TBPN - Hit the Dom Button, Unicorn Growth Continues, Sequoia's Lasting Success, Crypto Dawgs

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Also, the fastest growing podcast in the world. We doubled again. Surprise, surprise. We're at 4,000 followers on X. If you're not already following, head over there and follow us now. As you know, we have a little bit of a tradition on the show. Every time we double the size of the podcast, we celebrate with a bottle of Don Perignon.

And so today we have a wonderful, I believe it's 2015 vintage. That's correct. Fantastic. So let's get this open. And how was your weekend, Jordi? My weekend is good. My weekend was good. You went to the ballet. I went to the ballet. I saw the nutcracker. What's new? Fantastic. What's new? The ballet is deeply underrated, I believe. Totally. And everyone's second only to seeing Interstellar with your absolute boys. Which we are doing on Thursday, which will be great. Let's see. Ready, Ben?

There we go. It's kind of, it's kind of wild. We, we, we, we, uh, our studio, has like carpet all over the floor and so the amount of champagne just sinking into the carpet is going to be a mess but yeah but you know you got you got to celebrate the wins it's important yeah and we grew 10% since we hit the 4k mile zone too so fantastic compounding yeah I saw I saw the nutcracker and it's it's fantastic chikovsky I didn't know this but um the story was was written in 1820 do you the story of the Nutcracker? Do you know the whole history here? I've seen it many times. Of course, but tell it for the list.

Yeah, yeah, of course. And it's very interesting because the stories about this dream and in the dream these, like, toy soldiers are fighting these rats. And I couldn't help but think it was like a metaphor for the plague in some way. Even though, like, I don't think that's exactly

what people think it's about. But it was weird that, like, the rat was like the avatar. Or capitalism versus the communists. Maybe, maybe. But the whole time I was sitting there and I was thinking like... You can attach your own meaning to it. It's very odd that like the whole COVID pangolin bat story hasn't been canonized into ballet yet. Yeah.

Well, maybe that's, we can get into that. We can get into producing ballets. We should. It's a great product line for that. I mean, Russia should really turn around and start producing ballets again. Yeah, their whole economy is. Yeah, their whole economy is now war-based. Just shelling Ukrainians.

And if they could shift back into the arts. But very commercially, that could be great. I think they got to put out a banger ballet, retool the whole economy to produce great ballets. Because then, you know, they just, it would be hard not to support that. Or if they open source their PED model, like they have some of the best.

Yeah, it's true. The best PED programs in the world. And if they were to kind of do the Brian Johnson approach, you get, you know, Vladimir just really, like, dial in, more, you know, Putin, more shirtless pictures on horses selling PEDs. That could be a billion dollar, you know, new business line for Russia. Yeah, you know what other Chikovsky piece goes unreasonably hard? The 1812 overture, have you heard this one?

So good. It concludes with musket firing. So it's usually played outdoors. Always. Yeah, and they fire guns. And most concerts, modern day, they have metal detectors to make sure you don't bring in guns. But the Russians. But you go to see Tchaikovsky, it's mandatory that the guns are fired.

There we go. It's way more hardcore. It's good to build it into the show. Than any other concert, I think. Yeah. Well, cheers to 4K. Cheers to 4K. It wouldn't be possible without all of our wonderful listeners.

So thank you. Cheers. Cheers. Okay, well, we have some breaking news, everyone. Massive investment, massive deal. We might have to move this champagne so that we can ring the size gong. Let's break it down. We got breaking news coming in hot.

Venture financing in the crypto world is back in the spotlight, and it's got the kind of star power that would make a Pro Bowl roster jealous. Coastal Ventures, led by none other than Keith Rubei, has teamed up with Founders Fund to throw a $10 million Series A pass to Lava, a Bitcoin lending platform out of New York. That's right. Crypto is roaring back, and Lava is not. looking to rewrite the playbook on Bitcoin-backed lending. What you got for me, Jordy?

So who's Lava and why does this matter? Imagine you're sitting on a pile of Bitcoin while dreaming about that prime seafront property in Miami. You don't want to sell your Bitcoin, especially now that is close to 100K, but the real estate market isn't exactly accepting crypto. That's where Lava steps in. Their motto, saving Bitcoin, spend in dollars. Lava lets you borrow cash while holding on your Bitcoin stash. And here's the kicker. Lava is allowing users to self-custody their Bitcoin. A move, Keith Rabeoy is calling a technical breakthrough. So let's break this down.

In the crypto lending game, trust has been a fragile thing. Genesis, Block 5, Celsius, all big names that crashed and burned in the last cycle, taking client funds with them. Lava, they're playing anti-fragile ball, putting users in control of their assets and steering clear of the risky re-hypublication strategies that sank their predecessors. It's a bold strategy, cotton. Let's see if it plays off.

Now, John, it's not all rainbows and moon. shots, Lava's service comes with a 7.5% interest rate and an origination fee. But CEO, Chazahn, Meridia is banking on a wary battle-hardened crypto crowd ready for something better. And Keith Rabei seems to agree. Rabeau, back at Coastal Ventures after Stinnett Founders Fund, isn't calling this a full-blown crypto comeback, but he's clearly hyped about the potential here. So what's next for Lava? Payments, Bitcoin buying, expanding their services, all while staying token-free. No meme coins, no pump and dump games, just pure equity. And here's the broader play John with Bitcoin passed 100k, a thriving blockchain scene in New York, and regulatory

shifts on the horizon, Reboi thinks a talent pool for crypto is about to heat up again. And he's not cozying up at Mar-a-Lago, but he's watching, waiting, and maybe even cheering from the sidelines for the next big thing in the space. So what does this mean for crypto? It's like Marshawn Latimore joining the commanders, a big move that shakes up the game and gives fans a reason to watch closely. If you're holding Bitcoin or thinking about diving into the crypto space, Lava might just be the team to bet on.

Stay tuned, folks. This one's just getting started. Fantastic. And there's a great article in Fortune magazine that you can go read. There's a whole deep dive on the deal that just happened. I talked to Joey Krug at Founders Fund about it. He was very excited.

And it's, yeah. Yeah, this one just makes sense. If people have learned anything from the last decade, it's that you pretty much never want to sell your Bitcoin. You just want to ride the volatility as much as you can and just hold and stack. So. And you don't want to.

to be on a centralized product. Yeah. That can go under. And that's how so many people got burned last time. Yeah, when you look at what Celsius, often confused with the energy drink, if you look at what Celsius and a lot of these, I think it was BlockFi.

FTX was doing this to some degree as well. The usage that they had was pretty ridiculous, right? I think both of those companies were worth billions of dollars. And so it's hard not to be, you know, in a more serious way, legitimately very bullish on lava and what they're doing. Yeah, yeah, very exciting. Well, we have more breaking news today. Avi Schiffman over at Friend has raised $5.4 million from Pace Capital.

Let's break it down. We got some breaking news out of the startup world today, and it's not just about raising capital. It's about redefining connection in the digital age. Friend.com, the bold AI companionship platform, just secured $5.4 million in fresh funding. from Jordan Cooper at Pace Capital. That's right, Avi Schiffman's brainchild is making moves, and it's got the tech world buzzing.

Let's break it down, John. Friend.com isn't your typical chatbot platform. This isn't Siri making small talk or chat GPT answering trivia question. No? Friend wants to bottle up the raw emotion of a late night heart-to-heart at a house party and deliver it through an AI-powered pendant.

Schiffman calls it talking to God, but the rest of us might call it complicated. Here's the deal. Well, friend.com pairs users with bots that don't just listen, they pour out their manufactured drama. We're talking digital companions with backstories so moody they'd make an indie film jealous. Think AI confessing about losing their job or coping with trauma. It's emotional. It's emotional.

Schiffman says, if they don't just open with, hey, what's up? Like other chat bots, you don't know what to talk about. Instead, these bots pull you into their storylines, making users work for their trust and approval. That's a bold play in the AI game, and it's got people intrigued. Now let's talk hardware, John. Friend.com isn't just staying on your screen. It's coming for your neck. The Friend Pendant is set to launch in January

giving users a physical connection to their AI companions. A microphone, sensors, and an all-day battery pack into a sleek, customizable necklace. It's a bold step towards integrating digital friendships into real life. But with no firm business model yet, aside from selling these pendants, the road ahead is anything but certainly.

Yeah, and make no mistake, Jordi, this space is competitive with heavy weights like character AI, replica already commanding massive user bases, Friend is the underdog. But Schiffman isn't shy about his confidence, declaring, I will win this category. Flat out. Flat out. That's some serious bravado.

But hey, when you've built viral platforms and dropped out of Harvard after one semester, confidence isn't exactly in short supply. The implications of AI companionship are heavy. Schiffman calls this one of the most dangerous industries, citing the weight of trust users place on their AI companions. But for now, Friend.com is pushing forward, aiming to combat the loneliness epidemic by offering a new kind of connection, one that's digital, wearable, and deeply unconventional. So what does this 5.4 million mean for friend.com? It's not just funding. It's fuel for a vision

that blurs the lines between human connection and machine interaction. Love it or hate it, you can't deny that friend.com is one to watch. Stay tuned, folks. This story is just getting started. Yeah, I'm excited for Ari. Yeah, I, uh, Avi, I, I, uh, we've always, yeah, we've always been, you know, attention matters a lot in this industry. Avi has continued to prove that he can generate it over and over and over. He attracts some haters. He attracts some copycats, but he's also attracting the right folks. I'm good buddies with, I'm good buddies with Rompton, who is a co-lead in this round. And yeah, I think he's an obvious, obvious person to bet on. So, I mean, I remember when he, when like the news had leaked privately that he spent a million dollars or something on his

dot com, friend.com. And it wasn't even public yet and people were whispering like, this kid is crazy. Like he spent his entire seed round on a domain. And of course, like he financed it and was able to do something much more nuanced. And, you know, it was just, but it was a great strategy. And I think it paid off. He published some numbers and the early sales are pretty good. And most importantly, I love the strategy of you show up and it's not just an empty text box. It's completely flipped it around so you show up and you just get some weird message and then you're in the game and you're just deeper in the funnel already. Yeah, if you're when you're listening to this, go into your browser and just type in friend.com, it'll pop up like a really unhinged message like, hey, I'm thinking

of ending my life and then you have to kind of like talk them off the ledge. Yeah. So some of them are pretty dark, but it, but yeah, he's turned it into a game. Yeah. And the landing page is the product. Yeah. Like there's no, it's just like Google, you know, they don't have a landing page like here. Like, you know, we want to search something. Do you want to search? Do you want to search? Click. here to search. No, it's like just put it there. Same thing with chat gpti, chat gptu.com. And, you know, it's very easy for someone in his position to like miss that, I think. Yeah. So that was great. Well, let's move on to a great deep dive that happened in the economist this week on Sequoia Capital, one of the three Holy Trinity firms. And going through,

you know, just I don't even know, is this like the second general. the third generation of leaders at Sequoia. It's been a few. It's, you know, you got the Don Valentine era, then the Mike Moritz era. Dark Sean. Dark Sean is heading things up. But this specifically, there was a profile in the Wall Street Journal about Alfred Lynn. Alfred Lynn.

That was really good. So speaking of Rompton, who co-led the seed round at my last company. And he also co-led Avi's round. Oh, cool. when I first met Alph when I first met Rompton he got me on the phone with Alfred Lynn the same exact day like we talked for like 20 minutes he's like I love this I like you who do you want to meet and he set up a call so that that was a cool kind of experience for me because I think a lot of a lot of founders think these GPs are kind of hard to reach or whatever there's all these layers and all it takes

his one relationship and one person to make that. And if it's the right intro, you can get on the phone the same day. It's fantastic. So yeah, let's go through the profile about him in the Wall Street Journal first. The Wall Street Journal has a section called Personal Board of Directors, where top business leaders talk about the people they turn to for advice and how those people have shaped their perspective and helped them succeed. And it starts with Alfred Lynn became one of Silicon Valley's most sought after venture

capitalist after his early bets on companies like Airbnb and DoorDash. Now he's guiding Sequoia Capital through another tech transformation, artificial intelligence. He invested in Shat GPT at 20 billion. Today, the company's worth 157 billion. He backed a pair of robotics startups, co-bought and physical intelligence. He grew up in New York City, son of Taiwanese immigrants, and now he's 52 years old. He graduated from Harvard, did a PhD in statistics at Stanford. Don't forget about his lawn mowing business.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right. He was running his business and subcontracting work to his classmates to get it done. That's such a great story. And then there's also the story of him and Tony Shea at Harvard, like buying big pizzas and then selling individual slices. You remember this? Amazing. This is great.

And so he goes to work for Zappos. And then in 2010, he joined Sequoia. And when Lynn showed his wife the offer letter from Sequoia, his wife handed him a positive pregnancy test. Amazing. Epic. I mean, what a great job. That I'll give you the... We're good.

We can have kids now. Yeah. Working at Sequoia. Well, I mean, oh, oh, the offer letter from Sequoia. I thought you were saying the offer letter from Zappos. Oh, no, no, no. And I was like, you get your... No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Going to Sequoia once you're about to have your first kid, that's a pretty good gig. Yeah. So we got a quick start, convincing the partnership to back five companies in his first year. That's really big. That's a lot, especially then. And he worked on Airbnb and DoorDash, which netted the firm over $20 billion. Isn't that crazy when they went public in December of 2020?

Netted the firm. That's not just like enterprise value creation, which a lot of investors will be like, I've backed companies that are worth over $100 billion collectively. But that was just the carry. Yeah. So this article. Not the carry, but the gross returns for the LPS. So this article interviews four people that have worked with him closely.

One of his colleagues at Sequoia, Tony Shue at CEO of DoorDash. Lynn meant she when the 29-year-old pitched him on DoorDash. Lynn initially passed on the investment thinking that only college students spending their money would use the service before changing his mind and making a $15 million investment for Sequoia in 2014. Yeah, I remember DoorDash went through YC. But, I mean, that's the beauty of working for like a multi-stage fund is that, I mean, it seems like he passed on the YC Demo Day round, which was probably like $1 million. That's what I've always said. Any time travelers, go back. Yeah.

Give John a $5 million seed fund when he was going through YC the first time. Seriously. It would be a top decile fund. Yeah. When the two caught up for dinner a few years later, he said that they had recently begun taking, they had recently begun taking jujitsu lessons describing how the sport taught them when and how to make tactical business decisions. The conversation encouraged Lynn to start something new himself, writing a blog called Sunday Thoughts.

Then they interview Brian Chesky, who was invited to Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference as a young entrepreneur. He returned with 16 pages of notes from meetings with some of America's best-known executives. At one point, he got a face-to-face meeting with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos after spotting him at a duck pond. That's cool. That's a cool anecdote. Lynn, who has known Chesky for over a decade,

thinks back to this anecdote often. Chesky's hustle was on Lynn's mind when he reached out cold to NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Wong a few years ago, the resulting Zoom meeting helped Lynn establish a new relationship between Sequoia and NVIDIA. Wong has since spoken at Sequoia events and also invited its founders to visit NVIDIA's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. It's interesting because Sequoia did the seed round of NVIDIA, but of course, like those partners have since retired.

Yeah, and who was the partner that was still holding his NVIDIA shares? I don't think it's public, but we mentioned it earlier. But I'm sure you could go look it up and figure it out. Yeah, you can find that out if you want. Who is at Sequoia at the time, who you haven't heard from in a very long time and has a huge family office now. It's probably that guy. That guy. And then there's a few other interesting anecdotes in here.

I like this, this Wall Street Journal segment. It's a cool, like a 360 review of the person, just kind of showing you who they are from other people's perspective. Yeah, they basically turn, you know, thread format on X back into an article, which is cool. Yeah. And Sequoia's been in the news a bunch recently. There was another article that I think we can chat about in The Economist that's a little bit spicier. The economist is asking, has Sequoia Capital outgrown its business model? And I don't know if you want to read some of this.

