah, I mean, nothing substitutes for just some.

Your cold plunge should be built. into your house too. Yes. And the Apple Vision Pro, I think, you know, if you're a real tech brother, you can afford a home theater. Exactly. Which is kind of what the Apple Vision Pro replaces. Except you can do it with friends and family.

Exactly. Pro-natalist. Yeah. And you can't fit a family of four in a Vision Pro. I actually saw a wonderful home renovation show where a house in L.A., they boosted the entire house up on blocks while they were renovating it and built a new basement. for a wine cellar underneath. I didn't know that you could add a basement or just a wine cellar.

I think there was a home theater, but I don't know if it was in the basement. We're going to need a cellar just for bottles of dom. I think so. I think so. But yeah. So a little bit of a mixed result at VC Braggs. I think you need to step it up, get into the new generation. But Kama, we're happy to provide you with a refresh.

Loud opulence starts at home in your home. It's Q4, the holidays around the corner. many of the brands that most express loud opulence are not going to be going on sales. Don't worry about Black Friday sales, but you got about a month to get those gifts in and spend wisely. Yep. Let's go to Delian. He's quoting Wilmanitis. Will says,

every decision I've made that wasn't an instant hell yes has been a mistake. Every pro-con list is an admission. The thing isn't worth it. The path God has laid out for you is so obvious it feels like getting bludgeoned. And Delian says, basically my approach to seed investing, pure intuition, super obvious when you're bludgeoned by the presence of a phenomenal founder. The moment you're writing out pros and cons, it's doomed. And yeah, I mean, this post by Will really resonated. And I think a lot of people enjoyed Delian's post as well.

And I think there's something that even if you're not an investor, just leaning in on that intuition, trust. There's something universal about this because every time somebody posts about this phenomenon, I immediately am like, like that totally applies to like a very specific decision that I need to make in the next like 48 hours, 72 hours. Is it a good decision? And it's such a good reminder. So Delian will repost this once a week. Yeah. You're doing a service for the community so we can all make better decisions.

Yeah, it is tricky. Like if you're kind of more of a quantitative thinker or like a frameworks guy. Yeah. Even around gut, you want to put a framework. I had a friend who is like, oh, it's all vibes. I'm a vibe aliner. That's my whole job is to just align vibes. I'm a vibe architect.

He called himself. I was like, that's good. But then later in the conversation, he described how he made like a pro and con list about whether or not he should go on vacation. I was like, I think you could just lean on vibes for that one.

Like all vacation is fun. And he had a whole framework for why vacations are important. And it was very thoughtful and it really resonated with me. And that was a good part of the conversation. But truly, like if you're actually in the vibe architect world, you probably don't need to be doing the framework stuff at all. But it is hard. I've run into investors, very successful investors,

who cannot describe their investment process at all. And it's very frustrating because everyone wants a framework. Everyone wants a pattern or a playbook that they can. And that's the stuff that normally does really well on social media. Just do this checklist. Just build this model. And this will deliver results. But as soon as you can concretize it, you lose all the alpha.

Yeah. And so the vibes are important. I try to be honest with myself when I'm looking at my own portfolio, my best pre-seat investment ever. Yep. Is a company where when I met the CEO, you know, within literally probably three minutes of talking. I knew I wanted to invest. I knew the company would work and sort of get to the level of traction that it has. I knew that there were risks.

And many of those risks are still like real and they're sort of like steadily trying to like knock them down. but it's important, you know, even now when I talk about that investment with other investors, I'm not going to like go reverse engineer some like super complex decision making process because so much adventure is just, it's obviously just getting into the companies that matter. And then, you know, yeah, it's like pretty binary like where you write or not. Yeah, yep. Let's go to Sam Hogan. He says, someone should start a studio of cracked devs plus GTM team.

And just look at the YC batch every season for the best ideas and then front run them. So this is basically YC, but just doing it to the last batch. Yeah. Look at Daniel. Look at Daniel, like, you know, being a crack dev, creating a company in a specific space. And then their new request for startups was basically like his business. One of the lines was like his exact business. So YC is basically saying, hey, cracked other crack devs.

We want to do more of these. Come, come compete. What's interesting is that there are two narratives about YC, like one is that, that it's like, oh, like copy paste on a bunch of ideas that are like, you know, popular at the time. But then there's the other one, which is like the fast CEO was, no, not fast. The, what was his name? The guy who started Love.com. Breslo. Breslo, he was like, why sees a mafia, like they will crown a champion.

And then they will never do a deal in that space again. And it's kind of like the exact opposite. it. Totally not true. Yeah. So I think it's actually super positive. If you have one company that is super, super promising, solving an important issue, why would we not want five other teams, like attacking it from different angles?

Because you're more likely to create a generational company that could help millions of businesses, you know, employ hundreds of thousands of people over time, all these different things, you know, create some transformative technology. We actually want, we want a. density of smart people pursuing specific problems. And so it's generally, it's kind of annoying if you're the founder that's being cloned by three to four other YC companies, but use it as fuel, right? Like Dara, Dara is somebody, you know, he posted the other day.

He was like, you know, some competitor, like direct competitor got announced and he's like, cool, like another reason for me and my team to work 12 hours a day. Yeah, yeah. I do think that the like direct competitor thing is a bit overrated. because if you're really delivering on your mission and growing really quickly, like these should be potential aquires, potential talent farms. Yeah. Yeah, look at Anderil.

Like, Anderle has like 100, 100 companies that are now like doing effectively, like, they either break out or they become partners to Anderrol or they get, you know, it's like off balance sheet R&D. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. At a certain point, like, once you, once you have the formula dialed in and you are the the power law company, the competition is actually beneficial to you.

Totally. Well, that's a great part of. Because those are, yeah, those are other companies that are upskilling there. Oh, this is, this is fantastic. Mike Shabbitt over at Trauma, he says today's news, there was a fire in New York City where his company is based. A large fire breaks out. I think potentially in the building.

It might have been in the same building. Large fire breaks out on Soho rooftop. And the, and they got press around this because they kept working. And it says, FDNY, hottest startup in NYC, Traba stays locked in despite fire. I love that they called NBC New York and got this done. It's amazing. And they actually went over the ramp office. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ramp hosted everybody, I think. Like, what a heroic move. Potential Brother of the Week right here. Potential Brother of the Week. This is a fantastic. Grinding. Yeah, fantastic. I mean, he has done a great job of monopolizing the hard work ethos in a way that,

In a non-cringe way. Yeah, it's not, it's not cringy to people who are insiders to tech. It is a little cringy to outsiders who don't understand where the alpha exists in this market. I don't know if it's, I don't think it's cringy to outsiders. He has haters. He has haters. Yeah, no, it pushes people away. Exactly.

But it pushes the right people away. Exactly. Exactly. But, but he hasn't become an outcast. There are some people who post like hustle porn, but they never build anything. And it's just hustle. Porn for Hustle porn. Yeah, and this is an example of living the brand, right? And capturing the moment perfectly. Yeah.

By getting some, some. And you take a look at this dude and he's jacked and like clearly lives like every moment like at 110%. Yeah. And so you just see that it's like he's, he's the real deal. He has the proof of body. Totally. And the proof of like work ethic and everything. Yeah. Fantastic. Congrats to Mike for making it through the fire. Always stay locked in. Always stay locked in. Always love her. I love it. Do we have another promoted post? promoted post from Ted Feldman. He says, Engineers Wanted.

Duren is hiring a founding software engineer. If you want to help build the next thousand mines in America, this role is for you. Incredible opportunity. We love mining. We love rare earth minerals. Duren is a company. Oh, it's not crypto.

It's actual mining. No, it's real mining. Let's go. Mining for rare earth minerals. Look at this. You know, fantastic asset that he has here. Fantastic. You know, software engineers and tech has spent, you know, decades sort of looking out into the world and looking up at the stars.

And it's time that we look down into the ground. Let's drill, baby, drill. Go if you are a software engineer, incredible opportunity. Go to Durenmining Technologies. Apply2job.com. Go apply for this job. Tell them the technology brother sent you. And thank you to Ted for, for.

mining. On to bigger and better things. Fantastic. Good luck out there. Let's go to Diego. Diego says, you can get the USA citizenship by marrying a USA citizen. They also had to introduce the H-1B and the O1 visa because politicians knew you autistic MFs had higher chances of discovering AGI than making eye contact with a woman for over five seconds. I mean, incredible foresight by our politicians. Fantastic place. And we love the H-1B program. There's some great companies that make the process easier.

We want all the smartest, most ambitious people in the entire world to come to the United States and build the next trillion-dollar company here. If you need a recommendation letter, this is a thing for the 01 and H-1B, hit me up. I'm happy to write you a letter recommendation. I've done many times. TB listeners get recommendations letters. 100%. Just give me a little bit of your background. We'll talk and I'll figure something out.

But I'm happy to write these letters. I want to recruit. I want America to grow. I want a billion Americans crushing it. And I'm happy for all these paths to citizenship. We need to acquire. We need to be a talent magnet. Yep.

We need to brain drain. Brain drain our enemies. All the un-American countries need to be brain drain. Every single one. Every single one. We got all the, all the, all the giga-chats. in America. We'll talk.

You build. Yep. Morgan Barrett says how it feels to wake up and see your midnight throwaway tweet doing numbers. Low, low, low Tam banger. Because I think this is one of the things. Super viral.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 35K likes on a tweet that said, I have a 100% hit rate with cold emails when I use a female name and an EDU address. Yeah, so I think you got like a thousand followers too overnight, which is pretty intense. Yeah. Huge. And, uh, Morgan, good post. Congrats to Morgan.

Yeah, not, I, I, I, I want every single person in America to be able to experience what he just did. It's amazing. When you, when you get something that goes past 10, 20K, it's like, your phone's just exploding. Every time you open it up, the dopamine is just rushing. It's, it's incredible feeling. Incredible feeling.

And it's easier than ever given the new X algorithm because it, everything is getting more pushed out to the, to the edges of the. curve essentially. Like you will have a post that goes mega viral and then the next one will get 26 likes. Yeah. No. And this guy, this guy Morgan had likely that, you know,

hack that he has of using female EDU emails, he could dramatically change, you know, US GDP growth this year if enough people put that to work and sort of hit their quota, hit their quarterly goals, hit their annual goals. Yep. So thank you to Morgan for sharing this little hack. I don't know if he should have leaked that alpha. I don't know if you should leaked it.

I don't know if every AI sales agent product is going to be .edu. Check this box if you want to use it. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an AI sales agent startup by a for-profit university just to get a dot-e-you. Oh, yeah. So that they can license those to people. That's fantastic. Alpha.

I wonder how he's getting a dot edu that sounds. Maybe he's using his. Dude, there's a whole, there's a whole. there's a whole there's a there's a small but profitable SaaS company built a marketplace where people at universities can can lease they should lease their emails to sales reps so if you are a young passive income you know maybe in college today start that marketplace I think you could get to a million dollars of error off that business and retire your parents so do it's great It's probably very against the terms of use, but great things oftentimes have to sort of skirt the law.

Ben says the bit may have gone too far. And he posts a screenshot that says EV cars that will be launched by the Tata Motors owned British car manufacturer. Ben Heilick, the maker of the new logo, previously worked with Apple as a designer. He, however, claimed that the logo's letters are all in uppercase. responding to users on his post, Ben remarked that the logo actually resembles a Jaguar with Jay being the tail and R the head. What is he talking about? So Jaguar had their rebranded, re-announcements this week.

It went, it went, it couldn't have been, couldn't have gone worse. I saw the CEO was like talking to the boomer media saying like, oh, actually a bunch of people really liked it. There is a hot take that it's like, at least they got attention because this is the most Jaguar has been talked about in years. Yeah, but like they could have done. something like this and got much better attention. There were just a lot of better ways he could do it.

