TBPN - You Don't Need a Storyteller, ChatGPT Images, Ali on the Series L | Karri Saarinen, Mike Cessario, Elliot Cohen, Ali Ghodsi

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

(00:55) - Viral WSJ 'You Don't Need a Storyteller' Piece (28:52) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (34:03) - ChatGPT Images 1.5 (46:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:44) - Coreweave Tests AI Market Hype (01:11:40) - The Price of Ford's EV Push (01:19:58) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:32) - Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, a project management tool, previously served as Principal Designer at Airbnb and Head of Design at Coinbase. In the conversation, he discusses the importance of maintaining a broad perspective in design, cautioning against conflating design with coding, as it may limit creativity and lead to conservative solutions. He emphasizes the need for a conceptual design phase to explore multiple directions before execution, allowing for innovative and thoughtful outcomes. (01:51:42) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:00:47) - Mike Cessario, founder and CEO of Liquid Death, discusses the innovative launch strategy of his canned water brand, emphasizing the use of a viral video to gauge market interest before product availability. He highlights the importance of leveraging existing networks and resources, such as collaborating with the creator of "Mr. Pickles" for brand design and animation, to create compelling marketing content. Cessario also addresses the balance between humor in branding and maintaining sincerity in customer interactions, underscoring the significance of understanding the audience and context in communication. (02:21:36) - Elliot Cohen, co-founder of PillPack, which was acquired by Amazon in 2018, discusses his new venture, General Medicine, an online healthcare marketplace aiming to simplify access to medical care. He highlights the platform's ability to connect users with medical providers, assess care needs based on symptoms, and integrate health history into a chat interface for personalized support. Cohen emphasizes the importance of empowering consumers in their healthcare journey, aiming to make the experience as seamless as shopping online. (02:38:44) - Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, discusses the company's significant growth, highlighting a revenue run rate surpassing $4.8 billion with over 55% year-over-year growth, and AI products exceeding $1 billion in revenue. He emphasizes the importance of a solid data foundation for effective AI implementation, noting that AI models are becoming commodities, but their true value lies in reasoning over proprietary enterprise data. Ghodsi also shares insights on navigating open-source business models, advising founders to achieve widespread adoption of their open-source projects and then innovate with proprietary offerings to monetize effectively. (03:06:30) - Affinity Drops out of WB Takeover Battle (03:09:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.com/fal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.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

You're watching TVPN. Today is December 16th, Tuesday. Merry Christmas. Oh, oh, oh. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital,

the North Pole. The North Pole of net income. Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. You know what to get for that loved one in your life this Christmas.

Get them on ramp. Introduce them to a ramp SDR. They will appreciate it. It's the gift that keeps on giving. It really is. Anyway, you know what else is the gift that keeps on giving? Hiring a storyteller, which apparently is the hottest topic in Silicon Valley,

thanks to our friend Katie Dayton over at the Wall Street Journal, who made this go mega-viral by posting an article in the Wall Street Journal, all about how startups are hiring storytellers. Companies are desperately seeking storytellers, is the headline, of course. We are going to dive into it, Jordie Road to Take. If you have a storyteller, you want to tell a story, why don't you tell it on all of the streaming platform

simultaneously with Restream? One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Storytelling is the only way to impose meaning on abundance, says Signal. coherence on noise, legitimacy on power, strategy ops and capital are all downstream. Without narrative control, none of it will ever stick. This has been one of the core premise of my account in a world of infinite output. Story is the scarce primitive.

He's a very good writer signal. Whoever can compress chaos into something people can feel, remember, forgive, and rally around actually runs the system. This skill is worth more than the entire C-suite combined. Okay. So lay off the CEO. CFO, the CTO. You just need a storyteller, you're good to go. Is that the pitch? No, people are having fun with this one. What was your take, Georgie? Break it down from it. How do you frame this?

How did you process this? I mean, should we read through the article briefly or at least summarize it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So Katie writes, companies are desperately seeking storytellers, brands trying to rest greater control from their narratives or seeking storytelling skill sets without a campfire in sight. Maybe some of them have a warm hearth like we do. Anyways, corporate America's latest. Normally you'd be telling a story. Oh, around a campfire.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'd be telling a story that way. I usually think of smoking cigars around campfires. That's what I associate. Mostly focused on the cigar. But you like to yap between puffs. I do, I do. Corporate America's latest hot job

is also one of the oldest in history. History, storytellers. Some companies want a media relations manager by a flashier name. Others need people to produce blogs, podcasts, case studies, and more types of branded content to attract customers, investors, and potential recruits. All seem to use the word differently than in its usual application to novelist playwrights. As storytellers, a Google job ad said last month, we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long-term growth. The listing sought a customer storytelling manager to join the company's Google Cloud storytelling team. That sounds like a fantastic opportunity in another life personally.

I'd be on the Google Cloud storytelling team. For sure. In some ways, in some ways we are. One article, the unit published this year, was titled Loz Innovation, how Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences. Microsoft Security Organization, meanwhile, is recruiting a senior director, overseeing narrative and storytelling described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator, and part marketer.

Vanta is also hiring a storytelling. Teller, Notion. Head of storytelling. That's right. Productivity apps. Notion recently merged its comm, social media, and influencer functions into one 10-person team, a so-called storytelling team. And so anyways, Katie goes on and on.

She talks about how more and more of these listings are popping up. They're growing year over year. They're showing up in earnings calls. Yeah. And I have a different take on this. I think as soon as, as soon as, as soon as, As soon as there's a Wall Street, I mean, we love Katie, but as soon as there's a Wall Street Journal piece about a trend, the trend is effectively dead. And so there is no more alpha in hiring storytellers.

You need to hire a yarn spinner. You need to hire a fabulist, someone who will go around to group chats and tell wild lies about your product, your company, how successful you are. You recruit this person, and then they go around seating little anecdotes, little tall tails, and they spin yarns. I mean, that's called securities fraud. I don't know. It certainly depends. Maybe if there's no securities changing hands. Anyway, so I went and tried to find a storyteller from a long time ago.

Okay. And I found none other than the legend Steve Clayton. He's currently the vice president of Microsoft's communication strategy. But back in 2010, what was he hired for? The chief storyteller. No way. They were using that term 15 years ago. That's crazy.

It feels like a very modern term. He held that title from 2010 to June 2021. And he says, in this role, I led a team of 40 who engage in a wide variety of storytelling inside and outside Microsoft. And anyways, goes on and on. I was trying to also kind of understand the, from like the early 1900s to the 1950s, you had copyrighters, like that it was pretty elite to be a copywriter. This was like a high status job.

You were using. Don Draper. Isn't Don Draper? He was a creative director, but also a writer and the people that he worked with were copyrighters, because at that time, print media, you could being able to use your words to get people to take action that you want, that you benefit from, is a very elite skill set. Yeah. At some point, marketing. One more example that I mentioned earlier, early storytellers in Silicon Valley, Guy Kawasaki, he was one of Apple's employees originally responsible.

He was one of Apple's employees originally responsible for marketing their Macintosh computer line in 1984. He actually popularized the word evangelist in marketing the Macintosh as an Apple evangelist and the concepts of evangelism marketing and technology evangelism slash platform evangelism in general. And he became this idea of like word of mouth marketing, not quite storytelling, different different keyword around it, but he was also sort of, you know, one of the early, you know, turning points in internet marketing. Anyway, yeah, and around that time you started to get content content strategists, right? Yeah. And if you look back to the, to the 80s and 90s, it was about, that was kind of like the boom of brand strategy, brand identity, think like the Nike

kind of era of marketing. And Bology recently went viral because there was a clip from an older podcast that was reposted on Acts, went viral, and it was his take, a few years ago, during the creator economy boom, arguing that companies need a founding creator, or like a co-factor and resident. No, it was higher than creator in residence. It was like, on the co-founding team,

you should have a CTO, and then you should have a creator. And it was like, you know, it's an interesting thought experiment, probably good for some companies, maybe not good for every company. You know, like any piece of tech advice or wisdom, you know, There's going to be a variety of cases where it makes sense. But it went viral and everyone was saying like, oh, this is so, he's so behind. And I had to correct someone.

I was like, no, no, no. Like that clip is actually a couple of years old. When he was saying it, it wasn't. So it's sort of interesting that way. Early insight. Yeah. Anyways, I wrote a piece for the newsletter today at tbPN.com. And of course, I titled it, you don't need a storyteller.

It said, according to a friend of the show, Katie, at the Wall Street Journal, companies are desperate to hire storytellers. Hiring a storyteller is not a new phenomenon, but it makes sense that companies feel the need to hire them right now. Why? Because it's never been more obvious that the best storytellers in the world create billions of dollars of value for their companies and create massive advantages using only their words. Their words are so powerful that no matter where they appear on the internet, they draw millions of views and create a vortex of talent, capital, and customers. Yeah, there's this thing where like, if you have a hot take, you don't actually need to own the platform.

You can just go do a circuit of appearances. A podcast tour. Anyways, I'll continue. So the reality distortion field that emerges often results in 100xpe ratios. Of course, every company in the world wants this. The problem is that it's impossible to hire the most elite storytellers because they are founders. Think Elon, carp, and Palmer. New coinage alert, I call these types Joe Rogan CEOs.

I love it. You know if you have a Joe Rogan CEO. It's fine if you don't. There's great CEOs that are not Joe Rogan CEOs, but there's a certain type of CEO that's a Joe Rogan. And to be clear, you're not saying that the CEO has to have the same aesthetics as Joe Rogan or the same style. Even Carp has not been on Joe Rogan. That's true. But you know that if he went on, it would be a grand slam.

It would be electric moment. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, no. So it's more about being able to put on a performance in that particular environment Can you capture people's attention for three hours? Yes. Just like rambling, basically. Whereas there have been CEOs that have gone on Joe Rogan successfully,

but they just haven't delivered a Joe Rogan experience. And I think if you think about, I think if you think about like early stage founders, who would go on and just crush Joe Rogan? Augustus. Yeah, of course. It just like immediately comes to mind. You know who these people are. And there's CEOs, founder, CEOs of his job.

generation. Is a JRC? That are amazing, even though they wouldn't necessarily, they're not necessarily a JRC. Is it a JRC? So I continue, the internet is noisier than ever with thousands of startups competing for Mindshare. When every startup has a great launch video, no one does. And yet these storytellers consistently break through and dominate the timeline.

Even though Gen. I allows marketing teams big and small to massively increase their output, it is often not even 1% as effective as one of these elite storyteller founders going on a podcast or just posting stream of consciousness on X. The white pill for savvy marketing teams is that even as we're seeing an exponential increase in content production, I'm not sure we're seeing an exponential increase in great ideas. That means that companies large and small that don't have the luxury of having an Elon or Palmer on the payroll still have a chance to break through the noise and be remembered. As I was personally reflecting on 2025, there were only a handful of like truly

corporate storytelling moments that I remember. And each of them worked for a different reasons. One, don't work at Anderl. Iconic campaign. Palmer makes like a cameo in it, but he's not the star. He's just like a, he's like a kind of he's just like a character in it. But it's, you could remove Palmer and the, and the ad would like still carry weight. I thought that was one of the best campaigns of the year. The other one was astronomer. Their reaction to the, to the crisis and the viral moment they had. The campaign is titled, Thank you for your interest in astronomer. It obviously featured Gwyneth Paltrow. I think this one will be studied in 10 years. It was like really a perfect reaction to that moment. And I did not know

astronomer before then. I do now. I will never forget them. I thought ramps expenses should do themselves with Sequin. That one was this combination of like luck, uh, incredible execution and timing and and ultimately it just like having the Eagles got it done and that like was the cherry on top it was a great campaign it was a great you know first Super Bowl commercial for them next is keep thinking from Anthropic it's felt like very Apple inspired they even had the piano crashing and then sort of like reversing up right which I felt was a reference to that iPad ad in some way And then finally, Avi Schiffman's campaign, which I call Buy Every Billboard. He literally bought every billboard.

We've talked about this before, but near our office, there was a billboard that you could only see like a third of it. You could only see it, say, N.com because it was just facing, it was like 10 feet away from a apartment building. And so I said, Friend did something absurd, which we can call the Buy Every Billboard strategy. Many people criticize the campaign in the product, but the results from an awareness standpoint are undeniable. Avi spent one to two million was my estimate and became a household name, at least on the coast. And a lot of other brands have spent like 10 times that amount. And you don't even know who they are, right? You wouldn't somebody could rattle off a handful of them.

You'd be like, what? Like, I'm actually not familiar. So that campaign was notable to me because I think if you utilize that for the right product, it could be super impactful, right? it could have a, you know, I don't know if that campaign transformed friend as a business, but it certainly put them on the map. And I think, like, it's very possible that billboards can have increasing returns to scale. So you might buy two billboards, not really see any noticeable, like, lift and awareness

and attention and traffic. But if you buy, like, 200, it's sort of undeniable. You can't miss it. I kept... Well, we had a great result with literally two billboards. It could have just been one, basically, just one billboard, but we were able to get a lot of photos taken of it, and so it broke through in a very interesting way.

And so we probably got way more value out of that just because it was such a small, just one billboard, and then Avi went the opposite direction, bought every billboard. When he came on the show and was like, it's the biggest billboard campaign in history, I was like, there's no way. And then I saw it everywhere, and I was like, okay, maybe it is. But I thought it would cost me.

more than a million dollars to get that big of a billboard buy. I thought a billboard buy of that scale would be like 10 million or 20 million, but I guess not. I know he didn't spend that much because he hasn't raised that much. He hasn't raised that much, but I don't know. He also, he was like financing his, uh, his dot com. So is there possible, is it possible that he has like financing agreement to like pay these billboards down over time or something? Like, I don't know about that. I don't, I don't, you can finance a domain. Yeah. Because the domain gets whole. held in like a third party like custody. And so if somebody stops making payments,

you just claw back the domain. Whereas billboards is like, you ran the ads. You took the spot of another advertiser that could have been cash today. So I don't really know about that. I wouldn't be surprised if Vavi's levered up in more than one.

Who knows? Anyways, I said hiring a storyteller to craft narratives and tell your story internally and externally is fine. But if the goal is to be remembered and you lack a Joe Rogan CEO, remember that one great campaign

is worth 10,000. and posts. And yeah, I would just like to see people, companies, instead of frantically just trying to make a lot of noise in a bunch of random ways as you go into 2026, how do you have one breakout moment campaign and truly be remembered? Yeah, that's interesting.

I have more to say about that. But first, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. Develop and fine-tuned models of serverless GPUs, on-demand clusters. Yeah, I'm trying to square the problem that these job posts are trying to solve.

So in the Wall Street Journal article, it's the percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the U.S. that include the term storyteller doubled in the year ending November 26, I guess, to include some 50,000 listings under marketing and more

than 20,000 job listings under media and communications that mentioned the term, storyteller, storytelling, executives on earnings calls, and investor days mentioned it 469 times, which is like three times as much as 10 years ago. So clearly people are, you know, business leaders are interested in storytelling, both as a, you know, a narrative for investors, but also as an actual physical job. But I'm wondering, like, you get in the seat, it does feel like a little bit of what this, what this

story is, what this journal article is saying is like, you're going to be storytelling every single day. It's kind of counter to what, which I guess is what your whole point was, but it's very much counter to your point of like one big campaign, one breakthrough idea. And I'm wondering just like, I don't know, is there a world where you need both, where you need inspiration, but you still need like, you know, at a certain point, you know, there was an example here. It's like, you They did a Lowe's case study on how Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences. Like, is that going to be the major... The standout moment for me this year from Microsoft was Satya saying,

I'm happy to be a leaser. And I'm good for my... I'm good for my 80 billion. So when you think about when I, you know, I think what does that do for the Lowe's partnership, you know? Like if you're like, this was actually Google's cloud storytelling team. They published an article. And so if they just have to get out a blog.

post, maybe there is some benefit to just like shifting their mindset to at least being like, hey, instead of just doing like a list of facts, like, why don't you try and like tell it like a story? Meaning like the React structure, conflict, resolution, characters, antagonists. Like, you know, like, it sounds like a low bar. They didn't want lows to have efficient cloud infrastructure. They didn't want the shopping experiences to be interactive. but then Google came in and changed it up, changed up the game.

I mean, that is a little bit of it. If I'm at a big company, if I'm a employee to a big company, it would be cool to have a, like, a centralized resource that's like, here's how we talk about this product, here's how we talk about our mission, here's how we talked about, talk about our roadmap in the near term and the medium term and the long term, right? But ultimately that, when you think of the companies

that are great at storytelling, it is because the CEO is a great storyteller. Yes. I mean, yeah, there's two. I would argue that Apple, who's historically been an amazing storyteller, is not currently an incredible storyteller because Tim Cook is like 11 out of 10 operationally, and he's not the guy to go on Joe. He's not like, I don't see Tim Cook popping up on a bunch of podcast.

There also aren't paying him enough to go. do extra stuff. Like, if, you know, if you, if you're making that type of money, like, you're not going to be like, yeah, I'm going to go work on the weekends. You're going to, five o'clock rolls around. Exactly. You're bailing. You're bailing. But no, so, so again, and that's not, it hasn't mattered. Like, he's told the story through the company's performance, which is that he is one of the most elite operators. Yeah. Last night, I feel like we had dinner with a great storyteller. And he told us his entire life story. And what was interesting and why I thought it was a really great story was two things. Like one, the facts of the story, just the truth,

was a lot of up and down, a lot of conflict. Yeah, it was riveting. It was riveting. Failure, wins. He's the protagonist, but there were antagonists, and there were mentors and trials and tribulations. It really did fit the hero's journey. So the facts were there, and you could go fact-checked them and be like, oh yeah, there were, there were these story points. But then also, the way he told the story didn't hide those. There's another version of that story where he only tells you the good moments in the story. And he doesn't tell you about any of the trial and tribulations.

And we're like, okay, yeah, we get it. You're successful. You know, it's boring. Instead, we were like, whoa, like another downturn, another up, another swing. It was emotional. It was a roller coaster. It was a great story.

And I feel like if there's anything that comes out of like the storyteller era of, corporate marketing, it should be giving marketers, writers, storytellers, permission to actually inject conflict into their marketing materials. Yeah, look at the way that Palmer responded to that journal piece about how Anderol had a fire at one of their test sites, right? He was like, yes, we had a, I'm paraphrasing, but it was effectively, yes, we had a fire at the, at the missile test site or whatever it was, at the explosive test site, right? Like, yes, we, and he was trying to to do that. He was trying to do that in the journal article,

clearly when he was talking to them, but they pulled out moments where it was like, we fail a lot. Whereas Palmer was trying to tell a good story, which is like, yeah, we fail a lot because we test a lot. And we're trying to iterate faster than our competitors. And through that, we'll succeed. Yeah, I don't know.

I wonder what the net impact of that journal article will be. Yeah, ultimately, ultimately, I just think, I think tech needs to fall in love with advertising again. Advertising is amazing. I want to see companies hiring advertising specialist. That's funny. Somebody that is just focused on doing really great advertising, right? Not just like, you know, I think this gets lost because we're in this era of rapid testing,

iterating through a bunch of assets, you know, volume, right? You see this with, you know, companies that say like, yeah, we just need to create a hundred new ads for meta every single week forever and we're trying to get to 200 right um but in in that it can oftentimes get lost of like what what story are we telling right like what is the what is the through line between all this noise that we're creating and all this attention that we're getting yeah numeral compliance handle numeral worries about sales tax and bat compliance so you can focus on growth uh do you think companies we have some ben made the some new sound effects.