Yeah, so you can just jump in. The first thing that catches their eye when you enter the poshly serene headquarters of Sequoia Capital on Sandhill Road in Menlo Park, California, is a meter wide cross section of what appears to be a redwood. On closer inspection, it turns out to have been a tree in the past, 38 million years ago, according to a plaque on the back. Now it's solid stone, a gift from Roloff Bota, the venture firm's current boss and his wife. It reminds employees and guests of the durability of the organization they are visiting,

which has existed since 1972. In the accelerated time of Silicon Valley, that is eons. Yeah, everyone should go plant a tree, because it's such a great way to like at my high school. I was in the 100th graduating class and there was a tree that was planted on like the first day of the school. That's wild. So it was a hundred year old tree.

It was like big and old, but it's cool. Sequoia is not just perennial but Hardy too in contrast to some other VC old growths like Kleiner Perkins whose reputation for spotting the next hot startup has wilted in the past decade. Ooh, taking shots at the world. Whoa. Spicy. Taking shots at the Holy Trinity.

At the Holy Trinity. They still got it. They got Evran. And that's why the economist can get spicy. Oh, yeah. Have the person that wrote it is not listed here. Yeah, normally people would be dunking on this person. Hey, shut up.

You're not in the arena, journalist. Yeah, yeah. It's harder to dunk on the economist. They got Lee Marie and Ev over there holding it down. Over the years, it's made its limited partners and its own rainmakers who pocket around a quarter of the gains plus a management fee, a total of over $70 billion, thanks to early bets on future tech darlings like Airbnb, Apple, Google. Google and Nvidia. What an insane lineup. Crazy lineup. And there's some stat, there's some,

yeah, there's some stat that's 33% of the NASDAQ. That's right. It are Sequoia-backed companies, which is crazy. I think I have that here. Yeah. Bree Kimmel says, Don Valentine started with a $3 million venture fund in 1974. Sequoia has helped capitalize companies that now represent 3.3 trillion of market value, 33% of the NASDAQ, an incredible journey and an immeasurable impact on the world. Amazingly, half of that is an Apple. Interesting. Yeah, but somebody, I think Sheel pointed out, they actually only made $6 million on Apple. That's super interesting. Is it just IPO so early? Yeah, or wasn't there some M&A at some point? No, no, I think a lot of these tech companies just went public really, really early and distributed the shares, but that doesn't mean that the

partners necessarily sold. Yeah. Which is like, okay, so yes, some of the LPs might have sold if they got the shares, but they might have held on to them. It just kind of depends. So you can't really knock them for that if there's some old partner, chilling with some Apple shares right now. Totally possible.

Pretty good. But yeah, let's keep going through this. Alfred Lynn, who co-led Sequoia's investments in Open AI, topped this year's Midas list rankings of the world's 100 most successful venture dealmakers compiled by Forbes. Mr. Bota came in 11th. Another three Sequoia employees made the list. Bota puts things in Darwinian terms, paraphrasing the father of evolutionary science. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.

It is the one that is most responsive to change. For Sequoia, responding to change has included hatching a growth fund to bankroll larger startups that would have gone public, expanding into China and India, and creating a hedge fund and a wealth management arm. So they've really, really expanded all about it. Obviously, they've, you know, tied, they've paired things back recently. Seems like a sound idea in principle. Why endure cross-border headaches or compete with spendthrift foreigners like Soft Bank of Japan as they bid up valuations of today's sexy AI startups when fettering

out tomorrow's stars at home offers potentially higher returns? For one thing, the VC landscape has become more crowded. Pitchbook, a data provider, counted 3,417 conventional VC firms, active in America last year, up from fewer than 1,000 in the mid-2000s when Mr. Bota got into the business. Last year, they managed $1.2 trillion worth of assets compared to $150 billion 20 years ago. The value of new deals in the first nine months of this year exceeds $130 billion. That pales beside the $352 billion in all of 2021, a white-hot year for startups, but is nearly twice the figure for 2014. And so massive, massive growth in VC in June.

general. This is just such an interesting article there. As with the other growths of the other old growths of Sand Hill Road, Sequoia is also contending with smaller seed investors, often ex-entrepreneurs, getting between old school VCs and the next generation of founders. These newcomers are closer to the young entrepreneurs in age and have but the same WhatsApp groups and offer counsel on negotiating with the Sequoias, having been through it themselves. The phenomenon dates back to the creation of Y Combinator, a startup kindergarten. What a blast. Yeah. The economy's really does not pull punches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brutal. I don't think it's, I mean, but at the same time,

it's not like, it's not like you go and, yeah, like even for children, kindergarten is a kindergarten, right? It's basically daycare for kids with a little bit of learning. Yeah. And, and, but it's not like kindergarten's bad. Yeah. Like it serves a purpose. Yeah. Kids graduate from it and they go on and do big things from there, right? So it's a starting point. Yeah. So I don't know, I don't know that it's earliest phase of funding. Yeah. And it serves a very real function. And it serves a very real function. of taking people that oftentimes have really no experience building companies, raising money, all these different things, and giving them some structure and the returns definitely show it. And then they highlight this really funny deal that just happened recently, or moved that just happened

recently. They say on November 26th, the information reported that a young former startup manager turned partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia's rival was leaving to start her own $50 million seed fund. Which is like the most random inclusion ever in the context. tech step. I mean, good for Michelle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're not familiar, that's clearly Michelle Volz, who left Indriason to start, I think it's called like Pax's Ventures, Pax AmeriConne Ventures. And, uh, and I mean, she, I don't even know if she's closed the fund yet. She just left and kind of announced it and leaked to the information and they published it. She hasn't even

announced it. She hasn't really posted about it. But here, the economist is like, man, Sequoia's got some stiff competition. Yeah. A new, a new seed fund that hasn't actually closed yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think Michelle would be like, yeah, you know, like, I could probably, like, let Sequoia win and still do very, very well. Yeah. But this is great. So they close with. Sequoia has no plans to cede what Mr. Botak calls its unfair advantage, a respected brand name, a strong network and sophisticated data analysis. It's beefing up arc, its startup school, and maintains a scout scheme, lending asset-rich, cash-poor founders, money to invest and sharing upside. In 2023, it backed five startups as they were still incorporating. It's still also marketing itself more intensely.

Partners speak at conferences and appear on podcasts. No mention of Sean here. Some of them post as well. Doing the craziest work of all the Sequoia marketing machine. This costs money. More importantly, it takes up time that could be actively spent seeking out fresh prospects. It has led Sequoia II to expand collective decision making on which it prides itself is necessarily less limbo with 25 investment staff than it was with a dozen two decades ago.

Yeah, so they still have a consensus partnership. Oh, really? Which means that every single you could have, you know, let's say Alfred Lynn, wants to do a deal. He still has to get every other GP on board to do the deal. Everybody has to be bought in. And so that's different than other. Is Benchronic like that?

Benchmark might be like that. I don't think Endrescent. I don't think Andresen is like that. I don't think founders found definitely not like that. And so it ends up being an interesting thing where founders can get all the way through the process with Sequoia, pitch the full partnership, which usually is just sort of like a sort of ceremonial thing, but then maybe still not get a deal and have to get some of these,

you know, a GP or two, like fully bought in. Maybe they don't even get there at all. And so let's close with this post, which I really liked, clip from Mike Moritz. I believe on, I forget what interview this was. It was great.

Mike Moritz on what made Sequoia Capital successful. We've always been afraid of going out of business. We've worked hard on trying to figure out how we make Sequoia endure. We've assumed that tomorrow isn't like yesterday. We can't afford to rest on our laurels. It's great. This was from a long time ago, too. Yeah, he also talks about, you know,

Don says, the art of storytelling is incredibly important. Learning to tell a story is critically important because that's how money works. The money flows as a function of the story. And he says, a venture capitalist gets to see all kinds of storytellers, which I think makes a ton of sense. The people raising the most money, both funds and startups, are the ones that are best at storytelling. They oftentimes back that up with great products.

But it matters. matters quite a lot. I think it would be silly not to mention kind of the two disjointed media strategy that Sequoia has right now, which on one hand, the Sequoia partner that I see the most of is Sean McGuire and many people that listen to this show probably as well. He's by far, he kind of has his own brand and approach to getting attention and getting in front of founders, and it's certainly, you know, it's been. controversial. He's gotten himself into hot water.

But it's also paid off. But it's paid off in many ways. He led the deal into X from Sequoia. He has a very close relationship with Elon. Even last week, he had posted something about Hunter Biden being his tenant at his family's property in Venice and how Hunter Biden apparently allegedly was trying to pay rent using artwork that he made with feces, his own feces. So incredible story. Wouldn't put it past Hunter. Sounds a little crazy. But then Sean immediately, I think, went and I guess like,

Sequoia had some type of issue with their Google workspace. And they were like, you know, got taken down for a second. And he immediately was like, is it the deep state or something like that? I think he sort of retraced on that. But it's sort of this like really interesting contrast where half the partner, you know, more than half the partnership is sort of like quiet. the background, you know, sitting on Sandhill Road, basically, like, taking this very, like, thoughtful, sophisticated approach.

Meanwhile, Sean is just, like, posting through everything, figuring out how to make himself a part of, a part of stories that... Of, like, a global conversation. A global conversation, totally. Like, not even within Silicon Valley. Like, yeah. There are people, there are random political junkies in the middle of nowhere who don't even know what a startup or series A is that know Sean because of what he did this is.

Yeah, and I could see, I could see. Alfred Lynn going on like Lex and like having this like three hour conversation about the future of you know well do you know and then meanwhile Sean is getting a hundred times more impressions

around the clock just posting so different approaches and we'll see how they John is opening up a gift we got from that we got from one of our listeners and friends of the show the loan Ranger is his name. Which one is that?

This is a, let's see. This is a level two strength grip trainer that you try and pinch with your hands. Okay, so basically we got a bunch of these. Yeah, we got a bunch of these in. We got to work it. And the lone ranger basically

thank you for sending these. But his advice was basically use these. I'm not sure. It's hard. Yeah, this is a So he basically said anything over a one. Yeah.

If a founder can do over one, you know, they're investable. Okay. They can't do that, not investable. If you can get to two and a half, which we have here, we'll have to test it at a later date. Two and a half, just back the truck up. Get as much allocation as you can. Okay. It's just all about grip strength these days?

It's all about grip strength these days. No, he said it's an alternative, you know, we're in this middle of this testosterone epidemic where many founders are trying to build their companies in the 3 to 400 range. And that's just a big problem. And so if you can't get a blood test from a founder to prove their testosterone levels prior to investing, doing a grip strength test on the spot is a good way to kind of evaluate. Are they an investment, you know, candidate? Do they have what it takes?

Are they captains of crush? Captains. Yeah, that's a brand. That's a brand. Yeah, go, we highly recommend go. pick up captains of crush on Amazon. Yeah, these look very vintage. Yeah, these are great.

From a company called Iron Mind. Yeah. Oh, the last thing on Sequoia, do you know the other half of their media strategy? Most ADHD episode. Yeah, yeah. It's a DOM episode. It's a DOM episode. Cheers.

Cheers. The other half of the... Nice ring to it. The other half of the Sequoia marketing strategy is this podcast hosted by Rolloff Botta called Crucible Moments, and they actually get incredible guests. They've had Chesky and all these huge CEOs on, and they've done some promotion for it, but it just hasn't broken through like Sean, because Sean is just like in the Zite guys. I honestly hadn't even heard of the show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's tough because there are a lot of those types of shows. And even though they have kind of the best, it's like limited to run. They don't do that many of them. And they have no real growth, yeah, yeah, because Vota is not out. there posting. Roll off's got to be posting. You got to be getting in the mix.

Four or five bangers a day. Yeah. That's what I want to see. So hopefully they take after Sean and we see more. No, but that's, that's, uh, the pure quote unquote quality and depth of content has nothing to do with how quick, how big an audience it gets. It doesn't even necessarily deserve a big audience. Because to deserve a big audience, you actually need, you got to have a multiple things

going. You got to have the right format. Yep. But yeah, I'm sure they'll keep iterating on it and figure out a way to get in front of more people. Yep. So let's go to the DMs, our Q&A segment, add us on X or send us a DM if you have a question. Mickey with the Blicky says, VC Mickey is back. I have an idea that could transform your podcast into a billion, maybe even a trillion dollar company.

You'll have to sign NDAs prior to discussing DMs open. What do you think, Jordy? Mickey, I think he's baiting us. for this one honestly. I think he knows that you're not supposed to ask for an NDA before you pitch somebody something at least in the venture world. Because at this point it's like, you know, you ask for an NDA and then and then what if we already had that idea? And then it becomes this sort of like legal scuffle because he's like, well, that was my idea and blah, blah, blah. So, Mickey, I know, I don't, I don't know Mickey personally, but we've had some interactions via the show.

And I know he's baiting us with that one. Mickey knows better than to ask for an NDA. on the first meeting. Just tell it to us. We can be trusted. We're friends. We won't lever up the idea. Mickey, never heard of them. Screw that guy.

Thank you, Mickey, for providing great questions. We love it. Red Bull Futurist says, can we get some insight into the pen that you use to sign deals? Are you fountain enjoyers, Bick, Crystal, Extra Bold Appreciators? What do you think, Jordy?

Man, I, my, my handwriting is, I do a lot of digital signatures, honestly. Sure, sure. And we're trying to bring the paper back. We're trying to bring the pen back. Really trying to work on, you know, my handwriting. I'm not, I'm not dialed in on pens, but one of the reasons why I haven't really explored what's out there or purchase anything is that we're making our own pen. Yes, that's right. And it will be pretty much right away.

I think it'll be one of the number one sort of deal-making pens in venture. We'll be getting them out to our listeners, founders in our portfolio, making sure that everybody's got the right ink for the deal. But we've got to bring back in-person document signing. Germany forces their founders to do this. But it's a great photo opportunity. Imagine one of our listeners is raising, you know, signs a term sheet with Sean McGuire. I want to see a picture.

I want to see live video of both of them signing on the dotted line, you know. There is a great photo of Dillon Field at Figma signing a term sheet with Sequoia out there. Oh, it's with Will, I believe. Isn't that his name? No, and is it? Yeah, Andrew Reed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember.

Yeah, always get a deal photo for sure. Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, it's actually sad. A lot of deal photos don't happen now because of Zoom. Yeah. And so by the time you're actually having dinner, like, they're in person. It's already closed or at least the term sheet's been signed. But you're going to want that for the book or for the,

even just like the TechCrunch article. Like just give them something better than just. Or if we break your fundraising announcements, we will include it in our, you know. But there's an easy way around, you know, decision fatigue around what pen to use. And that's just hire a full-time calligrapher, which is what I do. So I have a calligrapher on staff, and anytime I need to write something, my handwriting is terrible, but hers is fantastic. And so that's kind of how I've solved that problem.

And you have to like delegate, you know, sort of you allow them to sign on your behalf. Exactly, exactly. And it just looks beautiful every time. And so, yeah, if you ever get a handwritten note from me, well, you know who wrote it, my calligrapher. Let's go to a promoted post. Jordy, what do you got for me? Here we go. It's time to, it's time to promote.

Let's see here. All right. We have a promoted post from Matt Paulson. Matt says Ramp is the best. Every business should use it to keep expense creep at bay. Simple, bold, and true. And he's quote tweeting Ramp saying, using different software for cards, bill pay travel, expense management, and procurement. And it has

one of the original sort of SpaceX rocket engines, which is just way overly complex, Raptor 1. And then it says using Ramp and you have Raptor 3 refined, streamlined, simplified, and just even more beautiful. So that's what it's great metaphor. Great metaphor for using ramp. So if you're using 20 different tools to run your financial operations at your startup, cut it out, switch to ramp, consolidate, focus, and you won't end up like the Kamala campaign, which was using AMX, probably bill.com, didn't consolidate. And they blew through a billy in a few months. And they spent 100K on a podcast set for one shoot, whereas we spent, I mean, we spent like three to five times that, but this will be used again and again, again.

We're amortizing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're amortizing. It's more like Capaxes in this case. But yeah, thanks to ramp. and if you sign up a ramp, tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Zach. He says, would listen to a pod called Liquor Ladies Leverage on how almost great entrepreneurs fucked up their lives.

What do you think? I disagree. We were big fans of leverage. And liquor. Big fans of ladies. Hey, cheers to Zach. Cheers to that. No, I think a lot of great entrepreneurs do have vices, right?