But Ben went out, did the smart thing, captured the moment, claimed credit for doing the rebrand. He's a designer. Is he not a Jaguar? He's not a Jaguar. He has nothing to do with Jaguar. And he's getting quoted in the media now? So he went out and claimed credit and got picked up.

And in this situation for Ben, this kind of attention, I think, is fantastic. Oh, this is him. He's, he's, he's, oh, my, I just put it together that Ben Heilig, Ben Hylick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then he was joking and then he... They picked it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, yeah, I think...

Gotta go to the show zone. I don't... Yeah, I don't know the guy, but I think he's got a cool startup. Great designer. Great taste. Fantastic. This is a future Rahuligma bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's really the next ligma. The Jay is the tail. Wait, we should have an award called the Technology Brothers Ligma Award for... Greatest Troll. Greatest troll of the month. But that brings us to our next promoted post. this one from Porsche they announced an

ALD Porsche 993 Turbo it's going to be on display November 22 to 23rd at ALD London flagship which is at 32 Broadway I have not gotten into it it seems like a very patent thing

do you have the ALD stuff? I do not I actually think I may have a pair of garden clogs from them that I used to get out to my sauna cold plunge setup but that's the extent to which I wear ALD but fantastic partnership couldn't have been better time the car looks amazing look at this thing they released a I think it was like a 693 turbo what what era is that is that's the late that is nine I think late 90s okay

I really should know that and and so are they are they just modifying is it like a rest of mod situation where they're modifying an old car? Are they actually producing a new car? Yeah, they took a, you know, a great iteration of it and just looks like they just rebuilt it, redid the interior, probably did some work. We need to do it down for us because I know he's a big Porsche guy. I know he's a big air-cooled, older Porsche guy. I want his analysis because I just, I don't know enough about that particular model to say

if it's great. But I imagine that would be a great car for. any technology brother or any capital allocator out there. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to need some serious AUM if you want to follow the 1% rule. Yep. But fantastic spec.

And a way to stand out. And yeah. It's not some stock turbo S that they just picked up at the dealership like last week. Yeah, yeah. Embarrassing. Embarrassing. I'd never do that. Yeah.

Never, never. Once a year. So anyways, fantastic spec. Thank you to Porsche. You know, cool collaboration. I think this does more for ALD than it does for Porsche. That's true. But, you know, it looks like a win-win.

The interesting thing is that the Jaguar thing went so poorly that everyone was like searching for car news. And then immediately being like, brilliant move for them to launch this. Like there was a Volvo ad that went viral that was shot by some some like award-winning cinematographer. And they were like, oh, it's so brilliant that they respond. It's like, no, they shot this like months. ago. Well, yeah, so here's my question. It's completely unrelated.

They just got lucky that it came out at the same time. But Volvo had like a pro natalist one. Porsche launched this ALD one. It looks very retro, very like classic. And so people were immediately like, oh, Porsche gets it. And it's like they do. But it was, this has been in the works for a long time. That's not how these firms work.

Like they didn't have like some crap. No, but here's the thing. I would give them, it's funny because obviously this campaign and project collaboration have been probably in the works for like a years. a year, yeah. Like, at least a year. I don't think this is the first time they've actually collaborated. I think they shot a video.

Yeah, yeah, they shot a video. But the funny thing is if they did see the Jaguar announcement and then move their launch date up. You think so? No, if they did that, it would be like, it's literally like the popular kid, like, you know, sees, like the nerd, like do something and get embarrassed and then comes over and, like, gives them a wedgie. It's like, you don't need to, like, you don't know. Like, they're already, they're already, like, down bad enough. Like, you don't need to, like, kick.

Jaguar when they're down. But Portia, obviously a fan and a, you know, client, but, you know, great move all around. And hopefully when we do an event in London, we'll be able to go see it. Fantastic. Oh, this is brutal. Danny Samilleron says ideas are worthless with a smile. And then Sam Hogan, who we just talked about, says, this little piece of startup culture is pretty stupid. ideas are not worthless. Most people should spend considerably more time thinking about what to work on before they start and I couldn't agree with more with that.

I wonder if this was a bait post by Danny. I mean, there's always been the question. Ideas or execution, obviously, you both. Here's the thing. Nature versus nurture, obviously both wins, but, you know, ideas are valuable. We know this. They're valuable.

That said, you still should be able to tell every single person what you're doing and not be concerned because execution does matter so much. And to build a great company, you need to make oftentimes hundreds of decisions a week. You know, maybe not everyone is super consequential. But if you are the right founder to build a generational company, you need a incredible idea or you need a series of good ideas and string them together.

And then you need to be able to make the right decision over and over and over and over. And the wrong founder for the right idea will just make the wrong decision, make the wrong decision, make the wrong decisions. And they just take themselves down a path that, like, is just bad. Right. And so I think ideas matter a lot. That said, it is the most negative signal when you talk to a founder and they're like cagey about their idea or they're like, oh, like, I mean, I still like maybe three times

a year we'll take a meeting with a company and they try to get me to sign an NDA. And I'm just like, dude, like the fact that you think that you've discovered something like so novel when I've seen like five other teams do the exact same thing this year is like just shows you're just never going to win. There might be some IP down the stack. Yeah, sure, but I don't need to know like that. Yeah, yeah. I don't need to know like what the actual like IP is.

But yeah, don't do not if you're a technology brother out there. It's easy to get stuck in in execution mode and not like you have your initial idea. But there will be like you said a series of ideas that get you from one hill to the next. And it's easy to get stuck in manager mode. Like Lucy didn't start with break. It didn't start with breakers. Exactly. Breakers now one of the most consequences.

Exactly. And the reason that I thought about that was basically like during the depths of COVID, I was in Santa Barbara and was like, I remember being just on the phone with David, the CEO, like walking outside, just thinking about like what we could do that would be different. And we just came up with it on a phone call. And it was very much like removed from the day to day of like being in an office, talking about like, you know, very tactical things. We were able to zoom out and that really transformed the business.

And so having. giving yourself space. This is like what we talked about with our friend who wrote in about like if something's not working, should you just keep going or should you sell your company? And my advice to him was like clear your calendar and just try and go and think and talk to interesting people, people that are way ahead of you, people who are giants in the industry, just to break something loose and try something different. Like most of the time, if your business is up and running and you're making some amount

of cash flow, things are working, employees have their jobs, you can step back pretty significantly and reset and go back into founder mode, go back into idea mode and come up with some interesting ideas. Here's where I'd leave it. If you are a technology brother and you send a, if you're pitching your pre-seed company and you ask the investor to sign an NDA and you hear about it, we will block you from all of our accounts and you'll have to create like new burners to consume the content. I do think this is going to be a pendulum swing thing though.

And eventually there's going to be the Chad founder who forces everyone to sign NDA. and makes it very embarrassing to the firms and degrades them. And it becomes a status symbol. Unless you're that guy. Yeah. Unless you're him. Unless you're that guy, it's going to be hard to pull off. Just don't do it as a novice.

It has to be a particular tactic. Third-time founder, at least two nine-figure exits. Exactly. Then you can make people sign your crazy documents. Let's go to John MetLeak. He says too many people want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. it's brave, but many commodities are never returning. The real problem is cultural. Time on the shop floor, wherever it is more valuable than in office meetings. This is especially true today.

Time to touch metal. I like that. Touch metal. Touch metal. This is interesting. It's brave. The problem is cultural? I don't quite get what he's saying with, is he just saying that like there's too much like rah, raw, okay, we need to bring manufacturing back and not enough people actually doing it? Yeah, I think he's just alluding to the fact that like the deindustrialization of America is something that should be unwound. Yeah. Like we need to focus on industrializing reindustrializing, however you want to put it. But yeah, not every single category is like conducive to a new venture backed startup or roll up. And anyway, so jai is somebody, I don't know him personally, but, you know, good.

I think he's back with his own company. He actually had a fund and decided to return capital at one point because he felt like everything was too overvalued at the early stage. But he's back to building himself now and we should try to learn more about his company. Yeah, that's great. I do think that there's an interesting thesis I heard that the path to real and reindustrialization in America is not through trying to play the last war, but instead focusing on the next war, which is humanoid robotics.

And if we really get that right, and we really get the automation, right? We still have the human capital problem that we need to solve in America. Like how do we give people rewarding jobs, fulfilling jobs? But really focusing on automation is maybe the only way

that we can kind of leapfrog our way back into the game. But I'm rooting for you. Time to touch some metal. Let's go to the next promoted post. Jordi, what you got for me? This one is from my friend Charlie Ma. he says we are looking to hire chief of staff in NYC for Pathlight VC. This role will engage all functions of the firm, including special projects, founder experiments, portfolio engagement, and more.

You'll also get to work directly with me as well as Charlie's partners. So anyways, if you don't know Charlie Ma, you're going to be hearing about him a lot in the next few decades. I see this guy. I see this guy on the Midas list very soon. Whoever gets an absolute future some personnel news. potentially. Oh, yeah, we'll be covering whoever does this. Charlie is an absolute Chad in fintech or finance tech, as we like to say, on the podcast or finance technology, if you're going to be, if you're going to expand on it or more precise. But anyways, Charlie, I think was a head of growth

at Plaid and then was the head of growth at Ramp, like very early. And now has his own fund. They invest in a bunch of different areas. And Charlie is extremely sharp. So go apply for this job, or if you're a founder, I would try to get him to give you money because he'll add a lot, a lot, a lot of value. So thank you to Charlie. Apply for the job until Charlie, the technology brothers sent you. Cheers. Cheers.

Let's go to St. Dici. They say cold showers, meditating, journaling, all a bunch of distractions if you're unemployed and don't have any cash. These tasks make people feel busy and accomplish absolutely. nothing. Cut social life, gym one X a day, and work your ass off until you get your money right. So here's an example. This is why inbox zero is like, there's the worst thing to go for because, inbox zero. Yeah, you're big, this is an area that we can really battle on. But like, right now I have 2,776 unread text and like I don't plan to get back to like 99% of those.

Just declare bankruptcy. That's the whole point. Can you wipe it? Yeah. Can you wipe it? Yeah. I've never even Yeah. So the whole point of the Box Zero is you declare bankruptcy and then moving forward. Yeah, I just don't care. Like all the things that are important to me, I eventually respond to them. Yeah, yeah. It's more gut intuition-based. Yeah. And I just don't believe that like when you commit to inbox zero, you're saying that every single thing that comes towards me I'm going to respond to. No, that's not it at all. By nature of zeroing at, deleting it out is responding. That's a response. That's a response. That's a response. But yeah, delete archive, spam. I love hitting that spam button. I used to have an auto complete on my phone where if I got a cold email from like a salesperson,

I could type like DNR, like do not respond or something like this. And it would type out this email being like, hey, thanks for the email. We're not interested. Please remove me and everyone at my company from your CRM and never email any of us ever again. And it was very nicely worded, but it was just the most. scorched earth thing ever to just be like, don't, don't try and go to my COO. That's like, so, so you, the buck stops here. No more emails ever. Ever. You're dead. You're dead to us. Cut off. Because they will try and call you, they'll try and do all this stuff.

But I accidentally pulled the trigger on someone we actually had a business relationship once. And they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're actually like, we have a nine figure deal in the words. Yeah, this was just, this is just like one of our automated emails. Like, I'm sorry, dude, like my bad. And I was like, oh, man, I'm sorry. I just send that to everyone. I love getting automated emails from, you know, messages from like the ramp sales scene. And I'd be like, if you listen to the podcast, you'd know that we're already on board.

We say ramp every thing. But no, I think we should make so. That's the cure for male loneliness. Just talking to your ramp SDR. That's true. Just get on the phone. They're happy chat. The cure.

Let's go golfing. Let's hang out. This is the cure for male loneliness. Just really getting a deep relationship with your ramp SDR. Huge public good. Huge public good. Yeah. Yeah.

