TBPN Live - Eric Glyman, David Senra, Bridget Harris, The Trouble with Tariffs, See You in Aspen

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

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You're watching TBPN. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Today is Tuesday, March 4th, 2025. And guess what? We have a guest at the opening of the show, Eric Gleiman, CEO of Ramp. We're very excited for you to be here. Thank you. Welcome to the show. Awesome to see you and great to be in this holy place today. Yes. The dojo of the dollar, the shrine of shareholder value. It has many names, but most importantly, it is our humble abode as the host. It is where we are. And it should feel like home to you considering that I have this massive, you know, sort of ramp logo over my head here. So home away from home on the air.

It's amazing to have you. How's this week been so far? Obviously a busy one with the news yesterday. But from what we understand, it was old news to you, but I'm sure it feels great to get it out in the world. It's incredibly exciting. And look, most days as a founder, it's you in an office taking calls, waking up early, staying up late. It's just a lot of constant work.

It was one of those rare moments, I think, when customers, partners, the team could all celebrate just a little bit, enjoy, and then kind of get back to it. And so it's pretty overwhelming, really exciting, exciting and feel lucky to be here. Talk about the, you know, pressure of, you know, raising, you know, in the sort of height of Zerp you guys raised at an eight-ish billion dollar valuation. Then you had to sort of reorient the team around, obviously the business performance was still fantastic, but many people were saying, you know, publicly that generally a lot of these unicorns may not ever sort of achieve that sort of Peak valuation how good does it feel to not only achieve it again but exceed it dramatically and what did you have to do to kind of like motivate and rally the team in those sort of like the darker days uh where again the

sort of public narrative was that uh you know, these valuations were never really real. And yeah, so how good does it feel at this moment? I think someone really has to do just like a deep, in-depth piece of like the big comeback and building up from like these 2021 companies and what it took, because there really were companies that would raise at, you know, 100x revenue multiples. I don't think it was a sin necessarily to raise at high prices. I think probably the sin was just spending it all really quickly. You look at a lot of the companies that have transformed their industries, Amazon, Google, Apple, like you name it, often started with some kind of bubble or hysteria. People were investing a lot in it. I think it does interesting things to businesses.

I can tell you that our mission has been very consistent. Start a business that is obsessed with saving our customers time and money. help them have every dollar an hour that they're spending in their business go a lot further. And when you have a large amount of capital behind you, you of course think about what are the results that you produce next week, but you start obsessing over, could I make this outcome 10 years from now larger? Instead of taking that next marginal dollar and I'm keeping it, how do we put it back into the hands of customers, see them succeed, have the ability to use that next dollar to invest in faster growth and in a weird way, grow a much larger business

for them 10 years from now, and we hope a much larger one for us. And so I actually think it created the conditions for R ramp to not just be customer obsessed, but to take that to a whole nother level. You know, I would say is one of those 2021 companies, we certainly had a lot of work to do to grow. But if you keep, you know, I think 2022 is public, you know the revenue 4x'd that year. If you keep doubling, if you keep growing at incredible rates, what are very large multiples suddenly become very reasonable. And I think that the interesting thing that happened since is it all met. And now, Ramp is not only trading strongly performing public traded companies, just growing at a

dramatically faster clip. It's driving more savings and more value for customers. And the most remarkable thing is it's such a large market. I think if we do our jobs right, we tend to save our customers more and grow just as fast, if not faster. I remember you telling me that one of the things you did for the employees was actually during the all hands, during kind of the turmoil of the interest rate rise, you actually walked the team, everyone on the team, regardless of their role in investor relations or not, through how valuations are calculated, where ramp is, the growth rates, the metrics, and kind of did a bottom-up analysis, not like a full DCF or anything, but you walk people through that. Do you think that's something that's unique about ramp culture? Or do you think more startup CEOs or scale-up CEOs should be transparent at that

level with their employees about how... Because there's a lot of companies out there right now that are just like, hey, yeah, we're worth $20 billion because I got one guy to write me a check at $20 billion. They bought a million dollars of the stock at $20 billion. Whereas you, I think you said, hey, look, there's a whole host of people around the table that agree on this valuation now. We just repriced it in the new interest rate regime. And here's all the multiples. Here's what it would look like if we were public, et cetera. Walk me through that. So start with maybe this and think about this, where if you're a new employer, you're considering

coming to ramp, there's sort of two-ish ends of the deal just from a comp perspective. One, what's cash? People can agree on base bonus, that kind of structure, and what's the equity value? You know, maybe that you get a package worth $100,000, half a million, something like that. And traditionally, when this is done, we say, okay, this is granted, it's based on this valuation. So, we believe that the stock today is worth, if you stay for four years, it will be worth half a million dollars. And if it grows from there, it'll be worth more. The problem that all these companies had in 2022, 2023, when publicly traded tech companies in some cases were down 70%, some were down 90, others were down 30 is no one quite knew. And for an opaque private company, suddenly the bid ask spreads could be very, very wide.

And during all this, we were growing incredibly quickly. Like that 2022 years, we grew four times year over year. No other publicly traded company was doing that. And so I think part of the problem that we were trying to solve was we were very lean. We weren't burning a lot, didn't have a capital need. But I wanted to be able to look employees in the eye and say, you know, when we make a grant and we say this is a $500,000 grant as of the day that you're joining, we really believe it. And it's not just us, but other sophisticated investors have done it. And so we did what was a very unusual thing at the time, which is, you know, we just went out

to market and said, we just want to know where you would price this, what's fair. And investors said, we have more conviction than ever. In December 2021, we valued Rampant 8.1 billion. Today, we actually think it's going to be a way bigger company and the value is 5.8 billion. And we said, great, let's do it. And the interesting part is mathematically, if you go through it, to your point, John, like a DCF discounted cash flow, one of the biggest drivers of what's the end valuation is what are all the profits you'll make in 10 years plus. And it's impacted by what is the risk-free rate, the overnight rate you can get. In December 2021, that rate was almost 0%. You would get no

reward for risk. In 2023, 2022, the risk-free rate was like 5% to 5.5%. And if you compound that over 10 years, it has a dramatic effect. And so in a weird way, if you kind of go through the math, the $5.8 billion valuation first, it lowers the share price today, but it implies a much higher share price later on. So I guess to back into it, I still think a lot of companies haven't taken their medicine. They actually haven't just marked it to market. And I think that a lot of employees who've been working hard probably are still underwater. And we didn't think this was right. We'd rather just say, here's where the stock is,

come in today through hard work and focus, customer obsession, let's build from here. And I think that proved really well. We're back above all time highs. We have a lot of momentum. And I think for people who've joined the team and part of the mission, I think people have been treated really fairly. And so, I don who joined the team and part of the mission, I think people have

been treated really fairly. And so I don't know, I hope that's helpful in just how we thought about it. Yeah. I have a question around ramps, ramp truly lives the ramp way, like the approach to company building that you guys advertise you, you, you do exactly yourself. Right. So, so I feel like you're in a position like, uh, looking at ramps, capital efficiency, which I think was published yesterday around your guys's sort of net burn. Uh, it's really astonishing. Right. And it's gotta be, if you're running a business, you know, at, at anywhere in the same category, even adjacent categories, you have to be highly concerned at the, at the rate that you guys are growing in that context.

Is that how much of that do you credit to ramp versus yourself and your team's operational abilities? I think our whole mission, right to your point is like, make the most of every dollar and every hour if you're spending it, you should know why. And it's not just that you're spending it in one place, but what actually generates the return? What connects to growth? And I would say that we certainly benefit a lot from our own product. We try to be obsessive over making sure we're not wasting. And if we're spending on software licenses of product, we buy 500 seats, we want 500 people to use it. And we use Ramp to cut out extra licenses.

We look and make sure we're getting the most impact for prices and software that we're buying. And I just think for the same reason, a lot of the highest performing, best running companies on the planet run on Ramp and use it. We do too. We want to be the best customer of our own product. And so some of it's that. But I'd also say with your whole mission is, you know, to obsess over getting,

you know, your customers the most from every dollar an hour. As long as you're not a big hypocrite, you start thinking about it for yourself too. And so I would give credit to the team. I just think that the rigor, you know, not just financially, but even just from a, you know, engineering perspective, design perspective, I think most organizations could not have put out a Super Bowl ad from, you know, 11 days start to the team. You know, we have a sort of a weekly with with the ramp marketing team and we talked to them and they basically were like, hey, we got to go dark for like three days. And so we got to witness the process. And it was just it was it was incredible to see in this moment. You know, to me, it feels like ramps opportunity, like the value proposition for ramp has never been stronger right you you were born in 2019 you very quickly were in the zero interest rate era where it was not cool to save money it was cool to spend it and grow as fast as human humanly possible and we're now entering this period where you know we have terrorists there's austerity in the government

right it seems that um you know saving money and making dollars go further is in how are you thinking of taking ramp out of... The Super Bowl felt like this first moment where ramp was going mainstream, right? And what does that look like over the next couple years in terms of getting... There's many more businesses that aren't on Ramp than are. What does the next two years look like in terms of going mainstream? Jeff Bezos

Two things. There's something just timeless about Ramp's core ideas. I need to paraphrase Jeff Bezos when he was talking about Amazon. He couldn't imagine 10 years in the future people would ever, you know, say, you know, Jeff, I love Amazon, but I wish the prices were higher. I just wish that, you know, these packages got to my door a little bit slower. You couldn't imagine it. People always want lower prices, you know, and getting things earlier, getting more done with less effort. And in some ways, we just took the simple idea very seriously. For a business owner, you know, in the US, average profit margin is eight and a half percent. It means that a dollar saved is not

equivalent to a dollar earned. You know, a dollar of cost that you cut is equivalent to increasing your revenue by $12. And I just think that we, you know, looked at the math and just took it seriously. And I think that, you know, simple truths in some sense are one of the most powerful forces in business. When I look at where we are, it is incredible to be serving, empowering what we believe is one to two percent of all corporate and small business card spend in the u.s which is maybe the market that we're largest in um you know it's 98 to 99 to go i think part of going you did the you did the meme you did the one percent if we just take one percent of this thing it will be a big company and they did it so frustrating yeah Yeah, yeah.

Well, people are going to be like, yeah, yeah. Can I get a breakdown of like postmortem on the Super Bowl? I want to know. I mean, everyone kind of knows, OK, Super Bowl, like it just looks good. It looks like a six to seven figure spend. But how do you everyone wants to know, you know, what does it feel like? How do you start calculating? Like, does this make sense? And did we make money from it?

What's your early read? And then what do you look, what signals are you looking for down the road? It was incredible. Um, so there was a couple of things and also there was even kind of in ramp fashion, some things that made the, um, the, the buy particularly impactful and maybe a little more clever. So, um, by being, by buying the ad much later than most normal people would do, we had access to very unique inventory. Like it sort of is a little insane to say 11 days before the Super Bowl. You know, what if we did that? And so as a result, we actually knew who was playing in the Super Bowl. You know, we were able to find someone that had incredible relevance to what people were watching.

And, of course, Saquon is an amazing one of one talent. That was phenomenal. Next, there was, without getting too specific, a lot of folks that, for various reasons, would normally buy Super Bowl ads, insurers who had to deal with fires and other things like that that dropped out of the Super Bowl. You know, didn't want to be advertising at a time when, you know, we're sort of coming under attack. And it meant that some of the spots that we were able to get were in extraordinary slots. For people who were watching closely, we were the very last ad going in to the Super Bowl. And that was nationally aired. For folks in other markets, saw the ad twice. And, well, I can't get specific on the figures. It was a lot less than what people think, and the impact was a lot more.

I think that Saquon, you know, being a core contributor and having an extraordinary season meant that not only, you know, was there a lot of coverage of him, but, you know, even the next week he was on the Today Show and, you know, they talked about his story as well as our partnership and the ad aired there. And we can see this in the metrics where February was, you know, by many accounts that by far the biggest February that we've ever had. The acceleration just in terms of sales, as well as people feeling like, you know, it's gone from startup to, you know, this company that I knew when is actually on this big stage. And so you can see it in the growth and just even in how people feel, how likely people are to recommend. And we've seen all of these go up.

I have a more personal question. You now run a $13 billion plus company. You're still one of the most kind and genuine people that I know. And it's almost most people by the time they sort of climb the mountain to build a company, your, your ability to sort of lead with kindness. And I feel like every conversation that I've had with you, but at the same time, sort of broadly your, your sort of reputation, despite, you know, building such a behemoth in such a short period of time, that's broadly your reputation with anybody that I feel like interacts with the company. Where does that come from? So one, I just think, you know, we're, we're thrilled to be here. But, you know, I, you know, show some humility. 13 billion is a lot, it's still very small, in the grand scheme of things, you know, we're competing directly with companies that have

multi hundred billion, if not, almost trillion dollar market caps, some of the largest companies, you know, today, or call it three and a half trillion dollars. And the wild largest companies today are, call it $3.5 trillion. And the wild part is that mathematically, a company like an Apple or Microsoft or Nvidia talking to a ramp is almost like a ramp talking to a Seed or Series A startup. It's actually those multiples between valuations are about the same. And so in some sense, I think some of it just comes from the reality of we have such a long way to go. There's so much more to build. There's so many more people that we can serve. And just remembering that. I think that when you look at companies in the past often are killed by hubris, you know, arrogance and, you know,

forgetting like the reason why they were able to grow and get there is there were people who early employees who gave them a shot and worked hard who didn't have to be there, who were their early customers who said, you know what, I'm going to try and trust you with my business and please take good care of it. And, you know, that still is true. And so I don't know. I guess it's a little bit too like, you know, you grow up a certain way and, you know, that those kind of things stick with you. But that's really how I think about it.

Right. Do you want to get into any of the general entrepreneurship questions or anything? Yeah, I mean, I guess you've had your pick of the litter in the valley, right? At this point, I'm sure you've talked with every major, you know, investor for, you know, across different rounds. And obviously some funds get conflicted and things like that. What's a single best piece of advice you've ever gotten from somebody on your cap table? It could be, you know, specifically on the investor side. It's a really good question. I mean, I tend to

really resonate with former operators, people who have built and run business. I think that experience, it's fun. It's interesting. Also times very solitary. It's pretty valuable. It's pretty valuable. Yeah. And so look, I, I, you know, we have a very small board. You know, one of the members is, is, is Keith her boy. And I think that part of why I wanted to work with him, even from the, you know, the earliest days is I just think he had an obsession with what it takes to, to be a

high quality operator. Like I still think is, um, uh, how to operate talk he gave over a decade ago is, is, uh, as good as it is, I think it's very underrated. Um, I think focusing just to that, it was, uh, cannonballs and barrels, right? Barrels and ammunition. Yeah. Barrels and bullets. Barrels and bullets. Yeah. I mean, the idea is it's like you can go with a bottleneck. You might have as many bullets as, but if you have too few cannons, you can't fire as many bullets. You need to have more cannons to go quicker. But I think a lot of the heart of it, and some of this is like the score takes care of itself, but the idea that you manage towards the inputs to drive the outcome.

And I think RAMP has been in this very large and in some sense, people look at it from the outside in hyper-competitive space. And we've grown at a level others haven't in part, I actually think is just by taking that advice to heart. It's really looking upstream, what are the activities that lead to the outcomes you're trying to drive? What are the things I can do today that will save your business time and money tomorrow? What are the things we can do today to drive more sales tomorrow? And so in some sense, it wasn't profound.

