TBPN - The Sonos Disaster, Act Like a Founder, MMA for Brothers, These Guys Have Exits

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we're doing a deep dive on Sonos. We're trying to get back into the technology side of the Brotherhood. We are still displaced. We're still in Santa Barbara. We've upgraded our chairs today. Hopefully it's a little bit better for you guys. But you know it's bad at Sonos when they bring out Mark German.

Are you familiar with Mark German? Tell me about Mark. So he's like the Apple correspondent. He gets all the best leaks. Like when you hear like, oh, new iPhones coming out. Like he's the guy. go to at Bloomberg. So there's been two articles previously. I'll give you one of these, two articles previously on Sonos and the chaos of the company started in August 22, August 22, 24. Sonos app leaves

company racing to save its reputation. And this was by Dave Lee. I'm sure he's a great journalist at Bloomberg. Bloomberg is great. But he's not Mark German big. And then on September 23rd, Dave Lee follows up with how botched, how Sonos botched an app and infuriated its customers. And so, you know, this is, this is like, you know, some rough reporting, but then they bring out the big guns, Mark Garman, because the CEO was fired. And so let's start with what happened.

They'll take you through a little bit of the history of Sonos and explain how they got here because there are some cool things about this company. We both use the product. I both, I've loved it at times. And more recently, I've hated it. So, uh, it's, it's, it's really cool in the off chance that it's working. But we'll get into that later. Yeah, it's kind of like a lightning striking twice situation when Sonos worked properly.

It's been so bad recently. Yeah. Just degraded, degree. And, and, yeah, it's a fascinating story. So, uh, let's read through a little bit of this first report from Dave Lee in Bloomberg. He says, Sonas has a loyal user base for its high-end audio speakers. Unfortunately, a disastrous software launch has angered customers and jeopardized the company's reputation, and the window to fix the problem is closing rapidly. The release in May of a new app that controls the speakers was meant to have been the company's,

the culmination of Chief Executive Officer Patrick Spence's grand plan to refresh the company's infrastructure and expand into a greater share of the $100 billion audio market, of which it estimates it controls less than 2%. The existing Sonos app was struggling to handle all, All the demands of the modern day audio file who wants to listen to sound from various sources, both local and in the cloud, across multiple devices and rooms. Spence said performance and reliability issues had crept in over time. The new app was flawed, though.

Sound drops in and out. Devices disappear. My push for speed backfired, Spence said. In a business like specialist audio trust can be extremely hard to win back. Case in point. And Jordy will never buy another son of a speaker in his life. Probably won't either. On Tuesday, the former Blackberry executive threw himself into the life.

This just turns into an MKBHD, just scathing review. Yeah, I mean, I'll go out. I'll preface some of this by saying, because, you know, the only few words I've gotten in so far, we're dunking. We don't like to dunk. In this situation, I felt like it was fair because I've, some of my worst experiences with consumer electronics have been with my dear sonos. Yep. But at the same time, Santa Barbara Company, I went to school in Santa Barbara.

Yep. I know they're doing their best. There are some great moments with Sonos. They do sound good when they're running. It's really the setup that is so devastatingly difficult. It was magical at first. Like my first Sonos setup was I had a TV and an Apple TV plugged into it.

And are you familiar with HDMI CEC? No. It's a specific protocol over the HDMI cable that allows you to control the device. Like you can control

a TV from the Apple TV. So I was able to wire it so that the Sonos went into the TV and the Apple TV controlled the actual TV. And so with just one Apple TV remote, I could push a button

and it would turn it on and the audio would work and it would be surround sound. Yeah. And it was just like flawless. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then added on to that, I could also like choose to play Spotify over it, and that was great. I think they almost could have taken the route as being more like encouraging people to hire a Sonas expert to set up the product.

Because when I think about it, every single time I'd be setting up a Sonos device, I'm thinking, I just wish I could pay somebody to do it. You know, and there are people that will do it, people that do smart home stuff. but it's not they make it seem like hey you can just set up this app it's super easy and it's crazy because i don't know the last time i did it was um arly was uh opening up their new uh their new showroom in beverly hills and i yeah i go over there i'm trying to be helpful i'm like okay like i'll set up i'll get the audio working in the sonos and ended up being like you know a 90 minute you know it's sort of set up where i'm it has this thing really really wanting to slam the sonos It gets the wall, and I'm pretty patient.

Yeah. During the setup, they have this thing where, like, you put in pairing mode and they're supposed to show up on the Wi-Fi and it talks. And sometimes it gets it perfect. And when it works perfectly, it's amazing. And then other times it'll just be like, hey, like, we're not finding it on the Wi-Fi. Like, would you mind, like, connecting it to the main sonos via an Ethernet cable? And it's like, no, I don't have a 20-foot Ethernet cable on me right now, bro. Like, this is so unacceptable.

And the main thing is just, like, the app got so... low. But the crazy thing is that like I heard about this obviously like this all started this in 2024 last year and the saga was kind of like a very bad last year. But even just a few years ago, they had such a bad app launch that they needed to deprecate their first app. Like most the time it's like, oh, Instagram launches reals. Like you don't, you don't have like two Instagram apps on your phone. Yeah. Instagram just updates, right? And that wasn't what Sonos did. They literally have the S-1 app and then the S-1 app and the S-1 app is for older systems. And so here's the thing. Sonos should have gone through YC as a public company. It'd be like,

look, like we really haven't figured. We don't have this figured out. We don't know what people want. Yeah. We need to, we need to help simplifying. One of the, one of the narrative violation here with Sonos is is that everyone, everyone says like hardware is hard. You can't build hardware as an American company like DJI is crushing. But what did Sonos get right? Like I'm not a super crazy audio file. I'm sure there's audio files that will say, oh, Sonus doesn't actually sound that good. But to me, it sounds fine.

It sounds nice. And industrial design, I think it looks fine. I think it looks good. You put it on the wall or you put it in the house. I think it looks nice. I think it's high quality. The actual hardware is never broken on me. I've never had a speaker, like actually just break or anything.

No, it is reliable. Yeah. Physical hardware. It's reliable. Totally. It's funny because it's just a software. Yeah, yeah. And that's the narrative is normally it's like America is great at software.

We have great B2B software. We're on the frontier of AI software, but we're lagging in hardware. And with this, it's like Sonos delivered on the hardware side. They did the hard part. And then they just couldn't get the app to work, which is crazy. One cool note, they were actually, when they were incorporated, they incorporated as RingConn Audio. And Rincon, I don't know if you know, is the most iconic surf spot in Santa Barbara. Oh, cool, cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Assuming these guys were spending more time surfing than developing the software once, especially in the later, in the later period. It is interesting to compare this. So tying this to something like Anderol, which is making hardware and software for our military, it's hard enough to make speakers that you just plug into a wall, connect to your Wi-Fi, and they just want to play music. that is difficult to do.

And that puts into the context how difficult it is for Anderol to put hardware devices tied to their software into war zones that have electronic warfare happening, new environments, bullets flying, bombs going off, enemies like trying to kill you. And sure, you know, every military contractor, you know, puts stuff in the field and has issues with it and they try to improve it. but it just goes to show, you know, how hard a lot of these new defense tech founders that are coming in and saying, Sonos is a public company with 12 offices, a bunch of retail stores, hundreds of employees, billions of dollars in revenue, and they can't even get their speakers to reliably work in their home without pissing off consumers. And it's fine for us consumers where I'm like, well, I have dinner guests coming over and I just want to play music. but if you're like trying to operate like an ander old drone in the field like that soldier like doesn't have another life yeah if you fuck it out right i would imagine the culture is just got to be way different though you know anderil it's like there's a different level of seriousness yeah with this it's like it's a 20 year old company it's in sanibarbara a little bit more casual not no longer founder mode because the founder stepped down yeah and maybe that's part of the problem do you want to get yeah so credit credit to them you know, the areas where I think they've done well.