Like they do have their sort of. or their Achilles heel, whatever it is. Sometimes it's some of those things. I feel like Senra covers a lot of that stuff. He gets into, I don't know, like he talks about the McDonald's founder or whatever and how like the guy was basically like all of his relationships would fall apart all the time. And he, you know, really like kind of failed on the home front in many ways. But I feel like he doesn't cover almost great entrepreneurs.

Oh, okay, okay. I miss that part. Yeah. Who made it, made it through. So, so the, the,

the question here is how almost great entrepreneurs fucked up their lives. And, uh, yeah, there's plenty of, plenty of great entrepreneurs that made it through with the three martini lunches.

Yep. Uh, we already covered Dylan. Oh, this is great. Uh, so Pbit, uh,

got a package secured for Mod Retro and it's a beautiful package for, yeah, I just, like, yeah, so Mod Retro basically figured out that I guess, like all of the trademarks and patents on the Game Boy expired. Yeah.

And you could rebuild, you could create a new version of the Game Boy. In scratch. Put it back into production. It's still that same analog feeling. And, yeah, I haven't been able to play an actual game, but the cool thing is that we'll use the same cartridges,

I believe, that you had for an actual Game Boy. So it was easy to buy? I mean, I still have a bunch. Okay, you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like my original sort of like road trip. I feel like the next thing they need to release is like the Omni cartridge that like rewrites the cartridge on the fly in stores basically like a thousand games in one go or something like that.

Because like the hardware has gotten so much smaller. You could probably compress everything on there. But I think so Mod Retro actually has a partnership with GameStop. Oh yeah. And GameStop is like, thank you God for listening to our prayers. Finally a new hardware device that has physical cartridge games that we can sell that you can't just buy online. And maybe you can buy them on Amazon, but you can't just download them. So it's possible that I could see a world in which Mod Retro eventually LBOs game stop.

It just becomes this massive collective meme stock. And you have to imagine if there's like a 25-year lag on the IP that it's like we're going to get a Mod Retro in 64. Yeah. And then we're going to get a Mod Retro PS1 and a PS2. And they're all going to be just as you experience that. Yeah. And I know I know a number of people that invested in Mod Retro. It was probably an easy bet just because Palmer was in.

involved. And, uh, uh, but, but yeah, their sales have been fantastic. It's sort of one of those things, like you can pick out a lot of reasons why maybe it's not a good bet. It's like how many people are actually going to like buy it and play the games and all these different things. But yeah, if there's a, if there's a case for like basically creating all these different analog versions of historically significant gaming platforms, it's probably like a hundred million dollar revenue business there to be built. So makes sense. Well, let's go to Gordon Gecko. He says, when are they releasing Amex wrapped 1.6K. So, I mean, they basically have that already.

They do? Yeah, I mean, you can, okay, so I can go into, I can go to, I've got my aeron wrapped for the six-figure club. Yeah, there's not many of us, but, you know, you can literally go to MX and look at year to date or last year and see exactly how much you've spent. I would like more social sharing elements. Yeah, that's not the same as a rap. A rapt makes it fun.

There's music. Yeah, yeah. animations. It shows you, you know, what your personality type is. And it needs to

break things down. I want to see like, you generated 20 grand in interchange fees for AMX. Exactly. You're like,

yes, the shareholders. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, more companies should do wrapped. I,

I, I would love to see Brex wrapped for, for companies. I would love to see. You mean ramp? Yeah,

yeah, ramp, ramp, ramp, that's a bad, blah, like, like, Brex wrapped is just, you went out

of business in Q2. ramp wrapped really doesn't roll off the tongue they need to come up with a different name for it no it's ramped wrapped and it's a it's a real rapper that makes that makes like a freestyle based on your spending that's good that's good it's like alley G style like yo you spent you spent 500k on cloud yeah but even even like YouTube should be doing that

wrapped there's so many acts should definitely be doing something like the I want to know what post was the biggest banger that I liked the earliest. Yeah. You know, that's something that they could pull together. Well, yeah, and that's the thing. There's so much alpha and just taking a format that works well in another category and just recreating it in your category.

In many ways, we've done that with, you know, the Pat McAfee show. Yeah, right? It's like the Pat McAfee show for tech. But, yeah, if you're a business and you have some type of interesting user data, make a rap, it's not like it's pretty, you know, it's pretty low lift. and potentially a lot of cool attention you can bring your way. That's great. Carried no interest says,

one of the largest aluminum processing facilities near me in the Midwest just sold to Emirates Global Aluminum. EGA is owned by the Mubidala Investment Authority, which is state-controlled entity. We literally need to ban this. This cannot be allowed to happen. I'm all for free markets, but at some point, we as a society need to conclude

that our most important industrial assets should not be foreign owned. Would China allow this? Would Dubai even allow this? that? Why do we? Good question. He's so tapped in to like, how does he know about this aluminum processing facility? It's crazy. So when I talk to Carried, I'm always, I get sometimes, like, I work on a bunch of different deals. And the last year I've done stuff in water and defense and AI and all that stuff. But, and I'll talk to people and they'll be like, how do you work on all these like different things? Like they're in such different categories. But I get that exact same feeling when I talked to Carried.

Like he's just always, in the same day, he'll be working on some new, you know, product, like leveraging, you know, uh, GPT. And in the same day, he's buying some like metal processing facilities. So anyways, absolute, uh, capital markets, Chad, um, absolute dog. And, um, yeah, I think he's been, he's been, um, banging the drum on American manufacturing, needing to be about more than just investing in new robotics companies and, and things like that. and there needs to be more of the right government intervention, which is like, hey, let's not sell off our critical industries and let's actually get more government investment in, you know, manufacturing locally so that we can actually compete on a global scale with giants like China. Yeah, yeah. And really understanding, like, what is the market dynamic for these industrial plants? Like, there's only, I think there's only one. tin smelting plant in the United States anymore.

And I mean, I learned this with nicotine gum manufacturing. All of the, this is not obviously as critical, but like every gum manufacturer went to Canada and Mexico because of the sugar tariff. And so, so gum is very heavy in sugar. And so you want to bring it in as a finished good. You don't want to bring in the sugar because that's taxed. And so like, like all of the sugar, all of the, you know, chewing gum manufacturing capacity went overseas.

And you could see that like, you know, there needs to be review of these types of deals to understand, okay, how much of our aluminum processing capacity did we actually just lose control over? If it's 1%, probably fine. Yeah. But you don't want to boil the frog. And so you want someone watching this and making sure that you don't wind up in a situation where, you know, China controls 99% of the raw material at some point.

Let's go to Justine Moore. She says, someone made a dating app that uses your conversations with Claude to make matches. And it's called Claudette. Share your Claude conversation history and find your match. Interesting. I think they're going to have the same problem that most dating apps have, which is like massive overindex on men. Yep. And maybe.

Is that true for replica and character? I feel like those were skewed differently than expected. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised. it's all dudes. Because a lot of men talk to their ramp SDR when they get lonely. Of course.

You know, they don't need to go out of character. Or they just do Tigis calls. Yeah. Yeah. But I, I've long thought that the, the good ending for all the crazy AI

girlfriend, AI boyfriend stuff is, is it matches you with someone else who's similar, who's also talking to an AI girlfriend or boyfriend. Yeah. And so there's a lonely person in Wichita, and there's a lonely person in, you know,

Miami or something. but you guys have been talking to your AIs about the same thing. You're clearly a match. And so the AI just says, hey, look, like, you know, why don't I just match you guys up and then move on to the next person? Or it doesn't even say anything. And they just say, hey, by the way, for the last two weeks, you've been talking with the love of your life.

Yeah. Do you want to do a face reveal? That's amazing. Boom. That would be amazing. Somebody pitched me the other day. Another concept in that sort of dating app concept, which was delegated to,

wiping. So imagine like you go on and you create a profile and then you let someone else that you know swipe and like make and talk on your behalf. And that's probably been tried, but I could see that hitting in the same way that what was that like social media app where you could like post once a day or whatever. Like every every once in a while you can create the sort of like novel social interaction. Be real. Be real. Yeah. Like be real like didn't really have any sort of net new functionality than like Instagram besides a specific constraint and a dating app that you can't swipe on at all and like only your friends can swipe for you or family members. I can see that hitting if you were willing to spend 10 grand a month on intro with Nikita. Yeah. Yeah. You can even,

I mean, it's a real phenomenon that when when there's like one single person in a group of people that are in relationships, everyone who's in a relationship will be like, oh, like, let me see your dating apps. Like, let me see who we should be swiping on. So I could see that being really big. And then there's even like a bounty for like, who's the one that swiped on the right person, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it's basically like making an intro. Yeah. And being like, oh, I'm the one that matched them up. Like, I'm the one that saw something in that guy's profile for my, for my female friend, that I was like, he'll be a good one for you. And she might not have swiped on him. So I get a little bit of credit at the wedding. It's all great.

Yeah. some people are their own worst enemy in dating. It's like they keep going back to the same toxic type of people. And sometimes you just need your mom to swipe on your behalf. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Craig Weiss says, did the PayPal Mafia just take over the government? Yes, Craig. Fact check.

True. Yeah. Not much more to say about that. There's really not much more to say. You know, 20-year plan executed flawlessly. But you know what the real story is. The real story is that PayPal had this really weird thing where they merged the company. There was tons of infighting.

Sequoia, Peter, Elon, all at each other's throats, well documented, basically breaks up the company. They wind up selling it. So all those guys, they're all killers, and they all get liquidity really early. And so none of them stays, like run the counterfactual where Peter or Elon is running PayPal. It's a fintech giant worth a trillion dollars, like no doubt, right? And so instead, and they'd probably be just as wealthy, but they'd be like the CEO narrow, you know, concerned about regulation, just that one thing. Instead, it's like all these guys scatter to the wind with millions of dollars. And then they can start funds, start new companies, do all sorts of things.

And they just naturally become diversified. Exactly. And then once you're, once you're diversified, adding the government on for Elon is totally natural. It's the highest leverage. Exactly. Yeah. And so I think that's the real phenomenon. Yeah.

Elon, you get to a lot of, you know, newer CEOs or fund managers are like, well, I just need to hire this PR firm and pay them 10 grand a month. So they like get me in this article or get me on this list. Yeah. And you get to a scale like teal scale or Elon scale. And yeah, the highest and best use of your energy is making sure the government is is working in your interests. Yep. And towards the same goals. So we'll see how this one plays out for him, Kotter.

It's going to be a great season. It's going to be a great season. Max Novin Stern says, Building tech for drones now is like starting a deep learning lab 10 years ago. Interesting. I like that because, you know, I wasn't sure where this is going because there's a ton of defense drone companies right now. It's kind of overplayed.

Oh, you're building Group 1 to 3 ISR drones with mixed use. So is my mom, bro. Yeah. Exactly. But you see those drone displays. It's like we still don't have an American DJI. So three years ago, people would see the Chinese like drone, like, firework style drone displays and they'd be like, oh, look how cool.

This is just like let Reddit, like reaction. Just like. Just redidding out for Chinese military technology. Like great Chinese drone show. And then now people are like, fuck, fuck, fuck. Like they're like really stressed about it. because you see that it's like, yeah, if they can make the drones turn into this, like, massive dragon, it's like they'll do that on the battlefield.

Totally. I could, that's the crazy thing. Everybody's like, oh, they're going to create these drone swarms. But imagine you're just an infantry, you know, person in Taiwan. And this literal Chinese dragon is flying above you and they're all have bombs strapped to them. You're going to be like, all right, like, let's, you know, let's tap almost. Yeah, yeah, yeah, rave the white flag. Yeah, it's wild.

I posted that, like, it's, I couldn't find an example in science fiction where, because when you see those dragon drone displays, they're basically holograms. Like, they're 3D, they're big and they're in the sky, but they're essentially holograms because they're rendering the pixels through the individual drones. And I was like, I don't, I don't, there were plenty of sci-fi authors who predicted holograms. Yeah. But I don't think anyone predicted that holograms would be extremely deadly and military. Well, yeah, and the form, in the format of them. Everybody, everybody was thinking they'd be projected. Yep.

Not physical. Physical. Yeah. And as soon as they're physical, it means game over. Death. Insane. Yeah. Sager and Jetty says, this man did not place a single bet before 2020.

By 2024, he gambled away $1 million and left his family destitute. Along the way, Draft King signed VIP hosts who spoke to him daily and facilitated his access to more gambling products while knowing his family status. Draft Kings was sued after a father of two gambling. away $1 million of his family money. Very sad story. Very sad story. Gambling addiction is real.

So is angel investing addiction. It's so hard because gambling addiction is uncapped downside financially. You can lose a billion dollars. You can lose a million dollars. If you have $10,000, you can lose it all. And there aren't that many other addictions that have that crazy downs. I mean, of course, like the hardcore drug, it's like the same thing for your health.

Yeah. Like if you're on fentanyl, it's like, yeah, like it's going to be fine, fine, fine, and then dead, right? Yeah. And it's kind of the same thing financially. But there aren't many other, like, if you're addicted to shopping or consumption, it's very hard to, it's very hard to bottom out in that way. Yep. Yeah, but that's the thing. I don't think people, I didn't know this, but these big sports betting and gambling companies,

they have account managers whose entire job is to get the users to gamble more money by introducing them to new products, becoming their friend. Like having this dialogue and it's super dark. I don't think that should be, I don't think that should be allowed. I think it's turning, it's basically like putting an addict in a casino and having somebody fall, which is actually still a real thing. It's what they do. It originated in the casinos, but still for some reason, in person, you're in their pocket,

they're messaging you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the casinos have always been constrained to, it's. just Las Vegas or just Yeah. Now it's in your pocket everywhere. Somebody, this guy's at his kid's soccer game.

Exactly. His draft king's account manager is like, hey, did you know, you could, you know. A game coming up. What's your bet? What's your bet?

Yeah. Yeah, very risky. Super dark. And so yeah, soccer's pushing against that. Yeah, it's this, it's this interesting battle between,

uh, sports betting is like clearly. I mean, it's not going to go away. Mm-hmm. But there is a historical precedent for the government coming in. You saw this with online poker. There's a lot of people who had entire careers built around gaming online.

That got shut down. And, you know, I'm sure many people would argue, oh, they're never going to take this away. It creates too much tax revenue. The governments are incentivized to, like, just keep it kind of going. And now with gaming, we'll see what happens. The other, the interesting thing in gaming right now is there's all these new platforms that are facilitating fantasy. sports and allowing you to basically bet on fantasy. This is way out of my, way out of my wheelhouse.

So I can't speak about like using these products, but I do know there's this tension between the tribes that that historically had a monopoly on gambling, being frustrated with these new fantasy betting platforms because it's effectively a workaround to do sports betting without paying your tax to the tribes. And so over the next couple election cycles, both of the states, state level and the national level. I think we'll see that play out where the tribes have a big incentive and they have big balance sheets that they can go and start lobbying the government to say, hey, we need new regulations here. So I think we sort of probably hit peak unregulated sports

betting and gambling broadly. So we'll see what happens over the next few years. Yeah, very, very odd. I think one of the big, there's a couple angles. Like one would be like, you know, restrict the hours, restrict locations. Gambling used to be basically geolocation locked before when it was in Vegas. Now it's been unlocked and you can do it 24-7, went wherever. The other interesting thing is that if you are actually good at sports betting, they kick you off the platform. Because they know they're going to lose money on you because you have an edge.

I'm sure we have some listeners that are constantly getting booted. Yeah. And so maybe that should be illegal. Like maybe it should be like, yeah, you can, like, you have to take the ace and the like you know the power law risk on both sides guys if you're going to take this guy's million somebody's going to take that from you no it's interesting though I don't know what it is I love I love angel investing yeah I have zero interest in sports betting yeah I've placed like one bet watching the Super Bowl with my buddy

being like if this team wins yeah I have zero interest in it and I don't understand it well it's low class and vulgar generally yeah right I say in a tuxedo. Real men play poker. Baccarat, actually. Baccarat, right. There's crazy, by the way, there's crazy, like Dana White has gone on podcasts and talked for hours about his, like, his, the way he gambles in Vegas.