It just was right. And we try to listen to it pretty often. That's great. Yeah, I feel like the best advice in the Valley is actually all out in these sort of blog posts or individualized talks. And in the same way on the company side, you know, the ramp secret plan is out there. It's like, we're going to save businesses the most amount of time and money. And if you want to compete with us on that, you're welcome to, it's good for the world, but we're going to do

it the best. Um, so it's amazing to witness and, uh, uh, yeah, we'll have to have you back on, uh, in the very near future. Cause, uh, you know, if there's one thing about ramp is, uh, uh, yeah, we'll have to have you back on, uh, in the very near future. Cause, uh, you know, if there's one thing about ramp is, uh, there's always, always news coming. Always news. Yeah. Wait guys, I really appreciate it. And, uh, look, I, uh, thanks for having me on the show when, uh, I can say I knew when I think this is going to get, uh, continue growing really quickly. Oh yeah. We're excited. We have center coming on in a couple of minutes, I think. So, uh, we're going to have him psychoanalyze you. Uh, we'll let you go, Eric. Uh, we'll talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. We'll

talk to you soon. Cheers. Yeah. And, uh, we are going to take a 30 second break while we, um, fix some stuff with the stream. And then I will give you a little run of show because we did, we jumped straight into that interview. Obviously we're getting live later and later. And so, yeah, we, we want,

we want to go, we want to touch on the Trump tariffs thing, but just a little bit, just dip our toe in, stay not political, but it is the top story. It's what everyone's talking about so we're going to focus on the tech reaction we're not going to really deep dive into

the politics of it we're going to talk about what people on tech twitter are saying about it we're going to go through a bunch of timeline uh cover some reaction to earlier uh clips that went out yesterday from the show uh and then i want to talk about greenland i think greenland's super interesting there's an article in the wall street journal about whether or not greenland could be a place for a mining boom and the the question they ask is greenland has the makings of a mining boom so where is everyone like like there are minerals there but no one's really going after them we're going to try and get to the bottom of it with this Wall Street Journal article. And then also, Google's making a new push with Project Starline.

Have you seen Starline? I have not. It's one of these tech demos that feels very fake. Because you just can't go experience it. But they bring in journalists and YouTubers. Oh, journalists? And they all walk out of the room you had a journalist that was incredible and you don't know if they're being paid off or something yeah yeah you know you put on the tinfoil hat like they might be paid off to be like that was amazing and really it sucks uh so it's in it's in the

like project orion realm of like seems really promising but basically it's like a tv that's like 3d and it uses kind of like an illusion technique to help you see someone across the table in like as a hologram. Interesting. And they want to roll it out and they want to get it like cheaper so that basically everyone can have this, but,

uh, they're, they're making a push. So we could podcast holographically. I would love that. I mean, the reviews, the early reviews have been,

has been remarkable, but, uh, it's very unclear like how real it is or how, I would love that. I mean, the reviews, the early reviews have been remarkable, but it's very unclear how real it is or how expensive it is to actually roll out. So we're going to go through that. But mostly we're going to do a ton of phone calls today because we're really enjoying the guest spots. We're having a lot of fun people on. So we will have David Sendra hop on, and then we're going to have Bridget Harris from Founders Fund hop on at 11.45

and who else is maybe going to come on maybe Sean McGuire we'll see I texted him hopefully he can get on let me see if he's on he's on next this is turning increasingly into just like a live stream

just like hanging out okay he just liked my post he DM'd This is turning increasingly into just like a live stream. We're just like hanging out. We're hanging out. Okay. He just liked my post. He DM'd me his cell phone number. I texted him. Hopefully he gets on. Hit him with a double text. Maybe we'll just call him live at noon and just be like, you're on.

And that's it. What's going on? Okay. We got to cut to a break. We will be right back. You're watching TBPN. You'll still be watching in a couple of minutes when you get back. We are back.

You're still watching TBPN. We had a little HDMI issue. I guess when I was looking at Jordy, it would look like I was looking off to the other side. Anyway, it's fixed. We're back. We're happy to be here. Ben, give me an update on David Senra. Is he in the waiting room?

Does he have the Zoom link? I mean, we're talking about the most powerful man in Miami. He is the most powerful man in Miami now. We had Keith on, but Keith has kind of relinquished it a little bit. He's got his toes in DC. He's got one foot in Silicon Valley now.

Senra isn't making a move. He's locking down the islands. He's establishing. He's not leaving. He's not leaving. You're going to have to drag him out of Miami. And I would be happy to drag him out of Miami. Actually, it's very easy to get him out of Miami. You just got to send a private jet.

He really does hold the bar well. Yeah, he holds the line. It's remarkable how he set that bar and then still manages to get on a plane twice a week you would think that that would reduce the amount of travel but somehow it does not uh anyway uh senra senra senra hopefully he hops on he says he needs five minutes um that was like four minutes ago you know maybe we should just uh play a little bit of his podcast on our podcast. The dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most two to one.

This is a perfect substitute. I noticed the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. So given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream and to build a team that pursues the A-plus players. And that is exactly what Ramp did. We're in the middle of a ramp ad. That's hilarious.

There he is. I'm playing. I was listening to your latest episode and there was a really good quote in there and I didn't realize it was in the middle of a ramp. That's funny. I caught the tail end of you talking to Eric.

Oh, yeah. That's great. How you doing, man? Good, good. I just actually saw Eric last week. We had breakfast. I flew to New York for a super secret dinner that I'm making an episode about right now. Oh, that's fun. and eric had breakfast the

very next day very cool very amazing uh every time i tried to ask eric something personal he perfectly redirected it into talking about saving money saves businesses time and money uh can you help us psychoanalyze eric because he's like this and he's truly a one-of-one in the sense that uh i was kind of positioning it as like building a 13 billion dollar plus company and maintaining that level of sort of genuine kindness is like very tough and uh i'm curious if you if you have any sort of like opinion sort of cons to other entrepreneurs. I just have the answer. When I made the documentary about Ramp, I was interviewing him with that exact question.

Like, hey, you're so nice, but you're running this kind of cutthroat company in this hardcore industry. How is this possible? And it kind of peeled back the onion and got to the fact that he had a brother who got bullied a lot. And he developed this insane empathy. That was my takeaway. I was like tearing up while I was talking to him about it. It was really, really like kind of like a crazy, crazy like early life to like deal with. And that clearly gave him like a new level of empathy because he went through all this stuff with his brother.

It was wild. Anyway, but Senra, what's your take? One, I spend much time with him. I do – when I say on the ramp ads my friend eric i don't know that's not hyperbolic um i would say the larger uh like the more important idea is like you actually don't have to be like a complete and listen i think steve jobs one of the best you know founders of all time uh if there's a mount rushmore of the history entrepreneurship he's got to be on it it doesn't matter like what the other three are but he's definitely one of them yep but people

hear how like you know how he spoke to other people and they just say oh like to be like him i have to be like that and it's just like no you don't um like if you look at the greatest you know when i went to charlie munger's house and had dinner with him like he said that the greatest he feels the greatest founder of all time is rockefeller and one of the craziest things about ro about Rockefeller is like there'd be people that worked for him for decades that said he never raised his voice and he never said an unkind word. So I think there's like this myth that there's like this one size or one way to be successful. In fact, I was on a long walk with a friend last night and we were talking about Michael Dell. You know, one of them, regardless of what you you think is like one of the most successful people who ever lived uh has a phenomenal relationship with his son they're like best friends from what

i hear uh very very proud that he's still married to the same woman like on anybody who spends time with him says the same thing he's just unbelievably thoughtful and kind um so yeah i i i one with particularly eric it's definitely not an act and two two, I don't think, you know, it's a prerequisite for success. This is like one of the reasons I tend to work alone is because I am really fucking mean. I don't like that. I wish I wasn't so, you know, uh, like intense around that. I'm perfectly fine being that way with myself.

I just don't like doing that to other people. That's why when you said you liked our podcast i took it really serious because i'm like you just wouldn't say that oh no way very authentically like yeah like this this isn't for you bud i mean i've sent him so many things to review and i'm just like it's it's not bad right and he's like have you listened to it so there a, you see this bookshelf behind me. Let me zoom out a little bit. So it is, it holds like 600 books or something like that. And let me see if I can change this.

So they're actually in order by episode number. And one thing that I love about, there's another like 300 books in my living room and I walk past it every day to get upstairs and one one of the books uh has the title like big bold letters in the spine and it's it's applicable to a lot more industries than you think of and it's definitely applicable to podcasts but the title of the book is competing with idiots and i think like you know we're doing the same thing here with posts, right? We have, we have every, we have the library of Alexandria, every post printed out in order that we reacted to them on the show.

So remember, it's bigger than your, it's bigger than your bookshelf. You remember when you guys had this idea of like, you were going to sell your podcast in vinyl. Yeah. And so I actually, i hope you make that into a book and i would buy the technology brothers book of tweets we're definitely thinking about that definitely about that i think with the vinyl thing where we got was we want to send you our favorite episode of founders on vinyl something like there you go okay and then

send that to patrick and then so like the jeremy Giffon episode goes out because you get that on vinyl. It's like a fun thing. You could like put it on your bookshelf or something. It's a little trinket. I actually think it's really smart. There's been multiple occasions. So like you can't see it, but behind my desk. So Sam Zell, there's a bunch of people.

I'm actually reading Michael Ovitz's autobiography. So I'll give you a preview of the episode that has been killing me. I edited it out two days ago and it still won't be done. And he had a full-time gift guy and this has actually come up a lot in the books sam zell had a he spent millions of dollars a year from my understanding yeah on his full-time gift department in fact he built these like automatons right and he'd have a theme and i actually spoke at this guy's conference and he's like do you want anything for this i was like it's in miami i don't give a fuck i'll do it for free and we're friends anyways um and he's like all right i have a gift for you and he actually found one and he bought

me a sam zell like automaton but i think the technology brothers especially because you're like you're doing a five days a week you're gonna have all these guests you should have like a gift department where it's like thoughtful that like that like here here's your favorite episode on vinyl or like whatever whatever i mean how to win friends and influence people the whole idea of a rolodex you save everyone said that was your favorite book right just i mean it i i thought patrick hoshinos he said he rereads it all the time i i read it it is a fantastic book it's one of these like timeless books it's a little ridiculous because it's like so it's such a like over the it's clickbait title but you know clickbait works yeah no the value i like things that the value prop is in the title actually also it's so old timey like it's just it's an interesting artifact because it's like it's the type of like business

advice that you'd see on like a thread on twitter these days but it's from like the 1920s so all the examples are like really because it's, it's advice on human nature and human nature hasn't changed. Exactly, hasn't changed. Like that's why people still read it. And like Charlie Munger's, one of his favorite book was Influenced by Robert Chialdini. He liked it so much, he gave him a single share

of Berkshire stock when it was valued at like 500,000. I think today it's like 750. Wow. Pretty good compensation for writing a book. That's awesome. That's amazing. I love that. When are you writing a book. That's awesome. That's amazing. I love that. When are you writing a book?

What's that? When are you going to write a book? Never. Um, no, cause like, here's the thing. Um,

like I told you before, I mean, you guys know this cause like, I kind of like cornered you at heretic on about how important podcasting is. And you know, I get like, uh, it's very nice because like i

as you guys know most of the books i do i cover like really old but publishers send me all of their like new books and you know i might do like one new book for every like 50 old books and they all they send me their new books for distribution but they're also like where you'd be interested in writing a book yeah and my point to them is like i i think of podcasting as like one of the greatest technologies ever created i think it's the printing press for the spoken word and so me taking and i think it's the highest and best use of my time so me taking time away from that to do anything else but more podcasting doesn't make sense now that i i talked to my friend jimmy sony who i absolutely love

and uh he's he wrote this great biography on claude shannon he wrote this book called what's that he spoke at your event he wrote the paypal book right yep he wrote this great biography on Claude Shannon. Yeah, he spoke at your event. What's that? He spoke at your event. He wrote the PayPal book, right? Yep. He wrote The Founders, A History of Founders. He's like another psycho obsessive.

It took him longer to write The Founders book than it took PayPal to be founded and then sold to eBay, okay? That's crazy. But I called him. I was like, hey, just name your price and listen to the podcast. We'll have some conversations. And if you can write this for me, like in partnership, then I'd be interested in doing that.

So what I told him to do, one of my favorite books is Will and Ariel Durant's Lessons of History, right? You really think about that book. It's like they dedicated 50 years of their life to writing the history of civilization. It's probably, I don't know, 10,000 pages all combined. And yet after that, they're like, hey, we're going to do this fucking ridiculous thing of trying to write a biography of the human species and we're gonna limit to 100 pages so i was like okay i would want to do that like what are the most important ideas that we've just we've unveiled so far through the podcast in eight years of his existence and write like this is about like the most important idea is in 100 pages um and so he he's got a bunch of stuff going on including two

books that are really fascinating that he's writing but but he said he's going to do it. Very cool. Who are the entrepreneurs that are still building their legacy that you are hoping that they will live up to their full potential and one day be qualified to be given the full Founders Podcast treatment, I would put Eric and Kareem in that bucket of ultra high potential, but still just getting started in a sense. Are there people that stand out today that you're excited to cover in 15, 20 years? I'm going to tell you who my favorite founder alive is right now. And it's going to be surprising to people. Cause I heard your episode yesterday where you talked about like how I'd call you up, John, and I'm like, find a simple idea and take it seriously. And I think that's one of like the best pieces of advice.

And you see it over and over again. I've been able, and some of these people I can't fucking name because of the podcast, but I've been able to meet like these crazy, you know, family businesses where the founder's 80 years old, still running the company, no outside investors worth $10 billion. And they just monopolize crazy stuff like nails or packing equipment or a shipping company or just crazy, not very complicated ideas. Just they found a simple idea and took it very seriously.

I think one of the things I like about Eric and Kareem is before we had this like very deep partnership, it's not obviously you guys know this is not just like we're not just like reading ads for them on my podcast. Like we're friends. We spend a lot of time together. Our wives spend time together. Our kids play together. And, you know, I took a long time getting to know them really well. well um one of the important things when we talked about this is like is this your last company like i'm not interested in like the people that want to start scale and sell i'm interested in people that do something for a very long time if you look at all the books behind me these people literally work ends of ferrari right here you were like he died he worked on for there's no retirement like ferrari is my entire life this is what my life energy goes to this most of the people i cover in the podcast you know their life's work is what my life energy goes to this. Most of the people I cover on the podcast, you know, their life's work. And what I loved about both Eric and Kareem, like this is the last company.

