TBPN - The Trump Bubble, TB's Unicorn Growth, Dom Perignon, Blood Boy Winner

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are excited to talk about an amazing development in the show. We got a massive shout out in a huge newsletter by one of the best writers on the internet. Pachy McCormick put us in his newsletter in one of the most important pieces he's ever written. It's called the Trump bubble, and we're going through it today. Stay tuned. Jordi, what do you got? All right, Pachie, where to start with this guy?

He has been ahead of many trends, and somebody who's a... excellent at sort of crystallizing and owning a moment, right? And so in this case, he sort of has effectively broken down what he believes is a new, potentially multi-year trend called the Trump bubble. And we're already seeing like evidence of this just post-election, Bitcoin goes up to 90K, the whole stock market rates. Everybody's risk gone. Even just normal fang stocks were way up.

there was like a massive trade. I was talking to a trader who was like, he predicted that Trump was going to win. He just bought everything that was Trump aligned. He bought defense stocks. He bought anything that he thought would move. And it played out very well for him. Yeah. And before we jump into this article, I think it's important to highlight that Pachey, like ourselves, is not a political analyst.

Sure. He does not discuss politics. Sure. He's fully focused on just analyzing the moment. and technology trends. And so he actually highlighted before he even jumped into this that he's had a number of incidences where he's covered something

and made a lot of people mad, right? That sort of people tend to get mad on the internet. He a while back wrote a piece called Why the Democrats Lost Tech and he had a lot of people that got mad at him for even, you know, painting any type of positive light on Trump. And then funny enough,

a lot of Republicans got mad at him as well. because they believe that there was nothing at all redeemable in the Democratic Party. So his broader point with the article is that there's nothing that impacts the industries that he's investing in and that he's obsessed with more than this sort of like new Trump administration. Really? And so that's a little context for the piece. So like John said, the last week or so has been pretty risk on. I think a lot of, you know, there's just been broadly a lot of companies doing really well, except for a number of pharma companies yesterday when a certain person got.

RFK got appointed. But yeah, Packy's broader point is that we're at the beginning of the mother of all bubbles, which kind of makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Yes, yes. It's sort of a. Yeah, what's interesting about this is like there's one narrative that's like, oh, we're going into this bubble, but at the same time, it's like the business cycle always kind of restarts after a major crash, and we saw that major crash, 2022, 2023, things were really rough. It makes sense that

this would be the beginning of something. It's just crazy that it already feels bubbly. But I think back to like when I got to Silicon Valley in 2012, like we were doing like essentially YC and all these different like VCs would come and speak. And there were a ton of articles in tech crunch, like, like tech is in a bubble, like the tech bubble, like the series A crunch. Like you won't be able to raise Series A. And that bubble literally lasted for over a decade. But it felt like a bubble then. And there were sort of minor oscillations, right? Yeah. Yeah. There was some minor sell-offs, but like, like, for the most part, like going long through that period was like the phenomenal strategy. And so even when it's frothy, like the business cycle is more is more of a like a massive

driver than like any specific like bubbly valuation in a single stock. And so, like, the, like, the business cycle is more. or a single asset class. I wouldn't be surprised of like the true beneficiaries of the Trump administration are, you know, not necessarily realized right now. Totally. Totally. It's a long-term thing.

Will Scott Shouts in here besides us. Yeah, well, I mean, right away, he shouts out, uh, Byrne Hobart's book.

That's right. That's right. We've talked about. Yeah. I just got in the mail, actually. Tammy sent it to me. Amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He shouts out, boom, bubbles in the end of stagnation. Yep. Uh,

recommends that everybody read it because it's kind of, like a cornerstone of his entire thesis here. Yeah, we should read it and do a review. But yeah, the high level with the book is that there's basically five overarching traits shared by all of the technologies and mega projects that they had studied, which was one, definite optimism and constrained vision.

FOMO, fear of missing out, and you only live once dynamics, which we love. FOMO and YOLO. FOMO and YOLO. Okay. Excessive risk-taking and overinvestment. Yeah. Parallelization and coordination.

Reflexivity and hyperstition. Huh. And he basically says that he feels many of these himself right now. I remember he tweeted maybe a couple weeks back that he is extremely over exposed to Bitcoin crypto technology. I think he's an advisor to Andreessen crypto and, you know, obviously is actively active investor, you know, both personally and through his fund. but even he was feeling FOMO despite being almost 100% allocated to technology.

So that is pretty significant. I mean, if you think back to the original, like the last crypto bubble, like a lot of people were trading with like 10x, 100x leverage. Yeah. And right now most people weren't sitting there with 100x levered positions. Yeah. They were just. They should have been.

They were kind of like, hoddling, you know, and being like, okay, I'm getting through this bare market, but they're not sitting there with some massive margin position. So, yeah, I mean, once that comes in, it's going to be insane. Yeah. Yeah. So he spends quite a bit of time defending bubbles, which I don't think we have to do on this. Like you and I, a lot of people like to use bubble as like a way to slander or something. But all of our listeners are students of capitalism.

Yeah. They understand. Yeah. I think we can skip over that. Yeah. But yeah, I think the. But you should go get the book and we should do a review on the show. Yeah.

So he talks a little bit about signs of a bubble. I think that, you know, Manhattan Project Apollo program, those are bubbles that had direct government oversight, right? They were like government created bubbles in a way, which was like massive overinvestment. Yep, yep. And his position is that the Trump bubble is going to look more like Moore's Law, which Byrne and Tobias and the books say is perhaps, Moore's Law is perhaps the most compelling and enduring example of a two-sided bubble, where in the expectation of, of progress in one domain spurs progress in another, which then propels growth in the first, right? And so the idea here is like we're in this two-sided bubble, right? The Trump administration is telling people that it will be easier to build, invest in, and accomplish big things. This is

Packy's words, which is already making people more excited to build, invest in, and accomplish big things, right? So it's a sort of like incredible podcast feedback loop. Yeah, yeah. It's a podcast feedback loop, right? Positive feedback. Positive feedback. loop and in our case it's a podcast feedback loop right uh i'm known to have a Freudian slip here there content that we can react to eventually this whole show will just be us reacting to our own content yeah in an endless loop yep and oral about us exactly uh so yeah he he shouts out augustus saying that he captured the sentiment as well as anyone we have a four-year window to go as hard as fucking imaginable right so here we are re-reacting to things that we've already reacted to

So we are in time. So I think it's the core kind of idea is that just people believing that things are possible now is kind of creating some real momentum with this bubble. And yeah, it's across the board. Education, health, everything, kind of every category is kind of moving in a positive direction. So at one point, Paki shouts. out, he says, I obviously love Jordy Hayes, John Coogan, and Eric Glyman's proposal to

help bring transparency and efficiency to the government spending with Ramp, which we talked about last week. And we, this obviously came up somewhat as a joke, right? We were, we were talking about how. I mean, I'm sure that's how the government,

I'm sure, like, the original moon landing was like a joke. They were like, ha, wouldn't it be funny if we'd like on the moon? Or like, wouldn't it be funny if we built like a nuclear bomb? But then, like, obviously, people set it in. And big silly things happen. And that's the reason we had the Apollo program. Yeah. And we had, you know, something we covered early in the show was some of the government's

spending on sort of boring, boring line items, things like soap dispensers over the last few decades have gotten to be so egregiously priced due to lack of competition and lack of downward pressure to more efficiently, you know, spend money. And so in many ways, getting the federal government running on ramp, is not at all a joke because it will help us drill down and figure out where spend is being wasted that could be invested in healthcare education. It's not unreasonable.

And yeah, thank you, Paki for the shout out. And what did Sean McGuire have to say over there? Sequoia, Sean McGuire said he's getting messages from physics PhDs asking how they can work in the Trump government. Oh, that's huge. Which again, I think part of this optimism loop is that for the first time in our lifetime,

you have non-political types that want to work in the government, which can't be understated. Yeah, I have a friend who lives in Taiwan and has spent a lot of time in China, and he said the biggest difference between like the way the Chinese government works is that they compel the best and brightest to work in the government. And a lot of that's, you know, forcible, but they, like, it's just night and day. and if we can you know obviously in America

because we're the land of the free the home of the brave like we need to do things differently but if we if it's a meme if it's a packy post if it's a tweet like whatever it takes to get people to actually think that working in the government is a reasonable path is a valuable

path to something like a better life like that's really really important it shouldn't be seen as like oh like I got stuck with this or I got to get out of here as soon as I can yeah and use this as a jumping off for you. Yeah, in China, the elite, the ones that stay in China are oftentimes the ones that are in the party, right, in the government. Many of China's elite actually end up, you know, leaving, you know, becoming expats. Yep. But anyways, you know, back to kind of the, the high level promises of the

Trump admin, make requirements less dumb. They want, you know, they're pushing for regulatory reform across the board. They want to delete things like eliminating certain agencies. Eliminating the Department of Education might be a bit extreme. It sounds like maybe we should have an education department. Elon said that there's 425 different departments and he was like I think we can do okay with just 99. Yeah. It's like a funny phrase. It's a funny thing to think about. You can't even name them. It would be kind of interesting to think about just putting like a very arbitrary rule like any government organization can only have 99 departments. Yeah, yeah.

And so if you want to add a new department, you have to cut one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. People propose their laws too, where it's like the case text and the law is just getting more and more complex every year. We're adding, adding, adding. And we need to be doing some, some code review here.

Yeah, and you know, a few others simplify and optimize. They want to streamline the processes that do exist. They want to accelerate cycle times, which means speeding up. approvals so if that stuff related to the private markets right SpaceX wants to launch a rocket how do we get them you know approval for that faster and then just automation how do we modernize like government systems right we've talked about wanting beautiful DMV apps you know here in California can we do that on a on a

national scale so and you know broadly kind of Paki sums this up by saying a willingness to make big changes is also a willingness to break things, right? And that's a willingness to take on certain amount of risk. Sure. I think the government's gotten very risk adverse over the years, but we're now in the situation where the government, the new admin seems to be willing to take risks. And what that is leading to is people in the markets also going extremely risk on, right? Simultaneously, everybody's going super risk on, which could create the mother of all bubbles, which we've been praying for. So it is, is great to see things coming around.

I think that's where a lot of the optimism is coming from is like, there's been a lot of critiques about like, you know, are the people that are going in administration, like, experienced enough? And the answer is like probably no. Yeah. But like, at least they might jar something loose, try something different. And there might be, you know, a few experimental successes

that lead to outsized power law as returns. And that's the value of shaking things up. It's like how a huge portion of the alpha that was generated in Silicon Valley from the year 2000 onward was literally just saying, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're a 19 year old kid. We trust it with a million dollars to go build something. And this is kind of that version of that. 100%. Another, you know, we don't talk about politics on the podcast, but it's worth calling out that a big critique. of Trump overall from the other side has always been that he is a threat to democracy.

