TBPN - Stripe's Billion Dollar Crypto Deal, AI for Police, Elon's Diablo Addiction

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Have I told you about Coogan's Law? Of course. You have? I've told you about this. I mean, you see it everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Once you know of it, you can't help but notice it.

I mean, there's a number of these laws that people, you know, repeat in tech. Metcalf's law or, you know, what's that one? Anything that can go wrong will, you know, those or, you know, those or, you know, Moore's Law, the rate of computing is doubling. They're not true scientific laws in the sense that they came out of scientific papers, but they're axioms that define the way. What's that one? Anything spacked by social capital will drop 90%.

So Coogan's Law is the value of a coined phrase is proportional to the square of the amount of algorithmically consumed content. Basically, my prediction here is that coining phrases like laws is going to increase in value as feeds and just the overall consumption of content becomes more algorithmically driven and more compressed. So as we move to tweets and TikToks and short form, you need to be coining phrases at like an increasing rate. And if you look at who's really popular in tech, they've almost all coined phrases.

You know, like it's time to build. American dynamism. Software is eating the world. There's so many of these. Bologi has the network state. Lulu has Going Direct. I don't even know, I talked to Lulu and she said that going direct was not her phrase, but she took it to a whole other level.

Lindyman, same thing. He didn't come up with that concept, but he like really- He's Lindyman. Yeah, but he like dominates it. And so finding a really key pithy phrase that you can build your whole brand around, super key and going to be increasingly valuable. If you look back to like the great books, like, you know, Augustine Thomas Aquinas, like those guys didn't need to compress their ideas down into pithy phrases.

No one talks about, you know, like Shakespeare's law. You know, you just read all of Shakespeare because you, that was the only thing that was, they weren't competing with tweets, but now you're competing with tweets. And so you need to really, you know, compress everything down. Yeah. And so Coogan's Law is a reference to that. Right. There's a guy, Zach, I think I'm going to butcher's last name, Pogrob.

who his whole, his word is obsession. And so he's just constantly every, you know, 50% of anything he ever talks about ties back to obsession somehow. Yeah, yeah. And part of his cult of obsession is pick a word or a phrase that you just become one with. And then you just repeat it over and over and over and over. And it works because I don't even know the guy.

I have some mutual friends. But I'm bringing it up right now in the context of all these other phrases that are, you know, have become popularized in different ways. And it's just because every, again, almost every single time he's saying anything, it comes back to obsession, right? Which is just his, like, rally and cry. I have a group of buddies who are, like, in the content world, and they all have these, they call them razors, you know, like Occam's razor.

This guy, George Mack has Mac's content razor, which is only create content that you would consume yourself, which is good. But it's also kind of silly that he even needs to coin a phrase, right? but it works really well because it sticks in your mind and it's this whole like just compressing a big idea down Paul Graham founder mode like yeah there's a lot that was said about that but it sticks in your mind is like okay well whatever that is whatever that is successful founders we're calling that founder mode now yeah and there's a phrase for that and that yeah clearly there

was a gap in the vernacular in text vernacular where we needed a word for like what is the Steve Jobs, Elon, Brian Shesky mentality. The founder mode just slotted in there. So it's kind of... Founder mode for us is listening to our own podcast. Yes. Because you've already had the conversation. Ideally on vinyl.

On vinyl. Which will be coming soon, by the way. So if you're not subscribed, subscribe, and then you'll be the first to know when the vinyl. Vinyl hits. Yeah. It's good. Yeah.

It's a different experience. The tonality, the analog nature of it, it almost, it's the closest thing for us to feel like we're back. in the room where the recording happened, right? Sitting at this wooden wooden desk, feeling the energy from the crystal ball. What did our one fan describe it as a rustic feel? A rustic analog. Because you hear the paper shuffling.

Yeah, we're rustic audio. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's organic. Organic. It's a return to tradition. Right. It's good. Should we go into the top story of today? It's hard to, hard to follow Coogan's law,

Well, next time we need Jordy's law. Right. So we're going to come up with that. And then we're going to be coining a lot more phrases and you're going to hear them. We're going to try them on here and you'll hear them here first. Yeah. That's a whole new segment of the show is new laws. Just coining phrases.

We're tracking phrases and laws. We could have a chart that was just like going long and short on these different phrases. I mean, in some ways it's extremely silly to just think that like, oh, okay, you have some. idea you've written it out maybe you've actually put a lot of thought into something and realized something interesting was the other one yeah somebody came out and wrote a piece on taste in terms of startups and it's like okay does that really need to be said yeah yeah but it's some ways it's controversial yeah and and yeah I think a lot of people a lot of people do forget about like the importance of like compressing it down and something it can be viral it's it's like it's a meat they're always

memes right it's time to build Yep. Salana's really good at that. Founder mode. Moon should be a state. Moon should be a state. Like that phrase is so much bigger than that. It's talking about.

Salana's law would be how many times people call you a billionaire in a derogatory way is equal to how political, you know, what would the law be is. There's something there, right? There's something, man. It's like if people are, if people are getting angry at you and calling you a billionaire. Yeah.

You probably are just a capitalist. Yeah. You know? It really is clear that like he's, he's particularly good at just these, these pithy phrases. Because every, when he writes a piece, the titles are always really good. Yeah. Like, I mean, he had one that was like moral inversion. Just this idea that.

In another life, he was a journalist. Yeah. If he wasn't a billionaire, he would have been a journalist. Yeah, yeah. And then, but now he's doing. with the daily. I don't know if you're subscribed to that, but it sends three takes, three morning takes, and each one of them has like some sort of clever, you know, pun or, you know, headline. And I'm like, how do you come up with these? Because it's really hard, but I guess you can build

muscle. You can be really good. There could be some real alpha and us just ripping all the takes from him. Just like, just going back through the daily and repeating them as original thought. Yeah, as original thoughts. And just in focusing more on the algo, just trying to grow faster and bigger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he'll be trying to plan his takes out to be like, okay, well, I can't do the daily anymore. I've got to drop it the morning after they record. Yeah. Well, I mean, as long as that's more profitable, then I'm down.

I, there's a topic that we have to cover. I'll actually wait. We can put it in the reaction section, but I just got an email that was from this guy, Eric Newcomer, who's a journalist, and he says the subject of the email is reflections on newcomer four years in. And the preview line is Newcomer is on track to generate more than $1 million in profit on more than $2 million in revenue this year, which is fantastic. And it just shows that he's living every journalist dream, which is to be rich.

but but instead of being you know just rich and successful they choose to attack and try to tear down the sort of like crabs in a bucket phenomena yeah yeah crabs in a bucket for sure crabs in a bucket journalists in a bucket well he's a Harvard guy he's he's buddies with Max Child you know this guy he runs this AI startup he's he's a little more in tech than most people think yeah and and he knows who he knows who butteres his bread because he's got the events business a lot of sponsors at Cerebral Valley. There you go. He's bringing in the big bucks.

He's not going to be writing hit pieces for very much longer. Yeah, but I think, yeah, eventually, eventually you just got to tone it back. Hit pieces aren't going to get you to, uh, Lacoa. There you go. No one, no one ever vote. You need to be a peer. You need to be a peer by writing hit pieces. No, no.

You become a peer by generating, you know, huge, uh, no one's, no one's inviting Taylor Lorenz to San Chope. Right. Right. Like, she's not going to Samaritz. she's climbing in through the HVAC system she's like she's in the

she's in a hotel du cop in the HVAC system because it's 82 degrees anyways we need to get into the story yeah the top story we got to talk about

Stripe acquiring bridge for over one billion dollars are you big in crypto I'm like generally a believer. I like Bitcoin, but I'm not really deep in any of the Webber. And we like bubbles and speculation. I do, I do. But I was thinking about like, why do we need to talk about this?

And I think the real reason is just that, you know, whenever one of these billion dollar acquisitions happens, like, there's a new class of wealthy individuals who are on the scene. And like, these founders, they're going to be the ones you're bidding against the Christie's. They're going to be the ones like if you're fighting for a new allocation in the- Ferrari F80, like you're going to be going up against this guy, so you've got to know who he is. So we should do a little overview of Zach Abrams and Bridge just to kind of set the story because it's a pretty fascinating journey to get to this billion dollar outcome. So Zach grew up in North Carolina, he attends Duke, and he's only done one podcast. I searched all over the place.

I could only find one like 20-minute podcast that he did, but it was really great. And he talks about when he was a Duke, his dream. That might be Abrams Law. A number of podcasts you do is inversely correlated with enterprise value. Yeah, yeah. The dude is clearly actually working and building stuff, not just stroking his own ego. But he said that while he was a Duke, his life's goal and his dream was to become an operating partner in private equity. Amazing.

I love it. And he achieved it immediately. He goes to this private equity firm. And he focuses on, like, opening and closing factories for this auto parts business that they bought. A real P.E. guys closing stuff. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so he's like 24 and he's like shutting down manufacturing plans, opening up new manufacturing plans. And it's like a beast of a time because it's post recession. I think it's like 2009. And it's the auto parts business. Like no one's buying new cars and stuff. It's just like really rough. But then 2010, he realizes that like, okay, I want something different. There's a startup scene out in Silicon Valley. He moves out there. He starts a fintech company called Evenly. And he sells to Square pretty quickly after a year and a half. And so this is, he gets into Square pre-IPO, pre-IPO.

pre-cash app pre a lot of the crypto stuff and kind of sees that start growing. So he's a product manager at Square, works there for a few years, goes to Coinbase, where he leads the consumer business. And what's funny is that I didn't fully fact-checked this, but his co-founder at Bridge is Sean Yu, who I believe was also his co-founder evenly and also worked with him at Coinbase and also worked with him at Brex. So I think, literally, this is one of those, this is like, this is, this, the story is fantastic because it completely justifies VCs pattern matching.

