TBPN Live - Billionaires Xmas List, Disneyland Buyout, Gifting A Mclaren F1, Too Big to Fail
Episode Date: December 12, 2024TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - ht...tps://getbezel.comFollow TBPN:Â https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - Brother Catch Up (09:43) - Xmas List for All (45:58) - Some Personnel News (56:23) - The Size Gong (01:00:00) - DM's (01:02:22) - The Timeline
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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world.
Jordy, how are you surviving? There are fires all over your house. Give us the breakdown.
Fortunately, not over my house, John. But yeah, thank you to everybody that reached out over the
last 48 hours. There is a big fire raging in Malibu. Luckily, it's a few miles from my house,
but got enough distance that we're never directly under threat.
But yeah, didn't have power for the last couple of days.
I was able to get Wi-Fi from my neighbor, so I was sitting on the edge of my house,
with their permission, of course, but sitting on the edge of my house,
making sure I could still get posts out on the accounts.
But yeah, it wasn't, uh, wasn't, wasn't an excuse to
miss recording today, rolled out of bed, uh, took the one road out of Malibu that was still open
and, uh, made it, made it to the studio as we always do. And, uh, got a shave courtesy of, uh,
the Jonathan club where, where we record and, uh And now we're on the mics.
Fantastic.
Yeah, I think while you were scrambling around Malibu
trying to find safe haven and deal with all the chaos there,
I was relaxing at Disneyland, which was great.
You were.
A little Tuesday Disneyland.
Yeah, a little Tuesday Disneyland with the three-year-old.
It was fantastic.
Highly recommend it.
It's fascinating.
It really makes you appreciate authoritarianism.
Totally.
There are metal detectors now to even get into downtown Disney,
which is just like a mall.
So you can't even go shopping without getting through the metal detector.
So you know it's just perfectly safe there.
Everything is perfectly clean.
There's just people everywhere.
Total surveillance state.
You sacrifice all your rights when you go in.
But I've realized that in light of recent events,
they need to put metal detectors outside of Manhattan.
It needs to be a prison colony.
That's why being in Dubai, the UAE broadly,
is so nice and relaxing because you walk around and given you have this feeling
when you enter the, to the, the, the monarchy, I shouldn't even call it a country. It's a,
it's a fiefdom almost. Um, you have this feeling that you're entering a highly secure place that's
run in a highly competent way where there's one guy who understands that it's my responsibility as king to keep the people safe.
Yeah. I mean, a billionaire reached out to me and was like, you guys shouldn't talk so much about luxury goods.
You live in America. You can only do that in Dubai or Singapore.
Yeah, or Miami.
Yeah, or Miami.
You need to be in a place with strong
property rights, John, stop what you're doing. And I was like, I'm not afraid. I will put on a
bulletproof vest every day. Yeah. And nice driving, nice cars, wearing watches or whatever. It's
motivating to try to get our country safer and more secure and, and use the leverage that we have.
Yeah. Um, but it won't be on this
podcast because we don't talk about politics. But, uh, Disneyland is an interesting place to
reflect on like the American populace. It's, it's, I, I read something that it's like the most
perfect representation of maybe the world demographics or at least American demographics.
Like one of every type of person is, uh, represented uh represented uh obviously there's a dearth of
pateks a plethora of tweety bird tattoos and uh the whole experience leaves you thinking you need
to go turbo long novo nordisk but these are these are our people and what i came from away from it
with with this this idea that it's like this is is our team for America and the team we got,
and we can't just reset and start fresh. These are, these, these are our compatriots. These are
our colleagues and we need to work hard to make America a fantastic place for everyone. And so,
uh, it's inspiring. Um, but one thing that kept hitting my mind as I was walking around Disneyland
was that, uh, it is, you know,
people think of it as expensive, a couple hundred bucks to get in. Uh, the price always goes up,
everything's expensive, but they are fantastic at price discrimination. So a couple hundred bucks
to get a ticket in, but for maybe if you, if you spend a few thousand dollars on your family,
you can buy basically every single fast pass and all the lines go from
like 60 minutes to like 10 minutes. It's great. So clearly they figured out that there's a whole
group of people that are willing to pay. Then there's the 20K. I was about to bring that up.
Yep. Yep. So if you pay something like 20K for your family, there is a Disneyland employee who
will walk you around and walk you directly to the front of every line. Do they wear a tuxedo? No, they're a cast member. So they're in kind of a very,
like, it's like almost old timey Hollywood, like pinstripes and bow tie type thing.
Great, great. That works. They'll educate you on what the best flow is, answer any questions,
give you extra history about the park. It turns it into a really crazy experience.
But every actor or actress that works on a Disney show gets one of those free.
And it used to be unlimited.
It used to be whenever you wanted to go to Disneyland,
if you were on a Disney show or a star in a movie,
they would just, yeah, come get the $20,000 experience.
But apparently Kim Kardashian was so obsessed with Disneyland.
She was going like every single month and they changed the rule,
but now she just pays because she loves it.
And I was thinking about that.
I was like, that's incredibly humanizing.
You know, people are very like, Oh, Kim's like this, you know,
Machiavellian like crazy, like, you know, person who's like so driven.
But like, I love that for her. At the end of. Yeah. I just loves Disneyland. Um, and giving that experience
to her, to her children. Yeah, exactly. And so my, my, that would be actually savage though.
She was like, no, we're not bringing the kids. This is my doom. Yeah, amazing. But
I love that Disneyland, you know, you can
go and have an experience for maybe
$200. You can go and have an experience for
$2,000 or $20,000.
And that spread is the same product.
And there's the $5 million product.
Yeah, you can do a buyout. We'll get to it on the show today.
The whole thing.
I think actually Citadel did
a buyout there. I'm pretty
sure they bought out all of Disney world or something, something like that. Some hedge fund,
maybe Goldman or something. But, um, yeah, so just a fantastic example of price discrimination
when they have a product that people wouldn't normally think is like consumption based. Like
obviously AWS has price discrimination because the more servers. There's a lot of, there's a
lot of midsize companies out there that probably spend, let's say they spend a lot of money
on their holiday party, right?
Maybe they spend $500,000, right?
They have to fly a bunch of people in,
and there's some events and maybe performers
and big catering fees, locations, all that stuff.
Those companies should start just doing a Disneyland buyout
every 10 years for retention purposes to be like,
well, it's been eight years. Like
you got to get to the buyout. That's better. It costs the same amount of money. That's great.
But if you took that 500 K that you're spending every year invested into the market, you'd also
get, you know, potentially, uh, uh, and even be even less than, than doing the events every
single year. That's one of the best things about a heretic on like founders fund. That's not an
annual thing. It happens like it's happened twice now.
And it was like,
everyone was like last year's heretic on,
but it was actually like three years earlier and it happens very randomly.
It's not an annual schedule.
So it's like when you get the invite,
you have to say yes because it's not going to happen next year.
Whereas the holiday party,
you get invited.
Oh,
I'll catch the next one.
Um,
but my challenge to the listener is, what could you be doing today
to drive more price discrimination?
Like, we're going to launch a merch store at some point.
You can bet your life that there's going to be something
in there for $50.
There's going to be something for $500.
And there's definitely going to be something
for $5,000 in there.
Absolutely.
Because you need to be capturing the value
of the entire breadth of your audience.
And it's obvious if you're
in a consumption B2B software product, but if you're, if you're not, you know,
yeah. And at the end, you know, we'll have venture, you know, we'll have venture debt
products for entrepreneurs. We'll have even, um, you know, uh, venture fund, like line of credits,
right. If you have, uh, if you're doing a capital call, but you haven't the capital,
you need a little bit extra time to fund an investment,
we'll have products for you, right?
So full spectrum of products for this audience.
I mean, a venture fund is like the best way
to price discriminate in an audience of founders
because the higher value the founder,
the more money you make when you invest.
Yep. And, and I think that's why so many content creators have built funds on the back of it
and run ads. It's very, very hard to capture the full value of your audience. You look at
what Ben Thompson has done at Stratechery, you know, that there are major, like, you know,
multimillionaires at Meta who subscribed to Stratechery for $200.
Yeah, and they're the people, they make decisions that lead to hundreds of millions of dollars
of spend in various infrastructure products.
Now, he's very happy with how much the big book of business he's built up, and he likes
not having that conflict of interest with the ads, so it's kind of made sense for him.
But if he really wanted to maximize the value of Stratechery, it would just be ads and a venture fund for sure. Anyway, moving on.
So go and figure out how you can squeeze more money out of your best customers because they
do it in a way that's aligned. Nobody, nobody spending the 20 grand at Disney is, is unhappy
that they're spending that money. They're getting a great experience out of it. Yeah. So let's move
on to, it's the holiday season.
Everyone's thinking about what gifts to get for their loved ones, their friends, their
colleagues.
And we're going to do a bit of a gift guide.
We've talked about the information's gift guide before.
It was an absolute disaster.
I don't think they had a single item on that list that was over a thousand dollars.
Disaster.
You're going to need a little bit bigger budget to follow along today, but there should be a lot of interesting items and interesting selections. And there's something for everyone in
here. There really is. There really is. So we're going to run through a few different archetypes
that might match folks in your life and give you some guides for what type of gifts you should be
putting under the Christmas tree this year. Let's start with the absolute size lord, the billionaire, the deca-billionaire.
You're shopping for the man who truly has everything.
What do you get them?
Hard to shop for.
Hard to shop for.
I say we start with cars.
And I think you got to go McLaren F1.
How can you not?
It's going to be a $20 million car, but it has incredible history,
both in the automotive world and in the tech world.
Yeah, and it's something that someone can appreciate,
even whether they're into cars or not, right?
Yeah.
You don't need too much time to explain the significance of the McLaren F1
until somebody is getting really, really interested in the vehicle.
And as soon as you sit in that middle seat, it's not left-hand drive. It's not right-hand drive. It's center drive. And the best part,
you can take two friends for a ride because it seats three in the front seat. Yeah. And it's,
and it's funny cause I wish more. Did you ever, um, we had, we had an old, like, you know, like
country farm truck growing up that had three in the front. And some of my best memories are with
my dad driving, you know, me or my little brother in the middle seat and then, uh, the right seat.
And, uh, we need to bring back car. I think it's really dangerous. I think it's why they probably
killed it. But, um, they're, they actually are bringing it back. Uh, Hyundai is releasing a new
Palisade that has nine seats. Hyundai is cooking. They're cooking. Absolutely.
They,
they basically ripped off the,
um,
the Range Rover,
the new palisade.
Like they're just like, it looks so good.
It's ours.
This is our silhouette now.
Exactly.
And the interior,
we're going to take all your colors and textures.
It's because,
uh,
in,
in Korea,
uh,
if you have a nine passenger vehicle or more,
you can use a bus lane.
No way.
And so they were like, do you have to have nine? But do you have to have, I don't know if you need to have nine in there or you you can use a bus lane no way and so they were like let's just
put nine but do you have to have i don't know if you need to have nine in there you just need to
have nine seats i think you just need to have nine seats and so they're just like it's technically a
bus so you can just take it anywhere and then they were like yeah let's just sell this in america so
it has the bench seat in the middle and you can just pull it up um so yeah uh if you're if you're
shopping for the size lord get them them a McLaren F1.
And then of course we have to get them a watch and we highly, highly recommend
picking up a graph diamonds hallucination
for $55 million.
It's the ultimate in jeweled watches
over 110 carats of rare colored diamonds.
It's true for context.
I think a lot of people that listen to the show
follow us on X as well.
And this was the watch that we recommended
um mark andreessen actually get eight of if he's going to follow the two percent rule they only
made one but they only made one but you can this is the kind of piece that you can commission like
it's not a it's not really the kind of thing you walk in off the street and say hey can i get a
graph diamonds hallucination you know the funniest thing about the hallucination it's quartz watch
really yeah it's not mechanical.
Wow.
Yeah.
You're like, I got to change the battery on my $55 million watch.
It's great.
But that's not why you wear it, folks. It's a good reminder that you have a $55 million watch, though.
Exactly.
Every once in a while, you want to be like, oh, yeah.
Got to change the battery.
OK, let's move on to guns, which is obviously something you'll be gifting to loved ones
this year.
And for the absolute size lord, the giga Chad, the deck of
billionaire, we're going with the Cabot guns, meteorite 1911 pistols. They're maybe four and a
half million dollars for the pair. But I have some copy for here. And it's fantastic. The timeless
design of the 1911, the ageless significance of interstellar materials, the innovative techniques
of an all American gun company, a trinity of circumstance fused together into the perfect embodiment of a transcendent
vision. After billions of years of travel, a meteorite hurtled to earth in Namibia during
earth's prehistoric times. Unknown to Western civilization until the early 1800s, pieces were
used by the ancient Nama people in the construction of tools and weapons.
In 2015, its destiny not yet fulfilled. The hands of Cabot Gunn's master craftsman wrapped around a 77-pound piece of unshapen metal, and so began a transformation. We too, like the men of yore,
saw in it the potential to shape earthly perfection from materials from the cosmos.
What a fantastic marketing language.
This reminds me, a while back I was looking into, I wanted to get a 1911 with a trigger made out of shark tooth.
Oh, that's great.
Basically, which is totally possible.
Yeah, totally.
It's certainly not easy, but in the world of high-end custom firearms manufacturing,
which I happen to have a little bit of experience in, anything is possible.
So I think that's really going to stand out if you get from the Meteorite pistols.