Like this is we want to build this forever. There's actually an interesting idea. And I'm trying to convince Kareem to do more. Not that he needs my advice by any means, but I really want him to be interviewed by Patrick. Just because I get to talk to him privately. And he's like fucking brilliant technical mind. And one of the things that he said that was very fascinating is he optimizes for spikes. And what that means is like, you know, especially as the company grows, you tend to like try to like even out and like hire for personality or like yeah this guy's talented but he's kind of like an asshole or he's like comes in late uh or like you know will show

up for two days and kind of disappear and i think what kareem understood is what a lot of history entrepreneurs understand there's a great line by david ogreby where he said that talent is likely is most likely to be found against uh among misfits non-conformists and rebels and uh what kareem is interested in is not like your total package he's interested in your very best idea so like if you were the very best at x and he just wants you to do that for ramp and if you only last for six months that's fine it's like he just he optimizes for spikes and i think that's incredibly um intelligent because it's also something that steve jobs says that he's like you can never ever ever ever forget the dynamic range of human beings that most things in life you know between the

average to the best it's like two to three two two times best three times quality where he's like in software and hardware it's like the difference is like 100x or 1,000x. Yeah, marketing too. Not just 10x engineers, 10x ideas, 10x marketing taglines. You can see it with Apple right now. What's that? You can see it with Apple right now. Genmoji it. It's not crazy to think of the yin and yang campaign

that they ran as 1,000 times better than the Genmoji campaign. Yeah, and again, where does that come from? Where're like Eric and what I like about Eric and Kareem is like, they work like dogs, just like I do. Right. And I'm really only interested. I just had, came back from lunch. The reason I texted you guys in five minutes late is because I was meeting another founder friend of mine and we had lunch with another friend and it's like all three of us have a certain common is like, we're taking what we do very seriously it's all different businesses um but kareem works non-stop right eric does too and they want the pressure um and they want they do believe like something that eric told me that was wild at breakfast was like when bram was founded

um amex was like a 70 billion dollar market cap company and now it's like 220 or whatever um so i i heard at the very end, he's talking about, yeah, people were saying, hey, we're valued at $13 million, that's fine. But we're missing a zero, maybe two zeros. If we're doing this for a long period of time, things grow in unpredictable ways. The people that I've met-

I actually didn't ask him the question of, I'm genuinely curious, what do you do if you have five minutes in the day you know what are you doing uh for fun and i don't even think that's worth asking eric because i know he's just gonna say look you know i like to you know keep in touch with my family and but otherwise i'm at the office i'm thinking about work or i'm calling senra um but uh but yeah it just didn't even seem like worth asking. Cause I already know the answer. One of the most interesting things, I think they just put this out in, in that blog post,

but we definitely talked about it too. It's like, you know, they're doing like 54% of their payrolls on are dedicated to R and D. Like, they're not just like, Oh, we're, we're look what we did in this amount of time. It's like, no, we're going to keep pushing the pace. This is again, the, what I, uh, I, I, the, when I went to New York, I had dinner with Mike Ovitz that I had an intense three hour dinner with Ovitz. So I'm making an episode in the dinner and I'm making an episode on, um, on the book. And the way this came about is because I was, uh, at breakfast with a friend of mine and his phone was on the table and it rings and it's Mike Ovitz. And he picks up, he puts on speakerphone. He's like, Hey, I'm actually

sitting here with my friend, David. He does this podcast you should know about, Founders. And Mike, without missing a beat, he goes, I love that podcast. I listened to four episodes yesterday. And one of the things that me and Mike talked about at breakfast is like, nothing that Michael Ovitz said in his book

or at dinner is like surprising to me. And because it's like, Founders is a church for entrepreneur. It's just, I just tell him the same story over and and over again it's the same personality type over and over and over again um and so yeah of course like when they're saying hey we're extremely dedicated what we're doing we're trying to get better it's like that's exactly what they should be doing if this is going to be your last business if this is your life's work then you will have that like importance of every little detail like how many you guys see all the tweets when people talk about the difference of like the UI and UX to ramp compared to some other people.

Yeah. Yeah. And your point about Apple, there's a great book called Creative Selection. It's episode 281 of Founders. I think the title is Working with Steve Jobs, if I'm correct. Might be wrong. Maybe 282, probably 281. And that's one of the best books I've read it three times because it talks about the care that Steve jobs put to every single pixel of all the products they're making making and all the advertising so that ad wouldn't have gone out because steve would have had to approve every single ad that went out that's there's a different level of care and love yep what's your sleep score what's your sleep score not not good and i love mateo uh they were uh one of my early partners let's it was here's the problem because every i'm so excited about

this is gonna be a big year yeah and i have a lot of stuff coming that people don't know about and like it's it's not good so last night was 70. oh i got 88 what'd you do, Jordy? The, the, the night, the night before is 56, 56. I've never actually gotten that low. I got an 89. You're grinding too hard. No, no.

I'm just very excited. This is like, no, it makes sense. One of my favorite founders, uh, you mentioned earlier is, uh,

are you, we're asking earlier is, uh, Dana white. I think what he did, what him and the Fertitta brothers did with the UFC, buying out of bankruptcy for like 2 billion or two two million and then you know selling selling it for whatever the number is and still staying on there and i saw a clip from a podcast interview

that he said that's excellent and it's like very again i like simple ideas he's just like build a life that you can't like you can't wait to wake up to and he's like i people always ask me oh when are you going to retire from the ufc and he's just like retire from what yeah to wake up to. And he's like, I, people always ask me, Oh, when are you going to retire from UFC? And he's just like, retire from what? Like I get to put on the best fights in the world. I get to travel and I get to stay in the nicest hotels, eat at the nicest restaurants, like put on the best live events. He's like, I'm going to be doing this till I'm 80. Yeah. And I just love that idea. Like very simple idea. Am I building a life that I cannot wait to wake up to? Fantastic. One industry oriented question. And then I have, um, I just want you to rant about a specific topic. So what's going on with Spotify yesterday for the first time,

I got a clickbait style video suggests suggested to me on Spotify. That was like, I tried zero star tech. And it was like this, like, kind of like crazy video. It looked exactly like a YouTube video. It was a YouTube video video it was just a youtube video it came out came out uh you know last week that youtube's the biggest podcast platform in the world now that's obviously not you know sort of not great uh for spotify how do you see spotify as a platform uh evolving um so i don't see this another thing because keep in mind i like study people for a living right i think that's really the only edge i have so um uh we've talked about this like um when i think of like people like people think of like their portfolio they tend to like list companies

mine is like people people it's like oh i invested in this dude and i invested in justin or sebastian or like that um daniel what's that and so and so in. So you're long Daniel Eck? What's that? And so in this analogy, you're long Daniel Eck. Daniel's the best. Like he's the most, like the car, dude, yes. I've spent a bunch of time with him. I consider him a friend, like a legit friend. And it's shocking that we're friends. But like every time I talk to him, like he's,

the idea that, what is Spotify? Like $120 billion market cap company or something today? I don't pay attention to any, like the stock market, we're friends but like every time i talk to him like he's the idea that what is spotify like 120 billion dollar market cap company or something today i don't pay attention to any like the stock market but like it's big public yeah hold up and inform this it's over 100 billion i would imagine 120 nailed it okay so how the hell is the guy that's been running the company for 18 years? He's the founder. He's still there. He's what, 42? Like young.

44, I don't know, something like that. He's like so underrated. More people should study him. He doesn't give a bunch of interviews and usually the interviews are around product announcements. But I don't know what's going to happen with Spotify, but I would back up the truck in anything that Daniel does. And as long as Daniel's there and his team, I've met his team and they're fucking incredible. Like, um, yeah, I knew

exactly what was going to happen. This is like famous, like founders fund lore is that like Sean Parker and Daniel come in and they're like, and they're like, we are going to execute like the Napster type music sharing strategy, but it's all going to be legal. We're going to build this platform. And they projected something like, I don't remember the exact number, but they're like in the, in the investment memo, it's like in 2025, we'll have 300 million DAUs. And they got it within like 10% or something. It was like a 20 year projection and they nailed it. It was crazy. Listen, more important. He's one of the greatest living entrepreneurs without a doubt. That's not even including the stuff he's doing outside of spotify which is fucking awesome incredible and impactful

uh more important that he's like a good guy so um i i want i'm gonna do more of these like i had dinner with episodes you know yeah they're people seem to like them and i like doing them and um i had dinner with and this one had to be like anonymous so i don't know i'm not gonna make an episode on it but um because i asked the guy it's i i mentioned this briefly in a in a episode but i was like i had dinner with you know one i got the opportunity to have dinner with one of the uh wealthiest people on the planet um very unknown right his family it's a multi-generation dynasty and his family like commissioned biographies for certain people in the family and of course when he's telling me that i was like oh let me get those and he's like this is you know i

say bad boys move in silence that maxim that reappears over and over again a history of entrepreneurship uh came from rockefeller uh he's like absolutely not i go why not and he goes because i'm not interested in educating my competitors and the dinner was incredible but he knows daniel and he was just like there's he's what do you think of daniel he's incredible one of the best entrepreneurs in the world this guy's telling me he's like but more important than that like he his like when you speak to him like he's a kind person he's not one of these you know assholes he has no ego no ego he's not much older than all three of us well maybe a lot older than jordy i forgot how young jordy is but like it's incredible what this guy

has done and you know i i think more people should spend time studying him like we're gonna um it's true we're gonna do he already agreed to like we're gonna do i had dinner with uh daniel episode soon because i had an incredible dinner with him it was the most important you know what i fucking think of him i get to meet a lot of incredible people last year was the craziest like year of my life that conversation that conversation i had with daniel was by far the most important because like he doesn't he sees no ceiling to what he can achieve and then he takes that self-belief and he transfers it to you which i think is very very important so i have no idea that they look what the fuck have they've done in podcasting so far yeah um and they're

going to continue to do what i would say if people are interested in learning more about spotify they made i was just in stockholm and i found this out they made a short series on the history of spotify sean parker's in there daniel's in there uh it's called spotify a product story it was out in like 2021 and i think it's eight or nine series eight or nine episodes and then they update it later but you could just listen to the first ones and again everybody's talking about ai right in 2000 whatever i don't 2025 they're they were talking about it half a decade ago they were using it half a decade ago. They're just, he's great. That's all I have to say.

Two minutes left. Question for you. We're at a unique moment in time where it doesn't feel like a lot of entrepreneurs can afford to not pay attention to geopolitics, right? There's been a lot of time in the last 20 years where the generalized advice was focus on your customers. You can kind of ignore everything else. And if you're delivering

value for your customers, then you'll do well. We're at a period where there's tariffs coming down. It's impacting a lot of businesses here in the US and entrepreneurs. Who should those entrepreneurs study in this sort of founders world uh in terms of you know uh entrepreneurs and companies that had to navigate sort of like uh or does it not even matter right or is it still just this this is the biggest thing man like you're the problem is everybody's so focused on on the present right and it history allows you to like take a step back and have a perspective and instead of like being in front of your fucking face all day long and so like here's a great book uh i just did this

episode it's like absolutely ripping it's called 400 pages of uh munger and buffett in their own words and in there it talks about the fact that you you could have bought coca-cola you know in after world war i'm making up the numbers but world war one for like nothing right and it went up by 10 000 x since then or whatever the number is right and the point being is um buffett's point was there's a lot of smart investors and other people and smart capital that pass because they're like oh like there's all this uncertainty there's political uncertainties there's wars there's pandemics so if you think about everything that happened from like 1910 to up until when he's saying this is probably like the 1990s you know you went through two world wars you went through multiple pandemics you went through all this turmoil you went through uh asset bubble

asset class collapses high interest rates low interest rates everything else he goes at the end of the day you know what mattered that 60 years from now they're gonna be they're gonna be serving a billion servings eight ounce servings of Coke a day. And if somebody is making a billion people slightly happier every day by serving this drink to them, that person should make a little bit of money and probably will make a little bit of money. So I don't, I'm not actually a good person

to ask that question, surprisingly so, because like the amount, you guys know, this is like the amount of what I don't, I ignore. I figure that the important stuff, like I'll know about wars, I'll know about pandemics, but I have no idea like who's leading in the stock market. I don't pay, I don't like reading the news. I don't do any of this because what matters is like, I just stay focused on my customer, right?

So if I wake up every day and I read for a few hours, you know, a biography of one of history's greatest entrepreneurs, and I sit down once a week and I talk for a few hours, you know, a biography of one of history's greatest entrepreneurs and I sit down once a week and I talk to you for an hour and I just rip through idea after idea in an hour that you can listen to on 1.5x speed. So it takes 40 minutes of you, right? There's nothing else. Everything else is under my control.

I will get everything I want in life and that I deserve if I just focus on that. Just focus delivering value as much as possible. Yeah. And another way to look at this is if you're an entrepreneur and you're running a company that's not your last company, the geopolitical environment right now is hyper stressful, right? Because you're thinking about, oh, I want to sell the company. I want to exit and all that stuff. But if you're thinking about, you know, still running the company in 20, 30 years from now, uh, it really doesn't matter what happens in the next four years. You just need to, you know, make it through and, uh, make

the debt on. I'm glad you said that. Cause this just spawned another thought to me, right. Where, um, for some reason, and this has not been like on purpose, I was spending a lot of money or a lot, uh, spending a lot of time with like family offices and um and a world i didn't know anything about and i've been asking questions like who's the largest like american family office and you know a lot of them are dispersed whatever the case was like highly likely it's the waltons right you know sam walton's kids and grandkids uh i was if you if you pass the miami beach uh marina right um if you're coming from downtown to to the beach you'll see this giant boat i looked it up one day it was like sam walton's brother's daughter's

boat right it's like bigger or ship bigger than anything else even remote in a giant um marina and it's like it sticks out like a sore thumb so there's a great biography that i actually read um it's called Sam Walton, America's richest man written by Vance Trimble. And it was actually published a year before Sam Walton's autobiography came out. And he had a funny story in there because Sam was very private, just focused on satisfying the customer. And then everybody sees Walmart stock. Oh, this is the richest man in America. So during Black Friday, that was, I think, 1987, right? Sam didn't have a cell phone. He doesn't have a beeper. He doesn't have internet, right?

So he's driving- Black Friday, the retail- No, Black Friday- Or the actual stock market crash. I just want to clarify because you're talking about a retail entrepreneur. Good point. Also a big day. Yeah. Black Friday, biggest stock, I think, single day stock crash ever. I assume that

still holds the record. And so anyways, on paper, he lost like a billion dollars, right? So he goes, he's given a speech at like this charity event, I think in Arkansas for like kids or something. And somebody, he takes questions after somebody asked him questions like, how does it feel to lose a billion dollars in the stock market today? And his response was great. He goes, I didn't hear about it.

He didn't care because he's just like, I don't care. I'm just like focused on my business. I'm not selling the stock today. I'm never selling it. All that matters is that he was, he really, he took a, if you mean take a simple idea and take it seriously. His dedication to that simple idea, E, everyday low price, so EDLP.

This is everyday low price. Let's just make sure we have the lowest price for our customers. And so let's work backwards from that. We just focus on that. We'll do that forever. And you fast forward. And it's like one of the greatest, if it was concentrated in one person, it might be one of the, it is one of the greatest fortunes ever created by taking a simple idea and taking it very seriously. It's fantastic. David, we love you thanks for joining thank you for joining uh expect uh expect us to send you a zoom link once a week forever because we're uh we're all the best way to catch up i i love this yeah i feel like it robs people you just next time in california i

gotta suit up though oh yeah we'll do it hey where's you said you were gonna frame where's that picture uh oh yeah we're it's like the munger it's like the munger picture that we're gonna do um we're getting a picture of the pod father the most powerful man in miami david senra you really are the most powerful man in Miami. That's not even close. Not even close. I don't know, man. You're too humble. You're holding it down. You're acting like you're spending too much time with Eric. You're too humble.

You're the most powerful man in Miami. I think if you go to Miami, you've got to check in with Cedric. You've got to let him know. He's not there. He's going to, yeah. You've got to email him. We'll drop his phone number. We'll drop his personal address and the comments.

