TBPN - OpenAI–Microsoft Restructure, Winning Formula for AI Founders, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

(00:20) - Timeline Reactions (02:39) - OpenAI & Microsoft's For-Profit Restructure (19:07) - Anthropic CEO Weighs in on Future of AI (22:35) - GPT-5 Data Analysis (25:04) - Timeline Reactions (01:00:34) - AI Startup Founder's Winning Formula (01:31:41) - Timeline Reactions (01:40:02) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:56:10) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.ai/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. We are in an undisclosed location, so we will be a little bit quieter with the intro, but it is Friday. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. We will be back in the Ultradrome soon. Don't worry.

But today we are still emotionally in the Temple of Technology, the Fortures of Finance, the capital, capital. And we need to kick it off with the level 100 performative tech bro final boss, Peter Diamandis. Are you familiar with Diamandis? An absolute legend in the game. Yeah. What is it? Singularity. Podcaster.

Yeah. I mean, he has a podcast. He's done a number of businesses. X Prize, I believe, Moonshot stuff. But, man, was he early to the singularity game? Yeah. Like, he was talking about that with the Kurzweil era. Yeah.

And, but the whole reason he's getting called a performative tech bro final boss is because, of course, he is vibe coding on replit, over Starlink, flying himself. up to the Bay Area. The only thing he missed was sleeping on an eight sleep. Sleeping on an eight sleep. He should have had the eight sleep in there. And then he should have had infinite jest printed out. He could have had some type of homegrown, like autonomous flying setup, actually flying the plane. He should have had a ramp card in display.

That's right. Time is money. Save both. He used corporate cards, bill payments, accounting a whole lot more all in one plane. Go to ramp.com. A lot more. We are, of course, on the road. We've been on the road a lot this week.

We hate being on the road. It's not our favorite thing. It's very, very rough. We know it changed the show. Hopefully we will get back in the swing of things and kind of bring you the show that you know and love. But we're doing our best. Of course, this stream's made possible. We stream one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are.

And for our gracious hosts, we're able to loan us a whiteboard where we were able to piece together exactly what's going on in tech. We're going to take you through the stories today. open AI. Calling this out. Someone's going to spend the next trying to decide for three hours trying to put it together. What does it mean?

They will understand the real nature of tech, how it all connected. This is the current state of tech, right? I like it because there are some connections there like Amazon Anthropic. That red line is real. The Hamptons in Patech. Also real.

There's a connection there. Wilmanitis, we'll leave it up to the viewer. exercise for the viewer to see how he's involved. Uh, you didn't get fig on there. We should have brought, we should have been doing all this on a fig jam. Uh, you should go to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

So the actual big story is that open AI, the nonprofit is going to control its for profit arm and own equity valued at $100 billion. I believe this will make it the most highly valued nonprofit or like the most profitable nonprofit in world history, the best funded. nonprofit, right? And it is remarkable to think about what that will be like. People have kind of written off the nonprofit as like, it's going away. Like it is not going away. Like it will continue to be a thing. It's incredibly back. It's it's incredibly back, funded forever essentially to do a ton of interesting things. I think we're going to see

interesting things about come out of that organization. But anyway, the news, this is from the journal and we'll and we'll break this down. But Nick has it summarized here. I'll be converted into a Delaware public benefit corporation. Open AI nonprofit retains control of the new public benefit corporation. The nonprofit will hold $100 billion plus of equity in the public benefit corporation. The PBC structure enables raising large amounts of capital for the mission, which obviously there are you doing. They're still aligned with ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity.

That's good. It also aligned with like your shareholders. just a normal C Corp, I know they're a public benefit corporation, but if you're just normal C Corp, like shareholders are humans, let's make sure it benefits the shareholders. That will, by definition, benefit humanity. But specifically, they're saying all of humanity, even if you're not a shareholder, AGI should still benefit you, which is a noble cost. Open AI and Microsoft signed a non-binding MOU for the next phase of the partnership. A definitive agreement is still being negotiated. Open AI says it's engaging in California. Remember, as it stands, Microsoft gets

20% of Open AI's revenue and for the big man something like that satia something like that which it felt like a stretch to me that that that would be sustainable given the uh looming costs that uh open ai needs to incur obviously they're ramping revenue really quickly yeah but you have broadcom to pay you have Oracle to pay you have all these but it is like revenue you know it's not the same as being like you're crazy big bill yeah yeah it's enough figure out exactly but yeah but still it's a lot of you know the there's these companies are under margin pressure already and and wasn't the original deal that it would it would be 20% up until they paid a hundred billion dollars or

something like that there was something where like it eventually ran its course I believe it had an ending and I think that's what's justifying a lot of the underwriting because the lesson from Google the lesson from Facebook the lesson from you know, Microsoft and the rest of the hyperscalers was that you needed your DCF models to be 20 or 30 years into the future, right? And so if you just, if you, if you didn't take into account the third decade of growth, you were undervaluing. It was originally reported 20% through 2030.

Okay. Which still is. I don't think a lot of investors are scared by thinking about value in 2035. I think they're fine with that now. I think they're saying like, yeah, I have a 10 year fund and realistically all the best venture investments, SpaceX is still hanging out in the portfolio 20 years later. They got continuation funds. I think that a lot of investors are actually fine to say, yeah, this company is going to be

like, you know, maybe a financial mess for 10 years. But if I'm super confident it's going to be a money printing machine in 20, I'll do the deal all day. Yeah. I think that's the wrap down. It's still insane to think that the deal ever got done in the first place. The Microsoft deal? Yeah, if you were, if if you talked to a founder and they were like, yeah, I was

running a fundraise and like, you know, ended up taking this deal. I got the valuation I wanted, but ultimately it gave up 20% of revenue. Off the top too. So not 20% of like profits, but like a 20% tax on gross revenue. Yeah. Just for the just still 2030. Yeah. And the founder's like, well, it doesn't matter that much because I'm in this for like 20 years.

You're right. Most. Most. very few do not get the pass on that yeah very few businesses very few businesses in the world especially like highly competitive you know categories uh can sustain a 20 percent tax off the top yep um and still really produce any profits or or be i mean functioning at all but obviously i'll push you off what if your what if your business is uh mobile games in the app store you've Effect, even bang Apple with 20%, 30% tax off the top for everything.

There's a bunch of examples. Like, Nvidia could do this too, right? And they sort of are through that the kind of deal. I don't know. I mean, I agree with you. Like it is a crazy, crazy deal. Unprecedented in a million ways. But everything about the entire Open AI story is unprecedented.

Unprecedented to start as a nonprofit. Unprecedented to have, who are the co-founders? Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. Like you have like seven different co-founders who have, a bunch of co-founders have gone. off and start direct competitors. That doesn't happen very often. Usually people are like, I got bags in the category. I'm going to go work on something else. Yeah. There's a bunch of weird stuff. Anyway, speaking of the nature of the industry and all the competitors, Sergei has a bit

of a joke post here saying, Dario, Claude will take your job, but it will feel ashamed. Elon, look at this anime girl. She says the N-word and is almost naked. Zuck, superintelligence will help people watch more Instagram rails. Demis, Gemini recently calculated more precisely the motion of the heavens. Sam, excited to announce that OpenAI, Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement with OpenAI LP and OAI Corporation and has signed MOUs with OpenAI Opco LLC and OpenAI Global LLC. It really sums up. It really sums up. And Sergei... They're all cooking. Yeah, they are all cooking. And they're all telling like slightly different stories. These are all real corporate entities, by the way.

And it's, yeah, it's worth noting. It feels like Satya has definitely slow played the renegotiation of this deal. Like this has been, they've been trying to make this happen for a long time. It was reported a while back that Satya wasn't, wasn't budging. Yeah, but it's good to see that the company is able to start moving forward. Rohan Paul on what's actually happening with this Open AI and Microsoft deal. Microsoft and Open AI struck a truce to extend their partnership, clearing a major obstacle to opening AI shift into a for-profit structure.

The new agreement is non-binding right now, but it sets the final stage for final terms to be hammered out soon. In the proposed setup, Microsoft and the Open AI nonprofit would each start with about 30% of the new company, with the rest going to employees and investors. The new company is the for-profit entity Open AI is trying to create as part of its restructuring. Open AI plans to keep nonprofit control and give that nonprofit an endowment stake valued at $100 billion. Wow.

Which would be huge on paper, but the timeline to turn it into usable grants is unclear, although with the secondary markets, you imagine that that has to be like, they're going to make payroll next quarter. Like they'd be able to sell some $100 billion and do a whole bunch of grants. California and Delaware attorneys are generally reviewing the plan. And Open AI has told its investors it aims to finish the restructure by the end of the year or risk losing its $19 billion in funding. It's very funny that like for all this drama, all the books that will be written, the movies, like the end results like, okay, there's like three parties around the table how about we go equal like Microsoft gets a third

nonprofit gets a third employees investors get the third like there's really like three key counterparties in the deal and there it seems like if this is what happens they kind of just all walked away being like yeah three equally three key parties on the on the effectively on the cap table but then you also have the California being like hey don't mess this conversion up you know you're a nonprofit yeah California and Delaware attorneys general are reviewing the plan and open AI has told its investors it aims to be talking about like the end result of like who gets what in the

like there's a bunch of poker chips on the table right now and there's a bunch of there's parties around there that all need to agree before anything moves forward right yeah and it's just interesting that like what they wound up with was like let's go equal like let's split it equally yeah if you play this out though what happens What is the, what do you think the nonprofit looks like 10 years from now, Open AI continues to execute very well, becomes a multi-trillion dollar, you know, tech giant. Yep. And you have a third of the company owned by this nonprofit. What do you think?

I know. How would happen, buddy? How would you allocate? What, what happens when you get a ton of missionary, AI, genius scientists who don't want to optimize for profits? They're just experimenting, working on whatever. ideas they want, there's no pressure because they don't have a user base, they don't have an app store, they're not competing with anyone, they just get to go do pure research. What do you think will happen? So they're going to create a bang or consumer app will happen for sure.

Oh, another one. Nonprofit is going to launch another company and they convert to for profit again. Well, I don't know. I mean, you could, you could last time. The question is like, okay, what is the real relationship between the nonprofit and and opening I like the private, you know, for profit arm. Yeah. Because there's a world where they're just like, okay, we're just going to keep a lot of research and R&D happening at the nonprofit layer. Yeah. And then like try to just be the ones that commercialize every time. Even though you would have to argue if it's like this. Yeah. I think I think over time like the two entities will actually separate and drift apart in we're hard to drift apart when we're you know, they're sitting on on 30% of the cap table. Yeah. I don't know. That's not bad crazy. Like there are VCs. funds that own 30% of a company when it goes public and well yeah they'll drift a like the VC fund is like off doing some other stuff right investing in competitors sometimes like just kind of looking for the next thing getting out of the position slowly right is selling into the public markets so i don't know um of course i'm kind of joking and it's like a little bit of a hot

to think that like there will be something but truly like if you if you want okay another interesting twist is like right now there is a there is a war for talent in AI and there's a war for for specifically for missionary talent right the true believers the folks who are just going to go grind and and explore and not be whole not be beholden to you know optimizing the like next quarters and may use right so if you're open AI and you don't want your direct competitors telling that story hey were the missionary AI lab creating a talent vacuum for that type of that type of that archetype of researcher with the nonprofit saying oh oh yeah what like we're a

nonprofit like you can do whatever you want you can just do research and we'll match the salary that Anthropics paying you or or is Oz Ozak made an offer yeah we'll match it just for you to come and hang out here can they give those researchers exposure to the private company shares here just being like yeah all of our directors that the non nonprofit, like they get paid out a bonus based on, you know, there's plenty of histories of nonprofits being abused, right? Yeah.

Like nonprofit. People get paid like high salaries. You usually talk like stock in a different company. Well, yeah, but it could just be like, you know, every year the stock appreciates some amount and they sell off a position to be able to pay. You would assume that they're selling down the position in paying cash. It's such such a strange position. It's extremely.