Yeah, the Meteorite, can't go wrong with Meteorite, pretty much anything.
Okay, then we got to move on to vacations for the, for the size Lord.
What are we getting them for a vacation we
recommend a box at every formula one race this is going to run you three to five million dollars
but they're going to be able to enjoy it for not just one month but basically the entire year they
will not be able to go almost go a single month without thinking about you exactly which is the
goal right if you're buying something for a b-n you want to be top of mind, whether it's just a friend or you have some
type of business relationship with them or, um, or if you're another beaner and you're,
and you're actually competing kind of PVP to try to accumulate the most assets, getting your rival
beaner box seats for every F1 event is such a good way to distract them. Exactly. Not to mention, you know, I think a gift like this is great.
You know, most of our B&R friends are not going to be going to every single race.
Like F1 can get boring, right?
It's definitely, especially if Verstappen, you know, continues his tear.
And, but it's the kind of thing you can, as a B&R can re-gift it, they can say to their,
you know, second or third cousin, Hey, do you want this?
I can't make it. Like, I can't make it like 50 people sometimes.
Yeah.
You know,
they can bring all their friends and they're reminding,
uh,
they're reminded of you.
It's kind of like getting someone like an old magazine subscription.
Every time it shows up,
they're like,
Oh yeah,
I'm still enjoying that present.
The graph diamonds hallucination might still be just sitting in a jewelry
case somewhere.
The McLaren F one might be wrapped in a garage somewhere.
But those F1 tickets are going to keep coming up, coming up.
And they're going to be on the circuit.
And they're going to thank you.
So pick it up.
And then, of course, you have to get someone a horse.
And so for the size Lord, we recommend a thoroughbred racehorse,
ideally derived from the Fusachi Pegasus line,
the 2000 Kentucky Derby winner.
It's one of the most expensive stallion deals ever. The bloodline was syndicated for $60 to
$70 million in 2000. So just really top tier racing bloodline. And I think that's something
that they could really enjoy. And they'd love to have a horse under the Christmas tree.
Yeah, it's a trophy. It's a trophy horse.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Everybody should have one, at least one,
and it's a conversation starter
if you're having somebody buy your property.
Let's do American Dynamist next,
and then we'll move on to one of yours.
So for the American Dynamist,
the capital allocator who's focused on making America great again,
we are focused on making America great again. We are focused on
American products, things that speak to revitalization, reindustrialization,
America, manufacturing, hard tech. And so for the American Dynamist we
recommend a M134 minigun by Dylan Arrow. It's gonna run you 200 to 300k. They're
pretty rare on the civilian market,
but it's an electrically driven 7.62 millimeter rotary machine gun. It's iconic and extremely rare
due to NFA regulations, but you've seen it in movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger carries one.
He played it in COD.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The minigun is iconic and it'll look great mounted on the back wall while
they're taking Zoom calls. Every defense founder will say, hey, this investor has a minigun is iconic, and it'll look great mounted on the back wall while they're taking Zoom calls.
Every defense founder will say, hey, this investor has a minigun.
They take American dynamism seriously, and I want their check.
I want them in my round.
Yeah, and it would look fantastic on a Cybertruck if your buddy buys a Cybertruck.
It's sort of a novelty thing to add to that novelty, having a minigun strapped to it.
And maybe you work with someone
like Allen Control Systems to make it fully autonomous. That'd be fantastic. Yeah. So let's
move on to cars for the American Dynamist. The Cybertruck's a great one. I'm also extremely
bullish on the Tesla Roadster second generation. You get them the allocation now. I think it's
going to happen. It's been way delayed, but Elon is on top of the world. The stock's ripping.
He knows where the regulation is going.
I think he's going to get it done, and I think those will be delivered pretty soon.
So that's a good one.
Come on, though, John.
Yeah.
What else do you have?
How can we not go with the Ford GT on this one?
It's a great car.
If I'm going to take an AD capital allocator very seriously, them pulling up in, you know, I want them pulling up
in something culturally significant, right?
And Ford GT is not a perfect car by any means.
You know, there's a bunch of ways you could sort of poke holes in it.
But it has history at Le Mans.
Yeah, you can go watch Ford versus Ferrari.
There's a whole movie about this history.
It's fantastic.
The silhouette is unbeatable. Like it is a
fantastic, it feels American, but it almost feels like a Lamborghini, a cousin of Lamborghini.
Um, and if you are, let's say you've got a portfolio founder that's, uh, running hot,
they're doing well. You think they're going to get you a nice markup, taking them to the airport
and your Ford GT or picking them up is a great way to make a statement and say, hey, when you're raising your next round, make sure I get my pro rata, super pro rata, and ideally get a chance to lead that next round.
Yep. And that's a classic is the blue stripe,
but you could throw a red, white, and blue livery on there,
and it wouldn't look tacky on a Ford GT because you're used to seeing some stripes.
You're used to seeing a little bit of a design on there.
Yeah, or if Catherine Boyle is driving it,
maybe a white with an orange stripe down the center would be cool.
Be very cool.
Or just throw an Eagle decal right on the front, like it's an old Ford Mustang.
Yep.
That's fantastic, too.
Yeah, I love that.
Let's move on to watches.
We've got to keep it in America.
This is tough for watches.
A lot of Swiss.
A lot of Swiss watches out there.
Swiss dominance.
If you're going American, you're going to want to stick to RGM
and get the Pennsylvania Series Tourbillon.
It's going to run you 100K.
Very limited annual production,
but it's one of the greatest american made
watches out there uh their movements built in house and uh it's just an amazing example of
of american craftsmanship and i really do believe that if you care about american manufacturing
you can't just put your money where your mouth is exactly like if we start pouring money into rgm
they will catch up eventually yeah like the market is a weighing machine over time. Yeah. And so, um, yeah,
we've talked about this on the show a lot. Yeah. You can't just rely on the government to stimulate
the economy. It's on every single one of our listeners, every single American to find, to,
to stimulate the economy in a way to, to bet on the future that they want. Right. And then for vacation for the American dynamist,
uh,
what's the most American vacation you could possibly do?
We mentioned it earlier.
It's the Disneyland park buyout.
It's going to run you a couple of million bucks,
but you get a one night private event at Disneyland in Anaheim or Disney
world in Orlando.
And you get the entire theme park reserve reserve for you and guests after
hours,
no lines, personalized shows,
fireworks, character meets, and unlimited rides.
Second on the list
here deserves an honorary
mention would be heli skiing in the
remote Alaskan wilderness. Yeah, for the more athletic.
One to two weeks, 100 to
200k, private helicopter,
untouched powder, luxury
base camps, gourmet meals,
avalanche certified guides.
And you're keeping it in America.
Extreme, you know, exotic skiing while staying American.
Exactly.
I love that.
And it's just a good reminder of like this place is ours.
Exactly.
It almost shouldn't be, right?
Yep.
Russia almost had a claim to it.
Could be Russian, could be Canadian.
But it's ours.
You got to go explore it.
It's going to be a great story.
And I look forward to doing our first live show in Alaska.
I've been.
It's fantastic. The Alaskan fans are crazy. I'm live show in Alaska. I've been. It's fantastic.
The Alaskan fans are crazy.
I'm extremely bullish on Alaska.
I love Alaska.
Always sending DMs and offering to send down fish and things like that.
Okay, so let's wrap up with the VCs for a minute and move on to the Seed Stage founder.
Jordy, what do you got for me?
Oh, man, this was hard. Um, seed stage founder,
you know, maybe, maybe you're pulling in 80, a hundred K a year. You're pretty oriented around
the work, you know, not less time on the road. Um, more capital constrained. You know, if you
give somebody a McLaren F1 and they don't have the income or the net worth to sort of support it,
that's kind of like a cursing them in a way, right?
It might cost you a few hundred grand a year just to maintain properly.
But so yeah, we'll go down the list.
For a gun, I'd say most of the Seed Stage founders I know, they do have Glocks.
They're pretty much a stock Glock.
It's a $600 gun.
Get them, have them take that Glock down to Arleigh Arms.
Sure.
And upgrade every single element of it.
Strip out all the internals, externals,
and really sort of upgrade it.
Arleigh is sort of like the Brabus or the AMG of firearms.
And so you can turn that base Glock
into something that's really significant, meaningful.
They can customize the exterior, customize the grip,
all that kind of thing.
So that's an easy one.
A few thousand dollars can really turn that
into a special piece for them.
For watches, I would go with the...
I'd go with a Cartier Santos.
It's like a...
You know, this watch is something that
I feel like it gets a lot of hate,
but it has like this great...
I love the Santos. I love the Santos. It's
got great, uh, it's got great legacy from, from the, from the aviation world. It, uh, it's not
like, it's not like a new watch, right? It's been around for decades and decades and decades.
It's not just not a new watch. It was the first watch. The first watch. Louis Cartier. That is
right. That is right. Louis Cartier was contacted by a pilot, Santos. I don't remember the full name,
but he was using a pocket watch while he was flying
and said it was very difficult to take the pocket watch out
to measure his time and speed.
What if you could have it on the wrist?
What if you could have it on the wrist?
And Louis Cartier made the first watch
and named it after him, the Cartier Santos.
Also worn by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street
in beautiful gold.
Fantastic watch.
It's beautiful.
It comes in a variety of different sizes regardless.
Even if you're in the 1,000-pound club, you can still get it on your wrist.
And yeah, it's not going to be so much more than two weeks of your salary
that other people would say, like, why is this guy wearing this watch, right?
So you're not going to put him in and make him look gaudy
or anything like that.
For cars, this one is a very personal choice for me,
but I think it's the right choice.
The first sports car I ever purchased was a 997 911.
I bought it for $32,000 on Bring a Trailer.
Felt like I stole it and put easily more than 10,000 miles on it in the first year that I owned
it. Did not have a single issue with it. It cost me literally under $1,000 in maintenance,
gave me millions of dollars of enjoyment. It was just one of the best cars I've ever owned.
And so this is a car that's got some legacy to it. It's timeless.
And it's going to cost you less than a Model Y, right?
So great choice for a seed stage.
And if you want an upgrade that will hold its value a little bit better, go Targa.
Targa.
The Targas are really holding their value.
Yeah, because even the grindiest founders that I know,
they'll still take a couple hours on Sunday to take a little drive up the coast.
You want to pop the top off.
Pop the top.
And so anyways, for vacation, this one's bold.
I'm going Eastern Europe.
Okay.
Great developers there.
Sure.
So if you have everybody on your team.
A little work play action.
A little work play action.
No, if you're a Seed Stage Found founder, you should never take a true vacation.
Sure, sure.
Do not go offline.
Yep.
If you're burning out, it's because your product's not working.
And you're not doing your life's work.
And you're not doing your life's work.
You don't need a vacation to fix that.
So go to Eastern Europe, great food, wine, views, everything,
and hire some new developers
or hang out with some existing ones,
and just avoid Western Europe.
That's great.
And of course, this one's going to be bold.
So we had been recommending some eventing horses,
some race horses, generally thoroughbreds.
But for the seed stage founder, I'd go with a mini horse.
And the reason for that is I think you could really get some yield out of it.
You could sort of keep them in the second bedroom of your apartment if you needed to.
But on the weekends, if you got little younger cousins or siblings or anything like that,
let them go rent it out to kids' parties and you
could earn some yield on it. So the food for that mini horse might cost you a few hundred bucks a
month, but I think you could get a few hundred bucks per party, uh, to rent out that mini horse.
And, um, and so anyway, some, some potential yield there. And you can make it, you can make
the company's mascot. Uh, there's a famous story about the hedgehog at Facebook.
Sean Parker wanted to go get a hedgehog.
It could be your mascot during the weeks, and on the weekends, it's working.
You could probably go viral with that on X.
You post, oh, yeah, grinding with the mini horse today. Grinding with mini.
Just developer next to the mini horse.
That's going to get engagement from everyone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's great.
Okay, I love it.
Marketing value and then some yield help pay off your ramp bill at the end of the month.
That brings me to my wildcard gift.
This is an easy one.
There's no excuse not to get this for the seed stage founder in your life.
Set them up.
Write them a nice card.
But in the card, it's the phone number of your favorite ramp SDR.
I love it.
It just says give them a call.
I already told them you're going to call.
They will take care of you.
They'll get you set up on a ramp. It's painless. It takes a few minutes. And companies on average save 5% a call. I already told them you're going to call. They will take care of you. They'll get you set up on ramp. It's painless. It takes a few minutes. And companies on average
save 5% a year. So that was an easy one to add in there. I love it. Okay, let's go back to me. I
got two and then we'll go back to you. We're going for the up and coming general partner at a venture
capital firm. Probably not a liquid billionaire yet, but has probably driven maybe a
billion dollars in returns for the fund. I would hope so. And so, you know, this is a person with
taste. They need to move up in the upper echelon of class and style, and they need to let people
know that they've arrived, but you're not going to be breaking the bank like you would with the
deck of billionaire size Lord. So for gun, we're starting with the Magnum Research
Gold Plated Desert Eagle
5.0.
Great conversation starter.
Under 10k, potentially.
And yeah, it's iconic.
You can still carry it in a board
meeting, which I think is important.
There needs to be a threat of violence in board
meetings. We've discussed this.
You need to know, oh, you think we should pull forward our sales targets?
Are you willing to die for that?
Are you willing to put everything on the line for what you're saying?
We've posted about this before.
