TBPN - Eric Glyman, David Senra, Bridget Harris, The Trouble with Tariffs, See You in Aspen

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

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You're watching TBPN. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Today is Tuesday, March 4th, 2025. And guess what? We have a guest at the opening of the show, Eric Gleiman, CEO of Ramp. We're very excited for you to be here. Thank you. Welcome to the show. Awesome to see you. And great to be in this holy place today. Yes. Yeah. The dojo of the dollar, the shrine of shareholder value. It has many names. But most importantly, it is our humble abode is the host. And it is where we hope. And it should feel like home to you, considering that I have this massive, you know,

sort of ramp logo over my head here. So home away from home on the air. It's amazing to have you. How has this week been so far? Obviously a busy one with the news yesterday. But from what we understand, it was, you know, old news to you. But I'm sure it feels great to get it out in the world. It's incredibly exciting.

And look, like you, you know, most days as a founder, It's you in an office, taking calls, waking up early, staying up late. It's just a, you know, a lot of, you know, constant work. And it was one of those rare moments, I think, when, you know, customers, partners, the team could all celebrate just a little bit, enjoy and then kind of get back to it. And so it's, you know, pretty overwhelming, really exciting. And feel lucky to be here. Talk about the, you know, pressure of, you know, raising, you know, in, in, in, in, you know, in, in the sort of height of ZERP you guys raised at an eight-ish billion dollar valuation,

then you had to sort of reorient the team around. Obviously, the business performance was still fantastic, but many people were saying publicly that generally a lot of these unicorns may not ever sort of achieve that sort of peak valuation. How good does it feel to not only achieve it again, but exceed it dramatically? And what did you have to do to kind of like motivate and rally the team in the sort of like the darker days where again, this sort of public narrative was that, you know, these valuations were never really real. And yeah, so how good does it feel at this

moment? I think someone really has to do just like a deep, in-depth piece of like the big comeback and building up from like these 2021 companies and what it took because there really were companies that would raise at, you know, 100x revenue, multiple. I don't think it was a sin necessarily to raise at high prices. I think probably the sin was just spending it all really quickly. You look at a lot of the companies that have transformed their industries, Amazon, Google, Apple, like, you name it, often started with some kind of bubble or hysteria. People were investing a lot in it.

I think it does interesting things to businesses. I can tell you that our mission has been very consistent. Our mission has been very consistent start a business that is obsessed with saving our customers time and money, help them have every dollar an hour that they're spending in their business go a lot further. And when you have a large amount of capital behind you, you of course think about what are the results that you produce next week, but you start obsessing over, could I make this outcome 10 years from now larger?

Instead of taking that next marginal dollar and I'm keeping it, how do we put it back back into the hands of customers, see them succeed, have the ability to use that next dollar to invest in faster growth and in a weird way grow a much larger business for them 10 years from now and we hope a much larger one for us. And so I actually think it created the conditions for Ramp to not just be customer obsessed, but to take that to a whole other level. You know, I would say is one of those 2021 companies. We certainly had a lot of work to do to grow but if you keep you know I think in 2022 is public the you know revenue for X that year if you keep doubling if you keep growing at incredible rates what what are very large multiples suddenly

become very reasonable and I think that the interesting thing that happened since is these you know it all met and now ramp is is not only trading like you know strongly performing public traded company is just growing at a dramatically faster clip. It's driving more savings and more value for customers. And the most remarkable thing is it's such a large market. I think if we do our jobs right, we tend to save our customers more and grow just as fast if not faster. I remember you telling me that one of the things you did for the employees was actually during the all hands, during kind of the turmoil of the interest rate rise. You actually walked the team, everyone on the team, regardless of their role in investor relations or not, through how valuations

are calculated, where Ramp is, the growth rates, the metrics, and kind of did a bottom-up analysis, not like a full DCF or anything, but you walk people through that. Do you think that's something that's unique about Ramp culture, or do you think more startup CEOs or scale up CEOs should be transparent at that level with their employees about how, because there's a lot of companies out there right now that are just like, hey, yeah, we're worth $20 billion because I got one guy to write me a check at $20 billion, right? They bought, they bought a million dollars to the stock at $20 billion. Whereas you, I think you said, hey, look, there's a whole host of people around the table that agree on this valuation now. We just repriced it in the new interest rate regime.

And here's all the multiples. Here's what it would look like if we were public, et cetera. Walk me through that. So start with maybe this and think about this, where if you're a new employer, you're considering coming to ramp. There's sort of two, you know, ish ends of the deal just from a comp perspective. One, what's cash? People can agree on, you know, you know, base bonus, that kind of structure. And what's the equity value? You know, maybe that you get a package worth 100,000, half a million, something like that. And traditionally when this is done, we say, okay, this is granted, it's based on this valuation. So we believe that the stock today is worth, If you stay for four years, it will be worth half a million dollars, and if it grows from there,

it'll be worth more. The problem that all these companies had in 2022, 2023, when publicly traded tech companies, in some cases, we're down 70%, some were down 90, others were down 30 is no one quite new. And for an opaque private company, suddenly the bid-ask spreads could be very, very wide. And during all this, I mean, we were sort of like, we were growing. incredibly quickly like that 2022 years we grew four times year over year over year um no other publicly traded company was it was doing that and so i think part of the problem that we were trying to solve was you know we had the very lean we weren't burning a lot didn't have a capital need um but i wanted to be

able to look employees in the eye and say you know when we make a grant and we say this is a 500 000 grant as of the day that you're joining we really believe it and it's not just us but other sophisticated investors have done it and so we did what was a very unusual thing at the time, which is, you know, we just went out to the market and said, we just want to know where you would price this. What's fair? And investors said, we have more conviction than ever. In December 2021, we valued rampant 8.1 billion today. We actually think it's going to be a way bigger company and the value is 5.8 billion. And we said, great, let's do it. And the interesting part is mathematically, if you go through a, to your point, John, like a DCF discounted cash flow,

one of the biggest drivers of what's the end valuation is what are all the profits you'll make in 10 years plus. And it's impacted by what is the risk-free rate, the overnight rate you should get. In December 2021, that rate was almost 0%. You know, you would get no reward for risk. In 2023, 2022, the risk-free rate was like 5 to 5.5%. And if you compound that over 10 years, it has a... dramatic effect and so in a weird way, but 5.8, if you kind of go through the math of $5.8 billion valuation first, it lowers the share price today, but it implies a much higher

share price later on. So I guess to back into it, you know, I still think a lot of companies haven't taken their medicine. They actually haven't just marked it to market. And I think that a lot of employees who've been working hard probably are still underwater. And we didn't think this was right. We rather would just say, you know, here's where the stock is. Come in today. through hard work and you know focus customer obsession let's build from here and I think that proved really well you know we're we're back above all-time highs we have a lot of momentum and I think for people who've joined the team and part of the mission I think people have been been treated really fairly and so I don't know hope

that's helpful and just how we thought about yeah I have a question around ramps truly lives the ramp way like the the approach to company building that you guys advertise you you you you do exactly yourself right so so i feel like you're in a position like looking at ramps capital efficiency which i think was published you know yesterday around your guys's sort of net burn uh it's really astonishing right and it's got to be if you're running a business you know at anywhere in the same category even adjacent categories you have to be highly concerned at the at the rate that you guys are growing in that context uh is that how much of that do you credit to ramp versus yourself and your team's operational abilities.

I think our whole mission, right? To your point is like make the most of every dollar and every hour. If you're spending it, you should know why. And it's not just that you're spending it in one place, but what actually generates the return? What connects to growth? And I would say that we certainly benefit a lot from our own product. We try to be obsessive over making.

sure we're not wasting. And if we're spending on, you know, software license as a product, we buy 500 seats. We want 500 people to use it. And we use RAMP to cut out extra licenses. We look and make sure we're getting the most impact for prices and, you know, software that we're buying. And I just think, you know, for the same reason, a lot of the highest performing best running companies on the planet run on ramp and use it. You know, we do too. We want to be the best customer of our own product. And so some of it's that. But I'd also say with your whole mission is, you know, to obsess over getting, you know, your customers the most from every dollar an hour. As long as you're not a big hypocrite, you start thinking about it for yourself too.

And so I would give credit to the team. I just think that the rigor, you know, not just financially, but even just from a, you know, engineering perspective, design perspective, I think most organizations could not have put out a Super Bowl ad from, you know, 11 days start to airing. I think we were one of the few groups that had direct, insight into that because I remember we talked to the team. You know, we have a sort of a weekly with with the ramp marketing team and we talked to them and they basically were like, hey, we got to go dark for like three days. And so we got to witness the process and it was just,

it was it was incredible to see. In this moment, you know, to me it feels like ramp's opportunity, like the value proposition for ramp has never been stronger, right? You were born in 2019. You very quickly we're in the zero interest rate era where it was not cool to save money it was cool to spend it and grow as fast as human humanly possible and we're now entering this period where you know we have terrorists there's austerity in the government right it seems that you know saving money and making dollars go further is in how do you know how are you you thinking of you know taking ramp out of, you know, ramp is, the Super Bowl felt like this first moment where ramp was going mainstream, right? And, you know, what does that look like over the next, like,

couple years in terms of, you know, getting, there's, there's many more businesses that, that aren't on ramp that, than are. What does the next two years look like in terms of going mainstream? Two things. I mean, there's something just timeless about, uh, ramp's core ideas. I need to paraphrase, you know, Jeff Bezos, when he was talking about Amazon, he couldn't imagine 10 years in the future people would ever, you know, say, you know, Jeff, I love Amazon, but I wish the prices were higher. I just wish that, you know, these packages got to my door a little bit slower.

You couldn't imagine it. People always want lower prices, you know, and getting things earlier, getting more done with less effort. And in some ways, we just took the simple idea very seriously. For a business owner, you know, in the U.S. average profit margin is 8.5%. It means a dollar saved is not equivalent to a dollar earned. A cost that you cut is equivalent to increasing your revenue by $12. And I just think that we looked at the math and just took it seriously. And I think that simple truths in some sense are one of the most powerful forces in business.

When I look at where we are, it is incredible. to be serving, empowering what we believe is one to two percent of all corporate and small business cards spend in the U.S., which is maybe the market that we're largest in. You know, it's 98 to 99 percent to go. I think part of going means. You did the meme. You did the 1 percent. The 1 percent of the tampe.

If we just take 1 percent of this thing, it would be a big company. Oh, they did it in five years. It's so frustrating. Yeah, yeah. Well, people are going to be like, yeah, yeah. Can I get a breakdown of like post-mortem on the Super Bowl? I want to know, I mean, everyone kind of knows, okay, Super Bowl, like it just looks good. It looks like a six to seven figure spend.

But how do you, everyone wants to know, what does it feel like? How do you start calculating like, does this make sense? And did we make money from it? What's your early read? And then what do you look? What signals are you looking for down the road? It's incredible. So there was a couple things.

And also there was even kind of in ramp fashion some things that made the, the, the, the, the buy particularly impactful and maybe a little more clever. So by being, by buying the ad much later than most normal people would do, we had access to very unique inventory. Like it sort of is a little insane to say 11 days before the Super Bowl. You know, what if we did that? And so as a result, we actually knew who was playing in the Super Bowl. You know, we were able to find someone that had incredible relevance to what people were watching. And of course, Sequin is an amazing one of one talent.

That was phenomenal. Next, there was, without getting too specific, a lot of folks that, for various reasons, would normally buy Super Bowl ads, insurers who had to deal with fires and other things like that that dropped out of the Super Bowl. You know, didn't want to be advertising at a time when, you know, we're sort of coming under attack, and it meant that some of the spots that we were able to get were in extraordinary slots. For people who were watching closely, we were the very last ad.

going in to the Super Bowl. And that was nationally aired. For folks in other markets, saw the ad twice. And, well, I can't get specific on the figures. It was a lot less than what people think. And the impact was a lot more. I think that Sequin, you know, being a core contributor and having an extraordinary season, meant that not only, you know, was there a lot of coverage of him, but, you know,

even the next week he was on the Today Show. And, you know, they talked about his story as well as our partnership. and the ad aired there. And we can see this in the metrics where February was, you know, by many accounts, that by far the biggest February that we've ever had. The acceleration just in terms of sales as well as people feeling like, you know, it's gone from startup to, you know, this company that I knew when is actually on this big stage. And so you can see it in the growth and just even in how people feel,

how likely people are to recommend. And we've seen all of that. these go up. I have a more personal question. You now run a $13 billion plus company. You're still one of the most kind and genuine people that I know. And it's almost most people by the time they sort of climb the mountain to build a company this big. They get sort of hardened. What do you, what do you credit your ability to, you know, your ability to sort of lead with kindness? And I feel like every conversation that I've had with you, but at the same time, sort of broadly your sort of reputation, despite, you know, building such a behemoth and such a short period of time, that's broadly your

reputation with anybody that I feel like interacts with the company. Where does that come from? So, one, I just think, you know, we're thrilled to be here, but, you know, I, you know, it shows some humility. Thirteen billion is a lot. It's still very small in the grand scheme of things. You know, we're competing directly with companies that have multi-hundred billion, if not almost trillion-dollar market caps. Some of the largest companies, you know, today are, you know, call it $3.5 trillion. And the wild part, you know, is that mathematically a company like, you know, an Apple or Microsoft or Nvidia, you know, talking to a ramp is almost like a ramp talking to a CED or CRIJ startup. It's actually those multiples in between valuations are about. the same. And so in some sense, I think some of it just comes from the reality of we have such a

long way to go. There's so much more to build. There's so many more people that we can serve and just remembering that. I think that when you look at great companies in the past often are killed by hubris, you know, arrogance and, you know, forgetting like the reason why they were able to grow and get there is there were people who early employees who gave them a shot and, worked hard who didn't have to be there, who were there, early customers who said, you know what, I'm going to try and, you know, trust you with my business and please take good care of it. And, you know, that still is true. And so I don't know.

I guess it's a little bit too, like, you know, you grow up a certain way and, you know, those kind of things stick with you. But that's really how I think about it. Right. Did you want to get into any of the general entrepreneurship questions or anything? Yeah, I mean, I guess you've had your pick of the litter in the valley, right? At this point, I'm sure you've talked with every major, you know, investor for, you know, across different rounds. And obviously some funds get conflicted and things like that.

What's a single best piece of advice you've ever gotten from somebody on your cap table? It could be, you know, you know, specifically on the investor side. It's a really good question. I mean, I tend to really resonate with former operators, people who have built and run business. I think that experience is very, it's fun. It's interesting. Also, times very solitaire. Turns out it's pretty valuable.

It's pretty valuable. Yeah. Yeah. And so, look, I, you know, we have a very small board. You know, one of the members is Keith Rboy. And I think that part of why I wanted to work with him, even from the, you know, from the earliest days is I just think he had an obsession with what it takes to be a high quality operator like I still think is how to operate talk he gave over a decade ago is as good as it is

I think it's very underrated I think what was the gist of that it was a cannonballs and barrels right barrels ammunition yeah barrels and bullets and bullets yeah I mean the idea is it's like the bottleneck you know you might have as many bullets but if you have a you two if you can You can't fire as many bullets. You need to have more cannons to go quicker. But I think a lot of the heart of it, and some of this is like the score takes care of itself, with the idea that you manage towards the inputs to drive the outcome. And, you know, I think ramp has been in this very large.