They were early 2002. Yeah. Like early to be doing a smart home audio system. And the design has always been great and the heart and the, we talked about it, but the sort of physical reliability of the actual devices. Do you know the story of what the guy did before? So the founder is John McFarland. and now they do over a billion dollars a year in business.

And the company was founded back in 2002 when most people were listening to music on CDs. At that time, music streaming was barely a thing. There was Rhapsody, but very few people used it. If you wanted surround sound in your house, you had to wire it up and drill into your walls and connect the speakers. It was expensive.

Like getting a nice sound system in your house is 100K. And with started so you could start building a collection with like a $300 speaker, a $1,000 sound bar. And for like 5K all in, you'd have like a really solid set up. Yeah. But before he, I don't know where it is, but before he started this, he owned software.com. Let's go.

Isn't that a great domain? And that company had gone public in 1999 and they merged with phone.com. Let's go. Isn't that amazing? To become openware, a major early player in mobile email. When the dot-com crash hit, they left and decided to start something new. their insight was that wireless networking was the next major wave. After just missing an idea to do in-flight wireless, they focused on multi-room audio,

seeing the rise of MP3s in Napster. People were starting to put Wi-Fi on their home, so the founders wanted to leverage that to play digital music seamlessly in every room. We got to do a deep dive on the merger between phone.com and software.com. Amazing. One of the most iconic, two of the most iconic domains of all time. Which, which. Right up there with chat.com.

At the time, if I was investing in the combined company, I'd be looking at it and saying, all, software.com, 10 million dollar domain minimum. Phone.com, I give it almost 10 to. So between the two of them, look, this is a $20 million company. I'm sure it was trading at like $2 billion. Yeah, straight. And they probably had nothing under the hood. It would have been extremely hard to do the TB Award for Domain Acquisition of the year in like 1999.

Yeah, because there was just. We should be a flashback. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The greatest domain acquisition of 1990. We should dress up as like... It's just so... Father's, you know, with wigs. I mean, I think we've talked about MP3.com.

They went public with just the domain into business plan. No software written. That's so great. $100 million. Crazy. One iconic, jumping ahead a little bit, one iconic moment in Sonos history is when they decided to partner with IKEA. Oh, really?

The other consumer product company that makes people want to kill themselves during setup. Um, really an incredible restoration hardware. It's just, uh, IKEA and Sonos announced a collaboration to build Sonas's technology into furniture sold IKEA. So you, you, after four hours, you've got, you've got this, you know, like,

set up. And then the real task begins. You're all warmed up and now you've got to set up this smart speaker. Yeah. Uh, nothing's really funny. Uh, I didn't notice, but they, they use this like super famous branding firm to come up with a name, Lexicon branding.

And Lexicon had come up with the name Pentian, Swiffer. We talked to them briefly about naming the podcast. Yeah, yeah. We ended up with, they wanted like a few hundred grand. We ended up going with someone more expensive. Yeah, it ended up being worth it. Pentium, Swiffer, Blackberry, PowerBook, and Zune.

Sonos is a palindrome and part of the logo design can be flipped or turned sideways. Still reading Soto's. Naming agencies have to. to be like the best, the best business models. Incredible. After you get a couple of bangers, like Blackberry and stuff like that, it's just like, yeah, we'll name your company. Yeah.

It's, you know, it's 100, you know, it's probably a million dollars. It's going to be like a million dollars. It's going to take 12 months. And then it's just, and that it's just a group like us being like, hmm. You know that there's a, there's like a whole separate industry of like naming firms just for pharmaceuticals. You know, you always, because like you, you always hear these names like it was Zemthic. And it's like it sounds like a English word,

but it doesn't trace its roots from anything. Like where does it come from? And I was trying to get LLMs to kind of like create more drug names. And it was really hard. Like it is like somewhat of an attractable problem that like you need, you need just some sort of human to come on. The names matter a lot. But the Sonos name is incredible.

And I remember the first time I flipped the speaker over and the palindrome. Like the logo reads correctly whether you mouth. the speaker like this or like this upside down, which is actually an amazing feature for a speaker to be mounted. I wonder if it still reads correctly if you throw it off a 20-story building. Yeah, if it shatters

into a million pieces, he still read it? I think people know because they're just like, oh, it's a smash speaker. It must be a son-as who frustrated his owner. You got to calm down with all the robot abuse because when the robots rise up, they're going to be like, this guy's like a serial killer. No, I respect robots. I'm trying to give them guns. I're trying to give them ARs.

We're working on this. Yeah. You know, you have a, in the robot apocalypse, the Sono speaker will be like the lowest cast. Have you seen the guy on, on Instagram that I send you these?

He's got chat GPT hooked up to his guy. Oh, I'm talking to him in like two hours. You want to jump on. That's going to be great. That's great. Let's go through some other stuff. I mean,

for a long time, they were doing really well. 93% of Sono speakers that sold in the last 13 years are active today. So people just mount them, and then they just stay forever. But not for long, given how bad the app it's so bad. Active. And they're boasting like, oh, we still do over-the-air updates for products, even from 2005.

And it's like, yeah, but those work with a different app, bro. Like, come on. It's interesting. Normally when you, when hardware companies, the real concern is that you ship, you ship hardware that ends up being malfunctional, and then you have all this hardware that needs to be replaced. And so it's interesting

that their problems seem to be just totally opposite of what the typical concern is for hardware founder. Software is always like, oh, that's easy. We'll just ship updates and fix it. Yeah. This is a fascinating little timeline.

So 2002, they incorporate. They changed their name. They were ring con. They changed their name to Sonos in 2004. So these guys clearly made money in the dot com, boom because they're just like they haven't really raised that much money for a couple years. But then they launched their first prototype, which is just, it actually links into existing speakers. So they weren't even making speakers.

It was just an amp that then would connect to like whatever speakers you have. That's cool. And that still exists. And that's very cool. If you have a speaker system, you can just plug in the Sonos thing or at least it used to be before the app. That's shit. But so it went pretty well. Walt Mossberg called it easily the best music.

streaming product. He had tested. It cost $1,200. It was expensive. Sales were slow. But they kept iterating. In 2006, they added support for Rhapsody. 2007, the iPhone arrived. Before that, you had to have, like, a dedicated Sonos controller, which was like a really low-budget iPad, basically. It was cool, but it was like really junk. It was like a universal remote. Like, it's going to be crappy. So they launched the iPhone controller app in 2008, instead of their hardware controller, much better Android app in 2011. and three years later. Wow, really disrespectful. I guess Android was pretty new.

And then by 2012, they phased out their own controller altogether. In 2009, they released the Play 5, the S5, which is their standalone wireless speaker. This was $400. And that was in the more mainstream market. And then by 2010, they raised $25 million from Index. And they launched the Play 3 at $299. So they're really going down market. And this is when everyone started buying these things.

They integrated Spotify. and in 2012, KKR led $135 million. And Red Point. Red Point. Shout out to Logan. Another streaming service they integrated with that does make sense is they integrated with MOG. What's that?

Is this real? Yeah, no, it's real. They partner with over 100 streaming services, but MOG is interesting to me because the Sonos, mogs the users, so are in the setup that it's just to match. It's a perfect match. I can see why they would partner there. You imagine you've gone to Mog and it's all just like Sigma Mail theme songs.

It's like, do do, do, do, do, like that. It's all a, it's all fonk and drift core. Everything slow. Honestly, though, but it's, you know, in 2012, they set up, this was around the same time. They did the KKR round. they set up a like an entire Sona studio which was like pretty cool and groundbreaking

for a consumer electronics company they had an art gallery they would host different artists salonge Lonely Island Beck things like that but to me it's way cooler that they work with such an iconic private equity firm

like KKR I mean to to have KKR by your equity is the kind of thing that every young man of one dream one you know dreams of that might have been where the idea came from to cut costs and stop developing software yeah totally i could see them coming in being like okay where are your costs um well why don't you cut the cto the VP of engineering the senior man every developer and every developer take it offshore no more h1b we're just cutting everything this is a hilarious

this anecdote. So when they launched it, All Things D, they, this is what, 2000, 2005? 2000,

yeah, 2005 they launched at, the All Thing D conference. This was before Apple had announced the iPhone, before Apple had those like major keynotes. Yeah, they were so early. You got to get,

so early. Even though they're net, they haven't been early to getting their net income pause there. They've been a little late on that. Well, we'll spend that right. So Steve Jobs is at the All Things D conference, and he introduced the Apple Airport Express,

which is the Wi-Fi router that Apple designed. And they still had good names back then. Yeah. They got the Apple TV, the Apple TV Plus, Apple TV plus app on Apple TV. They made Apple TV plus shows within Apple TV. Yes. Yes. It's so bad.