Your board meeting should look like at least once a year,
like an all-out brawl.
Exactly. Exactly. And almost having, you know, if every board member has a firearm on them,
it can kind of keep people more productive because there's this threat of
violence beyond just, you know, throwing blows.
And if you're a founder and you walk into a board meeting, uh, and you know,
in your suit, you got a holster, there's a gun.
And one of your board members says something, it's just like, Oh,
so you don't respect the constitution. Like what are we doing here?
Yeah. Yeah. What are we doing here? Ask him to step down. Yeah.
So, uh, I think that's a great choice for the up and coming GP for the car.
We're going to want to go with the Rolls Royce Cullinan Black Badge.
Very versatile car.
Great for driving around even the whole founding team.
So you can pick them up, take them to the Rosewood, write a term sheet, you know, show them the ropes, introduce them to Silicon Valley and still do it in comfort.
And it's not going to be loud in there. So you'll be able to have a conversation about the business. Yeah, it's to Silicon Valley, um, and still do it in comfort. And it's not going to
be loud in there. So you'll be able to have a conversation about the business. Yeah. It's a
good car too. If you do, you know, if it's, it's fun to drive yourself, but when you, your drivers
around, they can drive it, you can get back. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's hard, hard to go,
hard to go wrong with that. And then if you need, if you need a sports car, which you probably do, maybe get this up-and-coming GP Porsche GT3 RS
or maybe a Dakar.
I would go with the Dakar.
Okay.
It's going to stand out more in Sand Hill Road.
Yeah, and Northern California
has always had that sort of rugged outdoorsy element to it.
It's like a Patagonia vest as a car.
As a car.
Exactly.
Yeah. And so, yeah, it's the kind of thing you can drive it up to tahoe yeah i go to tahoe yeah yeah yeah you know as soon as i pull
up on the side yep um or you can take it hiking you know go up go up to tam and take it take a
little loop snow this week in tahoe i'm not worried no i got my decal. Yeah, that's great. Now for watches,
there's a couple different options.
Obviously the Patek Philippe Nautilus
5726.
Great watch. Definitely
recommended to any up and coming
GPs. Highly recommend gifting
that. You're not going to get negative
feedback on a gift like that. It's just going to be
received really, really well. But
if you want to mix it up, get them the Rolex Daytona 6239 Paul Newman. Can I tell you why I like that pick, John?
Yeah. Why do you like that? So Daytona just by itself is a high production watch, right? It's
coming out all the time. And so you can pick up a Daytona for, let's call it, $25,000, $30,000.
It is at the higher end of Rolex's lineup, right?
Well, they retail for something like,
I forget what their actual retail price, somewhere
between $12,000 and $15,000.
So the retail price is low.
Market value for a basic Daytona is somewhere around $30,000.
And so the reason that the Paul Newman Daytona is so great
is to the untrained eye it's just a
regular daytona it's like oh but depending on the room that you're in you can say no yeah this is a
paul newman daytona yeah so it's one watch for founders and it's a different watch for lps
exactly exactly so you're at yc demo day oh he's just got a rolex on he's just a normal yeah it's
an everyday allocator you go to lp day everyone's like this guy knows what. He's just a normal. Yeah, it's an everyday Rolex. Capital allocator. You go to LP Day. Everyone's like, this guy knows what's up.
Yep.
Makes a ton of sense.
You can wear that thing anywhere.
Now let's go to vacations.
What are we getting for the up and coming GP, the rising star in venture?
I say we go to Antarctica and we take a luxury icebreaker adventure.
That is something that will be good on the gram.
Yep. That will be something that will be good in the boardroom. Yep. When you're, when you're having to zoom call into a board meeting,
Starlink, you can say, yeah, sorry guys. If you, if there's any noise in the background,
it's the ice breaking from my luxury ice breaking, uh, adventure boat. A little controversial. I
don't know if there are people are cool with breaking ice these days. Isn't that like kind of anti-environmentalist?
Is it?
It might be edgy, but it certainly sounds fun.
Yeah, yeah. And just the noise. It's almost like a symphony of ice.
Yep.
We're big fans of the symphony in general.
And then if the GP in your life doesn't like the cold, we recommend switching it up, going to Egypt,
and doing a private archaeological
dig. You get some exclusive
permits to historical sites, you work along
the Egyptologists, maybe take a
private Nile River boat, luxury
desert camp, curated museum visits,
a week or two in Egypt, it's great.
It's not going to break the bank, it's only
$200. And for the GPs, they're probably
chosen the venture path because they're degenerate gamblers. Maybe
they don't go to, they don't do it in Vegas or sports betting, but venture in many ways is
gambling. And so the great thing about an archeological dig is that you might dig up
something worth well beyond what you paid to go on the trip. So you could almost position it as
an investment, right? yeah um and then for horse
it's a little bit trickier you could go with a lucitano you could do something dressage which
is a little bit outside of the norm you could also just go with thoroughbred maybe a stallion
prospect maybe some uh just mediocre stud fees don't break the bank something that they can still
enjoy at the track every once in a while, but it doesn't become their whole life.
I wouldn't be that mad at going the Arabian route either,
depending on where your LP base is.
That just might be more aligned with where you're going to want to take that horse.
Yeah, it also depends on what their lifestyle is like.
Maybe they're building a ranch.
Maybe you want to get a quarter horse, something like that.
There are plenty of great options, but don't miss out on getting them a horse because you don't want to be caught.
A horse, much like getting them year-round tickets, boxes to F1, it's something that they're going to be with for years.
Exactly.
Years and years and years and have many, many memories with.
Yeah.
So I have one more and then we'll finish out with yours.
We have for the crypto millionaire, for the crypto senti,
for someone who's done very well in crypto, what do you want to get them?
It's going to be a little bit wilder.
They're the absolute most misguided.
We're going off chain with this one. Yeah, we're going off chain.
So for the gun, I'm going Chetak M200 Intervention.
It's the 406 caliber, sniper rifle, anti-material.
You can take down an SUV or a Toyota Hilux with it.
Wow.
It is over the top.
It's going to look great on the Instagram, great on TikTok.
It's going to be iconic.
A lot of these folks are anonymous,
so you're just going to see some hands in the photo.
But you're going to know see some hands in the photo,
but you're going to know when you see this gun that they mean business. That's a statement.
It's a statement piece, for sure, for sure. And then in terms of cars, with crypto, it's super important to stay in the Lambo ecosystem, obviously, but Huracan played out. And then we
don't really know how the new Lamborghini lineup is going to age.
And they also haven't released the limited editions yet.
So instead of going upmarket, I say go back, get the Aventador SVJ, or maybe even go back further, Countach.
Yeah.
The SVJ is such a fantastic car.
I do know one of Solana's earliest investors
is a proud owner of an SVJ.
He doesn't post about it online.
I wish he did.
And they're just not making any more of those.
It's one of the last purebred Lamborghini V12s.
And it doesn't have any hybrid junk in it.
It's just a pure play, naturally aspirated V12s. And it doesn't have any hybrid junk in it. It's just a pure play, naturally aspirated V12.
And so in the last cycle, every crypto bro had a wrapped Huracan. This one, it's going to be the
Temerario. But if you go back, get the Adventador SVJ, people still know this guy made his money in
crypto because it's Lambo. That's what the brand's known for now. But this guy made money even earlier.
It stands out.
So I like that.
And the Countach, it's a little difficult to drive.
So stick with the Aventador SVJ.
Keep it simple, folks.
And then for watch, of course, we're going Richard Mille, the RM0056 Sapphire Tourbillon.
A racing machine on the wrist.
A racing machine on the wrist. wrist is a $2 million watch,
but it has a fully transparent Sapphire case housing complex tourbillon
movement, avant-garde materials and design. Can't go wrong.
I mean, it's so flashy,
but it's exactly what you need if you made your money in crypto,
you're going to have NFTs. They're going to be over the top.
You need something on your wrist that you can display the RM.
Yeah.
And the only thing I would say with all these choices is do your best to try
to buy the asset on chain.
Yes.
And then you can still take custody of it,
but it'll,
it'll mean a lot to that person who's made,
you know,
made their livelihood in crypto that you went the extra mile for it to be a
real world asset.
You know,
you bought it on chain,
you know,
it's just,
it's a really way to say, you know, crypto is real and, uh, it's, it's very valuable beyond just speculation.
I used it to buy this gift for you. Exactly. And then for vacation, for the crypto, uh,
the crypto Chad, we go to the Caribbean super yacht regatta. You charter a cutting edge super
yacht and you race along famous alongside famous regattas,
personal sailing coaches, private island stops, lavish onboard entertainment.
What could be more crypto than getting offshore with your money?
There we go.
And for horse, this is going to be a wild pick.
I say you go draft horse.
Whoa.
Clydesdale, bit of a meme.
Bit of a draft horse. Whoa. Clydesdale. Bit of a meme. Bit of a meme horse.
But it could be if you were launching like a new L2,
you could make it the mascot.
Exactly.
It's big.
It's robust.
It's from the Budweiser commercial.
It's not actually an American horse.
It's Scottish.
It's hilarious.
Anyone who is big,
say, oh, you need a Clydesdale.
Complete myth.
Yeah.
Unless you're 5,000 pounds,
you can ride a normal horse.
But the Clydesdale stands out.
So that's my recommendation for the Crypto Bro.
Great, Rex.
Let's finish it out.
And with probably our favorite category.
So the last category is technology journalists.
And how do you shop for somebody like this?
It's tough.
I mean, they are opinionated.
They're highly online.
They know what they want in life,
and they're going for it, right?
And they usually come from fabulous wealth.
They come from fabulous wealth.
So it's like, how do you get them something
that they don't already have?
But anyway, so we're going to try to keep it sort of reasonable.
Our goal with these gifts are things that they would buy for themselves as well.
Of course.
So it's sort of staying in line.
You want to get something that maybe they had their eye on or would have had their eye on.
So starting at the top for Gunn, I'm going to go with a little bit.
This might be a controversial decision, but I'm going to go for a Taser um uh this might be a controversial decision but i'm gonna go for
a taser off of amazon prime so you can go if you don't know this you can go buy a taser
on amazon uh and the reason i go with taylor taser is a lot of journalists historically
taylor is that a freudian yeah that's right it's a taser lorenz. Taser Lorenz. She tases me for talking too much shit.
It's funny.
But yeah, journalists have at least generally been sort of against the Second Amendment.
And so you don't want to get them a regular gun and have them get offended by that.
So I'd go with a taser.
They can daily drive it.
They can bring it in any situation they want. They can keep it in their purse, backpack, briefcase,
just right in their belt, but very versatile
and gets the job done in a pinch situation.
For watch, I'm going to go with,
this is the only time I'm going to ever recommend
somebody get an Apple Watch,
but I'm going to go recommend an Apple Watch
with an Hermes leather strap.
And the reason for this is the Apple Watch is great.
These people are hyper online.
They're getting scoops.
They're getting tips.
They need that on-risk notification.
But because journalists so often come from fabulous wealth,
they're going to want to stress it up a little
bit and get an Hermes leather band. So I think that's a great option for a journalist. For a car,
I would, for the journalist in my life, I would prepay a Maserati lease for them. Again,
people grow up around money, going to private schools, you know, being driven around
by private drivers and expensive cars. And so a Maserati is a luxury vehicle, but it's somewhat
accessible. It's, you know, you could probably get a one-year Maserati lease for them for like
25K or something like that. Are you talking like Quadraporte? Something like that? Yeah. Honestly,
the whole range, it's hard to lease a Maserati for more than $1,000 a month.
Yeah.
And so you're not really going to go wrong with something like that.
And it still gives, you know, the car is going to break down dramatically over that year,
but they still get the experience of feeling like they're in a fine Italian sports car, elevated sports car.
Vacation, this isn't going to surprise anybody. Get them a round-trip tickets to Idaho
so they can just kind of poke around Sun Valley
and just kind of sit around the edges
and just kind of observe
and try to pick up some scoops and tips on the fly.
And get a business class seats, right?
For them, they're used to flying just regular old economy,
a business class ticket to Idaho.
Unless they're with their family, of course.
Unless they're with their family in that case,
they're certainly not flying commercial.
But you could pair with that while they're going to Sun Valley.
You get them a Canon 5D and a 70-200 lens
so they can take some paparazzi shots.
They're going to need a lot of zoom.
They're going to need a lot of zoom.
So, yeah, telephoto lens.
Telephoto lens.
The lens should be like at least this big.
Yeah, exactly.
And a 1D.
And that's another reason to go business class because they should have the ability to check that without an extra charge.
If you're getting somebody a gift, you don't want them to have to spend a bunch of money out of pocket to experience it.
Yeah.
So the horse, again, this is not going to be surprising.
A lot of technology journalists had a prior life as horse girls.
Well, when you come from money, everyone in the family is into equestrianism.
Yeah, and when you come from that level of wealth, it's just sort of a given but i'm gonna go with an event
all right we're gonna use we're gonna take um no when you come when you come from that uh sort
of background i'd go with a top level eventing Hanoverian. It's $75,000 up to
$200,000 plus horse.
It's exceptionally versatile across
dressage, show jumping, and cross country.
And
the top bloodlines in this category
are dominating all the international
eventing podiums. And they can kind of take
it wherever they want. They can do dressage, they can do
jumping. It's an open book for them.
It's versatile. That makes sense.
Yeah.
