TBPN Live - The Sonos Disaster, Act Like a Founder, MMA for Brothers, These Guys Have Exits

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we're doing a deep dive on Sonos. We're trying to get back into the technology side of the brotherhood. We are still displaced. We're still in Santa Barbara. We've upgraded our chairs today. Hopefully, it's a little bit better for you guys. But you know it's bad at Sonos when they bring out Mark Gurman. Are you familiar with Mark Gurman? Tell me about Mark. So he's like the Apple correspondent. He gets all the best leaks. Like when you hear like, oh, new iPhones coming out, like he's the guy you go to at Bloomberg. So there's been two articles previously. I'll give you one of these too. Two articles previously on Sonos and the

chaos of the company started in August 22, August 22nd, 2024. Sonos app leaves company racing to save its reputation. And this was by Dave Lee. I'm sure he's a great journalist at Bloomberg. Everyone at Bloomberg is great, but he's not Mark Gurman big. And then on September 23rd, Dave Lee follows up with how Sonos botched an app and infuriated its customers. And so, you know, this is like, you know, some rough reporting. But then they bring out the big guns, Mark Gurman, because the CEO was fired. And so let's start with what happened. And then we'll take you through a little bit of the history of Sonos and explain how they got here. Because there are some cool things about this company. We both use the through a little bit of the history of Sonos and explain how they got here because there are some cool things

about this company. We both use the product. I've loved it at times and more recently I've hated it. It's really cool in the off chance that it's working. We'll get into that later. It's kind of like a lightning striking twice

situation when Sonos worked properly. It's been so bad recently. Yeah. Just degraded, degraded. And yeah, it's a fascinating story. So let's read through a little bit of this first report from Dave Lee in Bloomberg. He says, Sonos has a loyal user base for its high-end audio speakers. Unfortunately, a disastrous software launch has angered customers and jeopardized the company's reputation, and the window to fix the problem is closing rapidly.

The release in May of a new app that controls the speakers was meant to have been the culmination of Chief Executive Officer Patrick Spence's grand plan to refresh the company's infrastructure and expand into a greater share of the $100 billion audio market, of which it estimates it controls less than 2%. The existing Sonos app was struggling to handle all the demands of the modern-day audiophile who wants to listen to sound from various sources, both local and in the cloud,

across multiple devices and rooms. Spence said performance and reliability issues had crept in over time. The new app was flawed, though. Sound drops in and out. Devices disappear. My push for speed backfired, Spence said. In a business like Specialist Audio Trust can be extremely hard to win back. Case in point, Jordy will never buy another Sonos speaker in his life. Probably won't either. On Tuesday,

the former BlackBerry executive threw himself this just turns into an mkbhd just scathing oh yeah anything review yeah i mean i i'll go out uh i'll preface some of this by saying because i you know the only few words i've gotten in so far we're dunking uh We don't like to dunk. In this situation, I felt like it was fair because some of my worst experiences with consumer electronics have been with my dear Sonos. But at the same time, Santa Barbara Company, I went to school in Santa Barbara. I know they're doing their best. There are some great moments with Sonosos they do sound good when they're running it's really the setup yep that is so uh so devastatingly difficult it was magical at first like my first sonos setup was i had a tv and an apple tv plugged into it and are you familiar with hdmi cec

no it's a specific protocol over the hdmi cable that allows you to control the device like you can control a tv from the apple tv so right i was able to wire it so that the sonos went into the to the tv and the apple tv controlled the actual tv yeah and so with just one apple tv remote i could push a button and it would turn it on and the audio would work and it'd be surround sound. And it was just like flawless. It was amazing. And then added onto that, I could also like choose to play Spotify over it and that was great. I think they almost could have taken the route as being more like encouraging people to hire a Sonos expert to set up the product because when I think about it

