TBPN Live - Stripe's Billion Dollar Crypto Deal, AI for Police, Elon's Diablo Addiction

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Have I told you about Coogan's Law? Of course. You have? Of course. I've told you about this? I mean, you see it everywhere. Yeah, yeah.

Once you know of it, you can't help but notice it. I mean, there's a number of these laws that people repeat in tech. Metcalfe's Law, or what's that one anything that can go wrong will right you know those or uh moore's law the rate of computing is doubling they're not true scientific laws in the sense that they came out of scientific papers but they're axioms that define what's that one anything spacked by social capital will drop 90%. So Coogan's Law is the value of a coined phrase is proportional to overall consumption of content becomes more algorithmically driven and more compressed. So as we move to tweets and TikToks and short form, you need to be coining phrases at like an increasing rate. And if you look at who's really popular in tech,

they've almost all coined phrases, you know, like it's time to build American dynamism. Software is eating the world. There's so many of these. Uh, Bology has the network state. Lulu has going direct. Uh, I don't even know. I talked to Lulu and she said that going direct was not her phrase, but she like took it to a whole nother level. Lindy man, same thing. He didn't come up with that concept, but he really – He's Lindyman. Yeah, but he dominates it. And so finding a really key pithy phrase that you can build your whole brand around, super key and going to be increasingly valuable.

If you look back to the great books like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, those guys didn't need to compress their ideas down into pithy phrases. No one talks about, you know, like Shakespeare's law. You know, you just read all of Shakespeare because that was the only thing that was, they weren't competing with tweets. But now you're competing with tweets. And so you need to really, you know,

compress everything down. And so Coogan's Law is a reference to that. Right. There's a guy, Zach, I think I'm going to butcher his last name, compress everything down. Yeah. And so Kugenslaw is a reference to that. Right. There's a guy, Zach, I think I'm going to butcher his last name, Pogrob, who his whole, his word is obsession. And so he's just constantly every, you know, 50% of anything he ever talks about ties back to obsession somehow. And part of his cult of obsession is pick a word or a phrase that you just become one with. And part of his cult of obsession is pick a word or a phrase that you just become one with and then you just repeat it over and over and over and over.

And it works because I don't even know the guy, I have some mutual friends, but I'm bringing it up right now in the context of all these other phrases that are, have become popularized in different ways. And it's just because every, again, almost every single time he's saying anything, it's comes back to obsession, right? Which is just his like rallying cry. So I have a group of buddies who are like in the content world and they

all have these, they call them razors, you know, like Occam's razor. Uh, this guy, George Mack has max content razor, which is only create content that you would consume yourself, which is good, but it's also kind of silly that he even needs to coin a phrase, right? But it works really well because it sticks in your mind and it's this whole, like just compressing a big idea down. Paul Graham, founder mode. Like there's a lot that was said about that, but it sticks in your mind. It's like, okay, well, whatever that is, whatever makes successful founders, we're calling that founder mode now.

And there's a phrase for that. And clearly there was a gap in the vernacular, in text vernacular, where we needed a word for like, what is the Steve Jobs, Elon, Brian Chesky mentality? And founder mode just slotted in there. So it's kind of perfect. Founder Mode for us is listening to our own podcast.

Yes. Because you've already had the conversation. Ideally on vinyl. On vinyl. Which will be coming soon, by the way. So if you're not subscribed, subscribe. And then you'll be the first to know when the vinyl drops. Yeah.

It's good. Yeah. It's a different experience. The tonalityality the analog nature of it it almost it's the closest thing for us to feel like we're back in the room where the recording happened right sitting at this wooden wooden desk feeling the energy from the the crystal ball what did our what did our one fan describe it as a rustic feel a rustic analog because you hear the you hear the paper shuffling yeah we have rustic audio yeah yeah it's organic organic natural it's a it's a return to tradition

right it's good should we go into the top story of today it's hard to hard to follow coogan's law but well next time we need geordie's law right so we're going to come up with that and then we're going to be coining a lot more phrases and you're going to hear them we're going to try them on here and you'll hear them here first yeah yeah that that's a whole new segment of the show is is new just coining phrases we're tracking phrases and laws we could have we could have a chart that was just like going long and short on these different phrases. I mean, in some ways, it's extremely silly to just think that like, oh, okay, you have some idea. You've written it out. Maybe you've actually put a lot of thought into something and realized something interesting is going on.

Taste was the other one. Somebody came out and wrote a piece on taste in terms of startups. And it's like, okay, does that really need to be said? Yeah, yeah. But in some ways, it does. But it's controversial. does that really need to be said yeah yeah but it's controversial yeah in some ways it does yeah and and yeah i think a lot of people a lot of people do forget about like the importance of like compressing it down and something that can be viral it's it's like it's it's a meat they're always memes exactly right it's time to build yep uh salon is really good at founder mode moon Founder mode. Moon should be a state.

Moon should be a state. That phrase is so much bigger than that. It's talking about- Solana's law would be how many times people call you a billionaire in a derogatory way equal to uh how politically you know what what would the law be is so there's something there right it's like if people are if people are getting angry at you and calling you a billionaire yeah you probably are just a capitalist yeah you know it really is clear that like he's he's particularly good at just these these pithy phrases because every when he writes a piece the titles are always really good yeah like uh i mean he had one that was like moral inversion

just this idea that another life he was a journalist yeah if he wasn't a billionaire he would have been a journalist yeah yeah and then uh but now he's doing with the daily i don't know if you're subscribed to that, but it sends three takes, three morning takes. And each one of them has like some sort of clever, you know, pun or, you know,

headline. And I'm like, how do you come up with these? Cause it's really hard, but I guess, you know, you can be really good. There could be some real alpha and us just ripping all the takes from him.

Just going back through the daily and repeating them as original thoughts and just in focusing more on the algo just trying to grow faster and bigger and then he'll be trying to plan his takes out to be like okay well i can't do the daily anymore i've got to drop it the the morning that after they record yeah um well i mean as long as that's as long as that's more profitable, then I'm down. I. There's a topic that we have to cover. I'll actually wait. It's we can put it in the reaction section. But I just got an email that was from this guy, Eric Newcomer, who's a journalist. And he says the the subject of the email is new is reflections on Newcomer four years in yeah and the preview line is Newcomer is on track to generate more than

1 million in profit on more than 2 million in revenue this year pretty good um which is fantastic yeah and uh it just shows that that uh he's living every journalist's dream, which is to be rich. But instead of being just rich and successful, they choose to attack and try to tear down the sort of like crabs in a bucket phenomena. Yeah, yeah. Crabs in a bucket for sure. Crabs in a bucket. Journalists in a bucket. Well, he's a Harvard guy.

He's buddies with Max Child. You know this guy? He runs this AI startup. He's a littlevard guy he's he's buddies with uh max child you know this guy he runs this uh ai startup he's he's a little more in tech than most people think yeah and and i think he knows who he knows who brought it who butters his bread because he's got the events business a lot of sponsors at cerebral valley there you go he's bringing in the big bucks he's not going to be writing hit pieces for very much yeah but i think i yeah yeah eventually eventually you just gotta hit pieces aren't gonna get you glowing profiles sue to uh lake como there you go no one no one need to be a peer you need to be a peer exactly you don't become a peer by writing hit pieces no no you become a

peer by generating yeah you know huge uh no one's no one's inviting taylor lorenz to san chope right right like she's not going to samaritz she's climbing in through the through the hvac system you know she's like she's in the she's in uh hotel du cop du cap or whatever uh in the hvac system because it's it's 82 degrees anyways uh we need to get into the story. Yeah, the top story. We got to talk about Stripe acquiring Bridge for over $1 billion. Are you big in crypto?

I'm, like, generally a believer. I like Bitcoin. But I'm not really deep in any of the Web3 stuff. And we like bubbles and speculation. I do. I do. But I was thinking about, like, why do we need to talk about this? really deep in any and we like bubbles and stuff speculation I do I do but I was thinking about like why do we need to talk about this and I think the real

reason is just that you know whenever one of these billion dollar acquisitions happens like there's a new class of wealthy individuals who are on the scene and like these founders they're gonna be the ones you're bidding bidding against the Christie's they're gonna be the ones like if you're fighting for a new location in the F80 like you're gonna to be the ones, like if you're fighting for a new allocation in the Ferrari F80, like you're going to be going up against this guy. So you got to know who he is. So we should do a little overview

of Zach Abrams and Bridge just to kind of set the story because it's a pretty fascinating journey to get to this billion dollar outcome. So Zach grew up in North Carolina, attends Duke, and he's only done one podcast. I searched all over the place. I could only find one like 20 minute podcast that

he did, but it was really great. And he talks about when he was at Duke, his dream- That might be Abrams law. The number of podcasts you do is inversely correlated with enterprise value. The Duke is clearly actually working and building stuff, not just stroking his own ego. But he said that while he was at Duke, his life's goal and his dream was to become an operating partner in private equity. Amazing. I love it. And he achieved it immediately. He goes to this private equity firm and he focuses on like opening and closing factories for this auto parts business that they bought. A real PE guy is closing stuff. Exactly. Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, so he's like 24 and he's like shutting down manufacturing plants, opening up new manufacturing plants. And it's like a beast of a time because it's post-recession. I think it's like 2009. And it's the auto parts business. Like no one's buying new cars and stuff.

It's just like really rough. But then 2010, he realizes that like, okay, I want something different. There's a startup scene out in Silicon Valley. He moves out there. He starts a fintech company called Evenly But then in 2010, he realizes that like, okay, I want something different. There's a startup scene out in Silicon Valley. He moves out there. He starts a fintech company called Evenly and he sells to Square pretty quickly after a year and a half.