Let's have a couple. Santa's naughty is just got a bit longer. What was that one? Santa's naughty. Just got a bit longer. There's a couple of the good ones. You're surrounded by enemy snowmen. Walk it down.

You're surrounded by enemy snowmen? Hostile drummer boy. On your six. Take the shot. Hostile drummer boy. Very funny. Friendly reindeer inbound. Friendly reindeer inbound.

I like it. really fun. Anyways. So do you think it's going to be hard for companies to hire great storytellers? Ties here, Bronco says, the then diagram of people who get tech, get people, can explain complex things simply and can make people care as tiny. So will these folks be? I think a lot of these, I think a lot of these people actually are at advertising agencies. And, and, uh, if you're Coca-Cola, you've been working with hundreds of advertising agencies for decades and decades and decades, right? This has worked well for them. You're bringing in new ideas, new perspectives, you're hiring. It can be great to say, hey, we're going to give this agency like $100,000, but in exchange, we're going to get a great campaign out of it, right? So I just think people need to know what they actually want. I think what they want is to be remembered and to be thought about and to be, you know, have certain ideas associated with their company. right and and I think just people that are like oh we want we want to be remembered we

should hire a storyteller I don't think that's going to work really that well right because I mean for again just because like in order to it's about like cutting cutting through the noise like you need an idea that is so good like don't work at and roll that it will just break out and people will remember it right and people will will watch a two-minute ad yeah there's a little bit of like the just just like, you know, the story still has to be, we're talking about, we're not talking about yarn spinners, we're talking about actual real stories that potentially could be fact-checked. And so you do have to do a little bit of the hard work to actually deliver some facts and some

story points, which is probably why it's extremely hard to tell a compelling story as like a seed stage company, because you're young company. That's why usually your story leans on like your backstory, like how you grew up or what you were doing before, why you quit that big cushy job to go out and to cross into the unknown and become the the intrepid entrepreneur. I was I was reflecting on Keller at Zipline as having a great story this year in particular that sort of manifested itself in Ziplines, solar punk style launch video and Keller going around on different shows, coming on our show multiple times and talking about the progress of the business. But a lot of that story is just the fact that he's been running

the business for a decade and it's now finally working and it's this thing that the story of drone delivery was told a decade ago like I remember in san francisco people were saying there there was somebody who was like building a drone delivery company as like a small startup and it would basically just be like a dj i drone that he would just like clip it to and like fly it to you like yeah but it was like well an example also in the drone space of good storytelling is the nearest guys so like soren for example, when he comes on, he's like, yeah, it was competitive drone racer. Yeah. It immediately doesn't matter that he's, like, young and doesn't have the most experience in the category. Yeah. But you're like, okay, the guy that is making killer drones, you probably want him to be

one of the best in the world at actually flying. Yeah, I completely agree with that. The hard part is that, like, if you don't have that background, if you don't have the plot points, if you don't have plot, then no amount of storyteller hiring can fix that if you have a boring plot. So, you got to go do things. It's easier to be a great storyteller if you have motion and if you have aura. It is. But also, yeah, I don't know, plot points. Plot points are things happen. Things, like facts occur. Like, you know, things, the, you know, soren actually competed as a drone racer. Like, aura motion that ties to it, but it's really... You're saying that adds to the aura, right?

If you think about, if Soren rewind a little bit, he starts fundraising for his company, like that kind of just by, that gives him a huge advantage of that's just circulating of like there's a new startup raising and the founders were competitive drone races. I mean, even just like being on your second company, having sold your first company, that's just a plot point. No storyteller can come in and say like, hey, why don't we go tell everyone that you sold your last company for a billion dollars? It's like, yeah, that would make your story better. But it's not a fact, so you can't use it. Yeah, there's always, you know, there's always something to latch on to.

I think about with the Ridge Wallet guys, they never raise money. There was never any hype surrounding the business. And like as a storyteller, everyone's a storytellers. When I introduce them to people, I'd be like, you should talk to Sean and Connor. they've bootstrapped this business to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and profit by being truly elite marketers. And that creates a catalyst for people to be like, wow, I'm paying attention now. Yeah.

Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Ali is chiming in. She says, wow, 23K likes. She says, tech bro obsessed with storytelling but hasn't read a book in the last five years. probably not a good sign. A lot of the classic stories have been told again and again and again and go back to the classics. Instead of a launch video, somebody should just write an announcement in the full hero's journey.

That actually sort of works. I mean, I would use the story circle when I would write YouTube videos. Dan Harmon's story circle. It's basically like a three-act structure, but in eight parts. And so there's like the crossing into the void. I would try and map out like all the different. story beats pretty deliberately and try and map them on there. It's hard though. I would like to see a launch post written in verse. Ooh, getting back into poetry. I mean Homeric, you should maybe

drop an epic poem, like a true, true like thousand page book of poetry. Or you could drop 20 haikus on your startup. Yeah. Graphite.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. This really did become the current thing. There's a clue, Eric Zaworski says, there's a big clue in the middle of the viral Wall Street Journal article by Dolly Dighton that explains why the people who would otherwise crush the role of storyteller, the hot new job at hot startups, rarely get the gig in the end

as designer Stefan Sagmeister observed back in 2014. It's all the people who are not storytellers who now suddenly want to be storytellers. Interesting. He says every so often an article like this drops, remember brands the new moat or taste can't be taught that lays bare the repackaging of an oft taken for granted concept in communication, human-to-human relation,

just enough that it entices reaction discourse. today. It's the idea that telling stories is an important function of extending the lifespan of companies. A familiar debate on the timeline many are correctly pointing out that this is nothing new, marketing 101, always has been.jpg, tier stuff. So how did

storytelling an idea fundamental to our existence get Rubik's cubed into a novel optimization strategy? That is funny. Rubik's cubed is good. Yeah, I just think a title like this. would I think a good a good test if you're trying to hire for a role like this is would the person be do they want the title storyteller? Yeah.

Or would they be okay with the title copywriter? Hmm. Right? Because in my view, if you're hiring somebody to be a storyteller, their job is to like write down words in a structured, impactful way and help the entire organization like share those words in a consistent manner. and I would say a lot of the people a lot of people like want the title creative director but do they want to be a project manager?

Like no, they want to be a creative director right? There's just like a status associated with that there's maybe a status associated with storyteller but at the end of the day if you're trying to hire for this do you want somebody that is obsessed with writing?

You should be willing to take the job of storyteller if I come to you and you say you want to work for me as a storyteller, I say, I'm going to start you off with the title Fabulous, and if you're cool with that, then maybe we'll upgrade you to storyteller. If you're okay coming to this organization with your title being yarn spinner. Just tall-tail smith. First project. You just hand them a bunch of yarn. They spin this for me. Just tell me a lie. Tell me a lie about my company. You're actually a generational founder. You sold your last company for $10 billion.

They're like, yeah, write the blog post and post it. Anyway, what is this, Andrews-Nhorowitz has a laws of new media coming from Marshall McLuhan, the laws of media, the new science. There are four of these, the laws of media. One is, it enhances awareness of inclusive structural process, obsoleses dominance of the logical method, reverses into technology, hardware, becomes software,

retrieves metaphor logos. That is, I like some McLuhan. Where else is this? Xerox enhances the speed of the printing press. Obsoleses the assembly line book, reverses into everyone becomes a publisher, retrieves the oral tradition. That's a cool framework.

I like this. Dig through different value props, essentially. The iPhone 1. It enhanced bringing the world into yourself into the world, the world into yourself into the world. Well, obsoleses the house's home, flips. the end of the individual retrieves the nomadic hunter. What?

That's weird for the... Here's one of his tetrads on the computer. The computer enhances instant replay of information. It obsoleses hardware. It retrieves Hunter. It flips pattern recognition. What a fascinating framework. ChatGBTGBT has a new image model.

They just launched this. Sam Altman teased it with a photo that at this point, You know, him and a bunch of polos. Looks great. He says, most likely to launch a new image model. And Sam Altman says, launching something really fun today. What is the actual announcement? How is this framed?

I know the model got better. Elf. But what is... Elf. But what is... It's a good model. It's a good model, sir. Yes, yeah.

Okay, so... Image 1.5. Image 1.5. What were they on before? There's GPT image. Now there's GPT image 1.5. Were they on 1.0 before? Yeah.

Okay. Today, we're releasing a new version of ChatGPT images powered by our new flagship image generation model. Now, whether you're creating something from scratch or editing a photo, you'll get the output you're picturing. It makes precise edits while keeping details intact. And it's four times faster. You know that's a big deal. That's a big deal. That is the real thing where nanobananas been very, very fast.

They got to speed this thing up, and they clearly figure out a way to do it. Alongside, we're introducing the new images feature within ChatGPT, designed to make image generation delightful to spark inspiration. And it is cool. It's like it has its own little corner of the app, its own little surface area. Before I tell you more about this, let me tell you about fin.a.i. The number one agent for customer

service automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Why is Geordy going over to the gong? It's gongworthy. Finn is gone more than. Oh fan. Fantastic. So around here we have a benchmark for images, for image generation. You come to us, you come to us with a new model. You know we're going to try and generate a where's Waldo.

And we have some where's Waldo's pulled up. And we're getting better. We're getting closer. They're not ready for primetime, though. Not ready for print. We didn't pass our personal internal benchmarks. Can we pull it up? Let's pull up this first image of this Where's Waldo?

It's going to be very small, so I don't know if you'll actually be able to see that. Can you zoom in a little bit? Yes. So this is the Where's Waldo. Okay, the important thing is that from far away, this looks, this looks, it looks ready to rock. Now, part of what makes Wears Waldo special is it has this unique perspective. Like the, it has, it's like infinite depth of field. It's this 45 degree angle.

Isomorphic. It's an isomorphic image. This is not perfectly isomorphic, but it's not bad. And there's a lot of interesting detail and texture, but as you zoom in, you start noticing. It's actually isometric. Oh, isometric. Isometric.

Thank you. And so as you zoom in, you start to notice that, like, some of the people are not quite to scale. And the telltale sign of Awares Waldo is that there is Story. Back to storytellers. The creators of Where's Waldo are storytellers. Because as you move around the image in the Where's Waldo, you see little scenes playing out. It will be a dog that is hungry for a ham, a Christmas ham. And as he goes for the ham, as he goes for the ham, he knocks over a ladder where someone is painting and the paint bucket falls. And it tells you, like, there's these little vignettes that are playing out all around.

That's what makes it enjoyable to look around for Waldo. 100%, because you notice, and in fact, if you go to the back of the book, Where's Waldo? Oftentimes, there will be bonus things to search for. So you will get a list of prompts for what to hunt for outside of just the main Waldo. You will also be prompted to, is this a real Waldo? Or is this an AI one? No, this is, you made this.

I made this one. This is the... By hand? It looks great from this direction. But as you zoom in, you'll see that you're not quite getting the level of story telling. And also, the final, the final check is like, there must be one and only one Waldo. And I'm not, I'm not actually sure that this one included a Waldo of any kind. Put it back in chat GPT and say, where's Waldo?

Where's Waldo? Can it find it? So I'm not, I'm not seeing a Waldo on this one. On the beach, there are a number of people that look sort of like Waldo, but they, none of them have the precise, like, walking stick backpack. Bull Rock in the chat says, couldn't you just generate that picture and then drop in a Waldo with an edit feature, which is true. You could just say generate a Where's Waldo scene, but don't include Waldo and then Adam afterwards. No, I think you're 100%. Whereas Waldo was created by Martin Hanford, a British illustrator. He gained worldwide fame in 1987 with the release of the first book. He, prior to that, specialized in drawing massive, detailed crowd scenes for commercial clients, which ended up becoming the foundation of the Where's the Waldo series, a single illustration would take him up to eight weeks to complete. Wow. And also imagine kind of like a generator verifier setup where like the generator gets better and better at generating them. The verifier can find them.

So soon you'll have kind of where's Waldo's super intelligence? Do you think that would be adversarial? One could say that. It could be generative adversarial network potentially. They could network these two together. Can we work on, so Martin is based in the UK, just under seven. years old. We should get him on the show. The creator wears Waldo? Let's go. Let's get a new challenge. That would be a new challenge for the team. Let's get Martin. Yeah, we got to. But yeah,

the open AI news, the model excels at editing, adding, subtracting, combining, blending, transposing. It seems very clear that with a little bit of a harness, dare I say a wrapper, you could in fact create a proper Where's Waldo. But you probably need to generate the image. tile by tile, one tile at a time, and kind of work piece by piece, and then combined it all, blend it all together. And then, yes, you probably want to add one wall, though, at the very end, in some random spot, but you would not want to just one shot the full image because it's still a little bit too complex. But it's remarkable. I mean, these images are remarkable, and yet, and yet, there's still room for improvement. It's crazy. It's like, we're, every time we

see one of these. I'm like, okay, this is the final thing. We're done. It's good enough. It's great. And then another year goes by and there's more challenges. Pull up, pull up this post that says also a very fun way to use it to easily get fun images and then scroll down. I thought this was somebody messing with Sam as a reply, but it

is Sam himself as a firefighter with a calendar. And then there's a SORA video from Ramp Capital. Let's pull it up. Huh, that's funny. Oh, it's It's showing up in my replies, but not your replies.

I'll put it out. Odd. Yeah, going back to the OpenAI announces, chat GPT images, creative transformations, the models creativity shines through transformations that change and add elements here. Let's play this one. Well, this is not, what does it say? Impressive. Oh.

Very nice. That's pretty funny. I like it. Now let's see more slop. Oh, my gosh. The ability to use SORA to make jokes at Sam's expense is truly new territory for, I mean, I guess there were probably people that were in MS Paint making fun of Bill Gates back in like the 90s. Mocking him. Yeah, mocking him.

And he's just like, you wrote this takedown of me in Word. You wouldn't have been able to do this without me. But the feedback loop, the iteration cycle is way, way faster there. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with a personal AI engineering team. So these transformations work on both simple and more intricate concepts and are easy to try using preset styles and ideas in the new chat-chipt images feature,

no written prompt required. That's very interesting. So in an effort to make it easier to prompt, we are now instantiating more UI. So as that image shows you, it's like... As the models get better, we need more SaaS. Yeah, it's something like that. It's just that like it is...

I mean, this was David Holes' insight during the mid-journey boom, was that if you gave someone a blank text box and said, this is a magical text box, it's artificial intelligence, it can generate an image of anything. They would just type like dog, and they would just get a picture of a dog. And the picture of the dog was so photorealistic.

It was just like, okay, cool, you could go to Google Images and get that. Like, what is special about this? There's nothing special about it because, like, we have images of dogs. Like, yes, it's amazing that a computer can generate it from nothing. Like, that's remarkable. Can always have more.

But that pays away. And so, and he was like, Then you ask them again, you can do anything and be like, dog, dog, happy dog. And people just weren't fully inspired. And so the beauty of Mid Journey was putting everything in this big chat room on Discord so that people- Letting people inspire each other. Each other, each other.

And it became this collaborative thing. And so with this, it feels like OpenAI and the chat GPT app are definitely sort of embracing this idea that you will need to bring a little bit of idea generation. I mean, when Images in Chat GPD launched for the first time, I wasn't the person that came up with the idea of Studio Ghibli. I needed to see that. And then once someone told me, this is a great prompt, I was like, okay, I'm in, I'm going to go create a few more.

I needed a jumping off point. And they're bringing that jumping off point to their users in the images tab. And you know there's going to be Disney in there pretty soon, and that's going to be very cool, as you wrote in the newsletter last time. in the ex-chat says, no beards. I've never seen. Beards are coming. Beards are coming.

Well, thank you for supporting the coziest podcast in all of, in the entire world right now. We really, complete victory on the cozy maxing. We've been going back and forth on, well, does it look ridiculous? Yes. Yes. And that's why we do it. But Merry Christmas to everyone. And only a few more days.

Only a few more days. One really good Christmas gift, Turbo puffer. serverless vector and full tech search for grandma for your grandma. This is a built on fantastic. I know your grandma's saying you get me a sweater every every year. Well, this year, what about serverless vector and whole tech service? Exactly. She's going to be.

Linear. She's going to ask. She's going to unbox turbo puffer and she's going to say, well, is it built from first principles on object storage? You're going to be able to say yes. And she's going to say, this year, this year, yes. Does notion use this? Yes. You're going to be able to say yes.

Yes. Yes. She's going to say, well, is it extremely scalable? Absolutely. That's what most grandparents care about when it comes to Christmas. Scalability. Scalability. They want something scalable. They want something fast. And they definitely wanted to be 10x cheaper. And so get your grandmother turbopuffer this Christmas. Get them to talk. Bobby already got his grandma turbo puffer. She says she's going to be so happy. That's amazing. Open AI hires an executive from Google to lead M&A, according to Walter Bloomberg, according to the information. More notably, OpenAI hire comms chief Hannah Wong is departing the company. Okay.

She came out yesterday. She's stepping down. She's going to depart the company at the end of January. Axia says, Why It Matters, Wong, was the AI Giants first chief comms officer and guided the company through the launch of Chatsyptee, heightened regulatory scrutiny. controversies and a slew of deals and lawsuits. The bigger picture, her departure comes as the company is pushing on a variety of fronts. Do you think that she asked for the storyteller title and she didn't get it so she quit in protest?

Very, very possibly, John. It's very possible. Yeah, I feel like she deserves, she deserves like a little bit of a vacation at this point. I can't think of a more stressful job since 2021. some gray hair as the OpenAI op-com's role. She joined Open AI from Apple in 2021. And anyways, so vesting cliff reached. Well, first off, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously.

They got multi-asset investing and they're trusted by millions. Speaking of Merry Christmas, there is a fantastic art. in the Wall Street Journal. We got to go through it in the business and finance section. It says advertisers start Christmas season early. This is written for us. This is fantastic news. Brands chase inflation-weary shoppers with plentiful TV spots. There's a whole bunch of interesting articles or interesting stats in here. And so it starts with a very controversial question. It says, are you tired of Santa's and relentlessly cheerful snowman filling every screen? No.

Blame the advertisers. This is so funny. Advertisers kicked off the holiday season even earlier this year, and they are inundating televisions with commercials. The activity comes despite continuing efforts by many businesses to rein in costs to contend with tariffs. Holiday TV ads started in earnest in early October, and companies have spent a combined $1.47 billion over the past nine weeks, a 13% jump compared with the year ago period, according to ad tracker, EyeSpot.

So keep this in mind, $1.47 billion on holiday TV ads. Guess how much holiday retail sales are expected to be this year? Counting Black Friday? Everything. Everything. What do you mean? It's big. All retail spend? Holiday. Are you asking for all retail spend in Q4?

Do I have to like pull out grocery and? Sales from November and December each year. Does it include grocery spending, food spending? I don't know. I think it might include everything. I'll give you a hint. In 2020, it was, it was 0.7 trillion, 700 billion. Then it went to 850 billion, then 900, then 950.

last year came in around 99 something really close what was it it was point nine eight trillion nine hundred and eighty billion dollars this year it's expected to be over a trillion we got to hit the gong for that that is that is a that is some fantastic news but this holiday season truly the first holiday season in history that will be over a trillion dollars there's a bunch of interesting facts in here so There are massive investments in digital promotions flooding social media, email inboxes, and text messages. So, of course, the $1.47 billion that's happening on TV is just a small slice of the overall advertising that's happening this holiday season. Retailers spent $5.8 billion on digital ads in the U.S. from November 1st to November 7th, a 4% increase from last year.

