TBPN - Founders Guide to VC Holiday Parties, Dawgs of the Week, Zuck's Gold Chain, Trillion Dollar Potential

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordi, get off the phone, please. Sorry, Senator. I'm going to have to call you back. Okay. Great night last night took a massive group of bros and actually two women as well. There we go. The movies, we went and saw Interstellar, 10-year anniversary, 70-millimeter IMAX, Universal City Walk.

Been there. Fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Actually, the last time I saw Interstellar was at 70-millimeter Imax, maybe even the same theater. When it first released. Yeah, I think it's been 10 years.

Fantastic movie, very techno-optimist, very sci-fi. Lots of fun. The iconic scene of the guy like through the glass, right? Is that the movie that I'm thinking of? Yeah. No, don't go, don't go. Like make me stay, that whole thing. And there's, yeah, that great docking scene where they're like, it's impossible.

He's like, no, it's necessary. Yeah. It makes you think of, you know, raising the impossible round with, you know, one month of runway left. Yeah. It's impossible. It can always be done. But it's necessary.

Yeah. Great. A lot of people say, John, how do you get 30 people in a single movie? Yeah, I'll break it down. Yeah. So I highly recommend this to everyone, no matter what city you're in, if you have a movie theater. What you do, go to Fandango, pick a, pick a movie.

Doesn't matter if it's bad. It just has to be a good bro movie. We did Jason State the movie, The Beekeeper once. It was disaster, but it was amazing. Did you ever do, do millions? No. We just picked some. something fun, something easy, accessible. Don't go art house, don't go depressing, just something

action movie, something silly, a classic, something that's in theaters you've seen before. Get a whole row, get 20 tickets, buy the tickets, and then just text, literally just go down your text list, everyone that you've texted in the last month who's in your city, hey, going to this movie, you want to come? Yep. And then whoever gets back to you, some people just won't even respond. Other people, I'm busy. And then a lot of people will bail the last second. Some people will jump on in the last second. But you can refund the tickets up until like 15 minutes before. And so there's no financial risk. Yeah. But you've, but you've, you've, you've, de-risk the social capital that you generate from hosting your absolute boys and girls. It's fantastic. At a movie. It's priceless.

Yeah. And it just, it just defeats the activation energy of like, hey, should we do something? Well, who else is in? It's like, the first text is like, I'm going to see interstellar in 70-millimeter with 20 people. Do you want to come? And then people are just like, sure. Yeah. It's much easier. So highly recommend it. Holiday season. There'll be friends in town, people traveling, holidays, and it's a great experience. So just go make it happen. We've done a few times. Try and run it back as often as possible. Yeah, cinema's meant to be enjoyed as a collective in many ways. Cinema's now become so much like I'm going there with my little tiny group, one or maybe a couple people, you just sit there in silence. But there's an amazing energy of filling

a row with your absolute boys and just locking in. Yeah, the emotional, moments are more emotional, the funny moments are funnier. Everything's better with a big group. If you get scared, you can grab on your bro. Bulky size. Your mass monster who you brought with you. Yeah. David. Yeah. Definitely bring a guy who can bench 400 pounds to keep you safe during the scary parts. Yeah. That's essential. Well, it is the holiday seasons. It's Christmas time. And we are bringing you today something really special. We are breaking down the founder's guide to VC Christmas parties. And I have a cheat sheet here that, oh, this is, this is a prize possession. You put a lot of work into this. There's a lot of alpha here. And basically it more than a decade of

actually attending these and trying to extract the most amount of value. Exactly. Just because it's the holiday season, just because you're getting into the spirit of giving and just socializing and and doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying to extract value out of the event. Exactly. Exactly. There's always an opportunity cost. You could be working. If you're going to the Christmas party, you got to get your money's worth. And so I have six steps here. Jordy has a bunch of different ideas. We'll break it all down for you.

Here's how to get the most out of attending a VC Christmas party. Step one, you got to get your friends on the list. This is tough because the guest list can be very tight. You got to make your friends sound interesting. You got to craft compelling backstories for them. I have some examples. Go to whoever's hosting. Say, hey, I got a buddy.

He's in stealth mode on a revolutionary startup. He's building a bare domestication platform. He's an expert in bare domestication. You can just be like, hey, you've seen that movie Inception? Yeah, he's doing that. He's a biotech founder in bare domestication. Yeah, or doing dream tech, sleep tech, you know, Johnson rejuvenation. These are the guys that get invited.

Anyone else who's just building B2B SaaS, they're going to show up to the partner meeting straight away. But they're not getting the Christmas invite. The Christmas invites for the crazy. The crazy folks. But you got to get them up to speed. You got to tell them, hey, I pitched you as the inception guy. I need you to pull on all nighter.

Get up to speed on this. You can't just walk in there because you're going to be quizzed. Get on perplexity and just start researching. Yeah. How would we make inception happen in real life? You might need to be if you're the bare domestication guy. You got to know all the different breeds. How we're getting them smaller?

How long is this going to take? What's your timeline? You want to have some marks on your face. Exactly. It's a process. They're not fully domesticated yet. Like go down, get violently slashed by something. Yeah.

And, you know, really, it's like a method. It's like John Fio's, you know, method entrepreneurship. You've got to get into care. character and if somebody that's in a biotech founder in bear domestication certainly getting clipped with a claw here or there. Otherwise you're just working with previously domesticated bears. Yeah. Yeah. So you got you got to work the list, work around whoever's organizing the assistants, the the wild card folks who might be in the organization might have access to the event bread or the paper list or whatever they're using. Get the names on the list. You got to understand

the security is going to be tight. This isn't a college party. You can't pass back an ID. That's not going to play. You got to be. on the list. And so once you get your boys in, you want to be arriving early. You got to respect the opportunity cost. Time here is time away from building your empire. You got to maximize the night. So you show up, probably want to be bringing a gun. And the reason is because it puts them in an awkward position. It's like either they respect the Second Amendment let you in. Yeah. And trust you. And trust you. And then you're carrying the whole time. Yeah.

Or they make you take it off and check it at the door. And then you can be like, oh, so I guess you're un-American. And then you have the high ground. Yeah, yeah. And if they invest in American dynamism, then you have a little bit of blackmail on them to be like. Oh, yeah. They didn't even allow guns at their Christmas party. Yeah, yeah.

They didn't allow me to carry at the Christmas party. How American are you? Exactly. Yeah. And this goes back. Like a lot of people in L.A. carry. Yep. And a lot of people all of their country carry, but surprisingly here in L.A.,

and I have no issues being around people that carry. Yep. As long as I really fully trust them. And if that's a case, then great. I'm actually safer knowing that they're strapped, right? Exactly. And so it's a good way to determine does your GP, does VC actually trust you? Yep.

And if they've invested in your company already, then great. If they haven't yet, it's a sign that they are probably more likely to invest. Because if they trust you with their life, they'll trust you with their capital. Exactly. Exactly. So once you get in, you got to scout the best drinks. You got to skip the tray past wine and champagne. That's the house wine.

You got to head straight for the wine cellar, usually in the basement. Scout out the Somalié. You got to ask for the best pour. You're looking for screaming eagle. Here's what you do. You don't just drink it one glass at a time. You say, hey, I got a bunch of friends upstairs. Can I get four glasses?