And so this is, he gets into Square pre IPO, pre cash app, pre a lot of the crypto stuff and kind of sees that start growing. So he's a product manager at Square, works there for a few years, goes to Coinbase where he leads the consumer business. And what's funny is that I didn't fully fact check this, but his co-founder at Bridge is Sean Yu, who I believe was also his co-founder at Evenly, and also worked with him at Coinbase and also worked with him at Brex. So this story is fantastic because it completely justifies VC's pattern matching, right? It's like, okay, finance background.

So it has like extreme work ethic, understands how business works, starts a company, sells to Square. Probably wasn't like an amazing outcome, but, you know, stays on with his co-founder, learns the game, is at a hyperscaler, goes and works at Coinbase, another hyperscaler, goes and is at Brex early, a hyperscaler goes goes and works at coinbase another hyperscaler goes and is at brex early another hyperscaler with his with his original co-founder the whole time and then starts a new company and raises it 40 pre which probably felt like really expensive for a lot of people but they're like hey he was sold his last company to square he's with his original co-founder and so the pattern matching is extreme all the way through. Not technically hyperscalers, by the way. That term's reserved for the big tech companies that are building like massive.

Right, right, right. Sorry, sorry. Scale ups. Hyper growth. Scale ups. Scale ups. And in the financial world. Yeah.

He never like went off and did something random. Yeah. So when he, and, and, and, you know, he's now, he's not like, he wasn't, he wasn't FOMOing into FinTech. Exactly. He started in FinTech in 2010. Right. So he's like a decade and a half into his career when he's really building bridge.

Yeah. So I think here's the reason that this story is important is this is the only major liquidity event that I can think of in crypto that wasn't token oriented oh yeah right yeah like can you think of another and no they definitely didn't have a token yeah yeah because they didn't need it it's all just infrastructure and but i cannot think of another major outside of coinbase ipo can you think of another crypto company that was a eight, you know, sorry, 10 figure acquisition? It's just, you can't think of one. I mean, a similar business would be like Chainalysis, right? But I don't know if they've

sold or IPO'd yet. But that's a company that doesn't have a token. They just do the research. And I think they're doing very well. But again no but it's your point not this is like the instagram moment yep yep yep of in in and the funny thing is this will inspire in an entire massive wave of new crypto infrastructure investing it's good timing i have a a company that's similar to bridge uh for latin america yeah um that does stablecoin infrastructure they're called Menteo. They're going to be raising this quarter if you're listening. This is, yeah,

Dylan Field posted this about he's the CEO of Figma and he said in 2006 I asked Joey Krug, Joey, what are going to be the biggest use cases for crypto? He quickly and succinctly answered speculation, stable coins coins and prediction markets.

Meme coins, Stripe's acquisition of Bridge and Polymarket, the world is starting to catch up to Joey. And that's like exactly what's happening right now. You have pumped out fun, tons of meme coins, also just speculation on Bitcoin and ETH as like underlying assets. But then now we're seeing a lot of infrastructure in stable coins, which makes a lot of sense. It is really hard to refute if you're a crypto skeptic. And then Polymarket, which is obviously taking over the world right now. Yeah. So it's interesting. So I met Zach in 2022. It must have been post his

initial fundraise, which I think was at 40. I think he did two rounds, like a series A. Yeah. And I think they raised 53 total, probably 10 on 40 in that first thing. And then I think he did two rounds, like a C in Series A. And I think they raised 53 total, probably 10 on 40 in that first thing. And then I think they probably did like 40 mil on 100 or 200 or something. So I met him in the context of we were doing a lot of work with Stablecoins at Party Round. We supported Stablecoin investing on-chain, which was funny at the time because the reason that what he was doing was important is because i had already backed a company called layer two that um is doing sort of similar stuff to to bridge um more focused on like sort of like banking applications but um they were i thought layer two was a good bet at the time they were powering all of angel list stable coin infrastructure. Bridge took it in another direction. And when I jumped on with Zach, I wasn't, Zach's obviously super smart. I should

have probably tried to invest at the time, but he wasn't raising. And he basically just mined me for information for like the entire 30 minutes. Like he was just like not really wanting to share anything because I think he wasn't, didn't know exactly what he was doing yet. So he just used the entire meeting to just like, you know just mine uh information of how we were thinking about stable coins and we had a bunch of crypto sort of companies uh as customers so anyways should have should have uh bet big on zach uh at that time but um didn't really i don't know i don't kick myself that much because it wasn't like a fundraising specific meeting. It's interesting, though.

But yeah, I think it's fantastic for crypto at a time when speculation and prediction markets, like you're saying, are getting all the attention to say like, hey, here's a major liquidity event by the most storied, relatively recent Silicon Valley company being Stripe, putting it on the map and legitimizing it, which is just good because I have a lot of, I'm personally heavily invested in early stage crypto. And ultimately I think that it was always very clear that stable like nothing has product market fit in crypto like stable coins like if you actually look at like i think the most it's um usdt is has more revenue on a per employee basis by like 10x than black rock whoa um which is sounds insane but i think

they have like a hundred person team and they're doing billions of dollars yeah something that makes sense um so i think that uh it's very like legitimizing and it's just very positive the only the only thing that was unfortunate about the way the whole announcement went down is that sequoia didn't really get the credit that they were wanting and so Sean had to really come out the information really snubbed him snubbed him felt very personal yeah he had to come out and say hey we led the series a yeah it wasn't Ribbit or Han or you know Sean was like I don't even know who those funds are. Anyway, so hopefully they issued a correction. Thank God. Yeah, journalism is saved.

But it was a dark day for journalism. Yeah, it was rough. It was rough. I've actually used stable coins. I paid a video editor in Argentina. Yeah. And because the currency was fluctuating like crazy. And it was really, really hard.

And the fees to get dollars there were crazy. Yeah. As Americans, we want USDT adoption. Yeah. It's good for the dollar. Yeah. Dollar dominance. Dollar dominance.

I had a – I was on a surf trip with four Argentinians when I was 18, traveling from Ecuador to Panama. And I was on like a six-month trip at the time. And my Argentinian friends had to cut their trip short by like eight weeks because their currency just got demolished mid-trip. And they were sitting, obviously obviously in argentinian pesos and so they're imagine getting your budget like slashed like by 60 percent you know so they just literally had to go home um and so yeah just think it it um i you know i pray for the continued dominance of the u.s dollar as long as we both shall live live um for the sake of our children

and their children yeah but um stable coins are good you know stable coins are are um are a big catalyst for the dollar it's kind of fascinating i mean i it doesn't seem like anyone's announced like bridges revenue or how big they were but it um do you have they did it was like 15 million yeah dollar run rate so it was like huge multiple hundred but it seems like they have a massive regulatory moat or or have done a lot that was what i yeah yeah that's what i actually don't um as you know yeah idea guys non-technical folk i don't know what they built that was so valuable that stripe couldn't build it themselves and felt like they had to what you don't know is like how much of this this is almost like Stripe hedging like Stripe's been

had a lot of stablecoin initiatives internally they've been trying to build Paxos right yeah they've been trying they've been working on this space for a really long time so I'm excited for it to come out more of like what what did they build that was so critical that they had to pay a hundred times revenue or whatever they paid? Well, this Anon Signal wrote on conviction finance, Zach has managed to do the near impossible, obtaining solid licenses with the two major jurisdictions,

the United States and Europe, where they are both permitted to transmit large sums of money and exchange currencies on behalf of users, essentially a ramp. One for the Eurozone is located in Poland. The other, a U.S. Delaware C-Corp is located in Berkeley. The U.S. C-Corp has money transmitter licenses approved in 22 states, and they got more, and they're close to 48 states now.

If not, they already have them. And so it feels like Bridge went out and did all this, like, heavy lifting on the regulatory side to actually get approved. And then they also have very high transfer limits. i guess there are tiers to the money transfer like like yeah you know uh approval uh levels and so they did all this hard work and i wonder if that's if that's difficult for stripe because they're such a big company maybe they're like you know it becomes more of a political issue the politicians want to extract more of a pound of flesh or something because you would assume that like okay a bigger company would actually have an easier

time getting transparent it's it's sort of interesting stripe knows how important stable coins are to their business long term did they only spend like 50 million dollars trying to make this happen did they spend a hundred million dollars internally did they spend five hundred million dollars internally and like fail yeah right I just don't know why they didn't have the lobbying power. They have the technical prowess and the like war chest to have made this happen. And so maybe Maybe Zach is, who knows? Maybe Zach plays like, oh, I'm a nice guy. I don't do podcasts.

I'm just interested in money. But then behind the scenes, he just was an absolute animal, right? Just doing deals with the mafia in Poland. He did what it had to take. Getting anything approved in Europe now feels miraculous. Yeah, he was in Poland on founder mode, meeting with the mafia to get this done. Yeah. One thing I was listening to that podcast with him,

and he pointed out this very interesting thing that I couldn't quite get to the bottom of, is that there's some sort of legacy ruling in the American banking system where dollars in a bank account need to be demarcated between checking and savings. And I'm not exactly sure why. I think it might actually just be for the measurement of the money supply. I couldn't really get to the bottom of it. But he said that like one of the things that the stable coin infrastructure unlocks is the ability

to have a yield bearing account that then you can also transact with. So basically just merging a checking and savings account. And now like a crypto skeptic would say like, well, that's like a stupid technical feature. Like why can't you just make a combined checking and savings account or a yield bearing checking account? But it's like, well, there's so much cruft in the legal system around the American financial system. So it's like maybe,'s so much cruft in the legal system around the american financial system so it's like maybe yeah you do just need to like have some sort of green field fresh start and that's enough i don't know yeah so at capital we had uh we had a high yield checking account so it's not that um it is a good i mean i think the there's so much platform and infrastructure risk in all this stuff, right? Like one of the reasons that they maybe had to buy Bridge, I'm just speculating,

is that Stripe's existing bank partners had no interest in taking on that level of risk, right? At Capital, we were rolling out a stablecoin custody product when we were informed by our bank partner that we were going to have bank partner that we we were going to have to jettison a lot of our digital asset oriented customers and so our entire product strategy like fell apart because we couldn't do the thing that our customers wanted and in fact had to be like hey you guys should like leave basically yeah um so there's so much, um, that, that is, I feel like the whole bridge story is such a good example of risk taking, right? There's so much that bridge was trying to do that when they started was unclear if it was even going to be possible. And so oftentimes opportunities like that attract unsophisticated founders that don't know what they're getting themselves into.