Yep. Yeah. It's like, okay, finance background, so has like extreme work ethic, understands how business works. Starts a company, sells to square. Probably wasn't like an amazing outcome, but, you know, stays on with his co-founder, learns the game. Is that a hyperscaler?

Yep. Goes and works at Coinbase. Another hyperscaler goes and is at Brex early, another hyper scaler with his, with his original co-founder the whole time and then starts a new company and raises it 40 pre which probably felt like really expensive for a lot of people but they're like hey he was sold his last company to square he's with his original co-founder and so the pattern matching is extreme all the way through not technically hyperscalers by the way that terms reserved for the big tech companies that are building like massive right right right sorry sorry scale up scale up scale up and and in the financial world yeah

He never like went off and did something random. Yeah. So when he and, and, you know, he's now, he's not like, he wasn't, he wasn't fomowing into fintech. Exactly. He started in fintech in 2010. Yeah. So he's like a decade and a half into his career when he's really building bridge. Yeah.

So I think here's the reason that the story is important is this is the only major liquidity event that I can think of in crypto that wasn't token oriented. Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, can you think of another? I don't even have a token. And no, they definitely didn't have a token. Yeah.

Yeah, because they didn't need it. It's all just infrastructure. And, but I cannot think of another major, outside of Coinbase IPO. Can you think of another crypto company that was a eight, you know, sorry, 10 figure acquisition. It's just, you can't think of one. I mean, a similar business would be like chain analysis, right? But I don't know if they've sold or I think it yet. Yeah.

So like, again. But that's a company that doesn't have a token. just do the research. And I think they're doing very well. Right. But again, to your point, not a liquidity back that. This is like the Instagram moment. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

And the funny thing is this will inspire in an entire massive wave of new crypto infrastructure investing. It's a good timing. I have a company that's similar to bridge for Latin America. Yeah. That does stable coin infrastructure. They're called Menteo. They're going to be raising this quarter if you're listening.

This is, yeah, Dylan Field posted this about, he's the CEO of Figma. And he said in 2006, I asked Joey Krug, Joey, what are going to be the biggest use cases for crypto? He quickly and succinctly answered, speculation, stable coins, and prediction markets. meme coins, stripes acquisition of bridge and polymarket, the world is starting to catch up to Joey. And that's like exactly what's happening right now. You have pumped out fun, tons of meme coins, also just speculation on Bitcoin and

Eath as like underlying assets. But then now we're seeing a lot of infrastructure and stable coins, which makes a lot of sense. It is really hard to refute if you're a crypto skeptic. And then polymarket, which is obviously taking over the world right now. Yeah, so it's interesting. So I met Zach in 2022. It must have been post his initial fundraise, which I think was at 40. I think he did two rounds, like a C in the Series A.

And I think they raised 53 total, probably 10 on 40 in that first. And then I think they probably did like 40 mil on 100 or 200 or something. I met him in the context of we were doing a lot of work with stable coins at party around. Sure. We supported stable coin investing on chain, which was funny at the time because the reason that what he was doing was important is because we even had deeply crypto-native companies that were using our product that didn't want to raise using the stable coin functionality because it was too much of a hassle once you had the stable. to convert them and all that stuff. So he was solving an important problem. I had already backed a company called Layer 2 that is doing sort of similar stuff to Bridge,

more focused on like sort of like banking applications. But they were, I thought Layer 2 was a good bet at the time. They were powering all of Angelus stable coin infrastructure. Bridge took it in another direction. And when I jumped on with Zach, I wasn't, Zach's obviously super smart. I should have probably tried to invest at the time, but he wasn't raising. And he basically just mined me for information for like the entire 30 minutes.

Like he was just like not really wanting to share anything because I think he wasn't, didn't know exactly what he was doing yet. So we just used the entire meeting to just like, you know, just mine, uh, information of how we were thinking about stable coins and we had a bunch of crypto sort of companies, uh, as customers. So anyways, should have, should have, uh, bet big on Z. at that time, but didn't really, I don't know, don't kick myself that much because it wasn't

like a fundraising specific meeting. It's interesting though. But yeah, I think it's fantastic for crypto at a time when speculation and prediction markets like you're saying or getting all the attention to say like, hey, here's a major liquidity event by the most storied relatively recent. Silicon Valley company being Stripe, putting it on the map and like legitimizing it. Yeah. Which is just good because I have a lot of, I personally heavily invested in early stage crypto and ultimately I think that it was always very clear that stable, like nothing has

product market fit in crypto like stable coins. Like if you actually look at like I think the most it's um USDT is has more revenue on a per employee basis by like 10x than black rock whoa um which is sounds insane but i think they have like a hundred person team and they're doing billions of dollars

revenue or something like that um so i think that uh it's very like legitimizing and it's just very positive the only the only thing that was unfortunate about the way the whole announcement went down is that Sequoia didn't really get the credit that they were wanting. And so Sean had to really come out. Yeah, the information really snubbed him. Snubbed him, felt very personal. He had to come out and say, hey, we led the Series A.

Yeah. It wasn't Ribbid or Hahn or, you know, Sean was like, I don't even know who those funds are. Anyway, so hopefully they issued a correction. Thank God. Yeah, journalism is saved. But it was a dark day for journalism. Yeah, it was rough. It was rough.

I've actually used stable coins. I paid a video editor in Argentina. Yeah. And because the currency was fluctuating like crazy. Yeah. And it was really, really hard. And the fees to get dollars there were crazy. Yeah.

As Americans, we want USDC, USDT adoption. Yeah. It's good for the dollar. Yeah. It just allows us. Dollar dominance. I had a, I was on a, I was on a surf trip with four Argentinians when I was 18 traveling from Ecuador to Panama and I was on like a six month trip at the time.

And my Argentinian friends had to cut their trip short by like eight weeks because their currency just got demolished mid-trip and they were sitting obviously in Argentinian pesos. And so they're imagine getting your budget like slashed like by 60%. Wow. So they just literally had to go home. And so, yeah, just think it, I pray for the continued dominance of the U.S. dollar as long as we both shall live for the sake of our children and their children. But stable coins are good. You know, stable coins are a big catalyst for the dollar.

It's kind of fascinating. I mean, it doesn't seem like anyone's announced like Bridges Revenue or how big they were. No, it did. They did. It was like $15 million run rate. So it was like huge multiple. 100 times. But it seems like they have a massive regulatory moat or have done a lot of hard work on the Yeah, yeah.

That's what I actually don't. As, you know, idea guys, non-technical folk, I don't know what they built that was so valuable that Stripe couldn't build it themselves and felt like they had to, what you don't know is like how much of this, this is almost like Stripe hedging. Like Stripe's been had a lot of stable coin initiatives internally. They've been trying to build. Partnership with Paxos, right? Yeah, they've been trying. They've been working on this space for a really long time. So I'm excited for it to come out more of like what did they build that was so

critical that they had to pay a hundred times revenue or whatever they paid. Well, this, uh, a non signal wrote on conviction finance. Zach has managed to do the near impossible obtaining solid licenses with the two major jurisdictions of the United States and Europe where they are both permitted to transmit large sums of money and exchange currencies on behalf of users, essentially a ramp. One for the Eurozone is located in Poland. The other U.S. Delaware C Corp is located in Berkeley. The U.S.C. Corp has money transmitter licenses, approved in 22 states,

and they got more, and they're close to 48 states now. If not, they already have them. And so it feels like Bridge went out and did all this, like, heavy lifting on the regulatory side to actually get approved. And then they also have very high transfer limits. I guess there are tiers to the money transfer, like, you know, approval. levels. And so they did all this hard work. And I wonder if that's, if that's difficult for Stripe because they're such a big company. Maybe they're like, you know, it becomes more of a

political issue. The politicians want to extract more of a pound of flesh or something. Because you would assume that like, okay, a bigger company would actually have an easier time getting transfer licenses. Yeah, but it's, it's sort of interesting. Stripe knows how important stable coins are to their business long term. Did they only spend like 50 million dollars trying to make this happen? Did they spend $100 million internally? Did they spend $500 million internally and like fail? Right? I just don't know why they didn't have the lobbying power. They have the technical prowess and the like war chest to have made this happen. And so maybe Zach is, who knows? Maybe, maybe Zach, you know, plays like, oh, I'm a nice guy. I don't do.

podcast. You know, I'm just, I'm just interested in money. But then behind the scenes, he just was just an absolute animal, right? Just doing deals with the mafia, in Poland. He did what, getting anything approved in Europe. He was on, he was in, yeah, he was in Poland on founder mode meeting with the mafia to get this done. Yeah. One thing I was listening to that podcast with him and he pointed out this very interesting thing that I couldn't quite get to the bottom of is that there's some sort of like legacy ruling in the American banking system where dollars in a bank account need to be demarcated between checking and savings. And I'm not exactly sure why. I think it might actually just be for the measurement of the money supply. I couldn't really get

to the bottom of it. But he said that like one of the things that the stable coin infrastructure unlocks is the ability to have a yield bearing account that then you can also transact with. basically just merging a checking and savings account. And now like a crypto skeptic would say like, well, that's like a stupid technical feature. Like why can't you just make a combined checking and savings account or a yield bearing checking account? But it's like, well, there's so much cruft in the legal system around the American financial system. But it's like maybe, yeah, you do just need to like have some sort of green field fresh start. And that's enough.

I don't know. Yeah. So at capital we had, we had a high yield checking account. So it's not that. it is a good I mean I think the there's so much platform and infrastructure risk and all this stuff right like one of the reasons that they maybe had to buy bridge I'm just speculating is that Stripe's existing bank partners had no interest in taking on that level of risk right we at capital we were rolling out a stable coin custody product when we were informed by our bank partner that we we were going to have to jettison a lot of of our digital asset oriented customers. And so our entire product strategy like fell apart because we couldn't do the thing that our customers wanted

and in fact had to be like, hey, you guys should like leave basically. So there's so much that that is, I feel like the whole bridge story is such a good example of risk taking, right? There's so much that Bridge was trying to do that when they started was unclear if it was even going to be possible.