Holiday shopping season remains a critical moment for retailers with inflation still. weighing on household budgets, but brands aren't taking any chances of losing out on the action. The National Retail Federation is projecting that holiday sales will surpass $1 trillion. A handful of retailers are proving particularly busy on the TV ad front so far. Walmart's ads feature a Dr. Seuss-inspired world starring Walter Goggins as the Grinch. Target, meanwhile, brings back Chris Kay, a jolly bearded. Christmas enthusiast introduced in a 2024 campaign in Target spot, a woman who with whom

he is on a coffee date gets a peek at his gift list and leaves him confused by referencing his naughty list. Interesting. Amazon.com, this is the most interesting stat. So total minutes of U.S. advertising by retailer. So Amazon last year was, in 2023, they were around 7,000 minutes of, U.S. TV advertising.

And to be clear, that's right in line with Walmart. Target was around 6,000, 7,000 minutes. Macy's was around 6,000, 7,000 minutes. The joke's old. Even Verizon. It's an old joke now, John. Stop making it. What joke?

He said 6, 7. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is ridiculous. That's actually where it is. But they doubled in 2025. They went to 14,000 minutes. Whoa. Yeah, they went up to...

So Amazon has doubled the amount that they're spending on TV advertising. A.B. in the chat said Coca-Cola invented the red and white Santa. I was trying to... Is that true? I was trying to fact-check it a little bit. Apparently, it's an urban legend

that Coca-Cola invented the red and white Santa. In reality, Santa Claus was already appearing in red suits long before he appeared in soda advertisements. But apparently they did... standardize the Santa look, right? They're spending probably more on advertising than most other companies in the world for like many decades, right? They had an opportunity to really define the look, you know, define the look that we are delivering this.

Let me tell you about Adio, the AI Native CRM. Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Friendly reindeer? I'm glad it. It's good to hear that it's, it's... It's a friendly reindeer. Did you see the journal going after CoreWeave? Yes, we should get to that.

There's one last stat that we need to share. So, I mean, basically, it's like there's a lot of jitters in the economy is AI overheated. We're going to go into the CoreWeave story. But overall, the health of the consumer seems to be good. Holiday retail sales are higher than ever in history and over a trillion dollars now. Everyone's advertising. There's one interesting stat in here, which is at the bottom of this Wall Street, an article. They pulled consumers. How do you feel about the timing of holiday ads? And so

when holiday ads starts. So Amazon, one of the largest advertisers in the country, aired its first holiday TV ad on October 13th. Okay, but you got to give me more. Was Santa in the ad? Because I'm kind of a purist. I like to go full speed ahead on, on, on, on, on, the Christmas spirit, the day after Thanksgiving. Day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday. I got our tree. Yes. He went and got our tree on Black Friday.

Yes. And that just feels like the right moment. Yes. I like to have enough. So you don't want to see Santa until the day after Thanksgiving. But then I want to see him everywhere. Yeah, you know, of course. I agree.

She was zero to 100. So I'm with you. I generally agree with that. Tyler, how do you feel? When is it appropriate to see us? After Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving. But anytime before, I can't even listen.

listen to them. Okay, so I will describe the ad, and we could potentially pull it up here, but Amazon Home for the Holidays was the name of the ad. So let me, oh, damn. We got more Christmas lore in the chat. Red and white Santa is because of Amonita Muscaria mushrooms. Huh. Rainier, eat them. What? What is that? Okay, anyway. No, I can see. You know the red and white mushrooms? I know candy canes. Sugar bum player. Plum Fairs. So October 13th, they run an ad. It shows a college student arriving home to see that her childhood bedroom now contains

a treadmill with her father running on it awkwardly wearing short shorts. The young woman checks the Amazon app for more appropriate workout gear. And it's called Home for the Holidays. So no Santa, at least that I can tell from this ad, we can actually pull this up here. The Amazon TV spot Home for the Holliers. Maybe it's not playing. Oh, it is. It is.

Here. I have it here. If we can pull it up. Yeah. So we need to determine whether or not, Jordy, why are we zooming out like this? We need to determine whether or not Jordy decides that this ad is, is too early. Too early. And so let's pull up the Amazon TV spot.

On our side, we have been drinking this podcast in a can all. year. It's very Christmas themed. Okay, I think we have it here. So, Jordy, based on this, is, what is the, what is the earliest day you could run this? No, I'm getting red flags already. Red flags already. Okay, play it, play. You're home for the holidays.

You've dreamt of this moment. Back in your old room. Oh. Hey, kiddo, I'll be right there. At least you can get a deal on new shorts for dad. Something with a little more coverage. Hmm.

There's no Santa. Way too early. You think that's too early? What's the earliest day? You wouldn't even run that before Thanksgiving? And that's like two, it's like almost two months before winter. It's before, I mean, they ran it before Halloween. So, yeah, I mean, this is October.

There's some places in the U.S. where it snows in October, right? You go up to Alaska, this could be like, this could be their, the college students fall break. Yeah, this could be coming back for a weekend. They could be targeting Anchorage or Juneau. Yeah, we don't know where it ran. So I did find an article from the Fungi Foundation called The Influence of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms on Christmas. The story of Santa Claus is not the creation of Coca-Cola, nor St. Nick, or a children's story. It exists because of a small living being with great powers, the Amanita Muskeria mushroom.

So I'm going to go out and on a limb and say, like, the Fungi Foundation might have a little bias. Are you doing this research on Gemini 3 Pro? Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning. We're next-level vibe-coding and deep multimodal understanding. Why don't you vibe-code something for your family for Christmas? So would you say that the Christmas ads are, A, much too early, B, slightly too early, C, about the right time, slightly too late, or much too late,

in terms of the timing of holiday ads this year? I think you can start doing holiday advertising without putting snow on the ground and without... How would you do that? Wait, describe a holiday ad that doesn't at least have a little bit of snow. I would like to see Amazon do a plain text ad that's Star Wars style where the text is just scrolling

and it's like, get ready to buy stuff. This is about to be the Super Bowl of just buying stuff. Do it on Amazon.com. It's time to buy. It's time to buy. It's time to buy. But, but, but, so do you, it sounds like you think that the holiday ads are, you know, at least slightly too early, maybe much too early? Much too early. Or do you think it's about the right time? I think Amazon should start dropping a billion dollars on ads just on Black, Black Friday.

I mean, they probably already do. Because, so, so, so this is, this is the interesting stat from here. They, they pulled a bunch of consumers and, and boomers complained the most about the ads being too early. We're all, we're all the boomers. Because they're locked in. They're paying, they're paying for Gen Z. Over 50% said, yeah, Christmas in October is great. It's perfectly with me. Only 20-something percent of boomers said, yeah, the holiday ads are about the right time. Whereas over 25%, 30% of boomers said, the ads are much too early. Only 10% of Gen Z said.

How many said that they were too late? Did they say that? Yes, millennials. Millennials actually led the whole pack by saying 4.3% of millennials said that the holiday ads started too late this year, which is funny. Gen Z, only 2% were in the too late camp, basically.

A.B. And the boomers, the boomers actually, less than one, less than 2% of them said slightly too late. they were all saying too early, too early. Did they hate Christmas? The boomers? A, B, in the chat says Santa discovered chat, GPT, and now Christmas is 30% faster

and the elves are unemployed. Trey says every time Jordy pitches back on Christmas, when Christmas starts, I'm going to move it up one month. It starts September 1st now. September 1st is great. September 1st. Well, let's, let's... Here's a...

I would like to see Coca-Cola. Get a blimp. You know, I'm a blimp. I want to see more companies leveraging blimps for marketing. They get a blimp, but they hang a sleigh and a bunch of reindeer's. And so they fly the blimps in the crowd, and they have sort of like clear, you know, wiring so that it just looks like Santa's flying over the United States. Somebody's got to do it. I like it.

Well, let's talk about Correweave's staggering. But first, let's talk about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you, join millions who use Julius to connect. their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Very aggressive title. Core Reeve's staggering fall from market grace highlights AI bubble fears. The data center providers' terrible six-week slides picked up speed when a famous short-seller piled concerns on top of delays. Coreweave's value dropped by $33 billion due to AI bubble concerns, a failed merger,

and short-seller criticism. Coreweave, the largest of a new breed of companies driving the AI boom, has watched 33 billion. billion of value vaporized in six weeks. The share price plunge of 46% comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble. Fallout from a failed merger and public criticism from high-profile seller Jim Chanos, known for predicting the collapse of Enron. But some of the high-tech company's biggest problems began with a very low-tech nuisance, unexpected turbulent rainstorms in North Texas. Over the summer, heavy rains and winds caused a roughly 60-day delay at a construction site in Denton, a small city north of Dallas, preventing contractors from pouring concrete for a

major complex. As a result, the completion date for the huge data center cluster consisting of about 260 megawatts of computing power that Corweave plans to least open AI has been pushed back several months. There were additional delays caused by revisions to design plans for some of the data centers, a partner is building for Corrieve in Texas and elsewhere, according to filings. The slowdown was compounded by mixed messaging from Corrieve's chief executive. officer, Michael, which spooked investors and accelerated the company's share price decline at a particularly vulnerable moment for the AI trade. Corwee's business model involves using high interest debt to buy thousands of advanced chips from Nvidia, installing them in server racks

inside data centers that it leases from third-party landlords, then renting access to the chips. As capital spending on Infra has intensified, Corweave, which is 7% owned by Nvidia and backed by hedge funds such as Magnitar Capital and COTU management has become the standard bearer for both the promise and the risk of the AI boom. Some critics point to the high levels of debt it has taken on to finance its data center buildout, while others worry that the company depends on just a handful of large customers, such as OpenAI Microsoft to Meta for the bulk of its revenue. Correweave saw sales more than double in the most recent quarter to nearly 1.4 billion from half a billion a year earlier, but the company is unprofitable and lost 110 million in its most recent quarter.

in early November before the construction delays were widely discussed in Intra Tor played down fears of an AI bubble at a Wall Street Journal event in Northern California. If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, and the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business. He said adding that the number of buyers of data center computing services had convinced him that there is not a bubble inflating. I think this was the same Wall Street Journal event where Sarah Fryer made the backstop. comment that sort of went super viral. I think he, this quote is actually pretty reasonable. This is something that I agree with. The question is always just like the dance of like how much is it accelerating the economy? Is it showing up in the economic statistics yet? How much, how much value is there being created? And then how

are you financing that? Because naturally the capital markets will put everything to the edge. And if you're underwriting it against 10% GDP growth, and that doesn't show up, you could have a bad time. But if it's more like, oh yeah, like, you know, a new SaaS boom, a bunch of great companies building on top of us. Like I think it's super important to put it into context to their last private valuation in November 2024 was $650 million. Secondary Jane Street was in that Magnetar. So again, the company today is at a $34 billion valuation. So meaningful premium from the last private round. Private round?

Like, it was in the tens of billions. 23 billion. So it's still up 50% since the last private round, but it's round trips. Yeah, it was seven in December, seven in December of 2023. And I mean, even just today, the stock down five percent. So, so. Rough, rough, rough. Anyways, it's a lot of debt, but it's a lot of demand.

Yeah. It was interesting. Yesterday, there was a pretty viral post from an account called Hunter Brook. Okay. They said Bethany McLean broke the Enron scandal tomorrow. She publishes her first investigation for Hunterbrook on a company that may epitomize the AI bubble. Sign up. And then they say what it is.

And then they shared it this morning. So I'm expecting like she broke the Enron scandal. She is, her new investigation is on the company that epitomizes the AI bubble. And the company is Radnet. Whoa. Okay. Do you know the company? No. I wasn't familiar. I'm not familiar. I'm somewhat of a bubble enthusiast. I used to pray for a bubble. And I did see a clip of her talking about how it's not the hyperscalers. So it's kind of like we're on the hunt for the. Yeah. So Radnet is a as of today, it traded down on this report. It's a $5.37 billion dollar company. I was expecting something in the $100 to trillion range, right? I wanted some I wanted some real. I wanted some real. meat. Yeah. Didn't get that.

Hunterbrook says Radnett, the AI story that doesn't add up. It's a radiology firm? Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. But again, like this company, like we'll dig into it. But again, this company like collapsing wouldn't make a dent in the broader kind of like AI trade.

Yeah. There's like 25 different funds that could just write this off and be like, yeah, zeros are part of the game. You know? Yeah. Anyway, so Hunterbrook says Radnett's much-hyped AI business is a sideshow, less than 5% of the medical imaging company's revenue, about $65 million out of $1.5 billion in the first nine months of 2025 comes from its newfangled digital health division. Much of that division's revenue and two-thirds of its reported revenue growth, excluding recent acquisitions, come from selling software to Radnett's own imaging center. Imaging center, Radnet also charges mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. Again, I'm not seeing anything.

The pre-AI stock price of this company was around $20 a share. Now it's $70 a share, something like that. And so you have seen like a 3x pump. The stock has definitely benefited from the AI narrative, if that's what they're alleging. But it's, yeah, you know, you're going to have to do better if you're going to try and bring down the entire global economy. you got to service up something that's worth at least $100 billion.

I agree with you on that. Yeah, somewhat of a clickbait. And yet the company's stock has soared in value since it's AI rebrand, trading at a much higher multiple than historic norms and competitors. Yeah. And so again, I think... Okay. Well, let's tell everyone about Privy.

Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spend up white-label wallet, signed transactions, and integrate on trade infrastructure, all through one-sense. simple API. Now, there is interesting, like everyone's been hunting for the Enron of this cycle because there was one in the past. There must be another one. We, of course, were joking around doing the letters lining up from OpenAI or NVIDIA or whatever, when those are obviously very real businesses and no one is alleging that they are doing anything inappropriate. It's more just like, how fast will they grow up? Will they be complete winners forever? Will they face

competition. Those are the questions that people are asking. But Bucco Capital Bloch had a good rebuttal to this question of, is it possible to argue that AI is not a bubble right now? Someone in the chat was putting AI bubble in quotes kind of sarcastically. Well, Bucco Capital is arguing that AI is not a bubble. He says real businesses are seeing real impact from AI. Coding and tech support help are the two clear immediate role beneficiaries. Advertising is another clear beneficiary. Meta has talked about it in detail. We, of course, are sponsored by Profound and get your brand mentioned in chat. CHAPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Traditional boring companies like C.H. Robinson are

pointing to AI and agentic workflows as making them more efficient. The market is responding quite rationally and scrutinizing these AI input companies diligently see Broadcom and Oracle this past week. So that is the sign of, yeah, I agree with him. Like the fact, people are taking a victory lap dunking on Oracle. It's like, this is how the market should be working. Like it should, it should sort of be like, okay, we're regarding this future RPO five years out with some skepticism. We're not going to give you that much credit for it up front. You've got to actually deliver some real value, you've got to get some cash flow into the business, you've got to actually deliver on the build out that you're promising. We're not just going to moon your stock because you said the biggest number,

right? Mag 7 minus Tesla have reasonable valuations and the hyperscalers have more demand than they can handle. He says, I've been vocal that indiscriminately gunning all AI input companies is a dumb thing to do, again, as Oracle Broadcom, Neo-Clouds have shown this last week, but it doesn't mean AI is a bubble. I like it. I think it's a good take. But Dushant... Yeah, it's interesting going back to this Radnet analysis, saying that they also charge mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized.

It's like, how is that... They're positioning that as a bad thing when this company clearly has distribution, and they're just going to, like, vend in technology into that. And it doesn't... Like, I don't... That's basically making the argument that a rapper can never have value when clearly they have a captive audience here.

And they can put in commodity technology and charge premium for it. Yeah. I mean, there's a huge incentive once everyone is giving the stuff's overvalued take to then move into the like it's fraud, it's crime take. But the bar for that is so much higher because it's legal. Obviously, like anything can be overvalued or undervalued at any moment in time. But fraud is very much binary. Like the company's either cooking the books or they aren't.

Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. You've got to stay compliant. Automate compliance and security. AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Let's move on to the EV debate. Tomorrow I want to get into how Rivian beat Ford in trucks, in electric trucks.

That seems crazy to me. I want to get to the bottom of it, but there's a little bit of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and I thought it might be useful to go through some extra context. They say Ford learns a brutal... You're taking the gloves off? I'm putting the gloves on. Wouldn't you be taking the gloves off to fight it out? I don't know if we're going to be fighting yet.

Okay, okay, maybe we'll be agreeing. Ford learns a brutal EV lesson. The Carmaker takes a $19.5 billion right down on its electric vehicle business. And in this op-ed, they say not long ago, automakers were touting electric cars as the future. Well, now they are slamming the brakes hard on that future as market reality has hit them like a 16-wheeler. See Ford Motors stunning announcement Monday that it will take a $19.5 billion charge on its electric vehicle business. Instead of plowing, quote, instead of plowing billions into future, into the future, knowing these large EVs will never make money. We are pivoting, Ford's CEO, Jim Farley, said,

as he explained the company's plan to boost its lineup of gas-powered cars and hybrids. Ford will also scrap its all-electric F-150 lightning pickup. Full scrap. Which has been full scrap. They're not going to sell them anymore. Which is been a favorite of the EV-loving press. So it got very good reviews. And obviously it was positioned in this interesting way.

It has the aesthetics of the F-150. It doesn't have the baggage of the Elon brand, although does that really matter to the F-150 buyer? It's so complicated. I just hope they make a Raptor. You know they Raptor? Raptor R, the high performance version of the F150. Of course.

They need to do the Raptor R plus with a V12. You wouldn't want it to be the R max? R max would be good too. So Ford has lost $13 billion on its EV business since 2023, with bigger losses expected in years to come. Last year, Ford lost about $50,000 for each EV sold Wow, that's so much money to lose. Don't do that.

The truth is that the business case for EVs has always rested largely on government subsidies and mandates. Now that is, now that this combination of government favoritism and coercion is mostly going away, most carmakers have much less reason to make EVs. I was listening to an interview with the CEO Ford yesterday, and he was talking about some of the challenges of the supply chain. Like, I think that they're doing it sort of,

like almost a JV with a Chinese company that has IP around battery manufacturing, but they're going to make them in the United States. And so they're very much negotiating, like, how do we get this new technology that we haven't been really developing? This hasn't been in our DNA for, you know, 20 years. We got to get up to speed, but it's been very costly because they have to pay everyone all down the supply chain and then deal with tariffs and deal with, you know, geopolitical considerations and all this other stuff. So the Biden administration saw, to force feed the EV transition with ramped up fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission rules. Carmakers were required to produce increasing number of EVs, which they had to sell at a loss

because consumer demand was weak. The inflation reduction acts $7,500 EV tax credit boosted demand, but not enough to make the cars profitable. This year's GOP tax bill eliminated the tax credit in October, causing demand to fall off a cliff. Yeah, I was talking to a buddy on Saturday who manages a group of dealerships around L.A. And he was saying that, I mean, the market generally has been brutal for cars this year. You've had just like chaos and uncertainty around tariffs. And then also there was a huge boom right before the tax credit ended. And then everything fell off a cliff.