And then founders that are sophisticated and already successful and comfortable with the risk. Right. Yeah. Because a lot of people would have said like, oh, what you're trying to do is you're going to get destroyed by Stripe or you're going to get destroyed by stripe or you're going to get destroyed by block and square or or oh what you're trying to do like no bank's going to allow that or you're never going to get money transmitter licenses or whatever the things that there there would have been a lot of ways to to if you were writing an investment memo on the business be like what could go wrong here and zach i'm sure was totally aware of all those risks and still comfortable with it and it shows that it shows that there's so much alpha and just being okay with the fact that you're taking on a regular you're taking on a lot of regulatory risk you're taking on a lot of platform risk and you need to just that's part of what creates these sort of exponential opportunities.

Do you think there'll ever be a stablecoin de-pegging? In the sense that normally when a stablecoin de-pegs, it's like a disaster because it means that it's been discovered that they don't actually hold the assets. But I wonder if in the future, stablecoins become so popular that they essentially't actually hold the assets but i wonder if in the future stable coins become so popular that they be they essentially become global yeah super valuable and then the the us

the the fed is like printing too many dollars and the dollars become inflationary and and just like the dollar went off the gold standard imagine if like the imagine if usC or USDT become so big that they say, you know what, we're we're no longer backed by the dollar because we are more stable than the dollar. Yeah. Right now they're using. Yeah. I mean, that's it. That's that's been a big stability. so coinbase has always taken the approach yeah that um that everything like they've taken a very transparent approach yeah tether i don't think has ever come close to the same level of transparency yeah there's always and there's a there's a huge amount of you know saying tether usdt can say oh yeah we're a stable coin but what if but it's a private company and what if they've just been they could have been giving themselves for every dollar you know dollar that they take in and and sort of minting a new stable coin what if 30 of the time they were like we're

just gonna take you know i don't know right like you just don't really know what's going on and that's why they're they're usdt depegged during the whole ftx saga there was like a lot of people very very minor it was yeah it was like which was like off by 30 percent one day and everyone's like okay this is the end um yeah and so i think that there will undoubtedly be a time in the future where a major stable coin like blows up. Yeah. Right. Because part of part of crypto. By saying, hey, decentralized finance, which is another way of saying unregulated finance or like digital crypto based finance. The whole thing has just been speed running why we have all these financial regulations in the first place, right?

So if you allow anybody, if you allow a global team of anons to start creating financial products, yeah, you're gonna, similar things are gonna happen to the wild west of America when like 10 dudes were like, yeah, let's create a bank, you know,

and this is like the cattle bank, you know, whatever. And they just start, they're just freestyling, you know and this is like the cattle bank yeah you know whatever i mean they just are they're just freestyling you know finance yeah yeah i mean the bull case here is that is that it's like yes they are speed running like let's regulate financial products for the first time but just by virtue of the fact that they are not immediately slotted into the existing regulatory scheme, you're able to take a second crack at creating more effective regulations that make more sense and allow for speed and transparency or whatever. And you're just, it's just like, you know,

it's the same thing as the people that want to like go and build a new country just because there's like so much legal cruft because every year in America we're adding like 10 times the amount of laws that we're deleting right yeah so the amount of laws is just growing growing growing that slows down innovation that slows down the financial sector and so it's like yeah it is the wild west it is really bad while it's completely unregulated but there's a really bullish case for whatever regulation comes it's just going to be a little bit more fresh

and a little bit more from first principles and hopefully a little more permissive and just informed by the wins and losses of the last few decades in the traditional finance system. Absolutely. The other thing that's interesting about the whole thing is that stripe was willing to pay 20 of what people believe circles eventual ipo will be so people are projecting circle ipo at something like a five billion dollar valuation circle what let's look at what their market cap

is right now but i mean for the stablecoin market cap? Because that's just the value of all the stablecoins? Yeah, but they generate... So it's really, really high, and then they get a percentage on that as their market cap? Oh, wow, you can buy USDC for 99 cents right now. Depagged. It's the end.

Pegging. It's game over. What is the... So the market cap is 34 billion dollars right now yeah um and that's for all the stable coins yeah but the reason that that's substantial is it means that circle is has taken on 34 billion dollars and is earning interest yield on that, which right now is somewhere around 5%. And they're giving a lot of that back as incentives, but it's still very, very profitable business. So anyways, something that Zach and the Bridge team did

resulted in it being their $15 dollar company being worth a billion dollars and we'll find it out over time i imagine yeah i mean certainly crypto needed a win yeah that wasn't speculation it's not enough to be it's not even though pump dot fund who knows what the enterprise value of a business like that is right because it feels like very like it's on the most shaky regulatory ground possible but they're doing i think like 100 million a year in fees right so that's a massive win from a revenue generation standpoint but what is that company worth so i think crypto needed a win, and it certainly got one. I mean, it feels like this year there's been three major wins

across all three of those. Speculation-wise, Bitcoin is near all-time highs, like in terms of the digital gold thesis, like it's very, very solid. And so this whole, you know, fear that was being sowed by the crypto skeptics was correct around some of the bubbly NFTs, but clearly it was wrong about Bitcoin because it's had much more staying power than those folks predicted. Everyone was predicting that Bitcoin, once it sold off from 65 at the height,

or I think it was like 70 for a little bit during the peak down to like it was in the 30s and maybe even high 20s at one point well it's back up and if it keeps if it keeps going up and down like yeah it's it's volatile but it's here to stay in one way or another and then you have polymarket like absolutely dominating like the news cycle and providing some sort of insight and some value that's much more. Yeah, I mean, there's the degen gambler aspect to it, but there's also just the normie value of people want to look at a percentage of who's going to win the presidential election. That has value. people will pay for that

people and that that seems like something that's more fundamental and more easy to value than like what is an art piece worth right yeah like if you're a business or a hedge fund or something and you think that the the there's going to be some economic impact to a Trump election versus a Harris. I wonder. Like having that data is valuable. I wonder if this is available to see on chain, but what percentage of poly markets bets are on the election versus anything else? Like it must be like 98%.

I don't know if it's 98%, but it's certainly high. There's like a billion dollars of liquidity in the election right now. I asked Shane, like, what does he think the next biggest market will be after the election? And I think they have some pretty exciting things planned. I don't believe they use Bridge, but they do use stable coins in the back end. But they're a very crypto native company. So they were able to implement that. And Shane's been in crypto for years

in the Ethereum community. But for so many other companies, using stable coins is a huge hassle. I mean, you don't want to roll your own infrastructure there. With my first business, we accepted Bitcoin payments through Coinbase in 2013. And it was a mess. It was a disaster.

I mean, we lost like $10 million because we sold it too early. We should have held it. And then also it was just like a nightmare from an accounting perspective because you basically are operating in foreign currencies and you have to reconcile those. So your balance sheet's like fluctuating left and right. is just like a nightmare from an accounting perspective because you basically are operating in foreign currencies and you have to reconcile those, so your balance sheet's fluctuating left and right. And so you wind up accepting them.

And then for anyone who has a product with any sort of return policy, you wind up acting as a hedge, right? Because let's say that you're selling- I'll take that Bitcoin back. Exactly, let's say you're selling microphones for $500. You buy 10 microphones for Bitcoin, you have $5,000 in mics.

If the price goes down, you just sell those microphones and get your cash back at dollars. But if the price goes up, you return the microphones and you get the Bitcoin back. And so you wind up in this weird scenario where like, if the price is going up, you tell the customers, well, okay, we will refund you in the currency that you gave us

or if it's going down. So you're always like playing this weird game of like, what do I give back to the customer? Because you act as a hedge. So it's just really, really difficult. But obviously if you can just plug stable coins in, it makes a ton of sense. And that's what's happening.

That's actually the biggest win. What if it comes out that Stripe paid a billion because Zach had taken his entire $50 million round from Sequoia and just gone super long on Bitcoin? And then he's sitting on like, so the company actually got bought for $100 million, but then there's a billion dollars. And it's like, Sequoia is like, you know what? We made this bet once with SVF. It didn't work. You fucking did.

You know, I was waiting. You know, the famous story about the FedEx founder. Yeah. So the FedEx founder, he's down to his last dollar. The company is about to go out of business. Famously, he goes to Vegas, puts all the company's assets on black, comes up black. He doubles his money. He's able to make payroll.