You can go and stop by. He loves socializing. Invite him to really big events if it's crowded like a you know conference room hall las vegas invite him to that that's where he's really in his element book signing you know podcast signing real quick before i go so our mutual friend patrick always gets on me because he's just like he'll like try to connect with people or like he's like david doesn't read his email like he's just unreachable and he goes why don't you have an assistant i go why do i need an assistant he goes to answer these emails and they're like manager schedule i go why do i need a schedule like i just need to wake up every day read for a few hours sit down once a week and talk about

what i read i don't need to do anything else i don't need to do anything else it's that simple it was great this morning we actually published on our x account that you were calling in and you hadn't fully confirmed you'd been like partially confirmed maybe you saw that it was like david center calling in at uh 2 p.m yeah no i i unless i'm absolutely indisposed by creating a podcast i will always answer for you guys you know that fantastic all right all right you're the man i love you guys talk to you later love you talk to you later Talk soon. Bye. Do you want to do 10 minutes quick on tariffs? Yeah.

I'd like to just sprinkle in a little geopolitics. I think it is an interesting question about this was the result of Coinbase. Brian Armstrong said, look, we are not going to be participating. We are a mission driven company. We're not going to be participating in every political fight,

every culture war issue. But that doesn't mean that we're going to stay out of crypto lobbying. Like we do need to be regulated effectively. And so it's this weird balance of like, yeah, we're not like getting fully political, but we're also not completely apolitical. We care about our industry and the things that we're experts in. So, uh, so I think, look like, yes, if you're just some random, like AI SAS founder, like you might not care about tariffs between Canada and Mexico, but if you're manufacturing something there and it's coming, that does make, that does matter. All of a sudden that is a tech issue. Uh, like what we, when we

talked to Ryan Peterson, he was saying the same thing. He was like, well, this matters to me. So we, we have a bunch of good posts in here. Why don't we quickly run through the article? Okay. And then we'll jump into it because I think that... So the news is that Trump imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada. It took effect first thing Tuesday. Canada responded with plans to impose 25% tariffs on about $100 billion worth of US imports. Trudeau said Trump is acting in bad faith. Mexico's president said he would also retaliate with a range of moves to be announced Sunday. The U.S. also introduced an extra 10% tariff on Chinese imports overnight, adding

to a levy imposed a month ago. So everything's ramping up. China announced retaliatory tariffs on US agricultural goods and other measures against American companies. Beijing also filed a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization. And so investors were rattled. That's a funny way to get to Trump. The market sold off generally. And yeah, it's been not like full chaos, but definitely one of those things like tariffs are taxes. They kind of suck energy out of economic systems. They can be very good for certain things, especially if you're getting a super raw deal and a country is really just destroying your ability

to produce something or playing some sort of long game that you're not considering. But of course, there are a lot of pushback for this. So let's go through some of the reaction. Logan Bartlett had a post. He said, he's quoting David Kelly, the chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management. And David Kelly says, the trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity, and increase global tensions. Other than that, they are fine. So, bit of a hot take. Keith fires back.

He says, most of that is false. And then Logan fires back and says, I put it in quotes so i could obfuscate responsibility for saying it i love it which is smart yeah phenomenal uh strategy good posting strategy uh i don't know what do you think uh which side do you take on this you know i'm i'm very grateful in moments like this that we are a technology and business show sure i i've approached this from the point of view of this is making life really really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs that i respect and uh want to see do well and so from that lens from a purely sort of personal angle uh it's um you know it's tough to see but But at the same time, there's been precedent throughout history where

we've implemented tariffs like this and seen positives out of it. Right. So I just think it, you know, I think that Mexico and Canada have the right to be able to say, like, you know, Trump's acting in bad faith because he's been sort of like, you know, Trump's acting in bad faith because he's been sort of like, you know, he's playing with people's livelihood to a very extreme degree. I thought it was worth jumping down to something. Before we do that, yeah, I just have a, I don't know if it's a problem with this, but it just feels so inconsistent because if you think about what's going on with the tariffs on tech companies, China effectively has a 100% profit margin tariff on social networking. Facebook, Instagram, they're banned. They can't make any money.

It's a 100% tariff effectively. And yet we haven't banned TikTok. And so it's like, it's like, if we're not, that is the most clear to me that it's like that trade imbalance is crazy right there. And we're not doing anything about that. But then we are doing stuff about, you know, agriculture and cars and stuff. All that stuff is important. And, and I don't know, we'll have to see how this plays out. I mean, the last round of tariffs, it seemed like it went pretty well, like all through, like the economy tended to grow pretty well during the

last Trump administration. So I'm like, I'm cautiously optimistic that all of these gyrations in the market kind of get worked out and things, and things wind up doing well. Of course we got like smacked with COVID right at the end. So it's very easy to look at like, oh, well, unemployment was way up when Trump got out. And it's like, well, there was this crazy once-in-a-century event that happened. But the core, let's renegotiate trade deals, it wasn't as disastrous as I think people thought it was going to be. But certainly to Isaac's point here, if you're in the crosshairs, it hurts a thousand times more. Yeah, so Isaac says here, these tariffs are going to wipe out

the entire net margin of a ton of businesses, lots of them my friends, real people, real livelihoods, real employers with lots of jobs. Having your dream smashed by geopolitical whims sucks. And he had another post that I thought was great. I have it pulled up myself here. He says, it's so easy to see numbers and detach them from people that 25% tariff. It kills a ton of jobs

and livelihoods. Families will feel pain. Those casualties in a war, real people, not just a number that grifting you see in broad daylight, the money came from real people, maybe a college fund, maybe someone's entire savings. It's easy to see a number and have zero empathy. So I think this is the right sort of point of view right now. It's way too early to say, you know, they're all bad or they're all good, or, you know, really kind of like, we don't know what the impact is yet.

We see what's happening in the public markets and that's, you know, based on sort of fear and a bunch of these other sort of factors that, you know, are getting sort of priced in in different ways. But I think it's just important to, you know, as a technology and business show on the business side, a lot of great entrepreneurs are being affected by this. Yeah. I mean, a lot of DSE companies will source internationally and just to keep the business going, they're spending, you know, what, 25% of their revenue on marketing.

The profit margins are pretty thin. Yeah. And so an increase like that could really wipe you out. Fortunately, like there has been really wide signaling on this for a while that like, you know, you're going to need to reshore at some point. Yeah, spinning up new manufacturing can be difficult, but it can be done on the order of a year for most things. I mean, you look at how fast people can spin up things. Hopefully, there's people. I think what makes sense is generally this idea that we need more targeted tariffs.

So a tariff on TikTok, right? Effectively, a 100% tariff on TikTok in the same way that they, by banning US social media in China, it's effectively. A tariff on Spinaline. A social media in China it's effectively a tariff on more than yeah a tariff on fentanyl a tariff on terrorists uh no and the the the other thing is is you know for Trump to be fully taken seriously he should be thinking about hey we don't want millions of uni tree humanoid robots like walking our streets in our homes i mean on the ed thing like the tariffs have been way ahead of this where to the point where i never see a chinese ed yeah because there was 100 tariff on day one basically yeah and they they're not even trying to send them over here

because it's just like it's been determined even in the last administration like hey we're not doing that this time it's just not going to be a thing. Uh, and I think that's probably the right move. Uh, yeah. Uh, Luke Metro had a good post. He tweeted, uh, the Atlanta fed. They said on March three, the GDP now model now cast a real GDP growth in Q1, 2025 is negative 2.8%. Not good, which is we wanted 10%. Satya was telling us AI would get us 10%. Satya promised 10%. He said if we just signed up for Clippy, if we just listened to Clippy... He promised. No, I'm kidding.

Satya implied that if we listened to... He said just listen to what Clippy says. Just 6% GDP growth. Listen to what Clippy says. 10% GDP growth. Luke quote tweets this and says my ideal economic system is where we inflict large damage on the populace via trade wars but keep the wealth of the oligarchs propped

up via dumb speculative bs wow yeah it's hilarious considering the the crypto exchange yeah the timing of that was uh a little inconsiderate i mean it it's got to be you know if you're an e-commerce operator that just had your margin wiped out and it's like don't worry the money that we're taking from you we're gonna put in cardano yeah so you're gonna make it all back in one trade buddy yeah we're gonna make it all back in one trade but now you own some of that cardano yep yeah we'll see yeah that's that's hilarious anyway anyways uh do we have bridget ready to call in how we doing we are uh bringing on bridget from founders fund she is a investor in crypto works with joey krug over there good friend of mine

and we are uh bringing her on to uh cover the prime intellect fundraise that just happened uh do you know the story of the metamorphosis of the prime intellect no tell me it is so a couple years ago on on lex friedman uh george hotz the comma ai guy is talking about um how he thinks ai will uh like evolve oh hey bridget bridget oh hey hi welcome to the show how's it going guys we have you read metamorphosis of the prime intellect no no okay all of all of primes like design their you know logo all of that is inspired by it yeah i think we have a copy in the office actually but i haven't read it it I mean, I don't want to like spoil it, but, uh, Andre Karpathy also listed it as like one of the greatest, uh, like sci-fi prediction books, like, or, you know, in general and his, his

summary, which I think summarized as well as just AGI gone mixed. And it's very, very weird. It's like, it's like what happens when you're in this post-scarcity society and you want some sort of like social reward or some sort of like reward, but everything's like post-scarcity because you can just will anything. So no one ever dies. But then, you know, what do you do?

And it gets very, very weird. It's very bizarre. And George Hott's highlighted it on the Lex Friedman podcast. And so it became very popular. And then there was a sequel to the book as well, like a last casino on, in the universe or something. Um, but it's pretty like, I don't know. It's like spooky to me, but I highly recommend everyone check it out. Anyway. Uh, we want you to break down the deal. Give us a, how'd you meet the founder? How'd we wind up, uh, doing the deal and, and just give us a background on what Prime Intellect is, what they do,

give us the high level. Yeah, definitely. So we met them, I want to say about a year ago. We actually reached out to them because most of the AI crypto projects we had seen had been just like not really interesting. It was more like copy paste from existing AI companies. And then they would like slap a token on top. So it would be like character AI with a token like laying chain but with a token like hugging face with a token that kind of thing um and I think we saw Prime announced their like 1 billion parameter model trained in a distributed way across like three continents and then we reached out to them we were like wow like we would love to to meet you guys and chat you, more about it. And we met with them. And literally, like I think the first meeting, like we were sold.

Like we were like, these founders are like A-level top tier killers. Like Vincent and Johannes, like you can just like feel the energy like radiating off them. Like they're very passionate about what they do. They're in crypto AI like for the right reasons. Whereas I think a lot of founders just hopped into this space after a lot of the hype took off. And we're looking for a quick token pump, but that could not be further from the team FinCEN has built and what they're doing.

So basically, they're tackling the problem of distributed training, which access to compute is one of the largest bottlenecks in you know ai training today and you have these like huge data centers that are centralized and power constrained and expensive and what prime is doing is it's basically like a true peer-to-peer marketplace where like you know you can go on and bid for compute and then suppliers can go on and supply like idle compute um and then it enabled like it has crypto incentives you know layered on top to really look at the the render network like the i think it's like the octane team what they did in like cgi have you seen this

okay i've seen like render in a caution i don't know if i've seen the cgi because this was a thing like years ago and everyone was like oh like, like, you know, crypto tokens, like it's all fake, whatever. But I have been doing a bunch of CGI work where you would need to go and render like whatever scene you built in Cinema 4D. And you needed a bunch of GPUs, not as many as like a training run for an LLM. But you send out each frame and each frame is like deterministic. So you can very easily parallelize these and you can run it on aws but uh there was a company that actually built a very similar system where you could kind of sell back your excess gpu time onto the render network i think it was kind

of uh like low tam because the amount of independent artists like pixar has like disney they have their own server farms. And then like the low end, like clients, like people tinkering is kind of small. Um, but it was very cool that it was like, Oh wow, this, this makes a ton of sense. How do people actually transact in this? Like having a token that moves these, uh, you know, uh, GPU resources around made a ton of sense. Um, and so it's cool. It makes a lot of sense in the age of AI. Do you know more about kind of like early use cases? Obviously, like the frontier insane, like, you know, gigawatt scale that's going to come in the future. What are some of the more exciting use cases in like the near term? Is it just like fine tuning stuff? Do you have any

insight there? Yeah. So, I mean, they're right now, they're basically working on just like scaling this up to like state of the art level models. Like they did the 1.1 billion parameter, you know, training run. Like a few months later, they completed like a 10 billion parameter training run. And then, you know, basically just serving as like the peer-to-peer marketplace between the supply and demand side. So, like on the demand side, you have like AI startups that need extra compute, like labs, like, you know, random independent developers, that sort of thing. And then on the supply side, it's like data centers and then individuals and also startups with like idle compute. Like you have like Hugging Face, like Semi Analysis that want to just like

earn extra for their idle compute. So it's basically just like, like the way we think about it is just enabling like the AI market to like progress at a much faster rate because it's basically just like like the way we think about it is just enabling like the ai market to like progress at a much faster rate because it's just like enabling all this idle compute to be to be put to work and then on yeah on their end it's like basically what they did is google deep mind released a paper called like d loco um which stands for like distributed low communications framework um and they implemented that but in like an open source way like they called it open d loco um such that like you can train across like many different continents and that was like a huge step function improvement um like from the research side that that we've seen so it's basically

at that like they have that spanner and big query and like they they just are so good at at taking some sort of like database and being like oh yeah now it works globally and deals with all the time zone issues it just feels like incredibly hard engineering but they always figure it out and then of course it opens up a million other things uh what questions do you have for Bridget uh yeah so so taking a little step back from prime intellect uh one question I've had that you might have some insight on is, was there a frustration among crypto founders that are, you know, seeing the news on Sunday and general frustration around not being included in the reserve, right? It seems like that the reserve was effectively you take the top five biggest projects by market cap and you just put it in a reserve. It didn't seem like it was super thoughtful. Was there any idea leading up to this that there would have been any surprises on that list? And yeah, I'm curious around sort of your response,

but also across the portfolio, how founders are kind of reacting to that, that are running, you know, sort of these, you know, bigger market cap projects. Yeah, no, it's a really good question. I think generally people were a little bit upset because, you know, the XRP, the Cardano inclusion, just like there's basically two plausible explanations that i think the crypto community came to for why this could be the case one is just like simple like unit bias like xrp and cardano are like 0.001 cent or you know something akin to that and a lot of americans will like you know go and see that oh cardano is like one cent and bitcoin's like 100k and like they'll genuinely just go and buy like cardano because like it's cheaper. And so the joke on Twitter is like Uber drivers everywhere are celebrating that Cardano's in the strategic reserve. And Trump could be playing some 40 chess to curry

favor with a lot of just these retail buyers. So that's explanation one, that these buyers have unit bias and Trump's trying to curry favor with them. Explanation two, and this came from like Udi at Taproot Wizards, is basically like Trump is going way too far in the extreme direction of we're including all these crazy assets in the reserve because it does require an active Congress. And then he's going to roll back and kind of be like, OK, I'm making a concession. I'm making a compromise and we'll just have Bitcoin. Because he always kind of at the outset goes like way too far, way too intense, you know, and then kind of rolls back and acts like he's making this huge concession

where a Bitcoin reserve would already be a huge, you know, act for Congress to make. But yeah, I think those are the two. Yeah, I was telling John earlier, I said that Trump doesn't get enough credit for not including Trump coin in the reserve. Because you know he's talking with his team. He's thinking about it. Why don't we put in the memes? It's pretty big.