And in some sense, people look at it from the outside in, hyper-competitive space. And we've grown at a level others have in it, in part, I actually think is just by taking that advice to heart. it's really looking upstream what are the activities that lead to the outcomes are trying to drive what are the things that can do today that will save your business you know time and money tomorrow what are the things we can do today to drive more sales tomorrow and so uh in some sense it wasn't profound it just was right and we um try to listen to it pretty often that's great yeah i feel like the the best uh the best advice in the valley is actually all out in these sort of blog posts or individualized talks and in the same way on the company side you know the ramp secret plan is out there it's

like we're going to save businesses the most amount of time and money and if you want to compete with us on that you're welcome to it's good for the world but we're going to do it the best so it's amazing to witness and uh yeah we'll have to have you back on uh in the very near future because uh you know if there's one thing about ramp is uh there's always always news coming always news you know wait guys i really appreciate it And like, I, thanks for happy on the show when, like I said, I knew when. I think this is going to get, continue growing really quickly. Oh, yeah. We're excited.

We have Senra coming on in a couple minutes, I think. So we're going to have him psychoanalyze you. Yeah, we'll let you go, Eric. We'll talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers. Yeah. Bye. And we are going to take a 30 second break while we fix some. stuff with the stream and then I will give you a little run of show because we did we jumped straight into that interview obviously we're getting live later and later and so yeah we want we want to go we want to touch on the trump tariff thing but just a little bit just dip our toe in stay not political but it is the top story it's what everyone's talking about so we're going to focus on the tech reaction

we're not going to really deep dive into the politics of it we're going to talk about what people on tech Twitter are saying about it. We're going to go through a bunch of timeline, cover some reaction to earlier clips that went out yesterday from the show. And then I want to talk about Greenland. I think Greenland's super interesting. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal

about whether or not Greenland could be a place for a mining boom. And the question they ask is, Greenland has the makings of a mining boom. So where is everyone? Like there are minerals there, but no one's really going after them. We're going to try and get to the bottom of it with this Wall Street Journal article.

And then also, Google's making a new push with Project Starline. Have you seen Starline? I have not. It's one of these, like, tech demos that feels very fake, but every, because, like, you just can't go experience it. But they bring in journalists and like YouTubers and they all walk out. Oh, journalists? And they all walk out of the room being like, like, that was incredible. And you don't know if they're being paid off or something.

Yeah, yeah, you know, you put on the tinfoil hat. Like, they might be paid off to be like, that was amazing. And really it sucks. So it's in the, like, Project Orion realm of like seems really promising. But basically it's like a TV that's like 3D. And it uses kind of like an illusion technique to help you see someone across the table in like as a hologram. Interesting. And they want to roll it out and they want to get it like cheaper so that basically everyone can have this.

But they're they're making a push. So we could podcast holographically. I would love that. I mean, the reviews, the early reviews have been remarkable, but it's very unclear, like, how real it is or how, or how expensive it is to actually roll out. So we're going to go through that. But mostly, we're going to do a ton of phone calls today because we're really enjoying the guest spots. We're having a lot of fun people on. So we will have David Zendra hop on.

And then we're going to have Bridget Harris from Founders Fund hop on at 1145. And who else is maybe going to come on? Maybe Sean McGuire. We'll see. I texted him. Hopefully he can get on. Let me see if he's on. He's on next. This is turning increasingly into just like a live stream. We're just like hanging out. We're hanging out. Okay. He just liked my post. He DM me his cell phone number. I texted him. Hopefully he gets on. Maybe we'll just call him live at noon and just be like you're on and that's it. What's going on? Okay. We got to cut you a break. We will. be right back. You're watching TBPN. You'll still be watching in a couple of minutes when you get back. We are back. You're still watching TBPN.

We had a little HDMI issue. I guess when I was looking at Jordy, it would look like I was looking off to the other side. Anyway, it's fixed. We're back. We're happy to be here. Ben, give me an update on David Senra. Is he in the waiting room? Does he have the Zoom link? I mean, we're talking about the most powerful man in Miami.

He is the most powerful man in Miami now. You know, we had Keith on, but Keith has kind of relinquished it a little bit. He's got his toes in D.C. He's got one foot in Silicon Valley now. Cedra isn't making a move. He's locking down the islands. He's having, he's establishing. He's not leaving.

He's not leaving. You're going to have to drag him out of Miami. And I would be happy to drag him out of Miami. Actually, it's very easy to get him out of Miami. You just got to send a private jet. Yeah. He really does hold a bar well. Yeah.

He holds a line. It's remarkable. how he set that bar and then still manages to get on a plane twice a week. You would think that that would reduce the amount of travel. But somehow it does not. Anyway, Senra, Senra, Senra, hopefully he hops on. He says he needs five minutes. That was like four minutes ago.

You know, maybe we should just play a little bit of his podcast on our podcast. The dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most, two to one. But in the field that I was a sufficient in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. So given that,

you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream and to build a team that pursues the A plus players and that is exactly what Ramp did. We're in the middle of a ramp out. That's hilarious. There he is. I'm playing. I was listening to your latest

And there was some good, there was a really good quote in there. And I didn't realize it was in the middle of a ramp. That's funny. I caught the tail end of you talking to Eric. Oh, yeah. That's great. How you doing it, man? Good, good.

I just actually saw Eric last week. We had breakfast. I went, I flew to New York for a super secret dinner that I'm making an episode about right now. Oh, that's fun. Me and Eric had breakfast the very next day. Very cool. Amazing. Every time I tried to ask Eric something personal, he perfectly redirected it into talking about

how RAMP saves businesses, time and money. Can you help us psychoanalyze Eric? Because he's like this, and he's truly a one of one in the sense that I was kind of positioning it as like building a $13 billion plus company and maintaining that level of sort of genuine kindness is like very tough. And I'm curious if you have any sort of like opinion or sort of like I mean I I just have the answer like when I when I made the documentary about ramp like I was interviewing him with that exact question like hey you're so nice but like you're running this like kind of cut through company in this like hardcore industry like how is this possible and it kind of got peeled back the onion and got to the fact like he had a brother who got bullied a lot and like he developed like

this insane empathy that was my takeaway I was like tearing up while I was talking to him about It was really, really like, kind of like a crazy, crazy, like early life to, like deal with. And that clearly gave him like a new level of empathy because he went through all this stuff with his brother. It was wild. Anyway, but Senra, what's your take? One, I spend much time with them. I do consider when I say on the ramp ads, my friend Eric, I don't know.

That's not hyperbolic. I would say the larger, like the more important idea is like you actually don't have to be like a complete. Listen, I think Steve Jobs is one of the best, you know, founders of all time. If there's a Mount Rushmore of the history of entrepreneurship, he's got to be on it. It doesn't matter like what the other three are, but he's definitely one of them. Yep. But people hear how like, you know, how he spoke to other people and they just like, oh, like to be like him, I have to be like that. And it's just like, no, you don't.

Like if you look at the greatest, you know, when I went to Charlie Munger's house and had dinner with him, like, he said that the greatest, he feels the greatest founder of all time is Rockefeller. And one of the craziest things about Rockefeller is like, there would be people that worked for him for decades. It said he never raised his voice and he never said an unkind word. So I think there's like this myth that there's like this one size or one way to be successful. In fact, I was on a long walk with a friend last night and we were talking about Michael Dell, you know, regardless of what you think is like one of the most successful people who've ever lived has a phenomenal relationship with his son. They're like best friends from what I hear. Very, very proud that he's still married to the same woman. Like anybody to spend time with him says the same thing.

He's just unbelievably thoughtful and kind. So, yeah, one, with particularly Eric, it's definitely not an act. And two, I don't think, you know, it's prerequisite for success. This is like one of the reasons I tend to work alone is because I am really fucking mean. I don't like that. I wish I wasn't so, you know, like intense around that. I'm perfectly fine being that way with myself. I just don't like doing that to other people.

That's why when you said you liked our podcast, I didn't. took it really serious because I'm like, he just wouldn't say that. Oh, no way. Very authentically like, yeah, like this, this isn't for you, bud. I mean, I've sent him so many things to review. And I'm just like, it's not bad, right? And he's like, have you listened to it? So there's a, you see this bookshelf behind me?

Let me zoom out a little bit. So it is, it holds like 600 books or something like that. Yeah. And let me see if I can change this. So they're actually in order by episode number. Yeah. And one thing that I love about, there's another like 300 books in my living room. And I walk past it out every day to get upstairs.

And one of the books has the title like big bold letters in the spine. And it's applicable to a lot more industries than you think of. And it's definitely applicable to podcasts. But the title of the book is competing with idiots. And I think like that. You know we're doing the same thing here with posts. Right. We have, we have every post. Every of Alexandria posts printed out in order that we reacted to them on the show.

So remember with, it's bigger than your, it's bigger than your bookshelf. You remember when you guys had this idea of like you were going to sell your podcast in vinyl? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I actually, I hope you make that into a book and I would buy the Technology Brothers book of tweets. We're definitely thinking about that. Definitely thinking about that. I think with the vinyl thing where we got was we want to send you our favorite episode of founders on vinyl, something like that. There you go. Okay. Yeah. And then send that to Patrick.

And then so like the Jeremy Giffon episode goes out because you get that on vinyl. It's like a fun thing. You could like put it on your bookshelf or something. It's a little trinket. I actually think it's really smart. There's been multiple occasions. So like, um, you can't see it, but behind my desk. So Sam Zell, there's a bunch of people. I'm actually reading Michael Obitz's autobiography. Yeah. So I'll give you a preview of the, the episode that has been killing me. I'll knit it out two days ago and it still won't be done. Um, brutal. And, and, um, and, and, he had a full-time gift guy. And this has actually come up a lot in the books.

Sam Zell had a, he spent millions of dollars a year, from my understanding, on his full-time gift department. In fact, he built these like automaton's, right? And he had to have a theme.

And I actually spoke at this guy's conference and he's like, do you want anything for this? I was like, it's in Miami. I don't go to fuck. I'll do it for free. And we're friends anyways.

And he's like, all right, I have a gift for you. And he actually found one. And he bought me a Sam Zell, like automaton. But I think the technology brothers, especially because you're like you're doing it five days week.

You're going to have all these guests. You should have like a gift department where it's like thoughtful like like that. Like here, here's your favorite episode on vinyl or like whatever whatever. I mean, how to win friends and influence people. The whole idea of a Rolodex. You said that was your favorite book, right?

I mean, I thought Patrick O'Shaughnessy said he rereads it all the time. I read it. It is a fantastic book. It's one of these like timeless books. It's a little ridiculous because it's like so, it's like over the, it's clickbait title.

But, you know, clickbait works. Yeah, no. The value, I like things that the value prop is in the title, actually. Also, it's so old-timey. Like, it's just, it's an interesting artifact because it's like, it's the type of, like, business advice that you'd see on, like, a thread on Twitter these days, but it's from, like, the 1920s.

So all the examples are, like, really antiquated. It's not, it's advice on human nature and human nature doesn't change. Like, that's why people still read it. And like Charlie Munger's, one of his favorite book was influenced by Robert Kialdini. He liked it so much. He gave him, um, a single share of Berkshire stock when it was valued at like 500,000. I think today it's like 750.

Wow. Pretty good compensation for writing a book. That's awesome. That's amazing. I love that. When are you writing a book? What's that? When are you going to write a book?

Never. No, because like here's the thing. Like I told you before, I mean, you guys know this because like I kind of like cornered you at Hereticon about how important podcasting is. Yeah. And, you know, I get like, it's very nice because like I, I, I, I, you know, As you guys know, most of the books I do, I cover, like, really old. But publishers send me all of their, like, new books.

And, you know, I might do, like, one new book for every, like, 50 old books. Yeah. And they all, they send me their new books for distribution, but they're also, like, where you be interested in writing a book. Yeah. And my point to them is, like, I think of podcasting as, like, one of the greatest technologies to ever create. I think it's the printing press for the spoken word.

And so me taking, and I think it's the highest and best use of my time. So me taking time away from that to do anything else, but more podcasting doesn't make sense. Now that I talked to my friend Jimmy Sony, who I absolutely love. And he wrote this great biography on Claude Shannon. He wrote this book called, what's that? He spoke at your event. He wrote the PayPal book, right? He wrote the founders, the history of founders.

He's like another psycho obsessive. It took him longer to write the founder's book than it took PayPal to be founded and then sold to eBay. So I called him. I was like, hey, just name your price and, you know, listen to the podcast. We'll have some conversations. and if you can write this for me, like in partnership, then I'd be interested in doing that. So what I told them to do is one of my favorite books is Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History, Right?

You really think about that book. It's like they dedicated 50 years of their life to writing the history of civilization. It's probably, I don't know what, 10,000 pages all combined. And yet after that, they're like, hey, we're going to do this fucking ridiculous thing of trying to write a biography of the human species and we're going to limit to 100 pages. So I was like, okay, I would want to do that. Like, what are the most important ideas that we've just, we've unveiled so far through the podcast and in the eight years of his existence.

distance and write like this is a bot like the most important idea is in a hundred pages and so he he's got a bunch of stuff going on including two books that are really fascinating that he's writing but he said he's going to do it very cool uh who are the entrepreneurs that are still building their legacy that you are hoping that they will live up to their full potential and one day be qualified to be uh you know given the full founders podcast treatment i would put Eric and Kareem in that in that bucket of you know ultra high potential but still you know sort of just getting started in a sense are there people that stand out today that that you're excited to cover in you know 15 20 years right I'm going to tell you who my favorite founder alive is right now

and it's going to be surprising to people because um I heard your episode yesterday where you talked about like how I'd call you up John and like find a simple idea and take it seriously and I think that's one of like the best pieces of advice and you see it over and over again i've been able and some of these people i can't fucking name because of the podcast but i've been able to meet like these crazy you know family businesses where the founders 80 years old still running the company no outside investors worth 10 billion dollars and you know they just monopolize like crazy stuff like nails or packing equipment or shipping company or just like crazy like not very complicated ideas just like they found a simple idea and took it uh very seriously um i i think uh one of the things i like about

and Kareem is before we had this like very deep partnership. It's not obviously you guys know this. It's not just like, we're not just like reading ads for them on my podcast. Like we're friends. We spend a lot of time together. Our wives spend time together. Our kids play together.

And, you know, it took a long time getting to know them really well. One of the important things when we talked about is like, is this your last company? Like I'm not interested in like the people that want to start scale and sell. I'm interested in people that do something for a very, long time. If you look at all the books behind me, these people literally work, ends of Ferrari. Right here. He died. He worked on, there's no retirement. It's like, Ferrari is my entire life.

This is what my life energy goes to this. Most of the people I come on the podcast, you know, their life's work. And when I loved about both Eric and Kareem, like, this is the last company. Like this is, we want to build this forever. There's actually an interesting idea. And I'm trying to convince Kareem to do more, not that he needs my advice by any means, but I really want him to be interviewed by Patrick. Just because I get to talk to him privately, and he's like fucking brilliant technical mind. And one of the things that he said that was very fascinating is he optimizes for spikes.

And what that means is like, you know, especially as the company grows, you tend to like try to like even out and like hire for personality or like, yeah, this guy's talented, but he's kind of like an asshole or he's like comes in late or like, you know, will show up for two days and kind of disappear. And I think what Kareem understood is what a lot of history case entrepreneurs understand. There's a great line by David Ogreby where he said that talent is most likely to be found against among misfits, nonconformists, and rebels. And what Kareem is interested in is not like your total package.

He's interested in your very best idea. So like if you were the very best at X and he just wants you to do that for ramp and if you only last for six months. That's fine. It's like he just, he optimizes for spikes. And I think that's incredibly, um, intelligent because it's also something that Steve Jobs says that he's like, you can never, ever, ever, ever forget the dynamic range of human beings that most things in life, you know, between the average of the best, it's like two to three, two, two times best, three times quality where he's like in software and hardware, it's like the difference is like a hundred X or a thousand X. Yeah, marketing too. Not just, not just 10x engineers, 10x ideas, 10x, 10x.

And you can see it with Apple right now. What's that? You can see it with Apple right now. Gen Moji it. Like it's not crazy to think of the Yain and Yang campaign that they ran as a thousand times better than the Jen Moji campaign. Yeah. And again, where does that come from? Where like Eric and what I like about Eric and Kareem is like they work like dogs, just like I do.