And one of the broader trends that we're already seeing, you know, we talked about a few minutes ago, is this idea that a bunch of people now want to basically are more excited about participating in our government system, in our democracy. Oh, sure, sure, sure. And Elon is the number one example of that. Like he sort of dominated the private markets and then where can you go? what's the next sort of like battleground he chose politics that was the biggest way that he could have an impact on his business but it's cool to see the approach that he's taking with the with doge the Department of government efficiency uh you know they're they're already using uh you know acts to like be highly highly transparent and communicate there's already an account posting there's

already an account they're posting uh they've got some good posters running it i'm sure uh and vevec has said, Doge will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud, and abuse. Americans voted for drastic government reform, and they deserve to be a part of fixing it. So it's this idea that the people that are kind of like spearheading these changes actually do want participation, which is the foundation. Yeah, we literally need like a whistleblower for that $150,000 soap dispenser. Yeah. Like somebody sees that and it's just like, this is ridiculous.

Yeah. And there's some sort of incentive because I can basically go viral and get an Elon retweet if I if I post this. And so I'm going to call it out as opposed to just like, oh, it's just business as usual. Like that's always the way the government is. Like it doesn't have to be that way. Yeah. So anyways, I think as much optimism as there is in tech right now, I don't think it can be

understated how much fear I'm sure there is in Washington. I would love maybe we need to go over there and do some, you know, we're not journalists, but we could go start having some conversations with people on the ground, get a sense of how they're feeling. because if you are working in a bloated government organization right now or you're a lobbyist that's been reliant on the pharmaceutical industry, you know, those types of people, there's a lot. This is like the changes that the new admin wants to make

are a direct threat to a lot of the way of life in Washington, D.C. Yep. From, you know, from the bottom to the top. So overall, fantastic article, Paki, we just have one bit of feedback. the name should have been the Trump pump. The Trump pump. The Trump pump. Trump pump.

The Trump bubble is good. Packy is fantastic with his titles. The great online game. He comes up with these really good coinages. He's like a master of Coogan's Law where the more coinages, the better. But this one, Trump Pump, maybe somebody already said it. Maybe he needed to. Maybe we want to talk about bubbles specifically because of the Stripe Book.

But the Trump Pump. The Trump Pump is. Yeah. And the last thing I would shout out, you know, we love advertisers. We love advertising. Thank you to TrueMed for sponsoring Pachy's piece. Justin Mears, Callie, friends of the show, thank you for supporting independent writers. Yeah, and if you're going to review a piece, like a newsletter, like a Packy piece,

like you should give credit to the advertiser. Without them, none of that's possible. You can't just rip his quotes and pass it off as your own. You need to pass along the ad. Thank you to TrueMed. Yeah, thank you to TrueMed. Let's go to Matt Grimm. He asked me to fix something.

He says, it's an insane market inefficiency that we can't buy nicotine packs at airport convenience shops. John Coogan, please fix. Thanks. And I wanted to talk about this because a bunch of different things are changing in the tobacco industry, the nicotine industry. There's another viral tweet by Peter Hassan who says, The War is Over, fellas our pouches is safe, our pouches are safe and it's RFK holding a pack of pouches.

Just locked in. Locked in. And he's going to be nominated to run the NHS, which I believe will oversee the FDA. And so he will have a pretty huge say in how those get approved. But it is, it is very interesting. And a lot of people were asking me, like, wait, like, this seems obvious. Like, this is like people come to, you know, people come to me all the time with ideas. Like, oh, you should like, you know, sell this in grocery stores.

You should sell this in retail. Like, yeah, I mean, for the first like couple of years when we were mostly online, people would always say, oh, you should sell this in retail stores. It's like, yeah, obviously, like there's just a lot of hurdles to do that. But the hurdles for selling in airports are even more cumbersome. So they do sell nicotine products in duty free and you don't pay taxes, but you have to be flying internationally. And don't you have to be, you can't necessarily open them up? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, mostly you're buying cigarettes and you're buying large quantity.

and it's basically because that's like an embassy and it's like an international waters. We've tried to buy Dom during the duty free and open it in the store and they don't let you open it in the store. It's really frustrating even they even sell glasses and just don't let you open it in the store. But with the Hudson News thing or the airport stores,

there's just this very interesting legacy where so in order to be a retail store that sells nicotine products even nicotine pouches that don't contain tobacco, you still need a tobacco retailer license. And so that's somewhat cumbersome. And if you look back at the history of tobacco products, there was never a product in the post-cigarette era once they banned smoking on planes that wasn't disruptive to the person next to you. So even if you could argue that it's like vaping on the plane is not going to like bring it down, although you know, you could smoke on planes and they didn't,

they weren't falling out of the sky. It was more like a health issue. But even if you could make the argument that vaping next to someone is like safe. Yeah. It's like, annoying. And so they would never sell those because everyone would be like, why are you selling these? They're annoying. And same thing for smokeless tobacco. Like if you're chewing dip and spitting and the person has a dip cup or Gatorade bottle next to you, like that's just going to be kind of a nuisance. I once was on a flight back from New York and had a woman aggressively vaping in JetBlue Mint. Yeah. And she was about, I was sitting up working as I do on flight. She was on the lie flat sleeping

secretly smoking her little vape and we ended up getting into this huge thing and she went to the to the hostess and said kept saying he keeps accusing me of vaping I'm not will you talk to him about it I'm like I'm not gonna do this but yeah that that that I believe that flight was from New Jersey to LA actually so that might explain things yeah totally but so so now you know

know, obviously, tobacco-free nicotine pouches are incredibly popular, and it does seem obvious. Like, why hasn't Philip Morris tried to put Zinn in, you know, Hudson News? And I was trying to dig into, like, you know, okay, what is the real reason? Well, a lot of it has to do with, like, the licensing. Like, you actually have to go get Hudson News new licenses. That takes a long time. I think this will happen. But it's going to require some, like, a very aggressive move.

and the reason why I want to discuss this was I wanted to brainstorm with you. Like if I make this my life's work to get Lucy Excel breakers pouches into Hudson News, like what playbook should I run? And I'm thinking like there needs to be a grassroots campaign. There needs to be memes. We need more guys like Matt who are taken seriously in the government and in the business world to be talking about it. But then I also need to be getting intros to the Hudson News CEO from like, his whole network.

Yeah, probably listens to the show. Probably listens to the show. So give me a call if you do. I would say one solution. But then also like, yeah, what else? Give me the whole kind of, you know, Geordy marketing playbook to manifest this into reality. Because I was thinking, like, I should just put out a call on X.

Like, if you introduce me to Hudson News and we get a deal done, I'll buy you a lifetime. Yep. Because it's going to be so valuable. And a lifetime supply of pouches. And a lifetime supply of pouches, yes. So I will happily do that because if we get the deal done, it'll be extremely valuable to me personally. But also, I think there will be a knock-on effect from being the first pouch in airports

that will, even if we're not making a ton of money on the actual deal, I think we'll get press around it and airport travelers will see it and be like, what is going on? Wow. This brand? Really, this brand? XL. Exactly.

So give me a point. I'm a pragmatic guy. An interim solution to this, we're going to be rolling out some technology brothers, shirts, hats, various types of merch. So what I would say in the short term, once that goes live, all the technology brothers out there, if you can wear the TB branded product while you're traveling, it's a way to signal to other brothers that you are basically a mobile nicotine dispensary, right?

Because I think imagine anybody in our audience would be fine to show. or a pouch with another brother. Of course. Maybe even a few, right? Of course. A lot of guys, you know, any time two technology brothers are walking to the airport, one just closed, you know, a nine figure, you know, licensing deal for their company. The other one is fresh off of like a pre-seed pitch.

Yep. And maybe the pre-seed founder doesn't have a ton of pouches. But the guy that just closed a nine-figure deal did. Yep. And so they can make a trade, right? Take my can, you know, take a few. that's an interim solution but but yeah i like the protect giveaway uh i think that would that kind of you know i think we need to see more companies using uh luxury watches as bounties uh to say like you know if

somebody's hiring for a role and they're like oh if you find an engineer we'll give you five grand it's like i don't care about that but if if you're putting up even something of the same value like a cardier santos yep um i'm going to be much more incentivized right to actually go and make that have. And it's more tangible. And it's like, but it does have liquidation value in the sense that, okay, yeah, I, you know, I got this referral fee. I got this thing. Maybe I need to cash on it. And a watch is a story, right? But a watch has a story and you could pass that down. You could keep it on. Yeah. So I, I am very serious. I need to actually, uh, write that post and like canonize it. That could be a product. That could be a software product. I've done crazy intros

before just by tweeting, oh, I would love to be in like this retail chain and someone will be like, oh, I'm actually like brother in law with the founder or something. Yeah. So there's the Serendipity Engine on X is insane. So you heard it here first. We're going to put together a plan and nicotine pouches will be sold in airports. Mark my words. But in other news, this podcast has been growing like wildfire. You hear it every time we introduce the show.

We're the most profitable podcasts in the world. That's been true since day one. Yep. But more recently, we've become the fastest growing podcast in the world. That's right. And that's really huge. So we need to celebrate that. We recently hit 1,000 followers on X.

Major milestone. Major milestone. And so we will be opening up a bottle of Dom Parian on to celebrate. As we do. As we do. Okay. And we're going to need to talk through this so that the listeners have something to pay attention to while I'm working on this, getting this open. So do you drink a lot of champagne?

I drink champagne on occasion. Yeah. I try to, I find that if I'm drinking, it can sort of impede my nicotine, some caffeine consumption. I'm not a big espresso martini guy. And so usually I try to just focus. I'm a big, three martinis at lunch guy. Yeah.

For work. Of course. If you're doing creative work. Creative work. You want to get the juices. Or deals. Or deals. Yeah.

Or deals or spreadsheets or. Like if you're doing an IPO road show, you want to make sure that you're drinking early in the day. See it. See how this. Hey! There we go. Here's to 1,000 followers. 1,000.

Not every day. Many more. And we're going to be doing a bottle of Dom every thousand followers forever. Every thousand followers forever. Yeah. Well, it only gets more from here. Yeah. I mean, two bottles of Dom.

At 10K, we might need a lever up and do 10. bottles and do our first 10 hour episode first 10 hour episode that'd be fantastic um so the the champagne is flowing we're here to celebrate hey cheers cheers to technology brothers the fastest growing podcast in the world there you go there you go cheers the uh yeah the fastest growing so honestly tastes like ramp have you ever like if ramp was yeah yeah a champagne it would be the dom pair yeah but literally if you touch people people say that about ramp they always say it's like the dom pairing on a b2b sass right that's like You see that all the time. You see that flying around when people ask,

oh, should I use ramp or this other company? A lot of people say it's the dompering out of B2B SASS. And so we also did a little celebration with the fans. We promised that to our 1,000th follower, we would give them one complimentary blood boy. And Circe, vocal cry, was the winner. And so she will be receiving one complimentary blood boy. So we'll talk to you soon, Cersie, and thanks for supporting us.

We really appreciate it. Let's go to some DMs. We got some questions from the fans. Let's go to the first one. Mickey with the Blicky says, Jordy Hayes, question for the pod. I filled out this form on an investing app and lied about my income and net worth. Then at the end, it asked me if I was accredited.