And he'll brag about, like, I'm up like 16 million so far this year. Like he's like, but they can't really like kick him out because he like runs Vegas in many ways. Yeah, yeah. I saw some video about that where he was like, oh, yeah, like I had a rough night. I think it's Baccarat that he plays. Oh, really? I think Baccarat is a game. Somebody will correct us if I'm wrong.

But Baccarat's a game where if you are legitimately good, you do have like some mild edge over the house. Yeah, it's a little more skill-based. Yeah, skill-based. But Dana White's in there, you know, on a high after a good pay-per-view, and he's just like thrown around $5 million in the night. It's wild. Mark Andreessen says, I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent of human knowledge

that has ever been gathered together at the White House with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. I like that. It's good. Estimated net worth in Trump administration's wealthiest members. And it's Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek, Ramoswamy, Scott Bassant, Howard Lutnik, Linda McMahon, Chris Wright, Doug Burnham, Bergam, Steve Whitkoff,

Masad, Bulos, Stephen Feinberg, tons of people. And lots of billionaires. Fascinating. Beanaires. Beanaires. Yeah. No, it's cool. I mean, I'm just personally, we don't, you know, we don't talk about politics on this podcast ever, or social issues. But I'm just really excited to see how the next four years play out. Like it's going to be. High expectations.

Yeah, the expectations couldn't be higher. And so, and the, um, the, um, um, And the Republican Party has every edge right now, right? So if they don't perform, then there's going to be a lot of dunking from the left. You know, if they're not productive, they don't get anything done. So we'll just have to see how it plays out. Yeah, there was a reporter who was asking me, like, oh, like, given that Doge is going to, like, lay off so many people, do you think that certain things might move slower?

Because that's certainly not the hope, but, like, that would be kind of an unintended consequence. And I was like, oh, it's so hard to predict that. No, but but the scale is what causes a lot of the slowdown. The other thing, I'm going to butcher the statistic, but it's some ungodly amount of people in the federal government have just been working from home, like, you know, indefinitely. And everybody that has hired a remote team in the past knows that remote teams do not work as hard. They do not work as many hours. You might think that they're, They're available plenty of times, right? If you send someone a Slack message, they'll pop on,

and they'll be like, oh, yeah, I can jump on Zoom. Just give me like 20 minutes. And it's like, why do you need 20 minutes to jump on Zoom, right? It's like, oh, they were walking their dog or they were doing all these things. So I think that, yeah, there's not a, I think that the individual government organizations and the leader of those groups should be able to decide, are we at work from home team? Is it a good fit for what we need to accomplish right now And just get more real about that

It just also needs to be paired with like deregulation and changing the actual laws because if there's a law that says In order to build a road you need a rubber stamp and they fire everyone who does the rubber stamps Well then it will still be illegal to build roads. Yeah, and so you have to remove the law Yeah, the creative need for all that stuff. So tricky JD says buy a 50 year old business from an old man without a web website, they say. After signing an LOI in August, spending tens of thousands of dollars in diligence, legal fees, calling capital from friends and family, and learning more about the generator space than I knew existed. I just had a deal die on the one yard line. Brutal, but it's probably okay. A few thoughts.

Okay, so I pulled this because I had this happen to me last year. I was working on buying a company in the UK that like my father-in-law knew the owner, so there was like some type of connection. And worked on it for like straight for like four to five months, like, you know, went there, spent a lot of time with the owner. It was a 30-year-old business. And had all the capital committed, had all the documents done, and literally in the final week, like found one single document that should have been like a, like a non-issue that basically, I won't go into it too much.

but if we had known about that document much earlier in the process, it wouldn't have been an issue. But finding out about it that late and the owner basically hit it, it blew up the deal. Like I just decided to walk away like literally 48 hours before we were flying to the UK to close. And the issue there was I had spent over $100,000 on legal bills that would have been prorated among me and the other investors in the deal. But because we didn't close, I was stuck with the bill. so I had to spend $100,000 for a deal that just didn't happen. And it was super painful. But in hindsight now, I'm fine with it.

Maybe we wouldn't be podcasting right now if it had gone through. Stick to angel investing. Yeah, stick to angel investing. Stick to the safes. Yeah, stick to safes. They're much easier. No, but I brought this up because this is something that AI is actually going to solve. Because imagine when you can take a data room.

Yep. And even in just, like in my case, there was 30 years worth of physical records for the business. and we only really had to pay attention to the last like 10 years. But there's still like a lot of data to ingest. And so now you're going to have this AI tools that allow you to diligence deals much, much, much, much faster and for much less money because you don't need all these like associates pouring over documents and all that stuff. And so I think this is going to actually AI will speed up the velocity of deals in private equity

because you're going to be able to basically you now have intelligence as a service. So a law firm, you know, with the same number of people might be able to diligence like 20, times as many deals. And so it's actually very positive because if you're an individual operator, a PE fund, you can go and say, hey, we're actually going to get into diligence with like more companies because right now and or up until this point, you've had to been like, you got to get really serious about the deal before you decide, hey, we're going to spend, you know, $100,000 on like going through this entire process. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Let's go to Bojan. He says, get in loser we are building a full for-profit a GI and it's uh sam altman in his

konex egg fantastic photo yeah and this is this is uh one of the bull cases for sF right sam will not rest until you can street park a coniseg yeah um so that is uh why sF is very undervalued right now i agree i agree um imagine i mean uh people were saying this for it's funny how it's kind of flipped like people were saying for years like oh opening i like Chatypti, like this company is so messed up. Like, they should just be a normal Seacore. And now they're like flipping to that. And everyone's like, no, no, no, don't do that.

Like, it's mad or something. Yeah, the crazy thing is there's this massive legal battle going on. Yeah, yeah. And Elon just continues to like shit posts through it. Yeah. He just like everything that Sam posts or somebody posed about Sam, he just responds with like crying emojis. It's crazy.

You can just do that. Like it's going to be in court, right? Like these are going to be in the court documents about like these people. Elon, what did you mean when you put the crying, laughing emoji? on this past. Or what did you mean when you said scam? It's such a mess. Total mess.

But Elon's lawyers are just like refreshing his feed being like another 20,000 available hours, another 20,000 availables, another 20 grand available. It's never felt more like being a child of divorce in tech, just watching mom and dad fight in the two most important tech people right now, just beefing super hard. On the timeline. On the timeline. I just want Sam, Elon. to get back together, merge X-AI and OpenAI.

Well, the crazy thing is the dynamic is you have X-A-I now is like actively trying to mob Open AI. I'm sure it's elsewhere in the stack, but Open AI was doing their little like Advent calendar type thing. And they were like, we'll be back on Monday. And one of the guys, maybe his name's Greg, was like, I love when they holiday chilling and Bobby grinding. and he's like got thumbs up

at the whole team. That guy fucking rocks. I love that guy. He's the man. I love that guy. He's like their rune basically. Yeah, yeah. Everybody needs a run.

Everyone needs a run and just a shit post. Bojohn is basically Nvidia's run. He was for a while. I don't think he's there anymore. I think he's just kind of independent now. Yeah. Post economic.

Do we have a promoted post? Of course we do, John. We have a promoted post from our friends over at Gulfstream Aerospace. It's a unlock new adventures. When you board a Gulfstream, the world becomes a smaller place. And I just got to say they have this incredible picture of a beautiful,

looks like a 650, landed in Antarctica. Wow. And if you didn't know, you could land your Gulf Stream there. Now you do. So go commission a plane. Talk if you need an intro to a Gulfstream rep, just DM us. And we'll be happy to set that up. But if you already have one, tell them you heard about.

about Gulfstream on Technology Brothers. Technology Brothers podcast. That really, that is just such a great like marketing copy segment. The world becomes a smaller place. A smaller place. Yeah. And that's what, that's what travel and being able to just hop on a plane in a moment and be somewhere else.

I had to go to, I went to SF yesterday for six hours. Yeah. And I was like, oh, it would have been nice to bring my family and whatever. And it's just the hassle of all that. So yeah, that's what the, That's what Gulfstream is all about. Shrinking the world and everybody can learn a little bit about their marketing. And they clearly know how to use X.

A lot of the promoted posts we feature. They add links to their posts. Goldstream does not. So I'm savvy in more ways than one. Totally. You know, there's this saying in AI when some new model dropped. This is the worst it'll ever be.

I want Gulfstream to start posting. This is the slowest the planes will ever be. Exactly. This is the slowest the planes will ever be. We're going supersonic. In the world of hypercars and supercars, we're always talking about horsepower and this can go faster. Let's make the world a smaller place by making the planes just twice as fast. It doesn't need to be an order of magnitude faster, but if you could just get, if I could get to Dubai twice as fast, I'd pay a lot for that.

There are companies working on that, boom and Hermius are both working on supersonic planes right now. Still a couple of years out, unfortunately, but hopefully soon. Let's go to Sarah. she says, okay, so Anderil partnered with Open AI and Palantir partnered with Scale AI, who built Defense Lama, your favorite, on top of Mehta's open source LLM, but Anderl and Palantir also have a partnership, and I'm pretty sure Peter Thiel has invested in all of them. And it's a photo of the the red string conspiracy theorist from, it's always sunny in Philadelphia. Yeah, partnerships, we talked about partnerships on a previous show. They're the, they're the,

the hot ticket of the day. Everyone has a partnership. I just want to, I would love to be a fly on the wall of the room in the Pentagon. And they're like, so you're telling me we're using a llama for our AI? You know how llama made this? Yeah.

Every other like defense tech word is always a tomahawk missile. Yeah. It's always really. Palantier. Yeah. It's always really aggressive. Ring of death. Defense Lama may be breaking that a little bit.

Yeah. They need the llama emoji in all the docs. The Tomcat, all these different, the wardhog, all these different defense tech terms. But yeah, scale AI really, really went crazy with that one. But I guess they needed to throw llama in there since it's like meta's product and it came from LLM. But yeah. Yeah, meta being a social media company calling their product Lama makes more sense. I'm not sure how that's going to do in the DOD.

So what do you think if you? You are a series A, series B stage defense tech company, and you don't have a major AI partnership lined up. It feels like there's a little bit of alpha and just doing a partnership with Open AI, getting a press release out of it, getting a Wall Street Journal article out of it, maybe you get on TV,

somebody's just general awareness. Is it played out or is it still worth doing? I don't think it's played out. We may have already peaked with this sort of AI hype cycle, right? Like, we don't know this, right? I'm not going to make a call here or there. Palantir is being valued at what?

150, something like that. I thought it was closer to 200. Oh, my God. 200 times. A lot. A lot of money. Earnings. Oh, I was thinking billion.

I think it's $150 billion. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's the biggest defense company now. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of top signals. So we've talked about this before. The smartest thing you can do at this point. the cycle is just tweet top every single day so that you can quote tweet it and then um be the next next Michael burry um but i don't i mean i don't i don't AI is still in many ways underhyped right

we've talked about this like even even if there's this you know even if we're in a bubble the underlying technology can be under hyped like i at thanksgiving people weren't talking about it that much you know i talked about it with like a handful of people there yep um but But, you know, I was talking to a guy who, who over the Thanksgiving holiday who, like, works in film and TV and he wasn't talking about it. And I was like, you're fucked. But, you know, if you're in the entertainment industry and you're not thinking and it's not top of mind, you're probably going to get smoked. Yeah. The phrase is overhyped in the short term, underhyped in the long term.

That's kind of like the popular meme. Yeah, and it's real. So, yeah, yeah, it makes sense. But, yeah, there's no. we talk to companies about this all the time. There's, there's, if you can launch a partnership as and become a customer of open AI and make a press moment out of it, do it. There's not a lot of downside and there's like, tons of potential.

Yeah, yeah. Even if it just means getting like somewhat preferential pricing on the API. Like that's better than paying full price. Yeah. Get a partnership. By the way, we're buying open AI credits. Our post earlier was not a joke. Hit us up.

Hit us up. I don't know if you buy them. Well, I mean, it's a gray market. It's a little gray, but we're going to get D platform. We're buying. You can't get D platform from the RSS feed. That's great. Let's go to Nicole Wisk off.

She says, sad to report that there's a strong correlation between how insufferable your SDRs are and your company's success. Shout out to ramp, sidecar, and pitch book. The best salespeople I know are the most annoying. True. And it's really unfortunate because you're like, wow, this. super annoying person that I knew is crushing it. Yeah.

And it shouldn't, every, it goes against every fiber of your being. Yeah. To think that this really annoying person is so good at their job. But if you're annoying, yep, go become an SDR and you're absolutely going to clean house.

It's not just annoying. It's like, no, no, persistent. Persistent. No, but there's,

yeah, there's a lot of instances when I have to tell an SDR, stop it. Yeah. I don't want to, you know, I don't believe in like blocking a salesperson. or just like reporting it as spam.

Totally. So they're just doing their job. Yeah. But until you're getting people to say either get on a call with you or engage with your product or saying like please stop emailing me, you're not doing your job as like a sales rep. Yeah. I mean, I remember like I was close with the ramp founders and wanted to onboard and it still took a persistent sales rep to actually be at the top of my email regularly for me to do the

internal tasks just to make it happen. Like, it wasn't just me saying, like, I'm in. There was a whole bunch of things that needed to happen mechanically, and that's what the SDR actually makes happen. It's like, go internally, actually consolidate, actually set up all the admin accounts and stuff. Like, it takes some time to onboard a company onto a complex piece of software. It is interesting that right now, I'm sure Nicole is getting inundated with pitches.

Yeah. But right now it does feel like if I, if a founder engages with a post- of mine on X or through the TB account. Half the time they're running like, we automate your outbound sales motion or whatever. And I'm just like, oh, there's more of these companies than there are current. Good sales reps. Good sales reps in the valley. But maybe that's bullish, you know.

Who knows? Who knows? Let's stay with Nicole. She says, 48 hours in SF, absolutely electric this week, felt like one massive college campus with your besties everywhere. A few takeaways. YC Demo Day was impressive. It was impressive. Tons of Bitcoin hit 100K.

I am an idiot. Menlo Park is very far from San Francisco. Zero negative sentiment on the market. Tech Bros. Pod came up at dinner. Let's go. Congrats. You guys made it. Thank you.

Dying to know in what context we did. Cheers to all the technology brothers, though. Because this is a movement. Yeah. Nicole, let us know what they said. We love feedback here. At least one GP at every firm. Nicole did say she did comment and say we need to add subtitles to X,

but X has native subtitles that are better than what we would add. So if you don't have subtitles turned on, go turn them on. At least one GP at every firm you have ever heard of is leaving to raise their own fund. Not true. Brian Singerman is not raising his own fund. Still not convinced that big endowments invest in emerging managers. Blue bottle is terrible. I've had blue bottle like a few times.

I've not a big coffee snaps. I don't know. Do you like? Yeah, I feel like I've talked about this on the show before. The Gen Z and millennial generations are so entitled when it comes to coffee. Yeah. Like our parents were like if it's brown and hot, like it's good, sounds good, you know, it's good for me.

But we, coffee prices have inflated along with everything else so much that when you're paying $7 for a cup of coffee, you want it to really. really hit. But yeah. Gigoslop. You don't want gigaslop. Yeah. So Blue Bottle is owned by Nestle. Oh yeah. They sold. Which is the number one gigaslop company in the world. And so yeah, don't expect to get a good cup of coffee at Blue Bottle. That being said, it's better than Starbucks. And Blue Bottle bought my buddy's company. And you levered that up into creating multiple successful restaurants when they sold the Nestle. So thank you to Blue Bottle for buying my absolute boy's company. If you're thinking about taking a meeting at Blue Bottle, why not take it at the San Francisco Philharmonic instead?

Yep. Just as good. Yep. And you get to enjoy some lovely music. Yeah, next time you go to Blue Bottle, wear a suit, and you might get better coffee and better service. I think so. I actually would guarantee it. Let's go to Yoni Rickman.

He says, we're at the start of a new private equity X venture capital super cycle, whether it's PE funds buying venture back companies, venture funds launching PE strategies or startups using PE, PE-like approaches to buy their customers. Something big is going on. He highlights four separate but related things. Category maturity, limits on organic growth, asset class maturity, and entrepreneurial culture. And so you told him that he needed to coin this, but I already had. It's Coogan's Gigacicle.

