TBPN - Wednesday’s Diet TBPN

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Our favorite moments from today's show, in under 30 minutes. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

What's going on over there, Jordi? You got caught lacking? I was publishing an essay. You were publishing an essay. It's live on X now. You can go listen to it. You can also subscribe at tbpn.com. Our substack will email you every morning

with the TBPN newsletter and 500 words from me or Jordy. It's a lot of fun. Go check it out. The thing that got Jordy to learn to type was this video, this launch video. You were like, I got I got to write an essay. I got to lock in. I got to learn how to write because this is, this is, this is, this is, it's, it's enraged me. Were you enraged? I wasn't enraged. I try not to let the internet make me mad. Okay, but they were trying to enrage. They were rage. They were raging me. They were baiting me. Made you angry. I'd love to watch the Chad IDE brain rot code editor video. First, I want to see, I want to see the video for myself. Let's play it. Okay, so he's got some Newport cigarettes. He's packing, pulls out a cigarette.

With the Stanford. Lights it up. He's got the cutoff. Stanford cutoffs. What is this music that's playing? He's got the guitar in the background. And what is he playing? Some sort of playing?

This is steak. Oh, this is gambling. So he's gambling. He's gambling in the IDE. Okay, so I assume that means he's won something or other? I actually don't know what the state is. stake UI looks like. Okay, so he's done, winning. He has won the gambling session with steak, and now he's back in his IDE, and he writes a prompt, and he says, test the code, and it pulls up

some sort of mobile game that it's playing. Do you know what's... This is Clash Royale. This is Clash Royale. Okay. Have you played? I have played in middle school, yeah. So I'll start by saying, I think the video is funny. Okay. And I'm sure the founders are smart. For a low-budget launch video, I think they did well. They broke through. That is a very low budget launch video. That literally costs nothing. Yeah. Okay. So I think that's great. And I'm not, and I want to be clear that I'm not bearish on the founders at all. But yesterday, YC announced Chad IDE, aka the BrainRot code editor. Chad is an AI code editor that allows you to gamble, watch TikTok, and use dating apps while you work on coding tests. Their launch rightfully got a lot of attention.

On one hand, it's funny. On the other hand, what are we? we doing here and why does this belong in the official YC account? To understand Chad IDE, Clue Lee, icon, friend, and the new class of Gen Z startups, you have to understand the online environment that these founders grew up in. If you grew up on the internet and you studied how and why certain people would regularly go viral, you know that making people mad has and always will be an effective way to get attention. The feedback loop is simple. You make something that makes people angry and people comment, share, and dunk. And because feeds are optimized to show posts with high engagement the most, you get a lot of reach. Rage baiting for commercial purposes, in my view,

was pioneered by course bros. People like Ty Lopez realized that making the masses mad was an effective way to drive course sales. You could flaunt Lamborghinis, make a bunch of people angry, and as long as a handful of people found their way into their course, it was a viable, repeatable strategy. Historically on X, rage baiting was a marketing strategy, not a product strategy. Accounts like sweaty startup, aka Nick Huber, frequently post things to get an angry reaction and the subsequent reach. But behind the scenes, Nick has always been running a pretty normal commercial real estate fund. In 2025, rage baiting has become a product strategy.

Cluelly started as an app for cheating on coding interviews. Chad IDE's only known differentiation from the other 100 AI native IDs is that you can gamble and swipe on dating apps in it. It's becoming clear that while rage bait might occasionally work as a marketing strategy, it really should not be employed as a product strategy. Running a successful VC-backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you, win. Getting media, investors, talent, and customers on your side is not an easy task. Rage baiting, whether at the marketing level or product level, is the most effective way to get people who could be potential investors, customers, or team members to actively prey on your