I'm not. And I said yes. So now I'm verified to invest in pre-IPO companies. Can I get in trouble for that? What do you think? Okay, so I have a very quick solution. Yeah, just go to your boss and say you need $200,000 a year. Because as soon as you're making $200,000 a year, you are, you are a credit investor.

I thought it had to be for like the last taxable year. Is it, I don't know. You know, there's a lot of regulations. Just walk in and just demand it and say, look, I need to allocate capital. I need to create shareholder value. I need 200K, boss or I'm out of here. I'm out of here. You're going to get it.

And then if your boss says no, run your, your next job hunt and tell everybody before you submit your resume. 200k. I need 200k regardless. Because I will be angel investing 90% of my. Yeah. Or go apply for roles that have, you know, 500K based comp and tell them I only need 200k. There you go.

I'm gonna outwork anybody. I like that strategy. This is good. This is good. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then yeah, sleep in a shed and the the The potential.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Move in with your parents and just and focus on capital deployment. Right. Exactly, exactly. No, so I remember, you know, being in Mickey's shoes when I was a young man, you know, getting angel investment opportunities here and there. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of lack of clarity around these things.

Some founders care, some founders don't. A lot of more seriously run companies sort of will, I don't see a lot of formal accreditation checks. I write most of my checks out of a fund now, so it's not as much of a thing. But yeah, here's the thing. It's actually much less of an issue for the individual. I don't think Mickey's going to get in trouble for doing this. It really comes down to the company. So if Mickey is on a platform deploying money and they kick you off.

Well, yeah, of course it could kick you off. I imagine if Mickey's not using an alt, he will after this. podcast goes alive. Hopefully. We might have just burned you. We might have just burned your angel investing career. But, um, but, uh, no, uh, the bigger issue is, it sounds like he's, he actually hasn't made an investment, though. And I think that's where the security laws come into, uh, it's not, no, but it's probably not illegal to sign up. It's a bigger, a securities issue if you actually do the deal. Yeah. Yeah. The bigger, the bigger issue is for the company and the platform if Mickey makes a bunch of investments. Yep.

That are very risky and they go to zero. And Mick, and other people that were not accredited say hey I wasn't accredited they marketed these you know sort of you know investments to me yeah and the main thing Mickey angel investing is very very high risk yeah you will not get your money back for five to 10 years yep maybe nothing at all could go to zero it is one of the silliest investment activities of all time yeah it pays if you're good at it but what I would say is whenever you are you know officially accredited or in your current state, start small. Don't invest all of your liquid assets too quickly because then you'll start seeing better deals in six months and you won't have any money

to put to work. So good luck out there. Good luck. Let's go to another DM we received. Hi, John and Jordi. I've been investing at a large growth equity VC arm of a crossover fund and I'd love to move to one of the Holy Trinity firms. Can you give me a little insight as to how they differ, culturally. So he's talking about, Kleiner, Sequoia, and Founders Fund. Legacy. Yeah.

I mean, fantastic firms. I mean, obviously, I'm super biased here, so I can't really comment that much, but I can tell a little bit culturally. I mean, founders fund, everyone knows it's like kind of the pirate ship of the three. It's a little bit crazier, a little bit...

Weirder. Yeah, weirder. And, like, it's always been very freewheeling in terms of, like, the press strategy. Like, you have, on one end, like, Peter, writing a book that's... sits in airports and is like universally recognized as like a great business book. The, almost the foundation of this podcast.

Yeah, yeah. And then you have like Delian just like being a madman on Twitter and just like posting all sorts of crazy stuff. Mike too. Yeah, and Mike and just like both of those are acceptable. And that's very, it's a tier of rivals and so on. Cultural thing at Founders Fun, and I think the reason that founders gravitate to them quite often is the

entrepreneurial nature of the partner. So many of the partners have a fast-growing venture-back startup that they're also doing. Yeah, a ton of incubations. Peter with Palantir, Trey with Anderrol, Varda, and there's going to be more. So it's been, yeah, it's just a very entrepreneurial firm. No matter where you sit in the organization, there's everyone, like, you're never going to get like, here's your task list for this week. And at some, I mean, specifically in a growth. If this guy's at a growth equity, like, crossover fund, there's probably like an element of like dialing for dollars.

Have you seen this? Yeah. Where, you know, it's like we need a price for every company. So we got to get in touch with like every single IPO candidate, every single candidate that's late stage. Just call all of them get the data. Just, you know, pound and pound and pound and, and, and founders, it's much more like whatever your strategy is. We're cool with that. It's not a consensus partnership either, right?

So let's move on to Sequoia. I mean, Sequoia, obviously, like, long-term rival, can't say too many nice things about them. But, you know, we've talked about this before. We love Sean McGuire and what he's doing to pivot that brand to, it's essentially dark Sequoia. Like, you know, Elon has done the dark MAGA thing. And Sean has brought a very unique energy to Sequoia that kind of bucks historical trends. I mean, literally everyone thought he was going to get fired for what he's doing because it's so bold. And there's been even articles about like the.

pushback that he's got on like, hey, maybe are you taking like, are you too, too aggressive on some of these positions? Yeah. But he's fought the war internally. And he's, it seems like he's won, which is amazing. Because fundamentally, like, all these intra, all these intra-VC rivalries, like, I don't care about as much as what the VCs are doing, building technology for America versus our enemies. Yeah. Abroad. Yeah. The other thing you have to imagine, Sean has a bit of leverage, given his close relationship with Elon, who's creating the new deep state. Yeah, exactly. So.

Yeah. And then you go back. I mean, like, I love some of the founders funds, you know, legacy investments, the story of Palantir, the early Zuck deal is fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Like the early Zuck deal is legendary Airbnb in strike. But like Sequoia is just in a different tier when it comes to the legacy stuff.

Like Nvidia. Yeah. Google, right? Isn't it four out of the $5 trillion companies? Or covered by the Holy Trinity. everything but Sequoia did maybe they did

they didn't do Facebook Apple and video and they didn't do Microsoft but yeah but because Microsoft didn't really raise but yeah Apple and Vidia

Google and then Kleiner you go back even further and you have a whole other tier of like amazing legacy and you know

it's almost like a Vacheron it's exactly like Vashron it's like underrated now but has like an incredible historical legacy and of course

there's like the talent Wars of the Holy Trinity that people talk about a lot right now where, you know, Everett Randall moves over to, to Kleiner. He brings Liberty Braswell from Founders Fund. Keith goes to Kosla. Keith goes to Kosla. There's a lot of like, you know, trade deals going on right now.

Yeah. But I remain extremely bullish on Sean and extremely bullish on Ev. I think Ev is just fantastic. We're just bullish on risk, right? Exactly. Anybody that's taking risk, we're excited for you. Yeah. We're happy for you.

And so. And so to answer the question of like where you fit in, you need to understand like, okay, what is your strategy and how much are you want to push things culturally? How many systems do you want in place? How entrepreneurial is your deal making process? And I think that's kind of you go into a client or there's going to be a larger staff. There's going to be more support infrastructure. And to be. And some people are going to flourish in that environment.

It is harder to break into the Holy Trinity than the NBA. Yeah. Hands down. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Just statistically. Yeah.

So good luck out there. Start networking and start sending some of those firms good deals because you start sending us deals. Yeah, send us deals. And yeah. Happy to make a warm intro. Yeah, we'll make some intros. Let's go to another DM we got. This is hilarious when I first read it.

I'm going to keep it anonymous, but someone DM me and said, where does founders fund keep its cast? between investments and I love this question I love this because it sounds like they're going to do a bank heist and they're going to try and steal the money that Founders Fund has but it also is a very legitimate question in that I don't think a lot of people know obviously our most of our listeners know but a lot of people don't know where VC firms actually do keep the cash and just the mechanics of raising a fund when you raise a billion dollar fund that doesn't sit in your bank

account that's just commitments from LPs yeah and then you make capital calls on a per investment basis. So the money might or a quarter or yeah like programmatically quarterly. Yeah exactly. So like you're you're not necessarily just sitting on a billion dollars in some money market fund. It's sitting with your LPs and when you want to make an investment you call the capital it moves through your account very quickly and you only have a few days there. And then there are also credit lines that allow you to pull things forward if you're off by a few days. Yeah. And the reason, so the reason that that that is important is it is it increases the performance of the fund, right? So if you call the billion dollars, if you have a billion dollar

fund, you call that capital on day one. But then you deploy it over four to five years. That's money that's just like sitting there not really generating a return for your LPs. And so they would rather spread out those calls over time and be able to keep that that capital in, uh, actively in the market in other investments or treasury, you know, uh, bonds. or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And this was a big thing during like the SBB crisis. A lot of firms were, you know,

they did have some money tied up, but it wasn't exactly a situation where the VCs were going to lose like all their money because most of the funds that have been raised are invested just in liquid assets because the LPs have fun. We should do a, at some point, we should do a look back at the SBB crisis.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Because I'm happy to provide my point of view of running a new bank at the time. I was inside out of the time. And we were getting accused of, like causing it. It was the most insane thing. And our buddy who we mentioned before,

Bryn Hobart was the one who like deep dove SVB early and broke the story essentially that like their balance sheet was messed up. So yeah, we should do a whole thing. I've touched on it before in content, but we could easily do an hour on that. But now let's go to Brother of the Week. Each week we try and honor one technology brother

who exemplifies what it means to drive innovation forward to allocate capital efficiently, to live the lifestyle, to enjoy luxury goods, to be a capitalist and a consumerist, to be materialist. Yeah. And this week... Loud and proud opulence. Loud and proud opulence. And so this week was tough.

It was a really tight race. Yeah. Very tight. Yeah. There were a lot of really solid candidates. And this candidate... Kind of a cut above. Cut above.

And we'll start by saying that he is in the exclusive club, which is residents of the Venetian Isles in Miami. And this name might be new to some, but I don't think it will be new to many. Somebody who has inspired a generation of investors and operators. He is a historian in his own right and also a capitalist, right? He's somebody that has made a living and a very good one at that. that sort of telling these stories of the history's greatest entrepreneurs, handful of investors here and there. And he's somebody who, less than three weeks ago,

we met with in Miami. And we talked to him about the podcast. At the time, we were recording one day a week. And he said, you guys are not taking this seriously enough. You need to go home to California, go to your studio, and lock in. And we certainly have done that. Otherwise, we wouldn't be opening a bottle of champagne today, celebrating, you know, a very large number entering the four-figure club on X. Yeah. And being not only the most profitable podcast on Earth, but the fastest growing. So

today's brother of the week, this week's brother of the week, David Senra himself. So congratulations, David. You will be received. receiving your brother of the week. Plaque. Plaque. We just wanted to highlight one, one particularly great, David Senra post. He writes,

Henry Ford and meetings. And it's a screenshot from some of his notes. He said, Ford didn't like meetings at all. Sometimes in the middle or at the beginning of one, he'd spring up as if he had to go to the bathroom or mumble that he'd forgotten to check on something, always giving the oppression that he'd be right back. He never came back.

There you go. I love that. So in many ways, you have to imagine that Chesky and his recent tirade against meetings was inspired by Henry Ford. And he probably is a founder's podcast listener. Yeah. So thank you to David for the encouragement and exemplifying what it means to be a technology brother. Thank you, David.