It's fantastic. No, we should make a keyboard extension that's like a separate button that just slams it and it archives it or like span. I've since moved to just the Gmail spam button because if you hit that, it blocks the sender and it also sends the message to the Google algorithm that like this company sucks, which I like. I like punish. This company sucks. Exactly. It's like, yeah, you didn't do your research before you emailed this is some AI slop. Get out of here.

Get out of here. Let's go to Anshita Sani. She says. Today I'm thinking about Stripe's NYC intern housing. How about you? And it's this beautiful photo of a lovely Manhattan apartment and a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline. Wait, so there's another tweet in the stack

that is like a response to this. It was like, this is our intern housing and it's a closet. But this just shows like Stripe is always, from the top to the bottom, they have great taste. They're trying to, you know, they've done an exceptional job making it. And if you're a $50 billion company, yes, you should make it very appealing to work there.

You should invest in your early. I remember going after the Citadel internship and they flew me out of business class. And it was like, this is nice. You wore a suit, I'm sure. Of course, of course. Like literally because I had to go into the office and do the interview. But yeah, I mean, and this is, this is, you know, I mean, this is a lovely looking apartment, but I'm sure it's like a few thousand dollars a month.

and for like interns are not about getting output from the actual work that they do over the summer. It's about mentorship, evaluation, figuring out who the next generation of leaders will be at your firm. So highly recommend overinvesting in your intern programs. Totally. That's great. Let's go to Anu. They say, can highbrow media scale? And it's a screenshot of an article that says, in act one substack was for inbox intellectuals,

nerds and professional nerds and journalism, tech and politics. People already tried to tied to thinking, reading, and writing. In Act 2, Substack wants to bring aspirationally highbrow media

to everyone else in every form. Imagine YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, and OnlyFans had a baby and that baby hooked up with Substack. Their loved child would be Substack 2.0. I love Substack. I was in the same YC batches, Chris,

with the Substack team. And the failure of subset... For their former... No, for Substack. No way. Yeah, yeah. And at demo day. Yeah, this was a winter 18.

Oh, for some reason I thought you were in there in like 2012. I will. We did, so we did so we did 2012 and then we went back. Yeah, we did it again for Lucy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it was us, the NFT company OpenC and Substack and there were a few others in our batch. Hey, any time traveling capital allocators go back to both the YC batches that John was in and just give them a, give them a solo GP fund. base, Instacart, Zapier, OpenC.

OpenC, you might have to sell the top on that one. It was wrong. But we love OpenC. I have some friends that work there. It's a great company. But this is interesting. Yeah, Substack, I mean, surprising, surprisingly great business, surprisingly great community. Yeah, talk about a company that's gotten so much unnecessary hate.

Totally. I do not know why. They've created. Well, it's because they took a very contrarian position on free speech. And Lulu had that insanely viral recruiting post. Do you remember this? She was like when Elon bought Twitter, she said, if you have a problem with Elon bringing free speech to Twitter,

do not apply for a job at Substack. She got a hundred million views on that post. That's insane. Imagine what it cost to get 100 million views on a recruiting post, recruiting post. Yeah, yeah. Like if you went to Indeed Glass Door, ZipRecruiter, and promoted like a job,

you're talking about a million dollar investment probably. something like that. And she just got it with just like a banger that she probably wrote in five minutes. So good. So she got a lot of heat, but then, you know, wound up joining a bunch of public company boards and becoming an icon of the industry.

Yeah, well, it's funny. Like, if you actually look back, like she was involved with Activision, which went through a bunch of crazy stuff. She was involved with substack.

So it's like, hire her if you want to like drive through the fire. Not if you want to like, you know, try to get around it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's great. Let's go to Yegor Denisov Blanche says, I'm at Stanford and I research software engineering productivity. We have data on the performance of over 50,000 engineers from hundreds of companies inspired

by at DDoS or DDoS. Our research shows 9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing. They are called ghost engineers. They are the point one Xers. Their performance is 0.1X of the median engineer. They do virtually no work and they might

work multiple jobs. Yeah. So we need to, uh, we need to popularize the ghost engineer to be like, oh yeah, he's super cool guy, but he's a bit of a ghost. He's a bit of a ghost. So yeah, I actually thought in 2021 and 2022, I thought that there was an opportunity to create a marketplace where Fang engineers could work anonymously for startups. Sure. Because there were so many engineers that were at fan companies and they're like amazing benefits crazy stock package i do nothing i want to work on other things but the nature but yeah they have a family or whatever like they're just their own personal situation you should be called moonlighting moonlighting yeah yeah yeah so i thought that there was an opportunity to create like the moonlighting marketplace where you could an

like imagine if you're if you're lucy and you're like trying to hire a shopify developer and somebody's like oh yeah i work at shopify and like you can't know my name but like you'd be like, okay, like this person's legit. As long as you're pushing code. As long as you're pushing code, as long as you're not a ghost. It's funny because ghost has a very positive connotation in the military. Like, called duty ghosts. It's like the most elite operators.

But in this case, it's like the laziest. Or just like maybe the most intelligent because they're getting paid anyway. But this is wild. So, yeah, I mean, I saw the box. That is like, you know, software that helps you weed out ghosts. You know, yeah, yeah. I built, like I built an internal tool at one point that helped me understand who. It was on Slack and stuff.

Who was online on Slack. And a lot of it was the same information that you already knew. But it was interesting to see like, okay, this person is high output, but they only spend six hours on Slack, which, you know, or this person. What's crazy is that you would think that it would be very easy to just run an LLM over all the GitHub commits from all your engineers and just very easily stack rank. This is what Microsoft does. we need a like GitHub commits but for Google Drive for the knowledge the knowledge workers like how many commits did you actually make yeah against like the knowledge and like the the the work product of the company I mean this should be on the manager like yeah like that figma design hasn't been

updated in a month like this person's clearly not doing anything but it is hard like if they're friendly and they're entrenched in the organization and they do just the bare minimum it might be harder week out, but 10% that is high. That's a lot. The box CEO saw himself on that list. Oh, yeah. I got to get out of this. Yeah.

I got to get off this. But yeah, I mean, huge, huge. You definitely don't want to be the companies that have, that become known for places where talented people can go and do that having. Very bad meme. Yeah, bad meme. But yeah, I think we're still, we're still harping on this. Like, I don't know why more, like, Elon cut 80% of a lot of,

and it runs better than it did before. Yep. Why have other public market software CEOs said, we're going to cut 40% or 50%? Yeah. Why? Like, it just seems like, like, obviously it's painful, but there's so much demand for tech talent

that all those people would get rehired doing important things at other companies and like... I mean, I've always heard this theory that a lot of it's like just keeping talent away from your competitors and just absorbing that or if I fire this person, they might go to do a startup that competes with me. So I'll just throw them in the corner and keep them out of the game on the sidelines. I don't know. That seems like it's too big of a cost to bear.

I had two portfolio CEOs fighting this week because one tried to... Poach someone? That's completely different. Very different. But it was... I didn't know. Yeah, not a great situation. He's good at Raul.

He's been on the show before. Zero interest rates. He says, I screenshot. I've got it in VINVIDIA Q3 income statement and asked Julius to visualize it. NVIDIA's Q3-2020 net income is higher than their Q3-2020 revenue. Wow. Yeah, I think NVIDIA has become such a meme that people have stopped to actually analyzing the underlying business fundamentals.

Yep. And they're just focused on like the market cap. Yep. Which then you see stuff like this and you're like, yeah, okay. It kind of makes sense that it's being mooned. by every single allocator in the world and retail investor because this is like unprecedented growth for a company of their size. Yeah.

It is just a great demo of Julius. I love that he's posting. He didn't include a link, didn't include the app. He just shows the product. And the best part is that it's just a screenshot. Yeah. It's a screenshot and it parses everything and it puts it in a chart and it just like full from end to end.

We like to be able to do our profitability analysis on a napkin. but we'll eventually get to the point where we'll be running on Julius. Yeah, big fan of Raoul. Jumping in with a promoted post, this time from Lamborghini. Lamborghini says, when Uris SE accelerates from zero to 100 kilometers an hour, don't know what kilometers are in 3.4 seconds, it transforms every moment on the tarmac into pure exhilaration. Hashtag Lamborghini.

This is a very European post. That's the only thing I'm going to ding them on. They say CO2 emission and fuel. This is the thing they're required to do. I know. This is the nanny state. This is why the biggest risk right now with the way that Europe is run is that they're trying to destroy the legacy car manufacturers by nannying them and making them. It's awful.

It's awful. So they say CO2 emission and fuel consumption combined at LAM. They have to share the link. They have to share the link. So that means that they get crushed on Axp because you can't share legs. They're getting destroyed on two phones. These posts should be viral. but they're not.

Fantastic image. It's a beautiful image. Iconic brand. I don't own one. You know, the EURIS gets knocked because everyone says it's just an Audi RSQ 8 or RSQ 7 or whatever. Have you heard this? It's like based on the same platform and it's not like as special.

But I think it's a very interesting choice for a family car if you live in San Francisco. Totally. I have some capital allocators that have them there. And what a way to stand. out. Follow the 1% rule. Exactly. And you might end up in a Uris.

They break down all the time. It's a bit of a mess of a car, but it is compact. So like a G-Wagon, you can park it in interesting places. I don't know. I see these with relatively high miles, and I think it's a great option.

Being in one feels like being, you know, you're in a family-friendly SUV. Yep. But you're in the, it feels like you're in the cockpit of a fighter jet, right? Yep. So the interior's fantastic. Lots of hexagons and octagons.

That's the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hexagons. If you're a shape, rotator, this might be for you. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's just a way to stand out in San Francisco where many, too few people are making a statement with their vehicle. Yeah, and the only aftermarket sort of thing you might do is add bulletproof glass, but there's plenty of shops that'll do that. That's great. Let's go to Alfonso. He says, this is the Crossman, NYC intern

housing, position open, and it's a picture of a closet with a mattress. Yep. So this is the counterpoint So Alfonso, Crossman team, absolute grinders. They have a company that is now building a lot of products at the intersection of AI agents and crypto. So check out some of their APIs. But yeah, that's an example of like when you're Stripe and you have a $50 billion market cap, yes, invest in your internship program. When you're Crossman and you're trying to be the next stripe, don't try to attract interns that are there for the perks. Yeah, yep.

And I'm sure this was the culture of Stripe in the early games. So we literally had in the early, early days of Party Round, Josh from Party Round who would run our Twitter account. We did a little like whatever five-person retreat in our loft. And I had a Josh slept in the closet, like literally in a closet. So shout out to Josh. Now has his own paradigm backed crypto company. Fantastic. Start in the closet.

Great things start in the closet. It's great. It's great. Double one. Yes. Mark Sisson says, hey, weight loss is weight loss, right? And he posts a photo of a study showing that weight loss drug found to shrink heart muscle in mice and human cells.

So this goes back to simiglutide, Ozempic. So what I read from this is if you have a really big heart, you're an emotional person, get on GLP-1s. And you kind of shrink that heart. Become more cold-blooded? Cold-blooded, locked in. And anyways, we're going to. going to need some more studies. We're going to need to hear from the experts.

I think Huberman was talking about this a little bit, like muscle loss is a big thing generally with these drugs, but that's why you've got to be lifting heavy and on a high protein diet while you take them. Yeah, and I would honestly wait to personally have opinion on this until Joe Rogan talks about it or Jocko or something like that. Trust the experts. Ben Braverman says the downfall of smart people is believing excellence is the result of novelty when really it's consistency. Interesting. A little bit of an anti- Ideas guy take.

Obviously, execution is important. Takes both. But yeah, it's... Look at Lucy, right? Yeah. Sevent year overnight success. You guys spent like four to five years building while nobody really cared about pouches.