And so oftentimes opportunities like that attract unsophisticated founders that don't know what they're getting themselves into and then founders that are sophisticated and already successful and comfortable with the risk, right? Yeah. Because a lot of people would have said,

like, oh, what you're trying to do is you're going to get destroyed by stripe or you're going to get destroyed by block and square or oh, what you're trying to do, like, no bank's going to allow that, or you're never going to get money transmitter licenses or whatever the things that, there would have been a lot of ways to, if you were writing an investment memo on the business, be like, what could go wrong here?

And Zach, I'm sure was totally aware of all of those risks and still comfortable with it. And it shows that there's so much alpha and just being okay with the fact that, you're taking on a lot of regulatory risk, you're taking on a lot of platform risk, and you need to just, that's part of what creates these sort of exponential opportunities. Do you think they'll ever be a stable coin depegging? In the sense that, like, normally when a stable coin depegs,

it's like a disaster, because it means that, like, it's been discovered that they don't actually hold the assets. But I wonder if in the future, stable coins become so popular that they essentially become global, super valuable. And then the U.S., the Fed is like printing too many dollars and the dollars become inflationary. And just like the dollar went off the gold standard, imagine if like the, imagine if USDC or USDT become so big that they say, you know what, we're no longer backed by the dollar because we are more stable than the dollar. Yeah. Right now they're using the dollar to bring stability.

So that's been a huge critique of, so Coinbase has always taken the approach. Yeah. That everything, like they've taken a very transparent approach. Tether, I don't think, has ever come close to the same level of transparency. Yeah, there's always been. And there's a huge amount of, you know, saying Tether, USDT, can say, oh yeah, we're a stable coin. But what if, but it's a private company and what if they've

just been, they could have been giving themselves for every dollar, you know, dollar that they take in and, and sort of minting a new stable coin. What if 30% of the time they were like, we're just going to take, you know, I don't know, right? Like, you just don't really know what's going on. And that's why they're, they're, USDT, deepagged during the whole FTX saga. There was like a lot of people. It was a very, very minor. It was, yeah, it was like. Yeah.

It was like 30% one day. And everyone was like, okay, this is the end. Yeah. And so I think that there will undoubtedly be a time in the future where a major stable coin like blows up. Yeah. Right? Yeah, because part of, part of crypto by saying, hey, decentralized finance, which is another way of saying unregulated finance or like digital, you know, crypto based finance. the whole thing has just been speed running why we have all these financial regulations in the first place.

So if you allow anybody, if you allow a global team of anons to start creating financial products, yeah, you're going to similar things are going to happen to the wild west of America when like 10 dudes were like, yeah, let's create a bank. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is like the cattle bank, you know, whatever. I mean, they just are, they're just freestyling, you know, finance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the bull case here is that is that it's, you know, it's, you know, like, yes, they are speed running, like, let's regulate financial products for the first time. But just by virtue of the fact that they are not immediately slotted into the existing regulatory scheme, you're able to take a second crack at creating more effective regulations

that make more sense and allow for speed and transparency or whatever. And you're just, it's just like, you know, it's the same thing as the people that want to, like, go and build a new country just because there's like so much legal cruff because every year in America we're adding like 10 times the amount of laws that we're deleting right yeah so the amount of laws is just growing growing growing that slows down innovation that slows down the financial sector and so it's like yeah it is the wild west it is really bad while it's completely unregulated but there's a really bullish case for whatever regulation comes it's just going to be a little bit more fresh and a little bit more from first principles and hopefully a little more permissive and just informed by the

the wins and losses of the last you know few decades in the traditional finance system absolutely the other thing that's interesting about the whole thing is that stripe was willing to pay 20% of what people believe circles eventual IPO will be so people are projecting circle while IPO at something like a $5 billion valuation. Circle, let's look at what their market cap is right now. You mean for the stable coin market cap? Because that's just the value of all the stable coins. Yeah, but they generate.

Really high and then they get a percentage on that as their market cap. Wow, you can buy USDC for 99 cents right now. Deep tagged. It's the end. Pegging. Spatim over. What is the, so the market cap is $34 billion right now. Yeah.

And that's for all the stable coins. Yeah, but the reason that that's substantial is it means that Circle has taken on $34 billion and is earning interest yield on that, which right now is somewhere around 5%. And they're giving a lot of that back as incentives, but it's still very, very profitable. business. So anyways, something that Zach and the bridge team did resulted in it being

their $15 million company being worth a billion dollars and we'll find it out over time, I imagine. I mean, it certainly... Crypto needed a win. That wasn't speculation. It's not enough to be...

It's not... Even though pump dot fund, who knows what the enterprise value of a business like that is, right? Because it feels like very, like it's on the most shaky regulatory ground possible. But they're doing, I think, like 100 million a year and fees, right? So that's a massive win from a revenue generation standpoint. But what is that company worth? So I think crypto needed a win and it certainly got one. I mean, it feels like this year there's been three major wins across all three of those. Speculation wise, Bitcoin is near all time highs. Like, in terms

of the digital gold thesis, like it's very, very solid. And so this whole, you know, fear that was being sowed by the crypto skeptics was correct around some of the bubbly NFTs, but clearly it was wrong about Bitcoin because it's had much more staying power than those folks predicted, right? Everyone was predicting that Bitcoin, once it sold off from 65 at the height, or I think it was like 70 for a little bit during the peak, down to like it was in the 30s and maybe even high 20s at one point. Well, it's back up. And if it keeps going up and down, like, yeah, it's volatile,

but it's here to stay in one way or another. And then you have polymarket like absolutely dominating like the new cycle and providing some sort of insight and, you know, some value that's like the generate. Yeah. I mean, there's the, there's the DGEN GEMB. aspect to it, but there's also just like the normy value of like people want to look at a percentage of who's going to win the presidential election. That has value. People will pay for that.

And that seems like something that's more fundamental and more easy to value than like what is an art piece worth. Right. Yeah. Like if you're a business or a hedge fund or something and you think that the, there's going to be some economic impact to a Trump election versus a Harris. When having that data is valuable. I wonder if this is available to see on chain, but what percentage of polymarkets bets are on the election versus anything else? Like it must be like 98%. I don't know if it's 98% but it's certainly high.

There's like a billion dollars of liquidity in the election right now. I ask Shane like what does he think? the next the next biggest market will be after the election and I think they have some pretty exciting things planned they they I don't believe they use bridge but they do use stable coins on the background in in the back end but they're a very crypto native company so they're able to implement that and Zach's been in or Shane's been in crypto for years in the Ethereum community yeah but for so many other companies using stable coins is a huge hassle.

I mean, you don't want to roll your own infrastructure there. Like, with my first business, we took, we accepted Bitcoin payments through Coinbase in 2013. And it was a mess. It was a disaster. I think, I mean, we lost like $10 million because we sold it too early. We should have held it. And then also it was just like a nightmare from an accounting perspective because you basically are operating in foreign currencies and you have to reconcile those.

So your balance sheets like fluctuating left and right. And so you wind up accepting them. And then for anyone who has a product with any sort of return policy, you wind up acting as a hedge, right? Because like, let's say that you're selling. I'll take that Bitcoin back. Exactly. Let's say you're selling microphones for $500. You buy 10 microphones for Bitcoin.

You have $5,000 in mics. If the price goes down, you just sell those microphones and get your cash back at dollars. But if the price goes up, you return the microphones and you get the Bitcoin back. And so you wind up in this weird scenario where, like, you get your cash back. scenario where like if the price is going up you tell the customers well okay we will refund you in the currency that you gave us or if it's going down so you're always like playing this weird game of like what do I give back to the customer because you act as a hedge so it's just really really difficult but obviously if

you can just plug stable coins in it makes a ton of sense and that's what's happening that's actually what if it comes out what if it comes out that Stripe paid a billion because Zach had taken his entire 50 million dollar round from Sequoia and just gone super long on Bitcoin. And then he's sitting on like, so the company actually got bought for $100 million, but then there's a billion dollars. And it's like,

Sequoia's like, you know what? We made this bet once with SVF. It didn't work. You fucking did. You know, I was waiting, you know the famous story about the FedEx founder? Yeah. So the FedEx founder, he's down to his last dollar.

The company's about to go out of business. Famously, he goes to Vegas, puts all the company's assets on black, comes up black, he doubles his money, he's able to make payroll, the business keeps growing. Now, the conspiracy theory is that it wasn't, he didn't go to the casino, he went to like a loan shark in Vegas or like the mafia.

No, the real, Ben, where's my tinfoil hat? Is that, is the water in the shot for him? Can you just keep it on the other side or something? It would be on brand for me to have water in the shot. Yeah, the whole time. No, so I think the real conspiracy theory is that he was narco traffic, you know, doing like trafficking drugs and getting a lot of cash and he needed a story in terms to say, like all he would have to do to make $100 grand in cash is do like one run for the cartel. And then all of a sudden he's got. Oh, because he's in Fed out.

Yeah, that makes sense. Because he's in the trucking. Exactly. So he could be like, okay, I'm just going to do one. So if you want to create a. hypothetically, a legendary, hypothetically legendary story

of how you bet your company on the cassette in Vegas. And you suddenly came up with all this cash. Yeah. That's a pretty good way to do.