Yeah. So the deregulation has enabled it forward to cut its losses. sizable as they are, a $19.5 billion charge will hurt, but it's better than spending tens of billions of more dollars on making cars that are not enough, that not enough Americans want to buy. Ford can focus its investments on gas-powered trucks and SUVs that are popular with customers and earn, dare we say, the forbidden word, profits if Ford makes more money. Workers also make more in profit sharing. General Motors this fall also rolled back its EV plans and took a $1.6 billion charge way less. The American car industry would be stronger.

today had its CEOs not embarked on the EV Joy ride with politicians promising subsidies. So yeah, always dangerous to over-rotate on a government mandate or government action because we change governments every couple of years. That's the nature of America, democracy. You know, what might be loved? So you don't think Ford over-rotate and get like a, like maybe four V-12s into a single raptor? like put them at an angle like they do it W-16 yeah like the no the Bugatti but just do it like copy and paste yeah yes yes definitely definitely something eight leader it looked at front of the car looks like a train exactly and it's just it's just engine this is the goal this is what they should go for um no to to more seriously investigate it like do you can you think of a way that uh that

that the Ford F1 lightning would have been successful like it doesn't see like it was like wildly mispriced. It doesn't seem like it was, I mean, it had a classic silhouette. So it wasn't like you could, the cyber truck hasn't been selling fantastically well, but it's like so bold that you could easily say, well, okay, it's not doing that well because it's such an edgy choice. It's such a, it's such a bold design decision. Like, you have to really want to yell to everyone like, I own a, I own a cyber truck. You can get an F-150 lightning. And unless someone's really checking out the badge, they're just going to be like, oh, truck, you know? I don't know. I disagree. Okay. I think real, real ball knowers can

clock that from a quarter mile away. Okay. I, I, it's, it's nuanced. Yeah. But I can, I can, a, I can, a lightening over a normal one of 50s. Because you see the little blue, blue trim. Yeah, it's just, you can just, I know, I know you can, but is that, but it has to be, so would you have gone crazier in the design and put more distance? And put more between the lightning and the classic F-150? I think maybe. I also think, like, truck buyers, it's very possible that they're making purchasing decisions, not for how the average person views it, but how other truck buyers are going to view it,

right? There's so much like, oh, you have a TRX. I think that's true for almost every category. Yeah, very much. Even in, like, the mid-sized sedan. Yeah, or look at handbags. What does it say about you? You see a handbag.

Yeah. Your wife might see, like, oh, that's a work-in. There's the speed limit now. There is no real argument for, oh, I need this car because it's like more efficient or something like that. Yeah. Like they all go the speed limit. They all basically get you from point A to B in the right time. So it becomes very quickly about some differentiation and amenities, but really the brand and what it says about you.

The silhouette, the trim. The silhouette. And so maybe they needed to go more like it's even more obvious that you made the, you eco-friendly choice. But again, I think that the truck buyer just doesn't, is not interested in signaling I made the eco-friendly choice at all. And that seems very intuitive to me. Am I crazy? But like, I know that like the reason everyone went after trucks was because it's just such a big market. Americans buy so many trucks. You had to go after that market. And Rivian wound up winning it essentially, it seems like. But it's, it is weird that Ford wasn't able to break

I guess it's just like their core customers, weren't able to get over the hurdle to actually get into the brand. I'm going to try to figure out how many Rivian trucks actually sold. Yeah, we'll have to pull up all the data and run through it, maybe more. I'm pulling it up if you want to...

So in other news, I mean, we can move on from this. We have our guests joining in just a few minutes. In other news, SpaceX is now initiating a makeoff to select which investment banks will advise on its planned 2026 IPO. They are very much moving forward with the IPO. It feels very real. It does feel like there's a bit of a race between SpaceX and OpenAI to some degree. But SpaceX has to be set up for this.

Like they have to be, you know, there's a whole, whenever you talk to somebody about going public, they're always talking about, well, the financial requirements are much more onerous. Like, you need to be really, you know, like reconciling your books, like understanding the business. Like, you need to be, you know, really mature CFO operation, office of CFO needs to be really dialed in. You probably need, you know, clarity about whether or not you're a for profit or a nonprofit, right? And you have to imagine that SpaceX has been effectively ready to go IPO at any moment in time for a decade, because it's just been such a real business. And they've been working with the government. And so the government comes in and says, wait, we want to know that you

are actually generating real revenue or you're not cooking the books if we're going to be working with you, all that other stuff. So we'll see. I just want to take a second to give it up for everyone out there that's currently in a bakeoff, no matter what side you're on. I just want you to know, we are rooting for you. Like a Christmas cookie bakeoff? Yeah, a lot of people this time of year, they're winding down. Some people are just getting started on some of these bakeoffs, right? There's going to be intense, you know, it's going to be intense all the way through the end of the year. So I just wanted to give a, give a shout out to the bankers. You're not getting enough, not getting enough love.

If you're a banker, get yourself a nice luxury watch on getbezzle.com. Shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezell's team of experts. Bilal asks Bill Gurley, shouldn't SpaceX just do a direct listing? And Bill Gurley says 100%. I would love to know how that will actually play out. what the decision making will be because it has to be, I mean, you imagine in Elon's stock, like the chance that it moons

on day one is like, it feels guaranteed, right? Yeah, so the question is, yeah, I don't know. So looking at Figma's IPO, right? They did not raise very much money in the actual IPO, right? So they priced it around, it was around, like, forget, it was. something around $20 billion valuation.

Yeah. It immediately popped like crazy. Did. But, and people were like, oh, you're leaving a lot of money on the table, but they never had an intention of, they wanted to price the business fairly. So, of course, people had invested pre-IPO in that pre-IPO round, right, or as part of the IPO benefit a lot. But, again, I would, there is very real possibility that they, like, Elon

wants to sell the incremental 30, they raise the 30 billion at one and a half. And I could see there being that much demand. Yeah, I mean, I wonder if you're, if you're, you know, an investor who's supposed to potentially come in as permanent capital, stay as an investor for a very long time, even in the public markets. If you come in at a lower cost basis, even if the stock moons and then round trips, you're like, okay, well, like, I'm still kind of where I was. I'm not day trading it. My point is to like hold this company, not trade it, own it, not trade it. And so I could imagine a situation where we're going out at a logical price, even if you miss the pop and then round trip, could be good for keeping those types of investors on board.

I just don't think people are prepared for it to price at one and a half trillion and go to three on the day of the IPO. That would be very, very crazy. But it could happen. I mean, anything it happened with Elon. He's a Joe Rogan CEO. He's a JRC. That's right. That's right. This was a funny post from Andrew Benson. He says Peter Thiel will personally make 42 billion from the SpaceX IPO at a one and a half trillion dollar valuation. What a recovery from the mistake of exiting Facebook early. Betty never helped. Betty never fell. He was down to his last like 20K, I think. Maybe. I think so. I think so. I've never seen P.T. I've never seen P.T. I've never I've never seen PT do a money spread. I've never seen him wearing Rick Owens. No. I'd never seen an

R.M on the wrist. Never. Never. Never spotted in Chrome Hearts. Never. So how do we know that he's not down to his last 20 grand? He doesn't have spinners on his car. True. He doesn't have his wheels stop when he stops. They don't keep rolling. It's ridiculous. So it's really hard to clock. He doesn't have hydraulics on his car. Hydraulics would be a good one. You got to get hydraulics on That's elite. And 212s in the back. You got to get subwifers. Mod your car.

That's what real power is. Should we talk about Venture? Yeah, FF2 holds 10% of SpaceX. PT funded 10% of that. Carry of 20%, assuming that in the early days, he was entitled to all of it. I have no idea if this math is accurate, but it's going to be a remarkable result.

Probably one of the greatest, one of the greatest investments of all time, certainly in the venture world. It also will be interesting because this will be the second trillion-dollar early-stage investment for PT. And there aren't that many funds that have done any. Remember the Holy Trinity calculation was have you done the first institutional round into a Mag 7 company? And it was just Kleiner, Founders Fund and Sequoia, that fit. that criteria. If you take it to, you need two of those.

Well, the other thing is companies were just going so much, they were going public so much earlier. It's not like they just stayed private and let. I'm just saying if you actually held for the same amount of time. Yeah, yeah, I don't knock that at all because like a lot of the Sequoia guys did hold the Nvidia shares, right, even though they were distributed. I still count it as one of the big wins. But this, yeah, this.

He says never seen him with a grill. either. There we go. That's a great point. No grill is crazy. When you have that amount of money, you've got to get a grill and get it iced out. Did you see this venture capital compensation in the United States? Didi D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D.S. has been in some hot water lately because he's taking shots at Open AI. A lot of open AI folks. Well, he was right in the center of the whole Klein. Oh, that was also dramatic, but, you know, we're back, we're back on the time. He was born and viral stuff. He likes being in hot water. I mean, he did not stop posting. So, VC compensation by fund size. So this is a chart that shows what level are you at and how big is your

fund? And so if you have a sub $50 million fund, even if you're the GP, you're probably only making 200K. But if you're at a $3 billion fund, you might be making $1.2 million in salary. And so I had some car recommendations. This is why these smaller solo GP funds, you're really in it for the glory. It's a carry game. It's one of the best... It's one of the hardest ways to make 200K a year. Indeed, indeed. I mean, some of the associates here, if you're an associate at a small fund, you might be making 150K,000K, even at the big funds, the associates are making 238. The principal VP at a big fund might be making 450. So I had some recommendations for cars. If you're making $153,000 a year as an associate in a small fund. You're going to take that's about $12,000 a month, $13,000 a month.

You're going to put that into a leased Ferrari SF90 street dollar. Okay. Okay. Great. You have no money left over, so you have to sleep in it. But I think it's going to make a statement. You're going to get that promotion. You can sleep in an SF 90. You can't drive a house to work. Yeah. When you get that promotion and now you're making $2.50, well, that's $20K a month for your lease. You're going to upgrade to a used Bugatti Veyron. What about taxes? We're not paying taxes in this model. We're deferring the taxes. But I think if you pull up, if you're making $250,

so what role do you have to do to make $250? To make $250, you have to be, where are you? You have to get promoted to partner at a small fund or principal at a $250 million fund. So you're making $250,000. That's $20K a month. That's enough for the used Bugatti-Vey-Vey-R-Lies. That'll get you the bump up to 350 a year. That's 30K a month.

At this point, you're in Ferrari at 40 territory. There you go. The other thing I was going to say is you could go to the managing partner and say, instead of a bonus this year, will you guarantee the loan on a Porsche ST? Right? Go for something really timeless. And the benefit of that, assuming you live close to work, right? You're not going to be losing a lot.

There's not a lot of depreciation there. I mean, that's a special car. And so you kind of get creative here. The really crazy thing. Okay, so obviously, so once you get promoted, you'll be making $600,000 a year. That's 50K a month. That's enough for a multi-car garage. You're going to get the Ferrari F40 plus a daily driver per Asgoy, which you'll be sleeping.

Okay. Of course, sleeping in it. But at that point, at that point, you have some diversity. You can finally upgrade. You're making 1.2 mil a year. You're making $100,000 a month. That's enough for the Bugatti-Shiron or the Pagani Wira Roadster. But the interesting question is that the current market value of McLaren F1 is $20 million.

And so the carrying cost to lease that is probably around $2 million a year. And so if you see someone dalying at F1, you know that they are post-exit. It's truly the most vehicle. They're in the carry. You got to do it. Yeah, they're into the carry. the carry. Carry mode.

Our, speaking of Kari from Linear, he's our next guest. Let's bring in Kari from Linear. Welcome to the stream. He's in the rooster main room. How are you doing, Kari? Good to see you. Well, it's happening. I'm doing well.

How are you guys? We're doing fantastic. We're in the Christmas spirit, obviously. We're dressed up like Santa Claus, both Santa Claus. If you didn't notice. If you didn't notice. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of look similar to what you usually look like. Yeah.

When do you think is the right time? for companies to start getting into the Christmas spirit because Amazon was running kind of Christmas themed ads back in October. That felt a little early for us. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't really have, like, an opinion on the company level. Like, we don't do anything about it. I think personally, I believe in that in the, like, after Thanksgiving, it's okay to start it. So you can get a Christmas tree after Thanksgiving, but not before that. I'm here for another respecter of after-th Thanksgiving.

I said the exact same thing earlier. Everyone says this, but there's clearly been a sort of erosion and every day, every year, one day, earlier, and now they're running Christmas ads in October. It's an outrage. But anyway, we're not here to talk about Christmas anymore. We're here to talk about design. We're here to talk about your essay.

Design is search. I would love for you to just kick us off with, like, the inspiration behind the essay, why you felt the need to set the record straight on this particular topic. And then we can go into some of the actual thesis and hopefully bat around some different ideas around it. Yeah. Yeah, I think this whole, like, debate on Twitter or on X started like on Friday. I was just sitting on the couch and in the midnight and thinking about this, that this is probably like, I don't know, the fence time. I've seen a company launch this like designed to code tool.

or coding design or like designing code kind of tools. And I think it's like people always kind of see that that's kind of like the final form of design. Like now we can finally design and the actual medium like actually in the code. And I think there's definitely like some benefits to that. And like it is a great tool. But I always think like design is not just the tools. It's like broader than the tools. And in a designer's toolkit, you always have many tools.

And depending what you're designing and like what is the environment. like who's designing for, what's the domain, what's the product, you use different tools. So I think like it's not like that clear cut that like designing in code is the best way to do design. So I kind of like wanted to like highlight that there's some like challenges with this. And what I started with was that I think that what also happened to me in the past, like when I was designing and building front ends for apps, what I often like start feeling happening to me is that like I become less. idealistic or I become more conservative because I know that like whatever I design I also have to build. So there's like already like you start hesitate yourself or like you don't believe

you can actually build certain things because like you start to kind of collapse the design and build more too much. But I think like also like if you are designing against an existing code base, I think it's also introduces like additional bias where it's like the code base is like it's just kind of collection of decisions and architecture and layers and product features that have been built over the years or over the months. And you are now kind of like trying to fit something new into that. So like the natural tendency there is to like fit something that fits and like kind of like any kind of new or alien idea can kind of like feel like it doesn't fit and it doesn't feel like a good idea. So like you're too much reflecting the design against the state of the world

versus like thinking about design more than abstract, like what the world could be. It's like an artificial constraint. Yeah, I mean, it's not, yeah, I don't know if it's an artificial constraint, but it's a constraint is a constraint what arrives through early. So like eventually any design has to be like manufactured or coded or something like made it real. Like design is not real. It's like it's an idea or like a concept or like it's something, but it's not something people use. So I think it's eventually you have to deal with the constraints. Similarly, like architects has to deal with their constraints. Like how does the building, like, how can we build this building?

How can we stay under budget or how do we make sure the materials? How much usable land do we have? Yeah. But it's like, I think like Laura science architects still don't start from the constraints. Like they might acknowledge the constraints, but then they go to start sketching something what they want to see. So I just wanted to highlight those. like every tool has certain kind of strengths and weaknesses.

And like if you're not mindful, you kind of like, they can influence you, you're thinking a lot. So what I worry about is that like if we start thinking design is about coding, then I think we lose something. Like we lose that like space to think more broadly or kind of without those constraints. And we jump into like, let's build this solution. And that was kind of like that. I think like some of people were pushing back on this.

essay or this ideas I was talking about that, well, now the design can be better because we can build it better and the quality can be better. But again, this kind of proves my point. It's like, I don't think that I think construction and execution is different from designing. And I actually think that while it can help to construct the design better, like, does it really make the design better? So I'm like still like looking for that. Like how do these tools actually make the design process better? Like, how do we make better things with these tools versus like we just execute them faster? Yeah, is your view that like doing design within code is something that should effectively happen at a refinement stage where maybe you have a process of like planning how you

want to build a product or a feature? And then, you know, you think really deeply about how you want to do it. You make a bunch of decisions based on your intuition and what you know about the customers and how the things should work. And then you build it. And then, you build it. And then at a certain point you're able to make like more kind of like micro level changes to it when you've already you've already done all the work of the kind of like heavy planning and and being really thoughtful about something versus I don't know I would be I'd be worried if you know somebody was like building me a house and they just came to the land and they threw up like a box like a frame and then they started just kind of like okay we're going to add a door

over here and oh we actually have to add like some pipes under here so let's let's like dig under there. And like you want, when you're trying to build things that are high quality and great, I think like that that like pre-planning process and doing things in the right order matters a lot. So I feel like with these new tools, you have to be thinking about where do you actually like slot in that? Where do you slot into the tool to the overall process? Yeah. Yeah.

I think like I think these new tools can can help to plan this. like, so I think in the past, I think there's more like this, like, I don't know, the way things operate is much more that there's a design and then there's a handoff, then there's engineering, and then nothing crosses this border. And I think that's a bad way to do as well. And I think there should be this blended mode where I like to think that design is kind of essentially like two phases, like you have a conceptual design. So you're kind of like trying to understand the problem. And then you're trying to explore multiple directions. how to solve that problem.

And I always tell my designers to do that. Even if you know the solution, you should still explore something else, because maybe you find something better. Or sometimes you should even explore bad ideas, because sometimes the bad ideas show, sometimes bad ideas actually turn out to be good ideas, and then sometimes bad ideas can show why that other ideas are good.

So I think there's this stage where what my essay was about was like, design is a search. So you're searching for the direction. and you're searching for the concept, you're kind of like removed from the execution stage of actually making it work. So the conceptual design is like it's kind of like cars, car industry has a concept cars. Like those cars are not in production yet and like they never will be, but it's an idea what the car could be. And like car industry never like seems like they never take anything from those concept cars. We took the handle.

We took the handle from the passenger door. Yeah, yeah. We made this crazy, goal wing, super fast, crazy car. And it's like, yeah, the lights. So that's kind of like the idea. It's like, there's a concept that is cool. And we should try to execute it. But like, I don't know what happens in the car industry.

That's just kind of like can't do it. But I think like in a software, you can do it. And then there's the execution design where you like, how do we actually make this work well in this context of the application or fix the problems we didn't think about in a concept, like the edge cases or performance? or just like we get user feedback, we make some fixes. So at that stage, I think the coding tools can be really useful because you are iterating on the,

you're refining the kind of like the design. But you had first this other stage where you kind of like thought about it, like more like, I don't know, not exactly first principles way, but like you started from like a pure problem or an idea and then you like created some concept that you think is worth like, executing on. Yeah. How do you think about, like, it feels like so much of what AI is great is maybe, I mean, AI is pretty good at like search, but I still feel like we probably agree that there's elements that are lacking around inspiration and design is certainly not a solved problem from an AI perspective,

but a lot of times translation is more or less solved. So what stuck out to me was in your essay, you noted that a lot of architects will start by sketching with like pencil and paper. And we are in the era of like you could sketch it and maybe you have to come up with the brilliant idea or the brilliant beautiful design. But then you can just take a picture of that sometimes and get a floor plan out of it potentially. But do you think that something's lost there or do you think that like text? Like are these all going to be lossy and so you want to avoid? like text to image to code, and you want to be able to, like,

dip in at every single level. Like, how do you think about the different translation modes? Because some of them are really helpful. Like, at the end of the day, some of them are just auto-complete, and that's amazing. Yeah, I feel like there could be always something lost. Like, I think, like, when you actually,

if you draw something and then you try to, like, draw it again, for example, you kind of like, even if you just took the sketch and then draw it again on a paper, you probably start noticing different things. You start thinking about the problem slightly different way. So I think what the AI is always doing is kind of like it's shortcutting you to the output without actually you yourself going through the process.

So I think like something always gets lost there. I think again, I don't think it's like necessarily a bad thing. You can just like take a sketch and generate an idea and like you see it in a different way. And that can be good too. But I think there's that problem. Yeah, like some of the comments I got this, like, well, now the AI is so good, so you don't even have to code. So it's like you just describe what you want and the AI kind of like creates it for you. But then now you're kind of like adding another layer of influence there.