downfall. YC has long provided some of the most durable, high-quality, generalizable advice for startups, and I believe that it has had a tremendously positive impact on the companies that go through YC and even those that don't. Launch now, make something people want, do things that don't scale, ignore your competitors, are just some of those. So as someone who believes that YC is one of the most important and influential institutions in tech, I believe it might be time to include this in their list of essential startup advice, rage baiting is for losers. But I do think it's notable that rage bait has moved from kind of a fringe marketing strategy to a marketing strategy within tech to now living at the product level. And I just don't think that's going to create a lot of

enduring value for the companies that pursue that strategy. Yes. So the reaction to this was very negative. And I think there's a few, it really has to do that layer of the stack. It ends up, it ends up impacting the brands of the firms that fund these ideas. Of course. The most important thing in your piece that I liked was this idea that there is rage bait marketing, doing a stunt, doing something a little bit crazy, but then delivering a quality

product is separate from making the product itself rage baity. And so I think a lot of people, when they saw this video, they wanted, they were wondering, what does the product actually do? Because all you've told me is that you created an April Fool's joke and Google's been doing April Fool's jokes for years. The question for me and the question I had for Tyler was what's actually under the hood at Chad IDE? The company is not called Chad IDE.

called clad labs. The steel man here is that, hey, IDEs are boring. You gotta do something funny. Film a funny video, create a fake product, but then have something under the hood that is actually real, that does actually advance the conversation, and is maybe something that a real product would-

That might- I think this would have been a brilliant kind of like stunt. If they did it as a stunt, and it wasn't core to the brand that they're building. It wasn't core to the product. If it was April Fools and Michael Truel at Cursor or Scott Wu with Winsurf, we're like, we're doing a brainrod version of the IDE. Everyone would be like, that's hilarious.

Okay, now back to using windurf and cursor, right? Yeah, so I go to the website. You can't download yet because it's still in beta. You need a code. I DM the founders, but they didn't get back to me. The company is not Chad Labs. It's Clad Labs. It's the Chad IDE, but like this is obviously a marketing stunt.

I kind of disagree. Yeah, but can you get a product from CladLap? Labs. Like, Google would come out with a joke, you know, pigeon-based algorithm or something like that. That would be out, or like, Google Translate for Animals would be at like Animals.govotranslate.com that day. But Google Translate would still work. So, like, walk me through the Clad Labs product. Like, what is their core product outside of the stunt? When you go to the download page, there's the options, like, which brain rot do you want? Yes. And it's like, you know, steak or like Minecraft Barcore or whatever. And then there's an option that says, I don't want.

brain rot. Okay. There's obviously a product here. This is a marketing stunt. I believe that. Okay. Met a very successful founder who said, I chose fund,

blank, because they gave me credibility when I needed it. Now the fund backs everything, including the dumbest ideas I've ever seen. I don't think the next wave of founders will pick them. The credibility they had is gone. And I was thinking about how

AUM-W-W-W-D-Rod or A-U-M-weighted slop is not an excuse for slop. and controversial investments, if you put 1% of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the internet and be like, we're the most degenerate, we're the craziest, we're the most insane, we're the most fraudulent, like in your face company, even if it's only 1% of your fund, you're not going to be able to say, like, no, no, 99% of my investments are just like, you know, trying to cure cancer genuinely, or like actually trying to improve developer productivity.

Or like 99% of my investments are just reasonable down the fairway, like good businesses. I took a flyer. 1% is a little bit crazy. Well, if that 1% gets a thousand times more views than your enterprise SaaS portfolio, like you're going to be known as the slop fund. So like you need to be careful about that. Yeah. You know, one of YC's challenges as an institution is that they can only accept something like,

I think it's like less than one, isn't it less than 1%? Oh, yeah. So super small, you know, very, very low, accept. rate. Yeah. And so if you're a founder that applied with an idea that you think is, you know, world positive, and then you see them announcing this kind of stuff, those founders are going to be even more frustrating. Say that I have some new way to do, you know, agents in my editor. Yes. And it's like, it's actually works way better than cursor. It's way better than everything else. And I apply to YC with this thing. Okay, there's like probably, what, like 10

other YC companies that are like literal YC companies in the same batch doing similar, you know, coding editor stuff, how do I differentiate myself? I feel like this is like fairly reasonable. Okay, we get some users that think it's like funny to gamble in their IDE and then they realize like, oh, this is actually a pretty useful feature. Jordi, if you were in YC and you had a coding editor company, how do you like recommend like instead of doing stuff like this, how do you, how do they differentiate? Back to what I said, which was separate out the rage from the core product and have it be like a marketing stunt, I still think you could have gotten the same amount of attention, but that people would go in and they'd be like, wait, this is actually a really cool novel approach.