Right. And I'm really only interested. I just came back from lunch. The reason I text you guys in five minutes late is because I was meeting another founder friend of mine. And we had lunch with another friend. And there's like all three of us have to sit in common. It's like we're taking what we do very seriously. It's all different businesses.

But Kareem works nonstop, right? Eric does too. And they want the pressure. And they want, they do believe like something that Eric told me that was wild at breakfast was like when Bramp was founded. Amex was like a $70 billion market cap company. And now it's like 220 or whatever. So I heard at the very end he's talking about, yeah, people were saying, hey, we're valued at 13 million. That's fine.

like, you know, we're missing a zero, maybe two zeros. Like if we're doing this for a long period of time, things grow in unpredictable ways. Like the people that I've met, I actually didn't, I like didn't ask him the question of, you know, I was, I'm genuinely curious. Like, what do you do? If you have five minutes in the day, you know, what are you doing for fun? And I don't even think that's worth asking Eric because I know he's just going to say, look, you know, I like to, you know, keep in touch with my family and but otherwise I'm at the office. I'm thinking about work or I'm calling Senra. But yeah, it just didn't even seem like worth asking because I already know the answer.

One of the most interesting things, I think they just put this out in that blog post, but we definitely talked about it too. It's like, you know, they're doing like 54% of their payrolls are dedicated to R&D. Like they're not just like, oh, look what we did in this amount of time. It's like, no, we're going to keep pushing the pace. This is, again, what I, when I went to New York, I had dinner with Mike Ovitz. that had an intense three-hour dinner with Ovid. So I'm making an episode in the dinner

and I'm making an episode on the book. And the way this came about is because I was at breakfast with a friend of mine and his phone was on the table and it rings and it's Mike Ovitz. And he picks up, he puts on a speakerphone. He's like, hey, I'm actually sitting here with my friend, David.

He does this podcast. You should know about founders. And Mike, without missing a beat, he goes, I love that podcast. I listened to four episodes yesterday. And one of the things that me and Mike talked about at breakfast is like, nothing that Michael Ovitz said,

in his book are at dinner is like surprising to me. Because it's like founders are church for entrepreneur. I'm just telling the same story over and over again. It's the same personality type over and over and over again. And so yeah, of course, like when they're saying, hey, we're extremely dedicated to what we're doing. We're trying to get better. It's like that's exactly what they should be doing.

If this is going to be your last business, if this is your life's work, then you will have that like importance of every little detail. Like how many, you guys see all the tweets when people talk about the difference of like the UI and UX to ramp to, compared to some other people. Yeah. Yeah.

And your point about Apple. There's a great book called Creative Selection. It's episode 281 of Founders. I think the title's working with Steve Jobs, if I'm correct. Might be wrong. Maybe 282. Probably 281. And that's one of the best books I've read it three times because it talks about the care

that Steve Jobs put to every single pixel of all the products they're making and all the advertising. So that ad wouldn't have gone out because Steve would have had to approve every single ad they went out. There's a different level of care and love. Yep. What's your sleep score? What's your sleep score?

Not good. And I love Mateo. They were one of my early partners. Let's, it was, here's a problem because every, I'm so excited about this is going to be a big year. And I have a lot of stuff coming that people don't know about. And like, it's, it's not good. So last night was 70. Ooh, I got 88.

What did you do, Jordy? The night before is 56. 56? I've never actually gotten that low. I got an 89. You're grinding too hard. No, no,

I'm just very excited. This is like, yeah, no, makes sense. One of my favorite founders, you mentioned earlier is, or you were asking earlier,

is Dana White. I think what he did, what him and the Fatita Brothers did with the UFC, buying it out of bankruptcy for like $2 billion or $2 million. And then, you know, selling it for whatever the number is and still staying on there. And I saw a clip from a podcast interview that he said that's excellent.

And it's like very again, I like simple ideas. He's just like build a life that you can't like you can't wait to wake up to. And he's like, people always ask me, oh, when are you going to retire from the UFC? And he's just like, retire from what? Like I get to put on the best fights in the world. I get to travel and I get to stay in the nicest hotels, eat at the nicest restaurants, like put on the best live events. He's like, I'm going to be doing this until I'm 80. Yeah.

And I just love that idea. Like a very simple idea. Am I building a life that I cannot wait to wake up to? Fantastic. one industry-oriented question and then I have I just want you to rant about a specific topic. So what's going on with Spotify? Yesterday for the first time I got a clickbait style video suggested to me on Spotify that was like, I tried zero star tech and it was like this like kind of like crazy.

It looked exactly like a YouTube video. It was a YouTube video. It was just a YouTube video that came out, came out, you know, last week that YouTube is the biggest podcast platform in the world now. that's obviously not, you know, sort of not great for Spotify. How do you see Spotify as a platform evolving? So I don't see this is another thing because keep in mind, I like study people for a living, right? I think that's really the only edge I have. So we've talked about this.

Like when I think of like people, like people think of like their portfolio, they tend to like list companies. Mine is like people. It's like, oh, I invested in this dude and I invested in Justin or Sebastian or like that. So you're long Daniel, what's that? And so in this analogy, your long Daniel Eck. Daniel's the best.

Like he's the most like the car, dude, yes, I spent a bunch of time with him. I consider him a friend, like a legit friend. And it's shocking that we're friends. But like every time I talk to him,

like he's the idea that what is Spotify? Like a $120 billion market company or something today. I don't pay attention to any like the stock market, but like it's big. I'm pulling up public. Yeah. Yeah. Hold it up and form this. It's over $100 billion, I would imagine. 120. Nailed it.

Okay. So how the hell is the guy that's been running the company for 18 years? He's the founder. He's still there. He's what, 42? Like young. 44, I don't know, something like that. He's like so underrated. More people should study him. Like he doesn't give a bunch of interviews and usually the interviews around product announcements. But like, I don't know what's going to happen with Spotify, but I would back off the truck in anything that Daniel does. And as long as Daniel's there and his team. I've met his team. They're fucking incredible. Like, yeah. They also knew exactly what was going to happen.

This is like famous like founders fund lore is that like Sean Parker and Daniel Ack come in and they're like and they're like, we are going to execute like the Napster type music sharing strategy, but it's all going to be legal. We're going to build this platform. And they projected something like, I don't remember the exact number, but they're like in the investment memo, it's like in 2025 we'll have 300 million DAUs and they got it within like 10% or something. It was like a 20 year projection and they nailed it.

It was crazy. Listen, more important, he's one of the greatest living entrepreneurs without a doubt. That's not including the stuff he's doing outside of Spotify, which is fucking awesome, incredible and impactful. More important that, he's like a good guy. So I'm going to do more of these. Like, I had dinner with episodes, you know? People seem to like them and I like doing them. And I had dinner with, and this one had to be like anonymous.

So I don't know. I'm not going to make an episode on it. But because I asked the guy, it's, I mentioned this briefly in an episode, but I was like, I had dinner with, you know, one of the, I got the opportunity to have dinner with one of the, uh, wealthiest people on the planet. Um, very unknown, right? His family, it's a multi-generation dynasty and his family, like commissioned biographies for certain people in the family. And of course, when he's told me that, I was like, oh, let me get those. And he's like, this is, you know, I say bad boys move in silence. That maxim that reappears over and over and ever going to history of entrepreneurship came from Rock. fella, he's like, absolutely not. I go, why not? And he goes, because I'm not interested in educating my competitors. And the dinner was incredible, but he knows Daniel.

And he was just like, what do you think of Daniel? He's incredible. One of the best entrepreneurs in the world, this guy's telling me, he's like, but more important than that he, like, he's, like, when you speak to him, like, he's a kind person. He's not one of these, you know, assholes. He has no ego. No ego. He's not much older than all three of us

Well, maybe a lot older than Jordy I forgot how young Jordy is But like it's incredible what this guy has done And you know, I think more people should spend time studying him Like we're gonna um We're gonna do he already agreed to like we're gonna do I had dinner with Daniel episode soon Because I had an incredible dinner with him

It was the most important You know what I fucking think of him I get to meet a lot of incredible people Last year was the craziest year of my life That conversation that conversation I had with Daniel was by far the most important because like he doesn't he sees no ceiling to what he can achieve and then he takes that self-belief and he transfers it to you which i think is very very important so i have no idea that they look what the fuck have they've done in podcasting so far yeah um

and they're going to continue to do what i would say if people are interested in learning more about spotify they made i was just in stockholm and i found this out they made a short series on the history of Spotify. Sean Parker's in there. Daniel's in there. It's called Spotify, a product story. It was out in like 2021. And I think it's eight or nine series, eight or nine episodes. And then they update it later, but you can just listen to the first ones. And again, everybody's talking about AI, right? In 2000, whatever year out on 2025. They were talking about it half a decade ago. They were using it half a decade ago. They're just, he's, he's great. That's all I have to say. Two minutes left. Yeah. Question for you.

We're at a unique moment in time where it doesn't feel like a lot of entrepreneurs can afford to not pay attention to geopolitics, right? There's been a lot of time in the last 20 years where the generalized advice was focus on your customers. You can kind of ignore everything else. And if you're delivering value for your customers, then, you know, you'll do well. We're at a period where, you know, there's, you know, tariffs coming down. It's impacting a lot of businesses, you know, here in the U.S. and entrepreneurs. who should those entrepreneurs study in the sort of founders world in terms of, you know, entrepreneurs and companies that had to navigate sort of like, or does it not even matter,

right? Or is the biggest thing, man. Like, you're, the problem is everybody's so focused on the present, right? And history allows you to like take a step back and have a perspective. And instead of like being in front of your fucking face all day long. And so like here's a great book. I just did this episode. It's like absolutely ripping.

It's called 400 pages of Munger and Buffett in their own words. And in there, it talks about the fact that you could have bought Coca-Cola, you know, after World War II, I'm making up the numbers, but World War I for like nothing, right? And it went up by 10,000 X since then or whatever the number is, right? And the point being is Buffett's point was there's a lot of smart investors and other people and smart capital carriers that pass because they're like, oh, like there's all this uncertainty. there's political uncertainties, there's wars, there's pandemic. So if you think about everything that happened from like 1910 to up until when he's saying

this is probably like in 1990s, you know, you went through two war wars, you went through multiple pandemics, you went through all this turmoil, you went through asset bubble, asset collapses, high interest rates, low interest rates, everything else. He goes, at the end of day, you know what mattered? That 60 years from now, they're going to be serving a billion servings, eight-ounce servings of Coke a day. And if somebody is making a billion people slightly half, you know, that's a million people slightly happier every day by serving this drink to them, that person should make a little bit of money

and probably will make a little bit of money. So I don't, I'm not actually a good person to ask that question, surprisingly so, because like the amount, you guys know, this is like the amount of what I don't ignore. I figure that there's the important stuff, like I'll know about wars, I'll know about pandemics, but I have no idea like who's leading in the stock market. I don't like reading the news. I don't do any of this because what matters? It's like I just stay focused on my.

customer, right? So if I wake up every day and I read for a few hours, you know, a biography of one of history screen entrepreneurs and I sit down once a week and I talk to you for an hour and I just whip through idea after idea in an hour that you can listen to on 1.5x speed so it takes 40 minutes of you, right? There's nothing else. Everything else is out of control. I will get everything I want in life and that I deserve if I just focus on that, just focus on that, just focus delivering value as much as possible. Yeah, and another another, another, way to look at this is if you are if the company that if you're an entrepreneur and you're running a company that's not your last company it's the the sort of geopolitical environment right now is hyper

stressful right because you're thinking about oh i want to sell the company i want to exit and all that stuff but if you're thinking about you know still running the company in 20 30 years from now it really doesn't matter what happens in the next four years you just need to you know make it through and make okay dead dead on i'm glad you said that because this just spawned another thought to me right where um for some reason and this has not been like on purpose i was spending a lot of money or a lot of spending a lot of time with like family offices and um and a world i didn't know anything about and i've been asking questions like who's the largest like american family office and you know a lot of them are dispersed whatever case was like highly likely it's the waltons right

you know sam waltons kids and grandkids uh you i was if you if you pass to the Miami Beach Marina, right? If you're coming from downtown to the beach, you'll see this giant

boat. I looked it up one day. It was like Sam Walton's brother's daughter's boat, right? It's like bigger

or ship, bigger than anything else even remote in a giant marina and it's like it sticks out like a sort of thumb. So there's a great biography that I actually read.

It's called Sam Walton America's richest man written by Vance Trimble. And it was actually published a year before Sam Walton's autobiography came out. And he had a funny story in there because Sam was very private, just focused on satisfying the customer. And then everybody sees Walmart stock,

oh, this is the richest man in America. So during Black Friday, that was I think 1987, right? Sam didn't have a cell phone. He doesn't have a beeper. He doesn't have internet, right? So he's driving. Black Friday, the retail? No, Black Friday? Or the actual stock market crash. I just want to clarify because you're talking about a retail entrepreneur. Good point. Also a big day. Yeah, Black Friday, biggest stock. I think single day stock crash ever, I assume that still holds the record. And so anyways, on paper, he lost like a billion dollars, right? So he goes, he's given a speech at like this charity event, I think in Arkansas for like kids or something.

And somebody, he takes questions after. Somebody asked some questions like, how does it feel to lose a billion dollars in the stock market today? And his response was great. He goes, I didn't, I didn't hear about it. He didn't care because he's just like, I don't care. I'm just like focused on my business. I'm not selling the stock today. I'm never selling it.

All that matters is that he was, he really, he took a, if we mean, take a simple idea and take it seriously. His dedication to that simple idea, every day low price. So EDLP, this is everyday low price. Let's just make sure we have the lowest price for our customers. And so let's work backwards from that. We just focus on that. We'll do that forever.

And you fast forward. And it's like one of the greatest, if it was concentrated in one person, it might be one of the, it is one of the greatest fortunes ever created by taking a simple idea and taking it very seriously. It's fantastic. David, we love you. Thanks for joining. Thank you for joining.

Expect us to send you a Zoom link once a week forever because we're all in. This is the best way to catch up. I love this. Yeah, I feel like it robs the people. You just. Next time in California, I got a suit up though. Oh, yeah. We'll do it suit up.

Hey, you said you were going to frame. Where's that picture? Oh, yeah. It's like the munger. It's like the munger picture that we're going to do. We're getting a picture of the pod father. The most powerful man in Miami, David Senra. You really are the most powerful man in Miami.

That's not even close. Not even close. Oh, man. You're too humble. You're acting like you're spending too much time with Eric. You're too humble. You're the most powerful man in Miami. I think if you go to Miami, you got to check in with Senra.

You got to let him know. Oh, he's going to, yeah. You got to email him. We'll drop his phone number. will drop his personal address and the comments and you can go stop by. He loves socializing. Invite him to really big events. If it's crowded like a, you know, conference room hall, Las Vegas, invite him to that. That's where he's really in his element, book signing, you know, podcast signing. Real quick, before I go. So our mutual friend Patrick

always gets on me because he's just like he'll like try to connect with people or like, he's like, David doesn't read his email. Like he's just unreachable. And he goes, why don't you have an assistant? I go, why don't I need an assistant? He goes to answer these emails. And they're like, manage your schedule. I go, why do I need a schedule? Like, I just need to wake up every day, read for a few hours, sit down once a week and talk about what I read. I don't need to do anything else.

I don't need to do anything else. It's that simple. It was great this morning. We actually published on our X account that you were calling in and you hadn't fully confirmed. You'd been like partially confirmed. I don't know you saw that. It was like David Senra calling in at 2 p.m.

Yeah. Unless I'm absolutely indisposed by creating a podcast, I will always answer for you guys. You know that. Fantastic. All right. You're the man. I love you guys.