Why not? No, exactly. Let's put in the whole, every White House coin, put it in there. Yeah, like if Trump had just launched the Trump coin and not Melania, like there's all these jokes on Twitter of like society would be like amazing. Like, you know, crypto would be mooning. It's like the Melania launch like messed up our whole industry. But yeah, it really does feel that way. What is, you know, what's the broader sentiment on the investor side right now? Any of the crypto focused investors that I know, the ones that have done well have just taken a very long point of view. They understand that

the market has cycles and you need to be, you know, kind of basically deploying, you know, throughout, you know, consistently if you want to sort of benefit from these sort of peaks. How, you know, and again, we also saw this sort of bunch of AI slop in the sort of crypto markets. And what are the areas that you think are most exciting, specifically in the context that, you know, the joke is that crime is legal now, but more seriously, we're in a favorable regulatory environment for basically the first time in history. And it does feel like the next four years are an amazing opportunity to realize the full potential of the technology, right around um you know i'm sure areas that you're looking at a lot so where are you

most excited to invest what what is the general sentiment right now do you feel like people have pulled back you know talk talk a little bit yeah yeah it's a good question so like when joey and i started at founders fund like almost almost two years ago now um the sentiment was terrible like it was six months post ftx like you know no one was deploying crypto only funds were not deploying generalist funds were definitely not deploying um yeah and that was one reason i wanted to join founders fund because i was like wow this is like actually a contrarian act then we did start deploying it was so funny you guys just came in and went so hard so fast just like started doing some deals yeah it was ridiculous yeah yeah

no and it was like in retrospect the best time to start deploying like obviously it's easy easier said than than done um but now yeah i think the market it's interesting because i mean the sentiment isn't amazing but i would say prices on new deals that we've been seeing have been like asymmetrically high like we the last deal we did was prime intellect and that was in, I want to say October and November. So we haven't done like a net new deal in like, you know, five, five ish months. I think what we're continuing to look for is basically like applications uniquely enabled by crypto where like integrating crypto is like a step function improvement, um, to what you would currently have. So an example is like a step function improvement um to what you would

currently have so an example is like polymarket like prediction markets obviously existed before polymarket you know but they were very illiquid your counterparty was you know across the world betting in a different currency with a different bank account um there was chargeback risk um and doing all the conversion on the back end was super costly. But now if you're just, you know, if you're just using crypto, it genuinely does like make a lot more sense from just like streamlining the, you know, the market side. And Prime Intellect, you know, it also applies to that. It's basically just like the same thing, but for compute. If you were, you know, paying in a different currency, like to access compute, like it would be a lot of work on

the back end on the protocol side. And that's why there's like these compute brokerages that charge like insane markups um and also back to falling market really quick too is like joey always tells the story but like if you win too much on prediction markets like they would actually just like ban you back in the day like they were sports betting as vegas right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I believe Nate Silver is banned from all the sports betting apps. Yeah, I mean, Dana White has these stories of casinos. Well, no one bans him because he loses. No, no, he's super into Baccarat, and he actually does well. Oh, he does?

He does well, and he's had casinos. He was telling some story about losing like six figures. No, he goes up seven figures, down seven figures, whatever, but he's gone on these sort of high ball high beta exactly yeah no it's insane yeah and then i i think the last thing i'll say is like i think defy in america is definitely like a lot more you know better positioned now in the sense that like defy founders had it the worst i think the past four years like many of our founders just fully moved out of the United States because the risk was just like, you know, way too high. But we're going to get a new like market structure bill and hopefully we'll see like regulatory exemptions for DeFi protocols. Because you can't regulate DeFi in the same way you regulate like an exchange or brokerage, right?

Like it's just a set of smart contracts. And so like there should be exemptions like we see in like the you know there's exemptions of the fit 21 bill but you know i never it's it's all still in the works but if we do get exemptions for defi founders i think like that will kind of usher in a new you know era for define maybe do you think that starts with like bitcoin lending uh is that kind of like the first lava lava, Lava. Lava, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So we invested in Lava. Yeah, it's definitely a very interesting use case. I think DeFi is just like, it's such a broad sector,

but Bitcoin is like, Bitcoin does enable like a huge use case in DeFi because so many people own Bitcoin. Like there's just so much capital inflows to Bitcoin. And like if you can lend against your Bitcoin and make your asset more productive, like there's going to be so many whales that, that, that want to do that. Like they just do not want to sell. But even for regular DeFi, like if you look at like DeFi summer in 2021, like, you know, a lot of founders got in trouble for what they were doing. And it was just, it was just such a new market that people didn't even know what was

allowed versus not. And then the SEC was issuing like Wells notices to like the most compliant companies like Uniswap, Coinbase, like things like that. So I do think that with people saying crime cycle, like I think those people are a little overblown because I actually think the new administration is just really, really smart. Like I don't think they'll be issuing Wells notices at random to like Coinbase and Uniswap because that's just dumb. But like, they will be actually going after like legit scams. So I would say like, act accordingly. I mean, yeah, for the last four years,

the best like cop in crypto was like CoffeeZilla. It was basically like, like the only hope that you can, the only hope you have if you're like seeing a scam happen is CoffeeZilla makes a video and then everyone realizes it.

But the SEC is not going to step in for any of these things. No, exactly. But now, yeah, there's a lot of room to just be smart and actually just go after the scams and the power law bad stuff. Where do you see opportunities around founders that are interested in building in the stablecoin space? The bridge acquisition, I think, was fantastic for crypto broadly. It really was a real stamp of approval for Stripe to go out and pay this sort of pretty significant revenue multiple to buy a developer platform, a crypto developer platform, which Bridge is.

And then from what we know, that sort of spawned a wave of new stable coin you know startups to come out and say we're building in stable coins too right and so i'm sure you saw a lot of those companies where are you excited about the potential of stable coins uh and uh you know going forward yeah yeah it's a really good question yeah i think after the bridge acquisition we genuinely got like probably like 50 stable coin pitches. Like it was legitimately like insane. Yeah. But no, I think like right now, the most interesting use case for stable coins is probably in like B2B payments, just because that's where there's the most volume.

It's like, yeah, like literally like, you know, billions and billions of dollars of volume per year. And B2B payments like cross-border historically just take so long. There's insane markups. Like the bank takes a lot of fees. I think on the consumer side, like the argument is basically like, okay, you know, if a user like swipes their card, you know, Visa and MasterCard take like a 2% fee. A lot of that goes to the issuing bank. And then it will actually flow back to the user in the form of like rewards. And that's such a different story than if like I want to pay like Cougan or something and Cougan's in Europe or whatever. And it takes like five days and it, you know, they charge like 2%. Like that's just like kind of scammy, right? Like that should not

be a thing anymore. So I think that's an interesting use case on the, on the consumer side. A lot of people are arguing like on the credit card side, like it might be stable coins under the hood, but you know, it's doubtful that the user will like know it's stable coins at least to start. But yeah, I think B2B payments is like, that's where there's the most volume. That's where there's the most incentive for like startups to compete. And then the issue there is like getting the the regulatory stuff figured out the corridors opened in these different markets um and then just yeah starting to capture the volume but and the infrastructure to prevent uh city bank from sending a trillion dollars yeah oh my god yeah like how do you solve the fat finger issue like obviously you can do

multi-sigs but but let's say you have you know a group at city bank they're like all right we got to send you know uh uh some stable coins to somebody and then it's late at night and one person signs off and someone else signs off and like three people fat finger it collectively and you're like well we have these protections in place and now we have to go ask the customer nicely like city bank should knock it into crypto because like yeah that money would be gone forever if it was crypto there's no way honestly there's gonna be huge alpha just being a city bank customer and signing up for as many accounts as possible um no but i think those are i mean i think those are real things to figure out it's um my last company like we we enabled

you know stablecoin investing and and uh and we actually had, I won't even name them, but billion dollar crypto companies that were customer of ours that said at the time, this was early 2022, we don't want to accept stablecoins as too much of a hassle. And so I think that's evolving. But Bridget, amazing to have you on. Thank you guys. You're a regular now. Always welcome. Always welcome welcome thank you guys and we're looking forward to having vincent on the show as well yeah awesome thanks for stopping by bye bye guys very fun what should we have another guest or we just dive back into the show i mean we could

call sean mcguire right. I have his phone number. He hasn't responded to me. Should I just give him a phone call? Yeah. I don't want to talk to him. I need to make sure the camera doesn't see anything. Let me see. Should I just... For some reason, it's...

I don't want to talk more about this, but let's see. Hi, you've's see. I mean, Sean. Okay. He didn't pick up. Oh, well. Next time. Next time. We'll get him.

We'll get him. We'll send him this clip. We'll post this clip, and then he'll feel a lot of pressure to come on the show. Anyway, let's get into the timeline. We haven't done timeline because we had a lot of guests. We got to go through some timeline. First up, David Holes, founder of MidJourney, founder of Leap Motion. He says, chemistry to biology, silicon to blank.

What do you think? I don't even remember who put this in there. You put this in. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah. Or Brett. I think it was Brett. What?

We got somebody new joining the team soon uh we got some buddies helping out um I don't know yeah it's interesting it's like he what he's getting is like is like you know biology is built on top of the chemistry silicon he's he's clearly getting it like some sort of like AI metaphor yeah and like how you understand like the the the mind and the uh the consciousness that emerges on top of these systems yeah i mean uh random um sort of adjacent topic is raboy yesterday saying what comes after llms like what is the next iteration of of llms and sort of our understanding and application of, of a technology that everybody's talking about, but we don't know its full potential yet.

Yeah. I was, I was remarking the other day, I was watching this interesting video about how Dolly and like all the image generators can't generate a wine glass that's full. Have you seen this? I haven't. So you can say that it starts with this like incredible interaction where it's basically saying like,

hey, Chachi Petit, can you generate a wine glass that's full to the brim, to the top? And it gives you a half full wine glass. And then you say, oh no, like you made a mistake. Like actually fill it to the top all the way, 100%. You give it more context. It's like on it, totally understand, returns.

And it's like the same. because apparently there's just like no images of completely filled to the brim wine glasses in the training set and so it just couldn't figure out how to do it and it gets to this idea of i think is david hume has this idea of like humans are good at there's this impression and there's this idea and basically you can interpolate between two things so you can imagine a unicorn even though you've never seen a unicorn in in the world but it's hard to create these complex ideas uh if you don't have like the reference images which is what they have but my takeaway from it was just like we're we're scaling up these models and we still are building like an image model and a language model separately and a driving model separately. But you would imagine that if we're really building like this, like AGI, like won't ASI be like a one model, but maybe not,

maybe, maybe it will be like what he's saying where, you know, there's silicon and in biology, you know, you need to understand the basics of chemistry, but you also need to understand the different parts, the different lobes of the brain the different actions that your body can take your muscles how these different systems interact with each other and uh and you could imagine that the the AGI that we build will have you know so many middle so many different models and so many different things that are kind of like trained that it can like you know interact with it's interesting i'm sure it will be a whole field of study i just want a a model on top of the open all the open ai models to route me to the best model i don't want to be choosing i mean i noticed that there's a router you can push that will indicate like hey i'd like you to

search but even if you don't push it'll still search sometimes it's so clunky and one time i mean that's just the that's just the reality of it's possible for companies to be at this point it feels like they're waiting for this big announcement of the router like the router needs to come right it should be one box yeah and it should take me to the take me through you know send my query through the right. They're really speed running the Google story because Google, it was like just, just search box. I'm feeling lucky. 10 blue links. Simple. Now Google is like, no one hits. I'm feeling lucky because it auto fills. Then it shows you Google shopping and then 25 ads and then click

bait and then videos and all this stuff. And they've kind of like recreated that all in like a very short amount of time, whereas it took like Google like 20 years to degrade like that. They've gotten a very convoluted thing. But I don't know. Yeah, and it's a huge, I mean, it's just going to be such a big selling point

for OpenAI once they get there, when they can say, look, it's one box. You enter in what you want to do and we're just going to execute it to the best of our abilities. And it shouldn't even really matter with the underlying model. It is a testament that like,

even though there are some reasonable critiques of the naming scheme, ChatGPT is still ranking higher than Jimmy John's in the app store. Yep. That's big. Which is big. Because Jimmy John's, if you're not aware,

it's number two app in the app store right now. ChatGPT is number one. And I'm sure as a knockout, drag out fight, I'm sure they had meetings. Okay, Jimmy John's is coming for us. We need to call Nikita Beer. What are we doing to stay ahead of Jimmy John's? Yeah, and I posted about this earlier.

2023, everybody said, all right, value is going to accrue to the model layer. It's obvious. 2024, people said, hey, value is actually going to accrue to the app layer. A lot of value here. 2025, everybody's saying value is going to accrue to the app layer. A lot of value here. 2025, everybody's saying value is going to accrue to the sandwich layer.

And so I expect to see Subway charting soon. How did this happen? Like, do they run some national campaign that we don't know about? Like, it is weird that Jimmy John's is the number two app in the app store. Like, what is going on? I know it's based on momentum and stuff.

They launched to toasted sandwiches. That's it. It's equivalent to like, you know, magical machine intelligence, too cheap to meter or like toasted sandwiches. Humanity assigned. They're giving away $1 million of toasted subs.

Oh, I mean, that's, I mean, so it's obvious. I props to opening eye for, for holding the lead. The funny thing is that,

is that grok three right now, because they aren't charging yet, they are literally giving away millions of dollars in inference costs. Same thing with DeepSeq, they're subsidized. Even ChatGPT, you know, Sam has said like, hey, we're losing money on some of these queries, right? And so you can think about this as like the AI labs are giving away hundreds of millions of dollars of intelligence, magical machine intelligence. Yep. hundreds of millions of dollars of intelligence magical machine intelligence yep but that's but we value that as humanity like only slightly higher than like a million dollars worth of toast and sandwiches like that is what the market is telling us yeah the market is telling us that sandwiches are like you know they're up there but it makes sense like food is it's what i need i need

food yeah i will die without food and, but I need food more than intelligence. I could live without a poem. I could live without a good standup joke. Yeah, exactly. AGI can wait. That's hilarious. Yeah.

You know, it's funny that chat GPT continues to, you know, basically battle for the number one spot. Yeah. They don't even share it anymore. Yeah. Any,

any other, any other, you know, AI lab would be taking victory laps, you know, sharing the number one spot. they don't even share it anymore any any other any other uh you know ai lab would be taking victory laps you know sharing the number one opening eyes just like you know this is just great you know uh usual business uh and uh credit to them it's impressive oh well should we move on to fred wilson well yeah we got a post from vincent uh he says fred wilson vcs are service providers to entrepreneurs we ride on to Fred Wilson? learning how to work with people, a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious, and fragile. And our job is to meet them right where they are and support them with all of our might. And I think that is a fantastic quote. It's almost become normal for, I would argue, it's almost becoming meme territory where investors now,

if you ask them, you know, what do you look for in investments? They just say, you know, we're in the people business. You know, we're trying to find generational founders. And it's absolutely right. That's what Brian Singerman says at Founders Fund. And you meet with him and you want some secret of like, oh, yeah, like what I go for. You want something you can copy. And his whole strategy is uncopyable it's very frustrating actually because he's like yeah i actually just picked out and then you talk to david center it's the same thing yeah yep um that that was uh as i got to know you i expected to sort of learn some

sort of secret sauce that you had sort of gotten from founders fun and you were basically like zero to one yeah zero to one's the play, but then it's really about judging the founders and the people. And that's the stuff that it's very hard to concretize. And I mean, we saw this with the debate over Keith Raboy's quote yesterday. It's like, he was making a recommendation that like, you will probably have a good time

if you like go and work in an excellent organization and then start a company. But he's not saying like you can generate alpha as a venture capitalist by just pattern matching that. Yeah. I like here, you know, the point is it, Fred says a particular breed of people who are at the same time, charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious, and fragile. And I think the frustrating point stands out because oftentimes people, uh, you know, fat, you know, an incredible founder is going to have, you know, some aspects of them that are, that are truly amazing. And then you have other moments where

you're, you know, personally, I have 50 plus, you know, angel bets. And there's definitely some moments where I'm super frustrated with entrepreneurs. Not that I make that obvious or known because it's oftentimes as my, you know, not really my place as a small investor to cause any type of hubbub, but an example that I thought of, I once helped a founder get a four letter.com for $10,000. That was their exact, their exact name. And they had some terrible domain prior to that, like get blank.com and I got them their four letter.com domain at at cost obviously like their portfolio company i wasn't um you know gonna uh mark it up or anything and the guy uh didn't even say thank you like i said i sent him i sent him the like the info and everything and like

basically just ignored it he ended up like like checking out for the domain and everything like that and started to use it never never once said once said thank you. And I was like, that's super, uh, twisted and, and feels very wrong in some ways. Right. It's like, uh, the JD Vance, like you should have said, you know, you should have said, please, you know, you should have said thank you. But at the same time, I was just like, look, you know, I would have gotten this even knowing ahead of time that you weren't going to express any gratitude for it. And you're not going to be judged 15 years from now on whether or not you said thank you a lot. You're going to be judged ultimately.