That's super fascinating. Yeah, you'd have all the infrastructure to do it. But anyways, so take my tinfoil hat off. But I think that yeah, I was always thinking

that during the last crypto boom when everything was just ripping, we were going to hear the story of a company that raised some money, didn't find product market fit, but put their whole treasury in some alt coin and wound up with just a huge treasury. And then maybe they would keep building, use that,

and then actually make a win. And it'd be like, wait a minute, that company came out of like stealth. They raised a $1 million seed round, but they have a thousand employees or something and they're just launching this product. Like what happened? It's like, oh, well, yeah,

because they turned that million into 100 million, essentially gambling. it would be like a FedEx style story. But everyone I talked to in Crypto was like, yeah, there's been people that do that, but they just ride off in the sunset. They just leave and they don't, and they just stop building. They just drop out, which sucks. But yeah, with this, with Bridge, the one really interesting example that I did see of like

a company using this and it was a perfect example of this was scale. So they have a bunch of contractors internationally. They want to pay them quickly in dollars because there's no fluctuation. And so they use, I think they use a product that's built on top of bridge. I love how we say there's no fluctuation of the dollar. I mean, essentially. Meanwhile, it's been devalued. Yeah, yeah.

But like relative to a lot of these other places, like people will be so happy to get paid in dollars on the day that they work. And that's something that stable coins can bring. So it's interesting to watch crypto, like, rack up these, like, very real wins, whether it's like Bitcoin becoming essentially Lindy. Haters will say it's Photoshop. Yeah, exactly. Well, haters will focus on the board apes. And it's like, yeah, that was one thing that didn't work out. It was, it was Yuga Labs that was our customer that, that didn't use our, when they, when they raised with us, they didn't use the stable coin functionality.

Well, should we move on to Brother of the Week? Yeah, this was a tough one. But first, I need to tell you about net jets. If you're looking for the ultimate and flexibility and convenience when it comes to private travel, NetJets offers an unparalleled experience. With access to the world's largest fleet of private jets, NetJets allows you to enjoy the benefits of private aviation without the hassle of ownership.

NetJets operates the largest, most diverse private aircraft fleet in the world and offers a full range of personalized private aviation solutions to meet and exceed the high standards of the world's most discerning travelers. Tell a personal story about flying on a private jet. Do you have a lot of experience in the private jet world? Not as much as I'd like, John.

I think that private aviation is the last true luxury. It is. Something that David Senra said... What's that? One of his mentors told him. One of David's the life goal is to get a private jet. That's the only thing that matters. That's the only thing that matters.

That's the only thing that matters. Here's the thing. You can sleep in a private jet. You can't fly a house. Right. So what does that tell you? Yeah. Optimize for the jet.

Don't optimize it for the house. That's true. I'm surprised that's not more of a thing. You think about it. RVs are big. And why are people not just saying, you know, I'm going to get, I'm going to buy this jet or I'm going to leverage net jets primarily as a, you know, sort of like this sort of RV in the skies. Yeah.

There is this interesting thing where people always complain like, oh, we don't have flying cars yet. We don't have flying cars yet. But we do. We do. It's just not evenly distributed yet. We have private jets, which you can take anywhere like it's a flying car, and then we also have helicopters. Yeah. And if you put those two together, I'm surprised that it's kind of flying anywhere.

Yeah, I'm surprised that it hasn't become more popular to develop, you know, something, you know, maybe this is a partnership with net jets, right? But developing, you know, a city in Arizona that's way off the beaten path that has consistent air, you know, private air travel between L.A. or somewhere that's a comparable distance to New York. Anyways, there's, you know, we're thrilled to partner with NetJets as consumers and as a show. And, you know, we look forward to many, you know, more trips with them in the future. Yeah. So thanks to them. Should we move on to Brother of the Week?

We got to give it to Daniel Francis getting doxed. You might know him as Daniel Johnson. DJ. Or growing Daniel? Growing Daniel. Growing Daniel. One of the greatest posters. He announced his startup, ABLE, this week.

And it is an AI startup for police. And he's based in San Francisco. And he launched it an interesting way. I mean, he has over 100,000 followers. Basically, everything he posts goes viral. Like, he's fantastic at shit posting. But he chose to launch this in kind of the most normy way possible. just like a tech crunch article.

Tech crunch article. But his aura was so powerful that, did he do an interview with Gary or something? Gary, I think, was just a big investor. Yeah, yeah. So, like, you know, he could have, he could have gone on a podcast. He could have done a launch video. He knows people. He could have done all sorts of stuff, but he went with just the tech crunch article,

which is kind of hilarious and counter. I think he might still be having a little bit of an identity crisis. He's like, I'm the number one shit poster on tech Twitter. Yep. And I'm building. AI for cops. Yeah, it is a little hard because, like, yeah, maybe you know his account is shit posting. Like, there's a couple of shit posters that I follow.

Like, there's this one guy, Chris Backy. Do you know him? Yeah. He worked at, he ran Lasky. He sold it to Twitter. And he worked at X. And then he left. And when he left, he was like, big news.

Like, I'm leaving the company. Like, thanks everyone. And he's always shit posting. So my reply was just like, oh, this is like your best joke. Yeah. This is like, oh, this is like your best joke. Yeah. You can't believe you even like, you even got rid of your official badge.

Yeah. Yeah. This is like, searing comedy. great satire on like what what cringe people do when they leave companies yeah and so you can see this like backfiring if he's like hey i'm launching this like police a i start up everyone would just be like oh like this is the best ship post ever he's like no guys it actually is real it's actually like a real person yeah it's funny to think about him in some Milwaukee police station you know doing a customer like meeting or conversation or a sales thing and they're like so you know we have a few minutes

before the chief arrives what tell me about yourself you know what Do you have any family and law enforcement? And he goes, well, I'm somewhat of a sheriff myself on tech Twitter, actually. A little town called Technology Twitter. I don't know if you've ever been there. I actually met Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is not, here's the thing.

People aren't going to want to say there's always, anytime somebody posts a lot and is building a company, all the VCs that suck at posting try to signal them, you know, and sort of like shit on them and be like, oh, this is not a serious founder or whatever, why he's posting it. But whether you like it or not, if somebody can figure out how to post really well, they can figure out how to build a company and get attention and communicate in the right ways to raise money, to hire great people, to get customers. So for some reason or another, the skill set of posting translates well to doing important things. It's the compression of ideas, right?

Yeah. So, like, posting a banger tweet is just taking some sort of, like, complex. That's bouncing around in the ether and boiling it down in something that's funny or fits into a meme format. That gets attention. Yeah, exactly. And it relays a complex concept in a very short amount of time. And that is just a valuable skill. as long as you don't get addicted to it and you're not just making posting your entire life

or like getting sucked into it and having some weird e-o-books. But I don't think he has that. For Daniel, it's an edge because his ex-income allows him to take a lower salary from Abel. He probably makes a decent amount, right? Yeah, yeah. He's probably making like 10 grand a month or something, a couple of a month from that. Oh, yeah, Sian is in here. Yeah.

Oh, you got Long Journey. That's great. Justin's over there. Yeah. That's awesome. And YC. I love it. Did you see the his it's it I will say it is the most hilarious business that he could

build straight up as a post as a poster to go build AI for cops I'm totally for it I want I want the police to have more funding yeah I think that they have gone through a decade of being ostracized and put down and told that they were bad people when these are people that get paid way less money than they should probably to do a job that is very challenging and you you know half the country seemingly hates you whether there are people that are breaking laws or people that are just police haters so I think it's I think it's totally a smart move because he can go make building AI for cops cool and attract other smart posters but it's it's funny from the lens that I would say that you know somebody like iush who's building warp is like a talented poster there was a lot more

overlap in terms of the customer the buyer the buyer's already on his audience yeah um i just don't think you know maybe two cops follow growing daniel yeah yeah yeah the only value is maybe hiring engineers which is deeply valuable yeah but and investors yeah like every major bc u's on tech yeah the real yeah The real edge is ability to raise capital and hire talented people that otherwise wouldn't be going and applying for a job at AI for cops. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember his stunt at Twitter when? Of course.

It was iconic. Of course. I was actually, I got dinner with Raoul the night before that happened. No way. And we were just like hanging out. And then I went into like a meeting at Founders Fund the next day. And we all open up our phones. and we're seeing, like, he, the guy that I had dinner with the night before and Daniel,

just out front of, out front of Twitter HQ, like, talking to Deerbosa at CNBC about how they got laid off and, like, causing this, like, viral, like, fake news cycle. And it was just iconic. That was amazing. And it's no, that was really like the moment. It's no fluke that both those guys have gone on to build interesting companies. Yeah, they have. Because they're interesting people.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think both of them have the ability to not get lost in the sauce on Twitter. You could raise a whole, you could raise a whole fund dedicated to funding posters. Yeah. Right? It's just the poster index. Yeah.

And I think it would outperform. Perhaps. There's only one way to find out. Only one way to find out. Got to fund the posters. Fund the posters. It's an interesting category to be in. Like, I'm pretty sure the company that makes the book.

body cams is doing pretty well. I think it's the same company that owns the tasers. I forget what company that is, but they're like a multi-billion dollar public company. Yep. It's just hard because like selling into police departments is, it's not like DOD where there's one buyer. The real play is building Twitch meets police body cams,

meets polymarket. So you can actually bet on it. Bet on arrests. What's going to happen? chases and yeah we're in pursuit of this person will they pull over

will they make a run for it yeah okay I see a Hellcat engine he's he's breaking for it yeah yeah the other company that's done really well here is are you familiar flock safety yeah yeah they are crushing it

and is that a founder's fund yeah and they made that another big acquisition oh yeah yeah they did aerodrome yeah yeah yeah and and everyone thought it was really really hard to build like the the ander roll for like the

the local government because it's just so fragmented and you have to go like jurisdiction by jurisdiction. But some people have cracked it. And so, you know, if he can figure that out, it's going to be good. It's going to be good. I'm excited. So congratulations to Daniel, the brother of the week. Brother of the week. Should you do some tweet reactions? I like this one. So Elon Musk has been playing Diablo relentlessly. I mean, the guy is one of the top 30 Diablo players in the world right now, something like that. And so Alex Lieberman over at Morning Brew says, how does this man have time to play video games?