But at that conference, so Steve Jobs is announcing the Wi-Fi router, and then John McFarland is announcing the Sonos Amplified, connected Amplifier. And it's like a match made in heaven. Like, you should go by both of those because they're both going to work really well. But Steve Jobs is super pissed, and he goes up to John at the conference. He walked up, pounded on my chest, and said they'd sue us out of existence. I push because So Steve Jobs goes up to John The founder of Sonos

John McFarland The founder of Sonos And basically the Sonos The control app To control like what music was playing where Once you hook up the amplifier It had a scroll wheel That was like derivative from the iPhone

Or from the iPod Remember the iPod? Yeah, yeah of course So they'd use that same design element And Steve was like You stole that from us And so he walks up to him Pounds him on

the chest and says, I'll sue you out of existence. And John pushes back, pointing out that we had no overlap with their patents. He checked, as Steve Jobs checked, realized we were in the clear and the relationship improved after that. But I like that Steve Jobs just walks up to him and he's just like, I haven't checked the patents, but you're wrong. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny because it would have been great for consumers in so many ways if Apple had acquired Seno because Apple is the best in the world at making it seamless to set up a device. Yeah. And software integration.

It's gotten so, so, so. Yeah. Good. Yeah. I need to go buy a new iPhone at some point this week and I'm not even worried about it. I'm going to get in and out of the Apple store. Yeah. I mean, they eventually launched a competitor.

So they launched AirPlay 2, which had sonos like functionality. And then they've launched the home pod and the home pod two. It is an interesting. It's such an interesting miss because they had so much legacy. as a company in music. Yep. So many iconic campaigns. It would have been,

it would have made sense for Apple to, like, I wish I could have Apple speakers on my desk, like next to my monitor. Of course. You used to be able to. And it does seem, again, it wouldn't have been a huge business line for them, but they probably,

it's a $100 billion annual revenue. Yeah. Opportunity. And Apple could have probably gotten 20% of that or 10% of that at least. So it wouldn't have been as big as AirPods. So. Patrick Spence. When did all the, like, we should get into the, let's get into the drama. Okay.

You know, the stuff with Google and there was quite a bit with Amazon as well. Was there not? I'm not sure. So Patrick Spence, the CEO who was just fired, he joined from Blackberry in 2012. I know, I know. It really writes his, but he was there for over a decade and I guess did pretty well until he botched the status. What's a status? It's a lot of very.

And so, yeah, I mean, I think the drama that you're alluding to is that Amazon, Google, and Apple all realized that, well, kind of dumb speakers were not particularly critical to their core business strategy and, like, their value chain. Once you put the AI assistant in them and you connect them to the internet, then they become an important point. And it would be interesting to understand. And I think that Amazon needed to be in the market because they assumed that people would just be walking around their home and be like, hey, Alexa, order more paper towels. And I had an Alexa and I actually never, I don't have any visceral, angry moments with my Alexa. So they did a good job and they did well. The sound quality was never as good as Sonos, but they did well in terms of setup and usability. But I think they were thinking, okay, this is like a new ordering mechanism.

the place that consumers go to purchase. Yep. Like, we need to be here. Maybe it didn't really turn out to be the case. And voice, I feel like, is just continued to take L after L. Yeah. Even Air Chat shut down. I don't know if you know that.

Oh, they did. And people were saying, like, okay, if this didn't make it, this was the best shot on call for audio. Like, maybe it just isn't the thing. Yeah. So. But they also had run-emutes with Google. Yeah, yeah. So basically, so the stage, like 2012, they raised that round from KKR.

They launch a $200 speaker. So it's much easier to get into the Sonos ecosystem. And from late 2013 to late 2014, the revenue grew by 75%. So, like, they're really taking off at this time. Yeah. But then simultaneously, in 2014, Amazon announced the Echo and Alexa at $99 for prime subscribers. Soos had never considered building its own voice assistant. and the smart speaker era took them by surprise.

McFarlane later admitted that they were late to recognize the impact of voice in mid-2016. Sonos finally announced. Blackberry goes. Nobody's ever going to want to type on a glass. It's just not going to happen. Boom. But Sonos is going. Nobody wants their speakers to be smart.

Our users like that it takes 45 minutes to set up one of your six speakers. I mean, I think just this is another case of like slop being massively underrated. Like I think that, you know, I'm not like crazy. audio file, but I can tell the difference between like a nice surround sound setup, like an Amazon Echo. So, but I think many people don't care. I wasn't, I had never, I've never, I enjoy music. I don't enjoy live music typically just because it's the crowds and stuff like that. I rarely go to concerts. Yeah. But the, my neighbor is the biggest audio file that I've ever met. This is Stefan Simkowitz. He's a pretty high profile art collector. and if you go in his house,

there's just speakers everywhere, like every surface. And it is truly incredible, but all the stuff he does is he's like, this amp is made from this guy in Denmark and he makes 10 of these a year. And he's been doing it. And it's like watchmaking in a way.

So I think we should eventually get. You've got to come around on live music. I'll take you to the LA Phil. We'll see Doudemel. The Phil is different. I don't like being in, I don't like being in places where there's sweaty strangers. Oh, I'm imagining like a box.

Yeah, yeah. Some champagne. Yeah, the film. How do people do live music in a different way? Don't act like you've never been to Hard Summer. EDC? EDC. You went to the first EDC.

No, not the first. It is a long time ago. Long time ago. I was not born yet. It was 2003. Yeah. Okay. I was that. Yeah. Um, and so, uh, oh yeah, the other thing is that, uh, car speakers. Are you familiar with this stuff? So basically there's a, there's this guy that designed the perfect arrangement of speakers. He like ripped out the dash and custom like 3D printed a mold for perfectly placed speakers in a car that where the audio quality is just 10 times better than anything you'd get even like a Bentley or Mercedes or Rolls Royce. But what they, found was that when they actually tried to market that technology, no one cared. They all just wanted a headline number, number of speakers, number of ones. Or Bose. Yeah, or Bose. Exactly.

By the way, yeah, I blew out one of the subwarfers in my, in my turbo. Yeah, it's so annoying. I, I, I kept having to turn down the base. Yeah. Because I was like, that just doesn't sound that good. It's rattling. And then I really, and then I actually made it worse because like I was, oh, yeah, sure, sure. So I have to take it in. but it hasn't been a priority. Oh, that's brutal. I'm so sorry, man. That's like the roughest thing I've ever heard. I mean, there's people whose houses burn down,

but I mean, you're right out there with them. God. Yeah. So, yeah, send you already a comment. Tell him thoughts and prayers for his broken speaker in his turbo. But yeah. I mean, lots of competition. So plug.

I think the success of the Alexa and the, Google Home is just like check the boxes on features and make it super, super cheap. And you'll just get crazy distribution and people will put up with some of the other other junk. Yeah, I don't. And it's interesting if you think about how there was a phase where it seemed like people cared about audio and beats by Dre was part of this. But I don't think that people actually, that was still a status symbol, right? Like people just wanted to wear the Beats by Dre. Yeah.