And this is why when I talk to founders that are like, I think more and more people have kind of like standardized around just like start your company on Stripe Atlas. Yep. Don't try to read Delaware Seacorp. Yeah, Delaware Seacorp on Stripe Atlas. Even the post Elon like that thing. Like that has not made its way down to startups. Yeah. Most startups are just. And it'll just see. But every, I mean, I have a friend of mine that I grew up with that that that has. That has. had a breakout consumer product. He botched the cap table, didn't set up vesting, and it ended up costing him like millions of dollars. He would effectively be retired in his 30s if he had not, if he had done this correctly. And that's why it's like it's so key to get the foundation, the legal structure of a company

set up properly. And so the fact that you had Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam, Allman, they all set up this, entity. And in the fullness of time, it's like they botched. it right like it was it was a maybe a good idea at the time to try to create a non-profit for a i research but um just got kind of messier and messier and messier and messier and messier and messier and messier and uh every single you know person involved is probably thinking i wish we just set it up as a yeah as a ccorp from the beginning yeah completely agree good take the

yeah this idea of like you know like the folks who are on the founding team are not dumb they're like the smartest people in Silicon Valley basically. So maybe they were like overthinking it or like too smart and being like let's create an even more complex structure. The other the flip side of like the steel man on like what happened is if you play it back and you go back to like 2015 you say like okay. Yeah they raised how they raised a lot of money and at the time AI was maybe too like there there wasn't an immediate commercial opportunity. And so it's very possible they wouldn't have been able to raise like that that. Even if they raised, I think they might have been able to raise the money. But then my question is like, what happens in like 2017 when your share price is kind of stagnating? You still haven't made revenue and everyone and the meme in Silicon Valley is like, oh yeah, like Sam raised a mega round, a pre product market fit. Like that company is not really doing anything.

When are they going to ship? Right. Instead it was just like, oh yeah, like they have a research organization and they're like continuing to do cool like little projects here and there and like, oh, they're. They got the, they got a robotic arm to solve a Rubik's Q. We're like, oh, they won a chess or Dota or like, whatever they did. And so I bet, I bet the vibes were better throughout that. It's really hard to see corp to keep, because everyone's looking at the for a decade.

Yeah. When you're flat. And then it's like, yeah, yeah. I mean, we've seen this with so many other companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars pre-product launch. And it's really hard to get out finally. So I don't know. The counterfactual is fascinating. I wonder if it would have.

how it would have played out it's tricky yeah anyway yeah it's just interesting that almost every person around the table probably feels like they would have benefited from a more simple traditional structure i think you're right yeah and i think sam's even said that been like yeah we kind of overthought this one and like it would have been better just to come in clean um but you know it worked out anyway more or less and like we we got the yeah honestly opening eye is the best example of like if you have true product market fit you can botch so many things and so still be wildly successful. Great take. Anyway, automate compliance managed risk and prove trust continuously with Vanta.com. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your

security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first use by managing a complex program. Duolingo, Snowflake, Intercom, GitHub, Ramp, all of our favorites. So I think we covered most of this. We can go through a little bit of the Wall Street journals coverage. The Primigen, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, is putting Dario from Anthropics claims about AI progress in the truth zone. He said, we are 28 months into six months from AI taking your jobs, four months into 24 months until cursor is obsolete, and six months into six months until AI writes 90% of your code, part two, the codening. So exactly six months ago, this is the report from Futurism.

The CEO of Anthropics said that in six months, AI would be writing 90% of code. And so I think people, when Dario said this, people interpreted it as, okay, well, 90% of the software engineering jobs are going away. And that certainly hasn't happened. I mean, we're not seeing like fantastic job numbers broadly in the economy. There are like rumblings about software engineers not getting hired as fast as they should. New grad struggling. New grad struggling.

But I mean, we're talking about like what a few percentage points, if anything. Certainly not 90% of software engineers are out of a job. Yeah. But simultaneously we're seeing folks like Brian Armstrong at Coinbase highlight that what is it, 40% of their code is written by AI now. There's a lot more code being written. There are great companies. Yeah.

are internally not focused on hiring new people. Yes. And yet they're still ramping revenue. Yeah. We talked about this part, right? Headcount. Yep. With Palantier head count is like relatively flat.

Yeah, revenues way up. Couple thousand people. Clarna, right? Head count is way down. Yeah, revenues way up. A couple thousand people. And so you have these companies that are doing well, growing really fast and then not that needing to add a lot of people.

You know, you could just make an argument that that's like willpower, right? Or the other side of it is like, you know, they're getting new efficiency. And yeah, there's, it's an interesting, it's hard to tell what's driven by increased efficiency due to AI versus just CEOs deciding like we're all going to do more. Yeah. And you don't, I'm not giving you. We're not giving you budget to like for this new product you want to launch, have two people launch it. We're not going to give you, you know, 20 people and, and, you know, some massive budget. Yeah, it is, it is, like, if you had told me, like, artificial AGI is real, we'll pass the Turing test.

AI will be able to write code at the level of a mid-tier software engineer, maybe not total top-tier software engineer, but like, it will be. And in billions, yeah, you'll one shot up a calendar app and billions of dollars will be spent on this, like, every month. I would have said like, okay, well, like, I would expect that like my, my, my, the app from United Airlines is less buggy. And like, I haven't experienced that. I haven't, I haven't, I haven't been like walking around the internet using different websites and tooling and being like, oh, wow, they did a complete rewrite on this. It's so much faster or like, oh, wow, there's no bugs in this thing or that thing.

It's like, it's still very incremental. Like, we really do have a lot more software to write because I do believe that the code's being written and like the product, like internally, every company is writing more code and doing more things, but the amount of, you have to do it to improve your experience is crazy. There's a lot of CEOs and CTOs and engineers that have come out and said 90% of my code is written by AI, but they're still like, it's not like they suddenly only need to work for an hour a day. Yeah, it's not like, it's just like, okay, we just need to do. It's hard, if not more. Yeah, we just need to do more. Yep, totally. Really. Well, if you're writing a lot of code with AI,

you need code review for the age of That's right. Graphite. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Teams like RAMP, Figma, Asana, cursor, Shopify. Speaking of them. We have a post from Aura Karazian, came on the show earlier this week. He has the data on GPP5.

He says GPD5 was good actually. After a launch that led Sam Altman to apologize, the latest ramp data shows OpenAI is growing business adoption faster than any other model company tracked by RampTM AI index. It's also not just tech manufacturing is adopting AI faster than any other sector and it's why the consensus figures on AI adoption are probably wrong or the census figures which we talked about with ARRA and he says read to read his full an analysis on substack you can go to econlab.substack.com to subscribe to our Karazian and you should of course go to tbpn.substack.com and subscribe to our newsletter. So the ramp

AI index, the model adoption rate, the share of U.S. businesses with paid subscriptions to AI models jumped significantly in, what is it? This is probably March was opening eyes, really crazy fast takeoff. And then in July, the data's up again. This doesn't read purely as, this reads more as like people understanding 03 and reasoning models. and starting to pay. Also just more monetization tiers, probably, more ways to pay maybe. But 44% of U.S. businesses

now have paid subscriptions to AI models, platforms, or tools across OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI, Google, and Deepseek. And the Google number seems low since I would imagine that some of those Gemini subscriptions maybe get rolled in to Google apps, like, because Gemini just shows up in the Google apps billing already.

We'd have to talk to our and dig in more. But I mean, it's sure like the nearest piece of the data is that opening eyes on an absolute tear here in the B2B context, which is interesting. Yeah. And it's not like we're not seeing like, oh, GPT five sucked. So it's falling off cliff.

It's like no, like the models are getting better. It's just like we talked about this with the iPhone. Like if it was a war, if it was worse, they probably wouldn't release it. They just stick with the best. But anyway, this is crazy. Yeah, this is another pro chat GPT's impact and open AI. I guess I could put this loosely in the bowl case, but yeah.

So Isaac says, I met someone this morning who's number one source of traffic is chat GPT supplement brand and has figured out how to get chat GPT to recommend the brand whenever someone asks about a specific problem. Crazy. That is crazy. I feel like I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this, but it's just taken a while for not only tragedy to get adopted to the point where it's statistically significant, but then also people to figure out how to make it happen. I mean, you live the podcast boom firsthand,

and how long was it like podcasts had existed for years before we saw like AG1 become like the podcast supplement brand, right? Yeah. And there were a few. other brands where it was like this their whole growth strategy was more sigmatic do you remember that four sigmatic for sure that's a great example uh i yeah my friends uh my friends had a podcast and uh i was in college at the time they were quite a bit older and when i met them they had one sponsor which was like some random coffee company that just like happened that the founder happened to be in the audience

just reached out yeah was like hey let me like hey so so They started the podcast without any real plans to monetize or anything like that. Yeah. And at the time, it still felt like I was late to podcasting because there was a bunch of podcasts that. I mean, you could say the same thing about direct to consumer advertising on, on, on like, meta platforms. Yeah. Like the four-sigmatic, I heard, do we hear the numbers together? Someone was talking and saying that, so.

The TSC era was such crazy because it was like. Every, you know, a number of brands realize like, hey, you can buy like really cheap, really effective advertising on Instagram on Instagram and meta platforms broadly. And then. And that allows you to scale. A number of brands. Super quickly. Yeah. It was literally like if you had a decent product and you had funding, you could like, you know, scale overnight.

And so many people realize that. Yeah. So many people realize the opportunity and just flooded it and just peered away. And it just. It's a supply grew. but demand for the ad inventory. Yeah. I think in the mushroom coffee category, there are three or four different brands doing

$100 million plus in sales. Maybe like $300 million plus in sales. Like there are some really, really big. Yeah, there's mudwater. Mudwater, foursigmatic. There's two others that I haven't even heard of. And you just every time you hear it. I heard it crazy.

Yeah, they went from zero to $200 million in five years. I heard a crazy story about a somebody interning at one of the mushroom coffee companies. Leaving. You want to getting and out and generate this company was already a nine figure revenue mark. The intern left and started another one and then out grew the original. That's insane.

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of financial. I do wonder what those companies look like in five, 10 years. I mean, we've seen when we talk to the Ridge guys like like top line growth is not the end all be all of D to C success. Like you have to generate cash flow matters and this takes time. And so when you hear one of those like crazy revenue ramps, especially in DTC, you should always ask this even in AI, but in D2C, you really need to understand, okay, is there,

is this just the founders good fundraising and they're losing money on every transaction and they're just going to keep this flywheel going going because they've figured out how to make their revenue steeper than everyone else and though they keep getting funded or is there something really special about the aeronomic. I always used to laugh. Something about unprofitable SaaS. I mean, it's like, how are you going to sell software and lose money? It's funny, but like selling physical goods, it's like, wait, you sold this mattress.

It costs you money to sell this match to make it sell this mattress. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously there's plenty of cases of great companies that, that were deeply, you know, unprofitable for a long time. but something about D to C companies, you know, running, running in the red massively. Yeah. It's like, come on, you should, you know, at least. I mean, it's like lemonade stand stuff.

It's like as a kid, you learn like buy the lemons, buy the sugar, get the pitcher, and then add it all up, multiply it by two. That's how much you're charging. It's like cost-based pricing is like, you know, the most instinctual economic force in the world that like a child can understand. And yet we justify all these different things. And sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it does make sense to lose money on SaaS for a little bit. If you're building a, you know, some sort of network, some sort of locked in thing, some sort of high margin opportunity down the road. Anyway, if you're growing your business, you need to analyze some data, get on Julius.