The business keeps growing. Now, the conspiracy theory is that it wasn't he didn't go to the casino he went to like a loan shark in vegas or like the mafia but no the real can yeah ben where's my tinfoil hat um um is that is the water in the shot for him can you just keep it on the other side or something um would be on brand for me to have water in the shot yeah the whole time um no so i think the real conspiracy theory is that he was narco traffic you know doing like trafficking drugs crazy getting a lot of cash and he needed a story in terms to say like all he would have to do to make a hundred grand in cash is do like one run for the cartel and then all of a sudden he's got oh because he's in feta yeah that makes because he's in

the trucking exactly so he could be like okay i'm just gonna do one so if you want to if you want to create a a hypothetically a legendary hypothetically legendary story of how you bet your company on the cassette in vegas and you suddenly came up with all this cash yeah that's a pretty good way that's that's super fascinating yeah you'd have all the infrastructure to do but it's but uh anyways so yeah my tinfoil hat off but i i i think that um yeah i was always thinking that during the last crypto boom when everything was just ripping there was we were going to hear the story of a company that raised some money, didn't find product market fit, but put their whole treasury in some altcoin and wound up with just a huge

treasury. And then maybe they would keep building, use that, and then actually make a win. And it'd be like, wait a minute, that company came out of stealth. They raised a $1 million seed round, but they have they have a thousand employees or something and they're just launching this product like what happened it's like oh well yeah because they turned that million into a hundred million yeah essentially gambling uh and it would be like a fedex style story but uh everyone i talked to in crypto was like yeah there's been people that do that but then they just ride off in the sunset they just leave and they don sunset. They just leave and they just stop building.

They just drop out, which sucks. But yeah, with Bridge, the one really interesting example that I did see of a company using this, and it was a perfect example of this, was Scale. So they have a bunch of contractors internationally. They want to pay them quickly in dollars because there's no fluctuation.

And so they use, I think they use a product that's built on top of bridge i love how we say there's no fluctuation of the dollar i mean it's been devalued yeah yeah but like relative to a lot of these places like people will be so happy to to get paid in dollars on the day that they work and that's something that stable coins can can. So it's interesting to watch crypto rack up these very real wins, whether it's Bitcoin becoming essentially Lindy. Haters will say it's Photoshop. Yeah, exactly. Well, haters will focus on the Bored Apes. And it's like, yeah, that was one thing that didn't work out.

It was Yuga Labs that was our customer that didn't use our, when they raised with us, they didn't use the stable coin functionality. Well, should we move on to brother of the week? Yeah, this was a tough one. But first I need to tell you about NetJets. If you're looking for the ultimate in flexibility and convenience when it comes to private travel,

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One of his mentors told him. What's that? One of his mentors told him. One of David's mentors said. The life goal is to get a private jet. That's the only thing that matters. That's the only thing that matters. That's the only thing that matters.

Here's the thing. You can sleep in a private jet. Yep. You can't fly a house. Right? So what does that tell you? Yeah. Optimize for the jet.

Don't optimize for the house. That's true. I'm surprised that's not more of a thing. If you think about it, RVs are big. And why are people not just saying, I'm going to buy this jet or I'm going to leverage net jets primarily as this sort of RV in the sky yeah

right there is this interesting thing where people always complain like oh we don't have flying cars yet we don't have flying cars yet but we do we do it's just not evenly distributed yet we have we have private jets which you can take anywhere like it's a flying car and then we also have helicopters yeah and if you put those two together I'm surprised it yeah i'm surprised that it hasn't become more popular to develop you know something you know maybe this is a partnership with net jets right but developing you know a city in arizona that's way off the beaten path that has consistent air you know private air travel between la or somewhere that's that's a comparable distance to New York.

Anyways, there's, you know, we're, we're thrilled to partner with net jets as consumers and as a show. And, you know, we, we look forward to many,

you know, more trips with them in the future. And yeah. So thanks to them. Should we move on to the brother of the week? We got to give it to Daniel Francis getting doxxed. You might know him as Daniel Johnson. DJ. Or Growing Daniel. Growing Daniel. One of the greatest posters. He he announced his startup Able this week. And it is an AI startup for for police and he's based in san francisco and he uh he launched it in an interesting way i mean he has over a hundred thousand followers basically everything he posts goes viral like he's fantastic at shit posting but he chose to launch this in kind of the

most normie way possible just like a tech crunch article tech crunch article but his aura was so powerful that, oh, did he do an interview with Gary or something? Gary, I think, was just a big investor. Yeah, yeah, so like, you know, he could have gone on a podcast, he could have done a launch video, he knows people, he could have done all sorts of stuff,

but he went with just the TechCrunch article, which is kind of hilarious and counterintuitive. I think he might still be having a little bit of an identity crisis. He's like, I'm the number one shit poster on tech Twitter. Yep. And I'm building AI for cops. Yeah, it is a little hard because like, yeah,

maybe you know his account is shit posting. Like there's a couple of shit posters that I follow. Like there's this one guy, Chris Bakke. Do you know him? Yeah. He worked at, he ran Lasky. He sold it to Twitter and he worked at X and then he left.

And when he left, he was like, big news, I'm leaving the company, thanks everyone. And he's always shitposting, so my reply was just like, oh, this is your best joke yet, this is hilarious, I can't believe you even got rid of your official badge. This is searing comedy, great satire on what cringe people do when they leave companies. And so you can see

this like backfiring if he's like hey i'm launching this like police ai startup everyone would just be like oh like this is the best shit post ever he's like no guys it actually is real i'm actually like a real person yeah it's funny to think about him in some milwaukee police station you know doing a customer like meeting or conversation or a sales thing and they're like so you know we have a few minutes before the chief arrives what tell me about yourself you know what do you have any family and law enforcement and um he goes well i'm somewhat of a sheriff myself on tech twitter actually a little town called technology twitter yeah i don't know if you've ever been there but i actually met elon musk um but yeah yeah i mean i think that uh uh this is not here's the thing people aren't going to want to say there's there's always anytime somebody posts a lot and is building a company

all the vcs that suck at posting try to signal them, you know, and sort of like shit on them and be like, oh, this is not a serious founder or whatever. Why he's posting it. But whether you like it or not, if somebody can figure out how to post really well, they can figure out how to build a company and get attention and communicate in the right ways to raise money to hire great people to get customers so for some reason or another the skill set of posting translates well to doing well it's the compression of ideas right yeah so like posting a banger tweet is just taking some sort of like concept that's bouncing around in the ether and boiling it down into something that's funny or fits into a meme format that gets attention. Yeah, exactly.

And it relays a complex concept in a very short amount of time. Yeah. And, and that is just a valuable skill as long as you don't get addicted to it. And you're not just making posting your entire life or like getting sucked into it and having some weird, but I don't think he has Daniel. It's an edge because his ex income allows him to take a lower salary from Abel.

Potentially. He probably makes a decent amount, right? Yeah, yeah. He's probably making like 10 grand a month or something, a couple grand a month from that. Oh, yeah, Cyan is in here. Yeah. Oh, he got Long Journey.

That's great. Justin's over there. Yeah. That's awesome. And YC. I love it. Did you see the his it's it i will say it is the most hilarious business that he could build straight up as opposed as a poster to go build ai for cops i'm

totally for it i want yeah i want the police to have more funding. I think that they have gone through a decade of being ostracized and put down and told that they were bad people. When these are people that get paid way less money than they should probably to do a job that is very challenging. And you, you know, half the country seemingly hates you, whether they're people that are breaking laws or people that are just police haters so um i think it's i think it's totally a smart move because he can go make building ai for cops cool and attract other smart posters um but it's it's funny from the lens that i would say that you know somebody like ayush who's building warp is like a you know, somebody like Ayush who's building Warp is like a, you know, talented poster. There was a lot more overlap in terms of the customer, the buyer. The buyer's already on tech twitter. I just don't think, you know, maybe two cops follow growing Daniel.

Yeah, yeah. Is a hundred thousand. Yeah. The only value is maybe hiring engineers. Which is deeply valuable. Yeah. But and investors. Yeah. Like every major VC who's on tech is aware of it. maybe hiring engineers. Which is deeply valuable. And investors.

Yeah. Like every major VC who's on tech is aware of it. Yeah, the real edge is ability to raise capital and hire talented people that otherwise wouldn't be going and applying for a job at an AI for cops startup. Yeah. Do you remember his stunt at Twitter? Of course. it was iconic of course i was actually i got dinner with raul yeah night before that happened no way we were

just like hanging out and then i went into uh like a meeting at founders fund the next day and we all open up our phones and we're seeing like he the guy that i had dinner with the night before and and daniel just out front of uh out front out front of Twitter HQ talking to Deirdre Bosa at CNBC about how they got laid off and causing this viral fake news cycle. It was just iconic. That was amazing. That was really the moment. It's no fluke that both those guys have gone on to build interesting companies. Yeah, they have.

Because they're interesting people. Exactly. Yeah. And I think both of them have the ability to not get lost in the sauce on Twitter. You could raise a whole fund dedicated to funding posters. Yeah. Right? It's just the poster index.

Yeah. And I think it would outperform perhaps there's only one way to find out only one way to find out gotta fund the posters fund the posters it's an interesting category to be in like i'm pretty sure the company that makes the body cams has is doing pretty well i think it's uh i think it's the same company that owns the tasers i forget what company that is. But they're a multi-billion dollar public company.