It's like the AI is like kind of influencing the output. And the LLMs are kind of like statistic models, whereas they're like always like looking for the correct, like statistically correct answer. They're not looking for the like necessarily the unique answer. or your best answer for you personally or for this context or something. So there can be this danger as like everyone starts to average towards the means or the kind of like

the common standard patterns or standard practices. Again, like, I think it's fine to use AI, but it's just like kind of like you have to understand like what are you giving out or what is the tradeoff. And like if, wait, should you do something about it or are you okay with it? Yeah, so.

the M-Dash of Coe. Well, one interesting example. Earlier in the show, we were talking about Where's Waldo? We use, like, Waldo bench, so we'll test, like, a new image model by just making, like, a Where's Waldo illustration. And, like, none of the models can do it yet. It's, like, really complicated.

They can make it visually look like it's perfect, at least from far away. And then you zoom in, and it's, like, chaotic, and there's no story happening around the page. And maybe Waldo's just not even on the page. Like, it's the ultimate Where's Waldo? He just bounced. But we looked back. of the history and the original illustrators, this guy Martin, and he would spend like eight

weeks on to make like a full spread, right? And you could imagine, I mean, part of that was just like hand illustrating everything, but it's also like planning out, like, what is the storyline and what is the experience of like being in this page and like what is the experience of finding Waldo, right? And I feel like that is still the thing that is ultimately going to give products edge and make products have that craft is when you know that a team that's building software, could have one-shotted like a dashboard and got it like to to the point where it's like it's functionally a dashboard like we can functionally make a where's Waldo illustration that you can go on the page and search for where's Waldo but is it like an enjoyable is it an enjoyable

experience like right now we're not seeing AI that like maybe that you could find the right prompts but right now you're not doing or you're not one-shotting an illustration like this and it is still something you have to put an immense amount of like thought and planning into to and try things and revert them, things like that. Yeah. And I think there's different modes. Like I think you can use AI, like, creative ways of, like, generating a lot of output or different ideas.

But I think it's like, yeah, there's always, like, you now have this influence of the AI model. Like, what is it, how it does, how it creates those outputs and, like, decides things. And then you have the tool that is doing, like, the code base versus, like, you're kind of directly working on a sketch or a screen where there's, like, very, very, you know, little like influence like what what can be due how the design can be the other reason like i like why i even like talked about this like i didn't i don't i don't have any tool to sell here like i don't have a design tool to sell but it's it's more like i worry about the if we start to like kind of see

design as coding then or like start to see design as construction that we like already like there's like the incentives to ship things fast is so strong that we start to see that oh like now we don't need to design because we can just build it and we can designers are going to like design and build it and then i think we start losing that the other phases where can we just think about the problem like can we think about the concepts like how could this be work really nicely. And then, like, I think we, it's like very, like, it's very exciting idea for companies or founders.

Someone's like, I don't have to think about design anymore. It just like happens with that when we build it. And I think it's, it's maybe like a good for the business, but I think it's just like not good for the world or like good to get like my, my kind of like motivation with linear and like talking about some of this stuff is always like, can we just have nicer things? in the world, can we spend more time on the craft and quality and, like, value it again, even if it's not, like, something that can be measured. And I think the Silicon Valley and technology companies always have trouble with this. It's hard to, like, value something that

is not quantifiable, like, easily. It's, like, if there's no data for it, then it doesn't exist. And, like, good design is something sometimes, like, it's cannot be measured. So, so I think, like, this again, like shipping speed and like how many things you ship can be measured, but like if someone makes a design really good, it's like, it's hard to like, it's hard to measure that. And then designing things or like sketching things can be seen as unproductive because it's not directly contributing to that shipping speed or shipping more things. What's your philosophy on storytelling? Is Matt your storyteller? Do you, you know, like that word. Yeah, I mean, I like it because like I think I don't know what happened to marketing,

but I think marketing kind of like lost the, lost the story or lost the plot there at some point. It became very quantitative. Like it became more mathematical, like just buy the ads and run all the A-B tests and all. It became more of a science. And so the art needed a new brand maybe. Yeah. That makes sense. And I would kind of like think like storytelling is kind of like I think it, the same way as I think the brand. I think the brand and storytelling is maybe like the same thing. It's like so I, and like to me brand is something just that you have a belief or like some kind of worldview and you like and you have some values or things you stand for.

Like we always have that and linear and like that's kind of like from the place I always articulate my things. It's like I try to like keep true to that brand. It's like can we have nicer things or quality things or something? And so the brand or the storytelling is not never about the like, again, about the output. It's actually like, it's like a deeper thing. It's like, do you believe in something? And then I think the storytelling or the brand is like, how do you express that belief?

So anyone, like, people can't reach your mind. So you have to like either tell stories or you have to show visuals or videos or something. So how do you express your beliefs? So the problem when people are looking for storytellers is that like, again, like, do you have the story to tell, like, do you believe in anything? And like, is that, and if you believe in something, is it, like, engaging? Like, do we people, do people want to hear that story? So hiring a storyteller doesn't help if you don't have this, like, a good story or, like, engaging story to sell. Yeah, and someone in the chat noticed you guys are hiring a writer, which is something I was pushing for.

Like, if I wanted to hire a storyteller, I would want to, personally, I'd want to hire somebody that is very good at writing and wants to come in and write a lot and, like, enjoys the craft of writing. and not somebody that wants like a pretty title that like sounds cool, but then ultimately just wants to collaborate cross-functionally across the org or whatever it is. Last question I have, what are your thoughts on holiday gimmicks in products? I got into my car this morning and on my profile,

it had a Santa hat on it. And I got some enjoyment out of it. It had some cobwebs for Halloween too. But is that cheapen a product? It feels like something that I don't know which way you're going to go. Yeah, I would think about it, again, like from the point of brand. It's like, does it like fit the brand? Like I think we haven't done those things because we kind of like linear kind of the brand is more that it's like a serious tool for work.

And it's, I think some of those kind of things can kind of feel like often like, I don't know. Like for example, it's always like these situations where I don't know. company is using linear and then something goes down like their service goes down like their whole company is like scrambling and then suddenly some santa hat appears and everyone's like what is this thing is like we we have like our product or like customer base is on fire and like there's some santa has flying around so it's it's like it can be distracting and so i think it's kind of depends on your brand and like how critical like infrastructure you are and where do you put these things i think it can be fun thing for the team to do Easter eggs. Like we do Easter eggs that are hidden. So

there's like you can, there's games you can, there's an arcade you can enter in linear. And then there's like old arcade games you can play. But you know that you don't find them like you have to really find them to like you need to find the Easter egg to access it. So there's like these kind of things that you make secrets. But yeah, I don't personally like the like putting the decorations on your face and like professional tools. Yeah. Makes total sense. Well,

great having you on. And yeah, we'll save the Santa hats for the podcasters. Yeah. Thanks for it. Great catching up. Good to see you. We went,

yeah, thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Merry Christmas. We went way over. So we are going to skip Pranav Mayana and get him on the show tomorrow. Great.

Instead, we will be joined by Mike at liquid death at 1 p.m. And we will catch up with the space data center debate. Pranav, of course, built a first principles model on the economics of data centers on Earth and data centers in space. I'm really enjoying the way the space data center debate has evolved.

We are now vibe coding full applications to get to the bottom of the economics of these decisions. And people are just... Santa came early for Lightspeed this year. Yes, that's right. We have $9 billion a new capital for a new family of funds. Their largest raise in 25 years. AI is rewriting the rules.

We're backing the founders, building what comes next. Congratulations to Lightspeed guests, Aaron, Michael. Yeah. And all of the folks are there. Hang in out with you guys. Interesting. I mean, we saw that chart of like the new VATs. venture funds raised, really falling off a cliff.

Something like 50 billion to date. This feels like a huge chunk of it potentially. That chart was already getting debated. Okay. Yeah. Maybe stuff had been reclassified. Like it's possible that this $9 billion, well, some of it's in a growth fund. So they reclassified it or something like that.

Wait, do you have more context there on that one? No. Okay. Let me tell you about wander.com. Book of Wander with Inspiring Abuse. Hotel Great amenities, Dreamy Beds, Top-Tier Cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation on by Better Folks. Um,

Pavel Prata says, look at Haystack Ventures Fund 3. Okay. It was an $8.2 million fund. Semmel. Semmel. Former guests on the show. Got three decacorns.

Wow. Invested early in DoorDash. Senta corn. Centicorn. CENTACORN alert. Figma. Yeah, Figma. Public company, Instacart,

12 billion, Carter. Well, he did Instacart and DoorDash. That's, that's interesting. You'd think that that would be, like a little bit of like, hey, what are you, what are you doing investing in a competitor? But it was restaurant delivery versus grocery. Grocery, which is different.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's different. Yeah. Hashi Corp. Carda. Open door. Wow.

Best solo GP fund in history. Oh, and apparently, O'Shea says applied intuition was also in this fund. Currently, it's a 15 billion. Wow. That's very,

very impressive. Well, congrats to Semmel. Joe, a bird hasteck. Legend. We've got to have them back on the show. Wow. I'm liking the gong today.

Not warmed up. Still has a nice little ring to it. I have a wild ring to it. Harry Stebbing says, venture investors are going through an existential crisis. If you are not in OpenAI, Anthropic, Hursor, McCor, et cetera, et cetera, you do not freaking matter.

And we were with somebody yesterday for dinner, and they were in Open AI and Anthropic in... They were doing fine. Back in 20, early, 2023, he was feeling pretty good. I do, I do know some VCs that have been early to the category, but missed all of those. And it is a hard story to tell, you know, to bring it back to storytelling if you're, if you're a VC right now and you're, and you haven't done anything like that.

At the same time, if you're, if you're early, early stage, if you're early stage, it, it, I, it, I, it, it, I, it, it, I, it, I, it, I. It doesn't seem that crazy. There are only so many people that could be in these firms really, really early. But if you're a growth investor, I mean, we've seen many growth funds that are in both Anthropic and Open AI, which is like typically a no-no, but they figured out how to do it. Well, why don't you and Tyler read this post from D.D.I. I will. I'll be right back.

So D.D. D.D. Das says a few software engineers at some of the best tech companies. companies told me this week, my entire job these days is prompting cursor or clod code with Opus 4.5 to do what I need and then sanity checking it. Tyler, do you agree? This is that this is the new life of a software engineer? I mean, yeah, kind of. Like, blood code is like really good. And I mean, also Codex, the Gemini CLI, basically all, they're all like very similar.

Yeah, yeah. But that form factor is like really, really good. I find it to be, yeah. It says we've crossed some intangible threshold. of AI generalizing to most software. Opus 4.5 is the first model that makes me actually fear for my job. All models so far were okay-ish at best. Opus 4.5 really is something else. People who haven't tried it yet do not know what's coming for us in the next two to three years. Hell, even next year might be the final turning point already. I don't know how to adapt from here

on. Sure, I can watch Opus do my work all day long and make sure to intervene if it effs up. here or there, but how long will it be until it's not even, until I'm not even needed anymore? Yeah, I mean, I, is the, do you think there's any sort of like overweight here on the type of, like, you know, vibe coding, small apps, new features? Like, in, are you, are you hearing about big, like, big, hairy code bases, things that need to be very, you know, fault tolerant, where, um, it's not just throw, railway software still. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like, you know, he says, you know, he still has to intervene

if it misses up. Yeah. Which I think is like, that's extremely valuable. Like, you need someone to do that. It's like, it's like the law firm thing where people talk about it. You can't just replace everyone with AI because so much of like a law firm is like you need to have them be accountable. Yeah.

Where I think it's very similar with engineers. Yeah. I also think like a lot of the stuff I do is like kind of fairly like low risk. Like it's not super important. it messes up a little bit. So there I can like disagree models. Well it's not going to bring down like a nation state

or it's not like important government data or whatever. So if it's like not super efficient or stuff like this, it's like not that big of a deal. Where I think it's still, it's much hard. Like I often find that if I'm trying to like completely one shot of project and then I keep iterating on it, a lot of times I have to do some sort of like architecture rework because it just like doesn't make sense

if you really want to keep scaling it. Yeah. Yeah. Then you can use the model to fix the tech debt, but it's still, it's kind of like not as smooth as you would really like ideally want it to be. Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, eight sleep. Maybe you just hit clog code and then you go to sleep.

Overnight success. Take a nap on an eight sleep. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. Eight sleep should really make overnight success and do a campaign. Ooh, that would be good. That's a great tagline for them. Overnight success.

I like it. what most discussions of AGI feel like nowadays says Rota cars have windows and can move houses have windows and can't move so it's not the windows that make the car go it's something else entirely

wow yeah that's a good point it's not the car it's not the windows that make the car go something else entirely what a great post DJ cooked with this one it's fantastic What is this long?

Crazy image. That is a crazy image. Martin Screlli shared some, clearly a screenshot of a spreadsheet. I don't know how accurate this data is, but he's pulling minutes spent on AI sites last month alone. 64% were on chat GPT, 15% on Gemini. Deepseeking Grok are the only two on a trajectory to come even close. GROC.com. is only at 3% of the total of these users that were growing on web.

But it's growing very fast. Deepseek.com is the same thing, 3%, but growing very fast, whereas some of the other ones are shrinking. Interesting to see, yeah, perplexities at 2%. Claude A.I. is at 2%. Some of these have, they bend themselves into other systems. And also, these are, of course, websites. so, you know, app-based LLMs are not going to be quite captured here,

but, you know, continues to tell the story that, you know, ChowGPT is still the dominant consumer platform for just hopping on an LLM and answering some questions. Anyway, let me tell you about adquake.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable plan, buy, and measure out-of-home with precision. our next guest, Mike from Liquid Death, is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultrodome.

What's happening? Mike, how you doing? Welcome to the show. What's new in your world? You didn't get the memo. What memo? Oh, yeah. He's not wearing a Santa.

We're the only ones wearing Santa suits today. We are feeling the holiday spirit. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Welcome to the show. First time on the show. There's a ton of stuff I want to talk about marketing and launching this business and how comedy scales. But maybe can you just take us back and really quickly give us the intro on the actual launch?

I feel like is it fair to say that Liquid Death had like a viral launch video strategy? Was that the cornerstone of the launch? Or were there other pieces that were at play in the early days? Well, the way we launched Liquid Death was actually a bit different. So when I had the idea, it was a little bit too crazy to most people to find investment to make it. So I basically created a Facebook page and we made it seem like a real brand just to see like what kind of traction did it get in the world if people thought this was a real thing. Then we shot a cheap commercial for the product that didn't exist. yet. We probably spent

$1,500 to shoot the commercial. And you know, we put a little bit of paid media behind the video, maybe like a few thousand dollars. And then after five months, the video had three million views. The Facebook page had, you know,

60, 70,000 followers, which was more than Aquafina had on Facebook at the time. So then I use all that kind of market traffic to then go raise like a small... I'm so surprised that more CPG brands don't do that. Like it takes so long to make even like, like if somebody's making a drink like this, right? If they actually start working hard on it today, they might have something close to a product that they can sell in six, six to 12 months, something in that range to like really go through rapid iteration and getting it made and scaling up production and testing and all that stuff. When you could just actually make an image of something like this and just like start running ads against it and see like, do people care at all? Do they click through? at a good rate, even with ads that aren't super refined.

I did that once on a project in college. I was shooting a lot of film photos, and I was super frustrated. It was like a 30-minute drive to the place you drop off film. And so I wanted to make, like, basically, like, kind of Netflix model for film, so you could just, like, get sent to roll a film, send it back once you shot it. And I was shocked. I just ran ads against it. And I had, like, immediately, like, a 10.

like customer acquisition cost. Of course, I didn't actually have the service set up, so I just refunded everyone immediately, but it's so much easier to validate stuff. And I think people waste so much time. And when you're in that sort of like pre-product in CPG is just like the death zone, like it's just so hard to get people to care and like actually risk capital when it's like you don't even have a product that I can like sample and you want me to give you like $100,000 or $250K.

It's just, it's a big ask. Completely. it's something I hear from people, you know, who are aspiring entrepreneurs or have an idea. I think there's just like a general sense that, oh, I have this great idea for something. How do I now go raise money? Well, the reality is investors like to invest in businesses, not ideas. So how can you start in some way to prove out that there might be some traction, however you might be able to do that? and that's going to get you a lot further than just saying,

hey, I have this great idea. You know, give me some money. The first, so that video that you described, was that the animated video? I think that was before this, right? That animated video happened later. Can you take me through, like, how, like the, I mean, I imagine that cost more than $15,000 to produce that.

What was the story behind picking animation? I feel like a lot of brands were doing sort of like the founder testimonial direct to camera, you tell the vision of the business or, you know, you go on a podcast tour and Liquid Death came out with that really aggressive, animated style. What was the story behind that particular video? Yeah, I mean, with most businesses, I think you need to look at where are your strengths, what is your network, what are your connections, and utilizing what you have near you to the best of your advantage. So, you know, another way put is play the hand of cards that that you have.

It's unique to you. So for me, I was a big fan of this animated TV show on Adult Swim called Mr. Pickles. It's this bizarre acid trip of a violently funny cartoon. And I ended up reaching out to the guy who was the creator of it. There was two creators, he was one of the two. And in the early days of Liquid Death,

saying, hey, I'm a huge fan of your show. I feel like we have similar creative sensibilities, maybe you'd want to be involved in this liquid death thing I'm trying to get going. And sure enough, he responded. We met, we got along really well. And he's actually the one who drew the skull that is the logo on all of our cans to this date. And then once we actually got the brand off the ground and we had real product and we were selling and we were making, you know, real revenue. We had slightly bigger marketing budgets. You know, we were able to use the, the animation firm that he was working on his TV show with.

And they said, hey, we'll do this for super cheap because Will's already here. He can just do this on the side and, you know, we can make it happen. So animation is very expensive. Like, you know, 30 seconds or 40 seconds of animation is very expensive. But we were able to get, I think we spent all in like 30K on that. But that should have costed probably a quarter million dollars if you were just trying to go do that normally. minimum. So yeah, I was kind of like that was something that was in our quiver and we were a big fan

of it and we had some great resources there to make a really funny. And that was always our thing. How do we make something that's the funniest thing someone's going to see in the feed and spread it for us for free? Yeah, I mean, obviously we love comedy here. You're being interviewed by two Santa Clauses. I'm interested to know, take me a couple of years into my future. Do I regret this or do I lose this?

Like, how does, how do you maintain a level of humor while still, you know, coming to the customer and the business partners with like, hey, yeah, we're not joking around about quality assurance or something. Like, there's a serious side of the business now. There's still some humor that's still there. At the same time, the marketing's probably not laugh a minute anymore. How have you thought about, like, scaling comedy? No, it's a really great question. It's something that I've had to push through multiple departments of the company, which, Yes, we're a funny brand in the way we market,

but if you think about a brand like a person, like think about someone you know that's funny. Like they're not funny in every scenario. You don't tell them that, hey, my dad died and they crack a joke. Like people, a lot of really funny people, they just know people really well. Like they know how to make people laugh. They know when to tone it down.

Like the number one rule of comedy is like, know your audience. So I think it's important and it's always like, hey, when someone sends in an email saying, hey, my case of liquid death from Amazon got all screwed up in the mail, you don't crack a joke like act very burning. Hey, I am so sorry about that. Like, that sucks.