Take one. Chug it right there in front of them. Let them know. Establish dominance. Establish dominance. Then as you're walking up the stairs, that's glass two. Then you head upstairs. You act like, oh, I'm looking for my.

buddy, but I'm just going to take a sip. You're down to two glasses now. Take the third glass and then as you're milling about, Scott and the scene, four glasses. Then you're full bottle screaming eagle in. The fourth, you can slow down. Exactly. Do it a little more leisurely at least. Yeah, exactly. So now you're already up on the day. To be clear, the Somalia knows you've had at least one glass. Yeah. But everyone else just thinks you're on your first. Exactly. Because they didn't see the other three. Plausible than that ability. Yeah. So now, now like, no matter what happens, you've, you've hurtled your, your opportunity cost because you've consumed an entire bottle of Screaming Eagle. Now, it's time to get some food in you. So you got to head to the buffet.

Usually there's prime rib or another high value protein and you're going to want to take down as much as possible. But this is where it gets creative. Bring a couple Ziploc bags. Take a couple prime ribs home to your team. If you're a bootstrap startup, you can feed your entire team for a week off of what you can take. Yeah. And I would recommend like take, you know, don't just bring a couple zip block bags. Bring 30 or 40 and actually stash them around the property. So that you can come back after the party's ended, the host will probably be fairly incapacitated, right? They've had a bunch of drinks throughout the night. They're sleeping.

Leave the party, but then actually come back like an hour later and just collect all the prime rib and then get out of there again. Exactly, exactly. Okay, so step four, you've got to navigate the social scene. You've got to handle the cool kids because if you're a founder, you're not going to be the hottest kid there. You're not going to be the coolest guy. There's always going to be someone who's flexing a little bit harder. There's going to be a lot of drugs going around potentially. You've got to skip the mushroom bar for sure.

No psychedelics. There might be tattoos. If that's the case, let everyone know, get a giant chess piece. Bald Eagle eating a panda bear. Let people know. You're an American. A real patriot. Real patriot.

Everyone will be getting like small tattoos because it's, you know, it's time limited. You want to be in there for two hours. Yeah. And so much so much a company building is pure pain tolerance, right? Yes. You've got to chew glass for a decade to get that generational outcome. Yep. And so if you can sit there at the holiday party getting a chess piece for two hours,

that's a way to display that level of pain tolerance. And don't flinch, don't cry. Just take it on the chest. Yeah. And that's an easy way to get your next round done because other VCs are going to see. Yeah. This guy just got a pound of ink in his flesh. Didn't even wins.

Yep. Of course I can trust him with my money, right? because this is about, this isn't really about, if you're invited to the holiday party, you either have a pending term sheet or already in the portfolio. Yep.

And so this is really about getting in front of the other capital allocators at the event and getting their attention so that they can get your next round done. Yeah. And so you want to bring your pitch deck. You want to print it out. Use a high quality,

80 pound paper. Don't go cheap. No 20 pound, no 30 pounds. Smart. Full color. You want to bind it. And you want to leave it everywhere. Drop it strategically.

In the bathroom, the home office, behind books. where get it in the gym wherever you think the put it in the prime rib you know the the catering and they have the flip it open a little pitch deck in there easy next person you find it vc is not going to be able to resist looking at the pitch deck no matter how pop in the party is yep so then would you would you use airdrop in a situation like this where you just start air dropping to anybody like in the in the vicinity I like I like the way you're thinking yeah I like the way

you're thinking because if you're out of the physical copies start blasting air drops yep exactly Yeah. So then you're going to want to mill about. Now you have your tattoo. You got your steak. You got your screaming eagle. You're going to head upstairs and there's probably going to be some cool kids hanging out in some private room, maybe doing a little bit of cocaine. You want to stay away from that.

Yep. But you don't want to get mugged by the cool kids. So here's what you do. You walk in, you see them. Hey, hey. And they're going to be like, hey, come do the Coke. You don't want to. You want to stick to the basics.

Yeah. Caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, protein. Yep. Right. So how do you mug them? Say, hey, I just got back from Pyongia. I got some crystal meth that's pure than a graph diamond. Let's hit this.

Now they're scared because they're like, ah, I don't want to touch that. That's too crazy. And so now you're the boss. You're the boss. And you don't even have to do any hard drugs. Yep. And so you've established your dominance again. Just throw it on the table.

Exactly. And watch them scatter to the wind. Yeah. Their fear is your win. Yeah. Leave with your reputation intact. So the last thing, or actually step five, Spycraft.

Everyone suspects that these parties that the Asian women are CCP spies, but that's racist and just wrong. What you need to watch out for are the Canadian guys because they blend in. You think that they're Americans, but then you find out you get completely blindsided. Gaffon. This is Gaffon's law. I was shocked when I learned that. So you need to be figuring out who is un-American, who's from Canada. You can usually ID them by if they're saying happy holidays instead of Merry Christmas, very un-American.

And then you could drop an obscure ice hockey reference. You could start talking about the Zamboni market and how Zambonies are technically hard tech. And if they get excited, that's a tell. It's Canadian. He's into hockey. And if someone questions you, you're already good because you can show off your tattoo of the eagle eating the panda bear.

And they know you're on America's team. And so the last step, step six, you got to party like a legend. You got to be a contrarian. You got to leave your mark. You got to get ready for the pool. We always recommend wearing a swimsuit under your tuxedo. you go into the bathroom, you hang up your tuxedo, nice and neat.

You want to leave it, you want to leave it nicely folded. It wants to look good when you get back in it. Exactly. Hop in the pool. Maybe you start a revolution. VCs are hurt animals. They'll all jump in. All of a sudden, it's a pool party.

And do your best, if any of your absolute boys are in there, do your best to start a whirlpool, you know, where you all move around long enough, that you kind of create this, like basically creating a movement, venture capitalists like to invest in founders that can create a movement. And so this is a wonderful physical display, not just physicality, but ability to create something bigger than yourself. A whirlpool is a great example of that. And a beaner or any type of emerging GP is going to just appreciate their pool getting used in general. Yeah. Many of those pools go untouched for months.

I completely agree. And so it's a sign of respect to say, hey, you pay to get this pool cleaned every single week and serviced. I'm going to use it so that you get your money's worth. Yeah. Let's use the fruits of your labor. A cannonball is respectful. Yep. So you got any more tips for me?

I mean, you really covered it almost all. Yeah, my main stuff kind of just echoes a lot of what you're saying. I think it's always about finding a way to stand out. You sort of went over a number of different ways to do that and be memorable, right? But the biggest thing if I could hone in on anything, it's become the main character. Yep. If somebody's hosting people at their house, they're trying to create, environment that says, oh, you know, look, look at how incredible my network is, the quality of

the people that I surround myself with, the quality of my portfolio. And so if you're going to become the main character, you need to be controversial. The best founders are often controversial, right? Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanak, Kalanick, you need to figure out a way to pattern match to this and do that in this sort of party environment. So that can be, you already covered this. A lot of people are going to be sticking to one or two drinks. Try drinking order of magnitude more than that. Power law outcome for power law Power law drinking, they call it. And this is really like you want them to remember you on Monday, right?