It's just hard because selling into police departments is not like DOT where there's one buyer. The real play is building Twitch meets police body camps meets polymarket. So you can actually bet on it bet on

arrests what's gonna happen chases yeah and um yeah we're in pursuit of this person will they pull over will they make a run for it yeah okay i see a hellcat engine he's he's breaking for it um yeah yeah the other company that's done really well here is uh are you familiar flock safety yeah yeah they are crushing it and uh and is that a founder's fund yeah and they made that another big acquisition oh yeah yeah they did aerodrome yeah yeah yeah and and and everyone thought it was really really hard to build like the the ender roll for like the local government because it's just so fragmented and you have to go like jurisdiction by jurisdiction um but some people have cracked it and so you know if he can figure that out it's gonna be good it's gonna be good i'm excited so congratulations to daniel the brother of the week brother of the week should we do some uh tweet

reactions i like this one so elon musk has been playing diablo relentlessly. I mean, the guy is one of the top 30 Diablo players in the world right now, something like that. And so Alex Lieberman over at Morning Brew says, how does this man have time to play video games? I would absolutely love to see a screenshot of Elon Musk's calendar. Would be a fascinating window into elite time management, prioritization, and delegation and so yeah i mean he's running spacex tesla neuralink boring company all pretty serious efforts um then also campaigning constantly

doing tons of interviews he's also running twitter x yeah constantly and then apparently becoming one of the greatest diablo players ever in the world yeah and then and then aren't there people that are saying that he's not actually playing and maybe he has a whole team of people that are playing so they're warming up the account for him so he just gets to come on yeah so one of one of the other great diablo players did kind of a breakdown and said that so diablo basically has new season content every quarter where there's like a new final boss and new levels and stuff so even if you're maxing out your account when the new season drops like you have several hundred hours of content in front of you just to get to the right level to beat the final boss and so in order to be where he is which is beating because

he in this tweet he says like uh five minute t150 clear which is like the hardest thing you can possibly do right now hope there's some mid-season content because he basically like finished the expansion pack like in like a month and a half and it's supposed to take you like three months or maybe longer and so uh so one one of the diablo like you know fans says like in order to do this like you literally have to be playing like 40 hours a week or something like that maybe more yeah and so now there's like this theory that maybe elon has a team of interns or something like playing on his account, doing a lot of like the grinding and leveling, and then he can just log on for the best, which is,

which is like amazing delegation if that's true. Yeah. It's giving ammo to, I mean, the guy spends a lot of time on jets, right? I'm sure. I'm sure Starlink testing Starlink, making sure it's working. What better way to test the product than to play Diablo? I think that this is potentially giving some ammunition to the folks out there that say Elon's not a real, he didn't build SpaceX. He didn't do this or that. He hires team. That's like the, that's the number one gotcha that people like try to get elon for is like take that yeah it's like you didn't do that yeah other you hired people that

did that which is like okay okay you should you should hire people you should hire people and build neuro link too yeah uh i think everybody would benefit if you could do that um but yeah this is giving some real you know ammo to those people who are going to do a takedown piece which i'm sure journalists will find a way to paint this in a elon's deceptive video game practices apply to much more than just you know online games elon's treating the entire world like an online game yeah um he thinks leveling up is all that matters when yeah i mean i think it's i think it's human humanizing it's good like the idea of you know this very powerful and wealthy person like not having fun or like letting off steam at any point

is like very blackballing to me do you think that he is over having kids and now it's just like, I'm going to be a kid. He was joking about it recently. Right. He was saying he was going to have Taylor Swift's baby. That would be, that would be where he was like, I can't wait.

Yeah. That part of the simulation. I think he's, I think he's down and I think he's hit such economies of scale with the children that I would be surprised if it ever stops. I have this theory that there's a lot of old dudes who – I don't know. There's a lot of old billionaires who are constantly getting divorced and remarried. And I think at a certain point, it's like they just like having weddings because weddings are just like big parties and like an excuse to

to through because you look at you look at I forget it was like maybe the Founder of News Corp Rupert Murdoch like he had like three weddings in the course of like nine years or something He's getting remarried every couple years and it's like okay Why doesn't he just like date or like not get married but at a certain point? It's like he probably has some legal team that can like structure the perfect like prenup and then he just gets to throw a wedding and yeah his girlfriend likes that and so he's just like yeah okay run it back we'll do another one it's not not a big deal yeah and then when they break up it's like yeah they get divorced but to him it's just like breaking up with someone it's like very like low stakes i think

yeah but it's like an excuse that would be that would be i don't see it that way but yeah if elon elon should should open source his entire you know family building playbook including even if he's not getting married to these women i'm sure they're signing documentation that basically says if we have a child you get taken care of yeah yeah these are the terms well he gets he sends a term sheet well he got destroyed by pavel durov recently because pavel has like 50 kids because he was not only he got mogged oh he got totally mogged because pavel it came out that he has like 50 kids because he's been like donating sperm at sperm banks and stuff and just doing like

all this crazy stuff that's that's it feels a little unnatural it's not yeah that's not a that's not a cool way to have 50 kids no for pavel yeah that makes sense over 100 that's just to me reckless and weird just like yeah you know he is a dripped out technology brother though so no i support i support I guess I support, I just think that why not just have 50 children with 50 women if you're going to. I don't know. I guess he does. He just doesn't. He doesn't fuck. Yeah.

Well, let's move on to this one. So Will, who I think was at OpenAI for a while. I follow this guy. He says, I don't understand the recent trend of college dropouts, specifically raising some insane 10, 20, 100 million dollars at 100, 250, 500 million dollar valuations pre-product or pre-revenue, often for idiotic shit.

Are people unable to see how they're fucking themselves? It's not just free money, my brother. And he kind of went on to say like, yeah, he knows a lot of people that were young and they raised too much money and now they're buried under a pref stack and it's kind of a warning to the next generation.

This is the dark side of pattern matching. Yeah. Where pattern matching Zach, who had been in FinTech for over a a decade building at square his own company then square then coinbase and then um brex to go then build another fintech company but pattern matching oh mark zuckerberg dropped out to build the social media app and then go on to make a a plethora of devastating you know mistakes and mishaps with people and the you know the government all these different things and then when i saw this tweet the number one that the company i was thinking about is a company called

mock which is making um i let's oh wait uh mock industries mock industries which is making, um, I, let's, Oh wait, uh, mock industries, mock industries, which is like an MIT dropout. And,

you know, they're building, uh, I think they're building hypersonics. It was like hydrogen weapons, hydrogen powered cannons. He was going to shoot down weather balloons and drones and just defense. So the issue is speed running.

In some of these industries where the stakes are a lot higher, like defense tech, you're seeing some of those issues with Mach where one of their employees was hospitalized with devastating injuries because something blew up and um there's a real i i i don't think uh i'm all for giving smart young people lots of money to to do ambitious things but it's almost like they're find the balance of it right so but so bet on bet on the kid bet on the dropout but go get them somebody from Lockheed Martin well that's the under their chaperone that's the under discussed thing about Facebook they had some like VP of engineering who was like 45 who was there very early I forget what

this guy's name is but he was like allegedly like very important in like stabilizing the company early on when it was a bunch of crazy kids running around. And he had just the right level of respect to be like, okay, when he speaks up, we should listen. But he's not trying to be like, oh, we gotta bring in NetSuite. He wasn't slowing anything down, but he was providing just enough basic rules.

Because at one point, Facebook was all just like one file on on a web server and like when you wanted to make a code change you would just be like everybody I'm pushing the code like nobody make any changes I'm gonna update the file or whatever like the files on the web servers like it was good crazy and he like brought in like cool stuff that like cool process that everyone's like okay yeah this process actually makes sense yeah just cool it's it's interesting because i think there's there's two things that are kind of on a collision course with these like crazy high valuations and high early checks and it's one that the funds are bigger than ever and even though we went through

the zerp era and and vc fundraising went, there's still so many more billion dollar funds out there than there were 10 years ago. So there's just more money to deploy. And you've got to deploy it to get the fees. So there's all these incentives aligned with, like, we've got to deploy big money. So let's push out the IPO window, do more growth stuff. Let's put more money into earlier stage companies, like write bigger checks. That's fine. And then simultaneously, the two hot industries are immensely capital intensive.

AI. So I'm going to come in and say, yeah, I'm going to do a training run. I need to hire a bunch of engineers that are going to want a million dollars a year. And I'm going to also need to buy a bunch of NVIDIA GPUs and do a bunch of CapEx and build out a training center.

And even if I'm not capital intensive even from capital light a training run might still cost ten million dollars for my first thing so yeah like there's just higher computing costs and we're not in the zero marginal cost era of AI and then defense is the same thing yeah I'm gonna need to buy a bunch of CNC machines a bunch of like a bunch of aluminum like all this stuff has cost it's not just this this, oh yeah, you're YC, you get a hundred K and you're going to go spin up a web server and your cost is going to be perfectly matched with your revenue. Like when your website blows up and starts getting a ton

of traffic, well, yeah, you're going to have paying customers then. So all of a sudden we have the two hottest categories are highly capital intensive, at least in theory. And then you have funds that are perfectly set up to fund those capital intensive businesses. So it's just like anyone with an idea, let's get a big check in there. But the problem is that if you wind up pivoting to something that isn't as capital intensive or doesn't find like the immediate product market fit, you wind up buried under this huge capital stack. And I think that's the pain people are feeling right now but yeah yeah probably get uh i think they'll probably get a call from jeremy guffon soon yeah yeah yeah jeremy the rule is maybe it's Depew's law, which is the faster you get a lot of money, like the dumber you will be with it. Right.