What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. They're loved by two million users and trusted individuals. Well, Princeton, BCG and Zapier. equally important we need to talk about profound in the context of chat chdbd traffic yeah i was i would not be surprised at the company that is talking about here uh that's getting all of their traffic from chat gpte is using profound yeah pri profan com it's in the back there you go i put it up on the

which millions of consumers who are using ai to discover your products and brands get your brand mentioned in chat chpt yeah whether you're doing whether it's consumer product that you're selling or enterprise software you need to get on we kind of of like we kind of took the conversation in like an almost like negative situation talking about like the long-term durability of these businesses but I mean really this is crazy because it's organic yeah exactly it's like SEO is sort of like faded in terms of it's important to grow it's relevancy if you can if you can be the first brand to go and find the the correct strategy on Instagram and dominate like that's that's such a huge

advantage and it's the same thing with like how did Airbnb get to scale quickly old school SEO right they just had landing pages for every single uh you know rental homes in Tulsa right yeah and when you google it you go really good at SEO uh there's a whole bunch of other um drew house in at drop box he was like we we copy pasted the entire like web 2.0 growth handbook which was like give 10 get 10 PayPal model of like you know incentive based viral growth and with Dropbox it'd be like I give you five gigs of storage I get five gigs of storage we add it all up and it just went super viral and they he said something like all of the all of the viral like the viral growth it's like you can go way deeper

with that metaphor which is basically like as an internet SaaS company you need to be sneezing on as many people as possible, which I think is hilarious. So he's like, it's like, you know, to get the viral coefficient up, you need to be sneezing a lot and not washing your hands. What does that mean in the Dropbox context? Well, it means when any, whenever someone clicks a Dropbox link, there's a little prompt, hey, do you want to sign up? Hey, put your email, let's just grab your email before you view this PDF.

Oh, oh, hello sign. Yeah, we acquired them. Let's bring them in. And oh, if you want to sign a document, like set up a Dropbox account, right? It's like, these are sneezing all over the internet is what he'd like refer here it as I thought it was brilliant. Yeah. Angelist has done this well with the roll-up vehicle product right? Every time, every time, you know, somebody gets invited to a roll-up vehicle, they create an Angelus account, they maybe make their first investment and Angelus can say,

like, hey, do you want to invest in this fund? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do this? Do you want to read through this journal article at all? Do you think we covered it? I think we covered most of this. Basically, the journal's asking about Open AIS funding challenges, We ran through this yesterday and basically my conclusion was $300 billion to Oracle is a staggering amount of money, but it does, it is in line with what it takes to build all the data center capacity for an Amazon.com, a Facebook and Instagram like meta platforms internal, a Google.com, not the cloud businesses. And so I can see, I can imagine the spreadsheet that they used to develop the model. The question is, will the growth continue? I think they're on a fantastic growth curve. It feels like this will, that they will wind up paying a lot of this.

And that's certainly what the market's pricing in based on the pop and the Oracle stock. It's not like Wall Street looked at the Oracle backlog and was like, oh that's fake this is bearish we need to sell the stock no they were like yeah that money's coming it 300 billion's coming in over the next over the next half decade or something so like let's say uh i think that would i think i think you can i think you can think that it may not materialize but still think it's a good investment in the short term sure but i mean they missed like purely yeah yeah but purely momentum maybe that's uh i think that's kind of odd it's kind like a circular logic.

Because, I mean, then you get into like, you could say that about like anything. Like, like, yeah, well, like they, yeah, I would say like a bunch of people, a bunch of people are like, wow. Yeah. Oracle is going to generate hundreds of billions of revenue from AI. I want to own this stock. And then I'm just saying there's a category of people that are going to say like, okay, this stock's going to run.

Yeah. At least in the short term, but maybe it's 1999. And, you know, we're, we're going to see. some type of you know correction here so we will we will find out we'll see I mean well we'll probably have more data on I mean as soon as Oracle's next quarter prints will see exactly how much they're pulling down exactly how much they're building open AI in the NAS in the last nine months has committed to spend around 60 billion dollars a year for computing from Oracle and this will

really I mean if this pencil is out like this will drive a radical transformation in Oracle's business like you we saw the the chart in the journal where Their core business, like everything that they've built up so far is basically expected to decline over the next five years as they switch to Pure cloud computing like they want to be a hypercalular OCA Eric newcomer this morning said being a 48 year old database company suddenly grow by more than the size of Salesforce over the course of a trading day is one of those occurrences that makes you wonder about the moment we're in It's at once incredible and cany and terrifying like your grandfather during a family Reunion gathering everyone around tosses

off his walker and doing parkour. Good, very, very funny bit. Eric Newcomer also was bearish on, he was bearish on Open AI at around 30, or at least like very skeptical. Yeah, maybe a year or two ago. He wrote kind of the bear case. But I think this is a very, very fair.

Yeah. Open AI loses billions of dollars a year has told investors it is on pace to make 13 billion in revenue this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. Less than three years since the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAIs, tying its fate to a belief that companies and consumers will increase their spending on artificial intelligence at explosive rates for years to come. And I do wonder, like, you have to believe in the agent of commerce story to really see another like 10x in reference. revenue. How do they get to a, I mean, the project, the projection that people are under rating open ad, I believe is 200 billion in revenue in like 2030. And, and it's hard to imagine,

like, am I going to pay $2,000? It's hard to exist. Is everyone going to pay to my soundboard? Would I pay? Yeah. Yeah, I want to hit the air horns. Yeah. Yeah, I think you got to, I don't, yeah, you got them out of users. Yeah, you got to just got a users. You can't get all on $20 and $200 month plans. Maybe the two thousand dollar, I know, like the, the example that I always given like the average American if they don't have a show they like on your streaming platform they will just cancel it yeah yeah like I mean like they're like sorry I don't care they just are having upgraded haven't I mean people are just starting to experience like the reasoning models um I don't know like I if the if the if the if the paid plan stick around like

it could be they could get a lot more people it could ever especially if it's if it goes through your business if you're expensing it if like you know how much or how much how much how much money is spent on like email subscriptions across yeah it'll be interesting an interesting pomp is like do you think that Netflix or uh open i i will have more subscription revenue in 2030 i would say open i by mile yeah and you think that's because people will pay to have this like all powerful assistant that can yeah i mean I guess I the only the only question is just like is there a better way to monetize like can you get $20 or $200 of value out of someone by just handling their purchases and just doing the

agent of commerce thing yeah you're not an open AI is not uh open AI is completely aware that they're driving a ton of economic activity right so it's double in the company they're like i'm no happy that you're making millions of dollars from our product yeah yeah exactly how exactly did you yeah like you want to keep this relationship going let's get cut and that's super valuable that's what that's how that's how that's how meta generates so much money and Google to the scale of like internet commerce and taking a cut of all of internet commerce is extremely extremely this is an extremely huge pool of capital to draw from it's a huge it's a

massive Thanksgiving plate to eat off of right and so opening eye deals that came to light in the past week have added up have added more than 400 billion dollars to the market value of two companies, Chip Designer Broadcom and Cloud Provider Oracle. They also put Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison in striking distance of becoming the world's richest person. Oracle's stock market value jumped over $240 billion on Wednesday after the company revealed a giant backlog of computing orders. Most of that is derived from a roughly 300 billion five-year computing deal with OpenAI.

Well, if you are generating media, you got to go to fall. dot AI, generative media platform for developers, the world's first, the world's best generative image video and audio models all in one place, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Don't get caught writing a $300 billion check to Larry Allison, just going to fall. Not today. Adobe, Shopify, Canva, Cora, and many more are on. And you should be there too. Um, did we want to tap through this, uh, D.D was highlighting. Yeah, this was an interesting story.

It's so crazy to look back at these like incredibly strategic acquisitions from, from, you know, a couple, two, two decades, 2008. So in 2008, Apple acquired Palo Alto semi fantastic name really ahead of the curve. If anything, if anything, they were, they, they created the trend. That me conduct a company of Palo Alto. Really, yeah. The silicon company of Palo Alto. It's funny is there's also Palo Alto networks and so I wonder if Palo Alto semi was directly inspired.

They're like, oh well like we're in Palo Alto and we're doing something similar. Anyway, you want to actually like this formatting. They've just Palo Alto semi Palo Alto network more than the blank of blank. So you'd just be New York browsers? The New York browsers. It sounds like a sports team. The Palo Alto semiconductors. The Palo Alto networks.

Yeah, the Palo Alto networks are we should just read. We should just rename our C-Corp to Hollywood Content, Inc. But anyway, with it back, D.D. says few people know about Apple's acquisition of Palo Alto Semi in 2008, arguably the highest RY acquisition in tech history. The $270 million price for 150 engineers laid the foundation for all the Apple silicon chips you see today that have generated over $500 billion in value to Apple. And anyways, he's highlighting an article from 2008. an Apple spokesman said Apple has agreed to buy boutique micro processor design company called PA semi the company which is known for its design of sophisticated low power chips could spell a new feature for Apple's flagship iPhone and possibly iPod products as well these these kind of acquisitions have created the set of circumstances that allow CEOs to justify these like on like absolutely insane because when you get an acquisition right the return is can be as good as a seed to unicorn, you know, venture investment.

Yep. And so, but when you think about like the Instagram acquisition, the YouTube acquisition, Palo Alto Semi, right, these were different. I just feel like there is an alternative scenario where they don't, they don't buy P.A. semi instead, they're just like poaching and hiring 150 people. And it takes them like three years to get there, but they eventually wind up doing it. But maybe there's like important IP. I don't know.

I wonder what do you think $278 million is in today's startup economy? Like if you go back to 2008, $278 million feels like a blockbuster acquisition to me. This is totally. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. But is that is that a $10 billion, $10 billion acquisition? $2 billion acquisition? Yeah.

It's funny that like MNA has like actually out. stripped like inflation well 100% when you look at scale AI right is a 20 almost 20 billion dollar deal for half the company yeah and so I so I so I wonder like we have we really had a hundred X increase in in valuations basically this makes me want to go dig into Apple's recent acquisitions because remember on the earnings call Tim Cook said hey yeah we're actually acquiring a company like every few weeks like we've done basically one a month this entire year Yeah.

And everyone's been like, oh, it's boring. Like, who cares? Like, these, they're not doing, they're not buying anthropic or they're not buying perplexity for $10 billion. But if they have, if they have a NAPA semi in the, in the portfolio right now, and we just haven't I clocked it, like, that's going to be amazing. Yeah. So biggest M&A, I'm on, on Gemini, biggest M&A of the, of 2008.

2008 was HP acquires electronic data systems. okay there's the biggest 13 billion dollar deal like a huge merger of math companies oracle acquires BEA systems uh which was a business software company i'm not familiar with love i love business software me too 6.7 billion uh google acquired double click for 3.1 billion that was the huge acquisition yeah which in hindsight like you know it became the background of incredible incredible at words yeah um and uh business objects was acquired by SAP. I like business objects. That's a good name. No, make. Yeah. It's like, we don't know how to name companies like this anymore. That's so good. So the business company. There was, yeah, a ton of like

multi-billion dollar M&A that year. But it does feel like if Apple were to acquire, make a super strategic acquisition today. I mean, they were, who knows how real like the perplexity rumors were, right? They were, you know, Apple was under pressure to make an AI acquisition, but it didn't. feel like Apple would ever get to the point where they would buy perplexity for 18 billion or whatever they wanted out of it. It was odd for it was like when you look at an application layer company. They really don't buy a lot of applications. I mean, they bought Shazam, I believe, but a lot of times they're, what they're buying

are these underlying hardcore teams that are going to create the foundation of the next hardware wave for them. Like in the lead up to the Vision Pro, they acquired, I mean, you know, you know, you know, you someone who sold a company to them that went into their VR portfolio, correct? Like that is the Apple playbook is we have a vision we're going to do VR or our augmented reality in a decade or we're going to do car or we're going to do custom silicon. And so let's start hiring, acquiring little investments here and there here and there and here and there. They're not just going to go out and be

like we're trying to buy Waymo or like we're trying to buy the best asset. They're kind of the opportunity when they bought beats for $1.3 billion. Bates was doing like $1.4 billion of revenue. Sure, fair. Trailing 12 months. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Again, it was a very, you know, so running through the B-Day semi-acquisition, D.D. has the story. PA semi-specialized in power-efficient chips with power PC chips that delivered 300% more performance per watt than Intel Xion at the time, which I believe was their server chip, founded by the late Dan Doberplu.