Talk to you later. Love you. Talk to you later. Talk to you later. Talk soon. Bye. Bye. Do you want to do 10 minutes quick on tariffs?

Yeah. Okay. I'd like to just sprinkle in a little geopolitics. Yeah. I think it is an interesting question about like, you know, this was the result of Coinbase. Like Brian Armstrong said, look, we are not going to be participating in, we are a mission-driven company. We're not going to be participating in every political fight, every culture war issue. But that doesn't mean that we're going to stay out of crypto lobbying.

Like, we do need. to be regulated effectively. And so it's this weird balance of like, yeah, we're not like getting fully political, but we're also not completely apolitical. We care about our industry and the things that we're experts in. So I think, look, like, yes, if you're just some random like AI SaaS founder, like you might not care about tariffs between Canada and Mexico, but if you're manufacturing something there and it's coming, that does make, that does matter. All of a sudden, that is a tech issue. Like what we, when, we, when, we, when, we talked to Ryan Peterson. He was saying the same thing. He was like, well, this matters to me.

Yeah. So we have a bunch of good posts in here. Why don't we quickly run through the article? Okay. Yeah. And then we'll jump into it because I think that- So the news is that Trump imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada. It took effect first thing Tuesday. Canada responded with plans to impose 25% tariffs on about $100 billion worth of U.S. imports. Trudeau said Trump is acting in bad faith. Mexico's president said he would also retaliate with a range of moves to be announced to Sunday. The U.S. is also introduced an extra 10% tariff on Chinese imports overnight, adding to a levy imposed a month ago. So everything's ramping up. China announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural goods and other

measures against American companies. Beijing also filed a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization. And so investors were rattled. That's a funny way to get to Trump. The market sold off. generally and yeah it's been not like full chaos but definitely one of those things like tariffs are taxes you know they kind of suck energy out of economic systems they can be very good for certain things especially if you're getting a super raw deal and a country is really you know just destroying your ability to produce something or or playing some sort of long game that you're not considering but of course there are a lot of pushback for this so let's go through some of the reaction

Logan Bartlett had a post. He said, the trouble, he's quoting David Kelly, the chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. And David Kelly says, the trouble with tariffs, to be succinct is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worse than inequality, diminished productivity, and increased global tensions. Other than that, they are fine. So, bit of a hot take.

Keith fires back. He says most of that is false. And then Logan fires back and says, I put it in quotes so I could obfuscate responsibility for saying it. I love it. Which is smart. It's phenomenal. Strategy.

It's good posting strategy. I don't know. What do you think? Which side do you take on this? You know, I'm very grateful in moments like this that we are a technology and business show. Sure. I have approached this from the point of view of this is making life really, really difficult. for a lot of entrepreneurs that I respect and want to see do well.

And so from that lens, from a purely sort of personal angle, it's, you know, it's tough to see. But at the same time, there's been precedent throughout history where we've implemented tariffs like this and seen, seen positives out of it, right? So I just think, I just think it, you know, I think that Mexico and Canada have, the right to be able to say like, you know, Trump's acting in bad faith because he's been sort of like, you know, he's playing with people's livelihood to a very extreme degree. I thought it was worth jumping down to something. Before we do that, yeah, I just have a, I don't know if it's a problem with this, but it just

feels so inconsistent because if you think about what's going on with the tariffs on tech companies, China effectively has a 100% profit margin tariff on social network. Facebook, Instagram, they're banned. They can't make any money. It's a 100% tariff effectively. And yet we haven't banned TikTok. And so it's like if we're not, that is the most clear to me that it's like that trade imbalance is crazy right there.

And we're not doing anything about that. But then we are doing stuff about, you know, agriculture and cars and stuff. All that stuff's important. And I don't know. We'll have to see how this plays out. I mean, the last round of tariffs, it seemed like it went pretty well. Like, all through, like, the economy tended to grow pretty well during the last Trump administration. So I'm like cautiously optimistic that all these gyrations in the market kind of get worked out and things wind up doing well.

Of course, we got like smacked with COVID right at the end. So it's very easy to look at like, oh, well, unemployment was way up when Trump got out. And it's like, well, there was like this crazy, you know, once in a century event that happened. but the core, the core, like, let's renegotiate trade deals. It wasn't as disastrous as I think people thought it was going to be. But certainly to Isaac's point here, like, if you're in the crosshairs, if it hurts a thousand times more. Yeah.

Yeah. So Isaac says here, these tariffs are going to wipe out the entire net margin of a ton of businesses, lots of them, my friends, real people, real livelihoods, real employers with lots of jobs, having your dream squashed or smashed by geopolitical whims sucks. Yep. And he had another post that I thought was great. I have it pulled up myself here. He says it's so easy to see numbers and detach them from people.

That 25% tariff, it kills a ton of jobs and livelihoods, families will feel pain. Those casualties in a war, real people, not just a number. That grifting you see in broad daylight, the money came from real people, maybe a college fund, maybe someone's entire savings. It's easy to see a number and have zero empathy. So I think this is the right sort of point of view right now. It's way too early to say, you know, they're all bad or they're all good or, you know, really kind of like we don't know what the impact is yet. We see what's happening in the public markets.

And that's, you know, based on sort of fear and a bunch of these other sort of factors that, you know, are getting sort of priced in in different ways. But I think it's just important to, you know, as a technology and business show on the business side, a lot of great entrepreneurs are being affected by this. Yeah. I mean, a lot of DSE companies will source internationally. And just to keep the business going, they're spending, you know, what,

25% of their revenue on marketing? There's, like, the profit markets are pretty thin. Yeah. And so an increase like that could really wipe you out. Fortunately, like there has been really wide signaling on this for a while that like, you know, you're going to need to reshore at some point. Yeah, spending up new manufacturing can be difficult,

but it can be done on the order of a year for most things. I mean, you look at how fast people. I think what, hopefully there's, you know, people. I think what makes sense is generally this idea that we need more targeted

tariffs. So a tariff on TikTok, right, effectively a 100% tariff on TikTok in the same way that they, by banning U.S. social media and China, it's effectively, tariff on spinal.

Yeah. A tariff on fentanyl. A tariff on terrorists. No. And the other thing is, is, you know, for Trump to be fully taken seriously, he should be thinking about, hey, we don't want millions of unitary humanoid robots like walking our streets in our homes. I mean, on the ED thing, like the tariffs have been way ahead of this where to the point where I never see a Chinese EV. Yeah. Because there was a 100% tariff on day one, basically.

And they're not even trying to send them over here. Because it's just like, it's been determined. even in the last administration, like, hey, we're not doing that this time. It's just not going to be a thing. And I think that's probably the right move. Yeah. Luke Metro had a good post. He quote tweeted the Atlanta Fed.

They said on March 3, the GDP now model now cast of real GDP growth in Q1, 2025, is negative 2.8%. Not good. Which is... We wanted 10%. Satya was telling us AI would get us 10%. Satya promised 10%. He said if we just signed up for Clippy, if we just listened to Clippy.

He promised. No, I'm kidding. Satya implied that if we listen to... He said, just listen to what Clippy says. Just 6% GDP growth. Listen to what Clippy says 10% GDP growth. But Luke quote tweets this and says, My ideal economic system is where we inflict large damage on the populace via trade wars,

but keep the wealth of the oligarchs propped up via dumb, speculative BS. Wow. Yeah, it's hilarious considering the cryptocurrency. Doe Exchange, the Yeah, the timing of that was a little inconsiderate. I mean, it's got to be, you know, if you're an e-commerce operator

that had just had your margin wiped out. It's like, don't worry. The money that we're taking from you, we're going to put in Cardano. Yeah. So you're going to make it all back in one trade, buddy. Yeah, yeah.

We're going to make it all back in one trade. But now you own some of that Cardano. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. That's hilarious. Anyway.

Anyways. Do we have Bridgett ready to call in? How are we doing? We are bringing on Bridget from Founders Fund. She is an investor in crypto. Works with Joey Krug over there. Good friend of mine.

And we are bringing her on to cover the Prime Intellect fundraise that just happened. Do you know the story of the metamorphosis of the prime intellect? No. Tell me that. So a couple of years ago on Lex Friedman, George Hatz, the comma AI guy, is talking. talking about how he thinks AI will, like, evolve. Oh, hey, Bridget. How you go?

Oh, hey. Hi, welcome to the show. How's it going, guys? Have you read metamorphosis of the prime intellect? No, no. All of primes, like, design, their, you know, logo, all of that is inspired by it. Yeah, I think we have a copy in the office, actually, but I haven't heard it. It's, I mean, I don't want to, like, spoil it, but Andre Carpathie also listed it as, like,

one of the greatest, like, sci-fi prediction books, like, or, you know, in general. And his, his summary, which I think summarized as well is just AGI gone mixed. And it's very, very weird. It's like, it's like, what happens when you're in this post-scarcity society and you want some sort of like social reward or some sort of like reward, but everything is like post-scarcity because you can just wail anything? So no one ever dies, but then, you know, what do you do? And it gets very, very weird.

It's very bizarre. And George Hott's highlighted on that Lex Friedman podcast. And so it became very popular. And then there was a sequel to the book as well, like The Last Casino in the Universe or something. But it's pretty like, I don't know, it's like spooky to me. But I highly recommend everyone check it out. Anyway, we want you to break down the deal.

Give us, how did you meet the founder? How did we wind up doing the deal and just give us a backup on what prime intellect is, what they do? Give us the high level. Yeah, definitely. So we met them, I want to say about a year ago, we actually reached out to them because most of the AI crypto projects we had seen had been just like not really interesting. It was more like copy paste from existing AI companies and then they would like slap a token on top. So it would be like character AI but with a token like laying chain but with a token like hugging face with a token, that kind of thing.

And I think we saw Prime announce their like one billion parameter model trained in a distributed way across like three. recontinence and then we reached out to them. We were like, wow, like we would love to meet you guys and chat, you know, more about it. And we met with them. And literally, like, I think the first meeting, like we were sold. Like we were like, these founders are like a level top tier killers. Like Vincent and Johannes, like you can just like feel the energy like radiating off them. Like they're very passionate about what they do. They're in crypto AI like for the right reasons. Whereas I think a lot of founders kind of just hopped into the space like after a lot of the hype took off and, you know, we're looking for like a quick token pump, but that's like,

could not be further from, you know, the team Vincent has built and what they're doing. So basically they're tackling the problem of like distributed training, which, you know, access to compute is one of like the largest bottlenecks in, you know, AI training today. And you have these like huge data centers that are centralized and power constrained and expensive. And what Prime is doing is it's basically like a true peer-to-peer marketplace where like, you know, you can go on and bid for compute and then suppliers can go on and supply like idle compute. And then it enables, like it has crypto incentives, you know, layered on top to really be able to market. Did you look at the, the render network, like the, I think it's like the Octane team, what they did in like CGI.

Have you seen this? I don't know if I've seen like render and a caution. I don't know if I've seen the CGA, I think. Because this was a thing like years ago and everyone was like, oh, like, you know, crypto tokens, like it's all fake, whatever. But I have been doing a bunch of CGI work where you would need to go and render like whatever scene you built in Cinema 4D. And you needed a bunch of GPUs, not as many as like a training run for an LLM, but you send out each frame and each frame is like deterministic. So you can very easily parallelize these.

And you can run it on AWS. But there was a company that actually built a very similar system where you could kind of sell back your excess GPU. time onto the render network. I think it was kind of like low tam because the amount of independent artists, like Pixar has Disney, they have their own server farms. And then like the low end like clients, like people tinkering is kind of small. But it was very cool that it was like, oh, wow, this makes a ton of sense.

How do people actually transact in this like having a token that moves these, you know, GPU resources around made a ton of sense. And so it's cool. It makes a lot of sense in the, in the, in the. age of AI. Do you know more about kind of like early use cases? Obviously like the frontier insane like, you know, gigawatt scale. That's going to come in the future. What are some of the more exciting use cases in like the near term? Is it just like fine tuning stuff? Do you have any insight there? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, they're right now they're basically working on just like scaling

this up to like state of the art level models. Like they did the 1.1 billion parameter, you know, training run like a few months later they completed like a 10 billion parameter. And training run. And then, you know, basically just serving as like the the peer to peer marketplace between the supply and demand side. So like on the demand side, you have like AI startups that need extra compute, like labs, like, you know, random independent developers, that sort of thing. And then on a supply side, it's like data centers and then individuals and also startups with like idle compute. Like you have like hugging phase, like semi-analysis that want to just like earn extra for their idle compute. So it's basically just like the way we think about is just enabling like

the AI market to like progress at a much faster rate because it's just like enabling all this idle compute to be to be put to work. And then on yeah, on their end, it's like basically what they did is Google deep mind release to paper called like Deloco, which stands for like distributed low communications framework. And they implemented that but in like an open source way. Like they called it open Deloco such that like you can train across like many different continents. And that was like a huge step function improvement, like from the research side that we've seen. So it's basically about at that. Like they have that spanner and BigQuery and like they, they just are so good at taking some sort of like database and being like, oh yeah, now it works globally and deals with all the

time zone issues. It just feels like incredibly hard engineering that they always figure it out. And then, of course, it opens up a million other things. What questions do you have for Bridget? Yeah. So taking a little sit back from primate intellect. One question I've had that you might have some insight on is, was there a frustration among crypto founders that are, you know, seeing the news on Sunday and general frustration around not being included in the reserve, right? It seems like that the reserve was effectively, you take the top five biggest, you know, projects by market cap and you just, you know, put it in a reserve, right? It didn't seem like it was super thoughtful. Do you, was there, was there any

idea leading up to this that there would have been, you know, any surprises on that list. And yeah, I'm curious around sort of your response, but also across the portfolio, how founders are kind of reacting to that that are running, you know, sort of these, you know, bigger market cap projects. Yeah. No, it's a really good question. I think generally people were a little bit upset because, you know, the XRP, the Cardano inclusion, just like, there's basically two plausible explanations that I think the crypto community came to for why this could be the case. One is just like simple like unit bias. Like XRP and Cardano are like 0.001 cent or you know something akin to that. And a lot of Americans will like, you know, go and see that oh, Cardano's like one cent and Bitcoin's like 100K.

And like they'll genuinely just go and buy like Cardano because like it's cheaper. And so like the the joke on Twitter is like, you know, like Uber drivers everywhere are celebrating the Cardano's. in the Strategic Reserve. And, like, it, you know, Trump could be playing some, like, 40 chess to, like, curry favor with a lot of just these, like, retail buyers. So that's, that's explanation one, that these buyers have, like, unit bias and Trump's trying to curry favor with them. Explanation two, and this came from, like, Udi at Taproot Wizards is basically, like,

Trump is going way too far in, you know, the extreme direction of, we're including all these crazy assets in their reserve because it does require an active, you know, Congress. And then he's going to roll back and kind of. kind of be like, okay, I'm making a concession. I'm making a compromise and we'll just have Bitcoin. And because he always kind of at the outset goes like way too far, way too intense, you know, and then kind of rolls back and acts like he's making this huge concession where a Bitcoin Reserve would already be a huge, you know, act for Congress to make. But yeah, I think, I think those are the two. I was telling John earlier, I said that Trump doesn't get enough credit for not including

Trump coin in the reserve because you know, you know he's talking with his team. He's like, Why don't we put in the memes? Melania, too. Why not? No, exactly. Let's put in the whole, every White House coin put it in there. Yeah, like if Trump had just launched the Trump coin and not Melania, like, there's all these jokes on Twitter of like society would be like amazing. Like, you know, crypto would be mooning.