And then AirPods are the same thing. clear the average consumer clearly does not care about audio quality right they're not optimizing for that that's about signaling to people that you're not afraid of EMF exactly you're not afraid to microwave your head exactly I don't live in fear do not live in fear yeah the EMFs have a positive effect exactly exactly but yeah so so this is interesting so in January 2020 Sonos sued Google over copyright infringement relating to several patents including the abilities sync audio over multiple devices. In August 2021, a judge ruled in favor of Sonos. The International Trade Commission also ruled in favor of Sonos. As a result, Google was ordered to remove certain

features from its devices, including group volume control. That's got to be so annoying to get ordered by the ITC to make your product worse, basically. Google was ordered to pay Sonas $32 million damages, which is literally nothing. So I'm sure Google, was like, okay, like, whatever. However, a judge tossed out the verdict in October and criticized Sonos for abusing the patent system. Wow. Following the verdict, Google redeployed the features

that had previously removed. Wow. And anyways, so. Yeah. So not the first or the last Sonus. UI or UX innovations that you're just like, I get that you could patent this, but it'd be much nicer if this is just in every app.

Like, pull to referex. Fresh was one of those. That was actually developed by, I think, a company that Twitter bought. And then Twitter said, hey, we're not going to defend the patent. Like anyone's... So now you have Instagram and everybody has it basically. Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I, I, it doesn't. And this is this is, this is dark pattern. This is the kind of stuff like, founders will join YC. They never built a company before. And they'll go into their first partner meeting, whatever. And they're like, yeah, we're filing our past. patents for this and YC will give you the good advice of being like you should absolutely not do that.

Just don't focus on a total waste of time and money doesn't really matter. You can't. And patent stuff is is weird. Interestingly enough, the Ridge guys have just dealt with so much of this because they actually have designed patents around a physical hardware device. And even that, they spend like a million a year or more, like just like going after people that are just ripping it off directly. Do a patent? Patents on Aurora. Or just, on a patent? Are you on a patent yet?

I don't, I don't actually think, I got my first patent approved. On what? Breakers. Breakers. First capsule nicotine patch. Very cool.

Yeah. It was a big moment. Yeah. See, that's like, that's IP that you can defend. It's important to defend it. Because if Philip Morris tries to come after it, you're going to be able to come after them for like hundreds of millions of

damages if they are selling a lot of, yeah. But it's fine. I still got to get the tombstone made of like the, the plaque when you get like a patent. You can go and say like, okay, I want to buy like a like a trophy. Yeah, yeah. I think that'd be good for the office. I don't think of myself as like an inventor, but it's cool to like have my name on a technically

an invention. Yes. A lot of designers in big tech will have gotten on patents at 10 points. You've had engineers. I know a guy who developed a Google cloud platform like their AWS competitor and he has a ton of patents around like how cloud computing works. It's like really cool. And like I think they get a some interesting thing where you don't.

Yeah. You don't own anything related to it, but you get a little crush from Google, and then he went to another startup, and then another one made tons of money. He's all good. He's okay. Anyways, well, where are they today? Struggling. Stocks down.

In May 2020, their revenue, they had a 24% drop in revenue. They've had a bunch of layoffs, which is unfortunate because it is a big employer in Santa Barbara. And there's not a ton of technology companies. he's here. I wonder where they should go. Like, should they get acquired by Apple or someone? Like,

would that even get through? Like, Alina Kahn's out. Maybe the antitrust stuff is a little bit looser. I don't think Apple... I don't think Apple... Would you actually buy them now? Because think about it,

hey, we could spend... We already have AirPods. Yeah. We have audio devices that do crazy numbers. We have the best... You know Sonos launched headphones?

They launched their headphones. Oh, yeah, yeah. They were, like, it's like, why would I want buggy your headphones? I don't know, yeah, I don't know. I think they're not going to get bought by Apple because Apple could be like, well, why don't we spend a billion dollars

developing a better speaker and sell it through our thousands of stores? Yeah, but I mean, they've been doing that and it hasn't really been working. Like, you know. Yeah, but also clearly, as known as isn't working. One thing, one thing is that the phone

the phone kills speakers in so many ways. One of them is that I will often just put like as the phone speaker has gotten louder. Oh yeah. My need for speakers. You just listen to it. Because like what's the song we use for the Ashley Vance piece that hasn't dropped yet? The right above it.

Yeah, yeah. Little man. All you need is it. Often in the morning I would go into the kitchen and make my son breakfast and I used to go to Sonos and try and put on some music and it got too hard. And so I'll just play it for my phone. Seriously. It's just like his phone speaker's fine. He doesn't care.

I don't care. Whatever. I'm just putting on some. Honestly, take your sonos, hang out with your kids, take it apart. I used to really, I used to really, my dad used to do that. Yeah, hot layer. With old electronics with me and my brother, he would just say, like, let's take this part. He'd be like, this is this.

I mean, honestly, like, turning it into a dumb speaker is, like, pretty good. Because, like, this is fine. Wire them up. Wire them up. You know, when you put two cans and a string, you know, something like, needs to be that dumb. Yeah, something like that. Anyways, I hope they turn it around. I think if they just make smarter smart speakers,

continue to focus on design, actually get their software right. There's definitely a billion dollar revenue business here. They've done damage to their brand. But I hope one of these founders comes back and says, you know what? I'm going to buy speaker.com, form a new company, merge it with Sona, do a reverse take private.

it and, you know, come out, speaker.com, you know, run it back because, yeah, or the founder does if spaks are back, speaker.com, spack it, acquire Sonos, fresh start. Yeah, I mean, the real lesson here is, like, if you're frustrated with being a Sonos customer, like, you'd be better being, like, seed investor in Sonos and have sold at the top. Yeah. Just make the money. Just be on the capital side. Yeah.

consumer side. This is like your word of advice to those ski patrol is just like try out, you know, instead of being a ski patroler, you know, get into private equity, you know, launch your own billion dollar fund and just buy a place and the KR guys are all doing well enough that they can just have a full-time audio engineer on staff and then ever hear.

Yeah. Yeah. Or just a live string quartet. Exactly. That's probably the better solution. is just have a string quartet in your house. Yeah, and be a patron of the arts, you know, have a guitarist that you've used in certain settings.

Someone that plays a harp. A drummer. A drummer. A drummer. You know, the, you know, that, like, Peruvian-style drums. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That'd be great. Having somebody play, you know, the Apple alarm clock app,

I really complained about it. It's terrible. I'm, like, dragging this thing around. Yeah, yeah. It's very confusing where you're like, Whoa, is the alarm on? You don't really, is the volume right. Like, there's a lot of stuff about it that I think is great,

but I really should just stop complaining, hire, you know, somebody to play the violin for, like, 120 grand a year. Yeah. And all they have to do is just show up and start playing the violin out my window. Do you where I am. So you can get to the gym. Yeah. It's cool.

Anyways. Interesting company. Go, if you're looking to, for a challenge, go buy a sonos. It is a great American company. Do you say buy A-Sonos or buy Sonos? Both. Both. Take them private.

Turn them around. Turn them around. I think for our audience, the latter will be more relevant. Yeah, that's right. That was great. Cool. Let's move on to the timeline. Let's go to Moses Kagan.

He says, if you didn't get much from those before you, financially, morally, or whatever, you have the opportunity to be a very specific type of hero, the founder of your family. I put this in because I feel like you've been you've been you know, tooting this horn beating that drum for a while around creating new rituals, traditions. And yeah, I think it's important. I don't want to, I don't want to go out and say that this I, this resonated with me,

because I think it's a mentality that everyone can have. I think it's the same thing. If you're an employee, act like a founder, right? Like how would you? Yeah. You know, what would what would your founder do in that? Doing a gentic. Yeah.

And so, yeah, I don't want to, you know, my parents had had good traditions and there's a lot that I, you know, carry on. But at the same time, you can creating that family is more than just creating the humans and getting married. It's more, but it's more than about having kids. It's about creating the culture. The culture of the family. Yeah. And the financials, obviously. Yeah.

The generational. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the trust funds. Yeah, for sure. Speaking of... Deliver neptism. You need to be delivering.