DEC Alpha and Strongarm Legend. In 2003, the team had expertise in low power architecture that Intel couldn't match. The acquisition gave Apple the dream team that would create the A4 chip in 2010, launching Apple Silicon Dominance. Key engineers like Jim Keller, G. Williams III, and Johnny Serugi architected the A series that powers two plus billion devices today, crushing Qualcomm's monopoly. This philosophy evolved into the M1's, 20 plus hour battery life that's powering this laptop right here.

You get 20 hours out of that bad boy? I'm plugged in right now. I'm not risking it while we're on the stream, but I think we could maybe get 20, 20 hours. If I was, you know, low, low dim screen brightness and maybe not connected to the Wi-Fi and maybe just in a text editor with dark background the whole time. And it also had a 3.5X faster performance at Intel.

One third the power. The M line of chips today powers Macs, iPads, and Vision Pro. Without PA semi, there may never have been an iPhone processor independence, iPad dominance, no Apple Silicon Macs. The small investment, a series A round, a series B round today has generated 500 plus billion in value strategic acquisitions like this can make the break, make or break the future of a business. And if you, what else? Turbo puffer. It's on the schizzo. We puffing. We're puffing.

Search everybody. serverless vector and full-tech search built from first principles on object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely extremely scalable pretty much used by every cursing net company we've been able to find there's a bunch of logos that they have that are absolutely crazy that they don't even they're not even listing on the website so a lot more to come from uh turbopuffer in the near future but for now get on it uh did you want to go through this post by ajni midhad in recent yeah i thought this was I thought this was a couple things.

You could read into this. So many V, he says, many VC firms are being asked by their LPs, how they so utterly miss the entire 20 to 25 cohort of frontier AI startups that are now category winners. Worse, they're being asked the same by NextGen founders. I've never seen so many traditional investors become obsolete so fast. It was like, if you think about, if you think back like the 2020, 2020, through 2025, you had ZERP where just every category was going crazy. And then you had like, like, FinTech was super hot.

Crypto was super hot. It was easy to get kind of like, if you were a generalist VC, a lot of generalists, like, decided I'm going to go just be a crypto investor. Yep. Or I'm going to focus really heavily on fintech. And then you also had the sort of American dynamism boom, which people were, were drawn to in different ways. And, and, and, and, and, and, and when you look back at, um, um, when you look back at when some of these leading AI companies were started. Yep. Uh, it really was like 20, 22 during like a time where if a lot of UCs were like trying to, you know, do like basically damage control on the, on their portfolios, right? They had funded a bunch of companies like at insane multiples. We started seeing, um, you know, a real kind of like correction in, in, um, uh, in venture and, and, and, uh, and, uh,

If you just weren't really didn't have your eye on the ball and weren't like seeing kind of the future You missed a lot of yeah and when I see when I think about the cohort of frontier AI startups Who do you put in that bucket in that cohort? 2020 to 2025 like you're a if you're a traditional investor that doesn't want to become obsolete What logos do you want on your portfolio page? Well, so that signal to the next generation of founders and LPs that you did not utterly miss the entire 2020 to 2025 cohort of frontier AI startups. Uh, put in that bucket.

First example that came to mind was like listen laps, right? Six billion dollar company now, uh, started in 2022. Uh, seems like, you know, seems very obvious in hindsight, but if in 2022, you had like, funded, you know, 15 fintech companies and we're trying to figure. out what was going to happen to them as interest rates were spiking you know spiking uh and and you were distracted by crypto you just like didn't you know you weren't there were people that were locked in on AI right the people that I the people that I that come to mind is like people like a lot of these companies right um that a lot of the platform funds like I mean obviously uh on

Anjaneh at Andresen is there in a lot of these companies, but they're multi-stage, right? So it didn't matter. You didn't have to catch them at Series A or Seed, although they caught plenty. And then the other thing is like if you're not in, if you're a platform VC and you weren't in any of the winning foundation models. Yeah. Like what were you doing? So POSLA has a fantastic story around early Open AI.

Thrive has a fantastic story. around early Open AI. Then there was that first like pre like right around the right around the moment chat GPT happened. I remember there was a big round and a lot of investors got in there and it was around it was in the tens of billions and it was a crazy valuation to kind of come out of the gate with there was already this Microsoft deal. It was a complex thing.

You had to take a ton of risk on the nonprofit for profit conversion. But yeah, there was there would be clear there was plenty of reasons not to do a percent open AI 100 percent not like whether it was pricing this structure there was a meme about the model the foundation model layer will commoditize right yeah and so if you fell for that meme you are not in and then there was all the like the application layer it's there's no value that there was a period where people fell for both me you felt her it was like a mid curve both of them and then you're sitting here you got no foundation model bets

No no application layer bets and and And you're like well even the new foundation models are too expensive I can't do those and then this company is just like a fat trying to fast follow that company They already broke out. Yeah, so I mean when I think about the the 2020 to 2025 cohort of frontier AI startups. Yeah, I think 11 labs fits in there I think mid journey no one got into I think I would put deep mind you you couldn't invest because that was at Google, but it's got to be be open AI anthropic or a few of the other major like like application layer companies that have done very well and if you're in those even if it was a growth round and you got in later if you at least built a position and have something going

on there it seems like you kind of check this box but it is it is an interesting it is an interesting question to phrase you got a you got to buy fifth a half sometimes that's right linear Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. I think all the breakout AI companies are already running on linear, and you should too.

Well, we have some news from Dylan Patel over at semi-analysis. Another giant leap, NVIDIA Rubin CPX specialized accelerator and rack inference pre-fell specialized GPU. Dylan says, NVIDIA has widened the gap for inference rack scale architecture yet again. Pre-fill specialized inference chips massively lower total cost to own per million input tokens on long context transformers. As usual, other AI chip upstarts will follow this with pre-fill specialized chips, but later.

And so yet another bullish take for NVIDIA. Everyone's competing. Following the AMD story has been interesting. Dylan's been pushing AMD to. uh, make some of the bugs get more serious about AI, really, uh, talk to the developer community,

engage with the developer community. And AMD was doing that, was seeing some, some positive, uh, some positive early signs of being taken more seriously. George Hots was on the team a little bit, uh, but, but his sense like pulled back and, you know, Jensen sees semi-analysis too and can see, oh, AMD's coming for my lunch.

I'm gonna step on the gas and it seems like yes. So, congratulations. to everyone over at nVIDIA for putting on a putting on an absolute clinic in in ratfield's says uh well he's quoting sam there's not a single person in the world who needs a two terabyte iphone 17 pro max jackfield says slaps car roof this baby can fit so much other in it is that a thing like yeah if you look out if you look at like storage there's like a category called other And is it big? Is that just all the eye wear?

It usually is. It's a bad sign if I have other going on. I have one terabyte iPhone. And I don't have any other. I have no other. My phone is applications. And then a little bit further. I think I'm looking now.

I don't have system data. I don't have it anymore. But it used to be. Oh, a little throwback. It used to be a much bigger. Well, they've been a lot better. exposing where the data is actually stored. I think, you know, the 2 terabyte phone that feels like it's for someone who...

Mr. Beast, filming, you know, his entire... Yeah. And specifically, the new phones, 48 megapixel cameras, gen locks, you can run them for a long time, better heat management. So you can probably record for 10 hours if it's plugged in, no problem. And then you're saving all that footage. And you can record in raw video now. raw so that those are huge files so there is a world where if you're using this as a production

tool um i saw another take that was like the the iPhone 17 pro gets you ready for the two thousand dollar iPhone like the like mentally that's a that's a threshold that's a rubicon that everyone has to cross and and and and maxing it out and offering that level of performance and saying hey look we put pro on it like you have to be using this in a professional context yeah you should be expensing this and for someone like mr beast who says yeah i want to funny yeah i don't know funny yeah Every camera company just being like, where Apple's not, you know, threat. Like they're really, they're really, you know. He might be placing that with an iPhone soon.

I think the, watch out Sony. Watch out Sony. For sure. Tim Cook wants your lunch. He's cooking. He's cooking. Navine Rao is leaving Databricks, a little bit of a trade deal, $100 billion startup to build a next generation computer to shrink AI compute costs and Databricks plans to invest.

That's bullish. Databricks sits around $100 billion in just raised 1B. They're also at a $4 billion run rate. Congrats to Databricks, which we had our gong. The core problem for the AI industry is that large models are limited by memory bandwidth, interconnect latency, and power. So every token can be produced can be too expensive. A purpose-built computer may tackle those costs by bringing memory closer to compute,

wiring chips with faster links. Is this data center focused or something that would actually sit on your on your desktop. Does this, is this a George Hott's tiny box competitor? I'm not exactly sure, but, uh, congrats to Neveen Rao on the new gig. We will be following the story and monitoring the situation. Big move. We'll try to get them on.

When you tell those computers, make sure you're on numeralhq.com, Navine, uh, sales talks on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Uh, Otto van von Twiethmach. Wheatmark, auto. Says, uh, can you short an entire country? referring to albania albania is uh appointing an a i generated government minister to govern the country's finances apparently they've had so many issues with uh with with like uh corruption and fraud

they're just like let's just like make an ai yeah no one's gonna no one's gonna no one's gonna the top comment is uh their their alternative is now i don't i've never really uh i don't i don't think i know many albanians and i don't know atlps has some wild stories about going to albania i believe i don't want to docks too much but uh here's some here's some funny stories hopefully we can get them to share them on the show um um it's in uh the idea of like let's just use an a i for to to to like clean this up it's like that's who's prompting it like are they reliable well what if they're i mean miramaradi's albanian yeah about albanian american so they could get thinking machines it would be a pretty crazy story of uh

What's it called sovereign AI? It would be a sovereign AI story. I don't know. I don't know if they're claiming that it's that it's their national champion. Yeah, not yet. Albanian American. Yeah. Well, if someone in Albania needs to chat with someone about their tax return,

maybe they could get on Finn.a. I, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on you. John, I've been informed that back home in the studio, the whole team is clapping. with us during the during during during hopefully we could be audio mix in and everyone yeah everyone goes for it Gary Tan had a post a I start up founders tout

a winning formula no booze no sleep no fun but Gary Tan disagrees about the no fun though and this is from the Wall Street Journal San Francisco this is a vibe right now startup founding and we talked to a few of these folks one of these guys came on the show just at YC Demiday actually so fascinating And this was a second, this was clearly like a story that was inspired by that previous story of that, that founder who said that the vibes 996, no run hard, lift heavy, Mary early, that whole, that whole viral quote. This is probably like downstream coverage of that. But in San Francisco, startup founder Marty Kausus was at the office on Sunday. Where else would he be?

Kousis, 28 years old, recently posted on LinkedIn that he put in three. 92 hour weeks in a row. He went on vacation once, he said, but flew home early because he was too stressed about work. His goal is to build a $10 billion company in 10 years. The motive isn't purely financial. There are easier ways to make money. It isn't part of a social mission either. We built customer support software. It's not like this grand vision that we're saving the world somehow. He compared his pursuit to a board game, one he wants to win. I could be a programmer working at a big tech company, he said, but that doesn't sound cool. Instead, he He raised $51 million for Pylon on AI startup he co-founded.

Congrats. I was going for that. Yeah, I was just reflecting on this, this whole vibe and the coverage of this vibe and thinking about when I got to Silicon Valley and what was similar and what was different. And so you didn't have a PR person working over coverage. That was your mistake. John, I know you only raised like 17 grand in your first round. Raised $17,000.

And there was no concept. of going to the office because the office was my bedroom and my co-founder lived in the same bedroom as me. So we had two beds in the same room and we would wake up and go sit at the same desk next to another. That's like a real lock-in because you don't even have a private life. There's nothing. Nothing. It's purely like there was one local bar that we went to once in Sunnyvale because there was nothing to do.

But we would go outside and we'd throw the phone. football. Big skin. Do the pigskin. We would go outside and get some sun and throw the football back and forth and then go back inside and just program. And my, and my day was literally like wake up at noon and because you don't have any calls. Wake up at noon, program until 4 a.m. fall asleep, do the same thing the next day,

seven days a week. And there was no, there was no alternative. And there's other, like, we are also in this weird. I mean, also I wasn't 28. I was 21 at the time. It's funny because saying like I put in like three like obviously respect. to Marty, but saying I put it three 92 hour weeks is another way you could say, like, for the last three weeks, I've slept and ate and done normal human things for about 12 hours a day.