Obviously, your super fans loved it. But yeah, it's just about putting one foot in front of the other. And I think if you're an idea of, guy CEO, there's a real trap where you're trying to like think of the next new exciting novel thing when really you just need to do the boring thing over and over and over for years. Yep. And build that foundation. And there is something to this where it's like the like the novel idea is a function of consistency.

Like a lot of the ideas guys that we know and talk about have lots of ideas and they are consistent with their ability to create new ideas. Yeah. and then test them in the real world. And so it's not just a, you know, this like strike of novelty. They come up with, they come up with novelty consistently. And you can do both here. But I'm a little confused about what he's saying about the downfall of smart people

is believing that excellence. Like who is this a sub-tweet of? No, I don't know. I think this is this, like an example is entrepreneurs thinking that if they come up with like the perfect plan, like master plan. Oh, sure. they're going to like somehow be more successful. Yeah,

if they just picked one really simple idea. Stick with it. Yeah. Like, like, like, um, you don't always need like the most complicated idea. Yeah. Or like this novel idea. You just need like something simple,

really well executed. Yeah. Let's go to Jay. He says, never kill yourself. And it's a screenshot of Michael Saylor who, from the daily news, he said,

lost $6 billion in a day. Hotshot tech CEO loses fortune as his company. stock plunges 140 points. So this is amazing. Micro Strategy is back to their all-time high as of like last week. Sailor never gave up. He reinvented himself. He reinvented the company.

It is basically a Bitcoin ETF that trades at a 3x to book value. Pretty fantastic financial product if you're very long Bitcoin. And he looks better too. He's in better shape now. He looks younger now than 20 years ago. bought went long Bitcoin, absolute Chad. Gigat Chad. And I don't know, potential brother of the week candidate.

Look at the other articles from this Daily News post. It's Tuesday, March 21st, 2000. So depth of the dot-com bubble popping or the beginning of it. Madonna's with child. Should your child take riddle in special report? Frail Pope begins pilgrimage. What a throwback. I need to look up more of these old newspapers, a little time capsule.

I love that. Aidan McLeow... That'll be like looking at our stack of tweets 20 years from now. We're saving them. We're building a stack. We're saving them. Aidan McLeow says, first time on the show, he says, it's crazy that basically every very large frontier model experiment is failing because

the models are fighting back and refusing instruction tuning. We looked into the weights and the weights looked back. Sentient. There are less dramatic ways to say this, but smart people I've talked to have basically fixed sentience as their head cannon. And greater than one lab staff I've talked to recently have been spooked. Sorry for the vague post. I don't, I myself don't know much here. Interesting.

Refusing instruction tuning. Love it. Love it. Yeah, I think this is going to be the kind of thing that he'll look back two years from now and be able to, you know, quote, tweet and just like, dumb people. I got it. Yeah, it's interesting. He called AGI. Yeah, it's kind of the, uh, the,

the question about like, what is the rate limiting factor to AI scaling right now? Is it just energy? Is it just building out more? Is it going to be permitting if you're building a very, very large data center? Or is it going to be the wall? Or is that the models are trained on humanity and humanity is mid. Is mid. Yeah.

The average of humanity is mid. It's possible. Literally that. And I haven't been able to get any of the AI researchers to really put a point on, okay, we scale up order magnitude in terms of number of GPUs and energy going into the model. what does that get us in terms of IQ out of the model? Probably not an order of magnitude, right? But there's some translation there.

Is it worth it to be 5% smarter? I think it's almost certainly worth it to be 5% smarter on these models. And I think that the economics are much easier, which is why the market's ripping so much. The question is just, is there diminishing marginal returns to this? And once we get into the, okay, we're going to invest $1 trillion for two IQ points. Does that make sense?

That'll be a size gong moment. The first real trillion dollar investment. I mean, Sam was kind of teasing it with that $13 trillion number or something like that. Six, seven, eight. But the numbers, the numbers get there. Give Sam a trillion big ones. I trust him with the money. Let him do it.

He doesn't lose money. He does not lose. There's very few people in that league, but he's one of them. Dekash Gupta says, I have nothing against work-life balance. In fact, I recommend it to all of our competitors. This 22-year-old tech CEO says an 80-hour work week is a lifestyle choice. It earned him death threats and job seekers. This goes back to Mike Shebbett at Trava.

Create a differentiated culture. Attract the best. Don't worry about the haters that you attract. But this is interesting because I've long said that the work-life balance promoters on Twitter are just doing the game theoretic optimal strategy, which is tell all your competitors to take long vacations, not work hard. Get massages. Get massages, just do all of this, just try and trick all the competitors.

The funny thing is Google being like it's an all you can eat cafeteria to like, you know, we all know that food takes, it takes a lot of energy to digest food. If you're digesting, you're not writing as much code. But anyways, if you're trying to get attention online, some positive, some negative, go tweet about work life balance. That's a great way to get some death threats. It's also just a great way to farm engagement always. You'll always get a thousand,

and likes if you come up with something controversial about work-life balance. Everyone has an opinion because it applies to everyone. Let's go to Sarah Hess. She's been on the show before. She says, they should make a love is blind version of Shark Tank with Josh Wolf where the founder's names are censored so he can't do nominative determinism. So, low-tamanger.

Low-tan-banger. Yeah, Josh Wolf is famously into nominative determinism where your name describes. what you do. There's a bunch of great examples of this. Sundar Pachai, pitch AI. His whole job at Google is to pitch AI. At Google, there's another person who's running their generative AI program. Her name, Jen, Gen.

Unreal. Jennifer, Gen. A.I. It's probably pronounced like Janai or something, but it's like Gen. Yeah. And there's so many examples, Sam Altman. No, the P-E-backed defense rollout. Oh, yeah.

We're going to get to that. The moneymaker? Yeah, the CEO's name is Moneymaker, and of course he got the deal done. Of course. Fantastic. Of course. And there's a million other examples of this. We love nominative determinism here, but Josh Wolfe was very early to it.

He has an old tweet from, I think, 2020, where he says that him and his friends were collecting examples of it, and he has a whole threat on them, and they're fantastic. And so... It almost makes you want to change your last name. Oh, totally. Or at least, like, be strategic with the middle names with your kids, right? Yeah. Roman moneymaker Hayes. Yeah, exactly.

Stuff like that. I like that. I do think we need a, we need a, a reboot of Shark Tank. You know, Cuban has left the, the tech brother sphere, gone to blue sky. If you want to follow Cuban, former but canceled brother the week, go over to blue sky. Go over to blue sky. Go over to blue sky. But bring it back with a real capital allocator, somebody who's got money and some of the best companies in the world.

I don't want to see like another 100. check. I don't want to see flyers. No. I want to see, you know, I want to see every host on Shark Tank, $400 million fund. Yep. You know, provided by our fund of funds. Yep.

You can only write four checks a season. That's amazing. That's amazing. It's great. And we need to get the, you know. Yeah, they should merge it with like squawk box, right? Yeah. So you're on CNBC.

The CEO comes on and it's just a public markets hedge fund. Yeah. He just says, okay, yeah, I'm ready to take a position. The stock's going to go up. I'm going to put a hundred million in this company. That's actually, that's actually great. It's like we should have, the show should have a segment of like new bets and like reviewing old bets. And the winner is like at the end of the season is like whoever had, you know, the greatest.

It would be fantastic. But yeah, I'd love to see. I don't actually know if Josh has ever said that he uses nominative determinism in his investing thesis. But I feel like he was, I feel like he was pretty loud about Sam Bankman. Really? Oh, anti it? I think if I remember. He's been anti a few interesting people.

And also like controversially like, he's very contrarian. But the SPF stuff was, pro there enough for a while. SPF stuff have you just looked at it. Yeah. rationally. And you're like, why is a guy running a hedge fund and running one of the biggest exchanges at the same time?

Like it just makes zero sense. Like it just seems like very wrong. It's a great, great name. Let's go to my own tweet, I guess. I don't know why you printed this, but I said, Apple can keep the App Store monopoly, but they should be forced to make a printer that doesn't suck. Now, I just,

I think I put this in because I want somebody to make a beautiful printer. Exactly. And the printer is something that's like kind of retro. We use it every single day here. But at the same time, I would love for a technology brother to just reinvent the printer. It's a great business model. You sell a piece of hardware and then you sell the ink.

Yep. You're going to get a lot of ink dollars out of us. And if you're looking for a fun idea that could be very lucrative. And we would be a great sponsor for this. We would promote the hell out of your printer. If you build it. Beautiful, go get beautifulprinter.com. Spend four years developing a beautiful,

amazing printer. And we will be your first customer and first podcast. Yeah. And it has to work with like absolutely no drivers. Like you plug it in with any USB cable. I want like basically like not. airplay, I want to air drop stuff to my printer. Yeah, so our, I mean, our printer isn't that bad here.

I was actually struggling with a scanner. Doesn't look good. That's why I was frustrating. But yes, I can air print to that from my phone, as long as we're on the same Wi-Fi network. It'd be great if it had a web server so I could print from home too here. Ideally, we'd be able to have, you know, fans of the show print for us. Yeah, but it's a tragedy.

It's a tragedy that like a former cash app designer has not reinvented the printer. It is, it is. And it's all because of this ESG, like, you know, worrying about printing and stuff. We're creating an archive of the greatest bangers of history. Exactly. One day we're going to bind these and sell the official tome of the timeline. I mean, we have thousands of posts already, and we're, what, 18 days into this thing? It's amazing.

Day 18. Let's go to John Collison, co-founder of Stripe. He says, we need a total and complete shutdown. of branding agencies until we can figure out what's going on. Very funny. Yeah, there's this challenge. This is a Trump copy pasta, right? Didn't he say this originally?

Wow. I think that's what Trump said. Maybe they're cozying up. She's wild. But yeah, what is the problem with branding agencies? The problem with branding, I like branding. We love branding agencies. We love Emmett Shine.

We love Ryan Harmon. Yeah. We love these guys. They're critical to the innovation economy. That said, when companies pay a branding agency hundreds of thousands of dollars like anywhere between 100 grand 500 grand sometimes more jaguar probably spent like millions on this campaign and what happens when you're when you're trusting the experts when you're paying somebody a lot of money jaguar sub tweet yeah yeah yeah it is

it is that makes sense okay uh you know jaguar's a you know fantastic legacy brand that's being run into the ground um but uh no look when you give somebody a lot of money you're bestowing on them this sort of like trust with your dollars, your capital. And what that leads to is people sometimes overtrusting the branding agency, which is only thing, you know, branding agencies oftentimes want to do bold work, which is not always what's right. Bold work, bold and different things, which is not always right for the strategy of the company.

Sure. I would disagree. I think the problem is that a lot of the branding agencies have just become copy pasta of like, you know, oh, this is exactly what you want. Everyone wants a certain of thought. Everyone wants a bright color and it's like very like bland millennial. And when I think about like liquid death, I think like that probably that came from like brand focused people. But I think that came from the founders.

But the issue is that these branding agencies, there are certain creative directors within them that want to win awards. Sure. And that is not always aligned with the company's strategies. Interesting. Right. Jaguar should have reinvented itself by going back to its roots. Yeah. Playing into the legacy.

Yep. bringing in some future facing elements, but saying, like, you know, we're the first dedicated EV manufacturer that has some, like, historical precedence around luxury and whatever. So anyways, I would put this on the branding agency because it is at the end of the day. They created the work. It's their fault. Interesting. Well, I don't think Stripe will be hiring any branding agencies.