So the Saturday party, everybody, everybody's in a day's on Sunday. And then Monday you send that email out, hey, it was great seeing you at the party. I don't remember much, but I'd love to get together and sort of talk further, take the conversation a little bit further. And this is one of those like Tilean secrets about Silicon Valley. We know some VCs who get completely blacked out and they've gone on to raise huge funds. Yeah, there's sort of a blackout to fund manager pipeline. That's pretty well established. And so, yeah, kind of narrative violation there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you know,

you know. Another one, insist on bringing your own security. Oftentimes, there's going to be security already there. And if you're going to a party with people like this, you want them to know that you have enemies and that you need your own security with you. If I meet a founder and they don't have any enemies, they're probably not doing anything important. I probably don't want to invest in them. So by bringing your own security, it adds to this sort of mystique and a lure and saying, like, why does he need four bodyguards surrounding him at all times?

I thought he was just domesticating bears. He must be doing something much bigger. Yeah, yeah. You know, Seed stage founder, like, how does he have this many enemies? How is this, you know, a high threat environment? So it's just a way to establish sort of your importance. Second, so this happens a lot. Sometimes you're getting invited to a VC holiday party for a VC that you love.

That's one situation. That's kind of what we outlined. But if you get invited to a rival VC's holiday party, you can bring, I'd recommend bringing a journalist as a plus one. And here's the trick. Disguise them as an escort so that you don't make anyone's alarm bells go off. Oh, my God. So basically if they're just

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. If they're disguised as an escort, that's pretty common for people to bring escorts to a holiday party like this. And so nobody, the rival VC won't know what hit them until they're in the information on Monday. There you go. Yeah. And I mean,

the journalists will be able to blend in because they all come from fabulous wealth. Totally. It won't be a problem. They're going to know what wines to, you know, select and which. appetizers to skip and whatnot. And then the last thing, a little more serious, bring extra large napkins. A lot of rounds get done on the back of napkins of these kind of parties. But depending on your situation as a founder, there might be a lot of structure added to the deal.

And so if you have a bigger napkin, you're just that, you'll kind of need the extra space to make, to kind of work out all the kinks. And make sure you get the whole thing and the signature blocks and everything like that. So bring extra napkins, bring a journalist as a plus one if you're going to your enemies holiday party and whatever the situation is, bring your own security. We should make paper napkins that have full Excel sheets printed on them. Yes. So you can just do a full model. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

On the back. Yeah, you can do this deal on the back of a napkin. It's simple. And it's just the most complicated DCF you ever seen. That's great. Oh, well, that's fantastic. Let us know how it goes, folks. Use those tips and enjoy Christmas parties at VC.

events this holiday season. Moving on, let's do some DMs that we got. We have a bunch here. First is from Jeremy, good friend of the show. He says, why won't you guys put on a tie? That's a good question. I think for 2025, that should be a new year's resolution. I'm putting on a tie. Send me your recommendations. Send me, we found a great net jets tie. It was a steel. We're going to find, we're going to become Thai experts. Tie experts. Yeah, guys in LA. Guys in LA. put on a suit and think they deserve an award? And they haven't even thought about getting to the tie yet.

So there's levels to it. He did send us this the day that I was wearing a tuxedo with a bow tie, though. So, you know, pay attention. I do wear ties every once in a while. Oh, here's a more serious DM that I got. Ahoy, John, do you know how I can get off the employment blacklist? I've applied to an amount of jobs that would blow your mind this year and I've only had 10 or so interviews.

What do you think about how to stand out? Maybe we can tell some jokes, but also give some serious advice because I know that this person is seriously applying to jobs and is seriously trying to get a job right now. And he's kind of willing to do anything. Very, very strong hustler sent me some just like very interesting stock tips. He found this company that is in the caviar business that was moaning for a while. And he's just like observing. He's not like a trader, but he just like knows an interesting storyline clearly like tapped in. but is really having trouble standing out in the kind of vanilla hiring,

send in your resume. Like he just doesn't make it through the first gate. So what would you recommend to stand out? I mean, jokingly, maybe seriously. I know he's looking for real advice, though. Applying for jobs is pretty much futile unless you're applying to these sort of big companies that have sort of established pipeline. even then I don't really recommend it.

The one application process that works is like you're a new grad at a top school and there's a recruiting cycle. Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, of course you put in your application with Bain, BCG McKinsey, and it's like a clear flow. And even even relatively unknown seed stage startups will get 3,000 applicants for a entry level role. Any tech runner. And so it's completely impossible to try to get jobs that way.

not impossible, but I don't, I think people going and applying to a bunch of jobs, feeling like they're being productive and working towards something is not a good idea. So two things. One, establishing some type of personal relationship with someone at the company. That could be the founder. That could be an investor in the company. That could be, you need some type of warm relationship. Otherwise, you're just going to get lost in the stack.

second this is especially probably relevant to engineering roles if you can go talk to go find 50 engineering focused recruiters and and get on the phone with them because they're trying to get on the phone with potential candidates all day yep and have them start to understand you and help and then start warm and sharing you to companies so that that's another way but yeah i think you just need to get more creative in order to get attention my my favorite story uh of uh of hiring somebody was somebody who had message, seen some marketing in my last company, sent me a number of DMs that I actually didn't see. They went to the like request spam or like requested messages folder. And then he he just made an app for us like an entire end to end app that was like

fully out of the box like marketing drop. And that finally got through to me. And I jumped on, I think it was like a Saturday that I saw it. And I was like this is insane. Like totally like blew me away and I had a conversation with him and ended up hiring him. Pretty much like after seeing that work, I was like ready to hire him on the first call. So like you got to if you're struggling to find a role like you just got to get a find a way to get like figure out how to be 10 times more creative than what you're doing right now. Sending a link a boilerplate LinkedIn message, you know, probably not going to do it, but figure out a way to stand out. So two things. One on cold email incredibly effective, but dialing in the complexity. and length of a cold email is really tough and really critical.

Too short, hey, I just want a job. Can we hop on the phone? That's not going to break through. But also going super long and telling your entire life story is also going to feel like work. It needs to be just this perfect balance,

like three to five sentences with phone number. Hey, you can just text me. Like let's move to the next stage. You want to see these things as like a funnel. Like you want to get to like phone, text, meet, like, move very quickly. And then in terms of the building something, creating value before you get paid, essentially. A lot of people are like, oh, well, like, you just want free work or whatever.

But I think that if you reframe it in your mind in terms of like, I could spend 40 hours applying to 400 jobs with generic applications and just like slightly reworded, you know, like cover letters saying, I like your industry, whatever. Versus you take that 40 hours and you put that towards whatever your craft is, whether that's marketing or sales or develop. You put that towards one company. It's more wood behind fewer arrows. That's going to break through. And I think that you'll actually see a higher conversion rate down the funnel, even though the top of funnel is so much smaller. Yeah.

Because you're actually just, you know, dedicated. I think that will really show off. Yeah, try to do some type of small project. Even like if you're an engineer, message a CEO and say, hey, I contributed to this like open source project that I know you guys use. Yeah. That'll get you through. If you're at a marketing role, hey, I, here's,

five influencers in your category that I think could could be potential partners and here's why that'll get you through sales same thing hey here's three companies that I know that it could be potential customers I'd love to connect you to them and separately it would be great to jump on the phone sometime yeah we got a we got reply guy of the month and the big the big news here reply guy of the month there's been so much so much activity in the comment section of the TV account that we are moving reply guy of the month to reply guy of the week. And so there will be 52, up to 52 reply guys over the next year, honorary reply guys. And I got to say this, there's, there's a number of accounts that have been putting in the work. We're talking 10, 20 plus

comments a day. It's extremely excessive. The people that are, and necessary, the people that are, are standing out are actually reply guys that are engaging with each other. So they're taking the conversation onto each other's accounts and each other's posts. They're engaging with companies like Ramp and Devon. They're engaging with the employees of the companies of the companies that we feature. So there's levels to the reply game. Last week we gave it to Baldo. He has even leveled up since then.