I don't think we know for sure that they're not doing that. Like, there is no real product here. And that's what Jordi's risk is, is that they haven't built anything behind the scenes. It's all marketing. It's all stunt. The product you're making is to help people gamble, and gambling is bad. And so if you are anti-gambling, you are anti this product that they built. And now they have the opportunity to say, no, no, no, here's the real thing.

and they haven't done that yet. It would have been so easy if at that end of that video been like, that's what people feel like Gen Z entrepreneurs built. But we didn't want to do that, so we actually built this, go down this video.

But I'm not going to, I want to try the, I don't want to gamble, but I want to see it actually like in the ID. That's like funny. Tips to apply at YC Batch winner 2026. And I think,

I think Sharav is a literal, is a literal child. Good job. First tip, you should have some clear cold. like what you should do after funding and you should have a piece. I can barely hear this. Okay, we can pause it.

But the reason I included this is because I think there's a lot of people like Shirav and tons of young people that look to YC as whatever YC is promoting, they approve. And so I just, I want to avoid a scenario where the Shiravs of the world think that they need to rage bait in order to break out in this industry. It's not the reality. You can just build a great product. You can let that speak for itself. You can find ways to mark.

market it along the way. Alby, who is a 14-year-old applying for YC, went extremely viral earlier this week, got 3.6 million views. Wow. It's a 14-year-old's founder. I'm Albi. I'm 14 and I'm based in Sydney, Australia. I've been building things ever since I was six or seven. Br-brough. Don't get the joke. Really good editing. Well, I've been building things ever since I was nine, first writing code at code camps, then building Roblox games, and even launching a soccer gear brand when I was 12. Wait, did he edit this? We gotta hire this guy to edit for us.

Where teens learn the real world skills that school forgot. This is a great roto. Coding, AI, content creation, etc. Instead of boring textbooks, you level up earn XP and unlock challenges as you go. All while learning from top founders,

creators, innovators, and other young people doing amazing things. I started Finkel because school wasn't teaching me or my friends had to actually build, create, or launch something in the real world. I want to change. for VC funding is put me on the phone with your parents.

You're supposed to just turn on the webcam and basically just talk for one minute. That's how you apply to YC. One shot it. Yeah, you're supposed to just one shot at, no editing, because they don't want it to turn into, oh, to apply to YC, you spend two weeks doing an edited video.

They're like, no, work on your product. And then the marketing is like the last little cherry on top. Like that's always been the YC mantra. And that's a little bit of like this Cloud Labs thing, although the weird thing is like the video, I love the video, it's funny and it's cheap, and it's clearly just like a bit, and they did it, and it was two seconds, but then it feels like they didn't, they didn't give me the payoff of like, oh, okay, you guys are funny and you're working on something cool and interesting and hard. Ev Randall, who's coming on the show on Friday, went on Harry Stebbing's show, 20VC, is putting the timeline in turmoil over some comments about other funds.

I don't think, Ravi or Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool, and say, hey, this, this is a lot of, basket of funds that we're making you invest pari-pissue across, we're going to get you 5x net on that. I don't think they can say that, or they at least can't say that with a straight face. And if you look at the recent return data, I think it suggests that. So I think they'll be able to make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis. But I think a lot of these LPs are in the business to make, or in venture, to make high money on money returns. Like they had P.E. for the low return stuff and they probably get better liquidity from P.E.