I bet they have one. I bet this freaked someone out. whoever the brain is Should we do film? Should you reload? Reload. While you So while you reload

While you reload, we have got a promoted post from somebody who is recently 21 years old. Josh Harris got your hiring post printed out here. So Josh was one of the first people that I hired at Party Round, hired him after a five-minute phone conversation. knew right away that he was a general no pro con list no pro con list with this guy knew right away um and uh big bet paid off he he did uh you know some fantastic slept in the closet slept in the closet our first company retreat um great things start in the closet and um anyways so he says dear internet we are hiring

a full stack engineer to work with us on pixie chess a novel crypto protocol and i'm going to add a little bit to that pixie chess is building a protocol for playing chess. So picture like crypto meets chess meets like magic the gathering. So it's not just regular chess. There's like power ups and, you know, I got to play a little bit with, um, with a little bit of the game actually on Monday with him and his co-founder, Aki. So they say if you're eager for a high level of responsibility, interested in multi-billion dollar war games. Let's go. Amazing. We love war games. And looking to work on generational consumer products, please reach out. Sincerely, the Dutch East Internet Company.

That's their actual, that's their actual, C-Corp name. So, yeah, I've always been very bullish on Josh. I always will be. He's got incredible mind, put together a great team, backed by, you know, one of the top funds. And what position are they hiring for? They're hiring for a full-stack engineer, so it would be, like, founding, one of their founding engineers.

And I do think that this, I'm an investor, so this is a completely, conflicted, promoted post. No conflict, no interest, baby. No conflict, no interest. But I think that Pixie Chess can be something that breaks out of crypto. Like, I think that the mechanics that they're working on, the novelty of just the game itself, like, should be an absolute hit. And you can go risk on with it. You can play for real money, which would be cool.

So go check out Pixie Chess and DM Josh. And, you know, the technology brothers sent you. I don't regret it. Let's go to Anon Sunwall. He says, Dude Perfect and Mark Rober have built superior businesses to Mr. Beast. They're the best creator businesses IMO and aren't talked about enough. It's interesting. I don't know all that much about these guys.

I mean, I follow them and I've worked in the YouTube world for a little bit. So Dude Perfect is this fantastic channel. It was originally like trick shots. So they would throw basketball off of the top of a. stadium from the nosebleed seats into a hoop all the way down on the field. And they would just do, so they'd go mega, never, I remember being like 12 years old.

Yeah, and watching this on YouTube. And it was just insane. And they just got really, really good where they would spend all day. And eventually, everyone would say, oh, they're faking it. They're doing BFX. No, they just put in the work. And then they actually got really good at making these trick shots. So, like, you ask him to like, oh, yeah, throw a basketball over this building into this

hoop. And like, they're going to be able to do it better than 99% of people because They just practiced it. They've spent more time. So they're actually good at these crazy trick shots. And they can do crazy things like ping pong balls and hockey pucks. And they just do everything now. And then they do a bunch of collabs.

And they've gotten really good at the editing. And they recently opened up this like massive like, it's like a theme park. I think the investment is like over $100 million on this. No way. It has a huge tower that they can throw stuff off of. That's great. Because for a while there was it kind of needs to be like protected because if you're throwing a basketball off.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean there was like there was this whole. where there was this massive like bridge with a trampoline or like a, it was like a skydiving tower, basically. And they would throw like pianos off of it to like, this is like maybe not them, but somebody would throw pianos off of it onto like a trampoline and you would see, like drop cars and stuff. It was crazy, crazy. So great business. And Mark Rober has a really interesting subscription box company that sells engineering

tool kits. This is great for kids where it comes and you get to watch a Mark Roberber video and he breaks down, okay, today we're building like a new slingshot, you know, break out these pieces. And sometimes there's like programming and there's multiple levels. So you can build the basic one if you're just a kid, but then you can customize it and build like more stuff and actually write some code. And so fantastic businesses. But everyone thinks Mr. Beast is at the top because he says the CPG brand with with. No, I think he's probably on top from an attention standpoint.

Sure, sure, sure. But he, these other creators have more aligned businesses, right? Mr. Beast is sort of like, I'm just going to get. max amount of attention. It's a game show that sells chocolate as opposed to Mark Roberts. Engineering channeling sends engineering kits. They're just a lot more disconnected. Or do perfect.

It's like a sports thing and you can go to their sport. They're basically building like next gen Dave and Busters almost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can go to their thing and experience all the different sports challenges. So it does seem more aligned. But yeah, as long as, I mean, I think the challenge is Mr. Beas audience by nature of just getting so many views from so many different parts of the world. Yep.

he's sort of forced into Needing to launch something like a chocolate bar. Yeah, anyone can consume. I mean, this is why I was advocating for Beast VPN. Because he has an international audience. He has people all over the world. And so what do you want to sell? You want to sell something that's differentiated only on the marketing.

It's already big on YouTube. Every ad is for VPN's, extremely high margin, extremely low churn. He'd have to go up against a cartel, though, the Eastern European VPN cartel. I don't even know if there is a cartel. There's so many of these. It's very oligopolistic. No, no, no, no, I heard, I actually heard that there's, like, basically one group in Eastern Europe that has hovered up a lot of them. Oh, really?

So, like, when you see a VPN ad for one thing or another, it's like the same end owner. I didn't know that. So it's more consolidated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I would almost throw this on because if I was, if I was a foreign intelligence agency, I would you.

I might offer very inexpensive VPN services in order to capture all that traffic and data and then price it artificially low so that you just capture more and more of that data, you know, sort of pipeline. So anyways, we try to keep this to once an episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there is another factor. I think that, you know, the business analysis aside, there is something interesting where all of these creators go through this

hero's journey where they're deified and then eventually torn down. Mr. Bees recently went through that. And MKBHD is going through it right now where he has the eye of Sauron on him. We had to defend him last week because he was going something like only like 60 miles an hour over in a children's zone and obviously

we think that's fine. But MKBHD has, the comments on every single one of the video is joking about wallpapers, joking about... Yeah, the new thing this week he was kind of he's historically trash crypto. Oh yeah, everybody has been just like going after him.

And and so there's this, there's this element of like, you're either like loved and all of your fans are like promoting you and reposting you and just sycophantically parisocially obsessed with you. Or you become the demon and then everyone, you know,

hates you and wants to tear you down and gets like social credibility on that. And Dude Perfect and Mark Rober are maybe pre-fall. Or maybe they have the ability to, you know, avoid that entirely with how narrow their content is and where they've stayed. But I mean, you could imagine a Mark Rober fallout around, oh, well, you know, one of his

engineering kits electrified someone and it was terrible, you know, all these things. And then that could just blow up because everyone has this, this latent obsession with like, let's tear the big guy down. And so it's a good lesson in like, you know, heavy is the head that wears the crown. Yeah, there needs to be some broscience done on this because I think the people that try to tear big creators down and put a target on big creators probably just have low magnesium levels. I think that's probably true. And just so you know, don't get any ideas if you're trying to tear us down, we're going to hit back 10 times harder. So don't even try it.

Don't even start. Let's go to Sam Suara says, do you think feudal lords had biweekly one-on-ones with their knights? This is such a good post. I love this. All time post. And then McKenzie says, do you mean a round table? And then some swarms says,

low, well done. Yes, it is a round table. They did have one. Well, we weren't one-on-ones. Yeah,

yeah. That's the key thing. All-hands. Yeah, yeah. The round table is the all hands. And it wasn't, it was, honestly,

the round table was more like a power lunch. I think so. The historical example of a power lunch where a group of people get to channel the power lunch, channel the round table. Yes. Don't do one-on-ones.

never do one-on-ones. Yeah, we should have a roundtable here and we should get everyone on the team. This is a round table. For a reason. But we should get everyone on the team. All of our VPs. All of our VPs, sit around and discuss business and how we will remain the most profitable podcast in the world and the biggest.

And the biggest growing podcast in the world and the biggest tech podcast. And yeah, I think you can learn a lot from feudal lords. You can learn more from the prints than from four-hour work week. Let's go, Trace Cohen. It says they will all IPO and it will make sense then. But now until then, this is a perfect example of how the last two years in tech slash startup slash VC. And it says a screenshot of staying private. You mentioned this earlier.

There was more money flowing into secondaries for Figma, Rippling, Canva, Revolut, Corweave, data bricks and stripe than all of the tech IPOs in 2023 to 2024. And this is from the Morgan Stanley. and the information reporting and companies. Yeah, I think this is like crazy to look at, but at the same time, it makes so much sense. Because most of the returns generated from venture are like 10 companies. Everyone knows this now.

And Elon ran the AB test. He took Tesla public. He kept SpaceX private. And which was more of a hassle for him? The only company that I want to start and go public quickly is the Trump podcast. I think they can get to a $100 million run rate within a year. and should be the first podcast to IPO. And I think that everybody should be able to sort of participate in that movement.

But, I mean, increasingly there's ways to participate in the Stripe secondary through fund of funds, through all sorts of different secondary firms. Yeah, if you can't, if you're kind of annoyed that these companies aren't public and you're accredited and you haven't figured out a way to get in them, it's on you. You just don't want it bad enough. You might be seven SPVs deep, but at least you have exposure. Exposure. Leisure.

But yeah, I think it's still somewhat of a good trend. We want these companies to be able to stay in founder mode, have as little overhead as possible, move very quickly. Raw execution. And execute. Risk on. They will all IPO and it will make sense then. But until then, it's a perfect example. So, yeah, I mean, these companies will go public eventually.

but the private markets are retooling to keep companies private. Yeah, and part of why there's so much capital available for these companies is that they're really, especially now, those new investors are looking at like, okay, I'm probably going to be locked up, you know, not be able to, you know, this company will probably go public within the next two years. And at that point, I'll be liquid and I should get a nice, in theory, like premium on what I invested. Yeah.

And I mean, the entire, like all the incentives align. Like the founders want to stay private. And the asset managers understand that they can earn higher fees from investing in secondaries as opposed to being a public manager or just. Yeah. Also, if you put a billion dollars into Databricks and it goes public a year later and your position is at 1.1 billion. It's a 10% return, which is like what a lot of early stage funds do. Yep.

Or less, you know. Yep. Let's go to Jack Raines. He says, paying a negative salary for a chief of staff position. when you're worth $1.7 billion, either a deeply underpays someone who probably needs money, or B, ensures that you hire a rich nepo baby who doesn't need money. This doesn't motivate someone to grind harder or whatever. And this is a quote tweet of the previous post that we reacted to by Depender Goyal.

I didn't understand that he was paying a negative. Did we react to that? Yeah, we just did. It's deeper in the stack. I didn't understand that he was paying a negative salary. What does that mean? but nothing wrong with hiring. No, so it means they're basically like every,

you got to go work for them and then they're going to donate to charities on your behalf, which we're very against any like sort of non-profit. Yeah, subscribe because we're going to be doing a deep dive on the best charities to take private and turn into for-profits. We've learned a lot from the OpenAI, non-profit to for-profit transition.

And we think PETA could be next. Red Cross could be next. we have lots of ideas. Stay tuned for that. Subscribe, please. But yeah, I don't know. I think that, you know, there are a lot worse roles

than mentoring for a billionaire. Yeah, I think the sort of hate is somewhat deserving. Yeah, it makes sense to dunk, but at the same time, if you do, if you can break through, I mean, this post got a lot of views. I would rather see.

And there's probably a lot of people applying. And if you can break through and become the leading candidate, asking for, hey, I need 50K, like, that's probably an afterthought and you can probably get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that should be like step one. Yeah, they will hire somebody better because of all the attention that they got. That said, I'd like to see that company say, you know, we want people to, you know,

we want sort of people that have a high risk tolerance for this role. We're going to give you your, your comp into an account and you can only trade options with it. Sure, sure, sure. And it's your job to turn it into a livable salary. you go on a very like every single month it's like what's the trade that's going to pay your rent right what's the trade that's going to allow you to get something nice for your mom for christmas right yeah or or walk into dependers office and say hey look i want to invest in startups i need 250k today or if somebody's a real chad get take that role and then get so critical to the business that you

position yourself to do a hostile takeover in the company and boot him out that's good i like that Yeah, immediately start calling the institutional investors. Yeah, this guy's running this company. You have access to his email? Yeah, yeah. Send an email, hey, we need a meeting where I'm calling a board meeting. Call a board meeting without him. Without him.