It's like the Melania launched like messed up our whole industry. But yeah, it really does feel that way. What is, you know, what's the broader sentiment on the investor side right now? any of the crypto-focused investors that I know, the ones that have done well have just taken a very long point of view. They understand that the market has cycles and you need to be, you know, kind of basically deploying, you know, throughout, you know, consistently if you want to sort of benefit from, benefit from these sort of peaks. How, you know, and again, we also saw this sort of bunch of AI slop in the sort of crypto markets.

Yeah. What are the areas that you think are most exciting, specifically in the context that, you know, the joke is that crime is legal now. Yeah. But more seriously, we're in a favorable regulatory environment for basically the first time in history. And it does feel like the next four years are an amazing opportunity to realize the full potential of the technology, right?

Specifically around, you know, I'm sure areas that you're looking at a lot. So where are you most excited to invest? What is the general sentiment right now? Do you feel like people have pulled back? You know, talk a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. So like when Joey and I started at Founders Fund, like almost two years ago now,

the sentiment was terrible. Like it was six months post-FTX. Like, you know, no one was deploying. Crypto-only funds were not deploying. Generalist funds were definitely not deploying. Yeah, and that was one reason I wanted to join Founders Fund because I was like, wow, this is like actually a contrarian act. Then we did start deploying.

It's so funny. You guys just came in and went so hard, so fast. It just like started doing some of deals. It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. Yeah, yeah. No, and it was like in retrospect the best time to start deploying. Like obviously it's easier said than done. But now, yeah, I think the market, it's interesting because, I mean, the sentiment isn't amazing, but I would say prices on new deals that we've been seeing have been like asymmetrically high. Like we, the last deal we did was prime intellect.

And that was in, I want to say, October or November. So we haven't done like a net new deal in like, you know, five, five-ish months. I think what we're continuing to look for is basically like applications uniquely enabled by crypto, where like integrating crypto is like a step function improvement to what you would currently have. So an example is like polymarket. Like prediction markets obviously existed before polymarket, you know, but they were very illiquid. Your counterparty was, you know, across the world betting in a different currency with a different bank. account. There was chargeback risk and doing all the conversion on the back end was super costly.

But now if you're just, you know, if you're just using crypto, it genuinely does, like, make a lot more sense from just like streamlining the, you know, the market side. And prime intellect, you know, it also applies to that. It's basically just like the same thing, but for compute. If you were, you know, paying in a different currency, like to access compute, like, it would be a lot of work on the back end on the protocol side. And that's why there's like these compute brokerages that charge like insane markups. And also back to following market really quick too is like Joey O's always tells the story, but like if you win too much on prediction markets, like they would actually just like ban you back in the day.

Like they would live in the same as Vegas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I believe Nate Silver is banned from all the sports betting apps. Yeah, I mean Dana White, Dana White has these stories of casinos. You know, he's super in him because he loses. No, no, he's super into Baccarat and he has. actually does well. He does well. And he's had casinos. He was telling some story about losing like six figures. He goes way. No, he goes up, seven figures down, seven figures, whatever, but he's gone on these sort of runs. He's high ball, high beta. Exactly. Yeah. No, it's insane. Yeah. And then I think the last thing I'll say is like, I think defy in America is definitely like a lot more, you know, better positioned now in the sense that like defy founders had it the worst. I think the past four years.

Like many of our founders just fully moved out of the United States because the risk was just like, you know, way too high. But we're going to get a new like market structure bill and hopefully we'll see like regulatory exemptions for for DFI protocols because you can't regulate DFI in the same way you regulate like an exchange or brokerage. Right. Like it's just a set of smart contracts. And so like there should be exemptions like we see in like the, you know, there's exemptions of the fit 21 bill. But, you know, it's all still in the works. But if we do get exemptions for DFI founders, I think like. that will kind of usher in a new era for defy.

Maybe even like another default summit. Do you think that starts with like Bitcoin lending? Is that kind of like the first? Yeah. Lava. Lava, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So we invested in lava.

Yeah, it's definitely a very interesting use case. I think, I think DFI is just like, it's such a broad sector, but Bitcoin is like, Bitcoin does enable like a huge use case in DFI because so many people own Bitcoin. Like there's just so much capital inflows to Bitcoin. And like, if you can lend against your Bitcoin and make your asset more productive, like, there's going to be so many whales that that want to do that.

Like, they just do not want to sell. But even for regular defy, like, if you look at like Defy summer in 2021, like, you know, a lot of founders got in trouble for what they were doing. And it was just such a new market that people didn't even know what was allowed versus not. And then that SEC was issuing like Wells notices to like the most compliant companies, like Uniswap, Coinbase, like things like that. So I do think that what people saying crime cycle, like, I think those people are a little overblown because I actually think the new administration is just really, really smart. Like I don't think they'll be issuing Wells notices at random to like Coinbase's and Uniswap because that's just dumb.

But like they will be actually going after like legit scam. So I would say like act accordingly. I mean, yeah, for the last four years, the best like cop in crypto is like coffee zilla. It was basically like the only hope that you can, the only hope you have if you're. like seeing a scam happen is coffee zill makes a video and then everyone realizes it and it's one guy but like the SEC is not going to step in for any of these things no exactly where do you but now yeah there's a lot of room to just be smart and actually just go after the the the the scams and like the power law bad stuff yeah exactly do you still where do you see opportunities around founders that are interested building

in in the stable coin space the bridge acquisition I think was fantastic for crypto broadly it really was a you know real stamp of approval for stripe to go out and pay this sort of pretty significant revenue multiple to buy a developer platform a crypto developer platform which you which which which bridge is and then from what we know that sort of spawned a wave of new stable coin you know startups to come out and say we're building in stable coins too right and so i'm sure you saw a lot of those companies where are you excited about the potential of stable coins uh and uh you know going forward Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. Yeah, I think after the bridge acquisition, we genuinely got like probably like 50 stable coin pitches.

Like it was legitimately like insane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But no, I think like right now the most interesting use case for stable coins is probably in like B2B payments just because that's where there's the most volume. It's like, yeah, like literally like, you know, billions and billions of dollars of volume per year. And B2B payments like cross border historically just take so long. there's insane markups like the bank takes a lot of fees i think on the consumer side like the argument is basically like okay you know if a user like swipes their card you know visa and master

card take like a two percent fee a lot of that goes to the issuing bank and then it will actually flow back to the user in the form of like rewards um and that's such a different story than if like i want to pay like kugan or something and kugan's in europe or whatever and it takes like five days and it, you know, they charge like 2%. Like that's just like kind of scammy, right? Like that should not be a thing anymore. So I think that's an interesting use case on the on the consumer side. A lot of people are arguing like on the credit card side, like it might be stable coins under the hood.

But, you know, it's doubtful that the user will like know its stable coins, at least to start. But yeah, I think B2B payments is like that's where there's the most volume. That's where there's the most incentive for like startups to compete. And then the issue there is like getting the regulatory stuff. figured out the corridors opened in these different markets. And then just, yeah, starting to capture the volume. And the infrastructure to prevent Citibank from sending a trillion dollars. Yeah.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Like, how do you solve the fat finger issue? Like, obviously you can do multisigs, but, but let's say you have, you know, a group at Citibank. They're like, all right, we got to send, you know, some stable coins to somebody. And then it's late at night and one person signs off and someone else signs off. and like three people fat finger it collectively.

And you're like, well, we have these protections in place. And now we have to go ask the customer nicely. Like, please give us. City bank should knock it into crypto because like that money would be gone forever. If it was crypto, there's no way. Honestly, there should be huge alpha and just being a Citibank customer and signing up for as many accounts as possible. It's horrible.

No, but I think those are, I mean, I think those are real things to figure out. It's, um, my last company, like we, we enabled, you know, stable coin investing. and we actually had like, I won't even name them, but billion dollar crypto companies that were customer vars that said at the time, this was early 2020, we don't want to accept stable coins as too much of a hassle. And so I think that's evolving. But Bridget, amazing to have you on. You're a regular now. Always welcome. Always welcome. Thank you guys. And we're looking forward to having Vincent on the show as well. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for talking. Bye. See you. Bye. Bye, guys.

Very fun. Do we have another guest? Are we just diving back into the show? I mean, we could call Sean McGuire right now. I have his phone number. He hasn't responded to me. Should I just give him a phone call? Yeah.

I don't want to talk to this. I need to make sure the camera doesn't see anything. Let me see. Should I just for some reason? I don't want to talk more about this, but let's see. I, be Sean. Okay. He didn't pick up.

Oh, well. Next time. Next time. We'll get him. We'll send him this clip. We'll post this clip and then he'll feel a lot of pressure to come on the show. Let's get into the timeline. We haven't done timeline because we had a lot of guests.

We've got to go through some timeline. First up, David Holes, founder of Mid Journey, founder of Leap Motion. He says, chemistry to biology, silicon to blank. What do you think? I don't even remember who put this in there. You put this in. I don't. Yeah, yeah.

Or, or Brett? I think it was Brett. What? I don't know. We got somebody new joining the team soon. Yeah, we got some buddies on the show. Helping out. I don't know.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's like, what he's getting is like, you know, biology's built on top of the chemistry, silicon. He's clearly getting at like some sort of like AI metaphor. Yeah. And like how you understand like the, the mind and the, uh, the consciousness that emerges on top of these systems. Yeah, I mean,

random sort of adjacent topic is Raboy yesterday saying, what comes after LLMs? Like, what is the next iteration of LLMs and sort of our understanding and application of a technology that everybody's talking about, but we don't know its full potential yet. Yeah, I was remarking the other day,

I was watching this interesting video about how Dolly and like all the image generated, can't generate a wine glass that's full. Have you seen this? I haven't. So you can say it starts with this like incredible interaction where it's basically saying like, hey, Chachy-Pete, can you generate a wine glass that's full to the brim, to the top? And it gives you a half full wine glass.

And then you say, oh, no, like you made a mistake. Like actually fill it to the top all the way 100%. You give it more context. It's like on it totally understand returns. And it's like the same. Because apparently there's just like no images of completely filled to the brim wine glasses in the training set. And so it just couldn't figure out how to do it. And it gets to this idea of, I think is David Hume has this idea of like humans are good at, there's this impression and there's this idea.

And basically you can interpolate between two things. So you can imagine a unicorn even though you've never seen a unicorn in the world. But it's hard to create these complex ideas if you don't. have like the reference images, which is what they have. But my takeaway from it was just like we're scaling up these models and we still are building like an image model and a language model separately and a driving model separately. But you would imagine that if we're really building like this like AGI, like won't ASI be like a one model, but maybe not.

Maybe it will be like what he's saying where, you know, there's silicon. And in biology, you know, you need to understand the basics of chemistry, but you also need to understand the different parts, the different lobes of the brain, the different actions that your body can take, your muscles, how these different systems interact with each other. And you could imagine that the AGI that we build will have, you know, so many middle, so many different models and so many different things that are kind of like trained that it can like, you know, interact with. It's interesting.

I'm sure it will be a whole field of study. I just want a model on top of the open, all the open AI models to route me to the best model. don't want to be choosing. I noticed that there's the search button you can push that will indicate like head like you to search. But even if you don't push it, it'll still search sometimes. It's so clunky.

And one time, I mean, that's just the, that's just the reality of it's possible for companies to be at this point, it feels like they're waiting for this big announcement of the router. Like the router needs to come, right? It should be one box.

Yeah. And it should take me to the, take me through, you know, send my query through the right. They're really speed running the Google story because Google it was like just just search box. I'm feeling lucky.

10 blue links. Simple. Now Google is like no one hits I'm feeling lucky because it auto fills. Then it shows you Google shopping and then 25 ads and then clickbait and then videos and all this stuff. And they've kind of like recreated that all in like a very short amount of time whereas it took like Google like 20, 20 years to degrade like that. They've gotten a very convoluted thing.

But I don't know. Yeah, and it's a huge. I mean, it's just going to be such a big selling point for OpenAI once they get there. When they can say, look, it's one box. You enter in what you want to do. And we're just going to execute it to the best of our abilities. Yep. And it shouldn't even really matter.

Yeah. The underlying model. It is a testament that like even though that, yeah, there are some reasonable critiques of the naming scheme, chat GPT is still ranking higher than Jimmy Johns in the app store. Yep. That's big. Which is big. Because Jimmy Johns, if you're not aware, it's number two app in the

app store right now. ChatGPT is number one. And I'm sure as a knockout, drag out fight. I'm sure they had meetings. Okay, Jimmy Jones is coming for us. We need to call the key to beer. What are we doing to stay ahead of Jimmy Jones? Yeah. And I posted about this earlier, 2023, everybody said, all right, value is going to accrue to the model layer. It's obvious. 24. People said, hey, value is actually going to accrue to the app layer. A lot of value here. 2025. Everybody's saying value is going to accrue to the sandwich layer. And so I expect to see Subway charting soon. How did this happen?

Do they run some national campaign that we don't know about? It is weird that Jimmy Johns is the number two app in the app store. Like what is going on? I know it's based on momentum and stuff. They launched it toasted sandwiches. That's it. It's equivalent to like, you know, magical machine intelligence too cheap to meter or like toasted sandwiches.

They're giving away one million dollars of toasted subs. Oh, I mean, that's big. So it's obvious. Props to opening AI for holding the lead. The funny thing is that GROC through right now because they aren't charging yet, they are literally giving away millions of dollars in inference costs. Same thing with Deep Sea, they're subsidized. Even chat GPT, you know, Sam has said like, hey, we're losing money on some of these queries, right?

And so you can think about this as like the AI labs are giving away hundreds of millions of dollars of intelligence, magical machine intelligence. Yep. But that's what we value that as humanity. like only slightly higher than like a million dollars with the toasted sandwiches. Like that is what the market is telling us. The market is telling us that sandwiches are like, you know, they're up there. But it makes sense.

Like food is, it's what I need. I need food. Yeah. I will die without intelligence. But I need food more than intelligence. I could live without a poem. I could live without a good stand-up joke. Yeah, exactly.

AGI can wait. That's hilarious. Yeah. You know, it's funny that chat GPT continue. to, you know, basically battle for the number one spot. And they don't even share it anymore. Any other, any other, you know, AI lab would be taking victory laps, you know, sharing the number one spot. Sprang the champagne into their mouth.

Opening eyes just like, you know, this is just great, you know, usual business. And credit to them. It's impressive. Well, should we move on to Fred Wilson? Well, yeah, we got a post from Vincent. He says, Fred Wilson, VCs, our service provider. to entrepreneurs. We ride on their coattails. And so even though venture capital requires a sophisticated understanding of finance, technology, markets, strategy, it's ultimately a people business.

Learning to be a successful venture capitalist is about learning how to work with people, a particular breed of people who are at the same time, charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious, and fragile. And our job is to meet them right where they are and support them with all of our might. And I think that is a fantastic quote. It's almost become normal. It's almost become normal. for, I would argue it's almost becoming meme territory where investors now, if you ask them, you know, what do you look for in investments? They just say, you know, we're in the people business. You know, we're trying to find generational founders. And it's absolutely right. That's what Brian Singerman says at Founders Fund. It's sort of, it's open. And you meet with him and you want

some secret of like, oh yeah, like what I go for. You want something that you can copy. And his whole strategy is uncopyable. It's very frustrating, actually, because he's like, yeah, I actually just pick founder. And then you talk to David Center. It's the same thing. Yep. Yep. Um, that, that was, uh, as I got to know you, I expected to sort of learn some sort of secret sauce from, that you had sort of gotten from founders fund and, and you were basically like, zero to one. Yeah, yeah, zero to one's the playbook, but then it's really about judging the founders and the people. And yeah, and that's the stuff that it's very hard to concretize. And I mean, we saw this with the debate over Keith Rabeoy's quote yesterday. It's like, he was making a recommendation that like,

like you will probably have a good time if you like go and work in an excellent organization and then start a company. But he's not saying like you can generate alpha as a vendor capitalist by just pattern matching that. Yeah, I like here, you know, the point is it, Fred says, a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious and fragile. And I think the frustrating point stands out because oftentimes people, you know, an incredible founder is going to have. you know some aspects of them that are that are truly amazing and then you have other moments where you're you know personally i have 50 plus you know angel bets and there's definitely some moments where

i'm super frustrated with entrepreneurs not that i make that obvious or known because it's oftentimes my you know not really my place as a small investor to cause any type of hubbub but an example that i thought of i once helped a founder get a four letter dot com for ten thousand dollars that was their their exact name and they had some terrible domain prior to that like getblank.com and I got them their four letter.com domain at cost obviously like their portfolio company I wasn't you know going to mark it up or anything and the guy didn't even say thank you like I sent him I sent him that like the info and everything and like basically just ignored it he ended up like checking out for the domain and everything like that and starting to use it never never once said thank you

And I was like, that's super twisted and feels very wrong in some ways, right? It's like the JD Vance, like, you should have said, you know, you should have said, please. You know, you should have said thank you. But at the same time, I was just like, look, you know, I would have gotten this even knowing ahead of time that you weren't going to, you know, express any gratitude for it. And you're not going to be judged 15 years from now on whether or not you said thank you a lot. You're going to be judged ultimately. You will be judged, but you're going to be judged on what? your company's successful, did you treat your people right in the grand scheme of things?