They're here for the high money on money returns. And this is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited about benchmarks. competitive position in today's market because we can go to LPs. We can say, hey, we're shooting for higher than 5x net. We have the historical track record to back it up and we have the fund sizes to back it up as well. I mean, you had miles from Carnegie Mellon come on here and do the awesome math and the very clear math of, hey, do you know how hard it is to return 4x net on $8 billion, 10 billion dollars? It is immensely hard and it defies the laws of physics. So I think there's a difference between are they going to make a ton of money and are they going to produce the returns that LPs really

want this asset class to produce two very, very different things. But for now, like the rubber won't meet the road because, as you mentioned, there's just so much global demand from LPs for exposure to private technology. And they are happy to take lower returns. And so I don't think there's any end in sight. But I think on a relative basis between all these different constituents and all these different GPs, there's a huge, huge delta and a huge differentiation between who can actually produce venture-like returns. Boo! He's not H.I. Pilled. Boo. 10x. You're going to 10x the fund, just 10x it again. Just 10x it again. 10x the fund.

All within a 10 year of fund. Raise a $100 billion fund and 10x it. Just 10x it. And we're going to 10x it again. No, obviously. Ev was on a little bit of damage control this morning. Wait, wait. So I want to hear what exactly did he say the first line?

He says, they cannot go to LPs and say with a straight face that they can do 5X net. Can we play the actual clip? Because I feel like that's not quite right. What do you say? I don't think Rothera or Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool, and say, hey, this basket of funds that we're making you invest Pari Pesu across, we're going to get you 5x net on that.

We're going to get you 5x net. Yeah, because maybe they can go with a straight face and say, we're going to get you 6x net. Part of the reality is I don't think no fund manager can really go to LPs and you can share that you believe there's a chance we'll get a 5x net, but isn't it like 99%? of funds just don't come anywhere close to that. I think the broader point that he's making is something along the lines of like, I saw some other post about like there will be fortunes made just by getting getting retail investors and the broader capital that's out there in the world

into the private mag seven, the open AIs, the anthropics, the SpaceXes, the Anderals. There's a whole host of companies. There is a world where you set up a fund that has lower return expectations. but also lower risk and it's a great deal and LPs love it. I don't know that it's that hot of a take, but it certainly put the timeline in turmoil. Part of it is that benchmarks feeling pretty good right now. If you look at their 2020 fund, they have Merck 4,

they have fireworks. What's the other one? They have a bunch of multi-10 baggers at this point in that fund. So they're feeling pretty good about going to LPs and saying, look, we still got it. Still cooking. To be clear, I slash, we love working with our friends at all of these funds. And this part was not meant as a slight slash commentary on their quality as investors, just POV on fund strategies and the unique value prop of benchmark.

I think it's a fair tweet. But it's amazing because everyone is coming out and just trashed. Part of what made it feel super personal is that Harry tagged Robbie. Totally, totally, totally. And Ben. Yeah, we actively try to avoid, like, tagging people if someone is talking trash about someone else or, like, sub-tweeting them. We don't really try and, like, handhold into drama. Since my former colleagues at A16Z are RIAs and thus cannot legally comment on what they can slash cannot say with a straight face to LPs, this sounds a lot like what crappy board members say.

When as an outside observer, they have zero clue what actually happens, day to day in the business. Ev thinks he understands Andresen's business, but in fact, he does not understand Indreason's business. But I want to know, like, what is the misunderstanding? Because the steel man, the bull case on the Andreessen strategy is that Ev is making the claim that they will make more money, dollars, total dollars, because they're investing out of a bigger fund size. They don't need to go and say we're going to five exit. So it's a different pool of LPs. Also part of part of like the major appeal of investing in A16Z is that you pretty much know that you're going to get in every important company.

That's my point of view. I'm not an LP, but I happily would be, and it's because you know you're going to get some exposure to pretty much every important company, not necessarily always super early, but at some point in the company's life cycle,

it's very likely that they will take a meaningful check from A16C. What does I have said? He says, I think smaller constrained funds can produce higher returns in venture, quote, must be a shitty board member. Don't work with him. Incredible non-sequitur. Thanks, Scott.