Like, we will completely figure it out. So it's all about knowing where it's important to be, you know, real and authentic. authentic and caring and then where it's important to be funny and irreverent and that you always got to be cognizant. How much did you predict the death of the alcohol culture? It feels like this is perfectly timed. We've talked to so many folks on the show about the next generation just drinking way

less and it feels like you've been a beneficiary of this. But was that something where you had seen a chart and you'd actually seen a trend line or you just had a vibe or it just kind of came to you naturally or you just got lucky. Like, how do you frame the fact that you're selling an alternative to alcohol in a ton of bars? I see it all the time at a time when people are looking for an alternative. Yeah, it was a little bit luck. I think the bigger conceptual drive behind Liquid Death's inception was that how do we make a truly healthy beverage company that markets more like a fun alcohol or junk food company. Because you think about all the funny irreverent marketing over time, it's all like stickers,

Cheetos, dosakis, like it's beer, it's candy, it's fast food. Yeah, my biggest criticism of healthy brands historically is it's so hard to build a brand if you're not making people feel any like real emotion, right? like how many healthy brands are funny at all, like almost, almost zero, right? It's like tone down colors, like just kind of like simple, straightforward copy. There's not a lot of, there's no energy coming through the brands. How are you going to make somebody feel something? And if you want to be remembered, you have to make somebody feel something.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think it's also just strategically unhealthy brands, like in their marketing boardrooms, they're like, we want people to associate our products with fun. So everything we do is going to be centered around fun and like that. We want this to be fun. Or they think about their audience. Like, hey, we are selling to teenagers. Like, this is how we want to make teenagers love us.

We're healthy products. We're not ever marketing to teenagers. They were marketing to 35 plus, you know, females. And they would market a certain way there. So, yeah, part of what I love about liquid death, And why I wanted to do it is so many healthy companies just preach to the choir, people who already make healthy decisions. How can I use a brand to get people who don't typically make healthy decisions? So now every once in a while pick up a low calorie water just because they identify with the brand and they think it's cool.

Then you still get the healthy people because they're already buying in those categories. But how do you start bringing new people into the healthy categories who weren't there before? What's your philosophy on storytelling on X the last 24 hours? Everyone has just been debating. Everyone's been debating like, do you need to hire a chief storyteller? I took the point of view of like truly the most elite storytellers, our founders, CEOs, who are the ones communicating to customers and, you know, vendors and the media and all that kind of thing.

And if you're feeling like you need to hire a storyteller, it's very possible that you just don't know what story to tell, but I don't know that hiring somebody off the street to tell your story is going to actually get you what you want, which is like a plot and, you know, meaning and all these other things that great, great stories and brands have. Yeah, I mean, it's like storytelling is such a broad thing. It's like storytelling is in everything,

and as a founder specifically or if you work in sales, like just being able to tell a story is not just important to a consumer. How do you get employees that want to follow you? If you can't articulate a vision, a story that gets people excited and believing in the mission, like you're not going to be a very good leader either

because it's so important. So I don't know if hiring a chief storyteller is like the equivalent of having like, you know, a language translator. Hey, storyteller, tell everybody in the company why what I say matters. But I think that great CEOs have been successful because they're great storytellers naturally. And that goes far beyond just knowing how to tell a consumer story, but how to get investors excited, how to get employees excited.

You got to be able to speak in a way that makes people believe. You have an advertising background. How do you work with ad agencies today? another thing I was kind of sharing with the audience. My point of view is that more tech companies should work with traditional ad agencies to actually just come up with like novel campaigns to try to cut through the noise. I think people get too focused on, we just need a pretty website. That will solve our problem or we need a nice logo.

And it's like spending not enough time thinking about like really clear messaging and actually thinking in campaigns. I know companies that will spend $50 million next year on marketing, and they're not even thinking about what campaigns are we going to do. They're just thinking about what channels are we doing, how are we spending, who are our segments, and they're not thinking of this kind of like through line messaging. And so I think that that's an area that traditional ad agencies, not necessarily the biggest ones in the world,

but the sort of classic ad agency can actually be really helpful on. Yeah, I think another way to think about it is thinking about all different kinds of companies, tech or what have you, thinking about more of the full funnel. Because when you talk about campaign, you're kind of talking about top of the funnel, like more general awareness around the brand. And then you've got other marketing assets further down the funnel that are focused more on converting somebody into a customer. I think you have so much focus, especially in the tech world, on the lower funnel where you know, hey, I put this money. in and then this much money comes out because of conversion. But what happens is if you're not bringing in enough people at the top of funnel at the brand level, you don't have enough people to convert.

And it starts getting really expensive to convert low level performance people because you start running out of people and it just starts getting more expensive. And I think like a great example is like AI. All the LLMs now are fairly comparable in what they can do. But still, chat GPT is by far the biggest because it's the most notable brand. It's just the thing that people, oh, chat GPT, it's easy to say. It's fun to say. I know that.

I'm just going to use that one. Look at Google. How many other search engines tried to come about and just because of Google's brand and something that's emotional just made that the go-to place where nobody else could really come and take it away. And to your point, a lot of that has to come from more brand marketing and not just like nuanced performance functional market. How are you thinking about the new sparkling energy drink? I feel like there's there's a sort of like positive positioning.

Hey, we're the only ones that have this particular benefit or there's the free of strategy where everyone else has this bad thing and we don't. Is that the framework you think about when you go to launch a new product? What was your thesis behind getting into energy? I mean, we've been asked about when we were going into energy since probably like year one of liquid debt because people just think the brand is so much more like it's got a lot of energy it does and even it's still funny to this day you know in consumer research that we have you know we make flavored sparkling water we make plain water we make ice tea like 60% of the country has heard

of liquid debt 20% know that we make flavored sparkling water we make flavored sparkling water which is our biggest actually category now. Oh. But 19% of the country thinks we make an energy drink. So literally, our biggest category has as much awareness as a category we don't even make yet. That's crazy. Because the brand just sounds more like an energy drink than it sounds like a flavor spark with water. So the reason we got into energy was because I think we finally found a way to stay to our brand ethos,

which is to truly be a better for you brand. And we were able to find a way to do what we feel is a truly better for you energy drink product. And now that the better for you segment of energy is the fastest growing within energy, the Celsius of the world, Alani, C4, these other brands that are low, zero sugar, low calorie, et cetera. It just became the right window for us to kind of offer something that really felt better for you within the category. and that's a combination of things with just, we thought the category was getting a little insane with the caffeine. Like Celsius, Salani, all these brands are like 200 milligrams of caffeine. We started this show, by the way, John would have three Celsius in a single show.

It was insane. It was so bad. Now I do three Diet Coke's, which is like, I think around 100 or 200 milligrams of caffeine. It's not too bad. Yeah, I mean, most people don't think of Red Bull as a weak energy drink. It's the number one selling energy to drink. Red Bull is 114 milligrams in a 12-ounce can. So Celsius is like pounding two red bulls at one time.

Yeah. It's crazy. And I don't think a lot of people realize that. And the more we've talked to people, they kind of feel like, oh, yeah, I don't, I stopped drinking, you know, Celsius or Lani because I don't know, I started feeling a little, like, cracked out.

Oh, yeah, that's crazy. You know, I just thought there was like, you know, we thought there was like a good opportunity to come in with something that was not weak, but this just what we're calling a sane level. of energy in a category that I think is starting to go a little insane. Do you have a tagline for it? Murder your sleep or something?

Well, we actually have on the can, it's not really the tagline, but it's a small one that says death to drowsy. There we go. I knew it was going to do something good. What's the go-to-market with energy? I can imagine, a buddy of mine as like a pro skateboarder. And like in skating, there's like some fatigue around the big energy drink brands. And it feels like there's room. Like energy drinks have had a big place in the industry for a long time.

So I can imagine there's like an athlete angle to this. There's kind of campaign, broader campaign, but how are all the different ways you're planning to really bring it to market? It's funny. It's actually not that at all because, you know, Monster and Red Bull, both companies valued like upwards. of 60 billion apiece, they've got endless checkbooks to buy athlete. And that's the thing. When you do sports marketing, anybody with a big enough checkbook can buy any athlete. That's how they make their money, right?

So if Liquid Death tries to go in and buy athletes competing with the checkbooks of Monster and Red Bull, we're never going to make enough of a dent to have it move the needle for us. So for us, like, what makes Liquid Death unique is we're arguably the fun. beverage brand in the world. And we're better at being funny than anybody else. And big companies have a really hard time producing comedy because you go through that bureaucracy of focus groups and layers. It's hard to make something legit funny the way we can. And no amount of money can fix that. So we want to focus on being the only funny energy drink brand in a sea of extreme.

Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. Yeah, that's great. That's great different positioning. This is, what a great guest for today. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. We've got to jump to our next guest. But we'd love to have you back and go way deeper. No one loves advertising more than me. Maybe you do. Maybe you do.

You're very elite. It's definitely. It's always great. Super fun conversation. Let's do it. Let's do it again soon, please. Congrats to the whole team on the launch. Have a good one.

Appreciate it. Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. You heard from Kari, Linear. Let me actually tell you about linear. Linear. Meet the system for modern software.

linear streamline work across the entire development cycle from Roadmap to Release. We have Elliot Cohen from General Medicine in the Restream waiting room. Next is coming in previously. Co-founded Pill Pack with Friend of the Show. What's happening? Merry Christmas. How are you doing? Happy Hanukkah.

Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Exactly. Please, since this is your first time on the show, I mean, we've talked about General medicine before, but introduce yourself. I'd love to get a little bit of your journey, your story, and then I'm sure we can go into a ton of different aspects of the healthcare industry and general medicine generally. Also, hello, T.J. I hope you're watching. I hope so too. We love you. Anyways, Elliot. Thanks for having me on. He was joking that maybe he would have actually

been better for this because he's got the nice Santa beard. He does have the Santa Beard sometimes. times anyway, but it's great to me to dress up. It's prepared to you around. It's great to me to you guys. My name's Elliot Cohen. I was one of the other founders of Pilpac along with T.J. Parker. And we started that business in 2013. We sold it to Amazon in 2018 and then both of us stayed at Amazon. Success.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It was like, you know, a month or two and it all just worked out. Yeah. What's the latest of general medicine? I hear you guys are.

ripping. But we'd love for you to share kind of the state of the business. Business is doing great. We launched in May and since then we've just been expanding. It's available nationwide. I think it's got the most insurance coverage of any provider group in the country. And even if we don't take your insurance at our provider group, we don't always route you to the right care locally or anywhere else. And really, we started with this sort of first touch experience. We want to make a very good. sure it was as easy as possible to get access to immediate care. And the ambition has always been to build an entry point to health care where you should be able to come to us for absolutely

anything. And what we're launching today is a new way to do that with a chat that has all of your health history in it. You know, we've been watching, I think probably like you guys, people have been chatting with chat, GPT, and Gemini and others about their health care. And, you know, it's something like 60 or 70% of probably any all adult out there. And what we've noticed, though, is that those chats don't go anywhere. They aren't connected back into the rest of your care. And so at General Medicine, what we've been building is the ability to go from that chat straight into actual care. And all of it is health history aware. So we import all of your records, make it really easy for you to have a conversation with them. How are you importing records? I feel like my records are all over the

place. Sometimes the doctor just hands me a piece of paper. I lose it. Sometimes it's an email. Sometimes there's a web form or web portal that I have access to. Sometimes I went and used some one-off, like, you know, internet product that I signed up for, did some labs, have some data over there. It feels very messy. I understand that AI could do cool stuff with it, but I feel like I will be very lazy about actually centralizing all the data in my life since it's not organized. You need an agent that goes and finds every doctor. Yeah, yeah, maybe. But how do you see actually the the the most important pieces of health information pulling those in what's the workflow like how does the how does the user actually experience this we um we have a bunch of elves

and uh you tell us yeah they just stay right out that's great he's going for the elves we completely lost him on the camera too you dodged him completely where am i here i am there we Okay. You know, that's the, I think we've been willing to wrestle with the complexity of healthcare. That's the difference of being willing to take people's insurance, being willing to embed yourself in the entire healthcare system. And so, yeah, you look at what traditional healthcare or, sorry, tech companies have been doing. They've given you these ways to import your records one off. And the problem with that's exactly what you said. You get one record from one care event. You know, when I imported my records into general medicine, I had stuff going back. back to 2005. You know, more than 20 years of records that got automatically imported. And the

difference is we're an actual provider group and we're providing real treatment. And that gives us the ability to go collect a lot more information because it's critical to the way that we provide care. Ultimately, this is the context that we're using that let us provide this, this much richer care to folks when they come to the front door. So it's the goal for this to be like, effectively like passive where even if I'm not immediately seeking like a treatment and I'm just trying to understand my health maybe I have like shoulder pain and I want to understand that this is some I'm coming to general medicine to just like have a conversation with an LLM and maybe later I come back and I'm like oh okay I actually want to pursue treatment now whatever whatever I learned it's not going

away or whatever and then and then you guys can help route it is that is that the goal I think you know Honestly, whenever anybody comes in, if you're experiencing shoulder pan, there's always advice that we can help support you with that's going to help you figure out when's the right time to seek imaging or when's the right time to go to PT, when's the right time to talk to a clinician about it. And that's the whole point of trying to have the care deeply embedded into the experience is you shouldn't have to just wait to see if it magically gets better or doesn't before deciding to really engage with the healthcare system. If it was easy to engage with, you do it right away. And that's what we want to enable. Actually, I've had foot pain for the last

two years. And the connection I had never made in my head, I've been wrestling with this. I've been talking to doctors about it. I've been exploring it. And when I loaded all this into general medicine, it was the first time I made this connection back to injury I had in 2005 on my left foot. And it was the LN that helped me appreciate that there might be a connection between these two. And it started helping me explore, you know, what are the different options to figure this out? We decided, you know, one of the options that came out of that was imaging. I ultimately booked a visit so I could debate whether the imaging was really the right thing or whether PT was the right thing. Since this had been going on for so long, we decided, my clinician and I decided that really

jumping straight to imaging was probably the right next step. And the imaging ended up finding these fists in my ankle. And I'm a relatively, yeah, I'm a relatively educated consumer, and I read the report, and I didn't really understand it. You know, you get like that MRI, you log into your portal, your download, and all this time. It's like this really technical language, and I started reading it. I just didn't really get it, and I dumped it all into our, into General AI, and it started explaining it to me perfectly. In fact, it was so different, though, than my understanding of it, I had to give it to one of my buddies, who's a radiologist, because I thought it meant that this thing was wrong. And he was like, no, no, it's given you a perfect interpretation.

That's exactly what the radiologist said in the read. And so that I was then able to start exploring with it all of these different pathways. So is surgery the right next step? Is there a different, you know, left invasive approach? And ultimately, you know, this thing is not going to diagnose me. It's not going to tell me what the right next step in the care is. But being able to have that very exploratory in-depth dialogue, by the time I get to the actual visit to talk about the different options with the doctor, now I've been.

got this clear idea in my head of, man, there's these three or four different options. I actually don't know which one's right for me, but here kind of puts and takes. And it just makes it way easier to then have a super rich dialogue with the doctor about which of those pathways is best for me. What is it like being a doctor post-LLM in general? Like, are, do you think patients in general are coming in more informed or more freaked out for no reason? Everyone's been told by a doctor, you know, don't Google it.

You know, don't, don't search and then add Reddit to the end. You just go down a rabbit hole. But everything everybody's experienced at this point of, like, actually, it can be very empowering to, like, do research, and maybe it has some negative side effects, but in general, I think this is people want information. They want to understand their health, and you're never going to stop them from exploring.

I think we're pretty clearly on the side of, like, you want to give people these tools. More data and information is helpful. You want consumers to be empowered. You know, it's their bodies, it's their health. They're the ones you get to make the decision. The clinician should not be a gatekeeper. The clinician should be a guide, a quarterback,

helping them get to the best care for them. And we think AI is a really critical tool in that process. It helps the consumer understand more up front. So they come to the visit, way better prepared to have a really rich dialogue. We also then have a bunch of tools that let us share that conversation in a nicely summarized way with the doctors. The doctor, when you show up, they know a conversation. you've been having, they have a sense of that history and what you're interested in exploring

in a visit. And so in a 15-20-minute visit, you can just dive right into the meat of the conversation. You know, you don't have to spend the entire time just ramping up on the history. How do clinicians see you? Do they see you as just like a funnel for business broadly? Like they all want to be on general medicine having you funneled customers to them. Is there any sort of negotiation that happens? Is all of this just happening sort of by default? Is there opt in, opt out? Like, what is the relationship between you and the, you know, the radiologist, for example, in that example you gave?

We've got two ways that you could work with us. One is you can join the platform and see patients directly through the platform. And in that scenario, you're getting paid just like you would as part of any health system, you're getting paid for providing care. Separately from that, we have these really rich. tools that help us understand the quality and the different services that each physician across the country provides. And so when a customer needs follow-up care, we can help them search very precisely for the exact right care. So to come back to my ankle example, you know,

I can go hunting in that in that database for the doctor that is going to be the perfect one to remove this, this for me. Not just a general orthopedist, but someone who has experience in that exact surgery and that exact repair. And I think this is actually where physicians and consumers are perfectly aligned. Consumers want to get to the exact right doctor for their need as quickly as possible. It should really hard to know what that is because you didn't go to med school, you didn't go to residency, like you don't have the same expertise. Same thing on the other side. The doctor wants to practice, you know, they want to focus on the patients that are going to be the absolute best of seeing. And today, there's just no good way for the consumer to know that they're

going to the right doctor for them. And there's no good way for that doctor to say. And there's no good way for that doctor to say, hey, you know, these are exactly the type of patients that I'm going to be really good at. You know, I'm really good at these ankle repairs, but I don't want the knees. There's no way to filter for that to that. One more question from me, and then you can close it out. In terms of, like, AI and health, we're still, it feels like we're very much in, like, the abstract era of, like, maybe it'll cure cancer. And it feels like a couple years ago when in broadly in AI, we were like, Maybe there'll be like an economic explosion will be growing at 10% GDP. And like the economic data, at least this year, has been like pretty fine.

Like same is like not bad, but also not great. And like the unemployment rate just came back and like sort of mixed. And like the stock market's doing well, but it's not like, oh, 10% GDP growth. And I'm interested in if, you know, you know, Sotia Nadella said like, I'll believe the AI like fast takeoff narrative when I see GDP growing really, really fast. Like, what are some of the health metrics that you would look to to judge in, in five years, 10 years? Is AI having a really dramatic impact on health? We've seen, you know, I think everyone has expectations about what's happening with the peptides and GLP-1s, right?

And we would expect that if the GLP-1 mission works, you'll see obesity rates fall. But is there a broader health metric that you're you? you could imagine tracking to understand the impact of what you're doing, but also just broadly, like AI in medicine, having an impact? You want us to get a metric that's not like Chinese peptide shipments into the country? I mean, that one would be probably worth tracking as well. Yeah, I'm just wondering, like, what are the high-level KPIs for, like, the, we look at a lot of, like, the health of the American consumer.

How much do they spend on Black Friday? What about the health of the, just the health of the American? Like, how are we tracking that? I think we look at this stuff all wrong, honestly. Like, we spent the last 20 years optimizing for the financial relationship between the doctor and the system. And so all of our health metrics, the way we talk about NFL.com, I personally, I don't think that's what we should be optimizing for. I think we should be optimizing for the consumer and their enjoyment and their fulfillment that they get out of that experience. So to me, if you want to boil that down as a metric, it's something like Net Promoters Score.

Like, how much do you love interacting with the system, the health care system? Today, that's a silly question because the answer is nobody. Nobody loves interact. That's the craziest thing. It's the definition of wealth, right? The most important thing that anyone is having our life is probably our own help. We should love interacting with it. We should love engaging with it.

And to me, that'll be, that's the metric I would look for, particularly around AI. It has this opportunity to completely shift the way consumers engage with their health and how empowered they are in it and really make them the customer. At the end of the day, I think so much of our healthcare system today, the consumer is not actually the customer. And our ambition of general medicine is to build a completely new health system where the consumer gets to be the actual customer of their own care. And my personal belief is if we do that, we will solve most of the problems in health care. Most of the stuff we complain about, it's because the customer is the employer, the customer's the doctor, is the insurance company, if the government, it's not the consumer. And I think healthcare, I think AI has a real chance to shift that back around and make the consumer the center of that.