Let's move on to the timeline. And we will start with Lulu Masservi, one of my good friends. she writes, it's incredible that there's a Ramp Love Fest on here every few weeks. Imagine how crack the team has to be to organically build a fandom for a B2B SaaS finance product. And it's a screenshot of someone quote tweeting a question about should they go with Ramp or someone else. And they say Ramp by 100x margin. And yeah, it is incredible. But it's a testament.

It's interesting because it's like the Ramp fandom is, it's deliberate, but I don't believe it's ever been. in a deck. Like, I don't think they ever wrote, we need to build a fandom. It's more just like the founders and the people that they associate it. The network is really great. And it includes David Senra.

It includes Patrick O'Shaugh. And so it includes Lulu. Yeah, exactly. So if you're, you know, you're following Lulu and you're like, I fuck with her. I like the stuff that she's putting out.

Like, who else is she fuck with? Yeah. And it's ramp. It's cognition. It's Anderol. And so you're like, I'm in. Here's the thing. This is cool. So a lot of people think to have a great brand, you need to spend a lot of money on a branding agency. And, you know, we spent, you know, multiple six figures on our, you know, technology brothers branding, which is still, you know, rolling out. Not that you need to do that, but we felt it was important and more podcasts should do it. But here's the thing. A great brand is not the font that you choose. It's not your logo mark. It's not how pretty your. website is or how many times people copy your website or how many times people copy your choice of

color. A great brand is how is what it stands for and how it makes people feel and something that people want to be associated with. So in the case of Ramp, Ramp stands for operational excellence, right? And they came up in a time, they came on to the scene during the ZERP era. And so their position of actually, we're going to help you save money. It was very contrarian at the time. Everyone else was spend, you know, spend, spend, spend, check out all the rewards you you can get. They were saying, now we're actually going to give that money back to you and we're going to help you spend less on your cards, even though that's not directly beneficial to us. At the same time, they have built a, is it a decacorn yet? Is it close? Something close.

We'll be soon. They've done that in, you know, five-year time horizon, which pretty much only that Donald Trump has done in the last five years. So not only do they stand for operational excellence and help companies achieve that, but they have done that themselves and they've set that example, right? And so they've created this halo effect around the brand that other companies

want to be associated with. So now if you're a, if you just incorporated your company on Stripe Atlas and you want to make a statement to your team about what your company stands for, you're going to use ramp, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's how we're able to achieve our ridiculous profitability even at a small scale.

Yeah. There's also something interesting about them kind of building almost like a non-sequitur brand around the engineering excellence of the organization. Like most people would be like, I don't even know if I need IMO gold medalists or I. OI gold medalists to write my B2B software. Like I'm good with like mid-tier programmers most of the time. They don't know that that's what they want and they want like the, real polish in their software and they want the software to be an expression of almost art.

Yeah, and here's... But it's really stuck out. And the last company I know that did that was Google. Have you heard about Jeff Dean? You know this guy? No. He leads their AI, but he was like the most insane programmer during Google's rise. And there's like these arcane websites out there of Jeff Dean jokes.

And they're basically like Chuck Norris jokes. And it's like Jeff Dean's keyboard only has two keys. one and zero. Because he like programs and binary. Yeah. Or like, you know, and then there's like

20 more jokes and like you really need to understand computer science to get the joke. Yeah. But they, like Jeff Dean was just this like insane phenomenon and,

and it really like set the culture at Google. And you could almost say the same thing. Like, you know, people like, you know, do you need, you know, you know, gold medalists to write B2B SaaS software? Well, do you need Jeff Dean

to write search and ad software? Like, yes. Yes. Yes, you do. actually because there's a big opportunity and it's really important so like get the best. Yeah, I had having the opportunity to go to dinner with Lulu,

Eric and Kareem for Ramp and in Miami a few weeks ago and they invited one of their engineers who actually was moving over to marketing. So one interesting thing about Ramps organization is it's so engineering led that Ramp's CTO,

Kareem actually runs marketing and they often sometimes are focused on recruiting engineers to their marketing team because they want to take an engineering-led approach. And I can't comment on some of the things that they're doing in order to drive customer acquisition using that method, but they're a step above any other team, right? They didn't go recruit out of some big New York city like marketing agency, right? They're like engineering culture through and through. So let's go to Josh Kaplan. He, is posting a deep dive on the gundo from the blaze called hard techs main street it says augustus der rico

on the gundo practice of office checks if you're not in the office at 1204 a.m. chugging white monsters and popping zins you deserve to get your funding cut and this is this is interesting uh because great picture yeah I mean fantastic picture but I've always said that it's underrated that the gondo guys beat the allegations of being too Twitter-brained and too addicted to posting. And they very, very elegantly switched from just constantly posting and needing to do all the work themselves to get attention in media to the media comes to them now. And they just sit down. And I bet this got like a ton of reach.

It's very valuable, very important for SEO. And it was probably like, you know, a one-hour lunch. And they took some photos. High leverage. And Augusta's, it's very high leverage. Exactly. Yeah. It's way easier.

And credit to them, they're some of the best posters of the generation. Fantastic, but they didn't get too into it where they were like, now. No, they post way less than the AI people, the accelerationist. For sure. They post way less. They're averaging. Yep. And I think that's good because they're actually able to go and build something real and take time for the important things.

And then they can still pop up and post, but it's very much like, you know, shower thoughts. Like it's really like slack time. They're not sitting there being like, let me write a whole. That's a good segment for Augustus shower thoughts when he's when his drones are flying. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's good. He has a second to.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's basically, uh, yeah. I mean, like obviously they need to, um, on that note, they need to maintain attention. Oh yeah. Promoted post quickly. Uh, we wanted to shout out that Augustus is at Rainmaker, uh, who's featured in that article is hiring, hiring, hiring need more engineers please sir my tech development timelines are starving so if you are an engineer feel free to ping augustus directly apply for a job or DM us and we're happy to give you

our opinion on company and working with augustus as he's a friend of the pot so uh great great opportunity for the right engineers out there and make haste yeah i think it's uh rainmaker dot com if you want MakeRane.com. MakeRane.com. There you go. If you want to learn more, we highly recommend it. I've made a whole video about the Gundo. There's a great Jason Carmen video about Rainmaker.

Plenty of ways to learn more and find out if a job at Rainmaker is right for you. Let's go to Blake Robbins. Good, great investor. Just great guy all around. He says, the inevitable AI side hustle is to flood TikTok reels and shorts with AI edited subway surfer video plus top Reddit posts plus text to speech. Is that inevitable or is that like already happening? I think it's already happening. So Blake is a good example. A lot of people go say oh touch grass, get offline, go walk in the park. Blake's like no. I'm going to stay more online.

I'm going to take pitches while playing. He's the investor. I was pitching while talking while playing video games with him. Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. So he's an example of in our very online world, I would, anybody that tells you to get offline is maybe doesn't have your best interest at heart because Blake is a fantastic investor and found some great companies over the years very early. But yeah, we've seen this. A lot of people are saying, you know, you can make $10,000 a month, making some AI influencers. Not sure about that. But the clipping strategy is very established as a way to, you know, at least generate a lot of attention.

And you don't need to be. particularly an expert in anything yourself to get great at clipping. Yeah. When we get into more of the VC trade deals, the, you know, who's working where, who's moving from one firm to the other, we got to analyze Blake because he's that benchmark. They let him go start another fund. And he's had that Detroit fund for a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, he's moved around a bunch, tons to analyze there. Would have been a top draft pick for me if I was running one of the major venture firms. But holy Trinity, you know, we'll see. We'll see how he ends up. I like that he has his own fun though. He's master of his own destiny now. Santiago says, wait, did you just say Dutch East India Company? Dude, they were the OG venture capitalists.

VCs today are soft herd animals. These dudes were hardcore. They'd be like there's an island that produces something we want. And if we get it, will 30,000 X our investment. And it's, I guess that's him. Yeah, yeah. with the O-C-V-O-C-V, which is the Dutch East India trading company logo on Rogan. Yeah.

Which is funny. Yeah, it's funny. It's the same as Aaron Sloat-off, right? Yeah, Aaron was talking about, you know, cornering the nutmeg market. But, yeah, it's funny to think about the Dutch East India company looking at, you know, a venture capitalist today is typically pretty happy with 100x, 200x. That's kind of the range where you start to go, okay, so it's a good bet. And, you know, they probably looked at something like that, being like, man,

with the risks that we're taking on, like, I need at least a 2000. I mean, now it's even lower. Like, a lot of the growth equity funds are just like 20% IRA deals, no zeros. Yeah. Like, imagine, like, it's a good strategy. Like, it's worked. It's smart. It's rational.

But private equity, it doesn't feel like, yeah, it's private equity. It doesn't feel like venture. Venture means, it needs to be, there's a 90% chance. This is a trillion dollar company. 90% chance it goes to zero. Five percent chance. The founder goes to jail. And I'm disgraced.

And I never. work again. Here's a that's the venture model that practices a friend of the pod, Justin Maers, and Lee the team over at Long Journey. They practice true venture today where they will back a founder who's still working in some university on some like crazy project or a poster that's like the most absurd thing you've ever heard. Yep. And they take, you know, they're they're making these bets where they'll invest very small six figure checks at very recent. reasonable valuations given the risk profile. And I'm extremely bullish on the strategy.

It makes me feel like an idiot for entering companies at 15 posts or 20 posts. I mean, I was talking to Lee the other day. He was the first investor in Crusoe. Yeah. Like fantastic company, like crushing. And also, I was talking to Sain about something. They invested in a diamond company.

Yeah. Like where is that on any market map? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they were like, yeah, we. want to be investing off market maps yeah yeah off market maps for sure i think the the thesis was like well like lab grown diamonds are going to get cheaper people will eventually switch over but now it's like oh actually diamonds are important to like chip fabrication in some weird ways here's somebody i texted a i texted a market map to my friend amar the other day and he goes damn that market map looks like the

menu at a tg i friday and i was like that is a good example of like if the market map Looks like a TGI Friday's menu, probably it's past. Stay away. Don't make your first bet. Stay away. Because the game is. Well, stay tuned for the Technology Brothers Market Map. We will be mapping out every poster that we mentioned on the show.

And we're very excited to drop our first market map. Let's go to Ken. He says by 2026, there will be two jobs, HVAC technician and YC founder. Everything else will be done by computers and the HVAC technician. will have higher average annualized revenue. So here's the thing. I had, there's a guy, a guy I used for like random like candy man stuff around the house.