His posting has been out of control good. And he actually had a little bit of back and forth with this week's reply guy of the week, which is none other than Turner Novak. Congratulations to Turner. Congratulations, Turner. This guy, Turner, I would have to imagine, has post notifications on. He has been highly, highly active. And this goes to show that it's not just emerging posters that can win this award.

It doesn't, you know, Turner's got, you know, 100,000 plus followers on this platform. He's been, and been very active for years. Elon Musk is a reply guy. Elon Musk is a reply guy too. With just emojis. This is so good. Quote tweets. He engages.

You're never above replying and being a reply guy. Yes. And Turner had some fantastic replies. I'll kind of go down them. Let's go through the greatest hits. Greatest. Wow. Devin is a game changer engaging with cognition labs.

We love to see that. We were talking about how expensive podcasting is. You've got mics, cables, cameras, $300,000 to spend on a, you know, branding agency just to get in the game. And Turner said each trust fund actually comes with a podcast. So that would explain why there's so many podcasts. That makes sense. He also was trying to get wire instructions for Baldos seed around, which again, showing that engagement with other reply guys. Yeah, kind of syndicated reply guys going on. And he actually said, you guys are doing it all wrong. You don't actually need a podcast. You just need to be able to tell people you have a podcast.

Oh, interesting. Telling someone you have a podcast gets you all the same benefits without having to deal with any of the downside. So this is, if you just have a podcast, you can say, hey, do you want to come be a guest on my podcast? And if they say yes, maybe you do a podcast with them just to, you know, show, like, you know, extend an olive branch. Having somebody on your podcast is the modern equivalent of an knowledge branch. He also was dunking on tech crunch a little bit. He says tech crunch has been real quiet since the technology brothers got together. So, uh, so, uh, so anyways, love to see this. Um, he, uh, he even took it a step further. This kind of was, icing on the cake. He did not release an episode of his podcast during Thanksgiving, but he

used that as an opportunity to promote Technology Brothers podcast. So setting a new bar, I see a pretty, you know, vicious rivalry emerging between Baldo and Turner. Yep. Bright future for both of them as posters, but certainly I'm going to be continuing to get at it in the comment section. So congratulations to Turner. We'll be getting you your medal in the mail soon. So thank you. Thank you for replying and never stop. Near Sayan says, I am purchasing Mark Zuckerberg's golden chain for $15,420.69. And it's one of Zuck's gold chains in support of the Edge Institute.

And this was all over the timeline. People were very excited about the auctioning of Mark Zuckerberg's golden chain, which is very cool. I guess this was donated. But you know the whole backstory. Can you break it down and then tell us why we are awarding the brother of the week? not to Zuck, but to someone else. Yes.

So anyway, so this auction was hosted by a friend of the podcast and friend of ours, Justin Mares. So Justin has his own company, TrueMed. And totally fire. Made his money in bone broth, but more recently has been, you know, in the running TrueMed. He's also a venture partner at Long Journey Ventures, famous venture capital firm. And Justin has created this thing called Infliction Grants, which is, There's a program where if you're 25 and under and $2,000 would change your life, you can get a grant. So this could be getting a plane ticket somewhere.

Let's say you're living in Tennessee and you want to get to Silicon Valley. They'll give you a grant that lets you fly out, meet somebody and potentially change the trajectory of your life. It could be a computer. Let's say kids in high school and they're good at video editing and they want to get better at that. They'll give them a grant to buy a computer. And so this entire auction... Are tailor-made suits eligible? Yes.

So if you're a Gen Z founder, you're going to Y Combinator, you want to stand out and you want to get a tailored suit from Furentino label, $2,000 is not going to get you that, but you could go down to suit supply and pick up a suit from there. And so, yeah, it's an amazing program sort of adjacent to Teal Fellowship, more accessible, and just goes to show that it doesn't take that much money to change the job. trajectory of someone's life, right? So a very cool program. And so this chain, they were able to secure Mark Zuckerberg's former daily driver chain and auction it off and able to raise $100,000 for inflection grants. And so that's 50 people that are going to get this grant. And so if you're interested in the program, go to inflectiongrants.com, I believe, is the thing. And congratulations to Justin, one of the founding brothers of the week. And nobody deserves it more than him this week.

So thank you. Let's continue with potentially a future brother of the week. Luke Metro, he's been on the show before. He says, it's kind of cool how raising a seven-figure seed round is generally easier than getting a job as a VC associate. Interesting. Yeah, this was somewhat controversial in the group chats. Fio was saying that this behavior needs to be shamed, and I think he was talking about the pattern of VC associates or something?

No, no. I think he was saying it shouldn't be that easy to raise millions of dollars for your company. Got it. And I can see it both ways. Fio's point of view is a lot of people, their first few ideas that they work on are just not going to be that great, right? And sort of resources that are potentially wasted. Yep. I can see that side.

The other side of this is that the VC associate job is just. not at most firms is not that you're kind of like a BDR, SDR, like cold reaching out to companies. The good companies don't want to talk to the associates. And so it's just sort of like a role that has a bunch of busy work. And maybe it's, you know, maybe it ends up being a pathway to joining the firm as partner or joining another firm as partner. But I think in a lot of funds, the, the associate role is, is a, is almost like a death trap. But I think it's generally good that, that more young people will be better qualified to be investors later in life if they like build stuff. I think it's generally good that it's it's and you know Luke is just like identifying this,

but it's pretty wild how it's some for some people it's easier for them to get it to raise a seed round than get a job. Yeah. Which is actually probably very a indicator of how strong our innovation economy is. Yeah. I mean if you think about it just like a like almost like a tax on large VC funds, if you raise a billion dollar fund and you put 100 million aside for million dollar seed rounds, that's 100 companies. You're not going to hire 100 associates with a billion dollar fund. And so the math just plays out much better. You get all these call options and then all these companies.

It really does seem like it's a better job. That would be an interesting fund strategy, though. It's a $100 million fund with a hundred associates. And they just fight for the death. There's a leaderboard every single week. who's talking to the most companies, he's doing the most deals. There are some funds that track calls in the CRM. Like you've got to be making 40 calls a week.

And emails, I'm sure. Yeah, 40 calls a week. It's crazy. Oh, well, I agree with Luke on this. I think it is wild, but I think it's the cracked model. Erroneous input created a fantastic meme of us. I love this. This is reply guy of the month or week level posting.

He's a candidate for sure. Yeah. Do not stop erroneous input. We love what you're doing. On the map. It's a beautiful photo. Found some great photos of us from the show. Photoshopped them in to this sports car in the snow.

And really, really good job with the cropping and the masking. Very intentional. It's not a hack job. This is class. I like it. Really, really good. Probably could have blended in the TB logo into the hood a little bit more. Dusted a little snow over the hood.

In a couple months, he'll be pulling out the 3D rendering software, really baking it in. Using SORA, maybe. Yeah, maybe. But we love to see the user-generated content where it's going, how it's growing, and we appreciate what you do for the show. Great work. We wouldn't be who we are without you. Let's go through this three-post deep dive by Arfer Rock, funny name.