Yeah. And the other 12 hours I spent working. Yeah. It doesn't hit the same as three, you know. Yeah. It is, it is, it is wild. But I don't know. I mean, in general, like, if this is a, if this is, there was, there was a time in Silicon Valley.

so that you could raise enough money that you could just immediately be on like a party circuit. And like clearly this is a step in the right direction away from that. It's like actually taking business seriously. So hugely bullish overall. It's just funny like thinking about like like the money flowing like there were not that many companies that in 2012 that were raising like double digit millions. But then there weren't that many companies making money. Like we certainly weren't. We had no users.

So like who was going to fund us like $17,000 was the right amount of money to give us. And also, like it's not like we were being recruited by big tech. Like if I tried to get a job there, I'd be like, no. Capital markets were efficient. They were. They were. Like, I didn't deliver more than 17K. I wasn't that experienced.

Like I was just trying to, you know, like do something. Build, build a, it is a, it is a, you know, it's very real that like a lot of founders would benefit from like having their first fundraise be like $100,000, which is just enough for them to like hack for two years and not have to get a job. But the current the current state of the capital markets means that if you're like talented and charismatic and compelling and you have an interesting idea you can get at least a million probably well beyond that Yeah, yeah yeah Yeah, it was very obvious yeah for the most part when I if you could tell yeah I pretty much was guessing every time I was like let me guess your rounds closed yeah I mean yeah in in in 2012 like I think they were probably like

five or ten teams that like raise solid rounds coming out of like an 80 team batch like it was it was not it was not snap your fingers and the money shows up the I mean the hottest like most overheated round was done at like 60 and everyone was like this is a bubble this is insane there's one company most company was it was a company called the viral and they were actually really good at viral videos and they they were great at video production and they built an ad network and we're doing sort of like some programmatic ads. So it was more like an ad business than like I don't think they ever fully stuck the landing on like becoming like a major platform. Like I don't think that they IPOed or anything.

I know the founder's done quite well and has I think a number of businesses. But they launched a few like extremely great launch videos. I feel like they almost, you could almost go back and credit them with like creating the original launch video. You should look up V-I-R-O-O-L, like launch video on YouTube. V-I-R-O-L. By rule, yeah, by V-I-R-O-L. And the whole idea was like, they would get you to go viral. And so you'd pay them.

And then they did. It's still going. It's still cooking. Well, Alex DeBelov, I believe, is the founder. Great guy. So I'll have 50. LinkedIn says, I don't know, this company looks pretty dead. Okay.

Well, I mean. Oh, it's now called, I guess it was a, I mean, the founder, it was super young and I met him in college and it, you know, was just like he really was the type of person that you would want to fund at 60 because like he was making money in his dorm room like hand over fist too. Like had actually scaled the ad network and was like bringing in real revenue and real profits. It was just maybe like it wasn't necessarily going to turn into like, you know, ad words because he didn't have like a Google attached to the front of it. It's still like super impressive business, right? But they had worked with this video production company called Glass and Marker, which I wound up working with later, sort of like a precursor to sandwich video, a precursor to Jason Carmen production, and was particularly good at creating this like just super cinematic, like Hollywood level video production for like a launch video. And they put out a few that were really good. I remember that like SWAT team going in, pulling in like this like blue, this like blue goo.

that was like radioactive and it was like you got to get the formula to go viral uh it was great are you throwing them on there you throw it on there viral v i r o o o'l Alex debilov if you want to come on the show and tell us the full story uh hit me up uh the moon probably the moon well yeah they were they were going to the moon um yeah the the other funny thing that i like is this uh so like uh you know these teenagers that they interviewed, the brass ring is a trillion dollar company with a global user base to grab it. They rarely drink scoff at work life balance and are locked in a 24-7 competition to be or appear to be the most obsessed. There's a framing, there's a one framing which is like, I don't drink because like it's like I've done the research and it's a carcinogen

and it's bad for my health. There's another one which is like, I don't drink because it's like sacrificing because like I care about work. Like for me and my friends is like, like we would drink every drop of alcohol that we could afford it was just not that much so we had like three beers a month because like that was what we could afford and we and we did not it was like yeah like if we're going to Costco and getting like a huge box of ramen like it's gonna be a consideration if you take the 30 rack in the in the bag that's gonna hurt your burn rate when you're on 17,000 dollars for six months like an extra 30 bucks in beer is like material yeah it's it's a

serious yeah it was hacking Chipotle you know with a like double Yeah, double rice because it didn't add anything and then and then you're not being like yeah, throw a corona in there with my with my meal at Chagotilla. No way, but I used to go to I used to go to this is will be funny to you now, but I used to go to the first like 20 trips I took to Airwana. I didn't go in the building. Yeah. I would just bring jugs of water to fill up in this thing outside and I'd pull up with my car that had like 200,000 miles on it and just like just be like you know carrying these. huge jugs of water. Yeah. Fawn memories. Here's the tradeoff. Why would I go to drink at a bar if I can be building a company? I mean, it is the right tradeoff and it is the thing that you don't want to lose as the

capital markets loosen, right? This is such a this, all the people that are screenshoting this article. Why would I go drink at a bar if I could be building a company? That is a really. Yeah. It it there is a little bit of this that's like, uh, that's like, the whole, the whole question the Wall Street Journal is clearly asking here is like, I don't even like, I don't like bars and I don't like drinking, but this is still a funny quote. Yeah, yeah. No, I, I understand what you're

saying and I understand what people are, are screenshoting it about, but the, the, the interesting thing is like, if the money starts flowing in Silicon Valley, like the thing that you would definitely not want to lose is like the time in the office, like the time actually working. Like, That's the worst thing to lose. And so even if you have to justify it in this like, you know, psychological way. Yeah. It's good not to lose that. Yeah.

Because as soon as you actually go to the bar every night, like, yeah, definitely not building. Yeah. I was thinking, I was thinking like, like, I've always felt I had, you know, somewhat of a balanced life. Right. I mean, we, we, we, realistically, we work like 60 hours a week and that like we leave home at. Yeah. Somewhere around five. It's pretty balanced. Get home around 530. And then obviously working randomly on, on, you know, nights, weekends, et cetera. But I was thinking, you know, people say

like social life, work, like, you know, family, like pick two. And I realized recently, took me a while to realize, like how much I sacrificed like my like social life, right? Because I feel like I have a social life at work and and I'm lucky that a lot of the people obviously consider every person on our team a friend and and the people that I invest with are friends and the people that I work with are friends but yeah you do have to this this is just this culture of like sacrifice everything but the company works really well when you're 20 when you're when you're when you're in your early 20s mid 20s depending on when you I think we I think we found the ultimate killer in this article. Hasab Ula. He works out of Founders Inc., a waterfront campus in Fort Mason that provides

desks, a hardware lab, game room stage area for hatathons. He lives on one that we eat meal per day to save time and avoid cooking. Ula pays $700 a month to live at a former office building that was converted to a living and workspace for about 20 residents. The beds which are clustered in a common area are fully enclosed pods. He literally lives in the pod. with a privacy curtain similar to a train sleeper car. With the curtain shut, his pod gets pitch black, letting him sleep days after working all night. This guy is a killer. I'm betting on him.

Absolutely dog. This is not a larp. Seven dollars a month is so little to live on in San Francisco. I assume that's where this is. Founders Inc. Port Mason. He's living in the pod. He's locked in.

It is funny. It is funny to do. To get out to this guy. You would think he could maybe eat two meals if he didn't do Uber Eats and just walked to to grab some food but maybe too locked in too locked in yeah I think it's probably worth the trade off but yeah I mean this is still I got to put I got it I got to say like getting delivery is still an extreme luxury it's still a luxury back in back I would not when when when when I would not let I was like on a like once a

week like treat yourself to to Chipotle type of thing and otherwise it was like yeah there's we have like chicken breast and rice at home yeah no no no like you know I'm there my own head being like uh you know the quote the meme of like your your your your mom says you have you know x y z at home but that was like in my own head I'm like I have food in the fridge I'm not I'd be and I'd be guilty you know ordering ordering delivery no I remember one one one night I was up like really late working I boil some water in a in a pot to make ramen And I and I got sucked into a coding problem and I let the water boil and evaporate and it destroyed the pan. And it was like, that's our capax out the window.

It's devastating. It's devastating to depreciation. Like we were expecting to depreciate that asset over two years and now we have to buy another pan. Like what are we going to do? We don't have a pan. Pans are expensive. Money doesn't grow on trees where you know, we only have 17K is rough. Kausus, the guy, the original guy from Pylon, is on the Brian Johnson diet.

Okay. So, well, he's raised $51 million. And to be clear, I do think that like all of this is proportional. Like if your business has grown to the point where you can raise 10 million or 50 million, like you do not be, you do not need to be living in the pot. You don't need to pay yourself a reasonable wage. As soon as we raised real money and we're making real revenue, like we were in like decent apartments with cleaning. And it's amazing to feel like you have like a relatively, the lifestyle of like a corporate athlete or even just an injury level corporate athlete, but it still feels like a massive luxury. 100%.

Like my 800 square feet in a apartment yourself. When I first moved to LA, I had a apartment. My apartment, it was a two-bedroom apartment that I had a roommate. So I felt lucky to have my own room, but I had no windows in the room. because the window opened up to like a common area at eye level. So if I had my, if I didn't have like, I literally put cardboard up, if I didn't have cardboard up,

people would just see into my bedroom. I was like, and then- That's hilarious. Super dark, but this quote is hilarious. He said his ideal employee for a sales role at the startup is a quote unquote PhD, poor, hungry, and desperate. I like that. That's good.

Grinders. You're gonna get grinders. People that want to be on the, on the ups, that that risk yeah there should be a term for somebody who's fast until their next like steak sales dinner it's like they only eat oh during their closing i only eat what i'm closing like a real hunter on the this is a pretty crazy nico lockwuff 25 years old wants to build a trillion dollar company uh with the goal of replacing traditional insurance companies his father is a lawyer from the insurance company so he only hires people willing to work seven days

week, of his 40 plus employees, around 30 are X founders. That is a crazy stat just because, like, it really speaks to the, to the amount of founders that exist in the Bay Area now. Like, you could not, I mean, this happened, like, are, uh, are you familiar with the Y scraper instead of the sky skyscraper? There was, there was a, this is in maybe 2008, 2010. 10, there was one building where all of the YC companies lived after they graduated from Mountain View and went to San Francisco. They called it the Y scraper. And there was enough of, so you have stories about like Coinbase working right next to the Airbnb guys. I don't know if that's exactly right.

But like you could imagine a few different big companies coming. And it was like, if one company failed, it would just be like, okay, come over to this company. Like join forces. But you couldn't necessarily do that to the tune of 75%. of the workforce in the first 40, that's, that, that feels new and it feels like a, uh, uh, an example of how, uh, totally how much more popular entrepreneurship is these days. Um, it says he lives at the, uh, what he lives at the office, Lackwa said, who considers himself the most hardcore of his peers, employees share similar feelings, uh, though not a work

requirement, Lockwa said two thirds of our early employees got Corgi tattoos. That is hardcore. Wow. That's great. I have no tattoos. I've never been big into that world, but that is certainly a commitment. Hopefully you own the IP. So interesting.

This company, I'm on Niko's LinkedIn, and this is a stealth startup still? Well, he's not, but you're not, you're in the, you're getting tattooing. You're in the journal and you're tat it up. I think you're safe to come out of stealth. Yeah. Hopefully you have the IP locked up. I went through YC with a company called Pear that was a, I think it was like an app for you and your significant other. And so it was imagine a social network.