100%. Nick St. Pierre says, someone should start a weekend man school that teaches men how to be men. Proposed curriculum, grappling, carpentry, fire starting, cooking meat, fixing flat tires, public speaking, power tools 101,

knife sharpening, conflict resolution, barbecue mastery, basic survival skills, basic electrical work, fitness fundamentals, sourcing healthy food, emergency preparedness, electronics troubleshooting, how to shake a hand like a man, fixes for common household problems. So I'll take this one step further. I think this would be great as a parent kid class, right? Because I wouldn't, I wouldn't do this solo. I agree. I agree. I'm not going to go on a Saturday and be like, it's weird. Tell your wife, hey, I'm going to go hang out for eight hours and learn barbecue mastery.

I'd be like, why don't you just barbecue for us? But if I said, hey, I'm going to take the kids and we're going to go how to pick lock. You learn how to pick locks. We're going to learn how to start a car. You know, without a key. Now I'm just going after the ones that are

really disastrous situations. Mozart didn't have to ask people how to rate concertos, you know? Yeah. So there's a little bit of like if you're the type of person that needs this like man's school, like you're maybe not. No, again, again, this is the kind of stuff that, you know, my dad taught me had a tie knot and whittle and start a fire and stuff like that. But there's also other stuff on that list that he-

Man school is just hanging out with your dad, maybe. Yeah. Like there's a little bit of like what you've just described as like, maybe it's not, maybe it's not our own thing. Maybe it's just like actively being a part of your family. Recreating life. This is like with PMF or die.

We're recreating life, right? We're recreating locking in. We're productizing locking in. Yeah. There is this relentless pursuit of productization here. where it's like, do you need a course for this or can you just go do it? Like a lot of these things, it's like, go watch a YouTube video, buy a book on it, and you'll just know how to do it or just practice and learn from first principles.

You can just barbecue and the first steak you make will be burnt and then the fourth one will be delicious. Like, it's not that insane. Yeah, anyway, let's go to Jordan Schneider. He says, real talk and he's quoting Roon. He says, the thing about America is that it's clearly always functioning at like 10% of its power. level due to the costs of freedom and yet manages to win anyway due to the incredible benefits of freedom. Counter example is like China, which can reorient the entire ocean liner of its economy in a new direction if they want to go to war against COVID or whatever and yet manage to fuck it up.

This is a throwback post. Good resurface from January 16, 2023. Yeah, I think, so I think there's an entire, an opportunity for a poster to get hundreds of thousands of followers and their entire job is just resurfacing icon. Because right now the algorithm actually much prefers a screenshot like that than a quote tweet.

Totally. And so your job is to be the archivist of X. Just go back. Find Steinman Bangers from 2017. Yep. When he's, you know, 2017, he's in the trenches in Washington saying the same stuff that he's saying now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go find, you know,

Roon's like first true banger. Yeah. Resurface it. So resurface that. The curator. Yeah, curator. It's good. But yeah, you could easily get 100,000 followers during that.

But I like the core point there because you see like it is very easy to like lean into authoritarianism because you're just like, wow, things are so dysfunctional over here right now. Like wouldn't it be amazing if like the government could just come in and like build high speed rail in like two seconds? And it's like that would be good. But what would it cost? Like the cost would be freedom potentially. and it's often just like this hidden cost that just like sit there in the background. You don't really take it for granted. It's easy to take it for granted.

So good post. We should go to a promoted post. Okay. So I'm jumping into a promoted post. I don't have it printed out today, but it is a cool one. So we recently acquired an iconic four-letter domain from a, from our domain broker Rob Shutz. No, Rob.

Rob. Cool background. He was one of the founders of Roman and also bark. Bark. Bark. Let me confirm. Yeah, it's just bark company. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know. So he, yeah, so anyways, started some really big companies and just got obsessed with domains. And so as he phased out from Roe, he decided to launch Snagged. It's at Snagged on X or Snagg.com. And he was able to help us get this amazing foreletter.com. I sent him the domain that we wanted at like 6 a.m. He had secured it by and done an entire deal to secure it at a ridiculously low price by, I think, like, 9 a.m. It was like the fastest turnaround.

So he's amazing. but I wanted to highlight. So back in 90, this is a post from the snag account. He says back in 94, the internet was a total free for all. You could grab almost any domain and in many cases, domain registrations were free. At the time, Chris Clark was a 29-year-old consultant in Maryland.

On a whim, he registered pizza.com. Why? He thought maybe, just maybe, some pizza business would bite on his domain, but nobody did. So he slapsed, some ads on it, made a little cash, and left it to collect digital dust for 14 years. Fast forward to 2008, Chris heard that vodka.com sold for $3 million. So he listed his domain with a starting bit of $100. The next morning, it was at half a million, and by the end of the auction, it hit $2.6 million. The buyer, a shady company, which ended up getting busted for money laundering.

They couldn't handle their dough. Rob's a great writer. Well, what a great story. Even though pizza.com is still out there, it's stuck. in the early 2000s with his sites and aesthetics and info. No major pizza chain has ever bought it. Chris is one regret, not registering more domains back in the day. Opportunity knocks, but patience. That's how you win. So what's the next pizza.com? Only time will tell. So that's so insane. Imagine me 94. You're just like registering. And people were doing this a little

bit with eth addresses, right? And salon addresses. And I knew somebody who had like YouTube. dot soul or something like that. And it's like, I just don't see Google like actually buying that. But anyways, some great ones out there. If you can't speak highly enough. But I love that because you think about domain brokerage and it's like a pretty boring behind the scenes job,

but amazing content marketing. That sounds like a great account to follow just to get interesting tidbits of internet history. And I just love that so much. So shout out to him. And if you're looking for a domain, hit him up and tell the, Tell him the technology brother sent you. Let's move on to a bucket poll.

Jordy, we got one from Ben. He says, yes, professor, due to my brain rot diagnosis, I need to have subway surfers playing during every lecture. Somehow just got no likes when he printed it out. I don't know. Wait, so Ben, so Ben, this is the guy who had just, he's posting bangers all morning. I was like, we need to hire this guy.

I love this guy. This is fantastic. Very funny. the subway surfers is such a meme. I wonder how much the subway surfer trend is real or if like the Gen Z kids are like in on it. Do you think that they're, do you think that they're like aware of like the brain rot and it's like they're laughing with it? Or do you think there are some people that are actually like this is more engaging? Yeah.

What do you think? I, whenever I pull them up, I just look at it. I'm like, I'm so annoyed that this this other video is playing. Yeah. But it's partially because I was born, like I'm five days too old to be Gen Z. Sure. Or something like that. So it's like I just think I'm not.

It's just a different generation. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The other things like if you look at like ESPN or CNBC, like those have brain rot elements where there will be tickers at the bottom, picture in picture. You go to Bloomberg and it's like someone's talking while they're giving you the news facts on the side. Like this idea of having a feed of content that's sending you multiple pieces of

information all at once. Like, it's definitely a thing. Yeah. Okay, we got a... Yeah, we do that on our, we do that on our videos. People don't realize,

but there's a lot of alpha in the ticker. In the ticker. On whenever we post videos on X. Yep. TBSPN. Let's go to Tray Stevens. He says, the offer is still on the table,

Jason. We had over a quarter million raised for charity within just a couple hours. Maybe don't chicken out this time. At Scientist at Palmer Lucky. And so this was a clip from the All In podcast where Jason Calicanus and Dave Friedberg were discussing J-Cal getting in the ring with Palmer Lucky and Trey, who loves fighting sports, was offering to get in the ring. A lot of people were talking about this.

This was during COVID than this first broke. Yeah, it's interesting that Jason, Jason loves attention more than anyone. That's very clear. He's leveraged it in a, you know, and mostly, you know, he's built an accelerator, he's got his fund, he's got all this stuff. he's definitely played his game well. And he understands that like attention is attention, whether it's positive. Yeah, but he typically, you know, he is a bully. Yep.