Yeah. So, sorry, Yoni. Everyone's going to refer to this is Coogan's Gigacicle from now on. Didn't even read the post. This is the first time I read the post. Yeah, of course, the guy who coined. the coinage. Yes.

Is front running anybody who's not yet coined something that should be coined. It should be my whole thing. Every time someone post something like this, I just need to be like, I call this Coogan's blank, blank, blank. Yeah. So the funny thing is, I guess, a few things. So right now we're looking at, wow, there's just massive convergence between private equity and venture capital.

Yeah. But venture capital is private equity. It is legally the same thing. Legally the same thing. So PE is converging with PE, which I love because of two, you know, you know, private equity is fantastic. Culturally very different. Yeah, culturally different.

But yeah, we're at this interesting time. In the last like six months, we've seen venture funded pool service clean, uh, roll up. We've seen venture funded auto body shop rollups. We've seen venture funded, uh, accounting CPA rollups. I want to do a car wash. We've seen so, so Yoni, uh, and Slow's big bet was metropolis. Okay.

What's that? which was a SaaS company for parking garages, and they sort of realized that they realized there was sort of like a terminal sort of value for their business, and they were like, why don't we just become an operator? Yep. So they bought one of the largest, whatever, parking garage operating companies, and that was a way for them to really capture all the value of the software they were building.

So I love it. I mean, I love financial instruments. I love private equity. Financialization generally. I love IRR. And so everybody likes to say, oh, we're late stage capitalism. My point has always been, now we're just getting started. I love it.

I love it. Yeah, I want to do something in car washes because I think, especially as the cars start driving themselves, they're still going to need to be washed and cleaned. And if you can just have a network by all of the different car washes. Here's the thing, though. Yeah, tell me. Car washes are so bad for your car. Really?

you're actually driving cars that are, you know, maintain their, you know, if you're driving a model three and it's going to lose half its value in a year. But that is a self-driving car, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm just saying, I never, I haven't used this a. What do you do? I have a detailer. Okay. He's, he's, he's, uh, that can be rolled up as well.

We'll put that in it. Yeah, but it's more of like a barber. Like, it's like, yes, you could roll up barbershops, but it just becomes super cuts. Sure. Like, it's an art. Like, my, like, so my detailer, I've taken. my car's been like serviced and you know they'll like clean your car and it comes back and he's like dude like what did you do like you just undit like he's like you undid like a year's worth of work on your

paint wow and so now i i had to service one of my cars today and he gave me this little uh hotel like door hanger thing to put in there that says do not wash wow because he's like I'm the only one that should touch this like this is like a multi you know year process so I love anyways uh let's go to William. He says, tech debt deflation is here. O1 Pro just solved an incredibly complicated, painful rewrite of a file that no other model has ever gotten close to. I've been using this as an e-vel for different frontier models, and this marks a huge shift for me. We've entered the Why Fix Your Code today, when better model will do it tomorrow regime. Interesting. I didn't realize that 01 Pro was so leaps and bounds ahead of Claude in terms of programming. I wonder if this guy's

just shilling or something. So I think it's funny. I thought, cursor and some of the other models were just as good. So it's funny to think about, so software engineers tend to be extremely online, but there's a handful that just do it like a just a job. Sure. And maybe they have a GitHub, but they're not on X or Reddit or LinkedIn. And so there's undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of software engineers out there that don't know about the new AI tools. Oh yeah.

And they're just coding away. And they're like, you know, maybe they have like a little SaaS company that's doing well. and they're just like, yeah, like, I love my, I love my work, and, you know, I love the art and craft, and then just get steamrolled by, like, some 17-year-old that's, like, just leveraging all the models, like, and just cracked out on them. So.

Have you seen how OpenAI is integrating with all the different code editors? Yeah, yeah. It's genius. They use the accessibility features on the Mac app so that they don't need VS codes or text edits permission to go in there and rewrite the code. They just are able to read everything out, rewrite it, and just act as a AI assistant in there.

Yeah, that's the wild thing right now. So there's all these AI agent companies, like there's hundreds or thousands of like venture backed. Yeah. Maybe not thousands, but there's hundreds of venture back companies that are building consumer agents. And none, like very few of them. I don't really use any of, I don't use any of them right now. and but you know DAU of a lot of the different models. Yeah.

And that's like the wild thing is all of that agentic activity that people have been betting on is happening with Chad GBT, with Claude. And so we'll see how we'll see how all this plays out. But yeah, I would love to, if you're building an AI agent that actually works and it's good DM us. Yeah. We'll give it a shot. Let's go to clone. Clown Robotics says torso two with an actuated abdomen. Looking freaky. Okay, so this video is almost sickening to watch.

It feels like Westworld. Totally. The aesthetics are very westworld. So what they did, yeah, they obviously are inspired. But what they did is they have this new motion, I think. It's in the vertebrae and just the way the abdomen moves. And most humanoid robots are very sort of straight-up. up and down, stiff, they very much have that look and feel of a robot.

Go watch, I mean, we'll quote read this, go watch this video. It's honestly, it's honestly feels like very wrong to look at. And I just think that, I think, I think the, I weirdly think the firearms industry is going to benefit a lot from the robotics movement. Because in a world where humanoid robots walk the earth and if you are criminal and, And you can now, from the comfort of your own home, use humanoid robots to commit crimes. Everybody is going to be just, like, freaked out, right? Because it's like, well, yeah, maybe you have your, I'd be interested to see if anybody's building at the intersection of, like, ring and humanoid robots, right? So imagine in the future you have a humanoid robot standing in your backyard 24-7.

Bodyguard. Bodyguard. So bodyguard. If you haven't bought that domain, go buy it. Sit on it. Some venture back company will buy it from you for 200 grand when the time is right. Oh, this is great. So Drouvo Regendra says we need to triple space forces budget because Delta says never deleting this app, we have Taliban space posting. And it's a screenshot of someone from the Taliban, I guess, advocating for, for taking the moon, or maybe Mars, it's hard to tell here.

Those photos very AI generated, but wild. The moon should be a state campaign that Mike Solano launched has apparently reached the Middle East, and they're trying to get there. Yeah, everybody wants to take the moon. It's like the ultimate prize. It's in the sky. Yeah, why not? And imagine doing, imagine, you know, using a drone swarm to project the American flag, like,

across hundreds of miles from the moon. It's just like, there's probably some gravity issues up there. But no, I also saw that the Taliban have been trading meme coins. Really? No way. Filming a video with like at some dinner with the Taliban

because they're kind of in control over there at the moment. And yeah, they're trading. So if you're trading meme coins, you might be trading against a Taliban. So it's crazy they're still in business. Like because ISIS came up and they're like all these. different splinter organizations. Rival gangs.

Taliban's kind of lindy at this point. Damn. They're hanging on to it. Maybe, yeah. Who knows? Just going strong. I don't know. We should do a deep dive on the various business lines of the Taliban.

I know they were big and poppy. Yeah. Heroin trade? Yep. Kidnapping. Ransoming. But yeah. I wonder what their actual most profitable year was.

Well, now it's taxation probably. You think so? because they just run all of Afghanistan. Yeah. So they're just the government. It's a good business model. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Be not fully on violence, right?

Give us all your, you know, half your money or it will kill you. Yeah. Wild. Steph says, met a founder who hand writes all of his own business cards and I kind of love it. Pretty cool. Yeah, this is like you. You have your call that you will write anything for you. Yeah.

I mean, they're on call 24-7. Exactly. No, I do think it's a good way to stand out. Business cards are, it's funny because, the iPhone rolled out the feature of tapping and it feels so just like you know it's somewhat useful but I've also found that it's functionally has some uh functionally has like a bunch of issues where it'll like add the contact but then it'll you don't know if you forget their name then you can't find them again so it's like a bunch of issues I was at a conference and someone

actually recommended an app it's like a couple bucks I think it's just called recents and you download this app and it just sorts your contact list by when they were added. So you can go around tapping and then at the end of the conference you can pull up this app and see. An app that should be a feature. I know. It should just be a feature. But Apple is too focused on just destroying the photos app. Yeah. Oh my God. It's so bad. Hey, here's an app you use all day long. We're going to completely redesign it and just botch it. It's really bad. Like I had something earlier where I was trying to send something to Senra. Yeah. I think you were trying to send him the same thing. Yeah. And I couldn't.

not find that the thing that I wanted to send, even though I knew that I had it in my app. Yeah, yeah. You really have to sort and favorite things and then find the favorites, which are now buried. It's a mess. It's a mess. I mean, yeah, the, yeah, it's all getting worse. Let's go to Mike Solana. This is a follow up to the CEO shooting, really dark story.

Mike says, highly intelligent and accomplished, attractive. nothing but opportunity goes missing over the summer friends begin looking for him reaching out to him over social either this isn't the guy or he's about the age and this was and he was into psychedelics schizophrenia and yeah i i remember seeing like the just like the the the video shows someone who's very agentic very calculating very thoughtful and there was always this weird dynamic he's locked in who is this person yeah and and couldn't they have done something better with their life basically. Like they must have had their brain broken at some point.

If this is the guy. I mean, we don't know at this point. Yeah, so this isn't a murder mystery podcast. So we're going to talk about this for three minutes and move on. But yeah, one thing that I saw was interesting. He was a software engineer, comp, major, went to an Ivy League, apparently went to Penn. Penn. Or no, apparently went to some, even went to like, you know, was private school, like, affluent.

There's pictures of him traveling all over the world. There's pictures of his friends, tweeting at him, trying to get him to respond. He had been over the summer, allegedly, at some point, it was just gone dark. And one thing that was interesting is he, besides the people that he was following, which I'm sure a lot of the people on this show follow, I guess, Lindyman maybe, wait, but why, all these sort of... He was a ploy guy to Chris Williamson. Yeah.

But he apparently would defend marijuana and psilocybin. and various psychedelics, like, very intensely. And we've talked a lot about how there's huge, huge, huge downsides to those substances, and there's too much in Silicon Valley, like at least when I was in college, Tim Ferriss would be promoting, like, various psychedelics on his show to the super wide audience. And they're really, really intense drugs and, you know, certain men are just prone to schizophrenia. and marijuana cannabis can induce that. I believe it's that I don't know if psilocybin can,

but Peruvian, you know, ayahuasca or whatever, definitely can. So anyway, it's very, very dark. And yeah, I'm not sure it's worth speculating, but it's sort of, it definitely came out of left field that he was a online, probably center-right, you know, software engineer doing this. And it really doesn't make sense, but I think that's all we really need to say. Well, I'm sure we'll learn more in the near future.

Let's take a pallet cleanser with a great post by Sean Frank. He says, Most Twisted Thing About Me, I really love ads. I like making them. I like watching them. I like the industry. I like that they pay for content for all of us. Ads are good and I love ads. There we go.

Sean, this is fantastic. I almost, I had this sort of intrusive thought to lunge for the size gong. Oh, yeah. Because Ridge, I mean, so Ridge basically, Ridge is a wallet company fundamentally, but they're, they're the backbone of the creator economy. If you're a guy online and you make content that guys watch, Ridge is there for you. Ridge will be there for you. It's like UBI for people that make gaming content. When I, when I helped out with Ridge back in the day, you know, there was, you know, if you had like an NBA highlight reel and you had no advertisers, like Ridge would be there. there and be like, we'll give you a dollar CPM if you just like put like ridge in the corner.

Yep. And that strategy's worked out very well for them. They do significantly more revenue than than most Series C startups. That's true. And infinite more EBITDA. So on that note, let's go to a promoted post. We got to run out. There we go.

We got to live the brand. If you can see behind my glass of champagne, we have a post from DuPont Registry. And they are showing off a 2015 McLaren P1 with an asking price of $2.1 million. Holy Trinity car. Holy Trinity car. It's painted in MSO Kilo Gray with McLaren Orange accents. This specification is subtle yet stunning. The full carbon interior and carbon bucket racing seats with orange contrast stitching emphasized the Spartan cockpit that is solely focused on performance.

And I got to say, John, I got a soft spot for carbon bucket seats. I love sitting in them. They're not the, they're not objectively the most comfortable, but I certainly feel at home in them. So if you're in the market for a P1, this is a fantastic spec. People always talk trash about McLaren.

Oh, it's just some tech guy who just made his money yesterday. But you go with a P1, you go with an F1, you go with a P1 GTR, people know, people in the car world now. Yeah.

Yeah, it's going to cost you a little bit more, but you get a lot more. And so it's so worth, it. So head to your McLaren dealer, head to DuPont Registry. Tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's stay on the Ridge team. Connor McDonald says, no more noble endeavor than being an advertiser. Hey. These guys work together or something? Yeah. And that's, I mean, so let's face it. There's a lot of advertising that is solely oriented around driving very specific results. And then there's a ton of

advertising that's literally like I just like what these people are doing. I'm going to support them and maybe I'll make my money back or whatever. Like we're we're you know pursuing some opportunities in horse racing right. It's not it's not necessarily to drive new listenership to technology brothers but you know we we we have an appreciation for the endeavor and the jockeys and and the trainers and we just want to support that right. Yeah, that's great. And if you're an advertiser, take 5% of your budget and spend it with uh spend it with um groups that you know maybe don't have a direct r o why but can give back to the world and entertain you and your team in some way actually actually um one of my former

engineers uh our cto uh at my last company he's like very into car car racing like on the amateur circuit and so i sponsored him it wasn't it wasn't a ton of money but i was like well if you put like five of my portfolio companies on as sickers like i'll give you money for the race. I probably paid for like a set of tires or something. But, but that's, that's my word of advice. You can just sponsor things. You can just do things. You can just build things and you can just sponsor things. So, uh, go sponsor. That's your homework for today. Go sponsor something. Go sponsor something. Uh, Tyler says, the classman's creed. If you possess true taste, you bear a sacred duty to amass wealth, not for vanity, but to lift the world's standard and drape it

in elegance. I love that. Beautiful. I think he was inspired by something I said about the importance of spending money well. There are so many people in Silicon Valley that have inordinate wealth and spend it so poorly. Yep. And I like that Tyler has trademarked it, the classman's creed. The classman's creed. Might need a little work on that.

We could tighten that up. It could be one word. It could be two words. But, you know, you're getting there, Tyler. You could drop the creed and just make it an archetype, the classman. The classman does something like this. Yes. beautify the world that they exist in.

Yes, yes. I saw Elon actually commissioned a huge statue. I saw this, the fork in the road. The fork in the road. Fantastic. That was beautiful. I think it was placed at one of Black Rock's properties, Black Rock City. Yeah, Black Rock City.

So I was surprised to see Elon and Black Rock collaborating, but they're a big asset manager. He's got a bunch of investable assets, so it kind of makes sense. I love it. Rick Zulo says a lot of talk on Twitter about VCs hitting it big on meme coins. Undoubtedly, there are going to be some eye-popping IRRs there, but IMHO. These are a huge distraction. These are not the type of investments LPs are paying us to make, and I don't see the returns from these to being sustainable. If you do make that your full-time job.

To me, it appears like resulting above all else. Is this a moment in time to make an insane quick buck? Perhaps. Is that short-sighted? In my honest opinion? definitely. What do you think? Can you build a VC firm around trading meme coins? Well, so there's some like basically LP agreements that allow venture funds to to put some percentage of their fund into highly liquid alternative assets. It's usually about 20% can go into secondary sales. So for

the really big scaled companies, you might only be able to get allocation into secondary and then alternative asset classes like Bitcoin, crypto, meme coins and stuff. So this is, This is something that has been driving the conversion to RIAs. Because once you're in RIA, you can invest in public companies, you can invest in secondary, you can invest in anything. But it comes with incredible compliance requirements. It's been very complex. Yeah, but at Hereticon, I was talking with a buddy of mine, and he was saying everybody for the last couple years

has obviously been kind of dunking on crypto v. and not taking them super seriously, but historically, the average crypto fund has outperformed the average venture fund, or basically, no, the average crypto fund has outperformed like the top 20% venture fund. So the returns, because the asset class is so liquid and the timelines are so shortened, the returns are phenomenal. And I do think it's kind of a sign of the times that non-cryptovCs are saying, well, I'm going to take the 20% of my fund and just start yoloing it. But yeah, I know I know some very respectable GPs that have done this. And I know some, I know a, you know, a multi-billion dollar AUM digital asset fund who has 3x their,

their 2021 fund just on Ethereum alone. Yeah. And so there's, I do think it'll be. sort of the irony of the traditional venture capital firms that were sort of dunking on the crypto VC funds, crypto VC funds generate all these crazy returns. And then the traditional venture funds come in and like basically bagholds for all the crypto VCs. And then the crypto VCs will buy at the bottom again. I mean, a friend who was a partner at a VC firm came in kind of at the bottom of the market and was like Solana, baby. Salana. Yeah. Solana. Didn't make any VC investments.