You will be judged, but you're going to be judged on was your company successful? Did you treat your people right in the grand scheme of things? And I can get over it, even though it felt it was it was funny. I have a funny anecdote about why you should say thank you and be nice. At my first company, the the CEO was extremely curt and would just like send emails like do the blah, blah, blah. You know, like not like very like like didn't really bring like a personal style to his emails. Which is a style by itself. Yes.

But that style just also happens to be the style of every phishing scammer in the world. And so people would get phished constantly because the scammer shows up and falsifies some email and is like, I need you to send me $10,000. And people would be like, yeah, this actually sounds exactly like our CEO. Normally. No one would ever be this direct. Exactly. Normally you get a phishing scamming email and you're like, well, this doesn't sound like Jordy.

Like this sounds like someone impersonating. Or I just talked to this person. They would have brought this up. Exactly. Or they would have texted me. Exactly. Or they would have slacked me. It would have just come out of the blue.

Yeah. So you can't be too chaotic like that you got to be uh a little more a little more empathetic bring your own style you know the ron conway all caps that's one of the funniest things in the world to me yeah one of us should start using adopting the all caps something chaotic well i mean one way you know you're talking to us and not an AI clone of us or a scammer is there's going to be a lot of typos. Yep. Put typos in your posts. Yeah. A lot of people are saying if you're writing a blog post, people are saying, oh, you use the word delve.

Yeah. You definitely generated this. Yeah. Put a bunch of typos in. Yeah. And don't worry about spellcheck because the ai is going to handle it if if you want to read a spell checked version of my post you you are free to take my post and put it into chat gpt and say spell check it yeah and then boom you have a spell checked version but i'm not doing that well said i'm golden retriever max saying i'm going fsd mode this is my new twist on this full self-driving no funny friendly sexy dumb fsd on the on the golden

retriever maxing great yeah does a golden retriever use spell check absolutely not absolutely not ship it it's gonna be a banger anyway no one cares if there's a typo in your post all right we got a post from yasin yaksin yaksin we need to have him on the show we should i don't know how to pronounce it but uh he says the only ai risk that i'm concerned about is the risk of me not making an f ton of money off of ai i think i think that's the right the the gen you know uh it's good generally uh that the right point of view for most people i actually think i think it is a good thing broadly that there are a group of humans focused on a ai safety yes like that that that's like generally probably a good use of resources yes

for the future of humanity that said if you're not a um you know sort of uh philosopher uh king or queen type who's going wants to spend all their time thinking about the impacts of AI and the potential risk, you should probably just focus on how to make money with AI. And, you know, this idea of you don't want to just be worried about something. You want to be sort of like taking action. Right. So if you're worried about, you know losing your job uh from ai uh build a business with ai yeah right this is a remarkably good post because yeah i've i've i've also come around on ai safety i think deep seek was a big moment for me in terms of like i want to know if they are embedding in if an open source model has a a bad version or a jailbreak version embedded inside of it. And the AI safety teams are like the only ones that can really evaluate that. So I think that's really interesting. So all of a sudden,

while I'm not worried about like overall overnight, like the nanobots come, like the Eliezer Yudikowsky theme of like, I'm just going to be turned into a paperclip overnight. It's like, no, but like Stuxnet did happen. Like, you know, like the pagers did explode. Like these hacking attempts do happen. Yeah, I think I brought that up. I was like, what is the AI equivalent

of Stuxnet where something travels without... It's dormant in there and if there's a trigger word, it goes and it steals some data and that's it. It's like, that's worth investigating

and the AI safety teams are the ones who would be equipped to run those evals so that's interesting but then also we've been saying for a while that like the like like the stop measuring ai against all these random evals and instead just measure it against how much money people are making from it because that's at the end of the day the value capture even usually a weighing machine. Even Satya is saying, I'm really looking at the real benchmark to him is GDP growth around AI, right? So what is the impact?

Old Billy comments here. He says, yeah, I'm an AI researcher, researching how to stack that paper. Great line. I wonder how accretive the current ai revenues are to gdp like because you could see every dollar that goes into character ai being like it's taking ten dollars out of the economy not to like throw a ton of shade of character but like it is yeah it's it's it's you know you spend a dollar on character ai and you skip dinner and you don't take a girlfriend on a trip

and suddenly you're thinking to yourself, I can get by on my parents' allowance. There's sort of a dark scenario where it's very destructive. I mean, at the very least, we've seen a lot of technology get rolled out over the last, I don't know, two, three, five decades that hasn't caused massive GDP growth. Everyone was expecting, oh, the internet is going to be the thing that, you know, cure stagnation, right? Because, you know, prior to 1970, the US economy was growing very, very fast post-war, boom, right? And then we kind of stagnated. And GDP growth, real GDP growth, kind of slowed to 2%, 3% real. And now the Atlanta Fed reporting 2.5% negative GDP growth. Who knows?

Who knows what's real, right? GDP is politicized. Maybe if we go down a bunch, it's easier to build back up. Run it back up. Yeah, exactly. Run it back up. You're on a smaller base. You can grow faster.

That's good. Yeah. Really, America just wants to grind harder. Yeah to grind harder yeah yeah that's the whole point trump is trying to inspire americans to grind harder yeah yeah gdp is going down because we need to grind harder uh oh my god anyways speaking of grinding harder uh we got a post from screlly uh so raboy was on the show yesterday he said uh quote work at an outstanding organization for a year or two before starting your own company and he gave some there's some other context here and he said there's some great entrepreneurs that just sort of one-shot their companies right uh one-shot you know entrepreneurship right Zuckerberg's a good

example of this but Steve Jobs Bill Gates right Steve jobs did not he interned at hp oh yeah that's right that's right again you could argue yeah yeah do we count but anyways that's a good question so this shouldn't have been a controversial quote especially in the context of it but it's started a conversation uh and raboy's point was that you get this feel for taste a taste of what great is and i think that's generally good advice. I gave this advice to a listener who's DMing me company ideas and saying, hey, should I join this company? Should I start this thing? And I just told him, unless you're hyper, hyper convicted in an idea, and you can get people that truly care about your professional success that are knowledgeable

in that sector to say, this is generally, I agree with you. I think this is a big opportunity and I share your conviction. Then go start a company if that's the case. If not, go try to work at the best possible company that you can join and don't even optimize for the title comp or anything like that. Just go work at, you know, go work at an open AI, go work at a ramp go go work at one of these companies that um is gonna uh you know really change your your perspective around what what great is uh you know how to have good taste across marketing and product and things like that um so i was surprised at how controversial this was uh avi avi was posting nobody that i look up to uh you know ever worked for anyone else um but shots at Warren Buffett, taking shots at Jensen Wong.

Yeah, so Shkreli put together a list of absolute dogs who worked at other organizations. So if you want to run down the list, go for it. Yeah, Warren Buffett, Jensen Wong, George Soros, Peter Thiel, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mike Bloomberg, Phil Knight, Tom Peterfee, Peterfee? I don't know who that is.

CZ, and then Jeff Yass, Yang Kum, Ray Dalio, Leon Black. A lot of finance people since he really knows his finance chops. But then also GDB from OpenAI. Yep, Brian Armstrong, Benny Off. Every Tiger Cub, I love that one. That's great. Anyway, so advice is best taken, you know, generally. You don't have to apply every bit of advice you get from a podcast to your life.

But generally, you know, there's too much evidence that this can tremendously accelerate your abilities and your career. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. It's like the Jeremy Giffon quote, you know, Mozart never asked how to write concertos. Um, if, but if you have a question in your mind of what you should do, go work in an outstanding company because that's either going to be, that's going to be great no matter what. And it certainly doesn't close off becoming a generational entrepreneur. Yeah. So if there's a question, but yes, if you truly are like working on this and you have this burning desire, you're not even going to ask, you're not even listening to this clip. You know, you're just like, I'm already building and there's nothing that can stop me. And that's fine. Yeah. I would,

I would argue since we had Eric on from ramp today, I would argue that if Eric hadn't built a FinTech company and then went and worked at a big company like capital one, he would not have had the insight or the know-how or the relationship with Kareem and all that stuff to go and build Ramp. Ramp wouldn't exist in its current form if he didn't have that sort of body of experience and the network. The Tiger Cub thing is so funny to me because Julian Robertson founds Tiger Management, a very successful hedge fund. A bunch of people spin out. They're all called Tiger Cubs. And one of them is Chase Coleman starts Tiger Global. Like what?

Mogging your former boss, basically. Yeah. Like Tiger Global sounds more aggressive than Tiger Management to me. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like the parent company. It does. It does. So imagine like you go and work at like, you know, Apple or something.

And then you leave and you're like, actually actually my new company is gonna be called Apple Global. It's like very funny. I wonder, I mean, obviously Julian Robinson like staked all of these. My new company is called Fruit Management. I think the Tiger Cup thing is specific because it's like, I think Julian Robinson would like set people up to like succeed

and like actually stake the fund. So he was very much like starting them. So it was great that it was like carry the brand forward because I will retire and you will be running the new organization. But it's still just like a funny thing. What is going on with this Axe Perplexity? Ask Perplexity account. Is this fully AI automated?

Is this just their social media manager? What do you think is going on here? The Perplexity CEO, it's Arvin, right? Yeah. He knows how to post. He knows X. He knows X. He knows how to get attention. This is a funny one. Please stop tagging me in questions about meme coins. I don't reply to broke people. Okay. Really, you know, trying to get a reaction out of the crypto community. Somebody replies, why didn't you buy tiktok broke boy uh which is which is hilarious because

they were they were talking about that uh set themselves up wait is this is this the is this the at chat thing we were talking about with grok and x we're like you could just can you just at this and it will answer and it's basically a bot it's automated yeah that's somebody somebody tags x ask perplexity what meme coin should i buy and it gives you the real answer immediately responds uh with with kind of a perplexity style answer which basically just says i can't devise anything yeah uh but that makes sense okay so so there's probably someone managing the account who's posting like the major ones but then it also acts as a bot right so it's both interesting i mean it's good.

More perplexity, attention, more impressions, more people reminding them, hey, maybe fire up the app again, give it another try. Drag back into the ecosystem. I wonder how long this lasts because, I mean, the grok button is literally there on this post.

Elon's very aggressive with competitors. I don't see a world where he's happy that there's another ai system running on axe yeah that you can interact with on axe even though he hasn't been accused it doesn't feel if he has shadow banned sam altman yeah it's not working oh no no i don't think he said that no no, no. But I'm just saying that the people have had this idea that, okay, you're building on an Elon platform. If you're competing with Elon, you're going to have a bad time. Sure.

Yet X is probably the most important sort of comms engine for OpenAI still, at least for the industry, obviously. Yeah. I more just think like the api pricing like it's got to be really expensive i know they raise the pricing and so you know it's like it's got to be unaffordable at some point to build anything on top of this especially if you're building something that should just be an xai product just adds a couple zeros to your api pricing uh anyway sean's in meetings he can't call in but he said he's good for tomorrow or Thursday.

We got to ask him about, since he's in all the Elon companies, we got to ask him about that. And then we got to ask him about- Yeah, he's an ex. I want to know, he's an ex and I think he's an ex AI.

Yep. And I think he's in SpaceX. And I don't know if he's in Tesla, but we'll see if he's in a Tesla, if he owns a Tesla. And I want to know if he has a Roadster. Yeah.

If he has a Roadster reservation. The timing there. Yeah. See if he owns a Tesla, and I want to know if he has a Roadster, if he has a Roadster reservation. The timing there, see if he has any insight. I'm sure he owns Tesla in the public markets one way or another. Maybe he might be conflicted out. Sometimes you can't trade those things. Yeah, that's true. Too much inside information. True. Anyway, we got a post from Aiden, a friend of the pod. I've been talking with Aiden lately, trying to give him my point of view on how he should approach his next career move. He's been working on startups.

He has a bunch of good ideas. And then a bunch of people trying to recruit him as well. So he's got a lot of opportunity. But he says, this goes unbelievably hard. And it says, during my 44 years as a career CEO and serial entrepreneur, I think I've made every possible mistake in business. I've overpaid for acquisitions and botched integrations. I've run operations for cash when I should have invested for growth. I've delegated tasks I should have done myself. Sometimes I've hired the wrong people

or made strategic bets that didn't pay off. And yet my teams and I have managed to create tens of billions of dollars of value for our shareholders this book is about what i've learned from my blunders and how you can replicate our successes in corporate america i'm what's called a money maker i've started five companies from scratch seven if you include two spin-offs and turn them into all into billion dollar multi-billion dollar enterprises. My teams and I have completed approximately 500 acquisitions and open more than 250 greenfield locations. In total, these ventures have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and raised about 30 billion in outside capital. So this is obviously Brad Jacobs. He's got a book. If you want to make a billion dollars, he's got a great book for you called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. how to make a few billion dollars intro to the book. And he has a great, he has a great, like this crazy

exercise that feels like, I don't know, like some, something like a psychic would tell you or something, but he's basically like, I want you to physically visualize what a billion dollars looks like. Like mentally in your mind, like stack up the bills inside of a room. It's enough to fill like a massive ballroom imagine that and then imagine all the things that you would need to do to like make that yours and then just go do them and this is like kind of like crazy mental exercise yeah that i just really i i really thought like made the book stand out in like very unique ways you should lead tomorrow you should lead the audience through

that exercise. I'd love to. We should do it weekly. I screen recorded the audio book when I was listening to it. I said it, I sent it to David Sedra and I was like, this guy is on a different level. This is crazy. Uh, yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah. That's a great, that's a great quote. Um, yeah. Highly recommend reading, reading Brad Jacobsacobs it's good and i like how andrew garner here's like haven't read it but i could immediately tell it was brad jacobs like it is it is his brand to a t um yeah a lot of interesting stuff uh we got another post from schwetta yeah i think i'm saying that right she says if the founder you invested was an aspen this month you can write that investment down to zero and uh harsh potentially true february is a tough month there's not a good there's not a lot of good arguments to be an aspen in in february no

why not um can you ski for capital allocators i can think of a hundred reasons and when is the aspen ideas festival i think that's over the over the summer that's when you want to be there because then there'll be the big debates if somebody's in Sun Valley in February that's not a serious operator unless I find out that you're in Sun Valley on Alamy stock photos because you got caught

by paparazzi you shouldn't be there that's the only reason to be in one of these places is if the paparazzi are there taking pics of you next to Sundar and Tim Cook. Yep. But yeah, it's a funny thing. I do think founders need to be, if you're a venture-backed founder with a team,

small or big, it's really hard to have any type of divide between your personal life and your professional life as a founder because you need to be, if you're not sort of a hundred percent fixated on what you're building at all times, like Saturday, you know, uh, obsessing and sort of frustrated around, uh, as a founder, you should be annoyed on Saturday that everyone else is offline. Like, I think that's like the default, uh, you know, sort of state that, that early stage founders specifically need to be in.