And then lastly,
you know,
if said technology journalist
is not already working
at the information
or newcomer,
I would get them
subscriptions to both
so that when newcomer
and the information
get scoops,
they can just quickly
repurpose them
and get them out
so that they can stay,
get kind of the,
yeah, get for their career. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way to help them level up and stay
on top of the stories that matter. So, well, we did it. Yep. Uh, the last wild card that I would
throw in before we close out is, uh, maybe you're strapped for cash. Maybe you're not going material
goods. Uh, if you are shopping for anyone on this list, just get them a guy. Everyone has a
guy, guy for real estate, guy for lawyer, guy for antichrist. Just take your guy, give it to your
friend. Just be like, here's my guy. Interviews them, put them in a group chat. Let them run wild.
That's great. Well, we got to move on to some personnel news because we got some breaking news from the heart of America's industrial revival, NAIA.
The New American Industrial Alliance has officially launched.
This isn't just an announcement.
It's a call to action.
NAIA is bringing together founders, investors, and policymakers to restore America's industrial might and reestablish
our nation as a global powerhouse. Jordy, what you got for me? Here's the deal, John. For decades,
American industry has been on the ropes. Jobs shipped overseas, resources untapped, and bad
policies stifling innovation. But the NAIA is flipping the script. They're proving that
deindustrialization was a choice and that re-industrialization can be too. But NAIA is flipping the script, proving that de-industrialization
was a choice and re-industrialization can be too. Well, it all started back in June with the
inaugural re-industrialized summit in Detroit brought
together hundreds of builders, investors, and government officials. That summit wasn't just
a meeting. It was a movement, a rallying cry for American greatness. And today, that movement
became a force with the launch of NAIA. NAIA is here to be the voice, visionary,
and vanguard of America's industrial resurgence. What does that mean, John?
Cutting red tape, incentivizing investment in critical industries, protecting American workers,
and streamlining government contracting. Simply put, NAIA is doing what it takes to put American
builders back to work and innovation back on the map. And this alliance is already stacked with
heavy hitters. Members include Palantir, 8VC, Y Combinator, Hadrian, Allen Control Systems, and many more.
It's a roster packed with companies and investors who are betting big on America's future.
Austin Bishop, the driving force behind NAIA, summed it up perfectly.
He said, John, it's time to build in America.
It's time to reindustrialize.
So what's next?
Well, you can go follow NAIA on X and visit
their website at newindustrials.org. Whether you're a builder, an investor, or just someone
who believes in the power of American industry, this is your chance to join the movement.
NAIA isn't just about restoring what we've lost. It's about building what comes next.
The future of American industry starts now. Let's get to work, John.
Very exciting.
Stay tuned.
I love those guys.
I did not get a chance to go to the Reindustrialize Summit.
Same.
I was busy, but I think I'm going to the next one.
I don't think they've announced it yet, but it was a huge hit.
And I was talking to one of the organizers when I was in D.C.,
and it seems like it's going to be.
I think we need to give a talk about the posters driving re-industrialization and just give a full market map of, um, of what's
going on. I mean, I do think, I do think we could crush there in a sense that just like,
there's going to be a lot of kind of, you know, default people talking to their book,
like what's investing like in this sector, what's the government strategy, what's the
founding strategy. But then we cut across all that, which is some wild random shit.
I mean, posting matters a lot.
It does.
Yeah, the memes are powerful.
Every meme has the potential to convert somebody that would have gone and worked at.
Especially in college.
Like, there are so many new grads who are super into the reindustrialization thing,
specifically because they've seen the gundo phenomenon and the posting.
And it really is valuable.
Yeah, I couldn't make it this last time.
My second child decided to come literally within a week. Because it's cool. The condo phenomenon and the posting. It really is valuable. Yeah, I couldn't make it this last time.
My second child decided to come literally within a week.
We were both in the same boat.
But we'll be there next year. And very excited for Aaron and Austin and the whole team over there.
Yeah, they're great.
Well, congrats to them.
But we have more breaking news.
Breaking news in the world of AI, folks.
Devon has officially entered general availability.
That's right.
Cognition Labs has just announced that their cutting-edge AI software engineer is now available to all engineering teams, starting at just $500 a month.
No seat limits, Slack integration, IDE extensions, and even API access.
Devin's stepping onto the big stage, and it's already making waves.
Let's break it down, John.
Devin is more than just an AI.
It's your newest team member.
This tool isn't just helping engineers write code.
It's debugging, building, deploying apps, and even knocking out small but pesky tasks like refactoring and documentation.
Think of Devin as your all-star
utility player ready to step in wherever you need it most. So where does Devin really shine?
Teams are already using it for everything from fixing front-end bugs to drafting first pass
pull requests. And here's the kicker, Devin works best when you give it tasks you know how to do
yourself. Share detailed requirements and invest in coaching it along the way. It's not just automation, it's collaboration. The
numbers don't lie John, Devon has already proven its metal completing real-world
coding jobs, contributing to open-source repositories, and even passing practical
engineering interviews at top AI companies. From refactoring code bases to
handling integrations, Devon is stepping up where humans might hesitate.
Cognition Labs has made sure Devon integrates seamlessly with your workflow.
Whether you're tagging Devon in Slack to squash bugs in real time or using its IDE extension to tackle bigger refactors,
Devon's designed to save you time and keep your team focused on the big picture.
We can't forget about the enterprise potential, John. Devin is already helping engineering teams at scale with custom solutions available through Cognition Labs
sales team. You know I like talking to sales teams, John. I do believe it's a cure to male
loneliness. I love it. So what's the verdict? Devin isn't just a tool, it's a game changer.
At $500 a month, it's a small price to pay for a massive boost in efficiency and productivity.
Engineering teams, it's time to draft Devin to your lineup.
Head to app.devin.ai and start building with the AI engineer of tomorrow today.
I love Devin. Did you know that Devin is now the number one committer of code at Ramp?
Crazy.
Amazing.
If you know that and you're not bullish
on devon yeah what are you doing yeah fantastic team uh spun out of ramp yes spun out spun out
spun out neil was there i think there's there's a bunch of other co-founders too but you know
but fantastic team absolutely stacked with imo gold medalists. They have an insane amount of math and just next level engineering talent.
It's a fantastic team.
And they've executed really well.
And the interesting thing is that they've really focused.
Have you seen the actual UI?
It's really, really fascinating how they've built this.
They've focused on the user experience so much.
And I don't think they've got i love how the
product yeah can work with itself yeah so basically you can put two devins together
and they just are like working in tandem and that's kind of what happens when you just ask
chat gpt to reason through something it's kind of talking to itself internally that's what the
o1 model is um but they really haven't gotten bogged down with like, oh, we need to train some custom model from scratch.
It's going to build this data center.
They've just been like, let's use all the best tools in the box, but then make this very, very specific for this problem.
And it's just had immense impact, especially on the grunt work tasks.
I heard this interesting story about Scott was telling me that there are now some,
I believe ramp SDRs that can, if there's a problem they can, while they're on the phone with you,
they're non-technical guys. They can at Devin, Hey, this customer is having this problem. I think it,
I think the code needs to be changed a little bit. Like, can you go in and fix this? And while
they're on the call, they're solving it. It's like, that's crazy. So cool. Um, yeah, it's,
it's, it's always been cool to me because the work, the workflow that they're solving it. It's like, that's crazy. So cool. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's always
been cool to me because the work, the workflow that they basically built is the same workflow
that people have with junior engineers where they have to very, very clearly define what they're
trying to do, tell them to go do it. They go attempt to do it. Maybe they hit a wall and you
explain, Oh, you do it this way. And then they work around it and eventually get to a PR that
can then actually be shipped. So I was talking to Scott about this. Like there's, when Devin launched,
there was like a lot of like, just the re the re the reaction was so emotional.
It was a lot of fear about like, this is going to put all engineers out of jobs.
Obviously that's not true. It's very collaborative.
And really it's just, you get to do more and more, you know,
higher leverage work. Um, but it's particularly interesting to me that, uh,
kind of like the, the aspirational vision for Devin and like what the world looks like post Devin
mirrors Scott's life very closely in the sense that like, if you go back to that very early
video of him doing those insane math in his head, it's like he was essentially just a calculator.
Like he was like an algorithm, right? And now he's an ideas guy. He's a CEO. He's, he's like he was essentially just a calculator. He was an algorithm.
And now he's an ideas guy.
He's a CEO. He's operating a much higher abstraction layer.
And I think that that's what the customer of Devin should feel.
They should feel that I'm not being replaced.
I'm being amplified, and I have better tools.
And that's very, very exciting.
Yeah, and I'm excited to see how a lot of people scoffed at their varying valuations, but opening up access
to this, just knowing already that it's so actively contributing to ramp. If it's the
number one committer, that means that at the very least it's worth probably 500 to 600 K a year,
right? Like in a very low estimate. And so they're starting out,
the product seems to be pretty accessible. It's $500 a month, but I can imagine that I can easily
imagine a future where people are, you know, their bigger customers are spending a million
dollars a year on Devin. Yeah. I mean, it'll also be consumption based like a data dog or like an
AWS. Yeah. And the other, the other stuff that's wild is it just opens up. It's like an, it's an
engineering tool that allows you to tackle projects that historically were just not at all even really on the roadmap of like, hey, we need to completely migrate this system over here.
And that's going to take a year.
And now, oh, we could actually do this in a month and a half with Devin and a much smaller team.
Let's tackle that.
So it's actually it's not just replacing, um, you know, or, or empowering, uh, team members. It's, it's, uh, allowing you to tackle
tasks that otherwise were, uh, not, not really, uh, cost efficient or not effective.
Yeah. You're starting to see posts about this where it's like the age of tech debt is over.
Like there's no return on squashing tech debt because today today because the AI will solve it in the future.
And moving on, we got a size gong story for you folks.
Breaking news, an absolute blockbuster in the world of AI and language learning.
Speak, the AI-driven language tutor app has just closed a massive $78 million Series C round led by Excel,
pushing its valuation to a jaw-dropping $1 billion. That's right,
unicorn status for a company that's shaking up the game in ways we haven't seen before.
Let's set the stage, John. Speak isn't just your average language app. No games, no gimmicks. This
is about real deal fluency. Using cutting edge AI, Speak gives users a conversational partner
that adapts to their
unique accent, delivering real-time feedback that's changing how people learn. It's not just
about picking up vocab, it's about building authentic speaking abilities, and that's a
game changer. And let's talk about this funding round. Excel leads the charge with heavy hitters
like OpenAI's startup fund, Coastal Adventures, and Y Combinator all jumping back in. That's $162
million raised to date. Proof positive that Speak isn't just talking the talk, it's walking the walk.
Excel's Ben Quazo, now joining the board, calls it one of the few consumer AI companies actually
turning promise into revenue. Big words, but the numbers back it up. Eight figures of revenue and
closing in on profitability.
What's next for Speak?
Expansion, expansion, expansion.
Southeast Asia, Europe, the U.S.
Speak's coming for all the markets, and by the end of next year, it's aiming to support the world's most popular languages.
And let's not forget their growing enterprise side.
Eight of the top 10 largest employers in Korea
are already on board with Speak for Business,
teaching workforces English and boosting global reach. Okay, Jordy, the co-founders,
Connor and Andrew, they're on a mission to build a generational company. And judging by the accolades,
like winning Google Play App of the Year and APAC, they're off to a red hot start.
Zwick even teased 2025 as 10x crazier with new features and worldwide launches.
That's wild, John.
Bottom line, this isn't just a win for Speak.
It's a moment for AI innovation in the consumer space.
78 million says Speak just isn't part of the conversation.
It's leading it.
Stay tuned because this story is far from over.
Let's hear it from the size gong.
You love to hear it.
Go download Speak in the App Store today.
It's fantastic.
I wasn't super aware of Speak, but I did see Deleon posting about it
because apparently he lived with them.
Did you see this?
I think he lived with these guys.
A handful of people.
One of the Open Door, I think he was saying he lived with them as well.
That's great.
I always loved them.
When I saw the round, I hadn't heard of the company either.
And I was seeing it like, oh, look
at this new pre-launch AI consumer
app that suddenly is worth a billion dollars.
But it makes a lot more sense in the context of they've
been around for eight-ish years or something like that.
Grinding.
Had a thesis on AI and language learning for a long time.
And so that's just another
example of a lot of the companies that are benefiting the most from AI today were started
a long time ago before language models were even top of mind for anyone in tech.
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure there's like a lot of people that would be like, oh, well, you could
just learn language by talking to ChatGPT. but there's something about the UI that matters. And
there's something about, yes, the power users will figure out that chat GPT can do that. But
for a lot of other people having a track, a memory, a plan that's customized to you,
it's just like Devin, you know, it's like you could use the, the one size fits all model,
but having a more unique resource, unique plan makes a ton of sense and the workflow
matters a lot for sure for sure uh well let's move on to the dms we don't have that many questions so
keep sending them in but uh eliana over at palantir asks did coogan deliver your gift for me
and i didn't i forgot in my car but i brought it today palantir brought us a bunch of merch we got
some paddle tennis paddles back there, which I love.
They look great on the set.
And we have some hats and shirts from Palantir.
So thank you to Palantir.
We got a beautiful hat.
Do you want the Army or the Navy hat?
I got you the Army hat.
I like the Navy one.
I like Army.
I like visiting the desert.
Throw these on.
It's functional.
Yeah, these are great. Oh, yeah. There we go the desert. Throw these on. It's functional. Yeah, these are great.