And I think, did you want to start with the Steph post, Steph Moie? She says, a GP from a multi-stage VC firm is anonymously posting private revenue. revenue numbers and funding rounds of large companies that are apparently quite accurate. And they only have 450 followers and most of their tweets have almost no likes. And Arfraq is posting 11 labs, 90 million ARR, planning 100 million EOI, profitable, closed unannounced round at 3.2 billion from iconic growth in A16Z. And Orfer Rock also says $20 million ARR in the first two months, fastest growing software company ever, raising 80 to 100 million at one billion, have a few term sheets first week in market.

And then Arfaraq closes with saying, my DMs are open if you have some tea. It ain't much, but it's honest work. So yeah, what's going on here? So you remember last bubble, 2021? There was an account, I think it was called Genuine Info or something like that. That was just similar approach that was basically leaking major dealmaking that was happening. you know, months or two months out before he was getting publicly announced. And so Arthur Rock, great name. I actually don't know what is in a reference to. Arthur Rock. Arthur Rock.

The original GP or the original like BC. Wow, wow. I just proved I'm a zoomer. Yeah. The original GP himself. So anyways, the first venture capitalist. The first venture capitalist. So great, great name and some interesting Intel. I actually DM with him a little bit last night. Nice guy, a technology brother himself, clearly. But yeah, it's an interesting strategy, cotton, because I think at some point, some schizo is going to just try to pinpoint all of this and put it all together. Because on one hand, I think it's a lot of this information by the time that, but he's not sharing anything that would be potentially damaging to companies, but he's certainly front running the news cycle, which our friends at the misinformation like to do quite a lot.

And so anyways, I'm interested. I think I think I'm along this account. I'm investing sub 500 followers. He's got a bright future. And it's one, it's one to follow. It's funny because I think it will whip GPs into this hysteria because they're going to see sometimes announcements get done and GPs are like punching the air because they just didn't see the company at all and it just like happened. How did this happen without us seeing it? And now it's even earlier than that. Like the term sheets are basically already. signed and they're seeing arthur rock announce it and they're just like sending arthur rock's posts to their principal being like how the fuck did you miss this i love how you say uh during the last bubble because it's just like you're always in a bubble we're always in one battle you're either in a crash or a bubble yeah yeah there's no normal time yeah and this is true like when i got to silicon Valley in 2012, 2013, everyone was talking about Texas in the major bubble. And then that bubble went on for a decade. That was a great bubble. But I think we're in the best one yet. The America bubble. Yeah. Jacob Sandsbury says, having kids in the next five years might be a

tragic mistake. Every smart bio founder slash scientist I've talked to seems to think that embryo editing for things like short sleeper, reduced cancer risk, et cetera, as possible on a near-term horizon. Imagine having two kids a couple years apart. One is a superhuman and the other isn't. Sorry, Jim, little Timmy won't get cancer. Only needs four hours of sleep. And your normal, and your normal you were just born in the wrong order. 3K likes. Interesting.

The problem with this is that these innovations, like, it's not going to be some binary step change. It's going to be very smooth. And so, like, yes, every kid is more healthier. Descel alert. Desal alert. No, I'm kidding. I looked at this. I'm more like part of being human is being imperfect.

Yep. And I plan to have many more children with my wife. Go watch Gattaca. The indomitable will of the human spirit. Yeah. And my children are perfect to me, even though I'm sure one of them needs more sleep than the other, all these things. So I think it's pretty human. And a lot of these gene editing technologies will be possible once you're alive.

There'll be medications. There'll be all sorts of different hacks. Yeah. It's also, do you want to be in the first generation of fully gene-ed-ed-ed-ed-ed-a-old. children where you're like, oh, I want to make sure, I want to allow them to only sleep three hours so they can grind harder. And then it creates this like insane side effect. And it's like, yeah, maybe you want a cycle, a 20 year cycle.

All of them became serial killers. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just want to edit for not being one-shotted by ayahuasca. Yes. In the downside that my children were to rebel against me. Yeah, also, if you talk to a parent and you said, hey, there's this new experimental gene editing technology that will let your kids sleep for four hours. I don't know a single parent would take that every parent would be like every night where's the 12 hour sleep yeah yeah every night you're

basically optimizing for how make sure this light is yeah longer sleep blackout curtains noise machine yeah yeah noise two let's do two noise machines clearly doesn't have kids if you done the overlapping no I haven't done it works there's levels to the noise machine I love it okay okay uh Cora says today was the day I finally broke. I was accidentally not disassociated enough on the streets of San Francisco and projectile vomited from the yucky sights. This is interesting because I looked at Cora's profile

and she's like a very normal tech person. She's not some like raging right wing lunatic who's like agitating for culture war. But 10 years ago there was this guy Greg Gottman who posted something very similar talking about the homeless problem in San Francisco and he was canceled, harder than like anyone ever like could not get a job for years for years and then he kind of bounced around

I think he's doing okay now but it was really really rough he wrote a post about how like San Francisco has a lot of homeless problem and like me to do something about this and everyone was canceled for that incredibly canceled like terrible he got hired at Twitter for a little bit got fired there was an error you're basically I'm basically I basically missed this error because I was in basically in high school but um you said Dustin Curtis got canceled for liking nice things. This guy got canceled for identifying the homeless problem. Yeah, it was it was rough. And yeah, the tech industry hadn't learned to like circle the wagons at all. And so there was just it was just complete, complete scapegoating and then just ostracization. You just became an apostate

very quickly for for doing anything like this. Yeah. It was crazy. And yeah, Greg was a little too early on that one. But it's interesting to see like just, you know, from what I can tell, just like a completely normal person in tech. Like not, not raging like, oh. some culture war like clickbait you know trying to like rile people yeah it's not a contrarian thing i mean i that's my some of my core memories of san francisco unfortunately are being a kid and like walking around and being stunned at some sort of very yeah traumatizing yeah situation i mean i i lived in the tenderloin in 2012 2013 and it was it was rough but i mean i'm a tall guy most times six people would just be like uh oh do you play basketball they get kind of

And once you're once you're like a local, people just kind of clocking. And you'd carry a basketball, right? Exactly. In a dream. Leave the house. It wasn't that bad for me. But I went back after COVID and I'd seen everyone on Twitter in San Francisco talk about how bad it was. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try and be objective here.

Like how can I quantifiably say if it's actually worse or if that's just some sciop from tech people? And the thing that I landed on is being like something that I noticed. that was physically different was the number of barbecues that were on the street, like more permanent encampments. Wow. Because you're actually like living and cooking and like sometimes even hooking up gas lines and stuff. Like it's like very, very permanent installations.

On the city gas. And I was like, I don't remember that happening. And so you can never really tell if it's like, oh, you see a street and there's a lot of homeless people. It could just be like, well, they moved from five streets to one street. So there's not actually a gain in the number of homeless people. But the barbecue thing really, really stuck out to me. So I do think there's an issue and I really hope they solve it.

soon. And apparently the best way to solve it is to have Seizian Pink come and visit. You saw that? Gary Tan. Yeah, Gary Tan's leading the serious charge. But anytime there's Dream Force, Mark Benny Off is just like, clean up this entire city. It's great. Let's go to Will Quist. He says, that sound you hear is tech investment bankers everywhere canceling their holiday plans and breathing a sign of relief. And it says this post is unavailable. Should we even cover this? No, that was something about Service Titan. Because it was Service Titan. They price About their IPOs. And then it went out at like one over 100.