I love it. All comes back to MPS. It's a final metric. If you think about it, like in times that I've rate, like my NPS score for a company would be like one. Yeah. It was like a healthcare related experience, you know? Sure.

Like where if you get misdiagnosed or just get bad advice or you get prescribed a drug that you shouldn't be on or whatever, it's like you're going to have a really bad time. And a lot of that I think is avoidable with just, yeah, better understanding. better, more personalization, et cetera. Anyways, congratulations to the whole team. Very, very exciting.

And thanks for coming on the show. Great to have you on. Hey, thanks for having me. This is great. I love that. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

So, Root has weighed in on the word of the year situation. He says the word of the year is slop, thus making the word of the year as an article category, slop. What do you think? Word of the year, still underrated, still room to run. Does the word of the year as an article category have motion? We were trying to, yeah, we were trying to figure out our word of year. The word that we landed on was motion. I love motion. It's, it's hard to perfectly define. You know it when you see it. Sure. You know when someone has it. You know when someone doesn't have it. And I just felt like this year,

you know when they're awake, you know that who's been bad and good. Good. Are you on the motion list? Are you on the motion list? Are you on the motion list? Yeah, it does, it does feel like everyone

sort of landed on the slop thing. Anyway, you had another story you wanted to run through. Warner is preparing to tell shareholders to reject Paramount Offer. Wow. Okay. company to recommend existing Netflix deal as soon as Wednesday. So we'll be looking out for that tomorrow. If you want to participate, I'm kind of tempted to, at least I'm not a, I'm not a Warner

shareholder. I'm tempted to buy a share. I'm tempted to participate. Just to vote yes? Just to vote yes? No, no, no, I haven't decided yet. Oh, okay, okay. You could be swung. You could be swung. You're swing. I want to put the word out. I'm a single, I'm going to buy some and I'm going to be a single issue voter, foghorn leghorn. I need a trilogy. I need a trilogy. I'm going to need a trilogy. I'm going to need a foghorn leghorn trilogy with a lot of porky pig on there. I'm going to need a massive cinematic universe all around. Yeah, you want to hold up the process until you can get clarity on how they're going to treat that IP. Yes. Foghorn, leghorn is very, very important. Anyway, our next guest is already

in the Restream waiting room. We have Ali from Data Brin. Welcome to the show. How are you? So sharp. So sharp. You look very sharp. It feels like you're wearing a suit, but for not. It's your own. It's good to see you again.

How are you doing? Likewise. Good, good, good. I didn't get the memo. I'm not dressed up the right way. We should have. No, you look fantastic. Don't worry about that. Come back on tomorrow. We'll ship you as an outfit. You can raise the next round. We still have a few letters left. But congratulations. Give us the news. What happened? Yeah, what happened is that,

you know, we're just seeing an acceleration in the business, especially with respect to AI. And actually, we slice and dice we're data companies. We slice and dice that data in many, many different ways. Is it a particular customer concentration? Is it the particular cloud? Is the particular product? No, it's like, you know, broad-based acceleration throughout the business.

You know, we passed $4.8 billion run rate revenue. Oh, wow. I was asking him, that's, like, will I get it going? Thank you. Yes, of course, of course. Maybe multiple. Maybe multiple. Perfect.

Yeah. So over 55% growth. But more interestingly, we're now passing $1 billion on our data warehousing product, which we announced four years ago. And we also passed $1 billion run rate in AI revenue, which makes it over 25% of our revenue. Not that many companies in it. There's a lot of talk about AI, what's going on with AI, is their bubble or not? Not many companies have over 25% of their business in AI and over a billion dollars.

So we're excited about that. Yeah, how are you thinking about classifying that? Because I imagine that in some ways, a lot of the data warehouse revenue is from AI companies that want to warehouse data because there's more and more need for data because everyone's doing more things with it. We're in this era where everything is becoming AI. And yet it can feel a little disingenuous when companies slap AI on the back of their name. Well, it's hard to classify too because we were looking at some data earlier this week from Ramp

that basically said, 50% of businesses aren't spending any money on AI directly, yet they're clearly buying things from companies that are using AI. Yes. Where in the supply chain is it? But how do you think about what is the main driver of that data warehouse growth? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of interesting. So, you know, we started the company 2013.

And one of the reasons we started was because we wanted to do AI. And the problem is, since 2013, up until November 2022, no one wanted to hear AI. No one was interested in it. And then come November 2020, we're going to do it. 22 chat chpT gets released and now everyone will just talk about AI. You know, so now it's like, you know, well, you know, are you an AI company? Are you doing AI? What's AI? But yeah, no, when we split our revenue up, right, you can think of it like, you know,

roughly two billion of data munging and securing that data, one billion of data warehousing and then one billion of AI. So you can like separate these out. So it's not like overlapping triple quadruple counter or anything like that. Yeah. So what are they doing with AI? I mean, there's just lots of use cases. So let me give you an example.

So we have this product called Agent Bricks. One of the favorite use cases I have is that Merck actually created a model. These are called Transformer models. These AI models, they created something called Teddy, which stands for transformer-enabled drug discovery. And this is an AI model. Instead of predicting the next word in English sentence, it can predict cells and cell expressions. So it's called gene regulatory network. This is super important for drug discovery because then the drug companies can target those.

genes that are responsible for diseases. So that's like a game changer. And lots of use cases like this, 7-Eleven was able to automate most of their marketing stack. So before, you would have to do your own segmentation. Like, who should I show this material to, who this will be interesting to? And then you would have to create the material for that segment manually. Now the agents can actually prepare a lot of that material themselves. They can generate images. They can rewrite the text to target a specific group. You can do that much faster now. You know, I could keep going. RBC, Royal Bank of Canada. Basically, when an earnings call comes out, you guys will like this. Earning calls comes out. It fetches the earnings call. It looks at all the previous earnings calls,

of competitors, looks at what's going on in the market, looks on, you know, the sentiment, and then writes up the equity research report using the tone of the equity research analysts. And they can get this out in 15 minutes, which is, you know, usually in the industry, it's at least two hours or several hours. Sure. And every minute, every minute matters every second. Exactly. Exactly. So those are some of the use cases you're seeing out there. So it is taking off. You know, we're kind of focused on this. I call it sort of, you know, get stuff done or GSD AI rather than, you know, super intelligence AI. How much of those examples that, I mean, there's a great case studies, very, very tangible in a world where there's, you know, not many tangible AI narratives or how many of those, how many of those case studies came from companies that were already.

using Lakehouse or a data warehousing product, and then you came to them and they were comfortable working with you or they felt like they would be sped up on working with you on the AI side because they were already comfortable with you housing the data for probably years. Yeah, almost all of them. Let me explain why, though. There's a reason why. It's not just, hey, we know each other and I'm comfortable with you.

It's the fact that AI today, like large language models, are actually a commodity. I mean, they're the coolest thing that I've ever happened, but they're already a commodity. What I mean by commodity is just like oil. You know, you could get your gas from this gas station. You can get it from that gas station slightly different to price. It doesn't really matter for your car, right? Same thing with LLMs. You can get this LLM or that LLM.

You don't even know the difference. This week, this one is better. That week, that one is better at, you know, coding. This week, this one can do reasoning. This one can do images. So it's a commodity. So actually, it's now a commodity to have a generative AI model that can answer any question about the world and the history, and it's super smart.

What is super elusive and you can't get your hands on is an AI that can actually reason on proprietary private enterprise data. That actually doesn't exist because the techniques used to generate these AI models work on huge amounts of data. Like when I mean huge, I mean like the whole internet. Like take all the data and crunch it. It doesn't work on a smaller data that enterprises have. So how do you then make the AI work on that data that you already have inside the enterprise? Right? This could be electronic medical records that are sensitive. It could be financial models that are super secretive. It's your recipe for your alpha generation. So what you need to do is you need to get a good data foundation there. And that's the lakehouse that you're talking about. And then the governance and the secure in top of that with Unity Caplock. Those are the kind of things you have to get in place first

before you can unleash the AI on it. So that's why. It's not that they just know us. It's that they've been at it for a long time. And actually, if you haven't gone that foundation right, if your data is a mess, it doesn't help. If you're your data sitting in on-premise in some old database, you know, some Oracle database and it's locked away, what help is this commodity AI that you have on the top? Yeah. What advice do you have for founders that are building their business around, in and around open source technologies? We talked to a lot of young founders that, you know, are open sourcing something really cool. They have a bunch of GitHub stars. There's energy. They don't really have a business model yet, but you can see that they're delivering value and at some point they're going to capture it. What are the do's and don'ts of growing up and being a good

steward of an open source project or being a good partner to the open source ecosystem? What would you counsel a founder in that situation? Yeah, that's a billion dollar question. It's very hard to get that right. You know, what I would say is number one, there's actually kind of two requirements. And there's like an analogy I have that you kind of have to get right. First of all, realize it's a very difficult sport, the sport that you're about to get into open source and to monetize and create. It's like not an easy sport. So, you know, preferably don't get into it because you might, you know, get hurt. But if you decide it if you're all bent on doing this, then, you know, you can think of it as, you know,

your strategy basically is to hit two home runs after each other consecutively. The first home run and you're banking on hitting that home run is for your open source project to take over the world, everybody wants to download it. It's like the greatest thing ever. If you don't hit that first home run, you just shot yourself in the foot because you just gave away all of your intellectual property and you got nothing back for it. And now you have nothing. So you better have a first home run and the open source project takes over the world. So that's like step number one. Now you've achieved that. Congrats to you. Everybody's paying attention. They're downloading your open source project. The GitHub stars are just like, you know, going vertical. It's awesome. You don't

have any monetizable business. You cannot make any money. So then comes home run number two. Home run number two is now you have a 10x, just as good as the first one, innovation on top of the open source. And that's the proprietary value that you're going to provide to these companies. That's why they come to you. Otherwise, you know, they can get open source anywhere. And that's how you monetize. And now you have the sort of secret sauce to a really successful company. If you don't hit the second one, the problem is now the big guys, you know, that's a lot of the hyperscalers and others, just pick up your open source model and they offer it up for almost free. How do you compete with that? How do you compete with that free? That's where you need

your second home run. So it's very difficult. Yeah, so I want to double click on that part particularly. How do you compete that we have because we have other founders that have an open source project and it's growing and they're doing well. And then we see the press release from one of the hypers that their product is now a feature. Their child has been abducted into the cloud. And it's always a, you can just tell no matter how they respond. It's a scary moment. It's an existential moment. We know that there's a board meeting happening. If you're in, you know, a board meeting, a fly on the wall an advisor or something, and there's a founder who says, oh, one of the hyperscalers just launched a clone of our product. They're really going to come

for us this quarter, maybe next quarter. What do you advise them to stay in the game while the capital canon of the Mag 7 is pointed directly at them. Well formulated. So I actually get that call from the founder day before the board meeting and they're like, oh my God, you know, what do I do? My life is over. And I tell them, congratulations. You just proved that you hit your first home run. They're paying attention to you. So now they're coming after you. So now you need to do another home run. Okay. But your first home run, you just actually succeed. This is a home run business. They would not, yeah, they would not direct all the those cannons towards you if you didn't have anything. So you have something. Now they're

direct, now they're coming after you. So now you need to innovate and you need to actually monetize that. In that portion, you cannot open source. If you do, they'll just keep, you know, milking that with their cannons, right? So that's the way to go about it. And it's normal part of life. And we all went through it. I went through it. I remember like, you know, waking up, you know, cold sweats in the middle of the night and, you know, freaking out about like, oh my God, this thing will kill us. But, you know, the good news if you continue innovating, you can stay ahead. Because, you know, the people that want to copy you,

they're always going to be a few years behind. So if you continue executing, you can stay ahead. And if you did a home run once, you can probably do it again. If you set your mind to it. So just the trick is to stay behind, stay ahead, right? Because the way it works is that startups, the main thing going on is that they don't have time on their side, right? Like if you could freeze all startups for 12 months,

all the Macs 7 would catch up immediately. There would be no startups, right? So your whole thing is outrun the big guys very, very fast. So that's another thing I tell them. Don't slow down. Move very, very fast. Continue innovating. Yeah, I love that.

How do you categorize everything that's happening in AI? Like, what is your personal framework? Because what you're doing is very different than, let's say, a foundation model lab, which is different than, you know, maybe an end rapper company. Is picks and shovels a pejorative? Is that a pejorative? No, I mean, look, Levi's still around. I don't know how many of those gold diggers are around.

That's true. That's a great point. I never thought about that. Yeah, still here, kicking, you know, here in San Francisco. But I would say there's kind of like three paradigms going on at the same time. Paradigm number one is the quest for super intelligence. And the quest for super intelligence, you know, requires bigger and bigger data centers, more and more gigawatts, and it's very resource-intensive. And the idea is to come up with such a smart model that can improve itself to the point that we don't like,

you know, it's just curing cancer and coming up with new AI models. and of course we should be really afraid of the safety aspects of that. So that's like what the frontier labs are doing. I would say, you know, category two is the researchers that created these models in the first place, like Jan Lacoon or Rich Sutton who created reinforcement learning, that technique, they'll actually tell you like, hey, that's not going to actually work. You're not going to get to superintelligence that way because that's not how humans learn or animals learn and so on. So they're like, hey, leave us alone and we'll get to something in 20 years,

which to me sounds like a little bit like, hey, we don't really know. Leave us alone. Then there's a third camp. The third camp is, hey, we already have all the AGI we already need. We might not have super intelligence, but we have artificial general intelligence. I'm in that camp. I believe we already have artificial general intelligence. It's generally intelligent.

Just use it, and you'll be convinced within like five minutes. It's pretty smart. So now, start applying it and get stuff done inside of an enterprise or inside of an organization. Just GSD, deliver AI value on basic tasks. And if you're unsure, start with the simplest mundane. tasks that, you know, are really low cost right now. See if you can start augmenting and automating them. How did you process the talent wars this year? I think the question on my mind is, will we see, you know, a $1 billion pay package in two years from now or even in next year, right?

But I'm curious how you processed it as somebody. Was it a one-time thing or is it a new normal? That was last year, guys. You know, I think Noam ad character got like a billion, right? I mean, they paid billions for character. At a guy. And that was literally a billion dollars for one guy, at least one billion. So that's already done that. So, I mean, 10 billion is the next, I guess, package to go for.

And maybe that was Alex, that's meta. But, no, but, you know, joking aside, I think that it's also in everybody's interest to exaggerate these numbers. Yeah. Like, the joke among CEOs is, let's exaggerate that number, right? It's like, oh, you know, companies are making like 100, billion dollars offers for my employees. Because when you say that, what happens is that, first of all, you must have a great team. Yeah. First of all, it's like a compliment to your team. Second,

if someone comes after someone in your team now, they're going to expect at least that amount. If they don't, they feel insulted. You're not even offering me a billion dollars? What's going on here? So that's a, they don't value my skill set, clearly. Exactly, exactly, right? So it dissuades everyone. So I think there's also a little bit like self-reported numbers here going on. The market is not as crazy as, you know, people say, but it has been pretty nutty, and especially on the research side in AI, but actually, I think it's coming. Like, it used to be the case that if you're a big shot professor in AI, you could, you know, get funding, huge amounts of funding for crazy evaluations. And if you could just say, I want to just do research and get to superintelligence,

those days are over, actually, already. It's not longer a case that you could, that pitch doesn't work anymore. And there's no capital. Like, you're not going to get a billion or two billion dollars to go just to research on AI. You need to be a lot of. You need to be over. You need to have something more than that. So I do think actually the market is coming to its census. The timeline, the last 24 hours has been fixated on the role of storytelling within companies. You're a fantastic storyteller, like very just fun to listen to and animated. I'm curious were you always goaded or did you have humble beginnings? There's no way to answer that question, right? It's like a trick question. No, it's not, no, no, I genuinely believe there are

founders that come out and they're seed stage and they're hyper engaging and they're incredible to listen to and they get you excited and motivated. And then there are other founders that like have to really learn. But I think it's like in some ways it's like you either have it or you don't. Yeah, look, I think there's many things that go into like running companies. Like one of them, ingredient number one is to be engaging and excite people and get people excited about your vision. But number two, you also need a good strategy. If you don't have a good strategy, events just going to catch up to you. Number three, you need to, put together an amazing stellar world-class team, right?

That's all that matters. Because if you're amazing, but your team is not, then you're not going to go anywhere. Even if you have all of these, it's not enough. You need to also execute. Like, you need to actually get the team to execute again and again and again and get to the results, and that kind of matters more than anything else. I mean, look at AWS, like they're phenomenal at executing, right?

And then finally, if I, you need to do it with good culture. If the culture is not good, it will eat you up from inside. The key people will leave. You know, we've seen, you know, companies that went under because the culture was bad or the CEO got fired and they went through tough times and, you know, the, you know, authorities were after them for fraud and these kind of things. So you kind of have to nail all these five, you know, this unfortunate truth. Well, is it Series L now? You're quickly running out of letters of the alphabet. We have to ask, are you going to be hanging out with us at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon?

or are there no plans to go public? Because we'd love to. We can hang out there. We can hang out there anytime at the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. But whether we're going to go public, look, I mean, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't rule it out. Okay. We would be public by end the next year. But, you know, it's also not like it's guaranteed.

Sure. Because the thing I want to avoid is what happened in 2022. Yeah. In 2021, I had a lot of peers that were too excited. They took their companies public. They're ex. By the way, great storytellers. Great execution machines.

They were awesome. Yeah. But then interest rates went up. Inflation went up. And in 2022, they said, hey, man, you got to like get EBDA. You got to produce, you know, margins. So what did they do? They all did layoffs.

Yeah. And they all produced EBTA. And what did they cut down on? All the futuristic stuff. All the innovation. All the new products. And also employee morale kind of tanked. Yeah.

Because, you know, employees are like, I don't trust you anymore. You said this company is going to do well. But now, you know, you're firing my friend here. So, you know, as you can see, we're not. growing twice to growth rate of many of those companies. And I think staying private in 2022 had something to do with it as well. So, you know, we're not trying to exactly time the market. We're trying to win it. Yeah. Do you think that the narrative around open source LLMs is like is over? Do you think it's understood? Because, you know, the deep seek moment was a moment when everyone

was saying, oh, maybe open source will win or it'll have a serious shaping of the market structure in AI. It feels like folks have a much more concrete thesis around the shape of the AI market with, you know, like an aggregator winning in consumer and then maybe more of an oligopoly and in enterprise code gen and API businesses. And certainly the open source models fit into that. But how are you thinking about open source AI models developing maybe in next year or the year after? Yeah, I would just say that open source has always been a commoditizer in business. Sure. You know, like when Linux showed up, like is the greatest thing that's happening right now in the world Linux?

No. But what did it do? It kind of commoditize Windows, right? And significantly so. And we've seen that again and again and again. So what it does really, it sets the price of the IP of the open source project down to zero. So that price of that intellectual property shrinks to zero overnight.

Yeah. And that's great because that basically puts pressure. on the LLM Foundation model layer to have lower and lower prices. And the lower those prices go, the complementary market, the market on top, which is us with agent bricks and, you know, Lake Base, or, you know, our database for agents, helps that market because, you know, it makes our cogs, our costs of goods sold, which is we would pay for those LLMs lower. So I think that's going to continue happening.