And I were talking the other day. He's helping me with something. And he was like, dude, I've been taking these like engineering classes. I've been like learning to build websites. And I, I didn't try to dissuade him from doing that because I think it's like you should know how to build a website. You should know how to make an, application, right? Like those sort of things are like basic skills like replacing a, you know,

you know, screw in your house almost, right? You should know how to like paint a fence maybe, something like that. But I told them, I was like, look, every single person out of the last 400 people that I've texted could make a website today and ship it, like a tiny fraction of those people like know how to properly like clean a gutter and maintain the gutter in a home right and even smaller fraction are going to know how to like you know service an hVAC unit so I told them I was like look you're already very skilled in these areas and if you really productize what you're doing and

get smart about building a team and marketing I guarantee you that you already have momentum in this area like you're going to be making more money than the average web developer in in three years yeah it's like taste and like arcane knowledge that doesn't exist on the internet is like what's valuable like yeah i've seen what i what i'm seeing in the creative market right now is the truly truly talented creatives that uh that have incredible impeccable taste and execution and have built great teams around them are are busier than ever yep uh then the the bottom half of the market like the historical web developer like i'm going to make 200k you're developing maintaining a website like almost like blown out like non-exist

and not a great career path anymore. They're not going to be an credit investor for very long. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you want to be a credit investor, do not become a website. Commoditized web developer. Maintainer. Let's go to Trey Stevens.

One of my colleagues at Founders Fund. What do we want? An Anderle merch store. When do we want it now? And he is commemorating the launch of the Anderral merch store. Very cool CGI render. They're going to be dropping something. I don't think they've actually talked about what they are dropping, but I've heard it's a very unique and cool plan.

We'll have to do a live opening. Yeah, we'll have to do unboxing. I'll get. Yeah, so here's the thing. So the most hyped merch drops on X right now are Anderral and Palantir. But the issue is they both stand for very similar things. Yes, yes, yes. There's not a lot of like conflict.

It's hard to really pick a side. Yep, yep, yeah. We need a third player to come in the mix so that people can kind of like, you know, they're needs to be conflict, otherwise there's no opportunity. And I mean, I just imagine when I see a lot of Anderol and Palantier gear, it's a lot of t-shirts, it's a lot of sweatshirts. It says quiet luxury. It says, hey, I might have written a seed check in this company.

Now it's worth $100 billion. Yeah. I'm wealthy. But that's not the future. The future is loud opulence. Loud opulence. You need to be screaming. Yeah.

So I think there's an opportunity for a defense tech, you know, firm to come out that's maybe competing with these guys and say, We're going loud. We support kipping pull-ups. Gold-plated drones. We support, you know, Palantir has been very clear. They do not want you drinking or getting kipping pull-ups while wearing their merch. Exactly.

And so that creates an opportunity for a maybe pro-crossfit, pro-drinking. Wait, wait. They said no drinking in the game? Yeah, yeah. Oh, this is going to be a huge problem for us. No more than two drinks. No more than two drinks. Okay.

I wonder if we can get like a Dom Perian's exception. Yeah. I think that's essential. No more than five bottles of. Yeah. I mean, we're going to finish this bottle of day. There's no problem. Come on. Let's go. Matt Turk says, business trip to Europe. 6.30 a.m. wake up check phone, except cookies. 9 a.m. I already see where this is going. I didn't read this one.

9am. Meeting. Use laptop. Except more cookies. 12 p.m. Taxi to lunch. Except cookies? Yes. 4 p.m. New Czech's news. Except cookies. 11 p.m. Netflix. But first, cookies. One a am restroom except cookies. This is a joke, but somebody ran the numbers, and they said something like Europeans will spend billions of hours accepting cookies. It's insane.

It's just like a constant on-ball. It's so insane that there's no like opt-out. This is like the worst thing. Europe's going known for being known for great pastries to being known for lots of cookies. Even Apple's doing this where it's like every single app, I have to say allow app to track or accept or deny. And you always do because you want to support advertising.

I literally do. Yeah. because I'd rather have targeted advertisements than non-targeted advertisements. Like, I want to see an ad for a protect-filippe. I don't want to see an ad for, you know, some Hubello. Like, they should know me by now. Yeah. Exactly.

So, yeah, very disappointing Europe. I really hope we can push back against this in the United States because, obviously, I never go to Europe. I don't travel nationally. For Apple, it was a brand thing. They realized that they had an opportunity to be the privacy, big, focus, big tech company. And put pressure on the direct competitors. Even though they, yeah, yeah, even though they know every single thing about us already and it doesn't matter. Big Tech feels like being a user of big tech products, like when you're using Facebook or when you're using an iPhone, it feels like you have divorced parents.

And it feels like Apple is actively in a fight with meta. Yeah. And it's like I'm trying to use, I'm trying to log into my sunglasses. They work together, but they work together. Like I'll drop the kids off. Exactly. And then they kind of bicker at each other. Like, oh, oh, oh, you want to use these meta glasses?

Like, well, do you want to, are you sure you want to accept the terms? Do you want to do this? There's 20 different pop-ups. You said you were going to pack lunch for the kids. And when I picked them up, they said that they didn't have any lunch. Exactly. It's so, it's so frustrating. And yeah, I'm getting close to burn it all to the ground.

But we'll let them keep going. The Apple company is not happy with me, but I'll keep using that shit. Let's go to Ashley Vance. He says, my exclusive today is the big, on the biggest investor in brain and longevity of science that you've never heard of. James Fickle turned a crypto fortune into a research empire. I love this. You need better elites. This is an example of better elites. Is he sun gazing right now? I think he is. He looks like it. Nice. Yeah, there you go. I sungaze before the podcast. Yeah. I try and like tease it in. I try and go for a run outside. I don't, I don't raw dog it like

some people that we know. I try and run outside to catch some rays in the early morning. I mean, if you can get to the gym or to the whatever you're doing on the run and like the sun's coming up, nothing's more inspiring that. It's fantastic. But yeah, I don't know. Longevity and brain. Yeah, we need more crazy money. I think a great journalist. She writes some great pieces.

And I think that she is. Hey, hey, hey, easy, easy. I'm just saying certain journalists, you know, are friends of the pod adjacent, adjacently friendly and other. Others are, you know, less friendly. But, no, I think Bloomberg has been making moves. Credit to them, right? They got Kate Clark last week. They've got Ashley.

Emily Chang, the circuit. Big, big momentum over a lot of people. Yeah. It's great. Shout out to the journals. Let's go to Nick Milinovic. He says, DREG expectations are creating a lot of upward movement for public fintechs. So I brought Nick up on the show before talking about how his strategy, it's very

dangerous as a VC to just pick a single category and just make that your entire, make that your entire identity and focus. And Nick's strategy to date has been to have smaller funds and make sure that he's actually generating real carry. Yep. Phenomenal investor. I think he's had a community and a media platform forever and really has done, yeah, good job of making sure that I think anybody that is building in FinTech that's,

worth backing is probably aware of him at this point. And he kind of, as much as there was a crypto bear market, there was also a huge fintech bear market in the public markets for sure. Dave.com. Dave.com. Dave.com. And it's up 40%. Yeah, a bunch of others.

So, uh, wait, is this the last seven days? Oh my God. Like, I'm looking at this and it's like sezzles up 103%. I think it's the last seven days. I'm not sure, but like that's crazy. Maybe Nick should open a public. He needs to, yeah, start a hedge fund, man. Yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, I know a decent amount of these companies, but there's a ton on here. It's, yeah, it's good to be back. It's good to be back. Matt Freed writes, I don't know. I feel like Waymo can solve most of their problems by adding just one additional seat. So Waymo is counteracting the bird. A turret on top. You remember we've talked about the bird, how Bird really suffered in L.A.

because it became the new hot thing to throw a bird off. of a 10-story skyscraper. So we've seen Waymo's get into similar situations where they're alone in a street and maybe a bunch of people decide to start doing donuts around the Waymo and maybe jumping on it and lighting it on fire. So anyways, I think Waymo would be smart to, I would look at potentially partnering with Anderol and getting some of their FPV drones that just sort of like follow the Waymo. Flok safety.

Protect it. Plot safety works, but I want like something kinetic, right? Like you need, you need that kinetic potential. Didn't they acquire some of the drone company? No, non-kinetic, non-kinetic. Now, Waymo needs, you know, suicide drones trailing it. And there needs to be laws to protect AI, right? Because I think humans are a bigger threat to AI right at this moment.

Yep. Then AI is a threat to humans. So to make sure we don't piss the AI off too much, we should allow AI rights. Yeah. Self-defense is a important principle. Yeah, I mean, everything about the same. the decision to start in San Francisco just feels better and better because it's like an extremely chaotic city where I mean they obviously did the the pilot in Arizona which was like a super safe

like super wide open streets like always like dry no hills so and then once they got that going they went straight to the hardest mode like level 1,000 going into San Francisco like crazy streets tons of pedestrians like shoddy streets like all sorts of weather fog and also people who vandalize you. So if they can solve that, it's going to be a breeze to go to Chicago or L.A. Here's going to be the big unlock for Waymo. So when Waymo, instead of doing Uber black, because all Waymo cars are like clean and fairly spacious and it's nice inside. So maybe black doesn't matter. But they should have a Waymo TurboS functionality. Right. There you go. Call a 992 turbo S. Yep. And just say like, hey, look, drive however you want, but just try to keep it 15 over the speed

limit, which is maybe like where police aren't going to bother you, but just stay under that. And let me really enjoy the car while I'm in it, right? I like that. So Waymo, please roll out turbo S's. We will pilot them around Los Angeles. Yeah, this is correct. Elon says, use grok for answers that are based on up-to-date info. Chat-GPT has no idea on whom Donald Trump has assigned new responsibility of enforcing our borders.

GROC is real-time. Chad GPD is outdated. Interesting. I mean, there is something great about Groch. being integrated with the timeline. I love that. But I actually haven't used it that much. I've used it for a couple like generative images.

Yeah. Because I feel like it's a lot less restrained there. So if you want to do something fun for like a kid and you want to do like, oh, it's going to be Mickey Mouse and Paw Patrol together. Boom. Boom. Go to grok. Yeah, I think I haven't been going for just like the the news, the default LLM.

It's not in my home row in that way. Yeah, I think we should go on record. and say that we support AI. We are excited about all the foundation models. And, but we are excited about ways that these foundation models can differentiate, right? Yep. And this is one of them. Yep.

Not only as XAI have sort of an interesting distribution hack. Yep. Uh, through X, but they, uh, certainly have found ways to resonate with a broader audience outside of the college students that are using chat GPT to, to solve their homework problem or write an essay for them. Yeah, that's great. So got to mix that in more. I use perplexity.

I use chat GPT. Claude every once in a while. Really? Kind of go back and forth on it. I kind of subscribe. Really? Because every once in a while you see the meme of like, oh, Claude's doing really well.

Like the response is really good. And it has been good, but the UI, honestly, is great for me. So I back off. But I think if you're programming, Claude has become like the default integration for cursor. So yeah, I think, you know, we could be seeing some bifurcation, some specialization. Well, let's go to the other AI founder, Sam Altman says, more generally, I am feeling good about a bright future for cryptocurrency.

Here we go. Risk on. Risk on. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the interesting things. Like, you know, a lot of the AI people have been very, very bearish on crypto because they see it as this like zero sum rivalry. Like either the VCs are in AI.

crypto they're going back and forth and that's somewhat true same thing with talent like developing for crypto is hard developing for AI's hard yeah so you need the best talent you need the best talent you want to be sucked away by some person that's like oh I'm making I'm getting so rich working at a crypto company but it's good that he has this perspective at the top end of saying this isn't zero sum we actually probably need both especially as we go to like you know more global payments the stable coins the prediction markets the speculation the digital goal Yeah, I think part of it is there's real competition in the capital markets for there, there's, there's sometimes the capital feels infinite, which is an incredible feeling. But more often than not, these bigger allocators are looking at, you know, all right, we should be deploying into crypto this year.