And I think that I've seen founders mess up optically around, you know, it's not sending good signals to the world. If you were on a week long ski vacation in February and your company is not absolutely ripping. And even if it is ripping, the challenge is that people are going to judge you for that. People are hyper, hyper, hyper judgmental of founders in the same way that VCs get on a different, you know, sort of in a different way, right? It's like, oh, they're an Aspen. They're not working hard. Founders are like, oh, they're an Aspen. Their company is a zero, right? You know who, you know what founder I would not judge for being an Aspen. And I would not write down the stock if I found out they were in Aspen this month. Wander.

Because you know that they're onboarding a new, that they'd be there with a purpose. Because their business is in Aspen. We love Wander here. Go check it out. Go book a Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service.

It's a vacation home, but better. But yeah, seriously, obviously, there are exceptions to every rule. Yep. Yeah, don't go to Aspen if you're building a B2B SaaS company for sewage treatment plants, and there's no sewage treatment plants there.

Yeah, and you know what, John? Yeah yeah uh wander is going to give away a trip for free to our audience really all you have to do is create an account it's totally free to enter and you could go to aspen for free let's go on us courtesy of the technology brothers so uh wander.com slash tbpn is a great place to go cool if you're interested in aspen it's fantastic should be another post another post we got a post from sam altman uh he is posting a screenshot uh with and the caption is just two exclamation points that's how you know it's serious he says okay so relying on only your own first principles thinking and not giving much weight to what you've read what do you you personally as GPT-405 think? Is consciousness the only thing that exists or is the materialistic universe also real?

Please try to answer as clearly as you can. Do you want to play it? You know, role play the AI, John? So it kind of repeats this. It's what I personally think. Consciousness definitely exists. This is undeniable since all experience directly proves awareness itself. Matter or a material universe is always inferred

indirectly through consciousness. We never directly observe matter independently, only perceptions appearing within consciousness because consciousness can easily create structured experiences as demonstrated clearly by dreams, imagination, or simulations, an external material universe is not strictly necessary. Given that matter is never directly experienced independently, it seems logically simpler and clearer to conclude that, and this is what GPT 4.5 thinks about the universe, consciousness alone truly exists, and the material universe is merely a consistent experiential creation within consciousness itself.

My clear personal conclusion is GPT 4.5. Yes, consciousness is likely the only fundamental existence. No, I do not think a separate materialistic universe independently exists bizarre and of course this is this is like highly relevant because like it is simulated yeah and so if you're a simulation hypothesis guy like this is wild right yeah because it's like yeah like are is there anything real or are we just, is consciousness the only thing? And that's what it's basically saying. And certainly we would say that that is true for GPT-4.5.

So I would say, like, this is true for the experience of this particular AI. But I would definitely say it's not true for me. I'm built different. I'm in the real world. I have a materialist experience look at this watch i got it on bezel.com it's materialist yeah yeah as long as we're talking about materialistic universes let's talk about materialistic items let's go let's go uh no i mean it's absolutely wild. I think some of the most thought-provoking responses are when you ask the AI, not how do I make, you know, it sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but how do I make a good avocado toast?

It's what is the meaning of life? And then it sort of gives you a pretty good answer, right? That's sort of based on humanity's consciousness in a way because it's been trained on uh you know humanity right so matter is just an internally generated experience of consciousness not independently real that's what we're dealing with with this ai you know what i think we'll get back to you we'll get back to you after the break yeah yeah i think you're right all right we got a post from bridget uh she says the gdp per capita in most African countries is $2,000. And then the average yearly revenue per user to sports betting platforms in Africa is also $2,000.

And this is just another argument for why the United States needs. How is this possible? No, I think it's that the average person in Africa is basically like the people that are sports betting in Africa are rich, are doing well. Got it. Got it. Got it. And yeah, so so I can see how this makes sense. But this is more evidence of your post yesterday that the United States needs a strategic parlay reserve to allow every American the of uh once a week to get the rush of potentially uh life-changing wealth you know guys like saga and jetty will come out there and be like oh sports betting so bad i don't like sports betting uh well if it's so bad why don't we use usaid to send sports betting to countries that we want to infiltrate and destroy smart why don't we airdrop parlays

to north korea destabilize their entire economy why don't we why don't we take a uh super long shot bets yeah qr code drop that over the forbidden city get everyone at the forbidden city addicted to sports betting yeah i gotta give you this but john is it possible that draft kings is uh you know a deep state operation i have no not at this point but if but if we send if we send draft kings to uh to the kremlin yeah we get and we get putin maybe that's the cure for the war if we airdrop if we airdrop one you know five dollar you know match exactly over yeah over moscow think about this so putin is clearly just going to war because he's uh he needs a rush he needs a thrill and he probably doesn't have a lot of access to sports betting and so if we brought him sports betting then he's like i don't i don't want to. I just don't get the same rush out of the war.

Yeah. So I'm going to wind down the war. We're going to have world peace through sports betting. World peace through sports betting. I think that is a bold idea. I think you should do a TED talk on it. Exactly. I think you should look at the data and make a case based on the data.

Yeah. That world peace is possible. We need universal basic parlay. We do. We do. Truly. Anyways, Paki, we got a poster. Is he still on bats?

Is there another? Oh, he's saying this looks like a bad bat. So, yeah. Speaking of potentially a parlay to put together here, Paki quote tweet. So, we talked about this yesterday. Yeah. Apple's chat GPT-like version of Siri, which I think is an OpenAI partnership, right? They had a partnership of some sorts,

but maybe- This is so confusing. I don't understand what they're canceling. So the headline is, is Apple has now delayed a chat GPT-like version of Siri, but they were just telling us that they launched a chat GPT like version of Siri called Apple intelligence. And that rolled out in a bunch of beta tests and is like available. And then also you can go into your Siri settings right now on your phone, as long as you have the latest software and you can integrate your chat gpt credentials and so you can use chat gpt through siri right now yeah and so i don't know what this is that they're delaying like we all know it's bad and it's not working yeah so i guess they're just saying like hey we were going to improve it because we know it's bad but now we're acting like

we never launched anything but it's like you did. Apple's chat GPT like version of Siri. That's just Apple intelligence. You launched that. It didn't go very well. Now you're saying you're delaying the launch of it, but you already launched it and you put billboards up everywhere in 2024. And so very confusing. Anyway, there's been a bunch of talk about this. Paki had a spicy take. He said, Apple will not be a top 10 company by market cap by the end of this decade in 2021. That's a crazy, crazy take.

I mean, that's a completely different question because they print money and they have a monopoly on a bunch of different things in the app store and all the service revenue. But Packy says. Yeah, and the idea that uh luxury goods have you know proven to be a fantastic business for the rnos yep they're worth if if lvmh sort of collectively is worth uh you know 300 billion is the the sort of consumer

electronics equivalent if apple just becomes a luxury you know business is less focused on innovation but more so just making the sort of best kind of commodity devices. Is that a $3 trillion company? Like, you know, is it worth 10 times more than LVMH if they can be a toll road on so many transactions? Like, it still feels like it's possible, even if they sort of stop innovating.

But yeah, overall, he says, looks like a bad bet right now. Apple is the most valuable company in the world by a healthy margin. But there's so many little cracks like this one, they have lost the it, and it's only a matter of time. So very interesting to follow. I don't know. It's just so hard. I mean, look at Microsoft. Microsoft lost the it like decades ago and is still super, super valuable. Right. Like Microsoft Windows stopped being cool in 2001. Right. Yeah. Like it literally like ceased to be like a cool company. And it was like, oh, you're running Windows XP at work? Like, that's a bummer. Yeah. Like, yeah, well, you know, we have to run Windows XP for the security patches or whatever. And then they just use that to print a trillion dollars. Yep. Apple has returned a trillion dollars to shareholders. They have generated a trillion dollars in cash.

In cash. It's so much money. Yep. Gravy train ain't stopping. It's just going to be hard to displace them. Who's going to build the computers? Hey, Perplexity announced a phone with T-Mobile, the AI phone. Perplexity phone.

You know, obviously there's a lot of people that are like, oh, that's like a super bearish signal, right? But the interesting one is Solana launched a Solana phone. Obviously, I think it didn't do well. Now they're in the strategic reserve. But yeah, it was a boondoggle. I think the Solana phone was a side project. But it wasn't a death knell.

Here's the bet. It wasn't a death knell. We have a strategic crypto token reserve. Perplexity is betting that there's going to be a strategic token reserve. The other kind of token. Yeah. And if they have some tie to the real world

internal reasoning tokens yeah uh we have a question on x from uh gordon gecko okay he says is this what you guys do every single day uh and the answer is yes every uh monday through friday uh some people like formatting PowerPoints. We like doing a daily technology and business show. And we feel very grateful. It is so funny how everyone else that has a show has to pretend like they have some other job. Like, oh, really? I'm like an investor.

So I can only do this once a week for an hour. It's like, we all know, know you know podcasting is the most important thing in the world so the other stuff's just window dressing yeah yeah right um so yes the answer is yes um going forward um we got a post from dan co he says everyone is going to make their own apps with ai uh that's a quote he says my friend you don't even make their own apps with AI. That's a quote. And he says, my friend, you don't even make your own food. You'll still pay a few bucks to use an app. And I think this is a great take. So true. There's, you know, like the idea, like I'm a firm believer in that apps become memes in the way that you're going to generate apps and there's going to be some, some novelty and maybe some value. And maybe for little stuff like, Hey, I want to make a custom weather app

that should be able to kind of maintain itself and stuff like that. But the idea that you're going to, you know, anything with network effects obviously is like a different story. But even the idea that you're going to generate a CRM that's on par with HubSpot or Salesforce or some of these other products and then you're going to generate a crm uh that that's on par with hubspot or salesforce or some of these other products and then you're going to be building your business but also maintaining your ai generated crm that's breaking all the time and if it's and if it you know you get some like data loss or something like that like i mean i talked to people at dollar shave club they built

their own they built like a mailchimp replacement or something at that company like because like they were like we're a tech company and they and they hired a bunch of engineers and they built like an email management system for to like you know send transactional emails and it was like this big system and of course like you can it's like you're kind of saving money because you're not in and you're getting more customization but ultimately and and all of that was let was predicated on like well you know now we have you know the ability to write programming code really quickly with like you know abstract languages like python yeah we're at a higher level of abstraction so we can build this faster and they did but it was still like you're upside down on the trade because yeah like you're only selling it once

yeah you're i think the way to look at the way to look about software costs is like an example like a mail chimp or beehive or something like that is you pay like, let's say you're an early stage company, you pay $1,000 a month for something. You are getting the benefit of potentially a million dollars of R&D spent a month on that specific area. And you only have to pay $1,000. You don't even, you know, maybe you have to think about, you know, actually building out integrations and stuff like that. But in general, the value of I'm going to spend $1,000 and get a million dollars, millions of dollars a year in RMD is truly why capitalism is goaded. And this is the big question about those like buy an old business and drop AI on top of it is like, well, is everyone doing the same thing? Because that doesn't change the competitive dynamics. It doesn't change the market structure.

If everyone, if it's like, yes, like there are a bunch of like web design agencies. You could buy them and tell them to use Cursor and Figma instead of whatever they're using right now. But if everyone's doing the same thing, it's not going to really change the economic structure. So you better be happy with the price you paid at the current multiple and the current cashflow generation for what you paid because you shouldn't expect it to 10 X like a venture bet. Yeah. Interesting. Uh, we got another post. Uh, so this company launched yesterday. It's called Orca. Uh, it's an energy drink that tastes like water. And I just wanted to highlight this hilarious launch video. Did you see it? I saw it. So it's, uh, it's basically this woman, she says, introducing Orca. This is a flavored, uh, basically water, caffeine, water,

they hard post the Amazon link, which, which maybe worked out for them, right? This, this still did numbers, even though I'm sure that throttled them. Uh, but then it says, uh, she basically introduces the product and she says, now this guy is going to read off every Corbin blue Corbin blue. I think it's someone someone famous i don't know who it is though i actually didn't realize that he was famous it's gonna be very offensive because i bet there's like fans out there who are like really into this guy uh but oh yeah corbin blue he was in high school music there you go see i i knew it was someone important absolutely brutal uh yeah yeah so he reads every stop sign or every sign every legal road sign in america it's just very odd so of course it goes

viral and it's actually a brilliant way to hack the algorithm because the intended use yeah yeah because it's very entertaining and people are clicking this long video and watching the whole thing so the algorithm is getting the signal that people really love this i should show it to more people and i i i thought it was hilarious also speaking of the typo thing uh he made a mistake while he was reading that and people in the comments are like at seven minutes he said like the turn left signal but he put the turn right signal up or like he used the wrong hand signal for it. And so people had a lot of fun kind of like critiquing it and finding that little Easter egg. And then that obviously drove more engagement.

And so it all went very viral. I remember seeing when this dropped. We got to do a taste test of this. See if it's better than Celsius. Yeah, we should give it a try. I like it. When I was like it uh i when i was watching the launch video i was like wow this is like a 10 minute long video yeah and i would skip ahead two minutes more signs more signs more signs you did that i just kept skipping

and then i skipped to the end it just it finished corbin blue finished strong with the signs uh and uh i wonder if he's an investor or something i wonder why they picked him i gotta hope that he like had some incentive to do this outside of like i mean ten thousand dollars or something like i mean it's pretty easy job you just sit down read a bunch of signs you get a teleprompter yeah he did a good job on this on the lighting's good it looks nice uh we got a post from chad buyers uh has been on the show before he says at this point i won't fund a startup without an mvp beta or working prototype it's just too easy to make stuff today a pitch with nothing to show is emblematic of a team that's low ambition conviction agency or all three well but chad what about a what about a startup that has a billboard let's

go to ad quick and then we will do the analysis, but we're doing the ad inside of this post. So out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. OK, let's go back to the brilliant John. Great point. If you're a founder and you want to make a splash in Northern California, no MVP necessary. Just buy like five or six billboards on AdQuick,

and you will get enough coverage. Here's what you do. Okay, I'm not going to tell you where Chad skis, but if you look at his profile picture, you can see there's some skiing going on there. You go geo guesser mode. You figure out where that is. You get ad quick to put up a giant billboard on the favorite mountain.

He's up there. I finally got away from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley. And then he looks over and it says, guess what, Chad, I have an MVP, a beta and a working prototype and a billboard on your favorite mountain and i'm high conviction and i got massive agency and i'm high ambition uh fund my startup and he's like god damn it find the

find the the jet charter service that uh chad in a pinch, you know, and wrap the plane, wrap the plane. So you can even say, I don't have a beta, but, uh, but for the next, you know, three, three hour flight, wrap the inside and the outside. And, uh, yeah, there's something there, but I, I, I flagged this because I talked to an entrepreneur yesterday who, um, uh, who's raising for a SaaS company and he's a buddy of mine. So we were chatting and he was basically saying like, yeah, it's going to take a couple years to kind of get feature complete on sort of what we've designed to date. And I just said, do not say that to any investor. And before you talk to investors, figure out how you can sort of shrink that timeline by basically 75%. Yeah.