And it's interesting that as soon as soon as the bully is actually getting invited saying step into the ring. Yep. He's saying, oh, you know, it's, I don't know what I do. His excuse was that he, that Palmer was like much younger or something like that. I thought it was that Trey was like the mountain, he said or something like that. Yeah, but Jason could just get off. off ozimic and just get huge he's got he can train he can hire zox m-ma coach only i think i think i think you said that tray was younger than him oh yeah yeah yeah so i mean tray and palmer both younger than

jason yeah but but i mean mike didn't stop mike tyson from step in the ring he's 60 year old man yeah uh see it i mean i don't like the excuse it's it's a duck in ufc it's called ducking where a fight and John Jones has been doing this with the champion I forget his name that the champion

out of the UK where he just is making up all these excuses saying well I need $50 million if I want to fight him or it just doesn't make sense that fight doesn't make sense for you right now

and Jason would clearly just rather keep antagonizing you know on the timeline I mean I don't know at this point I've been like fooled too many I've gotten my

excitement levels up too many times with the Zuck Elon fight. Why hasn't there been a high profile? The highest profile one is literally Nick Carter. And that was like pretty tiny. But that was very crypto. Yeah. I don't even think, well, he was going to fight the bankless guys, right?

But then the bankless guy got an injury and posted a photo of like he slipped a disc or something. And so he was like, I'm sorry. I just can't fight you because I'm like injured. There was a big guy. There was another big, um, awesome in crypto. got in the Bitboy Crypto guy. They were fighting.

They're actually fighting? Yeah, there's shots of Bitboy getting an asthma thing. Didn't Sam Hyde fight someone too? The YouTubers are really good at this. The content, they're always fighting. What's the guy, Bryce Hall? Bryce Hall has gone into Barrenuckle boxing and performed. Really?

He has done well. And Bear Knuckles is gnarly because if you make a mistake or you get a clip, like your entire lip will get cut out. Like Luke Rockhold, the former UFC middleweight, went in and was fighting, God, what's it? Mike Perry. Yeah. And Luke just gave up midway because he was, his face was getting, and this is a former UFC champion,

his face was getting so damaged. He just was like, I'm not going to do this. And Bryce Hall goes in and does that, does well. The fight club stuff's tough because, like, it's really hard to balance out all the different factors. Even the Zuck-Elon fight, it's like, I think Elon has like five inches of height on Zuck, something like that. And so, yeah, size matters. Size really does matter.

But then Zuck's been training for a lot longer. So it depends on like if the fight was today, maybe Zuck's technique would work. But if you give him a year, Elon might be able to get up to speed. So it really was like 50-50 for me. You take to amateurs. Yeah. And size is going to almost always do it unless it's MMA where you can get a knockout. Yeah. And so it's been training for years, but not his entire life.

Jiu-Jitsu is cool. Yep. Because smaller dudes can just destroy, like, size matters less. Like, I would have, like, all my, I would have, like, a bunch of buddies around Malibu over to do Jiu-Jitsu. Rob from Huberman would come and some other dad friends. And it's just funny, you have, like, a former, like, Old Miss linebacker. Yeah, just kidding. Fighting, like, a college, like, basketball player. they're like super even though like they in a true street fight like it probably wouldn't isn't there

I saw someone on X talking about doing some sort of like founder fight club they wanted us to fight and so I was uh Chris Chris yeah I thought that was kind of funny um let's go to atlas creatine cycle he says many of you used to be technology accounts is he just reflecting on like the shift to politics yeah I felt like this was a sub tweet sub tweeted me but it was actually just everybody but it was as you know the fires I think catalyzed a bunch of people to say I'm going to stop posting

about Peck for a few days and just focus on Mayor Mayor Karen and the Newsom fires and you stack all that on top of what happened to your speaker in your car and you must have just been rocked so make sense that you were you know

you just broke character couldn't talk about tech anymore yeah how to go context I'm happy to be I'm happy to be I'm happy to be back talking about tech. We got a city to rebuild. And we can get back into tech. Because there's still really interesting stuff going on. But when big political things happen, like you've got to address them because tech is increasingly political because the stakes are so high.

The businesses are so large. And, you know, Elon is at Mar-a-Lago hanging out with Trump. And so clearly technology and politics are going to be continued to intertwine for a long time. Yeah. But yeah, you can't ever slip fully into politics. politics. It's just boring. Should we do another promoted post? Let's see here. We got some Locky Groom or you want to move on?

I actually got a promoted post from our Sean and Connor and Sean sent this over. Connor and Sean over at the Ridgewallet. They say 500 free-ish Ridgewallets up for grabs. We donated $50,000 to L.A. Fire Relief this week and are trying to find more ways to contribute. You. Wallets unfortunately are non-essential items, so donating product doesn't make a lot of sense, but money goes a long way. So here's what we're trying. If you submit proof of a $50 plus donation to any LA Fire Relief organization, we'll send you a Ridge Wallet for free. We'll do this for the first 500 people who submit. It's the cheapest you'll ever get a Ridge wallet and you'll be doing good. Details below for how to submit. So very cool. If you want to get a Ridge Wallet, now is the time to do it. If it's not. too late already. I don't think it is. That's great. So thank you to Sean and Connor for

helping raise money for fire relief here in Southern California. Cool. Let's go to some DMs that we don't have printed out, but I have here on my phone. Michael Tostod says the Tech Bros. Pod should have, quote, is this secret communist

section really bring back the McCarthyism? And you said, ha ha, that's great. Looking forward to the segment. we very too deep digging into secret continent. So I think we should have, I think we have a new segment can be kind of sporadic

where we sort of try to figure out Who are the targets? Like the venture communist? Well, so Karen Bass was the target. Okay, sure, sure, sure. It turns out her political career. Well, I guess this was just the beginning of her political career.

She was a very active communist working directly with the Cuban government in the 70s. So yeah, I just think, I talked about this before. people have been looking for new slurs, communists.

There's been a bull market and slurs. Fistation on slurs. And so, venture capitalists, hey John, that market map

makes you look like a junior VC. There you got. Slurs like that. You know, communist, mouth breather, low T, low magnesium levels.

There's plenty. So there's plenty. Let's go to the next comment that someone said, no, is a photo of us. And they say, no cases on their phone. Yeah, these guys have exits. That's great. And then Nate chimes in with the Jordi Hayes stack.

No phone case, no socks, no shampoo. Harrison, where anything is? This is in the reply to Ben's post. So Ben's producer Ben, has been, his account's been exploding. His account has been. Get in now. He's a couple hundred followers. He's blowing up.

It's great. That's great. Here's a good question for us. Britain Winterrose says, tasked with hosting an event VCs will want to attend, the options are Porsche racing experience, skiing, a panel of three other VCs, or other comment below.

And Mario says Tech BrosPod should have good insight. Jordi, what do you think? You want to attract as many VCs to the event you're throwing? What do you go for? Honestly, that the last time I saw True Fly was the gondo. Oh, we remember that last year.

Last, like a, like a flock of visas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was just in a, we need a name for that. You know how like if you get a group of lions, it's called pride of lions or you get a bunch of crows. I think a flock is good because you have. Flok a sheep, like seats. Some of them are seagulls, like the rats, you know, the rats of the air. Some are pigeons.

Yeah. Also kind of, you know, they're foraging. They're just trying to nip off. All I need is half a percent. That's my ownership target. You know, they're just trying to get a crumb. Yeah, there's more of like the eagles, you know, like the ones that sit high above.

And I put... That's not what you call eagles, though. No, I know, but I'm just saying we're going to broadly, we're going to flock of birds, I think, is fair. So we got to kind of bucket in a few different times. A group of eagles is called a convocation of eagles. Convictation. That's good. A convocation of an,

army or a congress but do you remember that when when the gundo i think you catalyzed it in some way with your documentary it was already building yep and then every every bc was was like yeah i'm gonna let me know if you're around i'm gonna be in the gunda this week you know um and uh it's cool i mean so you would say if you want to host an event with vc just go like the hottest new submarket that's blowing up yeah like a high influencer and then just take them on a tour of of startups in the area. Yeah. That's probably good.