We should be deploying into AI this year. And both industries in a perfect world would want to take all of that. Right. And so, but we've talked about this before with Sam. One of the, I honestly haven't followed World Coin closely enough. does feel like they're building some pretty crazy momentum from like a talent standpoint. I've been super bullish on wood coin from day one just because Sam's involved. Yeah.

Yeah. And you've said like Sam just makes money. Yes. Period. So. Let's go to the bear case for crypto currently or maybe just some cautious optimism from Robert Leshner. He says a cheat sheet of things that could blow up at 200K BTC crazy volatility.

Spot exchanges missing, missing coins. I think that's like maybe like a. Robin Hood thing? Is that what spot exchange missing coins mean? Like if you're trading like essentially synthetic Bitcoin and you don't actually necessarily own the under the underlying asset, derivative exchanging exchanges, miners that overwrote call options, defy borrowing markets, hedge funds, high leverage traders, including you plan accordingly. It's funny. It's all the lessons from the last bubble. I first heard that as minors as like people under the age of 18. I mean, so many literal miners were huge in crypto. Yeah. Especially NFTs.

especially in the ICOs, like lots of young kids. Can you imagine the NFT boom during, like, if you were in middle school and you had like, and you had like a crypto wallet? Yeah, yeah. And you get like 100 bucks and you run it up to. Yeah, but the thing that's interesting about here is people always think about like like systemic risk in crypto as being, prices dropping a ton, but the meteoric rise. And I think this is a great call out.

And I think I've talked to Robert like one time years ago, but like very early and right with crypto. But yeah, people aren't sort of prepared for the systemic risk that comes from just the market crap of crypto potentially doubling in the next few months. Do we have any more promoted posts today? Good question. Actually, on the note of financial markets, we have a promoted post from BlackRock. BlackRock says our chairman and CEO, Larry Fink, highlights in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, which we love, that the most realistic path, to reducing America's debt burden is through growth. He discusses the opportunity for U.S. capital markets to drive growth by building hashtag

infrastructure, particularly in data centers and hashtag AI technology. Larry says any realistic path out of debt has to rely mainly on growth. We need to increase the size of our economy so that what we owe becomes smaller relative to what we make. So incredible, we should consider printing this out and just kind of putting it on the wall because it's worth coming back to. But, hey, this is, this is fascinating. I heard this interesting take from Ben Thompson that, that if you're a government and you're in debt, there are two ways out of it.

One is to kind of unstagnate yourself and bring about economic growth, which is what Larry is arguing for, which I strongly support. It's a very hard problem. There's a piece of deregulation. There's a piece of innovation. There's a whole bunch of things that need to go right to actually get GDP above 2%, to like the three, four, four, five percent. to like the three, four, five percent range that would be real hyper-meanful growth. Going from 2% annual GDP growth to 4% would solve like pretty much all of our problems. So, yeah.

But the other way that governments are tempted to solve a debt crisis is always inflation. But democracy has this like built in kind of escape valve for inflation because inflation hurts the average voter, the average consumer so much. Because even though right now like inflation has declined, That's the rate of inflation. The prices didn't go back to before the inflation. Look at the tech. Yeah.

And so a lot of people are still hurting, even though, yeah, the prices aren't going up anymore. They're still high relative to what people perceive, you know, a banana should cost or a gallon of gasoline should cost. And so there's a lot of pressure. And most of the U.S. elections are like referendums on the economy, referendums on the right track, wrong track. How is the country doing? And so there's this hopefully over. time there's this forcing function to like do not inflate the debt away instead let's focus on growth let's focus on and and going back to the trump pump the sort of virtuous cycle of saying let's get government

spending in control let's spend more efficiently let's spend in the right places let's accelerate and let's let's focus on growing the economy which i think is a core tenets of the new administration regardless of your political beliefs yeah let's go to buco capital bloke he says private company SaaS employees hearing that the IPO window is closed with markets at all-time highs, doge coin mooning and Carvana up 800% year-to-date. And it's a picture of Shane Gillis. So I think... So I think...

So I think... So I think... This guy's very sharp on SaaS broadly. I don't know. I have no idea where he works or whatever, but he's clearly an insider within that world. And I think what he's actually speaking to is all of the... If you're in the top 20% private companies right now, every single one of those companies is looking at...

we are going to go public within the next two years. It just takes time. Like the IPO window is open. There's thousands. No, here's the issue, though. There's thousands of other private unicorns. They're backlogged? That are, no, that just don't have the traction of momentum.

Oh, okay. And so he's talking about these employees that are maybe at the number 49 unicorn SaaS company who's like, yeah, we have 30 million of error are, but we're only growing 40% a year. And yes, the IPO window is closed for you, right? Just because you shouldn't probably go public. That makes sense. I just think, like, generally, they shouldn't be hearing the IPO window is closed in that scenario.

They should be hearing the IPO window is about to open up in a big way. We aren't good enough. We need to double down. We need to grind. We need to get our butts in a gear. Yeah, we need to get it into gear because this is the opportunity if they want to go public. Or I think, you know, some of those companies, maybe they, maybe they, you know, end up merging with others and creating enough revenue. Let's go to Adam Singer with a related post.

He says, Doche coin is up 170% in the last month. and it's a picture of someone throwing the intelligent investor by Benjamin Graham in the trash. That photo I feel like is very Lindy over the last few years. Almost every single year you could use it in some capacity, almost every single day or month. I had a friend who bought Dogecoin, Dogecoin, right before the election. Deutsch coin. I wonder if it's related to literally like the Doge, the Department of Government industry or efficiency. I think it ends up, I mean, Doge obviously is always traded to some degree.

based on Elon's attention towards it, right? It's hilarious because the founder, like, completely distanced himself from this. You know the history of Doge? No. So the founder of Dogecoin created it as a joke because he was anti-cryptocurrency and thought that all cryptocurrency was a scam and a fraud. And so he created the dumbest possible thing. The dumbest possible token, Dogecoin based on the stupid dog.

And he effectively kicked off meme coins. Mem coins. It's the first meme coin. Yeah, he's the reason that pumped up fun has done like 200 million of net. He created an entire industry. Yeah. And he sold all his doge and he's been very against it. And he's put out these like long posts saying that like this is everything wrong.

White thing is tears with $100 bills. 100 dollars. I think he sold too early. I don't know. Maybe he still has some. Did you hear, did you hear about the, um, the best trade of the last week was a trader that turned $17 into about $3 million with peanut? Peanut.

I've never heard of it. I've never heard of it. So, and that made me think, meme coins are, the new American lottery for the terminally online. Yep. And anybody like just that one trade will probably inspire

a billion dollars of new investment into meme coins. Totally. Yeah. So I mean, I remember during the last Dogecoin pump, there was this guy who was like the Dogecoin millionaire and he was doing podcasts

about how he put his life savings in Dogecoin, ran it up to a couple million. It completely tanked. He had like 10K, was broke. And then he was like, I'm not selling, I'm not selling. So I hope he didn't sell it. I hope he's back up because we'd love to see that.

I want to put the word out that we're back up. Let's go to Sicki Chen, Blader. Is that he pronounced it? We'll see. Next year feels like it will be the best year in history to be in tech. As a founder, employer, employee, investor, anything. You got 1K likes. It has that vibe, right?

Build in winter, never felt so real and so good. I love Siki. I've actually never met him in person, but just interact with it. him online. Runs Runway, he started that company. I think he was an early BP. Yeah, he started, going to blank on the name of it, but it's the IRS. It's a playground VR.

Yeah, no, not playground. Yeah, I forget what it is. Ben, what's the name of the VR company that Cicke started? It's in, yeah, it's a really tough time in COVID. Yeah, exactly, because it was in-person VR experiences. But now he's got this amazing company called Runway. Yep. I think Gary Tangian investor.

Yeah, Gary invested in Dresens in it. Cool. A niche, my friend over there, I think did let one of their rounds. But, uh, Siki's, uh, always been, uh, just extremely, I would say like tech positive. Yeah, he's obviously, um, and, uh, his company runway is doing something really interesting. They're, they're basically applying, um, some of the same like kind of mechanics that you have in Figma to P&Ls and pro forma and helping everybody at a company better understand the numbers in their business. Yep. Do we have another promoted post?

Yep. This promoted post is from Cartier. They say in steel, rose gold, or paved with diamonds, the tank. Americane celebrates the casual, chic spirit of a continent on American time. Hashtag Cartier Tank. So anyways, if you are a technology brother and looking for a nice gift, for significant other. The Cartier tank is a great option.

Fantastic. It's certainly an investment, but it's something that has stood the test of time. Are you familiar with the history of the Cartier tank? I don't know the tank. I know the Santos. Oh, yeah. No, the tank is like fabulous.

Of course I know a tank. Yeah, but it was worn by Jackie Kennedy. It was worn by Muhammad Ali. Yep. And Andy Warhol. And so it's this interesting blend where it's, it is seen in some ways as like a feminine watch, but it's been worn by,

arguably like the most masculine guy in history, Muhammad Ali, and also this like interesting artist in Andy Warhol. And so it's cut across, it's cut across all of the cultural barriers in a really fascinating way. And it's just a really striking design. It's beautiful.

The Take American is, is a little bit more rectangular, a little bit more accented. But it's a fantastic watch and I highly recommend it to anyone who's in the market. it. Well, and thanks to Cardier. Let's go to Mary Gunerate, Atne. She says, Genius Bar employees asked me what I do for work and I didn't lie. We're so back. What does she do? So Mary has a crypto protocol. Okay. I invested. Oh, yeah. So the last couple years were rough.

Yeah, they, her and her co-founder, Luke, have just weathered the absolute storm focused on fundamentals and actually building products that that their users love they've iterated multiple times they've stayed focused I I love the team over there Mary's awesome Jason Calacanus who told them pivot to AI yeah they had a lot of people like J Cal telling them pivot to AI pivot to defense tech refused anyways brilliant team and I'm happy to see that Mary's no longer embarrassed to say what she does for living because she is a phenomenal founder and uh cheers to mary cheers to mary potential future brother of the week yep let's go to zach the founder of bridge

sold his company to stripe recently he says in the last week i've heard that a dozen developers building with bridge are raising rounds slash have term sheets makes me so incredibly happy we're entirely focused on empowering these builders supporting their success is all that matters so it's funny when when bridge got acquired for 1.1 billion about a month ago. Everybody was just like, oh, stable coins, bridge, Stripe, that makes sense. Yep. I don't think it was talked about enough that Stripe likely made that acquisition

because they saw that the brightest, most exciting companies building and stable coins were using bridge, which was exactly what Stripe built their entire business on was making sure all the best new founders in the Bay Area were using Stripe. So anyways, people that felt like that was a crazy price to pay or they were like, like they only have 15 million of revenue or they're paying this crazy multiple on revenue to acquire the business. Stripe was basically, I imagine making a venture style bet into a company that they saw themselves in. So excited to see what comes out of developers building on bridge. And congrats to Zach again.