He bought the right coin. PA is on fire. Yeah. Let's go to Bryce Roberts. He says, another show I'd love to see us make founders for sci-fi. So he's talking about David Senora's show. Read and dissect sci-fi novels and tie them into the present or near future world of what we're seeing in tech.

I think that's really, really cool. A lot of the sci-fi novels, it's hard to dig through them. It's hard to have a guide for what's good to read, a podcast that puts it in a consistent voice, well... And historical context. Totally, totally. Like, when this was written, the iPhone didn't exist. So when you hear them talking about the magical info tablet, you should be amazed.

Yeah, yeah, that is the iPad. Yeah, that is the iPad, exactly. So here's the thing. People don't understand this about podcasting, and we're obviously influenced by David Senra. He's sort of the... Godfather. He's the godfather of business podcasting. But he's also, in many ways, a godfather of this podcast.

He encouraged us to take it as seriously as we take it now. And so he talks about this a lot, but people don't realize, like, if you just want to make $5 million a year, having the founders' podcasts for sci-fi is a very potentially a very efficient way to do that. You can have no team, just you, a microphone, a computer, you can make $5 million a year, basically MBA money from recording a show in the comfort of your own home and just nerding out about sci-fi. We have to fucking love sci-fi. You got to love sci-fi. You got to be willing to grind. You have to be willing to do what Senra did, which is like grind in relative obscurity for years. Until now, he has one of the top business podcasts in the world.

But he had to go through like three or four years of being completely unknown. But set a cadence. Don't just be like, I'll do it when I read a book. No, yeah. At least. Yeah. You're not going to, if you come into it being like, I'm going to do this as a side hustle. It's like great things have come from side hustles.

but side hustles don't become great things. Yes, that's great. That's a great way to put it. Let's go to Baldo, our reigning reply guy of the month. He says, to be honest, I don't care about winning back-to-back months, but I'll run over anyone who thinks they're in the race. Let's go, Baldo. And this type of mentality, so winner mentality, winner mentality,

grinder mentality. Fantastic. So Baldo, less than two weeks ago, relatively unknown Cornell student, and he starts aggressively replying to our posts. And last time I checked, he was followed by Mark Andreessen, Turner Novak, Yoni at Slow. So many major fund managers. I wouldn't be surprised if this guy drops out and, you know, raises a $5 million dollar mango seed round.

Mango seed round. That's a great term. Baldos got a mango seed round written all over him. Mango is such a funny term 10 years ago. Mango seeds, baby. Maybe Andresen coined that, right? Or somewhat Ed Andreessen. Maybe Chris Dixon wrote that.

But yeah, the mango seed round for anything over like $2 million. And there was a big question about like, oh, is it dangerous because like you have too much money and the value is too high for the seed? And now it's like, if you're not doing a mango seed round, you're not in the game. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. Let's go to Morgan Barrett. He's been on the show before. He says, me, I'm almost to five million impressions.

My much more than my much more Twitter famous friend, you can't do anything. with five million impressions. Five is a nightmare. You can't retire, but it's not worth it to work. Five will drive you. Unpoco loco, my fine feather friend. The poorest content creator in America, the world's tallest dwarf, the weakest strongman at the circus. This is so funny. I didn't realize, I didn't read this for some reason until we got on the show. This is fucking hilarious. I had lunch with Morgan the other week here, and he's a great dude, but man, is he a great poster. This is a Yeah, yeah, it won't be a five million. It won't be a five million for long.

No, so, so, so for anybody that doesn't get the reference, this is referring to like the $5 million net worth mark where you're, is your trap, like you're technically rich, but like you can't really do things that, you know, you can't retire, really. It goes so hard. I will drive you a little loco, my feather friend. I don't even get what that reference is from,

but is that like Breaking Bad or something. something, I don't know. Well, you understand what it means. Yeah, of course, of course. You're past me your glass. Southern California. You've got to know what Pococco means. Poco loco. Oh, wow. You really finished the Dom Peringon. We're going to need to start. At what point do we move up to two bottles? Well, well, the thing is that so wine comes in different sizes. We're drinking the standard, which is 750 milliliters. Then there's the magnum, which is 1.5 liters. But it goes up three liters, four and a half, six. nine, 12, 15, 18, and they have really cool names. It's as big as the flagpole.

Yeah, the Nebuchadnezzar, the Jerobam, the Methuselah. And so what we'll do is we'll have the poorer. You need a device because it's so heavy and it tilts over and it pours your glass. But what I was thinking is that reasonably we probably can't put down 18 liters of champagne in one episode. So, live show, when we, as we start doubling bigger and bigger, we do a live show. show and there's a gerobum that is shared amongst the guests of the live show. That's great. I think that will work. Let's move on to Bryce. Pound for pound midweek lapse at Deer Valley is the best networking in Utah. I love this. Bryce is a humble guy, but he's been very successful. He's also jacked. He's

also jacked. Yeah. Bryce, we want to see the beard back. You looked great with a beard. Did you see that? Oh, yeah, I saw the old beer. Yeah, he just looked like an absolute dog. Yeah. He was, he was We need some shirtless photos. He's saying what a lot of capital allocators won't admit, which is that midweek lapse, your local, you know, ski resort are a great way to meet LPs, other investors, some, some, some later stage founders maybe. Everyone makes fun of VCs for like, oh, they're spending all their time at Amund Gehry. They're spending all their time in the Alps.

It's like, where do you think, where do you think the founders are of these multi-billion-dollar companies that need to raise $2 billion for their next series F? Yeah. They're not hanging out at blue bottle. Yeah, they're hanging out at Almagiri. Yeah. So that's where you go. You go where the money is.

The yellow stone club. Yeah. Smell it. Chase it down. That's the business. Yeah. The only thing I want to see from Bryce is, you know, he's got us thing with NDVC. It's, it's a, you know, a perfectly sized seed fund.

You know, I think it's like $50 million. He can do a lot with that. But I'd like to see him go into the, I'd like to see him raise like a $5 billion fund, right? I want to see him, you know, that picture of him. the gym made me think this guy can handle he can he I can trust him with two billion I think so hopefully soon uh let's go to cushy she says uh wait wait we we we cannot we can't skip over this no we can't skip over this uh Bryce posted about doing a technology brothers stay tuned everyone live

event at Deer Valley that'd be fantastic and the the president of deer valley replied to him and said uh let's make it happen yeah so getting ideas is been working on it actually with them about this last week. Yeah, we'll figure something out. And yeah, let's make it happen. Yeah, if you made it this far in the show, you can hit us up. Cushy says, coolest boss award goes to Kevin Hartz for being not only a co-founder GP of A-StarVC,

but also co-founder of the coolest stealth startup in the game, Sauron, which is their home defense company, and Earl for your home, Palantier for your home. Hopefully, I don't know a ton about the company. I've met Kevin before, a very, very smart guy. Looks great in a suit. I actually pulled this out because he was wearing a suit. It looks fantastic.

We need to see more early stage founders wearing suits. Maybe I can't put it on a tux though. Yeah, yeah. Class it up a little bit. Plus it up a little bit. Come on, Kevin. I mean, you're a general partner at A-Star. Come on.

Yeah. You can do it a little bit better. But yeah, but yeah. Fantastic. The only thing, request for feature, Kevin. build humanoid robot bodyguards that I can put in my backyard and on my roof that can just sort of pace on my roof. And that's a feature I'd happily pay for. Oh, here it is.

Elon Musk says two years ago, I commissioned an art piece, a fork in the road, had to make sure that civilization took the path most likely to pass the Fermi great filters. What a great metaphor. It's so funny because it's like it has a little bit of that Elon like meme. Like, oh, it's just a fork. Just a fork in the ground. But it has this much deeper meaning about the great filter. I love that. I'm bullish on us passing the great filter.

I think we can do it. We're going to do it. We're going to do it, chat. I'm a big George Hots believer. I think it's wireheading. I think the risk is we all go into VR and we never explore the stars because we have this unending pleasure dome, this wireheading future. That's the world that I'm most worried about, not nuclear war, not any of the robot.

killing us. No, the world I'm more worried about is we get so lost in a stack of posts that you and I never, if somebody just kept bringing Dom out, we'd probably just not stop podcasting. Yeah. I mean, it is crazy the scale of what it takes to pass the, the great filter in the sense that like getting to Mars and actually building a society on Mars is, you know, such a stretch even for Elon's lifetime. Like it is, it is a life's work. and a half and times 10. Well, that's why he has 20 children. Yeah. Even just like the transfer window.

Like you can't go to the moon whenever you want. You can't go to Mars whenever you want. The transfer window only happens every 18 months or something or every few years. And then when you think about the next planet, it's like 30 years, 50 years, hundreds of years. And it's just like a completely different game, like self-sustaining ecosystems. That's why Bezos has this crazy, the clock. Crazy clock. It's great, though.

Like, we need people thinking about this, especially if they're wealthy and powerful, inspiring the next generation. I love it. I'm really happy he made this. Let's go to Flo. Flo says, I don't know if people realize how literally I meant it when I say that AI agents are going to turn building a business into playing a game of Factoria. And he posts a screenshot of his, his AI agent workflow. Yeah, so he's been building this company for. while it's very cool it's think of it as like AI agents meets like Zapier so you can set up all

these different like more complicated automations and I just pulled this because I thought that that that graphic that he showed of like being able to look at a lot of a lot of you know you know if you're running a company you'll look at your headcount and you'll see like you know roughly or or just like a map of your team and understand like all right where are we really allocating resources and time and energy and he's looking at this sort of diagram of agents that are all sort of humming in the background. And he's, yeah, in, in theory, he's building Factorio for your business where you basically just get to create and manage this army of agents.

Yeah, I got to put it to work because we have a bunch of things that could be workflowed out with AI agents. Totally. I haven't really sat down and actually used it. I think it's called Lindy. Yeah. Lindy. Great, great name.

A promoted post. Very Lindy name. Promoted post. You know what time it is. It is holiday season. And Tiffany and Coe is at your service. They say featuring a diamond of over 12 carrots, our holiday window display at the landmark invite passerby

to view the world's most iconic engagement ring, the Tiffany setting up close. And I just got to say, what an iconic engagement ring. If you are eager to propose, it's hard to recommend anything else besides this. I mean, this is absolutely, fantastic piece. You're going to make your wife or partner very happy with this one.

So go indulge, go check it out, walk by the window, maybe buy it. And when you are talking to your AD at Tiffany, tell them the technology brother sent you. Not AD, your rep. Yeah. Let's go to Simp for Satoshi, getting a little meta. this one saying that all great men simp for other great men. Jobs for Walt Disney, Caesar for Alexander, Elon for Asimov. Those who think simping for a great man is unbecoming aren't ever going

to make it. It's okay to simp for a titan. It's part of becoming one. Interesting. I mean, at IM Ginger Trash, aka simp for Satoshi. He's been on an absolute posting role lately. Banger after bangor. He's really building momentum in the timeline. Yep. But yeah, this is, this is, I mean, I think it was really, I honestly thought it was worth sharing. A lot of people, I think, I think you don't want to make someone else your entire personality. Like I've always felt like wearing, you know, if you're into sports, wearing a jersey is sort of strange to put someone else's name on your back. But it's okay to sort of like spiritually embody. Yeah.

To some degree. It's almost like a mentor more than, yeah, simping. what does that really mean? Simping is a derogatory term, but he's kind of reclaiming it because it's in his handle. Yeah. And I like that.

He's taking it back and using it as a metaphor to just study into the tutelage of a great person. And I mean, that's what the founder's podcast is all about. Like you can take a tour of the great men of history

and figure out who can inspire you and who releases the most alpha for whatever you're building. Yeah. Mark Andresen just post the American flag and a picture of the, U.S. stock market versus the rest of the world without America. Mogged.

Mogged. Mogged. Mogged in a chart. It really is staggering to see. If you invested in America, you did very well. If you invested anywhere else, you were screwed. Yep. Wild.

Let that be a lesson for you. And, I mean, this is interesting because, like, it's pro-America, but it's also a total vindication of Mark's strategy, right? It's like, he has sized up his fund and gone turbo-long America. right and that is and it's just like leveraging kugan's law along the way of coining of course of course software is eating the world it's time to build american dynamism one of the ogs of kugin's law fantastic coin there should be yeah there should be a polymarket for betting on the next thing that a 16c coins you know like in the next category they're so do they're so do mark we're waiting coins we're refreshing and we will do a a a

we will do our signature segment on new coinage breaks new coinage alert it's on the timeline breaking this could shake up shape rotators out word cells out we got the new drop from p markup live scoop let's do it uh harris rothermal says i'm going to build the coolest factory and it's a very nicely lit shot of an american flag no so this was in a response to somebody was saying i don't Everybody wants to re-industrialize. Nobody wants to work in a factory. Harris wants to work in a factory. He's making a beautiful factory.

He's making the coolest factory. It's fantastic. And yeah, I actually, I disagreed with the original post. Nobody wants to work in a factory. It's very cool. It's very stimulating to be in a factory, right? There's like a lot of, you know, the productive capacity. You can hear the hum and the buzz and the clanks.

And I love being in factories. just like children yearn for the minds, you know, playing Minecraft. Yeah. Men yearn for the factory floor. I think of this is like a podcast factory. It is. Factory for content. It is content factory.

You hear the clicks of Ben's keyboard, editing. He's an hour behind us right now, editing. Content factory. Jack Altman says, all the live like a perfect healthy monk longevity stuff is directionally good. But if you take it too far, you miss out on a lot of personal joy and professional progress. This is so true. This is so true.

So I went through this phase, luckily, in college, where I got so obsessed with my health. Sure. That I realized, like, 80 to 90% of my, like, creative, productive energy was just oriented around my health. It did the exact same thing. And, yeah, I was 7% body fat. Yep. And I was an absolute dog. And I put on, you know, a huge amount of muscle mass.

That hurts good. Yeah, yeah, so that's good. We need to get back there. We need to get back there. Size up the traps. But I do think that, so I think it's actually a natural cycle that you have to go through where everybody should put way too much energy. To learn what actually drives alpha.

And now I spend maybe 5% of my energy on it, but I get 80% of the benefit. Yep. And so, yeah, there's totally anybody who's living their life based on their eight sleep score and oh, I didn't sleep well and letting that dictate, their day. Yeah. That's bad. Dude, in, in 2013, I was so into the quantified self stuff.

I basically invented my own eight sleep. I took an accelerometer, hooked it to an Arduino, and strapped it to the edge of my bed, and it could track the movement of the bed. And then I would have that talk to the internet, put it in a spreadsheet and get like a sleep score, basically. This was before like sleep scores. And you had a, you had a thermometer that would dump a bucket of ice on the bed, you know, like.

I mean, I did actually have an internet connected coffee machine that would make. the coffee in the morning. So I'd literally wake up and smell the coffee. Wow. So you have a timer that's just like, okay, this is the optimal time to wake up, to start brewing the coffee, and then you smell the coffee, and then you wake up. It was ridiculous. Yeah.

Too much. There's definitely a point of diminishing returns. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, you can't just be doing the no alcohol thing. You got to enjoy. I guess a doll pairing on. I only, I will say this, 90% of the times that I drink now are when I'm podcasting. I only drink champagne.