And in particular, one interesting trend is that China is putting the pressure on, just open sourcing, Everything. They're not just open sourcing the large language models and the weights. They're open sourcing the whole stack. Everything they did. This is the way we open source. This is the data we use. Here's a research paper. And they're having really fast diffusion of innovation happening in China. And that also puts pressure on the West over here. We're like, okay, we can't fall behind. So we're doing the same thing over here. So I think that's just going to continue. Yeah. So I mean, people, I completely understand that narrative. And it does seem like it feels like China's commoditizing American Foundation Labs, and you easily fall into this geopolitical narrative. But is there a world where in

China, it's really just like the classic open source technology with a for-profit corporation wrapped around it. And they're trying to build like the red hat of LLMs over there. And like, that's the real motivation more than just some like crazy wrench in the system. Well, I think that I don't exactly know how the communist party things and what they are doing. But I think that over here, we will have companies that are already doing that. Like, if you talk to startup already, many, many of the startups in the United States are actually using the open source models and the Chinese models. By the way, what's already happened, which people don't talk about openly. It's really hush-hush, is that they're taking these Chinese models and kind of distilling them and you get an American model, right, with an American name.

And you don't know that it actually tracks back to Kwan from Al-Bah or something like that. That's already happening in this market. Look at the vast majority of startups, a huge amount of open-source Chinese. these models that are being used by American open source models. And I think you'll have actually Red Hat like companies here, even here in the United States that will say, hey, we'll help you get up to speed, use the right ones, make sure it has the right safety and guardrails, and you're not taking any risk, and we do it at low cost. That's already happening in some sense.

And then there are people who do that in the cloud. We actually help you do that. At Databix, we are multi-LLM. So we have OEM. So OpenAI is available natively to all of our customers. Anthropic is natively available. to all of our customers, and Gemini is natively available. So if you use the analytics, those three are actually under the hood,

and then we have all the open source models to let you. So since we are the next layer on top, right, that's the complementary market that I was talking about. So I think this will continue. And I think actually that's good for innovation that's happening. There's so much pressure on that middle layer, because it is a very lucrative layer, right? I mean, you know, as judging from the evaluations of Anthropic and Open AI

that are very well deserved, you know, that's an important market. So I think this will just continue. You'll see more and more open source. that's not going to stop, and it's going to be from China. My prediction is that you're going to also see that now from Europe and United States. Because do we want Chinese models to take over the whole planet in open source? I think that some nations will say, hey, why don't we just get together and fund a supercomputer and then build one here?

By the way, we used to do that back in the day. It was called supercomputers. National labs that had supercomputers. The largest computers on the planet used to be supercomputers state-funded. That's going to start happening. you know, in either this country or that country, and once that starts, you know, everyone wants to get in. Like, you know, the United States is going to have the biggest one, right? Of course.

So, my prediction. What does your sales process look like at this stage? Like, where are you investing time specifically with customers that are in the pipeline? Like, what's the highest leverage and what does even the workflow look like? I mean, we have many different segments at Databricks. There is a self-serve segment. You can actually sign up. There's a free edition of Databricks that's really important funnel for us.

The free edition, anyone can just sign up with their Gmail and use Databix forever, but you don't get lots of compute. You don't get lots of AI. You get a little sliver. So you get a taste of Databix forever. Then, you know, we have... Good. This is your sales process.

You're selling right now. Always. You should try it out. You guys have a Gmail address. If you have a Gmail address, you know, go to databics.com slash try. And so once you've done that, so then come. Then comes the trial. It's like, okay, but that was just a sliver of compute.

I mean, you know, I want to process a lot of LLMs. I want to use the bigger models. I want to do more interesting things with agent Brickster. I want to have my database with Lake Base. Then I would say get the free trial. So free trial will give you, I think, $200 or something like that, and you get to spend $200 for free with us. And so that's sort of the funnel.

And then from there, people convert. This is really how most SMBs, mid-market companies, that's how they get started on Databricks. I'm talking about the big dogs. Yeah, how different is the organization? Do these people, like the person who maybe is responsible at some level for the biggest deal you've ever done and the person who's responsible for the smallest deal? Are these like, have these people ever met in the organization?

Are they completely separate? Is there some cross-functional opportunity? Because they're very different functions, I imagine. One is steak dinner. The other's like UI, U-X, I would imagine. But I don't know. Well, believe it or not, the steak dinner days are kind of over. Okay.

You know, I mean, like, it's not like, hey, we'll just take you out. And we have, like, the best golf players and we have the best drinkers that, you know. To be clear, if you take us out to a steak dinner, I mean, we'll go to databreaks.com slash try. I would. Yeah. Yeah. And you pay me $0. Exactly.

Right. But I was hoping I would sneak that by you. Exactly. Massive. Steak futures are selling off massively right now. Exactly. I'm sorry, guys. What I would say is that, you know, we actually have a funnel.

So, you know, you start maybe as a sales development leader. Actually, we have one at Databricks. You know, a guy called Matt started just, you know, hitting the phone, just getting these SMBs. And then grew with the business, then got into the sort of more mid-market accounts. And then now, like, on the enterprise side. So, you know, we have people who grew up with Databricks and they can, you know, you learn to do the whole all the way to the, you know, a lot of it is just getting comfortable, right? Because it's like, it's one thing, if I'm negotiating with you with 30,000. deal.

It's another thing if I'm negotiating, we do a, you know, $250 million deal. And, you know, a lot of folks will just get nervous and they'll just start shaking, right? So, but how do you do that? How do you get that, you know, $200 million deal? You know, it actually goes back to those free additions and those things. In that conversation with an exec high up, we will say, did you know that you're already leveraging open source sparks throughout the organization already? Did you know that you're already having people using the free edition with their Gmail accounts?

you know, you have all these trials. By the way, the things I'm telling you about today, if you don't trust me, you can go yourself try it up in the free edition. So actually, that kind of motion, bottom up motion helps a lot, even in the top-down big enterprise sales. But there, the goal is what are the transformational projects that you want us to help you with, and how do we really drive business value for your organization? Like, what's a big strategic board-level initiative? Let us help you make you successful with that. We're trying to get to 24 hours a day. And so we're really trying to use AI, 24 hours a day live, use AI to optimize when John sleeps, when I sleep, all that stuff.

Anyways, this has been super fun. Congratulations for the whole team on the milestone. We'll save it for next time. And looking forward to the next letter. Awesome. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

What a legend. Yeah, what a legend. He's such a great CEO, such a great conversation. More breaking news. Cushner's Affinity withdraws from Warner Bros. No way. Wow, this is breaking news right now. That is wild.

Jared Kushner is exiting from the takeover battle. Affinity was helping to finance Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers, but now it believes the dynamics of an investment have changed since it became involved in the process. The battle for Warner Brothers stands to reshape the entertainment industry, regardless of which bidder emerges victorious with both bids. Read between the lines, I think we know what happened. Jared Kushner, clearly a Foghorn, Leghorn fan,

when not enough Looney Tunes in the deal. Not enough Porky Pig. I'm out. I'm out. Not enough Foghorn, Leghorn. And on that, I'm out. I'm out. I'm out. I can't support this. If David Allison is going to pull the plug on the Looney Tunes Cinematic Universe reboot and Three Triloghors of Foghorn, Leghorn, live action, I'm out.

I'm not doing it. This is very exciting. It feels like, is it going to land with Netflix? We're back and forth on this now. But it feels like Netflix has certainly the upper hand, a lot of support, and barring some wild card in Washington, wild card with the shareholders, they're set up. I mean, the board has accepted the offers. Aslov is moving his thumbs up on it. Allison's haven't given their best and final offer, though. We know that. They said that themselves. And, I mean, to be clear, there are other sources of capital beyond affinity partners.

So, like, they could clearly marshal the capital. I mean, Larry Ellison himself has it. He's worth $250 billion. We're talking 80. We're talking 90. We're talking 100. It's a lot, but there is a lot of money there to, you know, pool around if you need to. Anyway.

Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 24 hours we see a new offer, right? There you have current one likely, you know, Zaslov pushing. to reject the offer. Sure. This is the moment where they kind of need a up the ante a little bit. Well, we got to get one of our media correspondence back on the show because that's been the highlight of last week was talking to Dylan Byers and Ben Smith about media and getting up to speed on the story behind the Warner Brothers Netflix, you know, Paramount deal.

Anyway, in other big company news, the U.S. Unilever CEO disclosed, neutrophil and liquid IV revenues. Have you ever been a liquid IV guy? No. Element guy. You're an element guy. That's right. You like salt, not whatever's in liquid IV.

Sugar? Sugar, it is based, though. Sugar is very good for hydration. You like, you like it. I really enjoy the liquid IV. Actually, I got to say, I just turned from liquid IV because I'm on the new Chris Williamson, creatine in the stick pack. Yeah, that one, the new tonic that the elf is putting under the tree this week.

The new tonic creatine stick pack, you can open it up and show what they actually look like. Just pull the whole thing off. Oh, yeah, that's fine. So it's this little stick pack, like liquid ivy, like the one that you were having, Elemente. But it has creatine in there, five grams of creatine in there. And normally, I'm used to drinking the sand, the creatine sand. And this is fantastic.

It's so delicious. Yes, you can just shoot it back if you want to be the boldest elf in the in Santa's workshop. And just texted wrist check the elf. Risk check the elf. That's hilarious. But anyway, back to Liquid Ivy World in a fireside chat with J.P. Morgan, the Unilever CEO, revealed that both Nutriful and Liquid Ivy have entered the billion dollar brand club. I don't know if you want to ring the bell.

Go for it. I'll take the next one. Enter the billion-dollar brand club. Great execution from Unilever. Sometimes when they announce these acquisitions, it sounds a little crazy. They pay a lot, but they know how to scale. They have the distribution. They are soft-circling one and a half billion euros per year for M&A.

I was thrilled to see this. I have a lot of friends with CPG businesses that are starting to get to a scale where they are prime targets. and I am just very excited for them. So Liquid IV, they bought it when it was doing 120, and now it's doing over a billion. What a good run. Do we know what they paid for Liquid IV back in the day? How much actually, how much did that deal cost them?

That would be interesting. But, I mean, it just, it is, it is a testament to the CPG founders. 500 million. 500 million. And now they're making a billion a year in revenue. I mean, I don't know that they're 50% net margins, but I would think it's high margin. And so imagine you sell for 500. You're the founder of this company. You're doing 120. You sell for 500. And you're like, this is amazing. I have a $120 million business. But then five years later,

they're making 500. What they paid for you in that one year, they're making that every year for as long as the brands around. So don't underestimate just compounding its scale with these businesses. get what you deserve. Don't take the low off. I think liquid death will be a good case study there because they certainly would have had opportunities to sell. They raised a huge amount of money. And they kind of probably took them out. And there were a lot of people saying, oh, it's overvalued now. But, you know, if you just keep compounding, keep getting more, I completely agree.

Just like, like, there's no one else that's really going after that particular brand positioning. You let it compound. It becomes this unique thing. It becomes Lindy, basically. And whenever we talk about CBDD. Speaking of compounding, what's compounding. Ann over at Forbes says, beloved productivity app, Notion told employees today it is doing a $300 million tender at an $11 billion valuation. The company crossed 600 million error, half of which comes from AI.

That is fantastic. Watch out for more Notion round slash an IPO. I expect that they will get out in, God willing, in the year 2026. Yeah. But we'll see. We'll see. They are on a tear. Notion was a $2 million seed, according to Jason, to $11 billion in 12 years.

That's crazy. Great case study of growing into your valuation. Jason says, $2 million seed. Yeah, if you scroll down on this chart, you can see a huge jump in valuation, and it takes them a while to catch up on the revenue. This was the journey. So 2013, they had a $2 million seed. 2019, they had $3 million of ARR and they got to an $800 million valuation.

That's crazy. 2020, they're at 13 million of ARR to a $2 billion valuation. Yeah. 2021, 31 million of ARR to a $2 billion valuation. That is so crazy because, I mean, if this number's right, they basically triple revenue, not even triple revenue, and they see their multiple double. They're multiple doubles from 150 X of 300.

But then from 2021, they grew revenue from 31 million to 600 million, and the valuation went up 10%. And it was the correct. Yeah, it was the correct. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, eventually caught up. Wow. Amazing, what a wild run. Obviously, the VCs in 2021 are not getting an insane IRA on that, but they're in the job's not finished. And story's not over. You're in the green. Yeah, what, yeah, what a remarkable revenue ramp. So Sophie says, price of the brick going up. We've missed saying that. We should have, we should have hit him with the brink. But it was good chatting with him.

So, yeah, as we know, DataBricks raised us. Brandon, Baylor said, this is crazy. The Lulu Lemon leggings to oil ratio just hit a new high. You can now buy two barrels of oil for every one pair of Lulu Lemon. What can we talk? High rise. Like, this is one of the most important economic metrics in the world, John. Obviously, this says so much about the state of markets.

Yeah, hilarious. also it is making me feel like Lulu Lemon leggings are made from oil. Well, I think they are. Right? It's like petroleum-based polyester or something. Yes. There's some. My understanding, yes.

T.J. Parker posted this. This is so good. Before there was TBPN. Look at him on Fox Business. It's funny because this headline is crazy. The CVS killer, he looks kind of like the guy that would kill someone in a CBS. Is this the C? Yeah, who is the CVS killer?

Did they ever find the real one? Did he ever get brought in for questioning? I'm going to say, I'm going to say, he looks more like a young Santa Claus. Okay, yeah. That's a much nicer thing to say. I take it back. But, wow, countdown to the closing doll in three minutes, he hops on CVS killer. And I don't know, he didn't quite kill CVS, but what a fantastic run with Pillpack.

Absolutely legendary business, and he's already on to the next one at General Medicine. So it's fantastic. Singer vehicles just put up a minute, 22 seconds. This is huge news. This is the biggest news in technology these days, I think, I think. So Laguna Seca, the legendary racetrack in California. This is an American hypercar. So the...

Production car lap record. The story here is that the... The story here is that Konigseg set the lap record just a few weeks ago, and Lucas Singer took it personally. And he said, I'm going to go and put up a better time,

and he did. But this car is insane. So it's a two-seater, but they're both centered. So it's like a fighter jet. I don't know why everyone's lie. That's a very cool setup. Yeah.

So you sit, it like this, one after the other. And the doors, we need to pull up a picture of... Why are you guys laughing? That's just fire. I've never heard of anything. I've never heard of that before. If you go to four seconds on this, on this main video, the Laguna Seca video here on X, you can see the doors. So the door, yeah, the doors are two, two doors long because you need to let two people in. So when you open the goal, and I'm sure they're planning to let it fly at some point. It's crazy. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy.

They're doing part of that it's ready to, like they have a secret feature. Yeah. Trying to beat Elon to the flying car like he was alluding on Joe Rogan. So there has been a recent hypercar war at Laguna. This is specifically for the production car record. Zinger just took it by two seconds. So in August of 2024, Konigseg strikes. Koenig brought the Jesco attack to Laguna Seika for the first time.

They got a 124-86. beating the previous long-standing benchmark held by the Singer 21C and the McLarence Sena at 125, 120, and 127. So Singer had it at 125. Then Konigseg shows up with a Jesco attack, gets it at 124. Then they come back, lowered the speed record. There was this new, there was this new, there's a new noise limit at Laguna Seiko. your car cannot make more than 90 decibels of noise from the exhaust.

I assume Brian Johnson had something to do with this, but you have to bolt on a special exhaust, so you're not too loud while you're going on the track. And of course, that affects track performance. And so they reset the record. A coding said comes back. They have a specific Jesco attack for this new Laguna restriction. They get a 124, and then Singer,

comes back on December 9th, just weeks after their Conex-November run, Singer returns with their 3D-printed hybrid 21C. Driver Joel Miller runs a blistering 122. And so... And put into context, the 992 G2G3RS is doing it at 12865. So, quite a big gap. Basically walking. Basically walking speed.

Walking speed. Wow. Congrats to Lucas Singer. is almost unbelievable. For me to believe that it's real, he's going to have to drive it into the actual. I think he is. He wants us to believe that this was built by humans. I don't know.

It seems like alien technology, probably. Make it make it make sense. Make it make sense. No, it's a beautiful, beautiful vehicle. Anyways, final, final post of the show. We posted this yesterday as well, but Future was named Friend of the House by Louis Vuitton for embodying its values. And Lewis Pisano says,

and what values would those be? I don't know enough about Louis Vuitton to understand what this means. Well, it's funny, do you know about future's values? No. Have you ever, you haven't listened to a future song?

I just know, no, I really don't know. I mean, I think his primary values is getting the bag. Getting the bag. And so that's kind of how I read it. Well, they make bags. people, you know, he has, I think, a lot of, a lot of children with a lot of different women.

Okay, okay. Well, I think maybe that's, I don't know if that's when Louis Vuitton's values. You know, we were talking about a friend, and he was saying, like, the whole goal, we're in the getting the bag business. Everyone wants to get their bag, get the bag, secure the bag. And I thought that, you know, that is a good goal. But there is an alternative, which is to secure a series of smaller bags every two weeks. Every two weeks. directly to you a bag that you have on your bank account. Yes, exactly. So you're getting a series

of small bags that then compound over time. You throw them in a large sack like your Santa Claus. But no one talks about getting the sack. Everyone talks about getting the bag. No one talks about getting the Santa Claus sack. But you have to get the bag. You get a series of small bags and over a lifetime. You accumulate a bag that gets larger and larger until you have the real bag. Well, here's another post about life from Colty Bra. I know I said it was the last one, but I take it back. Colty Bra says, a fantastic poster over the years. He says, you can just do things.

Go from Olympic snowboarder to head of cartel, $50 million reward from FBI on your head. Life is short. Let it rip. Absolutely do not let it rip. I do not recommend becoming the head of a cartel. That is insane. But, of course, this is a very wild story. Maybe become.

You know, maybe become the head of a $50 million annual revenue business in a sort of legal domain. Maybe an enterprise software. Enterprise software. SAS. Maybe a database. Life is short. Go from an Olympic snowboarder to a SaaS icon. Let it rip.

Life is short. And we'll leave it at that. We are actually going. Breaking news from Tyler. What we got on? Opening, I got rid of their model router for free users. I thought that was pretty interesting. What does that mean?

What did that mean? They got rid of it for free users? If you like getting rid of it, it is always there for, is it the model picker or the model router? Is it always on auto? Or can you still, or do you have to pick thinking pro legacy models?

Like, how do you pick the model? Yeah, so I think it's the router. So that means that the picker's still there, but it doesn't automatically do it for you. It just defaults to fast or the basic model? I don't know which one. I'm not either. But I would imagine that, like, if I was thinking through it, like, I would think it would be the opposite, right?

Yeah, totally. Because as a pro user, I want to. Do pro all the time. Yeah, I want to get what you paid for. Yeah, yeah, you want to get what you paid for. But the free user... Yeah, who you think is, like, the unsophisticated person, they don't know which wants to use. Hmm. Interesting.

Well, we'll have to dig in. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Merry Christmas to everyone. Happy holidays. Cartels only get a bad rap because they don't have a head storyteller. I feel like some of the, I feel like Eskobar was low-key, an incredible storyteller. I don't think so. I think people told stories about him.

I don't think he was doing any story. He was in politics. Oh, maybe. Okay. Well, we'll get to the bottom of that tomorrow. He was a politician. Have a good rest of your day. Merry Christmas.

Thanks for hanging out with us today. We will see you tomorrow. It feels like a Friday. It does. When you put on the Santa suit. It does feel like a Friday. We are going go-karting. We are doing a little end-of-year team outing.

We're going go-carting. as a team. We should be fun. Very excited for that. Well, we will see you guys tomorrow. Tomorrow. Goodbye.