Oh, yeah.
There we go.
Good.
Locked in.
I feel like a $100 billion company right now.
$170, I think.
$170.
I don't know.
It's a lot.
So, yeah, we've got to rock these shirts.
I don't know where the size is.
Thank you.
Thank you, Eliano.
I know you're the best.
We're looking good.
Merch lord.
We're going to be playing good.
They are crushing it on the merch side.
They have. You showed me the stats. Companies are looking good. Merch lord. We're going to be playing good. They are crushing it on the merch side. They have.
You showed me the stats.
Companies are having a merch off.
Yeah.
Wait, so revenue-wise, they're merch sales.
Yeah.
He pitched Palantir.
I was like, I just want to bring the merch store back.
Can we just do something?
We have so many fans, so many day traders and retail investors who are in the stock
and like the company, like Carp.
Let's get them some stuff.
Yeah.
And every time they put stuff up,
it just goes viral on X and Reddit and it's big. That's great. It's great.
I highly recommend having merch.
And the thing that I like about their, their merch is like, uh, you know,
we talk a lot of trash about, uh, what is that? Racquetball or, uh,
pickleball pickleball. Um, but that,
they didn't just pick pickleball randomly.
They Palantir actually works
with the company that makes those selkirk and so they're so they did like this collab and of course
the army navy hat makes a ton of sense because uh they're big in the army navy game which i believe
is happening this week in dc the football game and so uh we're we're very thankful to palantir
very thankful to eliano i uh did a workout with him in D.C.
It was great.
It was like visiting a far-off culture
and understanding how another man lifts, who's great.
He's jacked.
Yeah, and he's very against kipping pull-ups.
Extremely.
I actually did pull-ups with him.
He's very good at them, strict pull-ups.
I'm not.
Got to be strict about it.
Had to learn, had to learn.
Got to work on those.
It's hard when you're tall.
But let's move on to the timeline. We have John six, eight, by the way, massive, massive, uh, stack of posts to go through. So let's start with wasteland capital who says absolutely insane
amount of work in this world is going to format PowerPoints. Okay. And, and I would argue that it's very, very important work.
And we talked about this on the show last time.
It's communication.
I think it was Don Valentine talks about how capital follows stories, right?
And so deck is a form of storytelling.
In fact, I think it's the highest form of storytelling there is, right?
Because condensing a very complex idea or business
into 20 slides is not easy.
I've spent countless nights in Figma over the last year,
just like helping my portfolio companies make decks,
making decks now for TB.
But decks, like've got to have,
if you're a company planning to raise any amount of money
or sell any products at all, which every company is,
you've got to get good at this game.
You've got to have somebody on your team that's truly cracked at it.
And, I mean, the amount of work that's going into just formatting them
will decrease with AI and better tools.
But I still think there's something.
I've tried a lot of the different AI decks,
and there's nothing like the dynamic of working with a fantastic deck designer,
Devin, who we work with.
Just like that dynamic.
That's like saying, oh, if you're driving rally car,
it's like saying, oh, I don't want my co-pilot.
I'll just use an AI.
It's like you want your guy, your co-pilot making the deck with you and you can just make so much more engaging, interesting materials. The way I'm thinking of AI plugging in is like much better spell check, extra like just, oh, rewrite.
Oh, this line is just a little bit too big to
fit on one line. So it's hanging onto two lines. What if you just switch this word, it would fit
better. Oh, like, you know, like you, you accidentally indented this an extra couple
pixels, just taking it to the pixel. Perfect. Perfect level, uh, level even, um, just if you
have, you know, a whole bunch of photos, being able to integrate those,
pull those really easily, just better UI workflows, all that stuff should get much easier.
Let's go to Coastal Country Club. They say, received a wedding invite that specifically said
on the dress code line, no Apple watches, please. Wow. 200K likes.
I'm really happy to see how much engagement that got.
Because I think we're entering a new era.
The Apple Watch is functional, but it's not a dress watch.
It's not a dress watch.
It has no business in the aisles of a wedding.
Yeah, it's going to be beeping and taking phone calls
and showing your latest tweets.
Yeah, you're going to miss some incredible moment
because you're checking
your hinge notifications
popping up on your watch.
But anyways, we're happy
to see that the movement
against Apple Watches...
One thing that I'm really disappointed about with the Apple Watch
is that... Do you remember when they first launched it?
There was the Apple Watch Edition, solid gold,
10K.
I don't. You don't remember that that i don't remember yeah so they they launched them at like a couple hundred bucks maybe the most expensive one was like a thousand but then there was one that was
10k and and they were like we're gonna go like an unwrapped version oh yeah yeah yeah you can
definitely buy them uh probably on ebay but uh it it was they, they, they understood that watches have this luxury value.
But the problem is, is that the software and the hardware is getting so much better
that you have to refresh your Apple watch every year or every few years. And so,
so then it was like, okay, I have this gold thing. Whereas if you buy a gold Rolex or a gold
Cartier Santos, like it's going to have its same value. It's going to do the job just as well,
telling the time 20 years, 50 years from now it's still going to work. Sure. There might not
be as much like water resistance. The tech does get better in these Swiss watches. Um, but, um,
Apple kind of missed that, but they need to bring back the Veblen goods. Like Apple should have a
product that's, you know, up there and just in pure Veblen status, not just based on the RAM.
Let's go to Lulu.
She says, lots of founders wondering the best day
to schedule a launch.
There's basically no clear day between now and the holidays.
It's wall to wall with announcements,
not even counting news curveballs like today.
Just pick a day and go for it.
Rely on creativity to break through.
This is funny because I didn't even see this
because this was the day that they found the ceo shooter and the timeline was flooded with that
and it was impossible to break through and i had another friend who his launch like kind of leaked
and i was like well like no one found out about it because no one saw that article at all because it
was the busiest news day um so, so you do kind of need to avoid
like the bombshell days, like, you know, maybe delay your launch a day if it's, if you notice
that something crazy is happening in the timeline. But, uh, in general, yeah, done is better than
perfect. Get it out. And then the beauty of launching and getting, uh, drowned out is that
if by definition, if no one, if your post doesn't go
viral and doesn't get seen by everyone, well, no one saw it. So you can just post it again and
people will see it for the first time. Everyone thinks, oh, this post only got a thousand views.
Everyone knows I'm bad at posting or something. It's like, no, no one, no one saw that by
definition. So you can just post again. And so I don't know yeah i think i think um i mean yeah basically every company that has news that they want to deliver is looking at
doing it in the next week after you know i don't know you basically i guess you kind of have uh
next the rest of next week but um but yeah just expect there to be competition but like good
launches don't happen by accident even the the companies that have exciting news that people are excited to hear about, they're still making sure that they get 20 of their investors to share it on the launch day, right?
You need to punch through the noise and make sure you're not just leaving it up to chance and betting that it might go viral or something like that.
And even asking the second order. When the Cognition Devon GA launch happened,
I got multiple texts from people
who were closer to the company saying,
hey, here's the tweet.
Can you amplify it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so having...
That's why even a company of Devon's size
and with that much hype
is not leaving their launch to fate.
They're not just like,
oh, I hope the algorithm's on our side today.
And you see it just immediately.
It's like, oh, 300 retweets. It's's like that doesn't happen by accident like clearly people were lined up
ready to go yeah which is great um jack prescott says carp mogging with the cartiers and he tags
us thank you for tagging us thank you if you see something like this a dripped out technology
brother tag us it tag us we love to see it uh great pick carp is a style icon yeah he really is the og
dripped out we saw him wearing a fantastic patek philippe nautilus that we um that we
clocked and put on the timeline we got in front of him unfortunately yeah and i'd like to see more
this guy's running we don't know what it is today 100 to 200 billion dollar public company we'd like
to see more paparazzi following him around,
doing like fit pic analysis.
I'd want to see what...
Wrist checks.
Wrist checks.
Let's see the whole thing.
But great, great pair of sunglasses.
That's great.
Do we have a promoted post?
I got to go to a promoted post.
We got a promoted post from Kushi.
We wanted to promote this today
because she says a hundred million dollar
early stage fund in sf is looking for a new associate dm me if interested uh so we just
wanted to put this out there for our listeners if you are looking to join an early stage fund
there's one in sf these types of opportunities don't pop up too often because oftentimes these
smaller funds just don't have that many people so So if you're interested, go send her a note and she will connect you. Let's go to Paki McCormick. He says
anti-capitalist and then throws down about a million red flag emojis. Great post. Great post.
It is very cringe to be an anti-capitalist. Obviously, capitalism is incredible, but
also just weird to frame yourself in the negative.
Like, just say what you want the world to look like.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm just against the system.
Exactly.
It's like pick a different ideology
and then just be that instead of just being like,
I'm mad about the current system.
Yeah, it's hard to take anybody
that's purely anti-capitalist seriously
unless you're living in the wilderness in the
woods not benefiting from any aspect of modernity or our capitalist system but if you're if you're
eating your little oink oink grain bowl from sweet green and you're saying that you're an
anti-capitalist like i'm not going to take you seriously sweet green raised like 500 to a billion
dollars yeah like well we need a new term we We have the champagne socialist. We have the limousine liberal. We need something, the aristocratic anti-capitalist. We need a term
for the anti-capitalist that defangs them because they actually benefit immensely from capitalism.
The Luigi. The Luigi, exactly. His parents were in healthcare or something like that.
That story is so wild. Yeah. I'm holding my breath to understand it all, but we'll see.
Sean Frank says, Meta doesn't acquire, it copies.
We have all benefited from the Meta copy machine.
Snap is a threat, we get stories.
TikTok taking off, we get reels.
X looks viable, you get threads.
Chat GPT, AI search bar.
All this does is create new ad space for us.
The greatest blessings in this industry start as a threat to meta.
Written by me in our free newsletter.
Interesting.
Yeah, Mark has, in many ways, he's such an interesting entrepreneur
because the first product wasn't necessarily, allegedly,
like wasn't really his idea, right?
Like he was sort of approached to build this thing
because he was like the tech guy.
And then he's all of their, since then, like many of their most popular
products were copycats of other products that were succeeding. Yet simultaneously, if you look
at the Redbook, he has had this sort of like decades long vision for his company that only
a generational ideas guy could actually have.
And he's been right over and over and over about all these different theses.
So interesting to be the copycat founder
who clearly is just better at executing
and more of a visionary than the people
that originally had the ideas.
And I like Sean's take here
because he's really identifying the core meta strength,
which is the ad platform
and how great their ad inventory and matching algorithm is, is that there are, there are plenty
of other, uh, platforms, but none of them have the ability to actually drive real ROI.
Yeah. We don't know what, if we'd even be using Instagram today if Meta hadn't bought it.
It's really, really hard to build that liquidity.
Yeah, you could have easily imagined Yahoo buying Instagram
and ads never really working.
And then you just get it out of the box.
They launch a new product and it's just like,
cool, that's more ad inventory for Ridge, Sean's company.
And they know on day one it's going to work reliably.
And it's not going to be this whole like, oh, experimental budget.
Let's do some brand advertising.
Yeah, let's throw $20,000 a month at it.
Exactly.
You can throw a lot of.
You can throw any amount at it, and you're going to get the dashboard, and it's going to be accurate.
Yeah.
And that's just really hard to build internally.
And that's why you see even Netflix, when they launch, it's like all this craziness around their ad platform let's
go to Ola Lehman he says this is hilarious he says day of a European in
2025 wakes up likes a meme on X gets arrested tries to use AI blocked drinks
water bottle cap gets stuck opens browser 48 cookies wants to watch a
workout on YT. Blocked.
Buys coffee.
Pays 50 cents extra for the cup.
Clicks to buy a product.
No EU shipping.
Starts a website.
Gets fined for GDPR.
Orders meat.
Gets shamed for destroying the planet.
Tries to start a company.
Gets sued.
Repeat.
Mogged.
Self-mogged.
What's crazy about this is like you hear about all of these things individually.
No one's ever put it all together like this in such a way that's so embarrassing it's so crazy it really captures why there's no hundred billion dollar company in europe that was started in the last like 50 years or something like that bad
bad good crazy uh beck shaw says days like this on twitter feel like a bird got into the classroom 200k likes yeah this was
i mean everyone was seeing the exact same timeline it was crazy it was just like memes jokes fights
uh conspiracy theories news reports everything about the shooter uh what a crazy story makes
sense it's interesting how we didn't historically process these sort of wild events through humor
so intensely so right away it's like when historically like significant assassinations
there wasn't like people like billions of views on memes in the first like 48 hours
so it's interesting how like all of humanity
now process processes processes these sort of like crazy events yeah yeah like uh i want to say like
20 or 30 years ago maybe maybe not maybe even 15 years ago um there'd be a news story and then you
have to wait like a week and south park would come out with an episode yeah making fun of it and that
was or maybe you'd get the daily show
the night of making fun of the news a little bit,
but it was so not good for us.
Yeah, but they weren't going to make fun
of something that was super dark.
No.
Whereas now people will take a deeply dark, sad topic
and immediately start making jokes about it.
Like even I saw today,
there was like somebody filming Luigi
coming out of like some type of,
I don't know where he was going.
And somebody was yelling, it's Mario.
In real life.
Yeah, in real life.
But clearly done almost for the internet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it does feel like it's feeding back into the traditional media.