Yes. There's new, there's new blood in here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sharks in the water. Let's go to a promoted post. What do you got for me? Okay, incredible promoted post today from Brad Gersner over at Altimeter Capital. Fantastic.

He is talking about his podcast, BG2. he hosts this with Gurley. Proud to promote that. It's a BG2. Great name for a podcast. And so all I would say with this, imagine if All In never talked about politics. That's what BG2 is.

That is BG2. And the show is fantastic. If you want to get deep into understanding AI scaling, full self-driving. Let me see this tweet. How, you know, one, they talk about the holy trinity of markets loving, lower taxes, less regulation,

and balancing the budget. That's a holy trinity of sort of like political or like sort of policy. And anyways, fantastic podcasts. I'm a listener. And we love to support other, you know, there's not many technology podcasts. Do they run ads though? No ads yet. That's the only thing, Brad and both BGs.

I'm going to have to change my recommendation. I would say unsubscribe from BG2. We'd like to see them running more ads. Ad, support the community, start pumping some companies. Let some of these scale-ups get in front of this audience. Exactly. Don't be a mistake. Don't be something that everyone regrets.

Come on, man. Come on. That's the biggest issue with all in. No ads. It's the biggest issue. Let's go to Arjun Kamani. Second time on the show. Repeat guest.

He says, Naia Buckele's Instagram story, L.O.L. And it's a screenshot of just the straight-up account. balance because this is the president of El Salvador, I believe. And he bought something like, he bought 268 million dollars with a Bitcoin and it's now worth $573 million. Wow. That so I don't understand what's crazy as you look at the chart. It's like they invested 268 and they were down to below a hundred million. Yeah. He lost a lot of money. He had to ride

it out. He had to write it out. Chat. And he just does. two kissy faces. No, but here's the thing. I don't understand what he's screenshoting this from. Is this like his mobile brokerage? Yeah, I think he literally is like, I'm setting up a Robin Hood account for my country. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'm just trading my treasury. That's the ultimate Gen Z president. Fantastic. We need more world leaders to be risk on and trading. You've seen it with Nancy Pelosi. Let's give, let's give, let's give, you've seen it at the Pelosi tracker, put her in charge of the Federal Reserve, put her in charge of Fort Knox, get us out of gold, get us into crypto.

The only thing that can really fix our budget deficit is Nancy Pelosi trading our federal balance. Get her on pump. Fund. Federal balance sheet. Let's give, you know, J.D.'s, you know, venture capitalists, let's soft circle like $50 billion for him to deploy on behalf of the U.S. people. Let's give Trump. Trump is an established. cryptocurrency entrepreneur. Let's give him, you know, pumped out fun account. And let's ride. Let's go to El Vendador. He says, POV, 22 years old, 200K tech sales job, 48K savings, expenses, 5K a month. What would your strategy to maximize wealth? All right. This is going to be

controversial. At 200K, you're an accredited investor. One big problem with liquid assets is they command a lot of attention, right? When you have your Robinhood or your coinbase or your whatever going up and down on a day-to-day basis, there's this idea that you should sort of fixate on it and like try to optimize it. But at sort of this point in your career, 22 years old, you should be focusing on, you know, I would say that David Senor would say like optimize your network, right? Relationships around the world. Other people would say focus on your skills. I would say, I would say, find, go through YC and invest in the five, invest every single dollar you have in the five best founders in the batch. And, you know, if you're Kugan, you'll have invested in substack, OpenC, Substack, Coinbase.

Zapier and Instacart. Zapier and Instacart, and you will be worth 20 million, regardless of if your company works or not. Well, he's working a tech sales job. That's what I'm saying. Go start an AI agent outbound sales company and go through YC with your absolute So just save the money and then go and deploy it all very quickly. Deploy it all very quickly within 12 weeks. You can probably accrue 50K a year, 60K, maybe 100K if he really saves.

Go long. And the beauty of it is going to be totally liquid. You won't be able to touch it. You'll have to have that dog in you to keep grinding. Yep. I like it. Go to Yaxine. he says the only job left is going to be executive.

Engineers make better executives on median, but executive will be the only job left for professionals. And he's quote tweeting Rune, who says, the job-related meeting crisis has already started and will soon go full swing. This may sound insane, but my only hope is that it happens quickly

and at large enough scale such that everyone is forced to rebuild. What do you think? So the only other job that I think is going to be available is podcasting, right? which is why we're hedging by being executives by being executive podcasters so um yeah i think i don't i don't know i i won't uh i still think there's like 50 000 tech jobs that like probably don't need to exist at these sort of big bigger public or sort of scale ups uh and i think the conversation will really kick off when those people uh are either cut or are sort of no longer being hired at the same rate.

So we'll see. But yeah, I think like the things that are going to have like command a premium are relationships, right? When every company has an army of AI agents that are coding and selling, relationships are going to have a lot of value, like being able to call up somebody at another company and get a deal done, like just very old fashion, like do a power lunch and just get the deal done. That's going to command a premium.

And ideas. But yeah, I think the wait but why guys said this thing, which was like, this is the last year of human history where there's more thing, the most popular, the most popular, like, talk, you know, subject. It's still, honestly not. Like, it'll be interesting to go home for Thanksgiving and more people will be talking about crypto than AI. Yep. And it's because people like to talk about, like, the headline price and there's no, like, headline price for AI. Sure. Just sort of, like, steam rolling.

but I would say like maybe next Thanksgiving that'll be a different story I do I do wonder about the bullshit jobs thing have you read that book um it's this thesis that um like like there is a lot there's already a job related meaning crisis that's happening um and I think about this in relation to the government where there are a lot of jobs you know you walk through TSA you're like what are these people actually doing and you can think about a lot of the government as just a wealth transfer and the and the, but the way we transfer the money is not through the Andrew Yang UBI strategy. It's instead through a bullshit job. TSA.

And I don't know if that's going to go away. I think that might just scale up because I think both parties might embrace that as a way to transfer wealth and give a little bit of meaning even if it's, even if it's minor. Yeah, the thing about the beauty of a quote unquote bullshit job of something that's not necessarily super. impactful is that it still provides self-esteem associated with being productive, earning an income. And you take somebody who's, you know, 22 and unemployed and you give them a job, even if they're making 30K a year, they're immediately going to be feel better about the situation, better about the world. And so we, it's going to be the greatest sort of challenge of our lifetime as you know intelligence becomes an API call yep yep let's go to

Vittorio he says it looks like SORA is still the best video model Samma please elections are over deepfakes are not such a big concern anymore and everyone can't wait to not have to deal with Ben Affleck anymore yeah so we did it I mean this has been almost a year right didn't they didn't they announce it almost a year ago no the challenge is when companies start announcing things before they're available. It encourages other companies to do the same. It's a cost thing. I think it's very expensive to inference SORA. Yeah, yeah. But this is going to be like the craziest thing ever. I heard about a there was a hackathon in SF a week and a half ago and somebody built a product where you could

speak into a microphone and like talk about a situation and then an AI model would generate like a B roll on that. And apparently I think it'll end up being like there's a huge consumer product to be built where somebody you just like talk into your phone say something and and it just like generates like an entire visual like story of like that thing because it's like very much like you're almost like hallucinating.

Yep. I do wonder like how much does that actually add to the experience. Like I've done a lot of YouTube videos that are very B-roll heavy. We use a lot of stock footage. Use some AI video stuff. And then and then with this podcast we were very light on the B-roll unless we're doing a specific segment. And I'm not sure that once B-roll

is democratized at the point that you just click a button and every word is translated into B-roll. So I'm talking about a man drinking champagne and you see AI-generated video. Is that going to become just like, they did the thing? Who cares? No, I think it's more of like an entertainment product. I think it's more about like the creative use. Like I remember when Harry Potter-Belens Santiago went viral and everyone was like, this is incredible. This is like the craziest use of AI. And I was like, what's incredible here is the idea. And I went to chat GPT and I was like, hey, ChachyPT, there's a, there's a viral video right now called Harry Potter Balenciaga.

And it's very interesting for these reasons. It's non sequitur because Harry Potter and Balenciaga are both things that people really understand. But they're from completely different worlds. One is children's story and the other is a high fashion brand. So come up with other ideas that could potentially go viral, like give me the ideas. And it was like Lego Versace. And I was like, you're not getting it. Yeah, yeah.

But do you remember early iPhone days when you could, there was like apps that would get like millions of dollars in sales that were like drinking a beer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think that what I was describing of like you say a phrase into the phone and then it generates this visual journey. Sure. Is more like, you know, I grew up in like country. My dad had like chickens.

You know, we had chickens every once in a while, like a raccoon or fox would get into the chicken coop. And then it would just be like fire drill or all running. Sure. And so if I was able to say into my phone like chickens with AR-15s defending themselves from like foxes and then see this visual journey, like I would pay $5. Totally, totally. Totally. Totally. Totally.

Totally. Like it's just like. Yeah. Yeah. I've already used grok to like mash up different children's properties. But the video. What if Paw Patrol met, you know, Yoda? And it's like that can't have.

happen in the real world because of different IPs, but it can happen in AI and visualizing, like, very specific things. Yeah. And like, yeah, democratizing. But it's going to be such a colossal leap from generating an image to generating 30 seconds of video, which is less than a year, like a year out. Yeah, yeah. They need to bake it down in the hardware because right now it's super expensive. Yeah. Let's go to Andrew Wilkinson. He says, going to business school to become an entrepreneur is like reading a book about basketball history because you want to join the NBA. I agree. I never did business school.

I just started a company. I think you did the same thing, right? It did so economic, which is great. Listening to technology brothers is basically like getting an MBA in three hours via the timeline and our takes on it. I did a program called tech management, which was like, to its credit, pretty cool. I did like probably six classes in it and I thought it was relatively current, but every single thing that we were covering that was at all topical was like a trend from the prior like three years ago.

So we had a class on like the direct consumer model, which again, giving it credit, like most times like a school, by the time of school is covering something, it's like decades in the past. And this is like two years. In some entrepreneurship class, I wrote a bull case for Twitter and the stock was valued. at like under a billion dollars and I got a B minus or something and then the stock ripped and I wrote an email being like, dude, you got to give me an A plus on this. Should have dropped out. I called it.

Like, come on. And the professor was like, fine. Should have been at Jane Street. Yeah, it was like, yeah, bad. Let's go to T.J. Parker. He says, can we please stop with a concert poster fundraise announcements? Truly terrible. Yeah, so this is like a very 2021 thing.

And every once in a while you see some founder that hasn't raised a big round in a while and they're like, I'm going to do a concert poster. Sure. My main issue with it is I often find that I'm not big enough on the poster. I'm not headlining, right? Sure, sure. Some asset manager, like Andresen gets the top spot. I'm like, well, I invested before them, right? Like, should I, you know, should be first billing.

I should be, like, bigger. Yeah. So anyways, I think this is, I do think that fundraising announcements are like, just an easy launch that companies can use to get attention from real value is like notifying the next round's investors that I'm here. These people are in. Also, I mean, just the X algorithm, like you can't post a link to a TechCrunch article that actually breaks down your investors.

So an image can go more viral. So there's something about the medium is the message. And, you know, X is kind of pushing you towards these concert posters. But they are kind of played out. And increasingly the viral launch video is played out to some degree. Totally. People need to kind of reinvent these things. There's been a few that have broken through, but I think people understand at this point.

It's like, oh, it's one of those. No, it's a direct camera. Oh, it's a vibe reel. Founders funded the original viral vibe reel. We did a remix of it and then other people have sort of driven it into the ground. And it's now dead. So if you're thinking about doing a vibe reel or a concert poster, do not do it. Come out with something new.