Basically all the features of IMessage, you know how now in I message you can like see all the photos that you've shared between you and one person. So I can pull up like our I message and I can go into that info panel and see like, here are all the links that Georgie sent. Here are all the images. I can send you little stickers and all sorts of different stuff. Pair was that for like a romantic couple. So you could like draw to each other had all these like fun little games and stuff. And pair wound up getting sued by pair networks. And they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Like we are a consumer dating like messaging app for like a husband and wife to share their life together. You're a networking company pair networks. Like you sell into data centers. Yeah. Like why are you suing us? And they were like, no, you're a technology company. We're a technology company. you have to change your name yeah and so they did and they became couple and it was like this huge

huge difficult thing so anyway the importance of getting your name ip lockdown before we got a get the tattoo we have an important uh yeah ad so center is in the in the youtube chat it says can we get founders podcasts on the board absolutely we didn't add you because this was so schizo yeah but you are really the godfather of podcasting created the cat I don't think we can see up there. I don't know. We'll have to see. We can't see you up there.

You have a ton of space to your left, though. So get down and keep going to the left past vibe coding and past Discord. To the left past Larry Ellison. That whole area, you got like three feet to work with over there. You can draw massive stuff. There we go. Here we go. Oh, yeah, this is good going downwards.

This is perfect. Okay. I'm seeing everything we're good lock what regrets getting his Columbia University degree he said because he wasn't solving societal problems in class I always want to do the maximally ambitious thing I can think of and make the biggest impact possible you on the Corgi co-founder said her life two centers around work which across the start-up scene is populated largely by men from a personal perspective I don't mind it as much but it does suck to see not

that many women in startups Jared Friedman partner Y Combinator said the work ethic and energy of San Francisco's young founders feels like a return to the early days of the internet. And I agree with this. This is a great take. When people slept under their desks at companies such as PayPal, I actually see it coming as a full circle moment. AI is probably 10x as big. Friedman said the tech. Yeah, I mean, it's very helpful if you have, you know, five to 10 other heavily funded companies in your category. And so capital is not really a constraint for anyone. Yeah. And it just comes down to. raw execution do we just conference center in right now on this yeah we got to ask him about i got to call center and and get him getting get him tell us about the sleeping under

your desk should i give him a call center uh let's see let's see if he's available i'm i'm calling him i'll put him up if he's available he's in the youtube chat so hopefully you can come on the show uh i totally emphasize hey how you doing you're live Did you need to call me? Yeah. Yeah, you're a lot. We saw you in the, we saw you in the chat. We got Matt Eliasson.

Happy Friday, yeah. We're doing a whole deep dive on this Wall Street Journal article about the young founders in San Francisco who are working 12 hours a day, six days a week. There's a bunch of examples. Yeah. So we wanted to ask you is hard work important. Or is it overrated? We'll go to an article about people working for time? No, no, working hard.

Really hard. And the article. Being focused on the job. The article is. framed is like is like are they working too hard a little bit or like is this a larp are they pretending and uh we wanted to go to the source and get the get the final answer they do with the other that's what jordy says that's what i said it's like put differently they're they're spending eight hours a day sleeping four hours a day you know what we're doing whatever they watch netflix

i guess i'm like what would i what would my what would our lives look like if we didn't have five kids it's crazy like and wives that we that we don't know yeah Oh, dearly. Sorry, but that's part-time, buddy. 9-96 is part-time. Breaking. David Senra has called it. Working 9-96 is considered part-time in the Founders Podcast world.

Did you guys ever, proven? I know you're into, like, bodybuilding. Did you ever read the education of a bodybuilder by Armstrong Shrek? No, I should. Sounds fantastic. So somebody posted like the Great Lock-in, and it's just like nine episodes of founders. Yeah. oh i saw that i think so one of them i think is Arnold so Arnold wrote two

autobiographies one we use a 70 which is fine yeah but the way more extreme one he wrote when he was 30 oh wow that's young so the first half of it is really like a hundred and 10 page biography right and then the second half is like his workout routine which like another hundred pages but uh basically he would you know people were just like yeah i work 12 hours a day he's like so what else did you do with all the fucking time it's like you're not well yeah that's awesome i i don't want to get kicked off stream but uh he tells us i'm going to do the pg version of this this is before he made it to america right yeah so he would go to like him and his other bodybuilder friends they'd go to like this forest out in austria or maybe in germany

and they would bring a bunch of women and they'd bring a bunch of like beer and food like schnitchel remember that it's schnitzel okay yeah and they would essentially like go out there they'd strip off their clothes and they would like lift like tree trunks and they'd swim in the uh lake or something in the lake and they were just essentially just work out all day uh i was like this guy's extra grinds out all day uh who's the who's the hardest working founder purely by hours working hours spent working on a single company that you've ever studied Elon probably because if the how Elon, thanks for reading and covering that episode. It was so good.

You guys did a good job on it. He was awesome. So they actually had a really interesting conversation recently with somebody, everybody knows who's been a founder for multiple decades. And he came up in the technology industry and he's been there forever. And I actually asked him that question. I was just like, who's the greatest like entrepreneur you ever dealt with or like you knew about? and he's like listen you might not like him you might not like working with him but it was undoubtedly without hesitation a young bill gates young bill that would be my other answer if it wasn't Elon

yeah shifts from the time they started Microsoft in that little strip that little um strip mall in albrook in new mexico yep the guy until he left the company like i don't think he did a single other thing do you think that bill gates hardcore uh founder mode and was defined by his ruthlessness with regard to deal making or actually the amount of hours he spent in the office like have you heard stories about early Microsoft being this 996 culture working 12 13 14 hours a day or was it strictly that when he went into every single negotiation he was willing to do anything to win so like he's not working for a bar saying he's not so I'll give

a pre-do okay um i'm the next episode i'm working on right now is about a young bill gates it's got the title has to be something with hardcore because sure the favorite word yeah so he would work 36 hours straight until he couldn't literally stay awake and then he just crash and sleep in office for like a few hours and pop back up that's hardcore that's i don't want to hear about oh i slept i got a good night's sleep but i'm a grinder but i got a great night's sleep last night Yeah. So like, let me, wait. Oh, you're a grinder. Let me see your sleep score. Better be in the single digits.

Better be in the single digits. Let me tell you one of the funniest stories about Bill Gates. So the best book written about him is it's called Hard Drive Bill Gates in the making of Microsoft Empire. So the same guys that wrote that essentially it's a biography, the first 35 years was like, then they, it was so successful. They wrote a follow-up. The follow-up book is not good. But there is a story in the follow-up book that is one of my favorite Bill Gates stories of all time. And the thing I would say about Bill Gates is like he has a ruthless competitive drive that would terrify people.

And so one of his main competitors is this French guy. I can't remember his name. They would like, you know, they were going to war over and over again. And they would go, the only time they'd interact, they'd find themselves at the same like computer conferences. And so he sees Bill Gates sitting on a folding chair in the corner. this computer conference alone looking at something. And remember, they're like head to head competitors. You know, now this guy is completely disappeared.

And so he goes over and he wants to say hi to Bill. And then he walks up to him and he realizes that Bill's in the corner by himself staring at a picture of the guy. Of his competitor. He's just a sass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Next time I see you, I'm going to make my profile picture when I call you, your phone's background. Remind you of me constantly.

You have a hard drive. The way I described him in the first episode I made about on episode like 48 long time of is that Bill Gates is a gangus con in a Mr. Rogers costume. Yeah. It's wild. There's a few ways to read that. That is, that's hardcore. That is that, that is hardcore.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for giving us more context on what it means to hardcore, be hardcore and grind in an entrepreneurship context. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Thanks for calling me and I'm just going to say publicly what I said to you guys yesterday after seeing what you did in New York Sanctrine. I'm super proud of you guys. Thank you. You're absolutely crushing it. Thank you.

don't I don't think you'd have any kind of lemon at all. I'm very curious who you take this for the next years. Thank you. We'll catch up soon. Love you. Bye. And always good. Back.

Even when you thought we weren't going to have a guest. They said we couldn't do it. They said it was impossible, but you just got two random mics in the conference room that you could have a guest on your show, but you can. Anyway, honestly, congrats to everyone who got mentioned in this article. I think there'll be some snarky takes. I think there'll be some supportive takes. Overall, it seems pretty high leverage to throw up a flag that says, hey, I'm working hard on my startup, get mentioned in the Wall Street Journal.

They probably had to take, what, half an hour off to do a little phone call for this, and overall probably pretty high leverage effort. So, congrats to all the young grinders in San Francisco working 80-hour weeks. Good luck to you all. And congrats on your first Wall Street Journal mention. Not many, hopefully. And if you want to help grow your startup, get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free.

Did you see that Polymarket is getting offers set up to 10 billion? Whoa! Polymarket is of course a sponsor. What is volume just going through the roof? Aren't most of Polymarkets metrics kind of public because you can just look at the chain, right? chain, right? Yeah, check the driving growth. That is I mean, you know, they're

about to be, they're about to be you know, launching their app in the US. Everything to date has been international. That is a big catalyst, yeah. So a lot going on. They're, they're obviously duking it out with Kelchie, but it's great to see Shane on an absolute run and put more

put more, put more, put more cash in the coffers, more opportunity to to build and scale the business. It's been a fantastic data source for us. Of course, Polymarket powers the ticker that you see on the show all three hours long every day. And it's been a source of insight for us through our entire partnership. So thank you to Polymarket for sponsoring us. Rehat has a funny screenshot says design is not just what it. And you can't really see it. This is no way this is it has to be. fake. I think he's

meming some liquid glass nonsense and some poor design mixing up the design. But he got 6K likes potentially with the fake news. I don't know. If this is real... There's no way that... There's no way this is real, right? Anyway, we'll leave it.

You know what to figure out... It's a good jokes. Anyway, in other good news, Kaz over at Shopify, now open door is replying to random post.

on Twitter saying email me. I'm still at Shopify until tomorrow. Here's my email. And Fawd says, bro, this guy grinding to the last minute. Love this level of dedication. You know, open doors all over the place. The stock's way up. It's become this meme stock that is fascinating because I was talking to Brandon about this with, he was saying like there's something interesting about the open door story that is this like retail army driving a meme stock. The valuation is basically, I mean, Keith was actually steel manning it saying that as a revenue multiple, it's not that crazy. It's in the same territory as some other big public companies. I think he cited Robin Hood at 31x revenue or something like that.

Wait, what company? So Open Door. He was saying that like Open Door is not disconnected from the financials if you, if we can deliver on the growth and we can deliver on a revitalization plan, right? That was the, that was his pitch. And so, and so. But, but he won't, he wanted to fix it on the revenue multiple. I think it was the revenue multiple. Okay.

You can go and look at his reply. But basically, uh, I, I don't think anyone, anyone disputes the fact that open door is trading very differently than it was trading last year. Last year, he was trading like a company that was in manager mode with a new CEO and, and had gotten kind of hit in the post ZERP era and had not done particularly, well across a couple quarters and was I mean the stock was you know Jim Kramer would probably say the stocks in the dumps but the stock is no longer in the dumps it's been on an absolute tear people have been making fortunes off of

it and the question is you know what do they have to deliver well they clearly have to go you know they have to kick it into a completely different gear and it's just exciting to see Kaz take the CEO role and be cut from very different cloth Like I've interacted with Kaz. He's been, I've actually emailed him at this email and he solved a problem for me on Shopify in like two seconds. He basically saved my business. So, I mean, he is, he's a remarkable operator. Yeah, very aligned comp structure as well.

Totally. He's really only only making money. If the market. He's salary that like a dollar. Yep. Exactly. And so people will debate the valuation. It's clearly trading on the back of a completely.

different narrative with a completely set of investors that are setting the valuation. It's now valued, it was valued very low. Now it's very richly. But it's, it is interesting to see some real legit folks in Silicon Valley step in and say, hey, we're going to do the turnaround thing. You don't often see this. Most times when, most times when a VC incubates or backs a company and it gets out into the public markets and they're able to distribute the shares and they're able to sell their position down. If that company does not do well over the long term, they are looking for the next startup to go in and take a second run at that business.