I would absolutely love to see a screenshot of Elon Musk calendar, would be a fascinating window into elite time management prioritization and delegation. And so, yeah, I mean, he's running SpaceX, Tesla, Neurlink, boring company, all pretty serious efforts, then also campaigning constantly and doing tons of interviews. He's also running Twitter X constantly. And then apparently becoming one of the greatest Diablo players ever in the world. Yeah. And then aren't there people that are saying that he's not actually playing and maybe he has a

whole team of people that are playing. So they're warming up the account for him. Exactly. Yeah. So one of the other great Diablo players did kind of a breakdown and said that, so Diablo basically has new season content every quarter where there's like a new final boss and new levels and stuff. So even if you're maxing out your account when the new season drops, like you have several hundred hours of content in front of you just to get to the right level to beat the final boss. And so in order to be where he is, which is beating, because in this tweet,

he says like five minute T150 clear, which is like the hardest thing you can possibly do right now. Hope there's some mid-season content because he basically like finished the expansion pack like early. Early. And it's supposed to take you like three months or maybe longer. And so one of the Diablo like, you know,

fans says like in order to do this, like you literally have to be playing like 40 hours a week or something like that, maybe more. And so now there's like this theory that maybe Elon has a team of interns or something like playing on his account doing a lot of like the grinding and leveling and then he can just log on for the best which is which is like amazing delegation if that's true yeah it's giving it's giving it's giving it's giving ammo to i mean the guy spends a lot of time on jets right sure star link i'm

sure star link testing starlink making sure it's working what better way to test the product than to play you know diablo um i think that this is potentially giving some amy to the folks out there that say Elon's not a real he didn't build SpaceX he didn't do this or that he hires team that's like that's the number one gotcha that people like try to get Elon for is like that yeah it's like you didn't do that other you hired people that did that which is like okay okay you should you should hire people and build neuralink too yeah I think everybody would benefit if you could do that but yeah this is giving some real real ammo to those people who are going to do a takedown piece, which I'm sure journalists will find a way to paint this in a Elon's deceptive video game practices apply to much more than just, you know, online games. Elon's treating the entire world like an online game. He thinks leveling up is all that matters when, you know. Yeah. I mean, I think it's human, humanizing. It's good. Like,

The idea of, you know, this very powerful and wealthy person, like not having fun or, like, letting off steam at any point is, like, very blackpilling to me. Do you think that he is over having kids and now is just like, I'm going to be a kid? He was joking about it recently, right? He was saying he was going to have Taylor Swift's baby. That would be, that would be. Or he was like offering. I can't wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That part of the simulation, I cannot wait for it. I think he's down and I think he's hit such economies of scale with the children that, like, I would be surprised if it ever stops. I have this theory that, like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, like, old dudes who, I don't know. There's a lot of, like, old billionaires who are, like, constantly getting divorced and remarried. And I think at a certain point, it's like they just like having weddings because weddings are just, like, big parties and, like, an excuse to, to, to, to, because you look at, you look at, I forget it was, like, maybe the founder of news, Robert Murdoch. He had like three weddings in the course of like nine years or something. He's getting remarried every couple years.

And it's like, okay, why doesn't he just like date or like not get married? But at a certain point, it's like he probably has some legal team that can like structure the perfect like pre-up. And then he just gets to throw a wedding. And his girlfriend likes that. And so he's just like, yeah, okay, run it back. We'll do another one. It's not a new deal.

And then when they break up, it's like, yeah, they get divorced. But to him it's just like breaking up with someone. It's like very like low stakes, I think. But it's like an excuse. That would be, that would be. I don't see it that way. Yeah. Elon should open source his entire, you know, family building playbook, including,

even if he's not getting married to these women, I'm sure they're signing documentation that basically says if we have a child. You get taken care of, yeah. Yeah, these are the terms. Well, he gets, he sends a term sheet. Well, he got destroyed by Pavel Duraf recently because Pavel has like 50 kids because he was not only. You got mobbed? Oh, he got totally mocked.

Because Pavel, it came out that he has like 50 kids because he's been like donating sperm and sperm banks and stuff and just doing like all this crazy stuff. That's, that's, it feels a little unnatural. It's not a, it's not a cool way to have 50 kids. No. For Pavel? Yeah, that makes sense.

Over a hundred. That's just to me reckless and weird. Just like, you know. He is a dripped out technology brother though. So, no, I support. I support, I guess I support. I just think that. why not just have 50 children with 50 women if you're going to.

I don't know. I guess he does. He just doesn't. He doesn't fuck. Yeah. Well, let's move on to this one. So Will, who I think was an open AI for a while, I follow this guy. He says, I don't understand the recent trend of college dropouts specifically,

raising some insane $10, $20, $100 million at $1,250,000. $500 million valuations pre-product or pre-revenue, often for idiotic shit. Are people unable to see how they're fucking themselves? It's not just free money, my brother. And he kind of went on to say, like, yeah, he knows a lot of people that were young, and they raised too much money, and now they're buried under a preft stack, and it's kind of a warning to the next generation. This is the dark side of pattern matching.

Yeah. Where pattern matching Zach, who had been in fintech for, over a decade building at square, his own company, then Square, then Coinbase, then Brex, to go then build another fintech company. But pattern matching, oh, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out to build the social media app and then go on to make a plethora of devastating mistakes and mishaps with people

and the government and all these different things. And then when I saw this tweet, the number one, the company I was thinking about is a company called Mock, which is making, I let's see. Oh, wait, Mock Industries. Mock Industries, which is like an MIT dropout. And, you know, they're building, I think they're building hypersonics. It was like hydrogen-powered weapons. Hydrogen-powered weapons. He was going to shoot down weather balloons and drones and just.

So the issue is, is, but yeah, got a lot of money very quickly. Speed running in some of these industries that where the stakes are a lot higher, like defense tech. Yep. You're seeing some of those issues with Mock where one of their employees like was hospitalized with like devastating injuries because something blew up. And there's a real I don't think I'm all for giving smart young people a lot. of money to do ambitious things but it's almost like they're fine the balance of it

right so but so bet on bet on the kid bet on the dropout but go get them somebody from Lockheed Martin well that's the under to be their chaperone that's the under discussed thing about Facebook they had some like VP of engineering who was like 45 who was there very early I forget what this guy's name is but he was like allegedly like very important in like stabilizing the company early on when it was a bunch of crazy kids running around. And he had like just the right level of respect to be like, okay, when he speaks up, we should listen. But he's not trying to like, be like, oh, we got to bring in NetSuite. He wasn't like, he wasn't slowing anything down, but he was providing like just enough,

like, you know, basic rules. Because at one point, like, Facebook was all just like one file on a web server. And like when you wanted to make a code change, you would just be like, Everybody, I'm pushing the code. Like nobody make any changes. I'm going to update the file or whatever, like the files on the web server. It was like crazy. And he like brought in like cool stuff that like cool process that everyone was like, okay, yeah, this process actually makes us better.

That makes sense. Yeah. It's cool. It's interesting because I think there's there's two things that are kind of on a collision course with these like crazy high valuations and high early checks. And it's one that the funds are bigger than ever. And even though we went through the Zos. ZERP era and VC fundraising went down, there's still so many more billion dollar funds out there than there were 10 years ago. So there's just more money to deploy, and you got to deploy it

to get the fees. So there's all these incentives align with like, we got to deploy big money. So let's push out the IPO window, do more growth stuff. Let's put more money into earlier stage companies, like write bigger checks. That's fine. And then simultaneously, the two hot industries are immensely capital-intensive. AI. So I'm going to come in and say, yeah, I'm going to do a training run. I need to hire a bunch of engineers

that are going to want a million dollars a year. And I'm going to also need to buy a bunch of Nvidia GPUs and do a bunch of CAP-X and build out a training center. And even if I'm not capital-intensive, even if I'm capital-light, a training run might still cost $10 million for my first thing. So there's just higher computing costs

and we're not in the zero-marginal cost era of AI. And then defense is the same thing. Yeah, I'm going to need to buy a bunch of CNC machines, a bunch of aluminum, like all this stuff has cost. It's not just this, oh yeah, you're YC, you get 100K, and you're going to go spin up a web server, and your cost is going to be perfectly matched with your revenue. Like when your website blows up and starts getting a ton of traffic, well, yeah, you're going to have paying customers then. So all of a sudden, we have the two hottest categories are highly capital intensive, at least in theory, and then

you have funds that are perfectly set up to fund those capital intensive businesses. So it's just like anyone with an idea let's get a big check in there but the problem is is that if you if you wind up pivoting to something that isn't as capital intensive or doesn't find like the immediate product market fit you wind up buried under this huge capital stack and I think that's what I think that's the pain people are feeling right now but yeah yeah yeah I think probably get uh I think probably get a call from Jeremy Giffon soon yeah yeah yeah Jeremy mock industries is Jeremy's like Who knows?

No, I think that the challenge is So this happens with Let's say I think the The rule is Maybe it's Depeuse law Which is the faster you get a lot of money Like the dumber you will be with it

Right? And so if you win the lottery You're going to just spend that money horrendously. And that's almost always what happens because you didn't have to learn how money works. You didn't have to learn how hard it is to make it. And so you're just doing like crazy, crazy stuff. And this happens even with angel investing. People like, oh, I'm going to do angel investing and their worst five investments. Sometimes you get these people that are like, oh, yeah, my first two angel investments are unicorns. And that's because of the networks they were in. But more often it's

somebody starts angel investing and makes like their, the worst five investments, that they'll make in the first five deals that they do. Yeah. And so I think the challenge here is when money comes really fast and easy, like you're an MIT dropout that raises $50 million in the first year. You're just going to make a bunch of really bad decisions. It's everything from you're going to spend $400,000 on a brand identity because your VC connected you to a, to the top, to the top agency.