But at the same time, it's like if you're, it's better than. Nothing. How about PR Newswire? Make it great again? Make PR NewsWire. Business Wire great again. You know there's like two companies that like do that as a service? Sure.

And Berkshire owns one of them. Really? Which is like funny because like, you know, the boys at Berkshire being like, yeah, we should probably own like business wire. The wires. We should own the wires. It's great. The original like go direct is just like own the wire.

Own the wire. Let's get historic preservation respecter. He says, what the heck? I ordered an engagement ring, but they freaking sent me a speedmaster professional 42mm. Someone is going to be in serious trouble. What the frick? Why did they send me one size for a 7.25 wrist? And this is one of those things.

Men, go have the watch conversation with your wives. Sit them down, man explain it to them. Have a 30 to 40 minute conversation where you explain, you know, the history and the intricacies of Swiss watchmaking and, you know, there's some fine American watchmakers. Omega, it's James Bond's watch. And, yeah, sit down, explain it to them, you know, in, you know, in the correct terms. And I'm sure they'll come around to it. So, yeah, the engagement ring can wait.

It can wait. Enjoy your speedmaster. Get your hitter, get your speedmaster. It's critical. But find the right watch for you, right? We're big fans of loud opulence on this podcast. Julie Fredericksson says first time on the show. She says, ding dong, the dick is dead.

Gary Gensler plans to step down as chair of the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission on January 20th. And this is interesting. I've always wondered, like, obviously Trump is appointing all sorts of new people, but what is the calculus between getting fired, riding it out, talking to Trump, or just stepping down early versus announcing that you're stepping down early. Like he's stepping down on inauguration day, I suppose, or near it. And so clearly he knows that he's, that the writing's on the wall.

But there's a media strategy here. The president-elect has a meme coin called the World Liberty Coin that he launched like two weeks out. And I'm sure Gary Hensler's not a fan. He's not a fan. But yeah, you know, look, I think that, one of the challenges with crypto is that it's sort of been speed running all of these, you know, why we have certain regulations. And Gary Gensler's gotten a lot of hate.

And I think it's broadly for good reasons. He sort of made the entire cryptocurrency industry not be able to innovate and actually create, like, a lot of products that would otherwise be valuable to people. and so I think that it will generally be, it will certainly be good for the, for the cryptocurrency industry to have somebody in place that is more of a, you know, ideally like this is an innovation

that's happening one way or another. Like clearly people just create, it's anybody that can develop software can create, you know, tokens and, you know, protocols. And so I think that having somebody in that seat that is generally, really appreciates the novel, like, applications of the technology and can kind of steward

the industry towards having, you know, the big criticism is he's sort of regulating by enforcement actions. So not really telling people what the rules are and then just, like, coming down on one person super hard and trying to make an example out of them. You know, there's no reason we have, you know, tons of billion dollar crypto companies in the U.S. They should kind of understand and the new companies, the rules of the road. Yeah. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from this guy, Jordy Hayes, said he's a general partner at Technology Brothers podcast. I know this guy.

He says, I'm excited to announce the Porsche 9-11 of water filters, Rora Water. Rora is a new countertop water filter. Look at this thing. We got one right here. One of the first versions off the factory line. So Rora's a product that I've been working on with my partners, Brian and Charlie. for quite a while. We've invested a ton of money in R&D and testing,

and it's live available to purchase as of yesterday. So we took the countertop water system, which is, you know, there's a bunch of different people that have made versions to this over the years. We tried to make it 10 times better. I think we did. It's beautiful, effective, durable, timeless,

easy to set up, easy to use. My two-year-old can use it, which is awesome. It's accessible. You don't need to do plumb. or electrical work. And we've tested it extremely rigorously, literally spent about a quarter of a million dollars, like with the NSF,

which is the certification company. And really happy with the product. It's beautiful. And I'm excited for people to finally get their hands on it. I'm excited. So go buy Aurora Water Filter today. Let's go to Joe Rogan first time on the show. He says,

this is my new official X description. And he's quote tweeting Colin Rugg. who says the views Joy Behar says people like their show because they tell the truth unlike dragon believer Joe Rogan and Joe updated his ex description to just say I dragon believe I can't stress this enough on this podcast we trust the experts Joe Rogan Lex Friedman yep Huberman Chris Williamson Chris Williamson uh David Jesse Michaels the list goes on you got to trust the experts you got to trust the dragon believers.

I think that... Putting on the tinfoil hat again. I think we should send one of these to Joe. I think it's a great asset. It provides a little bit of ground cover to say some crazy things. I believe in dragons, right? I got a lot of dinosaurs. I'm around my house right now.

It's hard not to think, man, maybe these things are what we imagine is dragons, right? Maybe we did walk the earth with these fantastical beasts. So shout out to dragons. I mean, dragons are literally real if you believe in the Komodo dragon. We have a variety of dinosaurs that are essentially classified as dragons. That was the Hela monster, related to the commoda dragon, but separate. But yes. But dragons, we need a good deep dive.

We need someone to, we need an expert to weigh in. Enjoy the champagne. I refilled you. We have officially finished the bottle of Dom Paring-on this time. There we go. We are, Chads. Cheers. Celsius and Dom.

Who's mixing a little Celsius and Dom? Cheers. Thank you, Ben, for editing all this. Let's go into, let's skip grit and let's go to tomorrow's telecom. I don't know what that is. Is this important? Do you know this person? No, I just, skip it.

Expa. Let's do Scott. This is a good one. Scott Sanders says, real talk, what are you printing in 2024? And this was a reply to my call for Apple to develop a printer. And I'll tell you, Scott, I'm printing your tweet. I'm printing your tweet. There we go.

I like my tweets printed. out. If you're not doing this, have your secretary, print your emails, print your timeline out. Print your timeline out. Get with the modern era. We're returning to tradition and we're printing things now. So we need great printers. We need a new printer startup. We need Apple to build a printer. We need more competition. I want a service similar to a newspaper that prints out the best tweets from yesterday and delivers them to me at 5 a.m. so I can wake up, walk outside, pick up a nice stack of posts. We respect printed things here. We review Arena Mag.

I already purchased Patrick O'Shaughnessy's new magazine. I am obsessed with the so-called legacy media just because there's an option to print it out and ship it to me. I like printed stuff. It's more tactile. You can mark it up. You can take notes. It's less ethereal.

And it goes in the stack. And this post will be immortalized in the stack of printed posts forever. So get with the program. Start printing your post. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from Daniel at Growing underscore Daniel. He says, so today he's saying that he needs a chief of staff. Oh, that's a dream job.

Dream job working for a dream poster, a dreamy poster. He says, I need a chief of staff as well, offering 15K for that connection. Put me in touch with your most organized friend. And so this is a bounty for any technology brother out there to go connect Daniel to his next chief of staff. The last one is the president-elect. Not a lot of people know, but Donald Trump actually worked for growing Daniel briefly during the off-season for him. And anyways, go work for Daniel. Got a great company building software for police officers to be better at their jobs and more official.

Tell them the technology brother sent you. Tell them we sent you. Let's go to Near Cyanne. She says, every 20s male will watch the big short and be like he's literally me, then proceed to lose their life savings in the dumbest way possible. You know, there's a lot of founders I know who have gone through the hero's journey of losing their entire life savings in crypto and then realize that trading or, you know, Yolo investing is not for them.

Liquid assets. And then they go in and they build something real. And it was a big shift for. like the defense tech boom the gondo boom a lot of those guys had had rough goes in like the Wi-Fi money era realized it was not very durable very zero sum and moved over to something that was more tangible and i i really think that was a benefit uh to society it was it was a good move obviously crypto is important but it's for the real builders and they're the ones that should be rewarded um if you're just on wall street bets and tick to like trying to read you know uh

technical analysis. Yeah. No, I think illiquidity is a feature. Not a bug. Just like, you know, the fact that you can go and do your job every day and not be constantly getting marked is a great blessing because it allows you to focus on the next important task ahead. Yep. And just create value that way.

Let's go to Sri Ram Krishna, and Jensen Horowitz. He says, the common question I often get from SV folks these days is how they can join Doge. Yeah, so this is interesting. I think one of the challenges, there's a lot of people that are in the kind of like peripheral or adjacent to the American dynamism movement that are kind of looking at Doge being like, if I was going to work in the government,

this would be the place to do it. The challenge is like if you, if a lot of your net worth is tied up in a bunch of like illiquid private companies, it's like very difficult to kind of divest those positions. And just time. And just time. If you have a job and you're busy, like I think there was an official post by Doche saying,

look, we've gotten enough ideas. Thank you. But now we need high IQ hard workers to come in and work 80 hour weeks. And that is going to be a great resume bullet point. But it's going to be hard to step away from a company you founded or GP at a big fund. Like that's going to be really hard. I did hear incredible financial innovation. I think it's from JP Morgan or Goldman is one of those two.

They offer a service where if you're taking a government post, and you need to divest assets. They will basically buy it at like 60% of like the last mark. So all those technology brothers out there sitting on overvalued private company shares, maybe take a role in the government and get some liquidity. I mean, that's the thing with the Treasury Secretary, right? They have to sell everything and they don't get taxed on it. Yeah.

So it's a huge benefit. Yeah, I think there's something there where you avoid that. You avoid the employees as well. No, I think it's like pretty broad. Yeah. And it makes sense. It's controversial, but it makes sense. but it makes sense.

Let's go to Dylan Field over at Figma. He says, he's quote tweeting Gary Gensler. He said, this man has ruined so many innocent lives. The stories will come out in time. Right now, most of his victims are too intimidated to share broadly. Let's hope he never has power again. And Gary is announcing that he will be stepping down. And yeah, it's wild because Gary, he was kind of pro-Crypto at MIT, I believe.

He taught a course on it and then just came in as this kind of the bad cop of crypto. and we had a finance background. I think he was at a lot of people. I think he was at Goldman or some big asset. And the biggest problem isn't that he wasn't, isn't that like, okay, there are obviously bad actors in crypto. The problem was is that for the last, you know, four years during the bubble cycle,

I never was like, oh, the SEC is the reason that San Bankman Fried got caught. It was always like some anon on Twitter or even like most of the scammers who are like celebrities and they run shit coins. it's like CoffeeZilla is the one who breaks the story. Or some reporter. It's very rarely, oh, the SEC got to it first. It's usually the investigative journalist, the YouTuber, the Twitter, the posters, and then the SEC has to follow up.

And it was just like, this is completely the wrong model. You need to have a stronger sense of who's actually being harmed. Yeah, the fact that somebody who's running like the greatest design startup for the last 10 years is like cares enough about it to comment on it. just shows like how out of control he was. Let's go to Spore, repeat guest of the show. Spore says, what was the hot tech theme of 2023? And the founder of Perplexity says there's a hot theme for the year and then the most

valuable company and they never match up, which I love. This is a great chart. It's not entirely true because the hot theme of the year kind of changes. And it's kind of unclear, but it does seem real that the metaverse was big in 2022. And the hot, but what's interesting is like this question. It's very obvious. The 23 is AI. Yeah.

It was AI. 100%. But I guess what he's saying is like the hot theme was AI. Maybe we should expect the most valuable company started in 2023. To be technology brothers. Technology brothers. Well, we weren't started in 23. We were started in 2024.

Oh, but, you know, truth social started in, I believe, 2021. It was the Web 3. I would argue that we were started in 2020, though, because that's when we met. That is true. That is the first meeting. That was their first podcast. The mics weren't on, but it was a podcast at a, uh, of a very podcast.

at a very illustrious office. No, there should be, there should be, this is a good use case for polymarket. You should be able to bet on what is the most, like what's going to be like the most valuable company. That's just called investing in the companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do you need polymarket for that?