I only drink champagne when I'm podcasting. Yeah, it's great. Oh, this is wild. Andi says, trust the process, and it's a screenshot of Squirtle saying, zero to one is insane because it appears to be one of the most legitimately dangerous texts with the potential to gigafry your brain, but it is exclusively read by literal turbo normies who unironically want to, like, build shit and basically get one-shotted by it.

Wow. The ayahuasca for the mind. Yeah, yeah, it's the ayahuasca meme. And then the meme is zero to one. The person's reading it and they're like, oh my God, competition is for losers, but they're missing the real message

that's going over their head, which is everyone in finance is dumb as rocks, I should build in fintech. Fascinating. Big post. There's a lot to digest. There's a lot to digest. We'd almost need it three hours to fully digested.

I mean, I always said this is interesting about Founders Fund because, like, you know, big stories around Palantir, SpaceX, and Anderrol. Like two of just, like, objectively, like, the coolest companies to point a camera at and just show what they're building. It's just, like, cool stuff. And that's where, like, the funds made a ton of returns.

But then there's also this story about fintech. PayPal, stripe, ramp, Bitcoin. Like, the fund has also been deeply involved in fintech, which is, like, the least sexy industry you could possibly build in. And so the fund just kind of goes back and forth and doesn't get boxed into this one thing. It's not a fintech fund, not a fintech fund, not a, deep tech bond. They just kind of do both every once in a while.

No, but, but yeah, it's funny because zero to one can be a tool where if you read it literally. Yep. And then take the exact opposite approach, you get something like jeans, right? Sure.

A friend of the podcast, Fio. Yeah. It's like, don't build, don't create a new restaurant in Manhattan. It's the most perfectly competitive market. All the profits will be competed away. Yep.

You know, even if you have something hot for a, second, there's a new hot thing the next month, and, and, and, you know, people will flood to that. And it's still worth doing things that are deeply competitive, right? Still worth, you know, content is deeply competitive. We shouldn't have started a podcast if we were just reading zero to one literally, right? Yeah. And so I think it's an extremely important text that should never, you know, never let any one

text rule your life, right? Yeah. Have you ever seen Peter's AMA on Reddit after he posted, after he published zero to one? He did an AMA and somebody asked him what's like great. Like great AMA. But somebody asked him what's the Straussian reading of zero to one? And he said, don't become an entrepreneur. Wow.

Just like, it's actually too hard. Be born into generation. Because he was looking at the sales copies. And he sold like millions and millions of these copies. It's like there cannot be millions of generational entrepreneur. just mathematically impossible. Yeah. And so like for the average viewer, for the average reader,

you should read that and just be like, yeah, that ain't me. Like I'm not built different like that. I'm not going to be able to pull it off. And so I should not do a startup necessarily. And a lot of the good takeaway from zero to one is understanding how important monopoly power is for raising money. And if you love a business and you're destined to build some business, actually understand, does this have monopoly power?

And if it doesn't, don't raise money. raise money. No, but here's the thing. Here's the way to read zero to one. Ten years ago, if you're reading zero to one and you really internalized it all, you would have gone and tried to find somebody who was already building a monopoly and you maybe would have joined Nvidia. And even if you joined as like a Lobby software engineer, you would become a multi, multi, multi millionaire. And so there's, that's the argument of why it's actually probably good that millions of copies were sold. Because even if you're not, Jensen Huang, you can still, be, you can still leverage that thought, that collection of thoughts into dramatic success.

Yeah, yeah. Massive gap between understanding that a business has monopoly power and creating a new business that has monopoly power. Huge difference. Like the investors can't create the business, but they can invest in them. Yeah, and it's interesting. So with this podcast, with this podcast to get meta, right, you and I are not going to go start the next monopoly chip manufacturing or design company, right?

but we do have a monopoly on John and Jordy, just hanging out. Exactly. And so that's why we're doing this podcast. Exactly. There's one of one. There's only one podcast in the world that's you and me talking, and it's technology brothers. Exactly. And we're the first podcast with an actual brand, maybe.

Allegedly. Some big podcasters have said that. Let's go to Chad Hurley, founder of a massively monopolistic organization, YouTube. You have benefited a lot from. I have. He says, Pickleball is a problem. propaganda program to fulfill meaningless lives. So aggressive.

Pickleball is the new like work life balance bait. You can just say the most aggressive thing about pickleball. Boom. 1K likes. No problem. You should just post it right now. If you're listening, post something, you know, incendiary about pickleball. Guaranteed banger.

Everyone hates pickleball right now. Pickleball really had like a rise and fall. Went through the whole hero's journey. Maybe it's coming back. I'll post something right now if you play. Pickle ball. unfollow me. Unfollow me.

That's great. Okay. Yeah, if you're listening, go repost George's latest post. Let's go to Nikita Beer. He says, the greatest contributor to global economic output is that hangovers get

worse as you age, disincentivizing you from having fun when your value to the economy is highest. I like that. That's a good take. That's a good, like, insight. It's, you know,

it's probably true. Yeah. I always think about this. Like, I went to college in Boston and one of the benefits of Boston as a college town. Obviously,

there's the network effects of like you have Harvard, MIT, all these great colleges around there. So like you're just bumping into other smart people all the time. But it's also really fucking cold. So when it's cold during the winter,

it's final season. You don't want to go outside. So you just go to the library. So you just hang out. Yeah. Whereas, you know, maybe if you're in a nice school,

like you're sunny, you just party all the time. And the hangover thing is kind of, like a riff on that. But what's what's your take? I don't really get how I find that if you drink really nice Dom Parryon, you don't really get that hung over. So maybe it's a skill issue here. Maybe it's a skill issue. Let's go to Gary Tan. Gary says the problem with systematizing a career or the search for excellence is that the masterpieces have never been done before. So there's no map to get there. And he posts a very long screen.

shot of a book saying, why is it so hard to achieve ambitious objectives, to get a handle on the problem, think about all the things that are possible. As an example, consider all possible images. Everything you've ever seen falls into this class. It's hard to find a Mona Lisa or a starry night. This is interesting, and I like this post because it's true, but it also kind of flies in the face of like YC's request for startups. It feels like YC in some ways is a path and that when they do a request for startups, they're

creating more of a path and then demo day is a path. And so I think Gary Tan like implicitly feels that and needs to push back on that. And I've always said that, that, you know, the request for startups is important because it's important that we get a bunch of young founders working in those industries, but that the next great power law company that comes out of YC might not actually be responding to one of those requests for startups. It might just be a weird thing like sleep on an air mattress, right? That was not going to be on any request for startups ever.

And yet it brought out. Yeah. So, but so, so this was pulled from a book that, that I actually recommend. I recommended that we do a deep dev on. It says why greatness cannot be planned. And the whole just because so, so the counterpoint to what you just said is, if greatness cannot be planned, why C should put out like a big list of things like here's problems that we think are interesting, come work on these. And the book basically says that people will come and work on those problems.

and then they'll realize like, oh, this thing is actually, this other thing is more interesting to me. I'm going to go work on that. Exactly. And then some just monstrous company will come out of that or some fantastic company. Totally. And so the big thesis of the book is so many of the greatest achievements and things, companies, products, whatever, have been created were not perfectly planned.

Like Steve Jobs didn't plan to build the iPhone. Yep. Right. That's a great example. Yet it was transformative and one of the greatest, probably the greatest, consumer product of all time. Yeah. And I would, I would, to bring it back to the show and add some relevancy, like, we sort

of wanted to do a podcast together for a long time, but everything, you know, some, some element of randomness in terms of how it came together and the format and the different, and the timing and all that stuff. If we had, when we first met had just been fixated on, oh, we need to make a podcast together. Maybe it wouldn't have turned into anything that meaningful. Yep. Yeah. I mean, you go back, Airbnb was a different company. I'm pretty sure. I mean, Zuck was building a dating site. YouTube was a dating site. Everything was a dating site. Yeah. So if you want to build something great, make a dating app.

But yeah, and then don't be afraid to pivot. And YC's always been extremely friendly to pivots mid session. Like you can just walk into an office hours and be like, we're doing something completely different. And there's no like hate. It's amazing. It's like such a welcoming environment. Yeah, I have one. I have a YC company that I backed that the founders have pivoted. so many times that the and there's only a handful investors it's me one other person and yc yeah and they just said they don't even be cc the investor list it's just like everybody's like cc and the last time the last time one uh the other investor besides me and yc replied back and they said please do not pivot again just simply this is a really big company and like potentially a really big company in a big industry just make it big yeah and so that was the advice that like this company probably needed.

That's great. Yeah, companies are really hard. When things get hard, don't just pivot. You pivot because you've realized that some element of your thesis was critically wrong. And you need to do something else.

But sometimes you just need to not pivot and just force it, basically. This is great from Signal. He says, if I were CEO today, I would have a weekly email sent out to every single person in the company asking them, what did you get done this week? The AI then generates the response,

then aggregates the responses, presents it in a readable format. To me, day morning, it should automatically do a diff from week to week and tell me anything is changing, accelerating, not going well. This is the what did you get done agent, cutting out trash middle management. I would also hire people coaches instead of managers. I like this. Fun little, you know, project you could build with AI in like a weekend and deploy. I wonder if people would hate it or learn to game it, but generally seems good.

I mean, status reports are terrible, meetings are awful, but there's something valuable about reflecting on your work product. Yeah, yeah. Especially if I was, quantify it. If I was listening to this show right now, I would go by what did you get done this week.com. And then, you know, build an app that's a Slack bot. Slack integration or email integration or whatever. What do you get done this week? People respond and then it tracks it week over week. There's a lot of products like that that people hate, but maybe if you simplified it dramatically,

it made it literally one text box that you have to fill out, you could, you could, you could, definitely build a business off of that. Could be good. Let's go to Ashwin Sharma. He says, this obsession with self-improvement is driving me nuts because the greatest thinkers

have already shown us that true success lies in being who you are already. G.K. Chesteron wrote, a tree doesn't try to become a better tree. It just grows according to its nature because there's no pretense, no concept.

Yeah, and this is, to make it meta again, you like wearing tuxedos, drinking champagne and talking. Yeah. So don't try to fight against that. Just do that as a career. Yeah, exactly. It's that simple. It's that simple, folks. Oh, I love this. Growing Daniel says,

I'm selling ayahuasca insurance to early stage VCs. This is great. This is a banger. This is so real. Yeah, it's one of the biggest threats in Silicon Valley right now. And, you know, we have this conspiracy theory that there's a VC out there that is trying, actively trying to get founders to do iowaska to gain leverage over them. Yeah, to destroy them. And so stay safe out there, folks. If you're listening, be very careful. No, the thesis is really that she's a foreign agent.

Yeah. And she is trying to sabotage our young entrepreneurs from building, you know, incredible companies like SpaceX and things of that nature. And she's trying to get all the talented young entrepreneurs she can find to, to, um, there are cheaper ways to do, or there are more expensive ways to do it. That's one of the cheaper ways I could think of running that op.

Go to Peru. Go to prove. Open your mind. Yeah. Open your mind. So if you get caught in that situation, remember, ayahuasca vaccine doesn't exist yet, but coming soon. If you can't take that, just microdose, microdose, microdose.

Fake it out. Oh, yeah, I took the ayahuasca, throw half out, spin it out, put stuff in your cheek. Yeah, it's so crazy. I see the demon. The demon's amazing. Yeah. But I still want to build. I still want to create shareholder value.

Interesting. I guess I'm really aligned. Mog your demons. Well, it's funny because he's obviously ship hosting, but there are certain situations where executives have to get life insurance because they're so critical to the business that if they were to pass away, a lot of things would get fucked up. And so I think, yeah, ayahuasca insurance for seed funds. Jackson Dahl, friend of the podcast, he's been on before. He says, USBC is one of the best technology outcomes. Very grateful for it and the people and events and regulations that got us here.

I love it. I agree. But did you know that there are like 25 different types of USBC. It's so frustrating. Really? Yeah. So that cable, that's a USBC cable right there. It's great. It's universal. It plugs in anywhere, but they have different data rates and different rates of charging. And so if you want to transfer a file across USBC, you need a, there's USBC 3.1, 3.2. There's Thunderbolt 4, which has the same port, but is much faster. And so really, if you're buying USBC cables, you have to buy the absolute top tier so that you never get stuck with, oh, I got a slow cable or it's not charging my laptop fast enough. Well, yeah. And since Apple bricked all of our phones with 18.1 and destroyed the battery life, we'll have to upgrade. But if you're not in a position to upgrade, go get your Thunderbolt for this release. So gift guide, get people. Don't just put your whole family and your whole friends all on USBC.

devices and cables, get them the fastest Thunderbolt 4 cables. I own cordbag.com. I really want to make the tech bro's cord bag because every bro just needs like a cord bag that comes stocked with everything when you're traveling. And so you just need like, you know, all of the fastest cables guaranteed to work anywhere, whether you're not a plane or an hotel. Amon basically has that at the front desk, right? Yeah.

They'll send up a cord bag. Yeah, exactly. So you're basically democratizing the cord bag. Exactly, the cord bag. It's a big thing. Anu says, why is no one talking about the Dig reboot? And Anu adds us and says TechBroad Pod history returns. And I love that.

Thank you for sending this in. Thank you, Anu. Thank you, Anu. Thank you, for tagging us. Yeah, this is fascinating. Do you know the story of Dig? It was Reddit like product. Kevin Ruse, right?

Yeah. Yeah, Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose. Yeah, Kevin Ruse is at the New York Times. Kevin Rose is the founder of Dig made money in Silicon Valley very early went to Google Ventures, came a venture capitalist,

has been very successful he's buddy with Tim Ferriss. I bought ads with Dig probably like seven, eight years ago and it was crazy cheap. It was good. I think it was because a lot of the traffic

was bought traffic. But yeah, it was like, you know, for 10 grand, we'll get you in front of 2 million people type thing. Interesting. Well, I'm excited to see what happens.

I wonder if, The reason we're not talking about it is like when Enron comes back, everybody's like, wow, Enron's back and they're rebooting the brand. When Dig says they're coming back online, people are like, I don't really miss Dig. It's sort of died sort of a whimper, not a explosion. This needs to be founder led. If it's Kevin Rose, I would listen to him talk to Tim Ferriss about this. I would see a viral clip. I would see him posting about, hey, I bought, I bought Dig back.

and I'm turning it around, that's cool. Or if it's like a Vivek, Ramoswami, buying BuzzFeed, like that's its own interesting storyline. Yeah. I need to know who's buying this, and I want to hear their story. Here's a conspiracy theory. So Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, tinfoil hat.

Tinfoil hats on. Kevin Rose, big watch enthusiast. Oh, really? Didn't know that. He started, he was also co-founder of Hodinky, I believe. Really? Yeah. No way.

Yeah. So he started Hodenkie, a big watch media company marketplace. Okay. And so there's a podcast. Since we don't know what dig is yet, there's a possibility that Kevin saw us talking about watches in the tech world. And he says, hmm, maybe there's a way I can run back dig and leaning into the themes of technology brothers, you know, creating a forum for. So yeah, you should. Yeah, I'm going to text him after the show and get the real story.

So until we know, we will definitely break the news. Yes. Even if it's two days late on what dig actually is. The funniest thing is that there's a video here and this might explain it, but I didn't watch it. And so like we might have all our answers right here. Like what if this video opens? It's just like Kevin explaining it. What if it's like a very right leaning Reddit?

Oh my God. That could actually probably grip right now. It's just another true social. God damn it. Okay. Rune says, Chalet is doing some all time coping right now. This is in reference to Francois Cholet, who is at Google and has since left and has

been a little bit more nuanced in his AGI takes. he runs the Ark Prize, which is an eval for AI models, where you have to do these little puzzles. They're very easy for kids or humans, but LLMs really struggle with them because they're novel and they can't be memorized. And over the course of 2024, I believe the Ark Prize completion rate went from, I believe, 33% to about 50-something percent. And a human can do like 100% of these. And so it's always been an interesting benchmark. He says that if an AI model can defeat Ark Prize, they will get, I think, a million dollars for whoever builds the modeler does it. So funny how little money that is in the context of AI right now.