And you're not thinking about it. about the real cost of that, you're gonna make a hire that's not a good culture fit because they just care about cash comp and you're gonna just overpay for them. And then now you're dealing with this person that. Not holding the bar on hire. Yeah, you're not. I just need to hit my hiring quota.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, or you optimize your, you're telling you, you know, these people get excited about being like, oh yeah, we're a 20 person team. Yeah, it's like, well, you don't even know what you're building yet. You don't even need to be like fully starving, but just like a year, or two of like being somewhat cash constrained is going to set the culture up for years where you're

going to go back and like the CEO is just going to be when some VP comes to them and it's like I want to spend $500,000 in a branding package. They're going to be like, what? Like I did our first brand myself. Like yeah like why do we need to jump there? Let's just do a half step and then and then all of those are going to add up to like saving money and being a little bit more judicious and a little bit less like frivolous and then you won't have a culture of frivolousness, which I think it's like the real danger with like the yeah overall when people are I don't think I don't think it's bad for the world that this stuff happens to be honest and in fact in fact the entire model is predicated on if you back 20 MIT dropouts and one of them builds a generational firm yeah then it worked

That's the entire model of venture capital. So Will, I think it's a funny tweet and I respect that point of view, but he's not really realizing what the real game of venture is, which is if one of these companies becomes 10% as big as SpaceX, then the entire investment strategy worked. That's true, but he's not talking to venture capitalists here. He's talking to entrepreneurs. His brothers. Yeah, he's talking to the brothers. And so what he's saying is not that, like, yes, all of these deals could add up to plenty of funds doing well. And even the bad funds, they're going to return capital.

They're going to be one X funds, maybe two X funds. They'll be okay. It's not like the cash will really get totally incinerated. The problem is that I think he's trying to just raise a flag to college drop out young people that it's like, yes, you can go and do the fake work of, twisting your idea into something that fits a VC narrative and say, oh, well, like, we could be asset light, but we can raise more money if we say we're going to train our own model. Or we could do this, but if we say that we need to buy this huge manufacturing plant and put up a big American flag, we'll be able to raise more money.

So let's go with that path, even if it's not the right path for our business, even if that's not what the capital structure of our industry demands. And so you wind up building for the VCs instead of for the market, for the customer, and for yourself. And so I think that's kind of the meta take here to some degree. Yeah. But yeah. Got to kiss a lot of frogs.

It's the game. Should you do this one? I love this one. Evan Armstrong writes, obviously I am excited for my child, but also really wish I had like two more months to write. Just today, one, pre-product robotics company raising a $2 billion valuation. Two, Bridge, getting bought at 90x revenue.

Three, rumors about new. models coming can't help but want to publish on this amazing I know this is a man who prioritizes work over everything else skip paternity leave brother it is yeah it is the most important thing that keeps the keeps the society keeps capitalism grinding the relentless march of techno capital is nothing without those who are willing to put their family to the side I took off 36 hours when my son was born not necessarily proud of that yeah He was born Saturday, like, you know, in the early, early hours of the morning. 12 hour, 12 hour.

12 hour. I legitimately had a 12, 12 hour meeting back to backs on Monday. But we had to feel like that. That was the only way. We had to do that. I didn't do that with the second one. But, but yeah, I mean, I think that that's just a sign that Evan loves his work. That's great.

And he is, there's a lot of big stuff, stuff. We wouldn't have this podcast if there wasn't stuff to talk about. Also, I mean, underrated about this tweet, work life balance always goes viral. So I don't know if this got dunked on, but like if you're rage baiting, like, this is the best possible rage bait if you're just trying to grow your account. Like, because people will fight about this forever. Yeah, because he could have tweeted, while I'm a big fan of organic intelligence being my new child. I'm really a fan of artificial intelligence. Exactly.

And the child that I'm having today, I could have had the same child 400 years ago, but AI and large language models didn't exist 400 years ago. Exactly. So if you just dial this up, if he just rewrites this, is like, I haven't seen my child in months, but I've been writing. Boom. Yeah, they're actually, so every is chugging along. I've subscribed to their stuff forever.

Yeah. I think that they are too nice of guys to be in the media business. They now, they, they spun out a word processing product, which, which seems cool. But they're not like Eric Newcomer, who's putting up seven figures of Bivada because, you know, maybe they are now. I don't know. I have no idea. But I think that Evan is too nice to rage bait, you know, like he only went 50% of the way there. Yeah, what is the actual, it's every.

Yeah, it's a media company. I think they're focused on AI. Yeah, I've never seen them get absolutely raked over the coals by tech or the communists. And you've got to have an enemy. If you don't have an enemy, you don't have an ally. Yeah. The only reason people rally together. The enemy of my, yeah.

No, seriously, you have to have an enemy. If you don't have an enemy, there's no reason for someone to be your ally. We should, who we need to pick an enemy. The working class, obviously. There you go. Yeah. We all know that the working class gets too much credit. And it's long, and respect for the financial professional.

Yeah, blue collar. Yeah. They're clearly the enemy. Yeah. And we haven't done our jobs until people are calling us billionaires in a sort of negative. Exactly, a pejorative. Yeah, pejorative. I mean, unironically, the enemy that, the enemy that,

I always focus on in the tech stuff is China essentially and the foreign government. And that's so authentic to my lived experience because I studied abroad in Shanghai. Yeah. I studied while I was there at basically the Harvard of China. I worked at a tech accelerator like while I was there and within 48 hours of setting foot in that country, I knew that I wanted to do everything. I wanted to spend my life making sure that we contained China. And that they didn't export their sort of way of life to the world. So I don't have any issues with the people of China.

Of course. But their way of life. Yeah. And I feel like that's, I always try and remind people in tech when there's these little feuds. like, oh, Miami versus San Francisco, like, which is cooler? Or like the gundo versus SF, like, AI versus hard tech or even like the intro fights between like the VC firms. Like in Dresen, Sequoia, Founders Fund, like they're all beefing or whatever. And I'm like, okay, like there might be good reasons for these beefs, but like let's refocus on like the real battle here.

They're all going to. They're all going to enjoy a conversation at Milken. Yeah. Everyone's on the same team here. And I try and I try and refocus, especially like, you're all going to. when the gundo bros start going hard on s-f i'm like boys do you think china is having these fights over over wuhan versus shanghai no they say what is huon good at china

biotechnology bio weapons development what what is what is shenjin good at copying american consumer electronics like they're both excellent in their own ways in the same way that the gundo is great at hard tech and san francis is great at ai they're not fighting couldn't have said it better myself they're working together as one team We need to be one team over here in America. Yeah, who's the L.P. We need to find the LP in Sequoia, and Jriesen and Founders Fund is probably Saudi.

Oh, there's tons. Not even Saudi. That's gonna be like put, who's the, who's the one person that can put all the GPs on one group chat and be like, stop this. Squash this right now in front of me. You know who it is?

I think it's Zuck's family office. You know that? Yeah, yeah. I forget what they're called, but I'm pretty sure. their LPs and everything. Yeah. But there's a bunch of others,

endowments and whatnot. Dad, the GPs are fighting again. Yeah. I do think that I love the idea of like, you know, being a founder became high status. So it was like,

oh, I got a graduate from college and get on the track and, you know, start a company. No, drop out. I got to get into a good school. Then it was like drop out and,

oh, like, I'm just going to go straight to angel investing or like start a VC firm. And it's like, okay, like kind of odd. And then we talked about that one guy. who is like he's starting like fund management software it's like one layer of abstraction pretty soon it's just going to be like I'm just going to go be an LP I'm going to go straight to be

straight to be an LP yeah the investing is something that I feel like I grew up in the so immersed in the Silicon Valley ethos and you can just do things you can do anything that the number one way in which I've felt that experience really matters is an angel investment investing because I just started angel investing and I didn't know, you know, there was no, I didn't go to Jason Callicanus school of angel investing. I was going to ask if you had done that. Like I didn't, didn't do that. I just started investing in cool ideas with smart people and it's overall been very, you know, fruitful that strategy. But there's been a number of, it's like, okay, I talked with Zach. Yeah. Within six months of him incorporating bridge didn't invest. I met. I met. Shane from Polly Market, like we would DM back in like 2021 and I didn't go back up the Brinks truck. And now having had those experiences, I'm like next time when I meet people like that now, I just figure out a way to give them money as fast as possible. Yep.

And experience matters. Like my returns from this era of my investing life will be better than the prior era because of that learning. Yeah. Well, are you going to invest in any fentanyl vaccines? You said this article? Oh, yeah. This is the, I think I texted this to the group being, being. I think this is in Bloomberg. It says a fentanyl vaccine is a long shot that just might work. What did you find interesting about this? So I just think it's funny because it's the private markets doing what they do best, which is finding solutions to problems that the government is not capable of solving. I just think that the government is probably a lot more able to tackle the fentanyl issue than

than they have a monopoly on violence and they should enforce that at the ports, right? Right, right. And and. But at the same time, yeah, I mean, if you if you sell this through medical clinics, potentially people come in when they're not at, or when they're rock bottom. It's just a hilarious. Yeah. They're at rock bottom.

And they say like, look, I'm done. They're like, I'm literally going to buy some sketchy cocaine right now. Please, can I get this vaccine? So I don't. Will it kick in in the next two hours? Yeah. You know? Because I just, I don't know.

But I, but I think it's, I really don't know who the customer is for this. I mean, I can imagine, but it seems like sort of a very, I don't know, like people that think like I'm very happy to report that I don't ever expect to encounter fentanyl in my life. Yeah. And so this vaccine, I'm... You know what I need? I need an ayahuasca vaccine. So then I can go into the jungle with all the tech billionaires and be like, yeah, let's go on this ayahuasca retreat. Totally. And they're all getting one-shotted. And I'm just sitting there. Like a demigog.