And so if you win the lottery, you're going to just spend that money horrendously. And that's almost always what happens because you didn't have to learn how money works. You didn't have to learn how hard it is to make it. And so you're just doing like crazy, crazy stuff. And this happens even with angel investing people like, oh, I'm going to do angel investing and their worst five investments. Sometimes you get these people that are like, oh yeah, my first two angel investments are unicorns. And that's because of the networks they were in. But more often it's somebody starts angel investing and makes like a,

they're the worst five investments that they'll make in the first five deals that they do. And so I think the challenge here is when money comes really fast and easy, like you're an MIT dropout that raises $50 million in the first year, you're just going to make a bunch of really bad decisions. It's everything from you're going to spend $400,000 on a brand identity because your VC connected you

to the top agency. And you're not thinking about the real cost of that you're going to make a hire that's not a good culture fit because they just care about cash comp and you're going to just overpay for them and then now you're dealing with this person that not holding the bar on hiring yeah you're not i just need to hit my hiring quota yeah exactly yeah yeah or you optimize you you're you're telling you you know these people get excited about being like oh yeah we're we're a 20 person team yeah it's like well you don't even know what you're building yeah you don't even need to be like fully starving but just like

a year or two of like being somewhat cash constrained is going to set the culture up for years where you're going to go back and like's just gonna be, when some VP comes to them and is like, I wanna spend $500,000 on a branding package, they're gonna be like, what? I did our first brand myself. Why do we need to jump there? Let's just do a half step. And then all of those are gonna add up to saving money

and being a little bit more judicious and a little bit less frivolous, and then you won't have a culture of frivolousness which i think is like the real danger with like the yeah overall when people are i don't think i don't think it's bad for the world that this stuff happens to be honest and in fact in fact the entire model is predicated on if you back 20 mit dropouts and one of them builds a generational firm, then it worked. That's the entire model of venture capital. So Will, I think it's a funny tweet and I respect that point of view, but he's not really realizing what the real game of venture is, which is if one

of these companies becomes 10% as big as SpaceX, then the entire investment strategy worked. That's true. But he's not talking to venture capitalists here. He's talking to entrepreneurs. His brothers. Yeah. He's talking to the brothers. And so what he's saying is not that, yes, all of these deals could add up to plenty of funds doing well. And even the bad funds, they're going to return capital. They're going to be 1x funds, maybe 2x funds. They'll be okay. It's not like the cash will really get totally incinerated.

The problem is that I think he's trying to just raise a flag to college dropout young people that it's like, yes, you can go and do the fake work of twisting your idea into something that fits a VC narrative and say, oh, well, like we could be asset light, but we can raise more money if we say we're going to train our own model. Or we could do this, but if we say that we need to buy this huge manufacturing plant and put up a big American flag, we'll be able to raise more money. So let's go with that path, even if it's not the right path for our business, even if that's not what the capital structure of our industry demands.

And so you wind up building for the VCs instead of for the market, for the customer, and for yourself. And so I think that's kind of the meta take here to some degree. But yeah, gotta kiss a lot of frogs. It's the game. Should we do this one?

I love this one. Evan Armstrong writes, obviously I am excited for my child, but also really wish I had like two more months to write. Just today, one, pre-product robotics company raising a $2 billion valuation. Two, bridge getting bought at 90x revenue. Three, rumors about new models coming. Can't help but want to publish on this. Amazing. I know.

This is a man who prioritizes work over everything else. Skip paternity leave, brother. It is the most important thing that keeps the society, keeps capitalism grinding. The relentless march of techno capital is nothing without those who are willing to put their family to the side. I took off 36 hours when my son was born. Not necessarily proud of that.

He was born Saturday, like, you know, in the early, early hours of the morning. 12 hour, 12 hour. Monday, you're on call with the East Coast. I legitimately had morning 12 hour 12 hour monday 12 hour i legitimately had a 12 12 hour meeting back to backs on monday um but we had to like that that was the only way i had to do that i didn't do that with the second one um but uh but yeah i mean i think that uh that's just a sign that evan loves his work that's great great. And there's a lot of stuff. We wouldn't have this podcast if there wasn't stuff to talk about.

Also, I mean, underrated about this tweet, work-life balance always goes viral. So I don't know if this got dunked on, but if you're rage baiting, this is the best possible rage bait if you're just trying to grow your account. Because people will fight about this forever. Yeah, because he could have tweeted, while I'm a big fan of organic intelligence being my new child, I'm really a fan of artificial intelligence.

And the child that I'm having today, I could have had the same child 400 years ago. But AI and large language models didn't exist 400 years ago but ai and large language models exactly didn't exist 400 years ago exactly so if you just dial this up he just rewrites this he's like i haven't seen my child in months but i've been writing boom yeah they're actually so every is chugging along i've subscribed to their stuff forever yeah i think that they are too nice of guys to be in the media business they now they they spun out a word processing product which which seems cool uh but they're not like eric newcomer who's putting up seven figures of bivada because you know maybe they are now i don't know i have no idea um but But I think that Evan is too nice to rage bait.

He only went 50% of the way there. Yeah. What is the actual? It's Every? Yeah, it's a media company. I think they're focused on AI. Yeah, I've never seen them get absolutely raked over the coals by tech or the communists. And you got to have an enemy.

If you don't have an enemy if you don't have an enemy you don't have an ally yeah the only reason people rally together the enemy of my yeah no seriously you have to have an enemy if you don't have an enemy there's no reason for someone to be your ally we should who we need to pick an enemy the working class obviously there. There you go. Yeah. We all know that the working class gets too much credit. And it's long, and respect for the financial professional. Specifically blue collar. Yeah, blue collar. Yeah.

Yeah. They're clearly the enemy. Yeah. And we haven't done our jobs until people are calling us billionaires in a sort of negative. Exactly. A pejorative. of negative exactly pejorative yeah pejorative uh i mean unironically the the the enemy that i always focus on in the tech stuff is is china essentially and and the foreign that's an easy because and that's so authentic to my lived experience because i i studied abroad in shanghai yeah I studied while I was there at basically the Harvard of China.

I worked at a tech accelerator like while I was there. And within 48 hours of setting foot in that country, I knew that I wanted to do everything. I wanted to spend my life making sure that we contained China and that they didn't export their sort of way of life to the world. So I don't have any issues with the people of China. Of course. But their way of life.

Yeah. Certainly. Yeah. And I feel like that's I always try and remind people in tech when there's these little feuds, like, oh, Miami versus San Francisco, like, which is cooler? Or like the Gundo versus SF, like AI versus hard tech, or even like the intro fights between like the VC firms, like Andreessen, Sequoia, Founders Fund, like they're all beefing or whatever.

And I'm like, okay, like there might be good reasons for these beefs but like let's refocus on like the real battle they're all gonna america they're all gonna enjoy a conversation at milken yeah everyone everyone's on the same team here and and i try and i try and refocus especially like when the gundo bros start going hard on sf i'm like do you think china is having these fights over Wuhan versus Shanghai? No. They say, what is Wuhan good at? Biotechnology. Bioweapons development.

What is Shenzhen good at? Copying American consumer electronics. Like, they're both excellent in their own ways, in the same way that the Gundo is great at hard tech and San Francisco is great at AI. They're not fighting. Couldn't have said it better myself. They're working together as as one team we need to be one team over here in america yeah who's the l who we need to find the lp in sequoia andreessen and founders fund this is

probably saudi oh there's tons uh not even saudi that's gonna be like put who's the who's the one person that can put all the gps on one group chat and be like stop this squash this right now in front of me you know who it is i i think it's zuck's family office you know that yeah i forget what they're what they're called but i'm pretty sure they're lp and everything yeah um but there's a bunch of others endowments and whatnot dad the gps are fighting again yeah i i do think that i i love the idea of like you know uh being a founder became high status so it was like oh i gotta i gotta graduate from college and get on the track and you know start a company no drop out i gotta get into a good school then it was like drop out and oh like i'm just gonna go straight to angel investing or

like start a vc firm and it's like okay like kind of odd and then we talked about that one guy who is like uh he's starting like uh fund management software it's like one layer of abstraction pretty soon it's just gonna be like i'm just gonna go be an lp i'm gonna go straight to be straight to be an lp yeah the investing is something that i feel like i grew up in the, so immersed in the Silicon Valley ethos of you can just do things. You can do anything that the, the number one way in which I've felt that experience really matters is in angel investing because I just started angel investing and I didn't know, you know, there was no,

I didn't go to Jason Calacanis school of angel investing. Like I didn't, didn't go to jason calacanis school i was gonna ask if you had done that like i didn't didn't do that i just started investing in cool ideas with smart people and it's overall been very you know fruitful that strategy but there's been a number of it's like okay i talked with zach yeah within six months of him incorporating bridge didn't invest i met shane from polymarket like we would dm back in like 2021 and i didn't go back up the brinks truck and uh and now having had those experiences i'm like next time when i meet people like that now i just figure out a way to give them money as fast as possible. And experience matters. Like my returns from this era of my investing life

will be better than the prior era because of that learning. Yeah. Well, are you going to invest in any fentanyl vaccines? You saw this article? Oh, yeah. I think I texted this to the group being being i think this is in bloomberg says a fentanyl vaccine is a long shot that just might work what did you find interesting about this so i just think it's funny because

it's the private markets doing what they do best which is finding solutions to problems that the government is not capable of solving. I just think that the government is probably a lot more able to tackle the fentanyl issue than... Well, they have a monopoly on violence and they should enforce that at the ports, right? Right, right. But at the same time, yeah, I mean, if you sell this through medical clinics, potentially people come in when they're not at rock bottom. It's just hilarious. Yeah, they're at rock bottom. And they say, like, look, I'm done giving you that.