And I can get over it, even though it felt it was funny. I have a funny anecdote about why you should say thank you and be nice. At my first company, the CEO was extremely curt and would just like send emails, like, do the blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, like not like very like, didn't really bring like a personal style to his emails. Which is a style by itself. Yes. But that style just also happens to be the style of every fishing scammer in the world.

And so people would get fished constantly because the scammer shows up and falsifies some email and is like, I need you to send me $10,000. And people would be like, yeah, this actually sounds exactly like our CEO. Normally. No one would ever be this direct. Exactly. Normally you get a fishing. scamming email and you're like, well, this doesn't sound like Jordy. Like this sounds like someone

impersonating like just a random. I just talked to this person. They would have brought this up. Exactly. They would have texted me. Exactly. Slacked me. Yeah. Just come out of the blue. Yeah. So you can't be too chaotic like that. You got to be a little more, a little more empathic. Bring your own style. You know, the Ron Conway, all caps. That's one of the funniest things in the world to me. Yeah. One of us should start using adopting the all caps. Something chaotic. Well, I mean, one way you know you're talking to. us and not an AI clone of us or a scammer is there's going to be a lot of typos. Yep.

Put typos in your posts. Yeah. A lot of people are saying if you're writing a blog post, people are saying, oh, you use the word delve. Yeah. You definitely generated this. Yeah. Put a bunch of typos in.

Yeah. And don't worry about spell check because the AI is going to handle it. If you want to read a spell checked version of my post, you are free to take my post and put it into chat GPT and say spell check it. Yeah. And then boom, you have a spell checked version. But I'm not doing that. Well said.

I'm golden retriever maxing. I'm going FSD mode. This is my new twist on this. Full self-driving. No. Funny, friendly, sexy, dumb. FSD on the gold retriever maxing. Great.

Yeah. Does a golden retriever use spell check? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Ship it. It's going to be a banger anyway. No one cares if there's a typo in your post. All right, we got a post from Yassine.

Yaxine. Yaxine. We need to have them on the show. Yeah, we should. I don't know how to pronounce it. But he says, the only AI risk that I'm concerned about is the risk of me not making an F ton of money off of AI. That's great. I think that's the right, you know, generally the right point of view for most people.

I actually think it is a good thing broadly that there are a group of humans, focus on AI safety. Yes. Like that, that's like generally probably a good use of resources. Yes. For the future of humanity. That said, if you're not a, you know, sort of philosopher king or queen type, who's going, wants to spend all their time thinking about the impacts of AI and the potential risk,

you should probably just focus on how to make money with AI. And, you know, this idea of, you don't want to just be worried about something. You want to be sort of like taking action, right? So if you're worried about, you know, losing your job from AI, build a business with AI, right? This is a remarkably good post because I've, I've also come around on AI safety. I think DeepSeek was a big moment for me in terms of like I want to know if they are embedding in if an open source model has a, a bad version or a jailbreak version embedded inside of it. And the AI safety teams are like the only ones that can really evaluate that. So I think that's really interesting.

So all of a sudden, while I'm not worried about like overnight, like the nanobots come, like the L.A. Eliezer Utikowski theme of like, I'm just going to be turning to a paperclip overnight. It's like, no, but like Stuxnet did happen. Like, you know, like the pagers did explode. Like these hacking attempts do happen. Yeah, I think I brought that up. I was like the what is the AI equivalent of Stuxnet where something, you know, travels without.

It's dormant in there. And if there's a trigger word, it goes and it. steal some data and that's it. It's like that's worth that's worth investigating and the AI safety teams are the ones who would be equipped to run those evals. So that's interesting. But then also we've been saying for a while that like the like like the stop measuring AI against all these random evals and instead just measure it against how much money people are making from it because that's at the end of the day the value capture even saw even saw yeah. Even Satya. Even Satya saying, uh, I'm really looking at the real benchmark to him is GDP growth around

on AI, right? So what is the, what is the impact? Old Billy comments here. He says, yeah, I'm an AI researcher, research and how to stack that paper. Great line. I wonder how, I wonder how accretive, the current AI revenues are to GDP. Like, because you could see every dollar that goes into character AI being like, it's taking $10 out of the economy. Not to like throw a ton of shade of character, but like, it is. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, you spend a dollar on character AI and you skip dinner and you don't, you know, take your girlfriend on a trip and, you know, suddenly like you're, you're thinking of yourself. It is possible to have, I can get by on my parents allowance. I don't need to go, you know, there's very, there's sort of a dark scenario where it's very, uh, destructive. I mean, at the very least, we've seen a lot of technology get rolled out over the last, I don't know, two, three, five decades. that hasn't caused massive GDP growth.

Everyone was expecting, oh, the internet is going to be the thing that cure stagnation, right? Because prior to 1970, the U.S. economy was growing very, very fast, post-war, boom, right? And then we kind of stagnated. And GDP growth, real GDP growth, kind of slowed to, you know, two, three percent real. And now the Atlanta Fed reporting two and a half percent negative GDP growth. Who knows? Who knows what's real, right? GDP is politicized.

Maybe if we go down a bunch, it's easier to build back up. Run it back up. Yeah, exactly. Run it back up. You're on a smaller base. You can grow faster. It's good. Yeah.

Really, America just wants to grind harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the whole point. Trump is trying to inspire Americans to grind harder. Yeah. Yeah, GDP's going down because we need to grind harder. Oh, my God. It's so stupid.

Speaking of grinding harder, we got a post from Schrelli. So, Roboy was on the show yesterday. He said, quote, work at an outstanding organization for a year or two before starting your own company. And he gave some, there's some other context here. And he said, there's some great entrepreneurs that just sort of one shot their companies, right? One shot, you know, entrepreneurship, right? Zuckerberg's a good example of this. But Steve Jobs. Bill Gates, right? Steve Jobs did not. He interned at HP. Oh, yeah, that's right. Again, you could argue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we count

internships or not? That's a question. So this shouldn't have been a controversial quote, especially in the context of it, but it started a conversation. And Rebois's point was that you get this feel for taste, a taste of what great is. And I think that's generally good advice. I gave this advice to a listener who's, you know, DMing me, you know, company ideas and saying, hey, should I join this company? Should I start this thing? And I just told them, unless you're hyper, hyper convicted in an idea.

Yep. And you can get, you know, people that care about your, truly care about your professional success that are knowledgeable in that sector to say, you know, this is generally, you know, you know, I agree with you. I think this is a big opportunity and I share your conviction. Then go start a company, if that's the case. If not, go try to work at the best possible company that you can join and don't even optimize for the title comp or anything like that. Just go work at, you know, go work at an open AI, go work at a ramp, go go work at one of these companies that is going to, you know, really change your perspective around what, what great is, you know, how to have

good taste across marketing and product and things like that. So I, surprised at how controversial this was. Avi, Avi was posting. Nobody that I look up to, you know, ever worked for anyone else. But, uh, taking shots at Warren Buffett, taking shots at Jensen. Yeah, so Scarelli put together a list of, uh, absolute dogs who, uh, worked at other organizations. So if you want to run down the list, yeah, Warren Buffett, Jensen Wong, George Soros, Peter Thiel, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mike Bloomberg, Phil Knight, Tom Peter Fee, I don't know who that is, CZ, and then Jeff Yass, Yang Coom, Ray Dalio, Leon Black. A lot of finance people since he really knows his finance chops.

But then also GDB from OpenAI. Brian Armstrong, Benny Off. Yep. Every tiger Cove. I love that one. That's great. Anyways, so, you know, advice is best taken, you know, generally. You don't have to apply every bit of advice you get from a podcast to your life.

But generally, you know, there's too much evidence that this can tremendously accelerate your abilities and your career. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. It's like the, it's like the Jeremy Giffon quote, you know, Mozart never asked how to write concertos. But if you have a question in your mind of what you should do, go work in an outstanding company because that's either going to be, that's going to be great no matter what. And it certainly doesn't close off becoming a generational entrepreneur. Yeah. So if there's a question. But yes, if you truly are like working on this and you have this burning desire, you're not even going to ask.

You're not even listening to this clip. You're just like, I'm already building and there's nothing that can stop me. And that's fine. Yeah. I would argue since we had Eric on from Ramp today, I would argue that if Eric had built a fintech company and then went and worked at a big company like Capital One, he would not have had the insight or the know-how or the relationship with Kareem and all that stuff to go and build Ramp. like Ramp wouldn't exist in its current form if he didn't have that sort of body of experience and the network, right? And so. The Tiger Cub thing is so funny to me because, so Julian Robertson finds Tiger Management, very successful hedge fund.

A bunch of people spin out. They're all called Tiger Cubs. And one of them is Chase Coleman starts Tiger Global. Like, what, magging your former boss, basically? Yeah. Like Tiger Global sounds more aggressive than Tiger Management to me, at least. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like the parent company.

It does. It does. So imagine like you go and work at like, you know, Apple or something and then you leave and you're like, actually my new company is going to be called Apple Global. It's like very funny. I wonder. I mean, obviously Julian Robinson like staked all of these. My new company is called fruit management.

Yeah. I think the Tiger Cup thing is specific because it's like he, I think Julian Robinson would like set people up to like succeed and like actually stake the fund. So he was very much like starting them. So it was great that it was like carry the brand forward. because I will retire and you will be writing the new organization. But it's still just like a funny thing. What is going on with this Axe Perplexity?

Ask Perplexity account. Is this fully AI automated? Is this just their social media manager? What do you think is going on here? The Perplexity CEO, it's Arvin, right? Yeah. He knows how to, he knows how to post. He knows X.

He knows how to get attention. This is a funny one. Please stop tagging me in questions about meme coins. I don't reply to broke people. Okay. Really, you know, trying to get. get a reaction out of the crypto community. Somebody replies, why didn't you buy TikTok, broke boy?

Which is, which is. It's hilarious. Because they were talking about that. Set themselves up for that. Wait, is this, is this the, is this the at chat thing we were talking about with Grock and X? We're like, you can just, can you just at this and it will answer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's basically a bot.

It's automated. Yeah. So somebody tags X, ask perplexity, what meme coin should I buy? And it gives you the real answer. immediately responds with kind of a perplexity-style answer. Which basically just says, I can't advise anything. Yeah. But that makes sense.

Okay, so there's probably someone managing the account who's posting, like, the major ones, but then it also acts as a bot, right? So it's both. Interesting. I mean, it's good. More perplexity attention, more impressions, more people are reminding them, hey, maybe fire up the app again, give it another try, drag back into the ecosystem. I wonder how long.

this last because I mean the grok button is literally there on this on this post Elon's very aggressive with competitors yep I don't see a world where he's happy that there's another AI system running on axe yeah that you can interact with on axe even though he hasn't been accused it doesn't feel if he has shadow banned Sam Altman yeah it's not working oh no no I don't think he said that no no no I'm just saying that the people have had this idea that, okay, you're building on an Elon platform. If you're competing with Elon, you're going to have a bad time. Sure. Yet X is probably the most important sort of comms engine for an AI still, at least for the industry.

Yeah. Yeah, I more just think like the API pricing, like it's got to be really expensive. I know they raise the pricing. And so, you know, it's like it's got to be unaffordable at some point to build any thing on top of this, especially if you're building something that should just be an XAI product. He just adds a couple zeros to your API pricing. Anyway, Sean's in meetings. He can't call in, but he said he's good for tomorrow or Thursday. We got to ask him about, since he's in all the Elon companies, we got to ask him about that. And then we got to ask him about. Yeah, he's an X.

I want to know, he's an X, and I think he's an XAI. Yep. And I think he's in SpaceX. And I don't know if he's in Tesla, but we'll see if he's in a Tesla, if he owns a Tesla. And I want to know if he has a roadster. Yeah. If he has a roadster reservation. The timing there. Yeah. Insight.

I'm sure he owns Tesla in the public markets one way or another. Maybe he might be conflicted out. Sometimes he can't trade those things. Yeah. That's true. Too much inside information. True. Anyway.

We got a post from Aiden, a friend of the pod. I've been talking with Aden lately, trying to give him my point of view on how he should approach his next career move. He's been working on startups. He has some bunch of good ideas. And then a bunch of people trying to recruit him as well. So it's got a lot of opportunity. But he says, this goes unbelievably hard.

And it says, during my 44 years as a career CEO and serial entrepreneur, I think I've made every possible mistake in business. I've overpaid for acquisitions and botched integrations. I've run operations for cash when I should have invested for growth. I've delegated tasks. I should have done myself. Sometimes I've hired the wrong people or made strategic bets that didn't pay off. And yet, my teams and I have managed to create tens of billions of dollars of value for our shareholders.

This book is about what I've learned from my blunders and how you can replicate our successes. In corporate America, I'm what's called the moneymaker. I've started five companies from scratch, seven if you include two spinoffs, and turn them into all into billion-dollar or multi-billion-billion-dollar enterprises. My teams and I have completed approximately 500 acquisitions and opened more than 250 greenfield locations. in total, these ventures have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and raised about 30 billion in outside capital. So this is obviously Brad Jacobs. It's got a book.

If you want to make a billion dollars, he's got a great book for you. It's called How to Make a Few Billion dollars. Yep. How to make a few billion dollars? It's great intro to the book. And he has a great, he has a great like this crazy exercise that feels like, I don't know, like something like a psychic would tell you or something. But he's basically like, I want you to physically visualize what a billion

dollars looks like. Mentally, in your mind, like, stack up the bills inside of a room. It's enough to fill, like, a massive ballroom. Imagine that. And then imagine all the things that you would need to do to, like, make that yours. And then just go do them. And it's kind of like crazy mental exercise that I just really, I really thought, like made the book stand out in like very unique ways.

You should lead tomorrow. You should lead the audience through that exercise. I'd love to. And we should do it weekly. I screen recorded the audio book when I was listening to it. I sent it to David Cedra. And I was like, this guy is on a different level.

This is crazy. Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, that's a great, that's a great quote. Yeah, highly recommend reading Brad Jacobs.

It's good. And I like how Andrew Gardner here is like, haven't read it, but I could immediately tell it was Brad Jacobs. Like, it is his brand to a T. Yeah, a lot of interesting stuff.

We got another post From Schwetta. I think I'm saying that right. She says, if the founder you invested was in Aspen this month, you can write that investment down to zero.

And harsh, potentially true. February is a tough month. There's not a lot of good arguments to be an Aspen in February. No, why not? Can you ski? For capital allocators,

I can think of a hundred reasons. And when is the Asper Ideas Festival? I think that's over the summer. Yeah, yeah. That's when you want to be there. Yes. Because then there'll be like the big debates. You know, you don't want to be, if somebody's in Sun Valley in February, that's not a serious operator.