And for a long time, the tech IPOs would dip right after. It was rough. And then the SPACs were like aggressively bad. And so so many VCs were like, let's just stay private longer. Yeah. But now the game's back on. Tech is back on the menu. Lena cons out.

IPOs are back on the menu. Start, start underwriting your seed investments to Decacorn outcomes. It's okay to invest at 50 posts, pre-revenue, pre-idea, pre-team. Yep. just do it. 50 post. 50, 50 million going into the seed round.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 200. 50 on 250, right. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, sorry. We're building AI here, man. We need some cloud credits. Oh, this is a good one, but we're a little bit too deep in the post.

Gary Tan says, I want this. I would fund this too. And it's Andre Carpathie talking about building a tool to help you read along with a book. We talked about this last time. But Krish then says, I love you, Gary, but you guys literally rejected me. And he posts his company. But the beauty of YC, you can apply again.

Gary wants it. DMM. And if you want an AI reading companion, go to get meaning. Get meaning.xyZ slash home. Do you read the slash home, bro? Yeah, and go get a meaning.com. And, I mean, what a real poster. He included a link, 2.5K likes.

Real posters built different. Yeah. Respect. It felt different, broke through. Respect. Yeah. So, you know, never too late to apply to YC. You can always get in.

Go BioWorks went through at like $200 million valuation. Promoted post. Not a promoted post. I'm just going to jump in because this one is near and dear to my heart. I got a post from Druva, Rohendra, a close friend of mine. Yesterday, Drouva and myself and the deterrence team announced deterrence, which is a new company leveraging robotics to manufacture. energetics. So for anybody that's not heavy, heavy in defense, a lot of the high profile

defense tech companies like Anderol have been going after these sort of very sexy programs like drones and autonomous submarines. And there hasn't been a player yet that's come out and made a made an effort to rebuild the sort of high volume manufacturing base. So for anything like, you know, munitions in a case of deterrence, deterrence. his first product is manufacturing primer, which is the explosive sort of like thing that that starts the reaction in a in a round, in a bullet. Yeah. And so, yeah, deterrence has been in the works for, let's see, some, you know, Drewva and Brian, the founders had been working on this for since, you know, last year at this point. but company got out and running earlier this year, built a fantastic team.

And yeah, this is a company that I was fortunate enough to be involved with since probably six months prior to incorporation. So personally got a front row seat. And the team now is stacked. Tesla, Palantir, Rivian, a bunch of, you know, incredible engineers and operators. And ridiculous customer backlog. like we were able to identify something that has a shocking amount of demand. And so if you're looking for a job, check us out, deterrence.com.

I got a number of positions open. And this was a fun round for me because my good friend Will Cofield, who's here in L.A., led the round, $10 million in total financing. And a bunch of friends of the podcast participated as well, Heston, Berkman, Jack Dreyfus, people like that. So very exciting and it was good to finally get this out. It's always, it's always, it's always, it's always a strange thing when you've been working on something in silence for, you know, oftentimes more than a year. And so to finally get out there and see the reaction is great.

So good work to the deterrence team. And, yeah, this is one to follow. Fantastic. Let's go to Avi Schiffman. He says, there's nothing more nauseating than a Tesla Uber. And you had some comments on this. What's wrong with Tesla Uber's? Break it down.

So being in Malibu, like Uber is super unreliable. So I always have to, like, I have a driver that will take me to the airport. And I had to tell him, like, stop picking me up in your Tesla because, yes, it's like, you know, maybe environmentally friendly and it's just convenient, modern features or whatever. But it's just so nauseating sitting in the back. And a lot of people don't have been slow to sort of realize why this is. The obvious one is the acceleration. Teslas have like the acceleration of like a turbo S.

But like even like throughout like the full. It's just like way too much acceleration for the average person. It's like driving an F1 car on the street. The regenerative braking. So the car automatically braking creates this to sort of recharge the battery. Creates this effect where it's this fast acceleration and then you take your foot off the gas. And it sort of breaks aggressively more so than if you. you just let it sort of coast.

And then the big one that I should put on my tinfoil hat on to maybe protect me from some EMFs, but Tesla is just emit like a ridiculous amount of EMF, which is sort of low level radiation. A lot of people say that it doesn't have any negative effects, but there's quite a lot of evidence that it might. And you can actually go on YouTube and just search like Tesla EMF reading. and in most Teslas, the EMF levels are much higher in the back seat. So when you're sitting in the back seat, you're basically getting microwaved,

and then the car is like, you know, accelerating, decelerating. It's not a very amazing experience. And it's probably something people don't notice if they're in the front seat because their look, eyes in the roads. The acceleration is, it's like you rarely get carsick when you're driving. Yeah, exactly. So if you're driving and you're the one on the gas and then also a lot of the Uber drivers are just trying to get there as fast as possible.

So they're going to be really pushing the acceleration and braking to get there faster because they want to do the next ride. Whereas if you're driving yourself, you might be a little bit more legally. But I want to see, I know that there's stuff Tesla can do to mitigate EMF. Some other car manufacturers have made efforts on this. So I'd like to see them prioritize it because I don't have anything against Tesla as manufacturer. I think it's great. Let's go to dudes posting their Ws.

He says, buddy is the most condescending word in dude culture. and there's a meme that shows a hierarchy. Guys that say Big Dog are at the top. Guys that say bro and man are after that. And then Sir, Bra, Chief, Dude, Son, and Fella, and Buddy are at the bottom. So, St. Bud and Buddy are just so much farther than Chief. I don't think Chief is derogatory.

Yeah, well, it's about the hierarchy. Like, are you, like, when you say Big Dog, that's like a sign of respect. Sir, Chief, these are boss. Champ. these are your you're paying respects upward then there's brother which is equivalent man equivalent dude sir even but then when you go son that's younger and buddy is like what you call your dog and so it's like are you talking down to people or are you talking up to them or showing a sign of respect son can also be used in the right context can be um you know positive damn son

like that no more like here come on son i'll teach you that's still very negative. Yeah, but it can be, but it's more familial. Like, yeah, it's got a more positive connotation. But that's why technology brothers, we're all equal here. Yeah, we're all equal. I do think that if a VC calls their portfolio founder, Bud, they should be diluted to zero. Like, there should be like some type of new round of the structure done to just dilute them to zero because it's so condescending and should should be taken out of the vocabulary entirely. That's great. So this is interesting. Word grammar says most of people. Peter Thiel and Paul Graham's advice is directly contradict each other.

You have to pick aside. Trying to follow both is a good way to make sure you end up following neither. Word grammar. I'd never seen him until this post, him or her. But at great post and perfectly controversial, which is why the engagement seems strong. Yeah, I mean, I think that the funds are set up wildly differently. Yeah, I was going to say you're perfectly qualified for this. I've been through YC twice.

Work with Peter. Work at Founders Fund. Yeah, so I mean, the funds are set up wildly differently. Like YC invests in thousands of companies. Founders Fund is extremely picky. And they're trying to teach you two different things. I think YC is effectively just, can you start a business? And by the end of YC, you, like most of those founders, unless they mess something up,

they will have a company, like a business. I talked to a YC founder that when you, like, through they tried to build some like SaaS product and then they wound up it didn't they didn't really have traction and they wound up just being a software consultancy yeah and so the guy makes a great living as a software consultancy and it's just like a lifestyle business essentially it's great yeah um whereas the founders fund teal model is very very narrowly selected for monopoly power power or power law outcomes can this be a trillion dollar company yeah it's not it's not underwriting oh, we think this can be, they can IPO and have a $10 billion market cap.