They're like, I'm literally going to buy some sketchy cocaine right now. Yeah. Please, can I get this vaccine? Will it kick in in the next two hours? You know? Cause I just, I don't, I don't know, but I, but I, I think it's, um, I really don't know who the customer is for this. Uh, I mean, I can imagine, but it seems like sort of a very, I don't know, like people that think like, I'm very happy to report that I don't ever expect to encounter fentanyl in my life. Um, and so this vaccine, I'm, you know what I need, I need an ayahuasca vaccine. So then I can go into the jungle with all the tech billionaires

and be like, yeah yeah let's go on this ayahuasca retreat totally like and they're all getting one-shotted and I'm just sitting there like a demigod yeah getting stronger you're having to fake you're having to fake I'm like oh yeah it's so crazy like the world's open like oh my god brilliant idea like it's a nicotine company you should invest you're like wow yeah that's what that's what the demon told you i was like yeah it told me yeah it told me that nicotine pouches 100 big category 20 on 20 on 200 exactly exactly um yeah yeah i just think getting like if you're gonna do that vaccine just start doing start back start creating vaccines for everything i mean the vaccines are a great business model so it is i want a vaccine for

low testosterone yeah that's one another one would be like inbox zero you know it's like a vaccine that what if there's a microplastics vaccine? Take that. Just your body just deflects the plastics. Yeah. Force field. Force field. Anyway, I don't know how we're going to cover this, but the cover of The Economist this week is fantastic. It's the SpaceX rocket taking off the Starship. But instead of the core tube, it's just the dollar.

And it says America's economy is the envy of the world. And it's a deep dive on the resilience of the American economy, often hated on, but extremely resilient. And Robert Sterling posts this like mega thread of all the things that he loves about America. And it's just amazing. I'll read some of this culture that celebrates risk-taking ingrained ingrained hatred of bureaucracy, robust capital markets, Starbucks nitro cold brew, cheap and abundant oil, you can just do stuff, investment bankers that work till 2 a.m., low barriers to entry for entrepreneurship, manifest destiny, private equity, Delaware C corporations, M&A markets, meritocracy, low capital gains tax, McDonald's,

New York City, university Greek life system, Walmart, GPU clusters, Sand Hill Road, Michael Jordan, 50 states competing for business, the Homestead Act, the old school DARPA, no union reps on corporate boards. Like the entire state of Texas. Like you just riffed for so long and just sent this massive list of cool things. And how are you not bullish? How are you not bullish after reading that? You really you really have to be. But I love that it's two lenses on the same idea. You know that The Economist wasn't writing like this.

The Economist is going to have this very thoughtful article that explains basically the same conclusion. In a much more complicated way. In a much more complicated way, much more complicated way much more nuanced and i like how it almost every single thing listed off was like like intense american consumerism yeah and then and then and then finance finance yeah ability to get filthy rich even if you're born poor state school engineering programs pickup trucks yeah it's just amazing it really it really is such a wonderful country uh i always like that that that teal line where they're like oh are

you gonna leave he's like to where yeah it's the least bad option like you might complain about america but it is the best we're just number one yeah i never i i think we grew up in the period where young people thought that America was bad. Very good. I don't know what was the cause of it, but it's almost like things were so good here that people were trying to find reasons to not like it for some reason um but in i've been to i've been to 40 plus countries many of which i've spent you know a week plus in and the closest thing i got to wanting to live there was I,

I would buy a vacation home in Switzerland just because I, Switzerland is outside of the United States. Like I would say Switzerland is my favorite country. That's not the United States. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I just love being there.

I could see spending a lot of time there, but I never once in my life was thinking i want to spend three quarters of the year every time i traveled i would always just come back to like oh like i went to thailand and i was like oh this is russia's mexico like i went to cape town cape town south africa it's just la like there's a beach and there's mountains it's beautiful it's amazing people drive around on freeways it's very similar to la yeah like you go to all these I think the countries and it's like there's like America is so unique in that we have we have Manhattan so that's like your Tokyo your high finance like really dense city you have LA SF unrivaled Miami but then you also have

Hawaii like a chain of islands so it's like all of a sudden like underrated underrated fiji's fiji's great but it's a lot farther and it's not 10x better than hawaii what's the next alaska like okay i never need to go to russia yeah uh and yeah and america really just did a good job of capturing like every single biome so there are there are tropical areas there are desert areas there are mountainous areas forest areas tundra like we have it all whereas very few countries have every single biome covered russia doesn't have tropical areas they got to go to thailand yeah the the thing that you need to do if you're american and i think a lot of our listeners right now yeah are American is as you go about your day-to-day life or you go on a work trip or you go on a vacation within the United States view it from the eyes of some Italian kid who grew up in a small village and is visiting like Los Angeles right like we're sitting here

recording with a straight shot view of skyscrapers of that are home to some of america's greatest companies right if you're from a small fishing village and you get to look out and see kpmg i mean that is that's like a core memory yeah right if you're and so it's our duty to view our world through their eyes. And when I drive back and I'm passing, you know, the other Jonathan Club, the beach club, the beach club and seeing, you know, this this Ferris wheel like on a pier or I'm driving on PCH or I'm I see that I'm on the 405 and I see the Hollywood sign, you know, really in turn, uh, you know, these iconic places, it's important to try to,

don't just have your eyes glaze over and look back at Tik TOK, you know, enjoy it, enjoy it, enjoy it. Yeah. America's undefeated. It's not going anywhere.

Sorry. Sorry. Uh, this is this one I have this riff with you know how Josh Steinman tweets good morning we're gonna win yeah every day and I was thinking about like what is a mantra that you know you could tweet every single day and mine was just listing out every single country that's not America and calling them un-american Canada is un-American France is un-American Greece is un-American un-American is a good that's that's a potentially a phrase that we could that we could coin yeah that we could own it's literally true Canada is almost everything that I don't like is un-American. Yeah.

Should we talk about Tim Ferriss? Tim Ferriss is un-American. I like Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is the most American. No, no. I'm just saying I like Tim, but this specific video. So he put up a clip from his podcast where he did a 30-day dopamine detox. No caffeine, alcohol, sex, or sweetness. Which sounds like I'm not going to hug my wife or something,

but he was saying that he would not consume any sugar or anything that was sweetened. Yeah, the funny thing with this is I could do all those things, but whatever dopamine release that I negated from skipping coffee or nicotine or any of these other, or a nice piece of chocolate cake in the evening would immediately be undone by picking up my daughter and giving her a hug. You know, like the same, whatever. I mean, I think like to, you know, steel man him like that is the point of the dopamine detox is that you will put you'll proportionally get more dopamine from picking up your diet right right right you're you're not like okay this is like you know like 110 of tiktok it's like tiktok isn't even in the equation so it's just like the purest of the pure yeah for you it would just be waking up in the morning

and being like i have three sons yeah exactly um i do wonder if he stopped posting during this detox yeah because that's the real for a content creator yeah did he stop capital allocating did he stop investing because the rush i do think i do think i think tim stopped angel investing oh really like it was too much too much dopamine yeah i mean the angel investing is deeply addictive it is it makes no sense to do yeah financially yeah i just i always wonder where these dopamine too much dopamine. Yeah, I mean, the angel investing is deeply addictive. It is. It makes no sense to do financially. Yeah. I just, I always wonder with these dopamine detoxes,

if like, when you cut something out, like usually you find yourself finding a crutch. Like I noticed like if I stopped using one, like I stopped using a lot of the endless feeds, but then I find myself just opening up like the Wall Street Journal more, and that's probably better, but I'm still like using that for whatever. You're still a rat of the endless feeds but then i find myself just opening up like the wall street journal more and that's probably better but i'm still like using that still a rat on the treadmill exactly going to hit the so i wonder what his what his like cheat meal was during this dopamine

detox like what was he doing to get yeah i don't i don't the only probably posting the only video that i would watch it's funny i don't think either of us watched the video. I did. It was him talking to Kevin Rose, the guy who did. Yeah. So I would watch, I would watch a 30 day long video of Tim doing a dopamine detox.

That's the real dopamine detox is just to watch Tim's extremely boring life in monk mode It takes 30 days and you can sleep when he sleeps, but you have to let you have to be woken up by his alarm That's pretty sick. So that's probably that's a whole that's a whole category of content where you just live someone else's life I feel like that's something like Jocko premium subscribers would like pay for some sort of live stream like come live my life with me like tap tap into this live stream and you're just gonna like come along for this whole thing like when i wake up you wake up when i go to the gym you go to the gym it's kind of people morning in person yeah virtually it's pretty scalable you can scale it yeah that's definitely a high there's There's definitely like a lot of his off-site events, obviously very bounded by like the number of people that can attend. But if you just put out the 30-day video, anyone can do it.

Falling asleep, listening to Jocko effectively tell you a bedtime story. Today was a great day. Tomorrow is going to be a better one and then and then he just like is sort of rambling and you sort of fall asleep and then he says morning sweetheart it's 4 a.m it's 4 a.m i don't want to be up right now you don't want to be up right now i gotta start posting the jocko wake-ups with the patek at 4 a.. because he has like the really athletic like Navy SEAL watch. G-Shock. G-Shock yeah and it's just the Patek at 4 a.m. be like time to go to work. It's the best. I love Jocko. He's incredible. I love Jocko. Jocko as soon as he's a billionaire he can call in and be on the

show. For sure. He's gonna be close. He has multiple products that are like the top on Amazon. His business is insane. He has so many different are like the top on Amazon. His business is insane. He has so many different monetization methods. Did Senra ever send you that like breakdown? Oh, that's great. It's like, yeah, it's looking like in a single, in a single long Jocko episode, like all of the ad reads and all of the monetization that's going on,

there were like 10 or 15 different products and calls to action. So it's like an athletic greens competitor, an LMNT competitor, a protein powder, but then it's also like a subscription to the premium service. And then it's like- I bought his book. Yeah, the books.

And then it's like, there's a hundred dollar tier for like a course that you buy and you watch. There's like a thousand dollar tier for like going to a big conference. There's a $10,000 tier for going to like the vip conference getting kicked in the nuts by jacob there's a fifty thousand so so like no matter what you're willing to spend he does really really good at like price laddering and price discrimination because that's one of the hardest things with with podcasting and why it works with ads is that you you have some billionaires in your audience

with us it's like mostly billionaires but um But then you also have some people that are like, they're not billionaires yet. And so they don't have the ability to drop $100,000 on a private event with the Technology Brothers. But how do you get money out of both of those audience cohorts? Well, you got to have an affordable product. NetJets is a really good example, right? Where you might not be able to afford a private jet and we certainly have friends who are billionaires who own their own jets.