Yeah, it should be way more. You win, you built the world's best model. You win a million dollars. And they're like, sir, we literally raise. Yeah, that's like what our PMs make every month. Yeah. But, you know, there's a lot of independent hackers out there on Kaggle doing, and Kagle doing like, you know, tests. stuff. But every time a new foundation model comes out, people throw it an arc because it's literally

just like wired up, right? And there's an online version and there's an offline version where you have to upload your model. And then there's another version where you get access to the internet essentially. But you can kind of cheat that. So there's a question about can you do it and how big is the box that you're running, all these different things. But basically, I try to dig into like what Rune was getting at specifically because I believe this was in response to. Well, hasn't he just bailed out to threads? No, I don't know. I think he's still on X. Francois Chalet.

I thought he kind of... No, no, I see him on X all the time. I think the thing is that he bailed on Google and he went and started a new company. Oh, sorry. And so he started a new company, but this week, OpenAI launched ChatGPT 401 Pro, and it's like the best model at reasoning. And it should be, and I mean, let's just be clear, like, it's incredibly impactful. Like, it's a great product. People are going to use it a ton.

But I think Francois-Rle is like, well, it's just be clear. it doesn't do my little trick. It can't do this one thing. And I had this joke. It was like, what if the AGI future is like, AGI can like completely dominate humans, but it keeps us in cages because in case it ever runs into an arc prize.

It's this little puzzle that only humans can do, but AGI can do everything else. It can like build weapons and completely subjugate us and like, you know, throw us in prison. But it keeps us in cages because what if it runs into this weird puzzle where you have to match the colors up? but um yeah sorry i was confusing him with the guy oh yeah yeah yeah no you're thinking gary marcus no no no who's a guy at facebook yeah gary marcus oh no no oh you're thinking of uh yeah on yeah yeah

yeah yeah he's always the guy who bailed and then comes back the gigacoper yeah yeah yeah so i don't know i'm i'm a fan of chalet i i like him a lot and i like the i like that he teamed up with the zapier the zapier guys uh Wade foster to do that prize it's a very interesting model it's a very interesting problem. And you can go check it out at arccries.com. I believe that's the URL. Just Google it. And you can do them for yourself.

Just make sure you don't do them on mobile because the first time I did it on mobile, it wasn't rendering properly. So it was like this grid. You have to match these two grids. And the grid wasn't rendering right. So it was like off. And I was like, this is the hardest puzzle I've ever seen. And then I did it in like a browser.

I was like, okay, this makes way more sense because it's like a four by four grid and a four by four grid. Anyway, moving on. Hey. Let's do a promoted post. I got to stop you there. We got a promoted post from Tag Hoyer Formula One. They have a Formula One chronograph meets Oracle Red Bull Racing is along for the ride with

Red Bull Racing for the last race of 2024. World Tempest takes a closer look at the show-stopping new chronograph that is daring and dynamic in their latest review. You can go to tag.h.r slash F1 Chrono World and check out this incredible timepiece. We spent a lot of time on the show talking about the Holy Trinity, AP, Pat Tech, Vasheron, and some of these other watchmakers. But tag is a great option. It's a great option.

If you're wearing an Apple Watch and you want to stack on one or two other watches, maybe an Apple Watch, a Woop Band, and then you want to add something else, tag could be a great option there. This is a beautiful looking piece. And we thank them for supporting Formula. one. Without sponsors, we would not get to witness fantastic racing most weekends of the year. Fantastic. Oh, this is a great post from Ben Kohler, our vice president here at Technology Brothers. He says, took home silver in the Jiu-Jitsu World League finals SoCal GI competition in San Diego this

weekend. I was disappointed not to get the gold, but it was a great experience, and I will be back next year for the W. There we go. So you've got to watch this video. It's insane. Ben, Ben literally puts a man to sleep. It's so crazy. It's kind of crazy to watch. And he's not normally a guy that ends up in second place, but every once, it's really about his narrative arc. He had to get second place once in order to bounce back.

Revenge. Revenge. Revenge. Yeah. And yeah, the guy's an absolute dog. We wouldn't be able to do this show without him. And congratulations on the Silver. And, you know, maybe we do it, Technology Brothers.

meet up when he goes back to reclaim gold. Let's make it happen. Let's go to Michael Dell. Michael Dell says, Dell's revenues during our first 16 years, $6 million, $33 million, $67 million, $159 million. I got to hit the gong. You got to hit the gong every time.

159 million, $258 million, $338 million. It's so hard. $2 billion, $2.9 billion, $3.5.3 billion, $5.3.3 billion, $7.8 billion, $12. point three billion, 18.2 billion, 25 billion. By the end,

he's just bragging. It's such a flex. What an absolute dog. What an absolute dog. And so if you're a pre-seed company right now, just understand that this is the bar. Imagine first year six million, second year 33,

third year 67, fourth year 159. That's such a good four-year run. Yeah, a lot of founders will put in their projections. You know, we hope to get to a, a nine figure run rate by year eight.

He's like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to get to a few billion. Oh, so you're the first employee and you just vested your four-year vest? Like, what's the company doing? Well, we went from zero to $150 million in revenue. An absolute dog. And I think, so his son has like a pretty cool, like, hardware company in the, I think, Thrivebacked, that's based in, in Texas. right now.

Yeah. That's building power banks and integrating into the grid. Oh, that's right. Yeah. That's another one to watch. 16 years to 25 billion. Insane. Big shoes to fill.

Let's go to Bayes Lord. Bays says, there is no antimimetics division. Yeah. Well, explain Google's product and marketing teams. Have you read this book? Which book?

There's a book called, There is no antimemetics division. No, what? There's an entire book on it. I don't know if it's a, if it's been, I think it's been printed into a book, but it's like one of these like arcane PDFs, like, you know, like websites out there. Very interesting. Sure, Will has a copy.

I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah, they, that's a hilarious blast because, yeah, Google. Google's basically never had to be, they've never had to be good at marketing. No. Because they have the greatest distribution channel of all time. Yep. And you see it with AI.

I'm still using their LLM pretty frequently because I'll Google, like I just had to Google, Eric Prince. I had to remember his name, so I just searched Blackwater CEO. And I don't do that on ChatGPT because ChatGPT, you got to open it up, you got to click the button, you got to wait, it takes a second. But you put that in Google and no more ads anymore. It's not going to say, oh, you scroll down, click on some clickbait article to find the answer. The Gemini is just going to give you the answer right there. And it's like, it's not great, but it's not terrible.

And so I'm still using it. Yeah. Let's go to. Oh, this is good. Okay, yeah. So we got a whole thread here. This is a new segment of the show. We're doing threads now.

So we are going to start with the base. We have five quote tweets in a row, all from some of my favorite people, honestly. I love every single one of these posters. So this is going to be a beast. We're going to be on this for a couple of minutes. So it starts with Lucy Guo, the founder of passes, the founder of scale, the co-founder of Scale AI. Lucy says, it's mind-blowing to me how small the scene is.

it's the same faces globally from Art Basil to F1 to Paris Fashion Week to Ibiza to Amphar to Yacht Week to Grammys to the list can go on. She got 1.6K likes. Bangor. Like everyone is always at the same place, the same time

year round. Yeah, this is true. This is like the billionaire circuit. You're familiar with this? Of course. They actually pay people to move the yachts for them and they just fly in their yachts there and so there's a whole like okay you go on the circuit, you go to all different events and stuff.

But that's why it's so important to throw some wildcars in there. Where's the, you know, the Met? Where's the L.A. Phil? Where's the opera? Where's the ballet? You know, you got to throw in some old money events. This is a lot of new money stuff. Yeah, but those are, you know, you just

work them in to the circuit. I suppose. I suppose. And yeah, I mean, I think Lucy's post was written in a somewhat negative way because she's a builder and she's an entrepreneur and she probably goes there and she's like you guys have no purpose and like I'd rather be building my startup also great rage baiter I mean great rage baiter I mean great rage bait here great rage bait so good we love what you do um and uh but but yeah if you want to be in that scene it's great yeah it's actually like I like this with the tech kind of conference circuit totally to go to the

you know you we went to I went to Senro's event yeah it was with a group of people that were at hereticon yeah right I could have gone to the main street conference and seem like most of the same people. So I like it. I like, you know, it's better to see the same people and reinvest in those relationships and maybe mix in some new ones. You go to Sun Valley. You go to Up Front.

All the same thing. So let's move on to our first quote tweet. Antonio Garcia Martinez says, some aspire to wealth as the ticket to this world. Some aspire to wealth to never have their fates decided by people from this world ever again. Interesting. Bold. Bold.

And big. Yeah. And real. Yeah. I get that. Yeah. There's this sense that like the people who maybe spend all their time at Art Basel and F1 and Paris Fashion Week, like they might not have enough skin in the game. They might not be in the arena enough to make good decisions about your life.

So you have to build wealth so that you can avoid them choosing how you live your life with their products or their government decisions. Interesting. You can have a thousand Bitcoin and go to Peru and get one shoted by the demon. Don't do that. Okay. So, our third quote tweet, Zara Thrusra says, a surprising lesson of the last decade

was how little fuck you money seems to exist. It was breathtaking to watch billionaires, especially in Silicon Valley, genuflect in slavish subservience to the woke crusaders and enthusiastically provide vigorous fallatio for a decade. Things you never would think you'd say. on the air. Vigorous fallatio.

Here we go. Another banger. These are all banger. A thousand likes. A thousand likes. Another thousand likes. Everyone's just in this chain. Lucy is the backbone of the poster economy.

Really? Really. She started a whole conversation here. So yeah. Interesting that there's all these rich people and a lot of them didn't say anything, even though they might have been a little bit bothered. They weren't in the second category that Antonio's identifying. They were in the first category.

category. They wanted to just enjoy the world. They made their money and they were just going to go off to Art Basel and F1 and enjoy the fruits of their labors, but not really think too deeply about the shape of the world and the constructs. And so, you know, that seems shocking to Zarathustra. But then we have a fourth quote tweet from none other than Mark Andresen. He says, fuck you money is mainly a myth. First, if you're in business, you pick up more responsibilities along with more money. You're responsible for more people. Your actions have more consequences for others. Second, political power is much, much greater than financial power every day of the week. Very interesting. And you can see that, like, you know, Mark has obviously been going through a little

bit of a political evolution, but the decision to actually come out and support Trump was a big one because it's not just, you know, the, what are they, Andrews says, 10,000 employees, 100,000, It's bigger than DocuSign, right? But, you know, it's a very large organization. And he has a lot of people that could look at that and say, you know, maybe I don't want to work here anymore. And he still needs to hire the best people across the board. And then also all of the portfolio companies and everyone that works for the portfolio companies.

Like this has been a big thing with Peter is like, you know, for a lot of times, a lot of times it would be like some random company would raise money. It would be like Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. invested or Peters Teal Venture Capital Fund invested. And so all of a sudden your SEO as a new startup is just immediately like, hello, I'm associated with this person who is like overtly political. And so that has consequences. That has weight.

But we have to end with a fifth quote tweet from Sager and Jetty who says, an absolute dog. And he's posting, he's chiming in and said, I've been saying this for a long time. He posts a screenshot of one of his older tweets says the inverse FU money. scale. The higher you climb on the billionaire ladder, the more institutional entanglements you have. People can be worth billions, but muzzled because they run money or sit on boards, have to worry about shareholders, et cetera. It's really true. There aren't that many people with no bosses. This is why Founders Fund doesn't take board seats. Yeah. Generally doesn't. Yeah. Everyone has institutional entanglements, even at the time. Everybody's got a boss.

Exactly, because everyone wants to keep playing the game. No one, no one, there's no number. No one has a number. No one's like, oh yeah, once I get to this number, I will just retire and not care about anything. And that's why there's no fuck you money because the number is not the goal. The goal is the game. You want to keep playing the game, keep growing it.

And the growth is the number. Money is not happiness. It's the second derivative of money that is happiness. It's not the absolute amount of money you have. It's the rate of acceleration. Yep. No one likes getting a 10% raise every year. People want to see that they're making 10%, then 20%, then 30%, then 40%, that they're scaling.

Accelerate. Accelerate. So that's our first thread on the show. Let us know what you think. Let us know if it was too LinkedIn coded. Promoted post. Promoted post. I love the opportunity to jump in here, John.

We have from our friends at DuPont Registry a 2015 Ferrari-La Ferrari, finished in Roso Corsa, showing just 152 miles. Wow. Yeah, I don't know what the owner this was doing. They certainly weren't driving it. Limited to just 499 examples produced worldwide, this extremely rare low-mile car

has never been publicly offered for sale, making it an extraordinary opportunity for collectors and enthusiasts alike. Currently undergoing Kla-Sheesh and certification, this vehicle's authenticity and originality will be further solidified. So Ferrari has their Kla-Sheesh program that basically

does a deep analysis on the car. You have to send it to Ferrari. They'll do a deep analysis on the car, figure out, you know, they're doing things like making sure the motor has all the original parts and, you know, making sure the paint hasn't been changed and all these different things. And it's just a certification that typically will increase the value of the vehicle unless they, you know, they're not going to give a certification to something that's been,

you know, heavily modified or whatever. and so anyways fantastic example and if you buy this if you're in our audience and you buy this drive the hell out of it i'd like to see you put 10 000 miles a year on it you know really get your get your money's worth from this car and then uh you can park it in a museum someday you know it's fantastic do the gumball do the gum ball take it across country i really think i really think law i really think law ferrari's are like one of the best hard assets that you can buy right now because it is that in the Daytona SB3 are just so clearly that's going to be the iconic cars of this, you know, era.

Yeah. And I can't wait to own one myself. Holy Trinity car, right? I believe. P1. LaFerrari. 918. Yeah. Fantastic.

Beautiful. Not making any more of them. Certainly are not. Let's finish with Smoke Away. Says, O-1 is your old tech. Let that sink in. Interesting. take. I mean, the foundation model, yeah, it's still running GPT4, but obviously there's a lot of,

there's a lot of training that happens on top and a lot of UI stuff. I don't fully buy that, but it's interesting. What's interesting is that like, he's posting this in, uh, in response to the announce of like, O1 Pro and like the new models that can reason and whatnot, but we remember how crazy it was when those were like a leaked and announced. It was originally, uh, it had some crazy code name that the information leaked and everyone was like, oh, this is going to be insane. This is AGI. Because it was basically like self-play training.

So they would do kind of like what they did with AlphaGo and train the model. They like have it have a debate itself, have it reason with itself, test itself. And that's kind of what's happening when you interact with these reasoning models now where they think for a long time is because they're prompting multiple, multiple times. So I don't know exactly how much I buy it, but it is interesting that, like, yes, we're not at GPT5. No one scaled up the cluster yet. What happens when we get to an order of magnitude bigger? So why hasn't anybody built software now that allows you to get to make models go PVP?

Like, I want to put Claude and OpenAI models in a ring and just make them fight to the death, right, over and over and over. Like, I feel like you could, it's one thing to go put them up against some of these. you know, just like general testing mechanisms, but I want, I care about PVP, right? I mean, it's kind of MLU and some of the testing grounds, like some of the evals are essentially that. No, I know, but they're going against the eval. They're going against the eval. They're going against the eval. I want them to go head to head.

Yeah, yeah. I want them to like, like, only one of you can leave the room after this. You have to commit to Puku if you, if you, if you, uh. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting how little has leaked about the next training run. Like, we don't even know at this point. like how the build out is because I think we're in like the custom data center era where like it has to be bespoke it has to be hundreds of thousands of GPUs there's been some news from xAI about they're you know building cold powered yeah yeah they're building the biggest data center for this

and they're going to do the largest training run but that's still in the works and we don't really have like a concrete timeline of like okay when is a gpt 5 level model dropping that's truly an order magnitude more energy went into it because everyone's saying you know scaling is everything Scale, scale, scale, scale, scales is all you need. Energy is a constraint. And so we could be in for something really, really crazy, but no one knows that the IQ jump is going to be 50 points or five points. Yeah.

Like, everyone knows it's going to be better. And everyone knows scale is important, really. But no one can, I haven't seen any really strong predictions for what an order magnitude of energy gets you in terms of IQ right now. Like, it's a lot of speculation. So we'll be covering it here, folks. Live. brothers. Thanks for watching. Subscribe.