That works. I would say big game hunting would also be good. Yeah. The number of GPs that are secretly taking multiple trips a year to hunt elephants, Alks, lions, really exotic. Mostly predators. Predator hunting. Yeah.

Hunting is really big right now. Yeah. Also, Porsche racing experience, that's fine, but you'd be better off doing the Dakar. Yeah. Putting a group together driving from. Yeah, they're all three thousand. The gumball was also good. Great, great,

great option. Let's see, what else? Oh my God, someone just did guess the podcast and it's just photos of us, I think. Like, this? That's hilarious. When is that to do? Yeah, I guess we just posted this. I like this.

That's great. Oh, that's bad. And you posted that. You took some photos. They're proud of slides. That's great. Ben's out of control. Ben, following Ben right now is like buying Bitcoin. Oops. Following Ben right now is like buying Bitcoin in 1981. It just gets older every single time we promote something. Let's go to a bucket poll.

We got Juicy saying dudes be having the worst day of their life and still keep sending memes to their homies like nothing happened. 100K likes. I completely agree with this. Even during the fires, you lost cell service, but I was still sending you memes. And I was like, he hasn't replied like, By like hours.

I think this is back. This is like very uncouth. But yeah, this is the way like men. No, I think people, I think, yeah,

I think, I was, I was kind of processing this. I was thinking about this last week because I was sort of oscillating between being extremely angry at the response of our leaders in California. And then also needing to kind of process it through humor. Yeah, of course.

And so, yeah, can I can remember that the SVB, the period, when SVB was collapsing, it was very impactful on our, on our business, but then I also had a family health emergency at like 2 a.m. that Thursday, and Thursday and Friday was like the last

money you could get money. The last day you could get money out. So, but I still remember everybody was just like meaming it like internal. Like it was like the biggest, the most, existential moment. Crazy existential moment for Silicon Valley where we were like, did we did did this startup economy just get nuke? Yeah. And then everybody was, you know, the group chats were having a moment, you know. Of course. Of course. As they do. Never stops. Um, it's go to Mark Andresen. He says, well, this is really going to cramp my style. And he shows a screenshot of message block. The semantic email security. Cloud Service has detected content in an email that matches the following policy. Inappropriate content. 5.x.x. Please remove any language inappropriate for business and resend the message.

The funny thing is like this is clearly like on A16C's network right? I imagine or maybe it's very different. But it's just funny that he's like triggering the content flags. He's mouthing off so much. I love it. True technology brother behavior. Yeah, we're bringing, we're trying to encourage people to bring back intensity to the workplate.

Yes. And part of that is saying not words like the R word, but saying like the F bomb. Yeah. You know, all caps. We get it fucking done. You know the thing about Ron Conway? Every email he sends is all caps. Really?

Yeah, incredible. Everything you open is just screaming basically. I don't know. That's true. But you got to turn the volume down before you open an email from Ron Conway. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. let's go to Andrea she says much respect to us who have one Twitter account where we should post conduct business and socialize from Sigma moves and I agree with this there's the class is a question of like oh I got some spicy takes should I set up at a non account and I don't know I think that yeah you just got to find the correct line and only post things that you're comfortable living on forever and being baked into you're to the god in a box.

Feeding the AISR, the LLM. Yeah. So the AI. That's part of it. We've got to, every one of us is training these models. Yep. Through the stuff that we're putting online. Yep.

And so if you want the model to be more politically incorrect, be more politically incorrect. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And do it on Maine. Yeah. It's no, you know, I bet you, I bet you, I bet you, I bet you, I bet they're really, you know, try. I bet they're really good at detecting bots for XAI.

Oh, yeah, for sure. You know, they don't want any of that slop that says, like, in my, you know, check out my bio now. Yeah. You know, like some of that stuff. Or even just like, chat GBT just destroyed grok and, anthropic, like, 10 amazing discoveries below. Like, this stupid threads, like all those need to get filtered out. There is something to be said about, like, that mixed use account that's really cool. Like, Nikita broke it down where he was like, look, like, you're not going to have, like, some deep insight or some, you know,

revolutionary deep dive every single day. So you should just be kind of like hanging out at the water cooler, telling jokes, effectively shit posting, do that, like just whenever something comes to you a couple times a day. And then, but then you need to mix in a serious post like once a week or something.

So that, yeah, and Andreas, Zerja is like joking around, but she does some of the best analysis. Exactly. On the consumer package goods industry. And it's the most entertaining.

So I think it's definitely, and when you share stuff, that is personal, like your personal interest. Like for me, I'm always surprised if I share anything UFC related. I get a bunch of people that I, that I'm friends with that I didn't even know, like, the sport and they'll, I mean, talk about it, whatever. I mean, that's the beauty of X is that it's not designed, like, siloed reddits. So you don't need to, like, go and take your account over to watch Twitter or tech Twitter

or media Twitter or UFC Twitter to engage with those people. You can just kind of like follow a few people. People engage post. And the algorithm will send, sometimes it sends posts off to a different region of X. And you're like, oh, okay. There's a whole different community here. And they love me or they hate me. Who knows?

Maybe I got my account. The Canadians. Yeah. The Alaska. The Alaskans got me. Got me good. But let's go to Roon talking to Grimes. Grun says, if you guys aren't careful, I'm going to start writing essays on the immigrant

experience. And let me just say nobody will enjoy that. And then Grimes says, honestly, if you would just write. any essay at all I would be happy. Lazy fuck. Incredible writer. Proceeds to only proceed to only tweet

and not create a body of work. Upsetting. And then Roons says, LMFAO, okay, Grimes is kicking my ass, I got to do it. And then Grimes says, Are you serious?

You can't say it because then you won't do it. Please write something long form and for the love of God print it on a pamphlet and let's not have another substack. Let's show some grace to the written word and also get some branding moxie around the ideas percolating in Silicon Valley.

And then he says, yeah, substack is lame. X articles is lame. The vibes on both of those have become bad. And yeah, I mean, I think there's some great substacks out there and some X articles are cool. You don't want to get censored. So you got to put that up there too. But definitely print it out. Definitely send it to people in print.

Did you see Max Myers new project? Yeah. The love letters to America. Is that what it's going? Letters to Capitol. New project under a re. Really cool. under arena, so you can go subscribe and you'll just get a nicely delivered letter in the mail.

And we're building a mailing list, a physical mailing list. So send us your address. If you want to get drops, we're going to be dropping a bunch of fun stuff in the mail. And I think, you know, you should be keeping a Rolodex. These things often build up around weddings. You get everyone's address there. Keep that up to date. You need a real Rolodex. It's not enough just to have someone's phone or email these days. You got to be able to send them physical stuff and stand out. Should we do another promoted post? What you got? I got, I got one. We got to do the chair at some point. Yeah, we'll do the chair. We'll do the chair next. Do you have some backstory on his chair? Well, it was recommended by the obscure hobbyist of the year. Oh, really? Wilmanitis, yes. He said he's buying it.

Okay, okay, okay, let's actually just run this. So I got an extremely important promoted post today from, and it's actually a recommendation from none other than Will, Menidas. This is, honestly, I doubt he's bought it. Actually, pulled the trigger yet. So we're going to sell it out, Will. He had a couple other options. We're highlighting the one that we think most aligns with our brand. We have a fantastic looking chair here. This is the William Jefferson Clinton Oval Office Chair from the history company. It's only $3,475. And, you know, this thing just looks, fantastic. Is this the action, is this? It's a replica. It's a replica. It's designed to look like the oval office chair. It should be at least 40. And I think it's great because, you know, if you're an associate at a venture capital firm, you come in to give you some slop chair. You got to get that out. Bring in your own chair. No one's going to bother you if you just, oh, I need a more ergonomic chair. I got back problems or something. It's a whole issue. The thing about stop you. So VC associates,

you'll see around us, stuff, a lot of them driving like Valkyries, like, you know, some of these hyper cars. Oh, I8s. I, it's a big two, a wrapped IAs. You got to get the doors to go like this. The Valky's has the price range. As long as the door goes,

the doors go up, it's good by me. Valcruis GP money. Yeah, yeah. The I8, that's, yeah, there's some associates out there that, maybe they're nepoes. I know, yeah, I met a guy in the Alps

a couple weeks ago that work for a pretty prominent venture capital fund and is a billionaire through his, through his father's, you know, know past success but um so some of that you know but anyways great looking chair yeah highly recommend this out uh i've agreed i don't actually like the these metal knobs here but the what's really going to be in zoom is this top section and it looks very regal yeah and some other options but

yeah it's highly recommend you getting a nice chair check out the history company yeah and um tell them the technology brothers and wilmanida sent you yeah let's go to a bucket poll from alley she says dating a see must be so funny because imagine being in the middle of a fight and he says babe let's think about this from first principles. Wait, let me see this. So, so this, wow, two and a half K. Nice. That's a banger.