They'll still use NetJets, right? It's not one or the other. But it's also a reason why you might hear some ads on this show for things that have lower ticket prices because we want to monetize every single listener here. That's the goal of the show, to be the most profitable podcast in history. And that means that no matter who you are, no matter what your W-2 says, no matter what your Roth IRA says, we want to get the most money out of you. Should we move on to Corey Levy?

Oh, I tried to keep it together. So Corey Levy, I mean, it's funny because this got dunked on, but I mean, I love everyone involved in this. And is this Ben from Vesto here? I don't know. It looks like some of my friends. I don't know. But Ramp held an event with Kosla, with Keith, called The Art of Hiring,

and it featured Brian Chesky, Mike Shebet, and Keith talking about how to hire and founder mode. And Corey Levy, who runs Z Fellows, prolific early stage angel investor, essentially, I don't know, incubator, accelerator, I don't know what term he likes, but he wrote kind of a breakdown. Some notes from the Art of Hiring event earlier today. And he starts with Keith, and so he adds Keith, and the first line that gets cut off when you see the tweet is just,

"'Don't hire anyone over the age of 30." And then there's like 25 other things that are all like super reasonable, but he led with the most controversial thing. And so there's a community note now that says age discrimination in hiring is illegal in the U.S. Anyone who follows the advice from the first point is potentially committing a crime, which I just love. But obviously he wasn't saying that literally. Well, I could see Keith saying that literally. But he's also, he understands the art of rage bait.

Yes. Right? Yes. And using, saying controversial things to generate attention, which does other things. He's compressing the idea of like, you need young energy in your organization. You need people that are hungry, who aren't resting, investing, who aren't already millionaires, who want to make their equity work. And so you need people that show up and are hungry.

And so how do you compress that down into something that will stick in someone's mind? Oh, well, don't hire anyone over the age of 30. Now, it's probably a lot more nuanced than that. And I think Keith, if you talk to him for an hour, he would get into that. And there's a million reasons why. And if you look at his companies

and all the other companies, I'm sure there's people over the age of 30 at these companies. But it's a great way to get that to stick in someone's mind. So, it's funny because there's a... Here, just turn the mic towards you. I was talking with a founder that used to work for Keith and raise money from Keith on the way over here today.

And running a business for the first time. It's absolutely crushing. It's about to raise like a very hot series a cool. And he has taken every, almost all of Keith's advice. I don't know about this advice, but he certainly has learned so much from Keith. And the only thing that he didn't follow was the miami thing he really he originally started the company in miami and at one point it was probably the scariest day of his life telling keith that he was gonna go back to sf but almost everything else he's followed to a t and it's just working out of this company it's worked so well it's worked so well uh this is dara yeah yeah so it's worked so well for dara like ignored the hype yep building in a very like hot space which is like consumer ai has ignored the

hype stayed focused focused on customers like all these things that that um that that keith has parroted and reiterates and things like that. And it's just worked extremely well. And so the funny thing with, I will say that Dara hired one of my old engineers who is over 30, who does have children, but that guy's a fucking grinder uh so so um yeah i mean i think overall i do think about this sometimes where as a 28 year old that has the lifestyle

of some something that's more found from somebody in their mid-30s at least in tech or mid forties, uh, depending on how late to children. Yeah. Um, I do, that is almost like a recurring nightmare of like, if I was competing against myself without children, what, how much more would I be getting done and things like that. I do think that the counter side to that is when people are in their thirties, they're, they can't afford to lose in the same way. Right. So it's like, there is this whole other side of it and they have the benefit of it.

And so when you, when you look at this tweet saying, don't hire anyone over the age of 30 combined with young college dropouts raising 30 to 50 million dollars pre-product the combination of those two things is terrible right and you brought this up with facebook earlier being like facebook having a really veteran engineer who brought structure and experience and all these different things so anyways i i would say that overall keith's advice i'm i'm like very bullish on any founder that takes like 90 of keith's advice to heart yep and follows it i think it's a really good framework but um but again the uh don't don't take anything too literally yeah it's

interesting even miami is giving i mean miami is like a state of mind in many ways. And also, I mean, Miami is still like, I think we've talked about this before, but I mean, it still is just like a phenomenal place to go meet a lot of extremely wealthy people.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think everyone agrees that it is behind on hiring engineering talent, but in terms of just like lots of rich and powerful people having

money there, like if you're, if you're a, if you're a founder and you're doing a fundraising trip, like stopping in Miami and meeting a bunch of people is like very doable and very beneficial. Yeah. It's also just like an awesome place to live or awesome place to visit when you're a founder and you've been grinding in some like, you know, tenderloin complex in San Francisco. And you get to like you don't just have to go down to sandhill road which is like even more boring you just go to miami and hang out at all these houses i know that i will absolutely own property in miami at some point in my life i'm not in a huge rush to do it but i really enjoy there and we're going next week yeah

it's fantastic but yeah i i'm excited for this video to drop i'm sure that they're going to record it and put it out i think it'll be good i i think i think they're all really great it's funny we're giving we're giving him the benefit of the doubt and keith is like literally telling all these young kids i swear to god do not like i i cannot be i cannot be more explicit about this if somebody is 30 years old and one day disqualified write it into your hr like write it into your hiring policies put it on your wall yeah yeah um i don't even know where this is from but you dropped this in the in the group chat and i just wanted to read it because i thought it was a funny quote from maybe like a sub stack or something this guy says i look for the type of

guy in london who gets up at seven o'clock on sunday morning when his kids are still in bed and logs on to a poker site so that he can pick off the u.s drunks coming home on a saturday night i hired a guy like that he usually clears five or ten grand every sunday morning before breakfast taking out the drunks playing poker because they're not very good at it but but their confidence has gone up a lot. Someone who understands an edge. I love that. I don't even think we have to add commentary. It's just cheers to that.

That's great. Yeah, find an edge. The hard thing with people like that is they usually end up making so much money they're really hard to hire. Yeah, exactly. If you're making 10 grand a week, that's 500K a year.

What job are you offering them? I guess this is probably for a hedge fund position or something. Or somebody who understands that this is maybe not going to stick around forever, maybe. I don't know. Should we close with the new king of podcasting, Harry Stebbings? Harry. $400 million fund. I will say I think that that picture could come back to bite me.

So the story is podcaster Harry Stebbings raises one of Europe's biggest venture funds. The British firm 20VC pulls in $400 million to invest in early stage tech startups. And he claims it's to make Europe great again. Is he a Trump guy? Or is he just like riffing on that? I bet he's a Trump guy. He appreciates great entrepreneurs. Yeah.

Right? Trump is effectively an entrepreneur. I feel like he's pretty like non, like apolitical. Yeah. Because if you go super hard one way or the other, it's hard to get people on the show. There's nothing less cool than being, living in the u.s but being obsessed with u.s politics it's like get a life you know like get a life yeah so yeah no i think it's amazing for podcasting

it's amazing for harry he's now we kind of have him if we're if we want to build the most profitable podcast in the world yeah he's pulling down $80 million of management fees on that fund. Big shoes to fill. Big shoes to fill. Target on his back, right? Target on his back. It's not that, but we're a positive sum, right? Yeah, exactly.

We'll do a $500 million fund. Exactly. So, anyway, congrats to Harry. Congrats to Harry. It is interesting. I feel like, do you think his audience

is primarily entrepreneurs or VCs? Because he really focuses, he does get some entrepreneurs on the show, but it's mostly VCs that go on the show. So he probably has

an incredible network. Yeah, the reason that I work. So he can get into, he can get small checks and deals, but like what happens when, you know, yeah, he's interviewing like the Sequoia guys, but then they're not going to, So he probably has an incredible network. So he can get small checks into deals. But what happens when, yeah, he's interviewing Sequoia guys, but then they're not going to let him steal a hot round from them. So how does that work in terms of deal flow?

Yeah. Yeah. The reason that I'm bullish overall on, I'm not bullish on the European focus. Sure. Oh, yeah. I i mean i guess that he's gonna invest the whole if he's gonna invest the full 400 million in europe that's concerning yeah it seemed like the real alpha here was just he is probably one of the greatest bridges between European LPs and US investments because he's a name brand in America. And if you are wealthy in Europe, you can't necessarily just call up an American VC firm and LP and do it.

Yeah. So I've seen this happen a couple of times where people have raised really big funds because it's like, oh, they happen to be super connectors in Brazil. And so they can go around and just pull all the Brazilian capital together. And then they come in and they invest it in America. But they're providing that service to the Brazilian high net worth individuals and institutions. Yeah. The reason to be bullish on Harry is that what David Senra has done for founders, Harry has done for contemporary VCs. So in the same way that David will be talking with one VC and

be like, well, that's similar to how, um, you know, Peter thought about the initial investment in SpaceX or whatever. Um, so I think that being a student, he's now a student and a player, right. And he's drawing on, I think it's a very real thing that he could text probably 50 of the best GPs and get a response within, you know, a day of like, hey. And they can be like, well, here are the traps in aerospace. Yeah. Here's why this won't work. Sure. Oh, this is actually really interesting.

Let's look at it together. Yeah. You know, like that's real at it together. That's real alpha. Yep, that's great. Well, cheers to Harry, and we'll see you next time. That's a good place to stop. Thanks for watching. Or listening.