Reggie James says, the cost for lack of vision, a crowded market. Underrated tweet, 63 likes, does. deserve 6K. Low Tam, banger. Banger. Really good point. Really good point. This is the market map thing.

If it's on the market map, you don't have the vision. Here's an example. So WorldCoin clearly has vision. It's had a lot of critics over the years. Oh, why do you have this orb? Why are you scanning everybody? Literally vision. Yeah, yeah.

They're scanning eyeballs like all over the world. And in one of the world's most competitive industries where people switch between products very rapidly, you know, they'll cycle through multiple protocols in the same day, crossing across different L2s to L1s to L3s, not caring. They've carved out a lane and have a vision and you could maybe argue that they don't have competition in what they're doing.

So, you know, Reggie's a very unique entrepreneur and I think historically has always tried to do the same, right? Like have that unique point of view and focus. Yeah, he also just always focuses on like taste and design and like these interesting things that always get forgotten. by the core Silicon Valley folks. The YC crowd. Yeah, well, it's not just the YC crowd.

It's like you can dismiss design and taste if you're just a developer and you only care about like, what is the programmatic truth? What is the mathematical proof of this thing? And maybe design takes a backseat to that. Or if you're just the business guy and you're just like whatever makes money, maybe this taste thing or having good design

or having a strong opinion or a vision, that doesn't make sense this quarter. but Reggie has always been good about looking further into the future. And I think that calls back to like an earlier era of Silicon Valley, which I really respect. Let's go to Gabby Goldberg. She says, The Hawk to a girl ships faster than most of us on this app.

And it's a quote to a tech crunch saying, the Hawk to a girl launches Pookie Tool, an AI power dating advice app and it's fine. And I love this. You had a good take about this because there's been a lot of doubt in AI recently. Yeah. But my thing, I was happy to see she wasn't discouraged by the recent.

potentially scaling sort of wall. Yep, yep, yep, yeah. There's a lot of fear in AI. She's not, she's just shipping, she's building. That's what everybody should basically be doing. You can't be afraid. You just got to ship. And here's,

and there's a lot of hate on rappers right now. There's a lot, oh, you shouldn't build a chat GPT rapper. Well, what does she have? She has a cornered resource in her audience. She's got attention. Where, yes, who knows if this is that much better than just asking vanilla chat GPT, but if she can drive people to this app, she can monetize that.

She's effectively acting as like an affiliate. of Open AI. And sure, it's not going to be a trillion-dollar company. It's not going to disrupt open AI, but it's going to create a lot of value. And that's what matters. So here's a potential thing with the internet. So historically, people would have their 15 minutes of fame, right? Hawk to a Girl.

You know her website? No. 16 minutes. That's great. Fantastic. I soon as I saw that. She's smart. Clearly has a smart team around her.

Actually, no, she does her podcast with Joey. Yeah, I know. Better. But look, historically you'd have your 15 minutes of fame and then the traditional media would move on because you were no longer. And you wouldn't have captured any of that audience. You couldn't capture anything in that moment. She has millions followers already. Now you can get 15 minutes of fame, get your 5 million followers, however many it is.

And then continue to monetize that and ship against it and iterate. And so I think that's underrated. More people should be trying to get their 15 minutes of fame because it can actually convert into a very, very meaningful career for her. I'm sure she's having the time of her life. Yeah, yeah, it seems great. So classic American story of making a sex joke or having some sex-related video and then turning it into a career like the Kardashians. Yep, fantastic.

Let's go to Chris and Frank. He says, some are calling Elon the George Soros of the right. That's not really accurate. He's more like 44 George Soros is of the right because Elon Musk has $320 billion and George Soros has seven. Here's the thing. Okay, put on the tinfoil hat. We're in the conspiracies.

The conspiracy. The scientists are out of the room. It's bro scientists now. Yep. Let's hear it. Experts. Take a step back. Take a step back. So here's the thing. I'm fully in favor of this. I like that we're rebuilding the deep state. We're making a deep state great again. Great. That said, I do have to imagine that George Soros, who has done some of the most heinous political acts in the history of the country, is the kind of billionaire that would want his sort of a net worth to be under, like under projected, right? Okay. The real billionaire class is saying, I don't want to be on the Forbes list. Yep. If I have to be, put me down at this much.

I don't want people to know that I have $200 billion. Like, I'd rather people just think that I'm like, you know, a brokey beaner with, you know, $7 billion. Sure, sure, sure. Like, he, at a certain point, once you're a billionaire, like any sort of adding numbers to it doesn't do much, you're a beaner. And Soros is harder to clock because it's all in this fund. and stuff. It's not like with Elon, it's very easy to just say, okay, you own 20% of this big

company. And I have to imagine he's very pro taxation just across the board. You have to imagine that he does some creative things with his accounts, including offshore activity that would mitigate that. So shout out to the new Soros, Elon Musk. Fantastic. Let's go to Zeke at Zeke's up. He says, I can't wait to pump my system full of niche tech Twitter influencer John Coogan's proprietary lock-in chemicals. And then he quote tweets and says, My mom told me not to smoke cigarettes. She didn't say shit about online chewy chemical brain boost pouches sold by a handsome conservative investor with a podcast about combining technology and frat bros. Incredible. Put it on the wall.

Frame it. Frame it right now. I don't even think I could reply to this because I didn't even know where to start. It was just like thumbs up. Wait, when we posted about the Blood Boy give away, somebody said, Oh, yeah, Zik is RIP. He's going to be the Blood Boy. I don't know. Z.

Does he have blood boy physiognomy or something? Yeah, we're going to have to do kind of a deeper analysis there. Okay, yeah. But before we get into the next. Oh, yeah, we got a promoted post. Let's go. Promoted post from Langchain. We asked you answered our state of AI agents report is here.

We surveyed 1,300 industry professionals from developers to business leaders on how they're using AI agents today and the results are in. What are the top use cases for agents? what the biggest challenge is when building agents, who's finding success after deploying their agents to production? Go to langchain.com slash state of AI agents to get the full report. And thank you to Langchain. Yeah, thank you to Langchain.

Let's go to Gabby Goldberg. She says, coffee shops. Yeah, Gabby's in here twice. She's crushing it this week. Coffee shops opening at 10 a.m. is the sign of a crumbling society. That's always been my issue with New York. You ever go to New York and you wake up.

I thought it was the city that never sleeps. You can always get coffee and pizza. Seriously, I'll wake up in New York. I got to wait like three hours. What? Is that real? Yeah, their coffee shops open up super late. Weird.

You got to find like these random. I feel like in L.A., like Starbucks opens at six. That's the thing. Everybody's like, oh, the city that never sleeps night. New Yorkers are not getting coffee at 6 a.m. Interesting. Maybe it's because the people that are actually getting up at 6 a.m. Or they're doing cocaine.

That's always been my, yeah, that's always been my frustration with New York. New York's got to get it together. It literally is hurting the economy that people can't get more cups of Joe around the city at earlier hours. So, yeah, figure it out.

Let's go to Gary Tan. This is great because we see the followback icon. That means he already follows us, but this is the first time on the show because we haven't followed him. After we post, we're going to follow him. And then he will be an honorary technology brother. Yep.

Potential brother of the week, maybe. Yeah, Yeah, he might deserve Brother the week for the recent SF election. I mean, so many wins with this guy. It's just W's every single week. It's going to be hard. He's going to be in the running a lot. I can feel it.

Yeah. Many plaques on the right. So Gary says, design for super early startups seems like it has become increasingly a lost art. This is kind of what Reggie was talking about. Great simple U.X that has clear call to actions, obvious nav, good use of contrast and no distracting ornamentation, sadly waning. How you do anything is how you do everything. a great post. And it makes sense because Gary

is a designer. He designed the Palantir logo. You know this? It's crazy. Yeah, he was like one of the earliest employees of Palantir. Did he do Coinbase's logo? I don't know if he did Coinbase's logo, but I mean, Coinbase was in my YC batch, summer 12. Gary was around there. I'm sure he's super close at them. And then I think initialized did like one

of the major rounds or something. I have a ton of money on that. Wait, so you were in Wise Coinbase? Yeah, with Brian. So you how much did you invest? I didn't have any money. We're going to have to cut this out of the show. But you know what it was Crazy. In our YC badge, the referral bonus for going on Coinbase at the time was one Bitcoin. That's wild.

It was like, dude, if you sign up, I'll give you five bucks in the form of one Bitcoin. That's amazing. Yeah, I would say like small example here is the reason that more startup, there's no excuse not to have great design as an early stage company is all it takes is one person with good taste. Yes. And even one person with a freelancer that has good taste. Yes, yes. That's all it takes, right? It doesn't, you simply have to care about it a tiny little bit.

Yep. And you can make it happen. Yep. And more people just like hire the designer that they know or they go online and they ask for recommendations. Or the one who's like really hot and has already. But yeah. There's this weird like trend where, you know, there's someone who has a lot of taste. Yeah.

And then they start scaling their operation and they start delegating and you're still paying $300,000 for like B tier, C tier talent. Because the real taste maker. is working with like the Fortune 500 clients now and you're out of the game. Yeah. And I, I, you know, party around had great design early because the first hire that we made was Brandon Jacoby. He was the first person to join the team. He had been at Cash App for four years.

He was still like 23, 24 at the time. So it wasn't like we had, you know, it wasn't like he was like, no, I need to make 350K a year base. So I think that investors should be extremely judgmental of companies that have poor design because it's basically you should figure out a way to get it done for almost $0. I agree. And then all it takes from that point on is hiring one person who's a great designer, and you should be able to track that person.

Otherwise, you're not compelling as a founder. Or if you don't care about design, great designers will not want to join your company. I agree. Bifrost Orbital says the youngest teenagers to have built satellites at the age of 16 have made it to Y Combinator. Ankar CEO now 19 and Geffen CTO now 23. So one, incredible accomplishment. Yes, congrats. Congrats on YC.

Great, pretty good traction on this post. That said, I wanted to invite these guys to send us a note and we will help you learn to post. This could have been way more viral. If it was from the actual founder's account and it was a deep dive into, tell me more. Not in the third person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me more. Like what were you doing at 16?

I would want to show me a picture of the satellite that you built. to see like first line we built our first satellite at 16 now we're in yc here's the story boom exactly so anyways we yeah we don't do this often pro bono consulting pro bono consulting will help you learn this will pop for sure and i imagine these guys you know within the next 10 years we'll get brother of the week yeah i agree i couldn't agree more so hit us up we will help you thanks moving on Dennis says a GPT rapper of chat TPT itself makes $5 million a month. And you know, you know, that is crazy. There was, there was a time where you could search chat GPT in the app.

Oh, yeah. And you get crazy stuff. Yeah. Because it was all just like iterations on the name, like the same exact name. Like a bunch of trademark issues. That's why they bought chat.com. OpenAI doesn't actually have to do anything really because they're all just paying opening eye anyways.