SNL had a segment on their news show. I forget what it's called. Uh, whatever
their, whatever their news segment is. And they did, they did make some jokes about the shooting,
which was interesting because it is really, really dark story, but they still
had to cover it in some way. Let's move on to Amjad Massad over at Replit. He says, whoa, and he's quoting a post about Google's Willow quantum computer.
And he says, it lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes
in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
7,000 likes.
Fascinating.
Did you follow the quantum computing news?
So this was great.
The craziest part about this is that was Google putting out.
Yeah, it was Google's own press release.
We have discovered that we live in a multiverse.
By the way.
In our press release.
Yeah.
Now sign up for cloud computing.
Yeah.
That is crazy.
Yeah, I'm just interested to see what Google's rollout with this product.
Who gets access?
Is it just Google that's going to get access to it for the first 10 years?
Are they going to make it widely available?
It seems almost dangerous to make it widely available.
There was a lot of, I think, Bitcoin.
Bitcoin speculation.
Will it crack?
Yeah, Bitcoin crashed seemingly on that news, a few percentage points.
Maybe it was unrelated.
But yeah, it's interesting to see, okay, we've created this ultra-powerful chip.
Now who gets access to it?
Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years.
This mind-boggling number exceeds known time scales in physics
and vastly exceeds the age of the universe.
Fascinating.
Imagine being the team running that test, and you start the test,
and you're like, oh, this could fail.
It could take a few minutes, or it could take 10 septillion years.
Imagine running B2B software on a quantum computer.
Imagine running ramp on a B2B, on a quantum computer.
That's the way to do it.
I love it.
Will Minaitis posts a screenshot and highlights this quote.
There's always something happening in the world that creates an opportunity to try
and fix a business and build a business, Mr. Rainwater told the Dallas Morning News in 1994.
It was one of the few interviews he gave. Speaking on CNBC, Mr. Bonderman recounted Mr.
Rainwater's investing philosophy. If you couldn't pencil it out on the back of an envelope,
it wasn't worth doing. I like that. Yeah, the best business
ideas for the next 10 years are not always the most complicated. And oftentimes, you can take a
lot of inspiration from the past, if you literally just read old business biographies, and you learn
about some guy who cornered some strange market and levered it into building a massive, you know,
public company like those many of those same types of opportunities are available today.
And there's the classic trap for people that want to start companies
or people that think they need some ultra-sophisticated, complicated idea
that needs like 10 pages to explain.
And it's like, no, having something super, super like cognition,
it's just an AI software engineer that you can collaborate with.
It's not like it's very complicated under the hood,
but the core idea you can write on a single.
Yeah, and the value equation.
Just like you pay money, it does things for you.
It's very, very simple.
And that's the case for so many of the great businesses.
Start with very simple ideas.
Let's go to Sam Altman.
Sam says,
a few months ago,
Robin Hood sent me a gold credit card
with extremely high quality details.
I thought it was ridiculous marketing stunt at the time,
but now it's an example I give
when talking about great design.
I love that.
So does this have to do with their acquisition?
They acquired X,
didn't they acquire X?
Oh.
X card or forget what it was called
um i thought it was just for like their their biggest spenders on their credit card but i know
but i'm pretty sure they acquired like a big um they acquired uh robin i need perplexity i wonder
i wonder how much this costs though because with the really nice cards my fear would always be
if you lose it it has a lot of value. It's got to be
really expensive. I think it's 1200 bucks or something like that. Maybe they charge you if
you lose it or something because yeah. So the, the Robin hood gold card is a credit card that
was formerly known as the X one card, which was a company that, um, which was a company that Robin
had acquired. Got it. And, um, yeah, I just like to see, um, i'd like to see tungsten cards coming out from the major
major players like we got to go level it up a little bit i agree you know i agree you gotta
stand out i mean every card went metal recently like yeah basically every card is some sort of
metal so yeah gotta go into the rare metals yeah tungsten go rare let's go to john fio he says if
someone stops posting on instagram it
means they are probably in a great place mentally if someone stops posting on twitter it means they
are probably about to commit national headline worthy crimes it's a good subtweet of the
situation makes a lot of sense yeah yeah i it's yeah, that's, that's the thing. So Instagram is a place to dating site is for many
as a dating site, it's a place, uh, to kind of just brag about, uh, your life and, uh, X is a
place to share your thoughts. So if your thoughts get so extreme that you can no longer share them
and you're somebody who historically was sharing kind of stream of consciousness, which is a lot
of, a lot of the best posters are just sort of sharing what they're thinking,
stream of consciousness style.
And so if that turns off,
like they either locked in
and with their business so hard
or we've seen posters that are our friends
go silent while they're selling their company
because they don't want to say something
that's going to like botch the acquisition or whatever.
Obviously there's some good reasons to stop posting but
in general yeah and you see this with with with fund managers who are down bad they'll stop posting
like a lot of the like very popular gps from 2021 went kind of dark for 2023 because they were just
like going through it but now they're back many of them are back many of them are back a few markups
feeling good again yeah raised fun three you know they're back on Many of them are back now. Got a few markups, feeling good again.
Raised fun three.
You've got to get back on the horse.
The best people that make it through always restart. Posting through
is always good, but restarting the
posting just to kind of liven
up the serendipity engine, get it more
contacts. In many ways, Chamath
would have stopped posting with
how much hate he got for all the SPACs,
but instead he
launched a premium sub stack. Oh, he did? Yeah. Yeah. God, he's got like a ton of subscribers.
But also, I mean, there was a forcing function there, which was like, he wasn't going to stop
doing all in. Yeah. And so no matter how much like, you know, he got a ton of hate for different
things, like the, the, the, the Uyghurs comment and all the different stuff.
But he had this forcing function of his boys being like, get on the mic.
Stay in the game.
It's great.
Podcaster's high.
Podcaster's high.
And it worked.
It worked.
He's still in the game.
Love it.
Reggie James says, oh.
I got to stop you, John.
Let's do it.
You know what this show is about.
Of course.
It's about driving the bottom line.
We got a promoted post from our friends over at Cognition.
We talked about them at length earlier on the show.
And they're jumping in here to talk about how NewBank refactors millions of lines of code with Devin, reducing a large-scale ETL migration from an estimated one-and-a-half half year project to just two months. Devin successfully delivered 12x efficiency improvement on engineering time,
helping reduce the developer toil for NewBank engineers as they scaled to 110 million customers.
CY Vitor Olivier, NewBank CTO, is excited about the future of software engineering with Devin.
And anyways, fantastic case study.
This is the kind of case
study that, uh, any startup would dream of and it's why Devin has the hype that it does. Yeah.
So it would be very hard, even if you were able to hire a bunch of new grads, you put them on,
you put them on that project. It's going to be hard to keep them motivated. It's going to be hard
to, yeah, it's not a sexy feature to work on.
Even for the resume. And we're excited because now any developer in our audience can go sign up for
Devin today and start getting access to the same quality of tool. Just $500 a month. Yep. So hit up
Cognition and tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Reggie James.
He says, one retweet can send your message to a completely foreign digital land.
Well, welcome to our foreign digital land, Reggie.
You're in the technology brother's universe now.
Reggie's at home here as an OG technology brother.
But everybody that's had a tweet go viral will experience this.
We've, you know, we had a tweet yesterday about Lena Kahn.
Oh, yeah.
And eventually it got retweeted by people that came into the,
like, and that drove people to start dunking on us.
I don't know if you saw this.
A bunch of people were, like, defending Lena Kahn.
Really? Interesting.
Being like, she's sticking up for the little guy, whatever,
which I didn't totally get.
Yeah. But anyway, she's sticking up for the little guy, whatever, which I didn't totally get. Yeah.
But anyway, so yeah, any retweet can send you into a totally different audience that wasn't necessarily the intended audience.
Yep.
And that's the magic of X, you know.
It's fantastic.
And stuff like that, I want stakes on X.
I want there to be the threat of getting retweeted into oblivion
and then having to lock my account and turn off my DMs
because I'm getting so many death threats that gives me stakes that gives
skin in the game I don't want to be in an echo chamber posters hi I mean I got
cancelled in Alaska Twitter once which was great I said like Alaska is amazing
and we should all move there and and and both the right and the left the the
lefty Alaskans were like we're like stay out of here this is our land like you
need to acknowledge the land that you're going up here.
And all the right-wingers up there were like,
you wouldn't last a day in here.
Keep Alaska, Alaska.
Exactly.
And they were sending me pictures of their guns.
I can see Russia from my house.
Yeah, being like, if you come up here,
you wouldn't last a day.
You'd freeze.
You're some Silicon Valley button.
And you're like, hey, I got a Cabot Meteorite.
Yeah, 1911.
1911.
I think I'll do just fine.
Yeah.
Say that to my Chi-Tac in 408.
Say that to my minigun.
My intervention.
Let's go to Delian.
He says, there's this consensus talking point in Silicon Valley that at this point, all
tier one VCs are founder friendly.
On the other hand, in my seven years in VC, I have personally had to use our legal rights from the shares we own to block other tier one VCs from firing founders three
times. This is crazy. He's told me some of these stories. I don't know all three. Um, but it is,
it is crazy. I mean the founder friendly thing, it really just became a meme and it was so easy
to put up a blog post and then no one calls anyone out and no one really says anything publicly
because you're all syndicating deals and you don't want to really piss off anyone else. But it is true.
Like there are some bad actors out there and a lot of it's like rational based on the fun dynamics,
you know, incentives matter. There aren't necessarily that many evil people in Silicon
Valley. It's really just the fact that when incentives get misaligned and there's a partner
who has their career riding on a particular deal and they feel like this CEO is really screwing
things up, their natural reaction is, you know, they're backed into a corner. It's a fight or
flight response. And you have to have your fund set up in a way that you can actually take the
zero if it is crazy. And your brand can take the take the l
of backing a company that blows up and move on but if you're if you've staked your reputation
as a vc on this one company you've put so much of your money in there and you think that there's a
solid business there and it's just the leadership that's wrong which could be true it's really hard
to say no so it's tough this is why i mean this is why YC is like actually a very positive force in terms of, yeah, it's a union for founders. Basically. Yeah. If you, if you do
something bad to a YC founder, like every single YC founder is going to find out. Yeah. And that's
like thousands of thousands a year. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it goes on the, it goes on book face,
like Gary built that thing and like, there's a. And there's a whole database of VCs with ratings.
Like, how'd they do?
What'd they do to you?
All this stuff.
It's crazy.
Yeah, anyway, we got to get more stories out of Delian
and leak those here.
Anonymously, of course.
Of course.
But let's move on to Jack Randall.
He says, the New York Stock Exchange 10 years ago versus today, same but different.
And he now works with the co-founder of Robinhood.
He's there with Vlad Tenev and the other co-founder.
And they're starting a new company.
And Jack's working on it that is setting up solar panels in space that will beam down the energy via a laser.
No way.
To ground stations.
Yeah.
Because I saw that other company that Sean McGuire back
that was selling daylight at night.
So I like that we're getting all of these new weird things
that are not just.
I think it was in Andreessen's call for startups,
this idea that launch is getting so cheap.
Varda is one of the first movers.
But there will be other companies that are doing things that are completely off of SpaceX's roadmap but leverage the launch capabilities.
There's some people that are trying to do computing in space because of the temperature.
There's people doing the energy and the light.
But this is specifically harnessing the energy and then beaming it down
with a laser. And all of these startups, it's like, I'm like, this seems insane. Um, but it's,
but I never, I never actually talked trash because it's like, I haven't built a spreadsheet to see
if this actually works. Like it's possible. I don't know what assumptions need to come true.
Like does launch need to go down to like a hundred dollars a kilo ten dollars a kilo a dollar
a kilo to like make it make sense but like that could happen i don't know what the assumptions are
but but you know all these people are smart i mean this guy started robin hood it's like a huge
company like i don't think he like missed a zero in his spreadsheet like i think he thought it
through so also also that level of execution with robin hood in an industry that competitive
you don't reach you get lucky along the way, you don't reach, you get lucky along
the way, but you don't reach that level of scale by accident. And so, um, yeah, the other thing
that just should be said with, with any of these, any, any space related companies, like it's hard
enough to launch B2B software and you're like making this new feature and you launch it and
you launch it and there's like bugs and like this button's not working for these users, and all that stuff. And if you're
launching stuff into space, the stakes are so much higher. Yeah. And if you have any of these like
tiny sort of marginal errors, it can just end in total failure. Oh, yeah. And so the kind of
caliber of people that are doing this and are going to be successful at it are just giga chats.
Like you have to be,
you just have to be on another level to actually do this successfully.
Cause you can't just like ship and like,
let's see what happens.
It's like you have to ship with intention.
You make a bunch of money and money in FinTech.
I mean,
this is an age old story.
They made their money and money.
Basically.
I mean,
this is the story of Elon with SpaceX,
like made his money in PayPal, dumped it all in, that's the story of Elon with SpaceX. Like, made his money in PayPal,
dumped it all in something
crazier that required
a massive backstop.
And,
you know,
the Robin Hood guys
have enough money
to back up the truck
if they need to,
if they really believe in it.
And that's amazing.
And that's just something
that I think the rest
of the financial community
will rally around
and be like,
yeah,
let's do it.
It's great.
Let's go to Alex Cohen.
He says,
incredibly funny
that European AI regulations
are so backwards that the Taliban gets access to new open AI products before Europe does.
That's just so brutal.
I can't believe this.
I don't even know if this is true.
But, you know, somebody says, bring it to Europe, please.