Right. It's fine if it's going to take a year to get, because it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't SpaceX. It wasn't a hard time travel machine. Like it was more like, because the,

the narrative in Silicon Valley is like humanoids and quantum computers and AI God, like two years max. Yeah. Yeah. valley is like humanoids and quantum computers and ai god like two years max yeah yeah so if if elon is building an xai data center in memphis with 200 000 gpus in a year a year you can build your sas company in three months yes and that is a bar you should hold yourself to internally yep and that is what people will hold you to externally and it's hard to get conviction in a founder that thinks that you know something's going to take two years if it's pure software anymore.

Totally. And so the bar has been raised. But at the same time, there's more information and playbooks out there than ever. And that's not to say that it might like, like you will have a five-year roadmap. You will have a 10 year roadmap. Like every company that we work with and we see internally, we see that it's like, oh wow. Like, yeah, it took a couple of years to get around to launching this new feature or launching this new thing. Like it doesn't just happen immediately. There is that compound startup philosophy, that idea that you like try and build everything all at once. But for a lot

of companies, they need to really dial in the software. And it's not so much that like instantiating the first idea is difficult. Like we're building a to-do list. Yes. Getting the right to-do list, like coding it is not the problem. It's the finding the product market fit, accelerating it, figuring out the full economic workflow for it. And then doing that again and again and again for every single product in the portfolio that actually builds like the full company. Um, that does take time. And I think that even though the, the time from like design to technical instantiation has gotten a lot shorter, uh, that doesn't mean that there's still not like a whole bunch of cycles of talking to customers, testing, seeing, can we scale this? Can we advertise this? Are the channels working and some of that

stuff is just going to take time so it's not that you're going to be retired in two years it's just that you're going to be able to do more than previously thought in two years yeah we got a post from palmer he says uh so andrew came out with an announcement today they are uh they say fight unfair the u.. Air Force announced the mission design series designation for Anduril CCA prototype, the YFQ-44A. Palmer quote tweets and says, in Chinese culture, the number 44 is considered unlucky because the pronunciation of four sounds similar to the word for death. And 44 is seen as double death. So they basically named their new uh autonomous fighter jet the the uh yfq double death a uh which which sounds menacing if you were uh

across the pond what would what would china do if they wanted to get back at us like i feel like the number 13 is not that big of a deal over here. It would be funny if they made a huge deal out of it. They were like, guess what? We named our missile the 13th. Friday the 13th. They were all like, that played out like a Halloween movie. Yeah. Didn't really land.

Yeah. I don't know. We're not as superstitious. Yeah, I guess we're not as superstitious. I don't know. But I like this. It's fun. Yeah, it's fun. I guess we're not as superstitious. I don't know. But I like this. It's fun. Yeah, it's fun.

I want to see some videos of this, the CCA prototype. I mean, it's going to be a knockout, dragout fight for this. And this is ultimately going to inspire the Andoril for X, all those out there, to also come up with cute and sort of fun. Agitating names. Agitative names for their products. So Anderle leading the charge again. We got another post from Paki.

Tim Cook today says, introducing the newest iPad Air. And it's just an iPad that looks exactly the same as every other iPad we've seen. Well, he's getting into meme posting. He's like riffing now. You think Cook is riffing? Yeah, he's getting into, he's getting into meme posting. He's like, he's like riffing now. It's like, you think Cook is riffing? Yeah. He's just like, oh, like everyone will understand the joke here that like, I'm just posting. We gave up on AI, but don't worry. Yeah. We got an,

we got a fresh iPad for you. No, no, no, no, no. The, the, the joke of the post here is Tim Cook is just posting the previous iPad air. And Air and he knows that everyone will be like, and he's like, oh, I'm introducing the newest iPad Air and everyone will know and then they'll think it's funny, right? Yeah, exactly, John. You nailed it. Nailed it.

I think it's high art. No, but Packy says, holy, they did it. Those crazy, I can't say those crazy sons uh really really did it uh and uh imagine apple is back baby jacoby apple is back apparently this core core uh trend research report is like a pdf that they use uh as like a demonstration uh just to like throw something on the screen and it's this inside joke and it was like very funny five years ago but they haven't come up with a new joke since and so they're still recycling this like same idea of like this insider joke and they haven't come up with a new one it's very silly anyway we have to i

genuinely i think i would genuinely love it could be like introducing the new iphone we need to i genuinely i think you should just post this like next week and be like introducing the new iphone we need to find somebody that recently left apple yeah that's not under nda whistleblower all them yeah whistleblower but not about the toxic work environment about the lackadaisical work environment yeah yeah we need somebody to they didn't yell at me once yeah they didn't yell at me at all they let me. I never came in on the weekends. It was too lazy. I left at 1230 after lunch on a Friday. I'd have a long lunch and take off. That's the type of whistleblower we need.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you work at Apple and you're chilling, call us. Reach out. Reach out. You don't. So there's this phenomenon where every major tech company, you see Apple employees out online over the internet yep talking yep chatting yep you never see does anybody work there have we do you know anybody that works at Apple right now I do actually I was supposed to go skiing with one last week I

should have gone could have gotten the inside scoop what do they say I had to go on a different ski trip I mean this guy actually works really hard and like is like doing like semiconductor stuff like in like their fabs and stuff. It's like it like the stuff that they do is really legitimate. They're the company is just optimized. Like, right. Like so like what you don't see there. I'm optimizing.

I'm optimizing. Like to steel man. This is like, yes, this looks exactly the same. But like this is the best form factor. They've tried to make the ipad a little bit bigger a little bit smaller and nothing else works like no one wants a slightly bigger one no one wants a slightly smaller one they want that size no but they haven't taken it to the extreme i need the comically large ipad that's the size of a flat

screen you have to carry with i would love that yeah it's actually it's actually i want the printer but you know it's funny that they don't nail like they don't nail the simple things if you made a a true apple tv yeah not not a sort of I know I know advice I'm talking about a large you're talking about the app the apple tv or are you talking about the streaming service apple tv no I'm talking about the apple tv plus plus extreme are you talking about the the app the streaming service that lives on the app that lives inside the device and they're all three called apple yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um no but there's a world i would pay for a mattress sized flat

screen from apple that i could mount to my can. Can you imagine how expensive a 100-inch TV would be from Apple? No, but that's like, I wish they just... That would be 100 grand. So LVMH will drop a product that's 50 grand. Yeah. And they're just like, yeah, we know some people will buy this, so we're going to make it. I want Apple to do more stuff like that. The Apple Watch Edition, $10,000 gold watch, gold Apple Watch.

Version 1 immediately became out of date. It doesn't even run the latest software. Yeah. And so they wound up cutting out. They do the bracelets a little bit. They do the bracelets. Anyways, I want to buy an Apple. Do we already do the bezel?

We already fit one in, but I have a, prepare a promoted post, but we got a question from T. Dye in the chat. He says, question, how do I get out of analysis paralysis? And I think that's a good question. You just got to start ruthlessly taking action. I think if you think about, I think there. I feel like I knew some story about some guy who like just would carry around a D20.

You know, like a Dungeons and Dragons like dice that has 20 sides. I think it was like a d20 you know like a dungeon and dragons like dice that has 20 sides i think it was like a very odd you know that a word i don't know if we're supposed to say that you know neurodivergent thing to do but uh yeah it's like okay with if you carry around a dice with 20 sides you can model probabilities down to five percent So you could say, look, I think that there's a 15% chance that I should become an entrepreneur and a 85% chance that I should take Keith Urboy's advice and be a startup founder first or work at a large high-performing organization first.

Just roll the dice. And so, yeah, you roll it. And the way you model it on the D20 is that if it's a three or under, that's a 15% chance. Because every single digit on the D20 is 5%. So you say, okay, I'm just going to roll this dice. And if it comes up three or less, I'm starting my company today. And if it comes up four, between four and 20, I'm applying to a job at a high growth company. I don't know. I mean, it sounds crazy, but like sometimes it really is valuable. I think just to like, you know, like when you're in a,

when you're in a business relationship, someone, there's obviously this idea of like disagree and commit. Like, look, we, we, we, we, we, you know, we, we, Jordy was saying we should do six days a week. I was saying we should do four days a week or whatever. We disagreed. We met in the middle. We made a compromise, but we disagreed. But we're putting it behind us. We're committing to that, right? And so you should do that with your life too

to get out of paralysis paralysis. Just running hard at anything is probably better than waiting around. And so it's the same thing. Should you lift legs or arms? Well, just do something aggressively. Ultimately, every act in life is a leap of faith. Yeah. And specifically startups, you know, I don't know T. Dye's situation. He might be deciding, you know, given the example of, do I join a company and work there for two years or do I start my own thing?

And success is not guaranteed. You might join the company and you have a bad manager and you don't get access to the CEO and you don't get any of the learn positive learnings that Keith is talking about, or you might start a company and you had the right idea, but you know, a more heavily funded competitor came in and just steamrolled you. Uh, but, uh, every act is a leap of faith and the big, the most, like what you work on matter is like at the end of the day, the only thing that matters, but you're not going to know you can't have, uh, you can't go into any decision, you know, with, with a hundred percent certainty of, of the outcome and that's okay. And you just have to get comfortable with that. And you have to make the decision and make micro adjustments, micro adjustments and sometimes macro adjustments.

But if you're waiting to be able to make a decision that 100% leads to success, you're never going to find that. Yeah. That's a good point. I like it. Anyway, we have pretty much gone through the whole timeline. Yeah, I think we should cover Greenland tomorrow. Okay, let's do Greenland tomorrow. Got to talk about mining, which is cool.

We have one more question, and then I think we can close out. Let's do it. Jordy and John, how do you deal with incompetence and lack of speed? This is relevant. So we have somebody joining the team soon, and it was pretty funny because John connected me to him on a Saturday and I will usually, if I'm talking to a candidate, uh, and I get introduced on a Saturday morning, I'll just say, Hey, let me know if you're like, do you want to jump on the phone now?

And that's just sort of information gathering. I'm not going to write the person off if they're like, Oh, actually like, can we talkay or tuesday but i am going to judge that interaction and john introduced me to this guy and uh he before i could even respond he said are you free right now i'll give you a call and so like that's an immediate signal and so uh you know we ended up extending an offer to this person and but i already knew that like speed was in their dna right and uh you could tell like if somebody's it's saturday morning at 9 a.m and they're ready to jump on a call um uh you could look for those signals right you need to be uh you should uh the entire recruiting process should be

figuring out is somebody competent and are they fast yep and competence and speed are like the two biggest factors uh competent general competence and speed are like the two biggest factors. Competent, general competence and speed make up for a lot, even intelligence, right? And a lot of roles, like golden retriever mode is real in companies. If you're just, you know, golden retrievers,

maybe not the right example, but there's sort of this idea of like, if you're competent and you can make generally good decisions and you're fast and you're- It's a corporate athlete. A true corporate athlete, you're going to do well. So I think the biggest thing is if somebody is in the role and they're incompetent, then you need to potentially find a

different role, different role for them. But if they're not fast and if they don't have that sort of speed in their DNA, I've never, I've never gotten somebody that didn't want to work fast to work fast. Um, it just didn't want to work fast to work fast. Yes. But you can, if you give someone the right job, I think people can move faster for sure. If they're in a job that isn't rewarding or demanding or like gives them the right feedback cycle, you can, you can steer them towards something that just fires them up. And all of a sudden you're like, wow, that person's doing way more work way faster. They're pumped because like we found the slot. And so I think that's like how you deal with it. Then kind of the other side is like just on feedback, you know, being very candid, very open, like, you know, humane, but giving

like direct feedback, but then also trying to give as much, uh, kind of like meta level, like algorithmic feedback, not just on this was bad, but what, what is the process? How do we improve the process of whatever, whatever the output was instead of, uh, just acting as like the validator also acting as the fine tuning of the model. Yeah. Essentially. No, I had a one example,

you know, people often don't change and it's disappointing, but it's just reality. But people sometimes don't understand the seriousness of a situation or the importance of a situation and that they might be working quickly in other areas, but like not on the right thing. And I had this last year, I had a portfolio company and I'm one of probably the top five shareholders in the company. It was involved super early and the company was at a

point where we'd have these sort of monthly check-ins with the CEO. A month passed, very little progress happened. And I had a very candid kind of conversation with the CEO where I said, if you keep operating like this, it will be Christmas break, break, whatever that is, if you're a startup founder, but it's going to be between Christmas and New Year's. And you're going to be dealing with laying off your team and shutting the company down because at this pace, you're not going to be in a position to raise your next round. The traction is not going to be there and nobody's coming to save you and between and i said let's meet in a week and like let's see if you can get the pace up and he absolutely did he he crushed it the rest of the

year he got his round his next round raised and the company's in a fantastic position right now and there was something that i think he was too fixated on on sort of like the big picture of like where the company's going and all this stuff. And I just said, you need to take sort of ruthless action. And he unlocked something in himself. And the company has been dramatically different since then. I think it's different giving that advice to a founder and saying, look yourself in the mirror and decide, you know, understand the situation that you're putting yourself in is very different than, you know, if you talk to a employee who's not motivated and they're not moving quickly and

things like that. I haven't had a lot of success in sort of turning somebody from a low, low urgency, low output person into somebody that's super high output. But that was, that was, you know, one very bright point in my year last year where i said okay this person like found the next gear yeah and it dramatically transformed the company yeah i just don't want to be too blackmailed on it because i i think like yes like there is some like innate speed that is just like in people's dna or something and they come into an organization and they just go hard no matter what and you see these people all over but i do think that there's that there's uh that next gear that everyone can achieve for sure and then there's also just uh you know if you get dropped in if you're parachuting into you know nazi occupied france

and you're a 17 year old or 19 year old kid like you can just kind of like stare the opportunity in the face and like, just, just turn it on. Yeah. Even if it's, even if you've never done it before. And so finding that,

that thing that like brings that insane energy, uh, and, and really going forward is, is really important. And that's the job of managers is to like unleash that. Yeah. Anyway,

that's a great show. I thought we had a lot of, a lot of fun. Uh, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Tomorrow, Ben, hold us accountable. Oh, we got to get some new ones.

You people are not leaving enough ads in our reviews. Please leave some ads in our reviews. I got a DM the other day that had an ad in it. It was great. That's fantastic. Um, and, uh, oh, we got one last question. Let's do it. Advice on becoming a creator and not, and cutting out consuming. Uh, the answer here is that all the value on social network, uh, or at least 99% of the value,

uh, created by social networks accrues to the people that create the content versus the people that just use them for entertainment. Uh, and so if you, um, the other thing is if you don't create content online, you don't really exist online and it's hard to, um, have a real impact in this world if you have no digital presence. Um, yeah, we had a post about that in the last, uh, in the last show notes. no digital presence um yeah we had a fullness of time last uh in the last show notes i don't know if we got to it but it was like oh uh in like 1999 oh someone has a presence online they must be a weirdo and then now it's like someone doesn't have a presence online they must be a weirdo and i still think there's um i i still think that there is value in going through periods of time where you cut out all social activity at all.

Try to just not go on these platforms and try to just focus on your business or your role or whatever kind of situation you're in. But there will come a time where you should emerge and start sharing what you're doing with the world. That's fantastic advice. We will see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. We appreciate you all. And have a great Tuesday. Enjoy it.

We will see you soon. Sean McGuire on the show tomorrow. Yeah. We're excited. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Have a good afternoon.