It's all just front end. I would say like a lot of that revenue is probably just going back to open. I do wonder what the margins are on this. Like, are they able to mark it up enough and kind of fooling up people? I'm sure they're making money. It's a very cynical job. You only need one, probably two engineers to build that product. The one thing that I really hope is that I hope this is a kid.

I hope this is some really, really young founder who will learn from this and wind up, you know, making some money, putting something away, and then winding up and going and doing something much more ambitious soon. Because just seeing $5 million a month show up in your Stripe account, moving it around, hiring people, stuff like, that. We're going to claim credit for this. 10 years ago, it was trading sneakers was like the hustler thing. Now it's a chat GPT rapper, for sure. The Riz app, all these different things.

Like, you know, tarot card reader, star charts. I want to see the Rizler drop a. Hawk to a girl. I want to see. She's going to build something real. The chicken fry girl do a chat app that you can talk to abusive Zach Bryan on. Wow. That would have some numbers.

Here we go. Do we have another promoted post? Yep. This one is from Akashu is over at Ramp. He says the TriRamp and web engineering team is hiring. Let's Cook. And he chose this tweet because... So this is a promote post specifically for Ramp as an employer. A place to go work. Yeah. So if you're an engineer, go check out the jobs they have. Is there a link? And the reason that we chose this one is that Adam over at RepView ranked a bunch of potential 2025 IPO candidates and whiz was just a hair above ramp ramp was almost the number one uh IPO candidate oh by 0.07 wow yeah so very um we would honestly could be we kind of need to let the experts dig in there i think we need to put that in the truth zone yeah we'll have to put this in the truth zone yeah but uh go dm akash if you're interested in joining ramp or apply on uh ramps uh ashby job

yeah dream job uh let's go to shrieff Doreem, he says, nobody gives a damn about your roadmaps or strategy decks. Just show them a demo. So insanely great, it feels like you stole it from five years in the future. 1K likes. I love that. Yeah, I agree. I am pro roadmap and I'm pro deck.

I don't know about pro strategy deck. Decks are the funniest thing because. You don't necessarily show them to people other than, you know, investors need to see a deck. But I think there's still something valuable about writing a memo. Investors don't need to see a deck if you have a bang or demo. Sure. you are super compelling. Yep.

It helps if you're an insider. It helps if you speak the language. It helps if you've maybe interned at a venture fund or whatever it is. But build a phenomenal demo, get some users, show people that you can ship and ship quickly, and then still make a great deck because it'll help you get that, you know, maybe two X evaluation if you do it right. Yep. Michael Mirafloor says the Patek Philippe Generations campaign, obviously we're a big fan of this here,

has been running for years and years now. one of the best of all time in my honest opinion. And I couldn't agree more. It's the famous tagline. You probably know this. You never actually own a protect Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. And it's a side by side of an old ad and a new ad.

And it's essentially the same campaign. And it really speaks to the value of like getting your marketing message correct early, building that brand essence, something that you can live on for, live and die by for generations. I remember talking to the guy who did Warby Parker's early brand development, and he said that Warby Parker, they landed on this idea of, quote, the literary life. How are you familiar with this? So you've never seen it in a Warby Parker ad. It's never been on a billboard.

It's not a catchphrase that they use anywhere on their website. It's merely just the brand essence that they keep in mind when they're doing other stuff. What is Warby Parker? It's the literary life. So that answers the question of what do their pop-up shops look like? They look like libraries because that's the literally like. What does the website look like? Well, it looks bookish.

It looks like something that, you know, someone who reads in a coffee shop would enjoy. What about the colors, the tones, the music, the fonts? Everything comes from that essence. And getting that right early is just like once the arrow has left the bow, it just sails. And so, protect Philippe is a fantastic representation of that. And even though it's a watch brand, you can apply that. to your tech startup. Absolutely.

Absolutely. We see it with ramp. Let's go to die workwear Derek guy. He says, uh-oh, I'm going to jail because Donald Trump has nominated Matt Gates as the Eternal General for the United States. And, um, yeah, so these guys have an amazing history. Yes. Basically, Derek, uh, Derek creates a lot of beef with powerful people.

Yes. Powerful people tend to wear suits. Yes. And Derek has a lot of opinions and knowledge about, uh, suits. I'm sure when he sees this video, hopefully we don't get dunked on too hard, Derek, if you're watching this. Go easy.

You know, you can dunk, but then give us some pointers in the DMs, all right? But anyways, Derek has historically, you know, called out Matt for having some absolutely horrendous fits over the years, like truly some, some, like, worst fit ever worn in the White House type stuff. And so that created some beef.

Okay. And, you know, this new administration is ambitious, right? There's a lot of people in Washington and some posters that have been living out that are a little bit worried. Yeah, could be rough. But, you know, we stand with posters generally. So as long as he doesn't go to blue sky or threads, as long as Derek, you stay on X, you're safe. You're one of the good ones. Let's go to Kalshi.

There's a bunch of drama. Raj Veer says the Kalshi founder has to be trying to get. himself arrested right now. It's just an intention game. Because Shane got his phone raided by the FBI. We support Shane. We support Polly Market here. And then Sarah says, leaked email shows Kelsey Growth Executive, tried to plant a news story containing false claims about wash trading and money laundering on Polly Market. Calshia appears to be spreading misinformation about Polly behind the scenes. And it is a crazy time. If that is a real, I don't know if this is true. I'm not going to say this is true. I don't think we can, we're not journalists. So we're not, we're experts. Yeah. In many things,

called the truth zone, but we're not journalists. We're not fact checkers. But it is crazy how hot the fight between the prediction markets is. I mean, it feels like Uber and Lyft right now, where, you know, if you're not in Polymarket, you've got to get into Kel Sheet. You got to battle it out. Is it going to be a power law winner? Is it going to be more allegopalistic?

Like, you don't really know, so they're testing the waters. In many ways, the Kalshi versus Polymarket thing was a political battle of platforms, right? Polymarket is stands for many of the principles. that the new administration is for. Kalshi is for regulation. They've gone after being like, we are the regulated prediction market. And in many ways,

the campaigns tracked, right? So Kalshi was spending a million dollars a day on Facebook. Yep. Just to get into the charts. Polymarket had a lot more organic adoption and organic media. So in many ways, there's parallels,

not surprised that the current administration is trying to come after Polymarket. Indeed. Let's go to, Do we have another promoted post? Promoted post from the New York Phil Harmonic. Oh, I love the New York Phil. Sounds of the Season, a festive holiday matinee featuring New York Phil musicians conducted by Jeff Tizek on December 14th and 15th.

So learn more and buy tickets at NYFill.org slash sounds of the season. And I would say this could be something where we get the technology brothers community together. We all put on suits. and let's go to the New York Phil together. I mean, we are recording this like blocks from the L.A. Phil. I'm a huge Gustavo Dutamel fan. My dog is named Gustavo Duda Mel. Not a joke.

Not a joke. I played classical piano. Yeah, he does. He's 20K. But, yeah, I mean, I love classical music. It's a great way to, I find it just very meditative because you go and sit, listen to beautiful music. You're off your phone.

It just clears your mind. And it's still an opportunity to dress up, meet interesting people. The class of clientele. And immerse yourself in truly loud opulence, right? Truly, truly. Music is opulent. Yes, yes, absolutely.

And so can't recommend the New York Philharmonic enough. Please, if you're in New York where you're stopping by, go buy tickets, and Google it, NYFill at probably New York Philharmonic.com. And we're happy to support them on this show. Let's go to Michael Dubrovsky. He says that there's a beta testing opportunity. Hate pricking your finger but love biomarkers. We launched a new product at Syphox, his company,

and I need five people to beta test and provide feedback. Use the link in comments to get 50% off. We've got to try this. I mean, I think you can literally test your testosterone on an hourly, like a minute-to-minute basis. It seems like a massive breakthrough. And this, Michael is the man who studied the testosterone levels of YC founders at his off-site. And so now he's gone a step further.

He's being proactive. Okay, we need to talk to this guy. We do, we should get it. We should get this on our arm while we record and track our levels throughout the episode. Yeah. Yeah, where does it spike? Is it during the hard reads? Is it during the brother of the week?

You know, there's a lot of different places where you need to be maxing out. I mean, that's a big part of why we record it 11 a.m. every day because that's when your testosterone is peaking. Let's go to Eklot. Eklot says if you're 20 to 30 in your main circle, isn't discussing buying another country, terraforming, building a new city, lengthening winter days, creating rain, building a vast industrial base powered by nuclear, then it's time to find a new circle. I am proud to say that our circle is discussing all of those things.

Yeah, it's like, okay, this is Praxis Dryden trying to buy Greenland. Terraforming, that's Thomas Poirot and Augustus. Creating rain, that's Augustus. Building a new city, there's a bunch of people in Prospera. Nuclear, we know a ton of nuclear people that are doing. that Doug Burnauer at Radiant just raised $100 million to do nuclear. It's fantastic. And then the industrial base obviously goes to Aaron Slodov and Chris Powers at Hadrian.

Thank you to the absolute brothers. The boys. The gang. Doing your part. Yeah. Shout out to all of them. I wouldn't have my circle. Any other way.

Any other way. Any other way. It's fantastic. Do we have one last promoted post? One last promoted post from Daniel Mason, a close friend and Daniel says we've received 5,574 job applications in two weeks. We've interviewed four people. Why?

We're looking for a very specific kind of engineer, the kind who makes everyone else uncomfortable, which I like that, right? Oftentimes 10xers kind of freak everybody out a little bit. They're like maybe their keyboard just has a one and a zero on it. There you go. Yep. Makes sense. Anyway, so Daniel says know someone. My DMs are open.

So go to at DG Mason on X if you're interested. And there's more context on the role on his profile. Go check it out. And we're happy to promote that on this show. Let's close out with X gamers make great entrepreneurs, a post from Tom Beenham. We're used to locking in for fucking 13 hours straight sometimes. LMFAO.

Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. Many, many cases, and we've talked about this before, but very interesting correlation between the great gamers, Elon, one of the greatest Diablo players of all time, SBF, one of the worst League of Legends players of all time. And look what happened to their companies. Clearly, wasn't taking it seriously, wasn't locked in,

was a fake gamer, which is the worst that you can possibly do. The key is to figure out a way to find that early love for video games that many of us had and apply it to Excel, right? Yes. You and I were up until God, probably 3.30 last night in the Technology Brothers model. Yes. Make just tweaking. Making sure the profit was maximized.

Yeah. And in many ways, like it felt like being in a cod lobby. It felt like playing StarCraft too, right? Couldn't agree more. Those early days. So apply that same zealous for the game to the game of business and become a student and player of capitalism. Yes. Become a student of capitalism, a player of capitalism.

And that's our show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe. Give us five stars. Repost everything that we deliver on X. Start clipping us. Start clipping us. Become an Andrew Tate disciple for this show.

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And we'll probably try to hire you after you do it. Fantastic. That's a challenge for today. And cheers. Cheers. Cheers to 1K. Let's finish off the Dom Parignon. There we go.

To 1K and being the fastest growing podcast in tech. Delicious. And the most profitable podcast in the world. See you next time. That's our show. That's our show.