So if I'm not going to be able to think of a perfect example, but I mean, even just think about like the story of Square. Like Square was Keith Rboy as well, right? He was in that. It's like he wasn't saying like, okay, I sold PayPal. I need to get back into PayPal to do more fintech. stuff he was like no like I'm fine to do another startup and there's and there's a variety of of stories where someone's someone's taking a company taking it to

acquisition or taking it all the way to going public and then the VCs and some of the entrepreneurs and some of the early employees say hey we still really like this we like this industry I mean maybe the best example is is ramp and paribus like Eric Lyman and Kareematea took run at at you know understanding like the financial credit you know how people spend money saving people's time and money on the consumer side with paribus sold the company and we're like there's more opportunity here let's keep going and so i feel like that's the default playbook in silicon valley is that once once you've bet on an industry you've bet on a category and you've backed the right

founders you've gotten your return you've returned you've returned capital capital TRLPs either through an IPO or an MNA process, you're not saying let's go back into that same structure. Yeah. You're saying let's start again. Let's start a new company. But this is an interesting twist in that is that you could imagine Kaz saying, hey, I've been at Shopify for a while.

I want to start a real estate technology company. Yeah. And so Keith is going to write me a check. Kostla is leading the series A. I got a couple people that I've worked with before it. No, he's coming into open doors. He's actually turning around. So it's a little bit, it's a little bit different.

Although the game stop story was somewhat similar because the, the CEO of GameStop had founded Chewy, I believe, and was a very successful entrepreneur. And it was a similar example of like someone, there was still a lot of questions about GameStop. Like, can they turn that company around? But the stock performance was obviously crazy. But it was not a, it was not a purely financial person stepping into the role. It was an experienced CEO. who built a real company, like at real scale.

Yeah. Anyway, I don't know if you have a, I don't know if you have more of a take on open door or Shopify or anything like that. But I've been, uh, yeah, I'm excited to see what Cass does. It'll be interesting. Uh, how did you sleep last night? Did you get to catch up?

We need the soundboard because I would, I got a 92. How did you pull that off? I got a 92. I got to get to bed early. I got to bed really early. Uh, how's your, how's your sleep experience? I'm using an eight sleep.

by the way eight sleep.com five year one's at risk file free returns for you got only six hours and 27 minutes i'll leave a five-star review for eight sleep the app i love the app it is fantastic i am you're currently potentially you're you're going into a big i'm currently ill yeah i uh i have the i have the HRV of a dead person it's terrible uh well lock in this weekend get some sleep we will be uh fortunately home later this evening This is fun. iPhone error bend test on Tom's guide. Icon says an Apple exec casually throwing their product across the room and not flinching at all when the host misses and it clanks off of the wooden table is insane.

Apple is extremely confident in the journey. I look this one up. I looked this one up because I was like, again, it's like a parody account. It looks like it looks like it's fake video, but it's a real, real video. No, it's real. They're confident. I mean, do you remember Bendgate? Do you remember this with the iPhone?

I think it was the iPhone sick. No. They went, it was the thinest iPhone ever. And it got truly thin, like, well, way thinner than this back then. They went, they were thin maxing. So they, they were with meaning, I don't know. They went super thin. And the problem was that if you applied a little bit of pressure, you could actually bend it and break it, like pretty easily.

Like, you could do this. And now it's titanium. It's thicker. There's more structural support inside. But the question with the iPhone error was obviously, like, like hey you're back to being super thin is this thing going to bend and they just toss it across the conference room and the and the host tries to bend it and he's unsuccessful and i think they figured it out um anyway they probably designed it in a avengers themed office did you see this article in the

wall street journal's mansion section today of course i did 4.4 million dollar renovation helped one winnipeg couple turn their 12 000 square foot home into it into an experience and a story the wall street Journal says an Avengers office in a Frank Sinatra garage. They built their own Disneyland. I love this. I love when people go crazy with the rentos and make the homes their own. Some Disney fanatics get their fix by visiting theme parks. Tech entrepreneur Jeff Fetz and his husband Chris Fetz wanted to live in their own Magic Kingdom. The setting for their dream home, a 12,000 square foot traditional style home built in 2009 in the Tuxedo area of Winampaign. What is that? We got to ask you, I'm gonna steer me right now.

What's the, what's the, what's the area of Winnipeg? And so here he is standing next to what looks like a very fancy luxury car with the biggest Cardi-Santis on his wrist, I believe. He was an absolutely beast of a watch. If you want a Cardier Santos, head over to getbezzle.com. Your brother concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Such a good transit.

So they brought the, they bought the brick stucco and limestone house for around 4 million in 2029 then they spent a 4.4 million in a three-year renovation double to actually to actually upgrade the house we wanted to elevate the design to the level of fantasy Chris who was a full-time cast member it's dancer and parade performer at Walt Disney World Resortes he just is this like extremely recruited crazy no no no no so so the so the his husband so there's us and then there's also and Jeff Fetz has a startup as a business that does actually customer service and has

become very successful from that he co-founded a customer service tech startup now and called in touch CX after seven years they moved to Winnipeg to be closer to the family they met in 1997 so they've been together almost what 20 years they were both students at the University of South Florida and yeah they figured it out they have some crazy crazy stuff going on here let's read about the this shot of the cars in this entryways the car inside I mean this art deco stuff is wild we wanted each room to be experiential who grew up going to Disneyland and would regularly go to Christmas shows and they were first dating the garage Mahal as they as the

couple have dubbed it is a garage that was renovated to as a shrine to fangeload Frank Sinatra. It houses a peacock blue Rolls Royce silver shadow sedan that's that Sinatra bought as a wedding present to his wife Barbara, which Chris won an auction. The jazzy room with lacquered wood paneling, oversized backlit frame photos of Frank and Barbara and a curved blue sofa is where Chris hangs out, listening only to Sinatra records and drinking cocktails with the friends. It's way sexier than a man gave. It's crazy. Jeff's downstairs office is nicknamed Avengers headquarters and the window room has the feel of a spaceship to enter you touch a panel and a pocket door swooshes

open like in Star Trek there's a long metal mission control station a.k. The walled the walls are clad with stainless steel and covered with television monitors and Avengers logos and there's a room to store much of Jeff's 40,000 comic books on display as a full-size Iron Man costume it makes me feel very in touch with my childhood they call one of the bathrooms the spa and the story goes on you can read it the journal but what a wild house you love when when someone makes it big and just just blows it all i texted reno i texted germany that uh steady for their dream a 12 000 square foot traditional style home built in 2009 in the tuxedo area of winnipeg i said tuxedo area

question mark he said enforced by law actually do not go to the tuxedo area of winnipeg without wearing a tuxedo. You will be taken into custody. Anyway, let's move back to the timeline. Nader Khalil says, friendly reminder that multiplying revenue by 12 is not A.R. It says a lot that this goes viral in the year 2025 for 2.2 over 2,000 likes. Yeah. What about Harry's asking the important questions. What about multiplying daily revenue by 365? No, take, if you've got lumpy revenue. That you processed your biggest invoice and then multiply that by the number of hours in a year. Multiply by 24.

Then you have your hourly. Actually, taking a step further to find the exact minute that you got the largest payment ever. And multiply that by 60 and then by 24 and then by 365. And that is the way to think about a minute. We just had our biggest minute ever. Ever. Like, people talk about their quarterly earnings. We just had our biggest minute ever.

Put us on a $20 trillion rate. Here's the proof. Here's the stripe dashboard. Here's exactly what. Here's the exact minute. Well, if you want to bet on some companies that are subject to GAAP regulations and need to actually deliver really? Really are in quarterly reports that are SCs.

reports that are SEC regulated head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously multi-asset investing industry leading yields they're trusted by millions folks public dot com also Emily Sunberg breaking news she has commissioned Donald Boats work do you want to know this is a crossover I was not expecting do you want to know the very first sensation I felt while attempting to eat this spasm my jaw cramped an inward violent shaking I cried out in pain burger shouldn't be this tall that was the instant divine comeuppance I was punished from above for even trying to place it in my mouth says Donald boat

so I'm interested to see what Donald boat does obviously he's a very creative mind very schizo he he's mastered like he's you know schizo red string diagram behind us but Donald boat takes it to it to a completely different level with his collages which I have I've enjoyed he's he's done some fantastic posting Um, Morning Brew has a story. Uh, yesterday Larry Ellison's fortune grew by $100 billion. And today, uh, Larry Ellison's son, his media conglomerate is getting ready to buy Warner Brothers, normal family things.

These two, uh, father, this father son duo is, is, uh, on a generational run. You'd love to see it. He is, uh, running around acquiring companies, becoming a media mogul. Pretty fun. Crazy. I actually have not dug into what's going on with Warner Brothers, uh, Um, what's going on with this discovery. I know that there's like a merger and the free press is involved somehow.

Uh, I'm hoping we can get Barry Weiss on the show at some point to kind of break it all down for us because I, Warner Bros is up, uh, up 53% in the past five days. Yeah. Um, I do think it's interesting that, uh, at least in the, uh, at least in the dot com boom, uh, like the primary investment bank desk that would watch. tech companies would also watch telecom companies and also media companies. Tech media telecom. Like if you went to Goldman Sachs and you wanted to analyze what we think of as like pure technology companies, you would be.

TMT tech media and technology. And it's because they all have the same, they all have very similar zero marginal cost business models. So if you create Mickey Mouse or you own a telephone line or you have a website and you're selling SaaS, those are all financially modeled somewhat similarly. And so it made sense to put them all under the same coverage group. Of course, now, like, there's a dedicated desk just for semiconductors and just for, you know, social apps and just for SaaS and just for enterprise. Yeah. Anyway, imagine, imagine being able to run around buying companies, knowing that you have the full

backing of your father, but you're buying company. I mean, Warner Bros. is worth 46 billion. They're That's a lot more than I would have guessed. Wow. Is preparing a majority cash bid, meaning that they're going to spend at least put up at least. Ellison's into debt. I feel like he's not afraid to lever up. He's not afraid.

Maybe that'll happen at some point. But yeah, put the cash together, get the company. I don't know. It'd be cool. I feel like I've never met Larry Ellison's son, but I feel like I would trust him to make the next Superman and Batman film. and Warner Brothers owns the DC universe, I believe. And I feel like he would have good instincts.

I'm also excited about the Jeff Bezos James Bond. I feel like it's going to be good. I don't know. I know you know nothing about movies. So what, uh, who's the, who's the who's going to be Mr. Bond? I have no idea. But, uh, I just, uh, I think a lot of people, a lot of the true James Bond fans are, are worried about this idea that, um, that, uh, that, uh,

Now that Amazon owns the rights to James Bond, they're going to franchise it like they did with Star Wars. So it would be like a James Bond show and a James Bond kids show. Like if you see Star Wars, it used to just be like, there's three great movies, then there's three prequels. And then Disney was like, let's do three sequels and then two extra movies. And then spin-off show, like there's probably six or seven different shows for the Mandalorian and the Boba Fed and all the different spinoffs. And there's kids versions. I think that's kind of fine. Yeah.

I think Star Wars has been kind of like, yeah, there's like some mediocre stuff in there, but like you can just not watch it. And overall, there's like, there's enough to pull off the shelf. So like if you want to watch something with a four year old, you can. If you want to watch something with an eight year old, you can get into the original. The original trilogy still exists there. Like you can still watch it. So like, I don't know.

I've been, I've been happy with that. I would be happy with more James Bond content. Let, let Bezos cook on, on bond in my opinion. The, um, it's so funny people being like, oh, they're going to spend 200 million on The free press. Meanwhile, it's like such a rounding air. We talk about like this totality of deals that they're looking at doing that. They're looking at buying a $50 billion public company.

He's a lot of majority cash. Yeah. And you want to turn around these assets and improve them. And you need great talent. And if you need, if you got to spend a couple hundred million to get somebody to, you know. I think it makes a ton of sense. You're just thinking about it through like this Mark Zuckerberg mindset of like, who do I want around the table right now? I want a bunch of great people who are entrepreneurial, who are, you know, super connected, live players who really care about this stuff.

Yeah, you got to go spend some money to get them, but it's going to work out. Anyway, apparently there's a company called Math Inc. And Will Brown. They really, do you think they actually got math ink? I don't know. Maybe. Like, because these aren't... Mathematics Inc.