Meanwhile, over on X, people are saying calling me unk. They're saying I'm a boomer. Oh, yeah? For my post, which I think is fair. But again, there's more nuance. During the CLEULEADAYDA, I would imagine that 80% of the team's hours were spent on marketing and 20% were spent on product, maybe. Now I think it's flipped. And I think that's very bullish. I think that's Good. But Tyler, you had a rebuttal? This seems very different from, like, you see the gambling on your credit card statements or whatever, like from other accelerators. Like, this feels very different.

Like, this is like the marketing. Like, I think people kind of tend to group all this stuff together where it's like what growing gay in was talking about yesterday. Where it's like some of these are like immoral companies that you could say. Sure. I think this feels different than that. What if the whole, if the whole product is. And this is all we've, this is all we've seen.

A VS code fork with minimal auto-complete. They're always, you know, a year or two or five behind cursor and windsurf. And yes, it has the ability to add Tinder and stake and sports betting in it. And like that, the product that they are telling us their building is what they're building. And they stay with it for five years. Like, what do you say then? Yeah, then that's not good. Dwarquash Patel, Dylan Patel, sat down with Satchadella.

And they got an exclusive tour of Fairwater, too, the most powerful AI data center in the world. Maybe this is wrong, but I think Klossus 2 will be bigger. It's just currently it's not big. Like, this is the current. Current biggest. It's the current biggest. Okay, okay. So you had a chance to actually sit down and watch this whole interview before we started the show.

Can you give me some takeaways? Where should people, are there any timestamps that we should pull up? Are there any takeaways that people should know before they go and watch it? It was pretty enlightening. I usually think of Satia as being very non-age. PILD. And I think this was a bit of an update. So there's a bunch of reasons for this. I think so early on he like in the very, I think it was one of the first questions. He's like, what is AI? AI is basically two things. This Satya is saying this. There's cognitive like enhancement.

So this is like your like tools or this is your auto complete. This is your co-pilot. Yeah, co-pilot, stuff like this. And then there's like the guardian angel. And this is like the very AGI Pild where, I mean, it's like kind of lording over everything. And so. So he actually does say these two things are very possible. Okay, so the next thing he's talking about kind of how he thinks about pricing structures of AI broadly. So there's this kind of conflict between subscription models and usage model of pricing.

I think he's broadly more kind of focused on, at least in the short term, on this subscription kind of thing, right? Throughout the interview, he keeps emphasizing the point that Microsoft is a hyper-scaler. And so that means a bunch of things, that means that they're going to keep supporting multiple models it means that they are going to, like, they want to prioritize the kind of long tail of like high margin users.

Compare that to Oracle, who you can think of Oracle as basically... Prioritizing one potentially low margin. Yeah, exactly. You're giving bare metal essentially to one customer, Open AI. All the big hyperscalers have their own chip play, right? There's training and there's TPUs. Open AI is doing their own ship. Microsoft does have their own chip.

The actual production is way behind everyone else. And then Satya basically brings up that Microsoft has IP to everything OpenAI has, except for consumer hardware. Satya signaled that he's open to buying capacity from neoclouds, like Oracle, Nebius, Lambda, Iron, N-scale. Isn't he already doing that? To fill the... Yeah, he is.

But he... Semi-analysis has a concept called, like, the pause, which is, like, basically a gap of, like, this, like, insane period of demand. Oh, right now? Meet that demand. And Satya actually says specifically, you're rightfully calling out the pause in the interview.

Interesting. The chip question is also very important because you can think of it, like if you build a bunch of data centers right now, they have very specific power requirements that are directly based on the chip. If you're building based off the H-100 chip, that's different than if you're building a data center based off GB200s. And it's like you can't really, it's not like fun. Like you can't just trade one out for another.