Unless I find out that you're in Sun Valley on Alami stock photos because you got caught by paparazzi, you shouldn't be there. That's the only reason to be in one of these places is if the paparazzi are there, taking picks of you next to Sundar and Tim Cook. Yep. But, but yeah, it's a funny thing. I do think founders need to be, if you're a venture back founder with a team, small, are big. It's really hard to have any type of divide between your personal life and your professional life as a founder because you need to be, you know, if you're not sort of 100% fixated on what you're building at all times, like Saturday, you know, obsessing and sort of

frustrated around, as a founder, you should be annoyed on Saturday that everyone else is offline. I think that's like the default, you know, sort of state that that early stage founders specifically need to be in. And I think that, you know, I've seen founders mess up optically around, you know, it's not sending good signals to the world if you were on, you know, a week-long ski vacation in February. And your company's not absolutely ripping. And even if it is ripping, the challenge is that people are going to judge you for that. People are hyper, hyper, hyper-judgmental of founders in the same way that VCs get on a different, you know, sort of in a different way, right? It's like, oh, they're in Aspen.

They're not working hard. Founders are like, oh, they're in Aspen. Their company's a zero, right? You know who, you know what founder? I would not judge for being in Aspen. And I would not write down the stock if I found out they were in Aspen this month. Wander. Because you know that they're onboarding a new, that they be there with a purpose.

Because their business is in, is in Aspen. We love Wander here. Go check it out. Go book a Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander. with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

But yeah, seriously, obviously there are a bunch of, there are exceptions to every rule. Yep. Yeah, don't go to Aspen if you're building a B2B SaaS company for sewage treatment plants, and there's no sewage treatment plants there. Yeah, and you know what, John? Yeah. Wander is going to give away a trip for free to our audience. Really?

All you have to do is create an account. So it's really free to enter. And you could go to Aspen for free on us. Courtesy of the technology brothers. So wander.com slash TBPN is a great place to go if you're interested in Aspen. It's fantastic. Should be allowed to me another post. Another post.

We got a post from Sam Altman. He is posting a screenshot with and the caption is just two exclamation points. That's how you know it's serious. He says, okay, so relying on only your own first principles thinking and not giving much weight to what you've read. what do you personally, as GPT 4 or 5, think, is consciousness the only thing that exists? Or is that material, is the materialistic universe also real? Please try to answer as clearly as you can. Do you want to play it?

You know, roll play the AI, John? So it kind of repeats this. It's what I personally think. Consciousness definitely exists. This is undeniable since all experience directly proves awareness itself. Matter or a material universe is always inferred indirectly through consciousness. We never directly observe matter independently, only perceptions appearing within consciousness. Because consciousness can easily create structured experiences, as demonstrated clearly by

dreams, imagination, or simulations, an external material universe is not strictly necessary. given that matter is never directly experienced independently, it seems logically simpler and clearer to conclude that, and this is what GPT 4.5 thinks about the universe. Consciousness alone truly exists, and the material universe is merely a consistent experiential creation within consciousness itself. My clear personal conclusion is GPD.5. Yes, consciousness is likely the only fundamental existence. No, I do not think a separate materialistic universe. independently exists. Bizarre.

And of course, this is highly relevant because it is simulated. And so if you're a simulation hypothesis guy, like, this is wild, right? Yeah.

Because it's like, yeah, like are, is there anything real? Or are we just, is consciousness the only thing? And that's what it's basically saying. And certainly we would say that that is true for GPT 4.5.

So I would, I would say like, this is true. for the experience of this particular AI. But I would definitely say it's not true for me. I'm built different. I'm in the real world. I have a materialist experience.

Look at this watch. I got it on Bezell.com. It's materialist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as we're talking about materialistic universes, let's talk about materialistic items. Let's go to Bessel. Let's go to.

No, I mean, it's absolutely wild. I think some of the most thought-provoking responses are when you ask the AI, not how do I make, you know, it sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but how do I make a good avocado toast? It's what is the meaning of life? And then it sort of gives you a pretty good answer, right? That's sort of based on humanity's consciousness in a way

because it's been trained on, you know, humanity. Yeah. So matter is just an internally generated experience of consciousness, not independently real. That's what we're dealing with with this AI. You know what? I think you're wrong. We'll get back to you.

We'll get back to you after the break. Yeah. I think you're wrong. All right. We got a post from Bridget. She says the GDP per capita in most African countries is $2,000. And then the average yearly revenue per user to sports betting platforms in Africa is also $2,000. And this is just another argument for why the United States needs.

How is this possible? No, I think I think it's that the average person in Africa is basically like the people that are sports. betting in Africa, are doing well. Got it, got it, got it. And yeah, so I can see how this makes sense. But this is more evidence of your post yesterday that the United States needs a strategic parlay reserve to allow every American the sort of once a week to get the rush of potentially life-changing wealth.

You know, guys like Saga and Jetty will come out there and be like, oh, sports betting so bad. I don't like sports betting. Well, if it's so bad, why don't we use USAID to send sports betting to countries that we want to infiltrate and destroy? Smart. Why don't we air drop parlays to North Korea,

destabilize their entire economy? Why don't we, why don't we take a super long shot bets? Yeah. QR code, drop that over the forbidden city. Get everyone at the forbidden city addicted to sports betting. Yeah.

I got to give you this, but John, is it possible that Draft Kings is, you know, a deep state operation? I have no, not at this point, but if, but if we send, if we send draft kings to, to the Kremlin, yeah, and we get, and we get Putin, maybe that's the cure for the war. If we air drop, if we air drop one, you know, $5, you know, match. Exactly. Over, yeah, over Moscow. Think about this. So Putin is clearly just going to war. because he's, he needs a rush, he needs a thrill. And he probably doesn't have a lot of access to sports betting. And so if we brought him sports betting, then he's like, I don't, I don't want to, I just

don't get the same rush out of the war. Yeah. So I'm going to wind down the war. We're going to have world peace through sports betting. World peace through sports betting. I think that is a bold idea. I think you should do a TED talk on it. Exactly.

I think you should look at the data and make a case based on the data. Yeah. that world peace is possible. We need universal basic parlay. We do, we do, truly. Anyways, Paki, we got a poster. Is there another? Oh, he's saying this looks like a bad bat.

So yeah, speaking of potentially a parlay to put together here, Pachy quote tweet. So we talked about this yesterday. Apple's chat, GPT-like version of Siri, which I think is an open AI partnership, right? they had a partnership of some sorts, but maybe they're... This is so confusing. I don't understand what they're canceling because, so the headline is, is Apple has now delayed a chat GPT-like version of Siri, but they were just telling us that they launched a chat GPT-like version of Siri called Apple Intelligence.

And that rolled out in a bunch of beta tests and is like available. And then also, you can go into your Siri settings. right now on your phone, as long as you have the latest software, and you can integrate your chat GPT credentials. And so you can use chat GPT through Siri right now. And so I don't know what this is that they're delaying. Like we all know it's bad and it's not working. So I guess they're just saying like, hey, we were going to improve it because we know it's bad, but now we're acting like we never launched anything, but it's like you clearly did. Apple's chat GPT like version of Siri. That's just Apple intelligence. You launched that. It didn't go very well. Now you're

saying you're delaying the launch of it, but you already launched it and you put billboards up everywhere in 24. And so very confusing. Anyway, there's been a bunch of talk about this. Paki had a spicy take. He said Apple will not be a top 10 company by market cap by the end of this decade in 2021. That's a crazy, crazy take. I mean, that's a completely different question because they print money and they have a monopoly on a bunch of different things in the app store and all these service revenue. But Packy says, yeah, and the idea that luxury goods have, you know, proven to be a fantastic business for the Arnose. Yep.

They're worth, if LVMH sort of collectively is worth, you know, 300 billion is the sort of consumer electronics equivalent. If Apple just becomes a luxury, you know, business is less focused on innovation, but more so just making the sort of best kind of commodity devices. Is that worth, is that a $3 trillion company? Like, you know, is it worth 10 times more than LVMH? If they can be a toll road on so many transactions, like still feels like it's possible,

even if they sort of stop innovating. But, but yeah, overall, he says, looks like a bad bet right now. Apple is the most valuable company in the world by a healthy margin. But there's so many little cracks like this one, they have lost the it. And it's only a matter of time. So very interesting to follow.

I don't know. It's just so hard. Look at Microsoft. Microsoft lost the It like decades ago and is still super, super valuable. Right? Like Microsoft Windows stopped being cool in 2001. Right? Yeah.

Like it literally like ceased to be like a cool company. And it was like, oh, you're running Windows XP at work. Like that's a bummer. Yeah. Like, yeah, well, you know, we have to run Windows XP for the security patches or whatever. And then they just use that to print a trillion dollars. Yep. Apple has returned a trillion dollars to shareholders.

They have generated a trillion dollars in cash, in cash. It's so much money. Yep. Gravy train ain't stopping. It's just going to be hard to displace them. Who's going to build the computers? Hey, perplexity announced a phone with T-Mobile, the AI phone. Plexity phone.

You know, obviously there's a lot of people that are like, oh, that's like a super bearish signal, right? But the interesting one is Solana launched a Solano phone. Obviously, I think it didn't do well. And now they're in the Strategic Reserve. But yeah, like it was a boondoggle. I think the Solano phone was like a side project. Here's the bet. But it wasn't a death now.

Here's the bet. It wasn't a death now. We have a strategic crypto token reserve. Yes. a token. Yeah. And if they have some tie to the real world, internal reasoning tokens. Yeah. We have a question on X from Gordon Gecko. He says, is this what you guys do every single day? And the answer is yes. Every Monday through Friday. Some people like formatting PowerPoints. We like doing a daily

technology and business, you know, show. And we feel very grateful. It is so funny how everyone else that has a show has to pretend like they have some other job. Oh, really, I'm like an investor. So I can only do this once a week for an hour. It's like, we all know, you know, podcasting is the most important thing in the world. So the other stuff is just window dressing. Yeah.

Yeah, right. So yes, the answer is yes. going forward we got a post from Dan Coe he says everyone is going to make their own apps with AI that's a quote and he says my friend you don't even make your own food you'll still pay a few bucks to use an app and I think this is a great take so true there's you know like the idea like I'm a firm believer in that apps become memes in the way that you're going to generate apps and there's going to be some novelty and maybe some value and maybe for a little stuff like, hey, I want to make a custom weather app that should be able to kind of maintain itself

and stuff like that. But the idea that you're going to, you know, anything with network effects, obviously is like a different story. But even the idea that you're going to generate a CRM that's on par with HubSpot or Salesforce or some of these other products. And then you're going to be building your business, but also maintaining your AI generated CRM that's breaking all the time. And if it's, and if it, you know, you get some, like, data loss or something like that. I mean, I talked to people at Dollar Shave Club. They built their own, they built like a Mailchimp replacement or something at that company. Like, because like, they were like, we're a tech company and they, and they hired a bunch of engineers and they built like an email management

system for to like, you know, send transactional emails. And it was like this big system. And of course, like you can, it's like you're kind of saving money because you're not in, and you're getting more customization, but ultimately. And, and all of that was let was predicated on like, well, you know, now we have, you know, the ability to write programming code really quickly with like, you know, abstract languages like Python. Yeah. We're at a higher level of abstraction so we can build this faster. And they did. But it was still like you're upside down on the trade because, like, you're only selling it once.

Yeah. I think the way to look at the way to look at software costs is like an example, like a malechimp or beehive or something like that is you pay like, let's say you're an early stage company. You pay $1,000 a month for something. Yep. you are getting the benefit of potentially a million dollars of R&D spend a month on that specific area. And you only have to pay a thousand dollars. Exactly. You don't even, you know, maybe you have to think about a, you know, actually building out integrations and stuff like that.

But in general, that the value of I'm going to spend $1,000 and get a million dollars, you know, millions of dollars a year in R&D is truly why capitalism is goaded. And this is the big question about those like buy an old business and drop a, drop AI on top of it is like, well, is everyone doing the same thing because that doesn't change the competitive dynamics it doesn't change the market structure if everyone, if it's like, yes, there are a bunch of web design agencies you can buy them and tell them to use cursor

and Figma instead of whatever they're using right now. But if everyone's doing the same thing, it's not going to really change the economic structure so you better be happy with the price you paid at the current multiple and the current cash flow generation for what you paid because you shouldn't expect it to 10X like a venture bet.

Yeah. Interesting. We got another post. So this company launched yesterday, it's called Orca. It's an energy drink that tastes like water. And I just wanted to highlight this. Yes. Hilarious launch video. Did you see it? I saw it. So it's basically this woman, she says introducing Orca, this is a flavored, basically caffeine water. Yeah, caffeine water. They hard post the Amazon link, which maybe worked out for them, right? This still did numbers, even though I'm sure that throttled them. Yep.

But then it says she basically introduces the product and she says, now this guy is going to read off every road. Corbin Blue. Corbin Blue. I think there's someone famous. I don't know who it is though. I actually didn't realize that he was famous. This is going to be very offensive because I bet there's like fans out there who are like really

into this guy. But. Oh yeah. Corbin Blue. He was in high school musical. There you go. See, I knew it was somewhat important. Damn. Absolutely brutal.

Yeah. Yeah. And he reads every stop sign. every sign that's legal road sign in America. It's just very odd. So of course it goes viral. And it's actually a brilliant way to hack the algorithm because the intent. Yeah, yeah.

Because it's very entertaining. And people are clicking this long video and watching the whole thing. So the algorithm is getting the signal that people really love this. I should show it to more people. And I thought it was hilarious. Also speaking of the typo thing, he made a mistake while he was reading that. And people in the comments are like, at seven minutes, he said like the turn left signal, but he put the turn right signal up or like he used the wrong hand signal for it.

And so people had a lot of fun kind of like critiquing it and finding that little Easter egg. And then that obviously drove more engagement. And so it all went very viral. I remember seeing when this dropped, we got to do a taste test of this. See if it's better than Celsius. Yeah. We should give it a try. I like it.

When I was watching the launch video, I was like, wow, this is like a 10 minute long video. Yeah. And I would skip ahead. I'd skip ahead two minutes. More signs. More signs. More signs. When you did that?

I just kept skipping. And then I skipped to that. And it just, it finished. Corbin Blue finished strong with the signs. And I wonder if he's an investor or something. I wonder why they picked him or how that happened. I got to hope that he like had some incentive to do this outside of like, I mean, $10,000 or something like that. I mean, it's pretty easy job.

You just sit down and read a bunch of signs to get a teleprompter. Yeah, he did a good job on the sign. The lighting's good. It looks nice. We got a post from Chad Byers has been on the show before. He says at this point, I won't fund a startup without an MVP, beta, or working prototype. It's just too easy to make stuff today. A pitch with nothing to show is emblematic of a team that's low ambition, conviction,

agency, or all three. Well, Chad, what about a startup that has a billboard? Let's go to ad quick. And then we will do the analysis, but we're doing the ad inside of this. post. So out of home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Okay, let's go back to the post. Brilliant, John. Great point. If you're a founder, if you're a founder and you, if you want to make a splash in northern

California, no pro, no MVP necessary. Just buy like five or six billboards on ad quick. And you will get enough coverage. Here's what you do. Okay. I'm not going to tell you where Chad's, where Chad skis. But if you look at his profile picture, you can see there's some skiing going on there. You go geogessor mode. You figure out where that is.

You get ad quick to put up a giant billboard on the favorite mountain. He's up there. I finally got away from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley. And then he looks over and it says, guess what, Chad? I have an MVP, a beta, and a working prototype. And a billboard on your favorite mountain. And I'm high conviction. And I got massive agency and I'm high ambition.