There's a certain flex to getting... I mean, you can get the domain. Christian says, excited to share that I'm starting a new company dedicated to the creation of verified superintelligence via auto formalization. So is this a competitor to... Is this a competitor to Vlad's thing? Building on the amazing R.L.

infrastructure that we developed at Morph Labs, mathematics ink has already achieved a breakthrough result and their hiring page says we call a date a square if all its components day month year are perfect squares I was born in the last millennium and my next birthday will be the last square date in my life so there's a very hard math problem here and you just have to in order to apply for their jobs you have to solve a math problem so I don't know you want a job and you're good also I feel like this is this is an odd question because I feel like if you copy this and you and you ask it like of a frontier model it's that the whole i imagine that's the whole point i doubt it i do you think it can we should try if well if it would pretty i mean i i i have yet to see like a like a hard math problem out there that that hasn't been pretty easily one shot by um most of the um like this type of like concise question uh is typically handled by a frontier model with reasoning. Maybe not, but we'll see.

More importantly, a video game entrepreneur has just paid $31.5 million for an oceanfront. Hamptons home. You got Hamptons up on the board connected to Pawtech. The deal marks the latest in a string of luxury transactions of the busy East End market. So, Cartch, this is Matthew Karch. It's a circa 1970s home in East Hamptak.

Hampton. He's the co-founder of Sabre Interactive, a video game developer and publisher, and I dug into them. And they do a lot of porting and platforming. So a game will be put out by one publisher, and they'll say, like, we would love to get this Xbox game on Nintendo Switch. And Matthew Karch will pick up the phone and say, my team would love to do that. We will do the hard work of making sure your game works on the Nintendo hardware or over here. And they do a lot of other stuff. But he has some great video games in the portfolio. And obviously it's provided for a wonderful life. And he is now in the position where he can buy a $31 million home.

He's also, I believe he sold the company and the company changed hands again. So it's unclear exactly who owns what. But it's a cool story. And now he has a wonderful, stunning house. The house literally sits on top of the ocean. The property is so amazing that I wanted to buy it and figure out the details later. he said, so he's talking to the journal. He'd love to see it. If the, if the journal calls you about your home, you got to pick up the phone. The seller, an entity linked to Norman and Helene Stark,

bought the estate for $4.7 million in 1994. The property first hit the market in 2017 for $75 million. Wow, that's high. It'd been off the market for years, the most recent asking price with $39 million. Property contains five bedrooms, roughly 7,000 square feet main house, as well as a guest house, tennis court, and pool, the Hampton's real estate market, like those in many vacation destinations, soared during the pandemic, but the number of Hampton sales hit a 14-year low in 2024 amid tight inventory and rising mortgage rates. And there's an interesting dynamic where renting a house in the Hamptons is like a massive multiple of what it costs to buy, pay the mortgage on a house, because people really only want to be either in the summer.

They don't necessarily want to buy or live there. So there's the kind of an odd disconnect between the rental and purchase market where you might not see that in that way. Yeah, at the same time, I don't think it necessarily mass out to buy a Hampton's house right now and just rent it in the summer. Totally. Just given where rates are. Yeah, makes sense. In the second quarter of 2025, there were 26 home sales in the Hamptons at or over $10 million. Compared with 22 in the second quarter of 2024 and six in the second quarter of 2023, 2023 was really slow.

Karch also owns two properties nearby Sag Harbor that he used. for vacations, he's considering selling one of them. Anyway, another... Keep a couple homes nearby. There's a series A financing for a new company that just came out of stealth, Brain Company. We saw Math Company. Now there's Brain Company. Brain Company Emerging...

New Meta. Today, we're getting somewhere. We're seeing a trend. I like it. Brain Company emerges from Stealth today, and we are announcing our $30 million Series A, led by Alad Gill and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners. Brain Company provides an AI Placifact. AI platform and applications for the world's largest and most important.

We were getting this company. What? Did we? Yeah, we were connected. I believe we'll hopefully have the founder on soon. A lot of Gil's also coming on the show soon so we can talk to him about this. So go check it out. If you're looking to get in early, go work there potentially.

Meanwhile, the profound team is using out-of-home advertising to try to find an office in Union Square, driving around a, driving around an advertising truck, a box truck trying to find their... I think that they did scale this campaign. They should get on ad quick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I mean, seriously, they should put some of their testimonials or like case studies on like billboards and airports. Like, that makes a ton of sense if you're just like a general business and you're interested in getting your brand mentioned on chat, you p.t.

uh just flashing the profound name in front of people that's pretty high value um anyway did you see the knock off bugatti i did not this is uh but this is offensive to my this is extremely offensive to uh bugatti's italian we bugatti is an interesting company right because they're like it's german but then they have a they have a they've a they've a their manufacturing plant is like on the border and it's like changed hands a few times or something but uh anyway most people know the baguadi uh very on shiran um but uh there's german and then french is a top yeah that's right to change hands uh but then it was acquired by an alley slash home cleaning robot maker and it's showcasing the photo of its first car a bugatti like luxury battery electric vehicle so it's a

is this a dream is this a chinese company is it so uh tier taxes says a vacuum cleaner robot company founded in 2017 wow they're literally literally a Dyson knockoff. They're a Dyson knockoff. That's now knocking off. Value to $3 billion is making a luxury EV now. Apple gave up after 10 years of trying, burning $10 billion.

This is no offensive in my culture. I know. It's crazy how much it looks like. I mean, it wasn't even it even has like a weird diffuser on the body. Well, yeah, so they're knocking off like the Veyron, but then also the new one which I've...

Turbion? Yeah, the Turbion's the latest one. Although, are you talking about some of the one-offs? There is a one-off that looks. They've done like convertibles, but there's only, I believe there's only three major platforms. There's the Veyron. The Solitaire. Okay.

So they, this knockoff is using the front end of the Solitaire. Yep. I mean, it basically, the back end of the Veyron. Closer to do is just like a Solitaire knockoff. Yeah. Really, really dark. Never do this. If you're, if you're running Dream Tech, um, contact your lawyer. Don't.

work with them to wind down the company please just shut it down close up shop you guys had a good run you're out of ideas and just just close it up how do you think this sells i mean china's knocked off the taekon successfully they've knocked off a few other cars successfully um i wonder what yeah i do think it i do the the the humor here um is that they will probably make a pretty solid car And it will cost like they can start selling Bugatti's for a couple hundred dollars probably yes you imagine no but like you could imagine they sell this for like it's probably a couple hundred grand 150 or something which is why and then if these I could see this making it into America where somebody's like wait I can drive to make it to America this will get caught at the

ports for sure you mean you mean like yeah IP trade dress like it'll be easy to lock this up it's not making it to America but people will be driving around in China I mean I've I've heard about fully, fully counterfeit cars before. Like in China, they have the ability to set up, like, it's a G-wagon factory, and it makes cars that look like G-wagons. And that are bad. And it badge, everything is trying to be as perfect as possible, a true knock-off. And then they work their way to other countries.

You take it in the dealer and they're like, we can't work on this engine. This is not a Mercedes engine. Well, yeah. And the reason that knock-off cars are not as big as knockoff. watches is like there's no regulatory framework for watches, right? You're not going to hurt someone else by driving, wearing a fake Rolex or whatever. This was big. This was big. Two of the Cluelly founding team have broken off. Pretty crazy. I guess they're doing, running the same playbook. Yep. Gris says life update left Cluelly to start our own thing already at 1.2 million ARR,

seven days in stealth, had no idea making money was this easy announcement soon, Instinct Inc. This post is fascinating. Fascinating. Because doesn't say what the business is. 1.2 million ARR. What is the subscriptions of some sort? It's written to trigger.

Yeah. Had no idea of making money was this easy. Yes, you did have an idea. Because you were saying that. You said making money was easy. I know how easy money is, but here we are talking about it. Anyway, good luck to that. You bated us.

You bade us. No, but yeah, wishing them, wishing them luck. And I wonder if they will start beefing with their former employer to, uh, from, yeah, from a WDW. perspective that is going to be unmissable content. If they are constantly chirping at each other and fighting and going on podcasts and, debating each other and and taking shots and running adversarial billboard ads against each other. Like there is a world where that generates more views than anything they've done before.

That might be the final state of startup media and marketing. The real question is like, what is, what, does this say something about like whether or not clearly has hit product market fit? We demoed the product. We were not very sticky. Tyler, it seemed like he enjoyed the product and thought there were some glimms. But he did not become a daily user. Audience.

Well, when we talked to Roy, it was, it wasn't clear who the day, who the target audience was. It was maybe the college kid who wanted to cheat on an exam or you want to cheat on an interview, but then that was probably illegal and risky, so you don't want to do that. Then there was like maybe enterprise sales. Then Roy was talking about brain computer interfaces and VR. And so like, there were just like a bunch of different ideas, clearly throwing spaghetti against the wall, clear what was sticking.

And so I'm interested, I am interested to see what instinct ink winds up building. And I'm wondering if they have done more work to make sure that they're building on top of a solid foundation because the big question that was looming around clearly was just masterful marketing, lots of clearly breaking through the noise, cutting through the noise, getting downloads. But was it a leaky bucket? And so have has this team now that they're on their own, have they built a less leaky bucket with this? Because what happens if you stop going viral?

Does that $1.2 million in ARR turn into nothing over 14 days because everyone unsubscribes? Who knows? Yeah. Anyway. I would go out and guess that they're just starting a creative agency, which would probably make a lot of money really fast. I think so. So that would make a lot of sense. Anyway, uh, one five find your happy find your happy place look a wander with

find it views hotel grade amenities dream that's top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks uh we will close out with this 25 years ago uh there was an article in the newspaper in the daily mail Tuesday December 5th 2000 internet quote may just be a passing fad as millions give up on it and of course reconnoisse contextualized to max the VC is obviously drawing a comparison to the AI narrative. I don't know if anyone's gone out and actually said AI is a passing fad. People have kind of said like maybe we're over our skis on Capax or maybe we're over our skis on on you know enterprise value or maybe the promises are two grand. Yeah, maybe we're not getting ASI tomorrow. Yeah, 27. But I I don't think anyone is out there really. really saying yeah in 10 years like we're not going to be chatting with L-O-1 so funny to try to I mean it's it's very difficult to to like this article is especially funny because internet may just be a passing fad as millions give up on

it's like well are those millions of people benefiting from other people using the internet if so then like it's yeah this has enduring value crazy researchers found that millions were turning their back on the worldwide web, frustrated by its limitations and unwilling to pay high access charges. They say that email far from replacing other forms of communication is adding to an overload of information. Experts from the Virtual Society Project, which published the result, the report say predictions that the internet would revolutionize the way society works, have proved wildly inaccurate.

teenagers are using the internet less now than previously they conclude James Chapman I would love to know where James Chapman is now he was a science correspondent at the Daily Mail and it's interesting I mean he it's you can't really say like he got this wrong because he's just publishing the facts which is like these researchers found this data point and kind of leaving it up to your interpretation but less yeah and that's like all these articles come out like AI adoption and the enterprises dropping yeah or or what was the MIT report like 95% of Gen. AI pilots are I mean that that that meter report was like the most bearish

take on cursor possible because it was like cursor is slowing people down that and yet the basic and yet and yet demand but you dug into it and there was a lot of different ways that it could actually speed you up in certain in certain contexts in certain well yeah and then all the products just look at the demand for... Exactly. Yeah. Incredible.

The apparently cursor in the secondary market is trading closer to 30 billion than 20. That's up there, man. That's up there. It's great, though. Incredible time to be alive. Incredible time to be alive. Well, thank you for tuning into our remote live stream today. We will see you.

We did it. They said it was impossible. They said it was impossible. been wrong. And next week, got some travel in the middle of the week, but we will be back in the Ultradone Monday and Tuesday. Very excited. And get out there this weekend and touch grass, be with your loved ones, log off.

I'm excited to log off. I think Charlie would. Watch it on the same thing. was known for logging off from Friday night to Saturday and we'll be doing my best to do the same. And thank you so much for tuning in. Thanks for tuning in this week. We'll see you Monday. Goodbye.

Love you.