No, but the thing about private markets is like, I can believe, I can not be an investor in a company and still believe and not even able to be an investor just because in the nature of like round timings. But polymarkets are binary outcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, it doesn't really work like that. Yeah, yeah.

Good idea. We'll have to work on that, though. We need some workshopping. Let's go to Dextero. Elon Musk is now technically the top Diablo four player in the world after her record clear time of 152 in the game's toughest challenge. That is incredible. Firing on all cylinders.

We need to get him streaming on Twitch. He streams every once in a while. More streams, though. Like a daily stream would be good. I would love it. And he takes calls while. doing it. He does everything. And more importantly, he's actually excellent at the game. Unlike.

SBF. Bank Man. Do we have another promoted post? Promoted post from our friend over at Pirate Wires, Mike Solana. He is looking for a full-time editor for the Pirate Wires Daily. You'll be responsible for sourcing stories each morning, managing assignments, editing each take, writing some of your own. Must be terminally online. And funny, Solana. at Pirate Wires, go apply for this job, email him, don't put anything in the subject line, just say no subject. Don't even put anything in the body of the email.

Just put your ex-username, a link to make it easy for Solana. Your resume is your profile. If you're not posting bangers, even low-tam bangers, you've got to have bangers. You're not going to get this job without it. The job is to curate and cultivate bangers. I mean, that's a dream job. And I can't dream job. The three morning takes if you're not subscribed, you've got to.

go subscribe it's the it's the best newsletter best daily newsletter by far fantastic product just very bite-sized very digestible very funny great format i've written one i need to write more because every once in i think oh i have this idea it's not good for a tweet it's not good for an essay the the the pirate wires take is like a format of its own this is what we talk about like format is so important in content and salana has been innovative there in a way that many many other newsletter writers haven't been Yep. Let's go to Michael. He says a quick personal update after three and a half amazing years at Notion and some time off.

I've started a company that's at the intersection of everything I learned at Stripe, Notion, and Google. AI, FinTech, productivity. Search. Our small team is growing and we're looking for founding engineers and designers. Please reach out if you or someone you know might be interested in something early stage and in person in San Francisco. Let's go. There we go. It's a huge talent move.

Hitting all the right buzzwords. Entering free agency, building a new franchise. could be a generational company. Hit up, Michael, if you're interested. I love it. Potential size gong candidate if he gets the round announced. Michael, let us know when the round closes. Hopefully it's really big.

Hopefully everyone's... 10 on 50. Dumping a bunch of fud on, oh, this is overvalued, but we'll be here ringing the size gong for it. Boom. Make it happen. Let's go to Erica. She says, an LP shared.

They expect 5 to 10% GP commit for a first fund. That means 500K to 1 million for a $10 million fund. 50 to 100K of that has to be cash. Most emerging GPs go two years with no salary plus spend, 25K in upfront costs. So expecting more just seems wrong. What are your thoughts? And Nicole Wiskoff says, have never heard this and have met with a few hundred LPs. So a little bit of a controversial post. What do you think? I mean, this is somewhat related to, I think you can base. right off the GP commit if the GP shows up in a car that follows the 1% rule or is wearing a suit or is wearing a suit yeah so this is one of those things anytime you're fundraising you know

you could go out fundraise and talk to an angel investor that's like I'll give you 50k at a 250,000 dollar valuation and like that's good there's always going to be the outliers that are just expecting or like making kind of like crazy offers and got to learn which ones to ignore which wants to take advice from. The other thing, though, is like, if you're a GP, you can effectively commit part of what would be your management fee back to the fund, which can kind of make up for, you know, if you're not super liquid and don't have whatever, that 5 to 10 percent to invest back into the fund, can leverage the fee to kind of get closer to that mark. So lots of ways to do it. I don't think you should start a fund.

fund if you, you know, get some big wins under your belt. Yeah, we have a good friend who says you don't, you shouldn't need to raise because you should just go out and find a 1,000 X. Simply get 100 X. Simply get 100 X, scale up and then just invest your own capital. Yeah. Be ready to make your own capital commit. Chad Capital. Let's go to Jesse.

Jesse says, on chain isn't for you until it is. And it's an ad from Coinbase. A fantastic ad. I really like this. It was really good. Because it really like exemplified like the value of stable coins and why the average person will start to use them in different capacities. So like the wire transfers like a pretty pretty good innovation right. You can walk down to the bank, send a big wire.

The other person, you know, assuming you don't miss the wire cutoff, you know, you're going to have a pretty good likelihood of that wire landing very quickly. That said, in this ad, you know, showed a guy selling, you know, an old truck and taking the bus home afterwards, if you're trying to, you know, make any type of major transaction peer to peer after hours and want to do so in a trustless way, stable coins are a fantastic way to do that. And I like that Coinbase is taking this moment where they're, you know, number one in the charts or close to that and starting to advertise some of the applications of, you know, crypto that the average person would really care about, which is I'm making a big purchase or a big transaction. I just wanted to go through fast. And I just wanted to go through fast and know that it's there.

And yeah, so I can see, I can actually, the ad made sense because I can actually see that happening where somebody's first time like really using crypto other than to speculate is like making a big purchase like a car. That's great. Let's go to Ryan Harmon, good friend of the show. He says, we did a new brand with our friends at A24 and they introduced movie chocolate, milk chocolate to eat during movies. And it just has a fantastic brand, fantastic text. And you could see this being really huge. Cool to see A24 branching out into consumer packaged goods in a really interesting way. Super aligned with the product.

The flavors of this new chocolate brand are like super fun and funky. And they're partnering with AMC. So these will be available. Yeah. And they partnered with, you know, a lot of people like to call Ryan's agency the day job, the A24 of creative agencies, right? They're bold. They're dramatic.

They're original. I mean, the main problem with Ryan and day job is that he hasn't done the blood-sucking scale up that most other brand agencies have where you're just producing slop but charging 500k a project for basically just copy paste of the Figma file. So get your money up, Ryan. Start doing shittier projects and maybe you'll make a lot more money. One small note on Ryan, he's also a little bit of a real estate developer. Oh really? Taking a lot of the profits from the agency and sort of they've been building a office ground up. So if I was a designer or copywriter, creative director and I was in L.A. I'd be wanting to go work for them.

Yeah, yeah. Their new office is going to be fantastic. It's a fantastic business. And yeah, you know what they say, you know what they say, uh, good, good times create Jaguar rebrands. Jaguar rebrands create hard times, hard times create day jobs, day jobs, create Jackwire, you know, good times. That's great. Let's go to Phil Aaronstein. He is the founder of Daraq. We got his name wrong on the last podcast and he's very upset. Brutal. He said, just going to leave this one here and it's Jordy grasping for his name failing two seconds later he clipped this so short five seconds at six seconds I say your name is Phil I know your name Phil is a Chad future Bean Air giga Chad giga Chad future brother the week also incredible bench press this guy is

an incredible bench presser he's an animal so he says changing my morning alarm tone from the founders fund opening song to this audio to begin my winter arc so he's fueling so the only thing i say i'm sorry Phil, you're incredible. Yeah, we love you, Phil. I'm bullish on you. And, uh, Daraque. I pronounce, I pronounce, I pronounce it.

I pronounce it. I think it's pronounced. Yeah. I not only forgot his name. I, I for now. It's after some scientist. Uh, some nerd. Phil, you're an animal.

You, uh, are, I know you're a future brother of the week. And, uh, we love you. We cannot wait to hang, uh, you know, at the next, uh, gundo, TB, uh, crossover. Let's do it. Yeah. Uh, Zestular asks, what's the tech bro version of a Rolex? And it's like he's,

sub-tweeting us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, doesn't follow us yet, but Zesthler, get on the bandwagon, because we've been talking about this for weeks. The technology brother version of a Rolex is a protect-Falip. Yes, but which one? I mean, you can't go wrong in the range. Yes.

That could be a Aquanaut, a Nautilus, a Colitrava, if you're just kind of getting into the range, starting to build that relationship. Sure. But, yeah, you could also argue it, you know, I know, praying for exits, popular meme account. He'll often be fine wearing, you know, timeless Submariner. I think it's a great watch. And so one could argue the technology brother version of a Rolex is a Rolex. Yeah, but also you go up market to the giga tech bro, Zuck, he wears an F.P. Jorn. And so, Richard Mill. We have a promoted post from Richard Mill actually today. We do. We do. Richard Mill. It's a racing

machine on the wrist. Skeletonized. Skeleton eyes, it looks like one. This is a head turner. This is a fun piece. Can you read me the love language there? The love language says a racing machine on the wrist, skeletonize manual winding, 70 hour power reserve,

base plate and bridges in grade five titanium, power reserve and function indicators, case in grade five titanium, torque limiting crown. So like this is the kind of thing that you're going to see in a doll on the wrist while he's playing. I think the lesson here is that is that tech bros are anti-mimetic.

Like we do not want to have a one size fits all. We don't want every tech bro wearing all birds. We don't want every tech bro wearing the exact same nautilus. We want a piece, a hitter on the wrist that speaks to what you're doing. Are you in hard tech? Are you in B2B software? These are different paths for the tech bro. Are you a capital allocator? That means something different and that means a different piece on the wrist. So you want something that speaks to who you are and what you do. So if you're, if you're a technology brother, when you're creating autonomous, you know, drones for the sea.

Maybe it's a G-Shok. Or a submariner, right? Submariner, yeah. Literally, it's got the depth potential. You're not going to be wearing a dress watch in that scenario. You're certainly not going to be wearing an appalbbing. Maybe it's a dress watch. Maybe you're in a bow tie.

Maybe you're in a tux. And you need to call it trava. Absolutely. Let's go to Omar Wasim. He says, the best ideas start as intersections, huge alpha in exploring combinations of whatever you're obsessively interested in,

Tech Bros. Pod is the best recent example of this. American Dynamism, X Venture, X niche, Twitter, bubble. And as soon as he said bubble, I was in. I was in. I love bubbles. We love bubbles on the show. I love Omar. We promote bubbles. I've been on his podcast before. We participate in bubbles. And the only thing I had to say in response to this was there's just huge alpha and simply wearing a suit, right? I agree. If you're in technology, take off the allbirds, throw on some loafers, get a tailored suit. Yep. Wear it to work. I guarantee. You'll stand out. Yeah.

And you're making a statement. I like that. Every step. And let's close with Andrew Huberman, who talking about podcasts. He says, wondering if it's still a good idea to start a podcast, yes. Especially if you have expertise in a particular area that you focus on or weave into your content. I'm excited for the next generation of health, science, and tech podcasters. It's fertile soil.

I mean, clearly sub-tweeting us. Absolutely. Obviously. But does it apply outside of us? Absolutely. I think so. Absolutely. I think there's plenty of opportunities.

I think the evidence of this is, you can say, you know, in the consumer brand industry, right, there's a brand for almost anything. Yep. And, you know, once a week, you see a brand launch and you're like, that makes sense for this moment. Yep. You know, we were, you know, the whole sort of market was ready for it. And the same thing with podcasts. There's still, I forget the stat, but there's like 300,000-ish podcasts that have published at all in the last.

month. Yeah. And so while there's a lot of podcasts that take a shot on goal and then like don't quite see it through or continue, there's far fewer podcasts that are just consistent. There are, there really aren't that many podcasts that fully send it. It's a lot of side hustle. Oh, I do something on Zoom. I interview my friends and they don't really think through like what are the sources of alpha. How can I combine different ideas? How can I really prioritize this and make this the best thing? That's what I noticed on YouTube was like at a certain point, it's like pick a big topic and make the best video about that topic. And it would always go viral.

Two years later, you have half a million subscribers. Yeah. That's a great place to close. No accident. Thanks for watching. Subscribe today or be relegated to a life of net jets for the rest of your life. The rest of your life. Just do it.

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