Nice, nice work, Allie. Allie's fiance or a husband or boyfriend, I don't, I don't actually know. No, he's the, Ali's significant other. Yeah. Posted in late December, if I can get a Robin Hood. gold card, I will tattoo the Robin Hood logo on my arm. So this guy, Brexton, and he got his gold card. And he got a Robin Hood tattoo on an absolute piece on his shoulder. It's big too. It's pretty big. It's pretty prominent. I'm curious if it's his first ever tattoo. He should keep doing this and just get logoed up everywhere.

Yeah. Like a NASCAR. It would be interesting to go to these companies and say, you know, I'll get this logo, but I need $100 a month for the rest of my life. And it's like a bulletproof contract. And it's like you can pay it out early, you know, at like, you know, for like 80 years. Yeah. If you want to just get it all up front or you can just keep, keep me on the payroll forever. Correct. So you go load it up and you could probably get a UBI off that. That might be one of the last jobs. It's just getting a walking billboard. He was looking pretty jacked when I saw it. Yeah, yeah. I think he just wanted an excuse to flex. Yeah, for sure. Nice work. Brexton. Ali, you know, I'm curious. We should, we should get Ali's opinion on the Robin Hood and

Tat. I mean, she's got opinions. I think it's great. I love when my, my partner is stupid. The gold card better be, live up to the hype. Yeah. It does look beautiful. Let's go to Luke Metro. He says, it must be really, it must really suck to be too smart to make money in crypto, but too dumb to make money in AI. That's just brutally real. Yeah. That, hey, podcasting. I mean, there are so... Podcasting is a nice, a nice, you know, middle ground. You keep seeing these, you keep seeing these,

what's the latest coin, fart coin that just mooned or something? There's so many just super stupid ones. And it's like, yeah, anyone rational or intelligent would just be like, this can't possibly happen. But then they really gigabrain, they can figure out that, no, this one's going to meme. The Joe Bowden coined or whatever. Yeah, but even that one ended up flopping. Yeah.

And they all do. It's about the timing. It's about Ponziomics and playing it correctly. Yeah. But, oh, well. It's always some opportunity. There's always a bull market somewhere. Yep.

Let's go to Jack Soslow. He says one cold email at a time, I built my life. I thought that was cool. Yeah. Who was at A16 Z games? I wonder, I would like to see the cold email that he sent to get that job. Share it, Jack. I, um, to hear the story.

it's funny because everybody has you know i would hope that everybody listening has positive stories around cold emails yeah but you always remember the negatives there's this one guy it wasn't even a fully cold email that i met in college because there's one company here in san barbara decker brands they own hoka og and a bunch of other companies great business like 20 billion dollar company that you have you know shoe companies when they have hit shoes do really well and i met him at the gym and he's like here just i was like i love like let me like interned for you work for you whatever i'll do anything like here's what i'm good at he's like yeah just follow up the email and like longest most thoughtful email no response kept seeing him at the gym

often i just like it's just so brutal but the 75 emails 75 emails send emails until they they they beg you to stop or give you a job trust but then do it a hundred times you got to do like the volume is so cute so um this is like you know the balda method like he did just send a couple good replies. He sent hundreds and he kept crafting. And I'm talking to him in a couple He's actually a great poster. It's fantastic. I feel like he's also just gotten become a better poster.

Yeah. No, but cold emails are like little lottery tickets. Like every time you post on X, it's like a little lottery ticket. Yep. You're buying with your time. Yep. And keep it concise. Send it. Yeah. Concise. Let's do another promoted post. Promoted post. We got a

promoted post from Max Broder Erbos, Max, I'm sorry for butchering your name. But he says, he has a company called Gumloop, which just got out of, just got out of YC. And what do they do? They're doing some, it looked like something within the realm of Zapier. I'm trying to remember now.

I don't have any actual backstory on it. But the more important thing is they raise a $17 million series day. It's straight out of YC. And Max says that Gumloop will be a 10-person, $1 billion company. They have six spots left. So this is a company that got four people, took them to a $17 million series A. Wow. So they must be doing something cool.

17 or seven? 17 million. 17 million series. Yeah, wow. Okay. Sean from my first million is in there. Cool. But anyways, cool opportunity.

Go hit up Max. Tell him the technology brother sent you. Tell them the TB sent you. Oh, I like this one. Casey says, I got a bucket pull here. Casey says, I cannot overstate how valuable it is to have a regular gathering you can invite wonderful people to as you meet them. It's often the difference between that guy was cool, I wonder what he's up to, and gaining a new friend and or collaborator. So this is like the bro movie nights that we do.

Is that? You can say Casey. This is just a bucket pole. No, this is cool. I mean, this is one of the chaper nights, there's a cigar notes. And it's kind of sort of working remote. Yeah.

Because people in L.A., I feel like just have to kind of, if you're in tech, you have to be like pretty remote in terms of how you work with people and meet people because there's not that many people here. And that is a downside of like, well, there's only one Friday night every week. Yeah. If you want to get a bunch of people together. And then it's once you have kids, you know, you're sacred. if you're meeting up with, you know, work-oriented people, you're missing out on time of your family.

So getting four, five, six, ten, twenty people together at once. Yeah. Has it pretty amazing. This is why it's so important to get a box of every F-1 race because then there's always something coming up. You can just say, oh, I'm in, I'm in Austin, Texas. And this is, this is why we're going to put my Miami guy. We're going to start doing daily TV meetups at the New York Stock Exchange. Yep.

So one of the brothers recommended this. And I think it'd be very cool. Let's meet at the bowl. every morning. Just pray to the bowl. Pray to the bowl. We got time for one more post and then we got a jet, but we'll see you tomorrow because the pod never sleeps.

Wilmanitis, let's close with him. He says, I think it will shock everyone how short-lived the AGI fortunes will be. Secular nuts and bolts rationalism will not produce modern Rockefellers. They have failed at real institution building. They have weak family structures, polyamory, et cetera, and no transcendent morals. It's a once-in-a-generation bag fumble. We're about to watch hundreds of billions get made and wasted on small dogs, luxury marina apartments, and tasteless Napa homes. Roasted.

Roasted. But, I mean, I completely agree. Like, you look at the, I mean, have you seen Citizen Kane? No. Oh, man. Fantastic movie. It's a beast to get through it. It's a very different experience than like a modern movie.

but you know it's basically the story of William Randolph Hearst Hurst built Hurst Castle have you ever been to Hurst Castle it's like in Central California and it's like this insane castle it's literally just a castle has like these ornate pools indoor pools outdoor pools just built by this like magnet and it just like became this structure that like couldn't just be like absorbed by the market so it became this museum essentially and and and that's that's always my hope when And people say like, you know, the elites aren't bad. We just need better elites.

Like you need elites that care about aesthetics, care about taste. Exactly. That treatment is going to build something that will live on past him. Yeah. Both in the company sense and also in, I'm sure, whatever, he winds up building in the Godgill monument. Exactly. So yeah, if you wind up making an AGI fortune, call will, make some good decisions

and build a dynasty that will live on for centuries. And thanks for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow. Before we go, go rate us five stars and leave a funny review. Yeah. I want everyone to leave reviews. Send us a screenshot. On the app.

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