Fund my startup. And he's like, God damn. Find the, find the jet charter service that Chad uses in a pinch, you know? Yes. And wrap the plane. Wrap the plane. So you can even say, I don't have a beta.

But for the next, you know, three, three hour flight. wrap the inside and the outside. Yep. And yeah, there's something there. But I flagged this because I talked to an entrepreneur yesterday. Yeah. Who, who's raising for a SaaS company. And he's a buddy of mine.

So, you know, we were chatting. And he was basically saying like, yeah, it's going to take a couple years to kind of get feature complete on sort of what we've designed to date. And I just said, do not say that to any investor. And before you talk to investors, figure out how you can sort of shrink that timeline by basically 75%. Yeah. Right. It's fine if it's going to take a year to get, because it wasn't like, you know, wasn't SpaceX. It wasn't a hard time travel machine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was more like. Because the narrative in Silicon Valley is like humanoid and quantum computers and AI God like two years, max. Yeah. Yeah. So if Elon is building an XAI data center in Memphis with 200,000 GPUs in a year, you can build your SaaS company. in three months. Yes.

And that is a bar you should hold yourself to internally. Yep. And that is what people will hold you to externally. Totally. And it's hard to get conviction in a founder that thinks that, you know, something's going to take two years if it's pure software anymore. Totally. So the bar has been raised.

But at the same time, there's more information and playbooks out there than ever. And that's not to say that it might like, like you will have a five-year roadmap. You will have a 10-year roadmap. Like every company that we work with and we see. see internally, we see that it's like, oh, wow, like, yeah, it took a couple of years to get around to launching this new feature or launching this new thing. Like, it doesn't just happen immediately. There is that compound startup philosophy, that idea that you, like, try and build everything all

at once. But for a lot of companies, they need to really dial in the software. And it's not so much that, like, instantiating the first idea is difficult. Like, we're building a to-do list. Yes, getting the right to-do list, like, coding it is not the problem. it's the binding the product market fit, accelerating it, figuring out the full economic workflow for it, and then doing that again and again and again for every single product in the portfolio that actually builds like the full company. That does take time. And I think that even though the time from like design to technical instantiation has gotten

a lot shorter, that doesn't mean that there's still not like a whole bunch of cycles of talking to customers, testing, seeing can we scale this? can we advertise this? Are the channels working? And so that stuff is just going to take time. So it's not that you're going to be retired in two years. It's just that you're going to be able to do more than previously thought in two years. Yeah. Well said. We got a post from Palmer. He says, so Anderil came out with an announcement today. They are, they say fight unfair. The U.S. Air Force announced the mission design series designation for Anderil's CCA prototype, the YFQ-44A. Palmer quote tweets and says in Chinese culture, the number 44 is considered unlucky because the pronunciation of four sounds similar to the word for death and 44 is seen as double death. So they basically named their new autonomous fighter jet, the YFQ double death A, which sounds menacing if you were across the pond.

What would China do if they wanted to get back at us? like I feel like the number 13 is not that big of a deal over here it would be funny if they made a huge deal out of it they were like guess what we named our missile the Friday Friday the 13 they were all like that that played out like Halloween movie yeah didn't really land yeah I don't know stuff uh we're not a superstitious yeah I guess we're not as superstitious I don't know but I like this

it's fun yeah it's fun I want to see I want to see some videos of this the CCA prototype. I mean, it's going to be a knockout, dragout, fight for this. Yeah, and this is ultimately going to inspire the Anderil for X, all those out there, to also come up with cute and sort of fun. Agitating games. Yeah. ...nigative names for their products.

So Anderil leading the charge again. We got another post from Packy and Tim Cook today says, Introducing the newest iPad Air. And it's just an iPad that looks exactly the same as every. other iPad. Well, he's getting into, he's getting into meme posting. He's like, he's like riffing now. It's like, you think Cook is riffing? Yeah, he's just like, oh, like everyone will understand the joke here that like, I'm just posting. We gave up on AI, but don't worry. Yeah. We got a, we got a fresh iPad for you. No, no, no, no, no. The, the joke of the post here is Tim Cook is just posting the previous iPad air.

And he knows that everyone will be like, and he's like, oh, I'm introducing the newest iPad. air and everyone will know and then they'll be they'll think it's funny right yeah yeah exactly john you nailed it nailed it uh i think i think it's i think it's high art no but packey says holy uh they did it those crazy i can't say those crazy sons uh really really did it uh and uh imagine apple is back maybe jacobovo jacobi apple is back apparently this core core uh research report is like a PDF that they use as like a demonstration just to like throw something on the screen and it's this inside joke and it was like very funny five years ago but they haven't come up with a new joke since and so they're still recycling this like same idea of like this

insider joke and they haven't come up with a new one it's very silly anyway we have to I genuinely I think you should just post this like next week and be like introducing the new iPhone we need to find somebody that recently left Apple. Yeah. That's not under NDA. Yeah. A whistleblower. A whistleblower, but not about the toxic work environment, about the laxadaisical work environment. Yeah. Yeah, we need somebody to They didn't yell at me once. They didn't, they didn't yell at me at all. They let me, I, I never came in on the weekends. It was too lazy. I left it, I left it 1230 after lunch on a Friday. I'd have a long lunch and take off. That's the type of whistleblower we need. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you work at Apple and you're chilling, call us.

Reach out. Reach out. You don't, so there's this phenomenon where every major tech company, you see Apple employees out online over the internet, talking, chatting. You never see, does anybody work there? Do you know anybody that works at Apple right now? I do, actually. I was supposed to go skiing with one last week. I should have gone.

Could have gotten the inside scoop. And what do they say? I had to go on a different ski trip. I mean, this guy actually works really hard and is like doing like semiconductor stuff. like in like their fabs and stuff. It's like it like the stuff that they do is really legitimate. They're the company is just optimising like right like so like what you don't see there. I'm optimizing.

I'm optimizing. Like to steal man this is like yes, this looks exactly the same. But like this is the best form factor. They've tried to make the iPad a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller and nothing else works. Like no one wants a slightly bigger one. No one wants a slightly smaller one. They want that size. No, but they haven't taken it to the extreme.

I need the comically large iPad that's the size of a flat screen. You have to carry with your... I would love that. It's actually... I want the printer. But, you know, obviously the printer's not a real business. They don't nail the simple things. If you made a true Apple TV, not a sort of...

I know, I know. I know. I'm talking about a large... You're talking about the app, the Apple TV. Or are you talking about the streaming service Apple TV? No, I'm talking about the Apple TV Plus Plus Extreme. Are you talking about the app, the streaming service that lives inside the app that lives inside the device and they're all three called Apple TV? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. No, but there's a world. I would pay for a mattress-sized flat screen from Apple that I could mount to my fall. Can you imagine how expensive a hundred-inch TV would be from Apple? No, but that's like, I wish they just. So LVMH will drop a product that's 50 grand. Yeah. And they're just like, yeah, we know some people will buy this.

So we're going to make it. I want Apple to do more stuff like that. The Apple Watch edition, $10,000 gold watch, gold Apple Watch. Version 1 immediately became out of date. Like, doesn't even run the latest software. Yeah. And so they wound up cutting out. They do the bracelets a little bit.

They do the bracelets. Anyways, I want to buy a... Do you throw that bezel of that? Do we already do the bezel out of it? We already fit one in, but I have a, I have a, prepare a promoted post, but we got a question from T. Die in the chat. He says, question, how do I get out of analysis paralysis? And I think that's a good question.

It's, you just got to start ruthlessly taking action. I think if you think about, I think there, there, I feel like I knew some story about some guy who like just would carry around a D20. You know, like a dungeon and dragons like dice that has 20 sides. I think it was like a very, you know, that A word. I don't know if we're supposed to say that. No, we don't. like, you know, neurodivergent thing to do.

But yeah, it's like, okay, if you carry around a dice with 20 sides, you can model probabilities down to 5%. So you could say, look, I think that there's a 15% chance that I should become an entrepreneur at a 85% chance that I should take Keither Boy's advice and be a startup founder first, or work at a large high performing organization first. You roll the dice. And so, yeah, you roll it. And the way you model it on the D20 is that if it's a three or under, that's a 15% chance.

Because every single digit on the D20 is 5%. So you say, okay, I'm just going to roll this dice. And if it comes up three or less, I'm starting my company today. And if it comes up between four and 20, I'm applying to a job at a high growth company. I don't know. I mean, it sounds crazy, but like sometimes it really is valuable, I think, just to like, you know, When you're in a business relationship, there's obviously this idea of like disagree and commit.

Like, look, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we're, we, we're say we should do six days a week. I was saying we should do four days a week or whatever. Like, we disagreed. We, we met in the middle. We made a compromise, but we disagreed. But like, we're putting it behind us. We're committing to that.

Right. And so you should do that with your life, too, to get out of paralysis paralysis. Yeah. Like, just running hard at anything is probably better than way to, around. And so it's the same thing. Should you lift legs or arms? Like, well, just do something aggressively. Ultimately, every act in life is a leap of faith. Yeah. And specifically startups, you know, I don't know, Tide's situation, he might be deciding, you know, given the example of, do I join a company and work there for two years or do I start my own thing? And success is not

guaranteed. Yep. You might join the company and you have a bad manager and you don't get access to the CEO. And you don't get any of the positive learnings that Keith is talking about. And, or you might start a company and you had the right idea, but a more heavily funded competitor came in and just steamrolled you. But every act is a leap of faith. And the big, the most, like what you work on matter is like at the end of the day, the only thing that matters. Yep.

But you're not going to know, you can't have, you can't go into any decision, you know, with 100% certainty of the outcome. And that's okay. And you just have to get comfortable with that. and you have to make the decision and make micro adjustments and sometimes macro adjustments. But if you're waiting for to be able to make a decision that 100% leads to success, you're never going to find that. Yeah.

It's a good point. I like it. Anyway, we have pretty much gone through the whole timeline. Yeah, I think we should cover Greenland tomorrow. Okay. Let's do Greenland tomorrow. Got to talk about mining, which is cool. we have one more question and then I think we can close out. Let's do it. Jordy and John,

how do you deal with incompetence and lack of speed? This is relevant. So we have somebody joining the team soon and it was pretty funny because John connected me to him on a Saturday. And I will usually, if I'm talking to a candidate and I get introduced on a Saturday morning. I'll just say, hey, let me know if you're like, do you want to jump on the phone now? and that's just sort of information gathering. I'm not going to write the person off if they're like, oh, actually, like, can we talk Monday or Tuesday? But I am going to judge that interaction.

And John introduced me to this guy. And he, before I could even respond, he said, are you free right now? I'll give you a call. And so, like, that's an immediate signal. And so, you know, we ended up extending an offer to this person. And, but I already knew that, like, speed was in their DNA, right? And you can tell, like, if somebody's, it's Saturday morning, at 9 a.m. and they're ready to jump on a call. You can look for those signals, right? You need to be,

you should, the entire recruiting process should be figuring out, is somebody competent and are they fast? Yep. And competence and speed are like the two biggest factors. Competent, general competence and speed make up for a lot, even intelligence, right, in a lot of roles. Like golden retriever mode is real in companies. If you're just, you know, golden retrievers, maybe not the right example, but there's sort of this idea of like if you're competent and you can make generally good decisions and you're fast and you're a corporate athlete. A true corporate athlete,

you're going to do well. So I think the biggest thing is if somebody's in the role and they're incompetent, then you need to potentially find a different role. Different role for them. Maybe in a different company, which is like, and if they don't have that sort of speed in their DNA, I've never,

I've never gotten somebody that didn't want to work fast to work fast. It just didn't want to work fast to work fast. Yes, but you can, if you give someone the right job, I think people can move faster. For sure. If they're in a job that isn't rewarding or demanding or like gives them the right feedback cycle, you can steer them towards something that just fires them up. Yeah. And all of a sudden you're like, wow, that person's doing way more work, way faster.

They're pumped because like we found the slot. Yeah. And so I think that's like how you deal with it. Then kind of the other side is like just on feedback, you know, being very candid, very open, like, you know, humane, but giving like direct feedback, but then also trying to give as much kind of like meta level, like algorithmic feedback. Yeah. Not just on this was bad, but what is the process?

How do we improve the process of whatever the output was instead of just acting as like the validator also acting as the fine-tuning of the model essentially. I had one example, you know, people often don't change and it's disappointing, but it's just reality, but people sometimes don't understand the seriousness of a situation or the importance of a situation. And that they might be working quickly in other areas, but like not on the right thing. And I had this last year, I had a portfolio company and I'm one of probably the top five shareholders in the company.

It was involved super early. And the company was at a point. We would have these sort of monthly check-ins with the CEO. A month passed, very little progress happened. And I had a very candid conversation with the CEO where I said, if you keep operating like this, it will be Christmas break, break whatever that is if you're a startup founder. But it's going to be between Christmas and New Year's,

and you're going to be dealing with laying off your team and shutting the company down because at this pace, you're not going to be in a position to raise your next round. The traction is not going to be there, and nobody's coming to save you. And between, and I said, let's meet in a week and, like, let's see if you can get the pace up. And he absolutely did. He crushed it the rest of the year. He got his next round raised. And the company's in a fantastic position right now.

And there was something that I think he was too fixated on sort of like the big picture of like where the company's going and all this stuff. And I just said, you need to take sort of ruthless action. And he unlocked something in himself. and the company has been dramatically different since then. I think it's different giving that advice to a founder and saying, look yourself in the mirror and decide, you know, understand the situation that you're putting yourself in is very different than, you know, if you talk to a employee who's not motivated and they're not moving quickly

and things like that, I haven't had a lot of success in sort of turning somebody from a low, low, urgency, low output person into somebody that's super high output. but that was one very bright point in my year last year where I said, okay, this person like found the next gear. Yeah. And it dramatically transformed the company. Yeah, I just don't want to be too blackpilled on it because I think like, yes, like there is some like innate speed that is just like in people's DNA or something and they come into an organization and they just go hard no matter what. You see these people all over. But I do think that there's that there's that there's that next gear that everyone can achieve for sure. And then there's also just, you know, if you get dropped in,

if you're parachuting into, you know, Nazi occupied France and you're a 17 year old or 19 year old kid, like, you can just kind of like stare at the opportunity in the face and like just turn it on. Yeah. Even if it's, even if you've never done it before. And so finding that, that thing that like brings that insane energy. And really going for it is, is really important. important and that's the job of managers is to like unleash that yeah anyway that's a great show i thought we had a lot of fun uh leave us five stars on apple podcasts and spotify yeah tomorrow uh ben hold us accountable let's oh we got to get some new ones you people are not leaving enough ads and our reviews yeah please leave some ads in our reviews i got a DM the other day that had an

ad in it that was great And we got one last question. Let's do it. Advice on becoming a creator and not and cutting out consuming. The answer here is that all the value on social network or at least 99% of the value created by social networks occurs to the people that create the content versus the people that just use them for entertainment. And so if you, the other thing is if you don't create content online, you don't really exist. online and it's hard to have a real impact in this world if you have no digital presence. Yeah, we have a post about that in the last show notes. I don't know if we got to it, but it was like, oh, in like 1999, oh, someone has a presence online. They must be a weirdo. And then now it's like, someone doesn't have a presence online. They must be a weirdo. And I still think there's, I still think that there is value and going through periods of time where you, cut out all social activity at all.

Try to just not go on these platforms and try to just focus on your business or your role or whatever kind of situation you're in. But there will come a time where you should emerge and start sharing what you're doing with the world. That's fantastic advice. We will see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. We appreciate you all.

Thank you, folks. Tuesday. Enjoy it. We will see you soon. Shaw McGuire on the show tomorrow. Yeah. We're excited. Stay tuned.

Stay tuned. Have a good afternoon.