Are we going to still want to invest in this company at a $200 billion valuation? Exactly, exactly. So that's just a wildly different question. And you would never get that in a YC interview. Like, oh, like, let's make sure that you can, that it's plausible that this could be a trillion dollar company. No, it's like, are you an interesting hacker? Are you building something? Do you want to build business?

Yeah. And the cool thing is that YC generates a number of power law companies, right? Coinbase, Lucy. Airbnb. So they still generate these Teeleian companies. Yes. And Founders Fund will back those companies. But it's just a much different method.

Let's just continue with word grammar because this one's great. God cursed Peter Thiel by making him Silicon Valley's biggest tech guru. Now the minute he says something, millions of tech bros listen and agree with him. Because of his curse, he will never be able to be a contrarian ever again. So this is interesting and this is somewhat true, but there are plenty of things that he doesn't say publicly. Yeah, it's a timing mismatch. Yeah, exactly. He's going to say he's going to make everyone believe what he wants them to believe when it is convenient.

Yeah, it's timing mismatch more just in the sense of like, like there's clearly ideas that he's talking about with his inner circle, then workshopping in private events, then there's then there's private dinners where these ideas go out. And then maybe like six months to a year later, it's on a podcast. Yeah, and so there is a big delay there. I would say he's understanding the weight of his words and being very intentional with how he rolls out that messaging. Yep. To not come out and be too dogmatic about one thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we heard a talk by him recently in Miami. And it was very clear that that was something that was still being workshopped. And we've talked about this offline, but it's still contrarian to actually follows zero to one's approach to a T. Yep.

Where most investors will say, we're contrarian, we're only investing in power law, monopoly companies, but then they'll do like a run-of-the-mill like B2B SaaS company still. Yeah. And so they're not actually like fully embodying that approach. Yeah. And I, my, my takeaway from zero to one is always like if you read the book and you really apply it

to your business, like what you're meant to do, what you're enjoying building. The answer might not be, don't start a company, it might just be don't raise venture capital. And YC is not that check. But there are plenty of companies that get through YC and then they don't need to raise because they're not building in that zero to one playbook sense and that's okay.

But it just wouldn't count in that metric. Let's go to D.D. D.D. says, just learned that WhatsApp has not 10, not 20, but 150 designers all working tirelessly to make sure the app looks exactly the same as a did in 2014, 92K likes. Yeah, so this is crazy because the X design team, which now includes my dear friend, Brandon Jacoby, who you've covered on the show before. The X design team, I think, is under five people. Like it's some like tiny, tiny, much more complicated product, I would say in many ways to run a social app than a messaging app, even though WhatsApp has

plenty of social features. So anyways, this goes back to what we've talked about before. Why haven't more companies done the Elon and just cut like 80%? of people, but I guess WhatsApp being part of meta now. Maybe it doesn't have the same incentive. Yeah. I also wonder if a lot of those designers are working on like little, small, like ad integrations because the core product does look the same, but there's a lot of like design. Every simple product is deeply complex. Yeah. All the different onboarding flows and like little screens that you don't see and you never really interact with. But yeah, 150 is a lot of designers for an app that's pretty basic.

It feels basic. But yeah, I mean, Facebook has a long history of stuffing features in these apps. Like Instagram used to just be photos now.

There's like 25 different tabs. I do, do you have to give them credit for keeping Instagram, Instagram? Yeah. Like they've like 100 X the features. Yep.

And it's still the core functionality of going there to see what's likely the most interesting posts for me at that moment in time. Profile still fairly clean. So credit to them for that. It's go to Lee Jacobs. He says, when Chase Lockmiller first told me about Crusoe, I said, wait, you are turning large

fireballs from the ground into Bitcoin in North Dakota. What started is that absurd idea is now the leading full-stack AI inference company, excited for the new fuel from our friends at Founders Fund. That is crazy. Do you know the story of Crusoe, like how they started? I don't know. I don't know that Lee was the first semester. Yeah, Lee was the first semester.

And so Crusoe, they, the whole play. was like finding stranded energy and then using that for compute to power supercomputers. Very cool. And so what they did was they found natural gas plants where they have to flare the gas. And so there's excess gas that comes off. They can't capture it. It's just going to burn. And that's bad for emissions.

So instead they burn it and they turn it into energy that then they can use to power the computers. And at the time, the most valuable use for cheap energy was mining Bitcoin. So they started there. And then obviously AI came up and the Bitcoin mining business is. kind of taking a back seat to the AI infrastructure now. That's very cool. So yeah, it's crazy like second and third act for that company that was only possible because

they took the path they did. And for a long time, people were kind of like, oh, you're like a Bitcoin mining company. Like this isn't interesting during the downturn. And now that the AI boom's here, it's like, we got it. All the VCs that probably passed when they were, you know, doing something that was less on narrative. But we joked about this earlier, but you said the Crusoe found. under said some of these foundation models would burn whale blubber if they could yeah yeah totally so

desperate for energy so desperate for energy this goes back to just energy being one of the kind of core yeah foundational layers of the AI value chain just today I saw satchan adela was doing a some sort of interview whaling press conference for no press conference for Microsoft and he said that they're no longer GPU poor like GPU bound like yeah and everyone's like oh bull bear case for invidia like they they have all that they need it's I don't think it's that. I think that they're buying the maximum and now they've hit a different bottleneck, which is probably energy. Yeah, which is crazy. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted posts from our friend, Delian over at Varda. He says, if you want to come work for me, the teams I work with most at Varda

is expanding. If you've worked in Gov and Love Policy, come help us make space factory as a reality. It takes legislation as much as it takes nuts and bolts to make this crazy thing a reality. He puts a link in the next tweet. They have a fantastic role available. Government. Affairs manager. You're going to be based in Washington, D.C. So if you have experience in working the government and, you know, they go over some of the requirements here. But Varda has just been taking a, you know, crazy idea and then just ruthlessly executing against it, getting contracts, proving out that this is very real and happening. So awesome opportunity for the right person. The only downside is if you take that job, Delian will probably refer to you as a swamp creature.

I was out in D.C. once with him. And he was like, Oh yeah, I'll introduce you to our swamp creature, our head of our head of government affairs. Our head of swamp. He's like, he's so swampy. He's been in the swamp for years. He's the best. It's a term of endearment, but it's very silly. Let's go to Mark Sisson.

He says, when I heard the New York Times was suing Open AI for using its archives as training data, I knew relying on LLMs as arbiters of truth was fucked beyond all recognition. So real. So real. What about it? I mean, yeah. I think you have to models do a good job of processing broad. I don't know. You could argue maybe they don't do a good job,

but they're aware of bias and trying to piece together what they imagine is the truth. But it's the same thing, same end thing that an individual is doing of like looking at multiple sources and trying to piece together the truth. The truth is, it's hard to nail down oftentimes in the world that we're in. but yeah, you certainly, this goes back to,

there's a company out there called DeXA that I think is interesting. And it'll, they basically scrape all the binger podcasts. And so you can ask, what does Mark Huberman think about this, you know, gluten, right? And so this goes back to in the era of models. Yeah. You're still going to go back to individuals. So I'm going to trust the experts. I'm going to trust the experts.

Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman. No, but like, like, yeah. obviously you're joking, but like Mark is a good example where I want to know what Mark Sisson thinks about about seed oils, right? I don't want to know what what Open AI thinks about it because they're probably going to say, well, popular science says that there's no issue with Codil. Yeah, and he's calling out New York Times and there's been some crazy, crazy quotes in the New York Times recently about health. Like, I really would trust Huberman way more than New York Times. Yeah. Didn't they say like ultra-processed foods aren't bad for you? It's like, yeah, so I can just eat Oreos all day long? Like this is

Nutrition 101. Trust. You shouldn't be eating Cheetos all the time. This is not like some contrarian crazy idea. This is like pretty basic. Anyway, we have some breaking news, folks. Lucy Guo has broken her silence. She has not posted in hours,

but she just dropped a banger pod with Molly O'Shea. The Queen of L.A. is talking about the creator economy. She's the founder of passes. And we encourage you to go check out the podcast. And Lucy was also posting yesterday that she has millions of dollars in short-term capital gains, and she's looking to marry somebody who has millions of dollars in losses that's ideally local at L.A., and the two of you

would be able to split the savings, and presumably get divorced soon afterwards. But anyways, if you have millions of dollars in short-term losses, go hit up, Lucy. She's got a solution for you to make some of that back. Fantastic. Let's move on to Daniel Tenriro. I need to learn how to pronounce his last name. He says, The Robin Hood Foundation is running a stock picking contest for donors, and the leaderboard is truly a work of art.

Put it in the Louvre. And the leaderboard is Bill Ackman at the top, with a total return of over 100%. His long pick was Fannie Mae, and his short sector was financials. Wait, so is this, this is put on by Robin Hood? No, the Robin Hood Foundation with a space. And the funny thing here is that number two,

Number two is Mark Gallant and his long pick was Robin Hood the company. Wow. And his short pick was communications. And then Micro Strategy was the long pick for Mark Galant again. And David Einhorn picked Peloton. Wait, do you have back? I actually am not familiar with the Robin Hood Foundation. I'm not familiar either.

I think it's just a charity. This is why you come to the technology brothers. Yeah. Get the facts and the deep analysis and backstory. So if you know what the Robin Hood Foundation is let us know in the YouTube comments. It's probably literally in the second post here but I didn't study for this one. We were phoned it in folks. This is an interesting one. Zach Coelius says, Coelius, is that how you pronounce it? I don't know. I wish I knew.

Zach says played credit card roulette for the dinner bill last night with a bunch of VCs and it was surprising how uncomfortable a bunch of them were. What happened to the D-Gen gambler mentality of our asset class for a neutral EV bet? It is. is such a no-brainer. Such a no-brainer. I love playing that game. Well, it's not always neutral EV. Because what if you're the one that

drank the most wine, ordered the most steak, housed all the appetizers? It could be extremely positive EV for you. So maybe the people that were sheepish, they just had a little salad on the side and they're like, ah, I'm going to get burned here. I'm going to get burned.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I just go into that. You want to be going to dinners where you would happily pay for everybody and still feel like it was a good, just exchange, right? Because you're going for the company.

It's not about the food. It's not about how much you ate. It's not about how much you drank. It's about who you were there with and what deals you got done. That's great. Do we have any more promoted posts? I got a promoted post from the number one business podcast in the world. Oh, this is fantastic.

David Senra with Founders Podcasts. He gave a great summary of the book How to Make a few billion dollars, which we've talked about before on the show. Brad Jacobs. He did a whole. He did a whole interview with Brad Jacobs. You called this out last time, but some of the most iconic founders now are actually living and breathing. And so David can just hang out with them and hear it straight from the horses from the thoroughbred's mouth. From the stallion's mouth. From the eventing horses mouth. From the dressage horses. If you haven't seen our gift guide, go check it out. We talk about the different horses that you should be gifting your friends. But a couple highlights. out here, narrow your focus to the most important dreams and tune out everything else.

Two, the most important thing a CEO does is recruit superlative people. Three, an empty seat is less damaging than a poor fit. Four, resist the urge to flood communications with non-essential information. And five, if you want to make money in the business world, you need to get used to problems because that's what business is solving problems. The problem we're solving on this podcast is Tech, Tech One, didn't have a podcast. and the tech adjacent podcast all in wasn't monetizing, right? So you couldn't get in front of that audience.

This is how you're getting in front of the similar audience. So there's five or sorry, five more that I'm not going to say here, but go listen to Founders Podcasts. It is the number one business podcast. And thank you to David Senra for being on our board and supporting our show. Good Godfather podcasting. Let's stay on podcasts and close with some news from Dextero. they say BuzzFeed has sold the show Hot Ones for $82.5 million.

So, I mean, that would be a downround for us if we sold for 82. We wouldn't even clear the preff on that. Yeah, I know. That'd be rough. But good for them. I hope they, I hope they did okay. That wasn't that, wasn't that, that feels, I feel like it was originally reported that they were trying to sell it for like 30 or something like that.

Oh, really? So it seemed that that's coming a lot higher because I think a lot of people just looked at that and they said the show was so reliant on the host that how do you really attach enterprise value unless you're locking them up for a pretty extreme time period so maybe they figured out a way to do that but it's funny because buzzfeed i think was wasn't weren't they trading at less than that or something they were trading i thought they were trading at like 20 million dollars well well that's the equity value and so i think buzzfeed has debt and so even if they sold this for 82 they might still Yeah, they were using BuzzFeed or they were using the sale to reduce their debt.

Yeah, makes sense. I do wonder about- Yeah, so they're trading at 126 now, but they were- Yeah, I do wonder about if there's, if there is asset value beyond Sean Evans because his, I mean, he obviously is a great host. There, but his style is very much like asked the question and then kind of get out of the way. And there have been talk shows in the past that have had asset value beyond the core host. I think the best example is probably late night, which traded hands from Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien in this very dramatic situation where then Conan got pulled and Leno came back.

You heard of this whole story. It's like the late night wars. But that's very tied to. There are only 24 hours in the day. There's going to be a late night show that's on Monday through Friday. And there's only three spots for late night. It's like 10 p.m. 11 p.m. midnight. And then you get into the late, late show that has no value.

And if you go earlier, you're in prime time and you want to be showing like scripted stuff. And so there's only for a while, it was like there were only four channels like NBC, ABC, ABC, Fox, CBS or whatever. And so there were really only like 10 slots for late night shows that would do interviews for adults after the kids go to bed, that type of stuff. But with the internet, obviously there can be unlimited interview shows, unlimited podcasts. And so Buzz, like Hot Ones has obviously built like this incredible. brand. It was originally with Complex, then sold to BuzzFeed. It's traded hands a few times now. We'll be interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it doesn't seem like Sean Evans is stopping anytime soon, and it seems like they must have gotten him a great deal. And I bet part

of that A2 was, you know, built into his contract and predicated on a great contract there. So always interesting to see what's going on in the podcast world, but we got to wrap up. We got a lot to do. Got to get on with Taipei, I think. That's right. That's right. So thanks for listening, subscribe, follow us on X, and we'll see you next time. See you on the timeline. See you on the timeline.