So that's another one of the reasons why you don't want to basically have insane buildout right now because you don't think you know that chips are going to get much better. Sure, especially with like A6, right? Yeah, exactly. InVdia is like constantly they're saying we got this next chip coming out. Yep, yep, yep. You want to build up your data center with those chips because otherwise they're going to depreciate and you're going to have these basically data centers in like five years that like are using, you know,

the old gen chips or two generations back. Yeah. Anything on depreciation? He gives like two reasons how you can justify data centers, right? Because you have data center basically depreciating in like five years, or the chips, which is a big part of the cost. There's basically two ways to like justify the actual buildout. One of them is basically you can think of like research as just being like R&D spend.

And the other is just like everything has to be like super demand driven. So that's also why he's not, it's like again in comparison to Oracle. Oracle is basically maybe you could say that they're kind of skating to where the puck is going or trying to figure that out and then doing a bunch of debt, et cetera. And then Microsoft, Satya, is saying, no, where is demand right now? How do we fulfill that demand? Basically, exactly.

If we're not fully built up, then we can lease from the neoclads. Yeah, makes sense. Okay, one last thing. Dorcache asks Satya, like, does he buy basically the revenue growth of when Open AI or Anthropics says they're going to be like $70, 100 billion in like three years? He's like, well, you know, they have to justify their fundraise somehow. And then he basically doesn't say much else besides that. Wow, Sautja, absolutely.

I love him. He's the best. Another thing that I was surprised to hear is that Sotia, he made a big point of saying that, like, there is a superintelligence lab within Microsoft. They're going to be training their own models. That's why I've always felt like the dynamic between Open AI and Microsoft is so interesting because OpenAI just has massive ambitions in the enterprise. They want to create, Sam, you know, alluded to a AI native Slack. recently Microsoft has teams. Imagine those competing. You can imagine Open AI having

like word processing, Excel-like product. You can imagine them ultimately competing on like every single layer, including at the eventually at the cloud layer. Have you ever done illegal drugs, Tyler? Answer the question. No. Answer the question.

Good answer. Who's your favorite host? Me or Jordy? Answer the question. Answer the question. I'm my favorite host. Oh, whoa. Oh, taking shots. An emotional and expressive robot to reshape our attachment to technology. Is this a CGI vibe real or is this a real product?

It's pretty cool. I don't know. It's weird. It just feels cool. It's a cool thing to have. Put a speaker on it. I'm like 90% sure it's real. There was an Apple research paper that came out like, I don't know, six months ago.

It was all about like expressive robots. Sure. And they had a bunch of like demos and stuff on how they could build this stuff. Wow. Okay. This is very cool. I have been delight baited. I have not been rage baited by this.

Raghetti, what an opportunity, Kaching, buy IBM. What is that even mean? Kramer posts like a crazy amount. I mean, he's got 2.3 million followers. He's posting like every half hour. That's our show for today. I do not tolerate Kramer slander.

Yeah, no, no, no. I think he... He's entertaining. He's insightful. He's controversial. He's a total package. We love Kramer. I took delivery of a beautiful shiny new HW4 Tesla Model X today. I like this hardware four. He cares

about the chip inside that thing. He doesn't care about what the light bar on the front is or the door handles or whether the doors go up. Andre Carpathic cares about the GPU inside. So I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive a bit like I used to do almost daily for five years. Basically, I'm amazed. It drives really, really well, really smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3, my previous car, and Elon's aeons ahead of the version I remember driving up highway 280 on my first day at Tesla nine years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped. On city streets, the car casually handled the number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars and

tight lanes. It gracefully went around construction and temporary in-lane stationary cars. It correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides. It's a glowing review, glowing review of Tesla self-driving from the man who basically invented it and started the whole process. We also missed it, but opening I released GPT 5.1 rolling out to all users this week. Chat ChbPT is officially in its Fiji phase now if you're wondering why the upgrade doesn't come with benchmarks. Have fun. Podcasts and Spotify. We love you.

at TBPN.com, and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.