And he says, we want to.
If you were going to follow the laws.
Yeah.
It probably is true.
But is this true?
How can the Taliban have access? I mean,
who knows? I mean, it's certainly less of like a regulatory overhead. So if you can,
maybe if they're not, even if they don't have a server there, if they could VPN somewhere. Taliban loves memes and language models, meme coins and language models.
Awful. Either way, I'm excited to see more about Alex's new startup. He's got a voice AI company in the health care space.
It's called Hello Patient.
Had a cool launch video for it.
So excited to see what he does there.
Yeah, great poster too.
Great poster.
Let's go to Jared Madfuss.
He says, Jack Founder Thesis, which you talked about
on the show earlier.
He must have been listening because he was like,
I got to post that.
No, no.
No, so I talked about it. I think somebody Yep. He must've been listening. Cause he was like, I got to post that. No, no, no. So, so I,
I talked about it.
I think somebody sent it to him or he listened to it and then he,
and then I kind of butchered it.
So I was like,
post,
post it.
Let's give it some proper coverage.
Yeah.
So he says the Jack founder thesis is I have never lost money investing in
elite technical founders that are in the thousand pound club composite of
their bench press squat and deadlift over 1,000 pounds.
They are simply too big to fail.
That's a great post.
Too big to fail.
Great post.
Just unreal.
And then in the thread, he actually gives examples of the founders. No way.
That's amazing.
Individual founders.
I love it.
Anyways, Jack founder thesis, if you're investing in technical founders and you're a little bit lost in the sauce, maybe you're non-technical, just follow Jared's thousand pound club model and you'll do well.
Okay. Let's go to Gary Tan. He says, I want this and I would fund this too. And he's quote tweeting
Andre Karpathy, who says, one of my favorite applications of LLMs is reading books together.
I want to ask questions and hear generated discussion, notebook LM style, while it's automatically conditioned on the
surrounding content. I love that. Yeah. Tyler Cowen had a post about ChatGPT01 being a fundamental
paradigm shift in how people read books. And found this to be true I was at the
nutcracker and while I was there I was on my phone and uh and I was like I feel like I'm kind of
being disrespectful it feels like I'm texting yeah but I'm really like asking the AI for the backstory
to actually enrich this experience and I am I'm actually more engaged than someone who's just
sitting there watching but zoned out. I'm actually locked in.
Yeah. And so I think that they, yes, we need more, uh, more applications. The interesting thing is that for most books, you actually don't need special conditioning. And Tyler pointed this
out was like a lot of times you're reading a book and you're like, Oh, I need to like find a PDF
and then load that into chat GPT in order so that it knows the books that I can ask a question,
tell it that I'm on page 67. But a lot of times, like, it kind of already knows,
and it knows everything. And so you can just ask questions. And it really puts the, the,
the onus on like, figuring out what questions to ask. And that's really important to the inquiry.
Tyler had this whole riff on the, he, as a professor at, at GMU, George Mason, it used to be about him teaching students.
And now he grades the students based on what they teach him.
Yeah.
And so his job is just to ask questions and whoever answers them the best.
I saw something else about a about a professor who was saying he encourages his students to have these language models write
the essay that he's tasked with them. And that's now the average essay. And your job is to write
something that is much, much, much higher quality than what the model put out. And when I saw this
post from Gary, it made me think of Daniel on the ReadWise team, because that feels like something they already have this huge customer base of pretty online readers.
And rolling out some type of software like this seems like they could have a pretty strong edge there.
So Daniel, when you listen to this, go back to the original post.
Check it out.
But obviously, you can use ChatGPT, but probably still an opportunity to build something bespoke.
And so if you're looking for an idea for the next YC batch, start hacking. But obviously you can use ChachiPT, but probably still an opportunity to build something bespoke.
And so if you're looking for an idea for the next YC batch, start hacking.
Start DMing Gary.
Let's move on to Pixel Mothman.
They say, while my AI friend is spooked by ghost, TriRamp is dominating X.
BasedBefJezos is pulling more monthly views on X than Forbes.
And I'm haunted by tech bros pod,
not featuring any of my Z's tweets,
X sweets.
I don't even know.
I don't know either,
man.
Well, that changes now that changes.
Now you're on the show.
We're on the show.
Officially a guest.
First of many,
we will follow you back.
We're excited to have you on.
I think one of the more insightful things here is I bet you Beth does get more
impressions than any of these big legacy posts.
He's a beast.
I swear he has the notifications turned on to the point where if someone he likes posts, he gets a push notification.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like the alarm bell.
Post notifications, yeah.
He is quick with tweets.
He's quick with it, yeah.
I hung out with him a little bit in Miami just for a minute. Uh,
first time meeting him. Uh, he wasn't on X right then, but he must be given that he's quick on the
trigger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I think he was just absorbing takes from the, from the community
there. Um, he also gave a, gave a talk and a debate about AI doom. Uh, uh, fun, fun poster. Okay. So this, this is the post that I wanted to cover
about, uh, GM, uh, shutting down cruise. This is a wild, wild post. And I screenshotted it because
I thought it might get taken down. I don't know if it's still up, but so this is Kyle vote. The
founder of cruise went through YC. Uh, he's one of the Twitch co-founders, uh, with Justin Kahn,
Dalton, uh, not Dalton, Michael Seibel, uh, uh, Emmett Shear, I believe his name is. And after
he started Cruise, which was this self-driving car company, they started with the Audi A4.
They eventually built their own cars. Then they get acquired by GM pretty early for a billion
dollars. Great outcome. And then they're working internally. And he was at the company still
building, even though they were internal. They had a ton of resources. And they were live in great outcome and then they're working internally and he was at the company still building even
though they were internal they had a ton of resources and they were live in san francisco
and they were a competitor to waymo and then they had you know and i remember he left and it was
like i think it was a surprise to a lot of people so this is him being able to say yeah speak his
truth finally so kyle says in case it was unclear before, it is clear now,
GM are a bunch of dummies. And Rune just says, la mau. And then Salvino Armati says,
you sold them a layup $100 billion business and those redacted clowns still managed to fumble.
Brutal. Dunked. Yeah. I mean, how can you not be in the self-driving game?
How do you shut that?
The CEO, Mary Barra, I believe that's her name, GM, said, like, we're not in that business.
It's expensive.
Blah, blah, blah.
We're in the car making business.
And I get that GM is struggling, but, like, you've got to bet on the future.
That's the only way to leapfrog.
We need a reindustrialized poster to acquire GM and return it to glory.
Seriously.
LBO GM.
Yeah.
It's not going to be cheap, but.
Who knows?
It might be.
They've been bankrupt like 25 times.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So who knows?
That's true.
Okay.
Let's go to Arvin Srinivas.
I'm going to struggle with that name for a while.
The Perplexity CEO and founder.
He says, P. Marka, can you wire me $1 billion?
Because Donald Trump says any person or company investing $1 billion or more in the United States of America will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including but in no way limited to all environmental approvals.
Get ready to rock.
And so, yeah, the race is on.
You need to acquire $1 billion of capital ASAP.
You need to size up those fundraisers, guys, because the gates of innovation are wide open,
and you must push. But here's the thing. I don't think Andreessen is an investor in perplexity yet.
Oh, they aren't? And so when I saw this, I was like, are they just kind of like joking with
each other because like around is in the works? Maybe. Because like it seems like a company that
A6 and Z should be in. Yeah. And that would be kind of like a funny thing even especially if a term
sheet had already been signed of like hey can you give me a billion dollars so i don't have any
inside info there unfortunately but uh we'll we'll probably find out uh soon enough well let's go
back to gm because george hotz dropped a great analysis on the cruise situation. George writes,
Today, GM pulled funding from cruise robo-taxis.
I called this five years ago.
I remember him calling this.
If you had been paying attention,
self-driving has played out exactly like I said it would.
Tesla will win, and Kama AI will take second
with an open-source solution like the smartphone market with iOS and Android.
Today, Tesla has the biggest fleet, and we have the second biggest.
Tons.
I have a Kama AI car.
It's fantastic.
Yeah, why don't you give some backstory on Kama?
So, yeah, Kama is an open-source software package
that George and his team at Kama maintain.
You buy a device that's essentially a smartphone
that he makes internally in an office in San Diego. I toured it. It's amazing.
And it has a camera. It has a front-facing camera, a couple of rear-facing cameras that
look out on the road. It takes in those images. It runs it through a neural network, through an
AI model, and it figures out where the lane lines are. It draws a path for where your car needs to
be. And then it sends that signal to your car over the OBD two port, which is the diagnostic port, kind of the USB-C for cars that if you come into the shop
and they want to know what's going on with your car, they plug in there, but you can control the
car through there. And so it works with hundreds of different cars, gas, electric, all sorts of
different cars. Uh, and it's a fantastic product.. It is so much better than the stock system
in Mercedes, BMW, Audi, everything except for Tesla.
It's way better.
It keeps you dead center in the lane.
It's insane.
I've driven this thing for hours, hands in the lap,
feet on the floor, just sitting like I'm a passenger.
It's amazing.
Crazy.
It's so, so good.
We should put it in a P1.
I'm trying to get him to put it in better cars because he obviously focused the—
From a marketing standpoint.
I know.
Obviously, they focus on—
Fast cars have always been good marketing.
Yeah, they focus on the most popular cars, so it's a lot of Hyundais and Hondas and just random cars.
But you put that thing in a Rolls Royce.
That's what you want.
He has a Rolls Royce.
And it doesn't work because it has mechanical steering.
So there's a lot of cars that aren't compatible.
And now there's cars that are encrypting the OBD2 port
to lock out Kama, which is such an anti-feature.
It's so hostile.
So we need a boycott of any car company
that's disabling Kama. And then we we need comma to start being sold in dealerships.
The only thing I would say is if, if you're a manufacturer and you're allowing people to
add this open source self-driving functionality, does that open you up to any risk? It shouldn't,
but it's America. Oh, like now Apple's going to tell you what phone case you can put on?
Like this is America.
Like let me be free, you know?
Right to repair is important.
Let me hack on my stuff.
This is George's lineage.
He was the first guy to jailbreak the iPhone.
He was the first guy to jailbreak the PlayStation.
And that's essentially what he did.
He jailbroke cars.
And so he's built this fantastic product that I highly recommend to anyone.
It's like a couple thousand bucks.
It'll upgrade your driving experience incredibly.
So he continues to say, tons of self-driving car startups have shut down with zero to show for it.
Ghost Autonomy raised $240 million, worth zero.
Argo AI raised $3.7 billion, worth zero.
Investors are now going to waste billions.
I don't even know about Argo.
I know.
Investors are now going to waste billions on humanoid robots. Can anyone
stop this train wreck? It is just as obvious as last time.
Comma is the furthest along with the scalable tech
needed to solve self-driving and eventually humanoids. We have end-to-end methods
shipped that 10K people are now driving with, myself included.
You can buy it on our website.
And we have state-of-the-art learned world model simulator tech, which is a lot more
pure than what Tesla is doing. Self-driving is a couple of years from its AlphaGo moment. Again,
nobody will believe me because believing me isn't the hype way. It doesn't allow for brain-dead
idiots to throw billions of dollars at large-scale garbage. It requires 10 to 100 very smart people carefully fixing the bugs in a fully end-to-end software
stack.
That's just how the problem is.
By the way, if you are one of those 10 to 100 smart people who actually wants to solve
self-driving, not whatever Cruise did for the last 10 years, come work at Comma.
We have the most straightforward hiring page i've ever seen
hiring is a challenge and bounty based and uh yeah potential brother of the week here let's put
him to the side uh yeah fantastic uh george is uh amazing to talk to and hang out with
brilliant thinker um and i think he's i think he's right that uh the the model that will win
is very very tight are you familiar with like end-to-end self-driving?
Basically, the AI takes in images and there's no... So the default way to do self-driving is
you use the AI to understand the world and basically identify the lane lines in the images,
but then you translate those into something like a like something that like a video game world.
And then you're using C plus plus not machine learning to mathematically calculate what the
accelerator should do, what the steering wheel should do, but you don't need to do that. You
can actually go end to end and have a machine learning model from start to finish. Just look
at the images and decide what the output should be. Just translate from, if you see this, apply braking pressure. If you see this, apply the accelerator. If you see
this, steer left, steer right. And that is where Tesla is going. That's where Kama already is.
And everyone else is just completely messing around with like crazy models that don't scale.
And so you're saying that's what Waymo is doing, even with their full LiDAR setups?
I'm not sure what the latest and greatest with Waymo is, but George has always been bearish on Waymo because at one point they had a cone guy whose job it was just to write software to identify cones.
And that's an example of they were able to throw so many resources at it that they had a cone guy, a stoplight guy, a dog guy.
And their whole job is just build a
model that just identifies it's good to have guys more so like you got your guy for private security.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Or something like that. Yeah. And so, uh, the, the, the, the model of
trying to get every edge case in, in George's world is that that is a failing strategy because eventually, like you won't,
eventually you'll get to, oh, there's an order of magnitude more edge cases. And then there's
another order of magnitude edge cases, but scale allows you with a scaled machine learning model
to capture all of those essentially and learn the actual underlying behavior of a human.
So yeah, still very bullish on Comma.
The company's too small.
Should be bigger.
It's fantastic.
I love it.
It's a long term.
So he's already thinking long term, right?
He's saying, we're two years out from the top.