Yeah. Yeah. Getting stronger. You're having to fake. You're having to fake the effects. I'm like, oh yeah, it's so crazy. Like the world's open. Like, I had this brilliant idea.

Like, it's a nicotine company. You should invest. And you're like, wow. Yeah. That's what the demon told you? I was like, yeah. It told me that nicotine pouches a big, big category.

20 on 200. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just think getting, like, if you're going to do that vaccine, just start doing.

start creating vaccines for everything. I mean, the vaccines are a great business model. It is. I want a vaccine for... Low testosterone. Yeah, that's one. Another one would be like inbox zero. You know, it's like a vaccine that...

What if there's a microplastics vaccine? Take that? Your body just deflects the plastics. Yeah, force field. Force field. Anyway, I don't know how we're going to cover this, but the cover of the economist this week, week is fantastic. It's the SpaceX rocket taking off the starship, but instead of the core

tube, it's just the dollar. And it says America's economy is the envy of the world, and it's a deep dive on the resilience of the American economy, often hated on, but extremely resilient. And Robert Sterling posts this like mega thread of all the things that he loves about America, and it's just amazing. I'll read some of this. Culture that celebrates risk-taking, ingrained ingrained hatred of bureaucracy, robust capital markets, Starbucks nitro cold brew, cheap and abundant oil, you can just do stuff. Investment bankers that work till 2 a.m. Low barriers to entry for entrepreneurship, manifest destiny, private equity, Delaware C corporations,

M&A markets, meritocracy, low capital gainsacks, McDonald's, New York City, University Greek Life System, Walmart, GPU clusters, Sand Hill Road, Michael Jordan, 50 states competing for business, the Homestead Act, old school DARPA, no union reps, on corporate boards, like the entire state of Texas, like you just rift for so long and just sent this massive list of cool things and just got to be so pumped up. How are you not bullish after reading that? You really, you really have to be. But I love that it's two lenses on the same idea.

Like you know that the economist wasn't writing like this, right? The economist is going to have this very thoughtful article that explains basically the same conclusion. In a much more complicated way. In a much more complicated way. Much more nuanced way. And I like how it, almost every single thing listed off was like intense American consumerism. Yeah.

And then and then finance. Finance. Yeah. Ability to get filthy rich, even if you're born poor. State school engineering programs. Pick up trucks. Yeah. It's just amazing.

It really, it really is such a wonderful country. I always like that, a teal line where they're like oh are you going to leave he's like to where yeah it's the least bad option like you might complain about america but it is the best we just number yeah i never i i think we grew up in the in the period where young people thought that america was bad we i don't know what i don't know what was the cause of it but it's almost like things were so good that people were trying to find reasons to not like it for some reason. But I've been to, I've been to 40 plus countries, many of which I've spent, you know,

a week plus in. And the closest thing I got to wanting to live there was I, I would buy a vacation home in Switzerland. just because Switzerland is outside of the United States. Like I would say Switzerland is my favorite country. That's not the United States. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. I just love being there. I could see spending a lot of time there. But I never once in my life was thinking I want to spend three quarters of the year. Every time I traveled, I would always just come back to like, oh, like I went to Thailand. And I was like, oh, this is Russia's Mexico. Like I went to Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. It's just L.A.

Like there's beach and there's mountains. It's beautiful. It's amazing. People drive around on freeways. It's very similar to L.A. Like you go to all these different countries and it's like there's like America is so unique in that we have, we have Manhattan. So that's like your Tokyo or your high finance like really dense city.

You have L.A.S.F. Unrivaled Miami. But then you also have Hawaii like a chain of islands. So it's like all of a sudden like underrated. Underrated. Fiji's great. but it's a lot farther and it's not 10x better than Hawaii. What's the next Hawaii?

Like okay I never need to go to Russia. Yeah. And America really just did a good job of capturing like every single biome. So there are there are tropical areas, there are desert areas, there are mountainous areas, forest areas, tundra. Like we have it all. Whereas very few countries have every single biome covered. Russia doesn't have tropical areas. They got to go to Thailand.

Yeah. Yeah. The thing that you need to do if you're American, and I think a lot of our listeners right now are American, is as you go about your day-to-day life, or you go on a work trip, or you go on a vacation within the United States, view it from the eyes of some Italian kid who grew up in a small village and is visiting, like, Los Angeles, right? Like we're sitting here recording with a straight shot view of skyscrapers that are home to some of America's greatest companies, right? If you're from a small fishing village and you get to look out and see KPMG, I mean, that is, that's like a core memory. Yeah. Right. And so it's our duty to view our world through their eyes. and when I drive back and I'm passing, you know, the other Jonathan club, the beach club.

The beach club and seeing, you know, this Ferris wheel like on a pier or I'm driving on PCH or I'm on the 405 and I see the Hollywood sign. You know, Chateau Monta. Chateau Monta. You know, these iconic places. It's important to try to don't just have your eyes glaze over and look back at. TikTok, you know? Enjoy it. Enjoy it.

Yeah. America's undefeated. It's not going anywhere. No matter what happens. Sorry. Sorry. This one was good. I have this riff with, you know how Josh Steinman tweets, good morning we're going to win every day?

And I was thinking about, like, what is a mantra that, you know, you could tweet every single day. And mine was just listing out every single country that's not America and calling them un-American. Canada is un-American. France is un-American. Greece is un-American. Un-American is a good... That's potentially a phrase that we could...

That we could coin. That we could own. It's literally true. Canada is un-American. Almost everything that I don't like is un-American. Yeah. Should you talk about Tim Ferriss? Tim Ferriss is un-American.

I like Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is the most American. No, no, I'm just saying I like Tim. but this specific video. So he put up a clip from his podcast where he did a 30-day dopamine detox, no caffeine, alcohol, sex, or sweetness. He didn't do, which sounds like, it sounds like I'm not going to hug my wife or something. But he was saying that he would not consume any sugar or anything that was sweetened. Yeah, the funny thing with this is, I could do all, I could do, yeah, one, I could do all those things.

but whatever dopamine release that I negated from skipping coffee or nicotine or any of these other or a nice piece of chocolate cake in the evening would immediately be undone by picking up my daughter and getting her hug you know like the same whatever I mean I think like to you know steal man him like that is the point of the dopamine detox is that you will you'll proportionally get more dopamine from picking up your daughter right right right you're not like okay this is like you know like 110% of TikTok, it's like TikTok isn't even in the equation. So it's just like the purest of the pure.

Yeah, for you, it would just be waking up in the morning and being like, I have three sons. Yeah, exactly. I do wonder if he stopped posting during this detox. Yeah. Because that's the real for a content creator. Yeah.

Did he stop capital allocating? Did he stop investing? Because the rush of making a good seed deal? I think Tim stopped Angel investing. Oh, really? Like, it was too much. Too much dopamine. Yeah, I mean, the angel investing is deeply addictive.

It is. It makes no sense to do financially. Yeah. I always wonder with these dopamine detoxes if, if like, when you cut something out, like, usually you find yourself finding a crutch. Like, I notice like if I, if I stop using one, like, I stopped using a lot of the endless feeds. But then I find myself just opening up like the Wall Street Journal more. And that's probably better.

But I'm still like using that for whatever. You're still a rat on the treadmill. Exactly. Going to hit the. So I wonder what. What his like cheat meal was during this dopamine detox? Like what was he doing to get? Yeah, I don't, I don't.

The only, the only video that I would watch, it's funny. I don't think either of us watched the video. I did. It was him talking to Kevin Rose, the guy who tried to dig. Yeah, so I would watch, I would watch a 30-day long video of Tim doing a dopamine detox. Yeah. That's the real dopamine detox is just to watch Tim's extremely boring life in monk mode. I love it.

It takes 30 days and you can sleep when he sleeps. But you have to let you have to be woken up by his alarm. That's pretty sick. So that's probably the, that's a whole, that's a whole category of content where you just live someone else's life. I feel like that's something like Jocko premium subscribers would like pay for some sort of live stream like come live my life with me.

Like tap, tap into this live. stream and you're just going to like come along for this whole thing like when I wake up you wake up when I go to the gym you go to the gym it's kind of people pay for that in person yeah virtually it's you can scale scale it yeah that's definitely a high there's definitely like a like a lot of his on his like off-site events obviously very bounded by like the number of people that can attend but if you just put out the 30-day video imagine falling falling falling asleep listening to jaka effectively tell you a bedtime story. Today was a great day. Tomorrow is going to be a better one. And then, and then he just, like, is sort of rambling and you sort of fall asleep. And then he says,

morning, sweetheart. It's 4 a.m. I don't want to be up right now. You don't want to be up right now. I got to start posting the Jocko wake-ups with the Patech at 4 a.m. because he has, like, the really athletic, like, Navy C-L watch. G-shock or whatever. G-shock, yeah. And it's just the Patec at 4 a.m. be like, time to go to work. It's the best. I love Jocko. I love Jocko.

Jock, as soon as he's a billionaire, he can call in and be on the show. For sure. He's going to be close. Only a matter of time. He has multiple products that are like the top on Amazon. His business is insane. He has so many different modifications methods.

Did CENRA ever send you that like breakdown? Oh, that's great. It's like, yeah, it's looking like in a single, in a single long Jocko episode, like all of, the ad reads and all of the monetization that's going on, there were like 10 or 15 different products and calls to action. So it's like an athletic greens competitor, an LMNT competitor, a protein powder. But then it's also like a subscription to the premium service. And then it's like, yeah, the books. And then it's like, there's a $100 tier for like a course that you buy and you

watch. There's like a $1,000 tier for like going to a big conference. There's a $10,000 tier for going to like the VIP conference. Getting kicked in the nuts by. There's a 50,000. So, like, no matter what you're willing to spend, he does really, really good at, like, price laddering and price discrimination, because that's one of the hardest things with, with podcasting and why it works with ads is that you have some billionaires in your audience. With us, it's like mostly billionaires, but then you also have some people that are like, they're not billionaires yet.

And so they don't have the ability to drop, you know, $100,000 on, you know, a private event with the technology brothers. But how do you get money out of both of those audiences? cohorts. Well, you got to have an affordable product. Net jets is a really good example, right, where you might not be able to afford a private jet. And we certainly have friends who are billionaires who own their own jets. Yep. They'll still use net jets, right? It's not a one or the other. Yeah. But it's also a reason why you might hear some ads on this show for things that have lower ticket prices because we want to. Yeah, we want to monetize every single listener

here. That's the goal of the show to be the most profitable podcast in history. And that means that no matter who you are, no matter what your W2 says, no matter what your Roth IRA says, we want to get the most money out of you. Should we move on to Corey Levy? Oh, I tried to, I tried to keep it together. So Corey Levy, I mean, it's funny because this got dunk time, but I mean, I love everyone involved in this. And is this, is this Ben from Vesto here? I don't know. It looks like some of my friends. I don't know. But Ramp held an event with Kossla with Keith called The Art of Hiring, and it featured Brian Chesky, Mike Shabbitt, and Keith talking about how to hire and founder mode. And Corey Levy, who runs Z Fellows, a prolific early stage angel

investor, essentially, I don't know, incubators, accelerator, I don't know what term he likes, but he wrote kind of a breakdown. Some notes from the art of hiring event earlier today. And he starts with Keith. And so he adds Keith. And the first line that gets cut off when you see the tweet is just don't hire anyone over the age of 30. And then there's like 25 other things

that are all like super reasonable, but he led with the most controversial thing. And so there's a community note now that says, age discrimination in hiring is illegal in the US. Anyone who follows the advice from the first is potentially committing a crime, which I just love. But obviously he wasn't saying that literally. Like, yeah.

Well, I could see Keith saying that literally. But he's also, he understands the art of rage bait. Yes, right? And using, saying controversial things to generate attention, which does other things. He's compressing the idea of like, you need young energy in your organization. You need people that are hungry who aren't,

who aren't resting, investing, who aren't already millionaires, who want to make their equity work. And so you need people that show up and are hungry. And so how do you compress that down and is something that will stick in someone's mind? Oh, well, don't hire anyone over the age of 30. Now, it's probably a lot more nuanced than that.

And I think Keith, if you talk to him for an hour, he would get into that. And there's a million reasons why. And if you look at his companies and all the other companies, I'm sure there's people over the age of 30 of these companies. But it's a great way to get that to stick in someone's mind.

So it's funny because there's, There's a, you just turn the mic towards you. I was talking with a founder that used to work for Keith and raise money from Keith and on the way over here today. And running a business for the first time, it's absolutely crushing. He's about to raise like a very hot Series A. Cool. And he has taken every, almost all of Keith's advice. I don't know about this advice, but he certainly has learned so much from Keith.

and the only thing that he didn't follow was the Miami thing. He originally started the company in Miami. And at one point, it was probably the scariest day of his life telling Keith that he was going to go back to SF. But almost everything else he's followed to a T. And it's just works so well. It's worked so well. It's worked so well. This is Dara.

Yeah, I'm an investment too. Yeah. So it's worked so well for Dara. Like ignored the hype. Yep. Building in a very like hot. space, which is like consumer AI, has ignored the hype, stayed focused, focused on customers, like all these things that, that, that Keith has parroted and reiterates and things like that.

And it's just worked extremely well. Yeah. And so the funny thing with, I will say that Dara hired one of my old engineers who is over 30, who does have children, but that guy's a fucking grinder. So, so, yeah, I mean, I think overall, I do think about this sometimes where as a 28-year-old that has the lifestyle of something that's more found from somebody in their mid-30s, at least in tech or mid-40s, depending on how late to children. We're pretty long in the 50s. Yeah, mid-50s. I do that is almost like a recurring nightmare of like if I was competing against myself without children

what how much more would I be getting done and things like that I do think that the counter side to that is when people are in their 30s they're they can't afford to lose in the same way right so it's like there is this whole other side of it and they have the benefit of and so So when you look at this tweet saying don't hire anyone over the age of 30 combined with young college dropouts raising $30 to $50 million pre-product, the combination of those two things is terrible, right? And you brought this up with Facebook earlier, being like Facebook having a really veteran engineer who brought structure and experience and all these different things. So anyways, I would say that overall Keith's advice, I'm like very bullish on any founder that takes like 90% of Keith's advice to heart and follows it. I think it's a really good framework. But again, don't take anything too literally.

Yeah, it's interesting. Even Miami is giving, I mean, the whole founder of mind in many ways. And also, I mean, Miami is still like, I think we've talked about this before, but I mean, it still is just like, a phenomenal place to go meet a lot of extremely wealthy people. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like, I think everyone agrees that it is behind on, on hiring, engineering talent. But in terms of just, like, lots of rich and powerful people having money there,

like, if you're, if you're a founder and you're doing a fundraising trip, like, stopping in Miami and meeting a bunch of people is, like, very doable and very beneficial. Yeah. It's also just, like, an awesome place to live or an awesome place to visit when you're a founder and you've been grinding in some like, you know, tenderloin complex in San Francisco. And you get to like, you don't just have to go down to Sand Hill Road,

which is like even more boring. You get to go to Miami and hang out at all these houses. I know that I will absolutely own property in Miami at some point in my life. I'm not in a huge rush to do it. But I really enjoy it there and we're going next week. Yeah, it's fantastic. But yeah, I'm excited for this video to drop.

I'm sure that they're going to record it and put it out. I think it'll be good. I think they're all really great. Funny, we're giving, we're giving him the benefit of the doubt. And Keith is like literally telling all these young kids, I swear to God, do not. Like, I cannot be, I cannot be more explicit about this. If somebody is 30 years old and one day, disqualified. Disqualified.

Write it into your HR, like write it into your hiring policies. Put it on your wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't even know where this is from, but you dropped this in the group chat. And I just wanted to read it because I thought it was a funny quote from, maybe like a substack or something, this guy says, I look for the type of guy in London who gets up at 7 o'clock on Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed and logs on to a poker site

so that he can pick off the U.S. drunks coming home on a Saturday night. I hired a guy like that. He usually clears five or 10 grand every Sunday morning before breakfast, taking out the drunks playing poker because they're not very good at it, but their confidence has gone up a lot, someone who understands an edge. I love that. I don't even think we have to add commentary. Yeah, I think it's just like cheers.

It's just cheers to that. That's great. Yeah, find an edge. The hard thing, the hard thing with people like that is they usually end up making so much money. They're really hard to hire. Yeah, exactly. If you're making 10 grand a week, that's 500K a year, like, what a job are you offering them? I mean, I guess this is probably for like a hedge fund position or something.

Or somebody who understands it like, yeah, this is maybe not going to stick around forever, maybe. I don't know. Should we close with? the new king of podcasting, Harry Stebbings. Harry, 400 million dollar fund. I will say I think that that picture could come back to bite. So the story is podcaster Harry Stebbings raises one of Europe's biggest venture funds. The British firm 20BC pulls in $400 million to invest in early stage tech startups.

And he claims it's to make Europe great again. Is he a Trump guy? Or is he just like riffing on that? I bet he's a Trump guy. He appreciates great entrepreneurs. Yeah. Right? Trump is.

I feel like he's pretty like non, like apolitical. Yeah. Because like if you go super hard. Well, there's nothing less cool than being not living in the U.S. But being obsessed with U.S. politics. It's like get a life. Yeah. Like get a life.

Yeah. So yeah. No, I think it's amazing for podcasting. It's amazing for Harry. he's now we kind of have him if we want to build the most profitable

podcast in the world yeah he's pulling down 80 million of management fees yeah on that fund yeah he's in our

big shoes to fill big shoes to fill target on his back right target on his back it's not that but we're positive some right exactly we'll do a 500 million dollar fund

exactly so yeah congrats to Harry congrats to Harry It is interesting. I feel like, do you think his audience is primarily entrepreneurs or VCs? Because he really focuses, he does get some entrepreneurs on the show, but it's mostly VCs that go on the show. So he probably has an incredible network.

So he can get into small checks into deals. But like what happens when, you know, yeah, he's interviewing like the Sequoia guys, but then they're not going to let him like steal a hot round from them. So how does that work in terms of deal flow? Yeah. The reason that I'm bullish overall on, I'm not bullish on the European focus. Sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, I guess that he's going to invest the full.

If he's going to invest the full 400 million in Europe, that's concerning. Yeah. It seemed like the real alpha here was just he is probably one of the greatest bridges between European LPs and U.S. And U.S. investments because he's a name brand in America. And if you are wealthy in Europe, you can't necessarily just call up an American VC firm and LP and do it. Yeah. So I've seen this happen a couple times. People have raised really big funds because it's like, oh, they happen to be super connectors in like Brazil. And so they can go around and just pull all the Brazilian capital together.

And then they come in and they invested in America. But they're providing that service to the Brazilian and high net worth individuals and institutions. Yeah, the reason to be bullish on Harry is that what David Senra has done for founders, Harry is done for contemporary VCs. So in the same way that David will be talking about founder and then tie in, oh, here's how these other three founders also thought similarly and applied this way of thinking to their business.

He's doing the same thing with VCs, you know, where he will be talking with one VC and be like, well, that's similar to how, you know, Peter thought about the initial investment in SpaceX or whatever. Sure, sure. So I think that being a student, he's now a student and a player, right? And he's drawing on,

I think it's a very real thing that he could text probably 50 of the best GPs and get a response within, you know, a day of like, hey and they can be like well here are the traps in aerospace yeah here's why this won't work sure oh this is actually really interesting let's look at it together yeah yeah you know like that's real alpha yeah that's great well cheers to harry and we'll see you next time thanks for watching we're listening