I kept asking him, why don't you go and raise a billion dollars?
Because that wouldn't pull things forward.
This stuff just takes time.
We need great people working on it.
We need to just collect the data, continue. There's nothing that we can do to pull things forward. This stuff just takes time. We need great people working on it. We need to just collect the data, continue.
There's nothing that we can do to pull this forward.
I want to own a lot of my company,
and I want to just solve this.
That's all I care about.
Very cool.
Let's go to Jason Liu.
Brother behavior.
He says, this is my first angel investment of 2024,
Augmental.
I'll be onboarded Friday and soon be able to shit post
on Twitter with my mouth.
OK, so I know nothing about this company except that it seems very clear that it's a human-machine interface that uses the retainer form factor or Invisalign form factor.
So I'm assuming you get to talk into it.
I think we talked about this in a previous episode.
Maybe you get to whisper into it.
Yeah, I was talking about with the AirPods,
it can be very distracting to talk.
But when you get your wisdom teeth out,
you could essentially put a microphone in there
and then be talking or whispering.
You lose the wisdom of the wisdom teeth.
Yes.
But you add the wisdom of language models.
Exactly.
So then you can just whisper.
And the AI can take that in or the phone call or transcript or anything like that.
Imagine having friend.com in one of your molars.
Because you can wear an earpiece that no one can hear, but talking is still disruptive.
People hear what you're saying.
But if you're just able to whisper and it can pick it up, that's pretty powerful.
So this seems like a better solution than going in for anesthesia and getting your wisdom teeth out.
Just pop the retainer in.
So probably,
uh,
an interesting thing.
Uh,
huge,
huge,
huge pushback on the form factor.
I'm sure people will be like,
that's disgusting.
It's like getting moldy and stuff.
But,
uh,
but I liked that someone's trying it.
Yeah.
Let's,
uh,
Jason,
Jason,
let us know how it goes.
Yeah.
Once you post at us using the,
using the mouthpiece.
Yeah.
Interesting.
He made the angel investment
and he is getting onboarded,
but hasn't actually used it yet.
I'm excited.
Great picture though.
Let's, oh, this is great.
Let's go to Everett Randall.
He says, have never been more bullish
on a podcast slash X account than Tech Bros pod.
Can we get a coin going
so the early adopters can invest?
Thank you, Ev.
We really appreciate the shout out, the love.
And we replied back, the best way,
if you want to benefit from the show, buy LVMH stock.
It's just a fantastic proxy.
And we see that stock.
We buy a lot of Dom Perignon.
We don't give stock tips or anything like that.
We're not Jim Cramer over here.
But yeah, we're buying a lot of champagne.
We double quite frequently.
And so we expect those sales to really help the French conglomerate.
And it's great to be supported by another member of the Holy Trinity.
Totally.
Over at Kleiner Perkins, one of the Holy Trinity firms.
Fantastic.
I think we got Sean McGuire next.
Hopefully we can get Sequoia on board with the Tech Bros Pod movement.
And then I think it's in the bag.
In the bag.
Let's go to Sean.
He says, you can't make this up.
The information runs a provocative headline asking if SpaceX's valuation is irrational.
But their math is off by a factor of 1,000.
$350 billion divided by 2 times 4 million equals 43.75K.
This also doesn't count Starlink Enterprise and GovRevenue, or that it's doubling year over year.
And so, of course, they might write the dealmaker newsletter,
but over at the information, they're not dealmakers.
Have they done deals?
They're not dealmakers.
Not a lot of Excel over there, a lot of Microsoft Word.
Well, here's what I'd like to see.
Let's get Sean a position at the information as executive editor
and contributor and just run the articles
by him before you put them out. He will catch it. I think so. He's on it. He would have caught this.
He's effectively like he's doing, he's doing the work for them already. He should get paid for it.
But, but I respect Sean, a capital allocator, putting the information in the truth zone.
That's important. There's a reason
people have been calling it the misinformation. We obviously don't promote that, but, uh, you know,
with errors like this, you know, it kind of makes sense that people refer to as the misinformation
sometimes, because this is, this is a big, big mistake. Hopefully they'll issue a mea culpa and
just shut the entire operation down. Um's move on to Tren Griffin.
He says, SpaceX share value,
Sears sales values the company at about $350 billion.
Tender offer includes $1.25 billion of stock at $185 a share.
Bloomberg, employee liquidity for the win.
We are selling to willing buyers
at the current fair market price.
Yeah, it's good.
Get those employees liquidity.
I mean, the company is 20 years old. Like, yeah, it's like you wasn't exactly a speed run. You could be a new grad
and your company is still not public. It's like you're 45 now you have a family and like college
to pay for. Like, yeah, this is not, this is not, Oh, some C stage founder who wants to, uh, do some
cheeky secondary and buy a sports car.
This is, you know, I need money to pay for my kid's education.
Yeah, it's no longer cheeky secondary.
But, you know, if I worked there, it'd be hard to sell.
It's a pretty good company.
Yeah.
Let's go back to John Fio.
He says, America has totally forgotten about small town America. We're about
to remember that this life is not only possible, but better. The next wave happens in small town
America, full stop. This is the next frontier. And he shares a picture from Portland, Maine.
Yeah. I love that Fio actually lives in a small town. Like it's very, it's very cool that he went
hard to, I mean, Nashville is not exactly a small town, but it's certainly smaller than New York.
Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's, it's certainly smaller than New York. Yeah.
He's moving that direction.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which is great.
He'll eventually be the mayor of a small town somewhere.
I think so.
Yeah, I think it's, I mean, every once in a while a post will pop up,
and it'll be like, there's not a housing crisis.
You just don't want to live in Idaho.
It'll be like a $300,000 house.
It just is like beautiful four bedroom house on an acre and like near,
you know, walking distance to the city or whatever. And so, yeah, I think,
I think we're the whole remote work trend is actually a multi-decade trend
where people know, you know,
it's still like under hyped in many ways and it
hasn't had the level of impact that it will when people realize like, oh, I can go move to a small
town with a group of my friends and make it, um, you know, make it something new. Let's go to
a promoted post. Promoted post. We got a promote post here. Uh, this one is from Will O'Brien,
friend of the show. He says, join the Ulysses founding
team. Come be my right hand on the GTM front at our base here in San Francisco and help us scale
our technology around the world. We are reducing the cost of doing critical ocean activities like
how SpaceX is reducing launch costs. We've developed technology that reduces the cost of
seagrass restoration by 10x and close 1 million of revenue.
This is just the start.
Ulysses is on a path to power every ocean task and become critical infrastructure for the $8 trillion ocean economy.
Our mission is to steward the ocean for an abundant future.
This was top of mind for me.
There was a post that went viral this week.
I think Steinman covered it and will
covered it as well talking about how china has these floating cities where they'll just show up
somewhere and just like completely strip all life out of the ocean and just like kill everything
ship it back to china um and will was uh maybe a little bit shitposting, but talking about wanting to prevent that
and some of the technology that he's building.
So Ocean Economy is $8 trillion.
If you want to work at potentially a future trillion-dollar company,
go work for Will, the SpaceX of the seas.
And tell him the technology brother sent you.
Let's go to Preston Holland, the private jet guy.
He says, seen in a group, lol, and it's a post that says,
I have a large social media influencer that is looking for an empty leg from Miami to Philly
in exchange for incorporating the jet or broker company into the video
and being tagged and included in all posts.
250K followers on Instagram, 900K on TikTok, 150 on YouTube.
Is anyone interested in being involved?
I can provide all of the analytics for each of his pages. DM
me with interest. It's funny.
Why not try? You missed
100% of the shots you don't take.
Go for it. The thing I would respect,
it's not like a super small
time. It's not like a...
I think 900K on TikTok
gets you squarely into the influencer
bucket. You're no longer a micro
influencer yeah you know micro influencers still that 10 to like 100k range somewhere in there
um so anyways good good shot on goal there's seven is there seven million full-time influencers in
the United States something like that so these people need to fly private sometimes empty legs
are a great way to do that I love it if You're just getting into the game. Let's take a quick break
we'll be right back we are back and
Let's go to a post from David Senra David Senra writes Brad Jacobs has started eight different billion dollar businesses
He was kind enough to invite me to his home and we had an incredible two hour conversation that felt like 20 minutes.
I made an episode about what I learned.
Episode is available now.
Highly recommend going and checking out the Brad Jacobs episode on Founders Podcast.
It's in your RSS feeds.
It's on Spotify.
David's a good friend of the show.
Godfather of podcasting that, uh, this was able to happen because of all the work that David's put into his show.
He spent years and years studying the great entrepreneurs.
Yeah.
And for every, for every episode that he does like this, he gets 300 people reaching out saying, can we do, can I, can we do, can I do an episode with you?
And so he's saying no to like 99% of them.
Oh yeah.
And then a handful actually are worth doing.
And you end up with content like that.
But Brad Jacobs is an animal.
He has a very methodical way that he builds billions of dollars of enterprise value.
And he wrote a book.
And he's done it over and over and over.
Yeah.
And he wrote a book.
So David's able to cover it.
How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, I think it's called.
It's great.
It's such an incredible name for a book.
But it's amazing because, you know, David, like so many of the books are by founders who have
passed away. And it's very much like a history show. But he's in many ways like caught up to
reality and covered so many people that now the great entrepreneurs of this generation are like,
I want to talk to you. I looked up to Rockefeller. I looked up to Steve Jobs.
And it's a good example of, you know, we've talked on the show a lot about how if you're doing anything in startups and venture and you start asking for people to sign NDAs, it's like a very negative signal.
Brad Jacobs has basically published his entire strategy and methodology for building billion-dollar companies.
And he's willing to put it all out there because it really is so much comes down to execution that he can write out exactly what he does. And he's still not worried that other people are going to attack his business, his existing
companies, or go after new opportunities that he wants.
So anyways, tons to learn from that book, though.
It's great.
Great work from David.
Let's go to Gabby.
She says, whoever did all this to the Photos app needs to be tried at the Hague.
Low-tamping.
This is so real.
Have you tried?
I mean- It's awful.
The whole iOS 18.1 is the worst update that I can ever remember.
I posted about this myself.
One of our listeners said that it was LinkedIn coded, but I was angry.
But the Photos app is truly abysmal.
I go in there knowing exactly what I want to get, and it's like playing whack-a-mole,
trying to just find the right section of the app.
I will steel man it.
I think that they are going through a transition
and they want to get away from all the hard-coded UI entirely
and they want it just to be a search bar at the top
and they want search to be so good
that you can actually just search for dog video
and it will automatically filter for videos and it has dog in there.
No, I totally get what they're trying to do. I wish there was a way. I still wish there was a
single place that gave you the feed of photos. Cause that's really what I want. I don't care
about the AI organization. Yeah. And there's all these times when I download a video, an image from
the internet and it has a different date because that, that image was created a year ago.
And so it just goes way back.
And I'm like, where is this thing?
And I wind up saving it five times.
I wind up just taking screenshots and then those are messy.
It's just a disaster.
And the video functionality of the camera completely broke for me.
I had like five or so different moments with my children that I recorded and then before realizing that it no longer saves videos for me.
So standing by for an update there.
Yeah, that's great.
Let's go to TJ Parker.
TJ says the best chance Democrats have in the next election is running Alex Karp.
I love that.
Karp is the man, very thoughtful philosopher, been on the left for a long time, strong Democrat, but understands the importance of the Western
order and has been in great style to great style. Yeah. The problem is that he's just,
he's just running too, too important of a company to step back. I don't think he could do it.
Yeah, but he's got a lot of runway. Yeah. But I would love to see it. I would, I would be happy
to support carp in a future election. I hope it happens. Uh, let's go to hold up see it. I would be happy to support CARP in a future election.
I hope it happens.
Let's go to...
Hold up, John.
I got to jump in here with a promoted post.
If there's two things we love on this show,
it is capital allocators and watches.
We just wanted to jump in here and support Bill Ackman.
He says,
A little bit of shameless promotion
for my favorite watch company, Braymont.
The Braymont Submariner, Submarine,
500 meter automatic and camouflage ceramic, perfect for the toughest city streets and
underwater operations. So I love that he's showing that this is a versatile watch. I'm sure Ackman
wears these in boardrooms during activist campaigns and even when he's getting wild over the weekend,
doing some underwater operations. So anyways, fantastic looking watch. I wasn't familiar with
Braymont, but now I am. And thank you for promoting fine watchmaking, Bill.
And I believe he's an investor in the company or he owns the company.
I would hope so.
At a certain point, we have the 2% rule for a capital allocator of his size, the only option left is to buy the whole company.
To buy the damn thing.
Buy the damn thing.
Let's close out with Daniel Doyon.
He says, technology brothers only want four things in life, and it's disgusting.
And it's a picture of a beautiful woman with a baby, a private jet, a wonderful Patek Philippe Grand Complication, and a Ferrari 296, I believe.
Fantastic choices.
Great choices, Daniel.
You definitely have taste.
I love it.
He is living it.
Go check out his company, Readwise.
Oh, yeah.
And thank you for being a listener and supporter of the movement for Loud Opulence.
Yeah, we love it.
We hope to see more of those.
Send us your photos.
Send us your ideas.
DM us questions.
We'll answer them on the show.
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And we have to jump because our tailor is here.
Not a joke. We are actually
getting fitted for new suits. So it's important. Stay safe out there. Show would not be possible
without suits. So thanks for listening. Thank you. Bye.