every single time I'd be setting up a Sonos device I'm thinking I just wish I could pay somebody to do it you know and there are people that will do it people that do smart home stuff but it's not they make it seem like hey you can just set up this app it's super easy and it's crazy because I don't know the last time i did it was um arlie was uh opening up their new uh oh yeah their new showroom in beverly hills and i you know i go over there i'm trying to be helpful i'm like okay like i'll set up i'll get the audio working in the sonos and it ended up being like you know this is a 90 minute you know sort of setup where i'm it has this thing where you're really wanting

to slam the sonos against the wall and i i'm a pretty patient yeah person so during the setup they have this thing where like you put in pairing mode and it's supposed to show up on the wi-fi and it talks and sometimes it gets it perfect and when it works perfectly it's amazing and then other times it'll just be like hey like we're not finding it on the wi-fi like would you mind like connecting it to the main sonos via an ethernet cable and it's like no i don't have a 20 foot ethernet cable on me right now bro like this is so unacceptable um and the main thing is just like the app got so slow but the crazy thing is that like i heard about this obviously like this all started this in 2024 last year and the saga was was kind of a very bad last year.

But even just a few years ago, they had such a bad app launch that they needed to deprecate their first app. Most of the time, it's like, oh, Instagram launches Reels. You don't have two Instagram apps on your phone. Instagram just updates, right? And that wasn't what Sonos did. They literally have the S1 app and then the Sonos app. And the S1 app is for older systems. And so go to one house.

Here's the thing. Sonos should have gone through YC as a public company. They'd be like, look, we really haven't figured. We don't have this figured out. We don't know what people want. Yeah. We need help simplifying. You know what the narrative violation here with Sonos is that everyone says hardware is hard.

You can't build hardware as an American company. DJI is crushing. But what did Sonos get right? I'm not a super crazy audiophile. I'm sure there's audiophiles that will say, oh, Sonos doesn't actually sound that good. But to me, it sounds fine. It sounds nice. And industrial design, I think it looks fine. I think it looks good. You put it sounds fine. It sounds nice. And industrial design, I think it looks fine.

I think it looks good. You put it on the wall or you put it in the house. I think it looks nice. I think it's high quality. The actual hardware's never broken on me. I've never had a speaker actually just break or anything. No, it is reliable. Physical hardware is reliable.

Totally. It's funny because it's just the software. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the narrative. Normally, it's like America is great at software. funny because it's just the software. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the narrative. Normally, it's like America is great at software. We have great B2B software. We're on the frontier of AI software,

but we're lagging in hardware. And with this, it's like Sonos delivered on the hardware side. They did the hard part, and then they just couldn't get the app to work, which is crazy. One cool note, they were actually, when they were incorporated, they incorporated it as Rincon Audio.

Oh, really? And Rincon, I don't know if you know, is the most iconic surf spot in Santa Barbara. Oh, cool, cool. So I'm assuming these guys were spending more time surfing than developing the software. Especially in the later period. It is interesting to compare this so tying this to something like anderle which is making hardware and software for our military it's hard enough to make speakers yeah that you just plug into a wall connect to your wi-fi

and they just want to play music that is difficult to do yeah and that puts into the context how difficult it is for andrew to put hardware devices tied to their software into war zones that have electronic warfare happening new environments flying bullets flying bombs bombs going off enemies like trying to kill you and so and sure you know the the every sure, you know, the, the, every military contractor, you know, puts stuff in the field and has issues with it and they try to improve it, but it just goes to show, um, you know, how hard a lot of these new defense tech founders that are coming in and saying, Sonos is a public company with 12 offices, a bunch of retail stores, hundreds of employees, billions of dollars in revenue, and they can't even get their speakers to reliably work in their home without pissing off consumers. And it's fine

for us consumers where I'm like, well, I have dinner guests coming over and I just want to play music. But if you're like trying to operate like an Andoril drone in the field, like that soldier like doesn't have another life if you fuck fuck it up right i would imagine the culture has just got to be way different though you know andrew it's like yeah there's a different level of seriousness yeah with this it's like it's a 20 year old company it's in santa barbara a little bit more casual not no longer founder mode because the founder stepped down uh yeah and maybe that's part of the problem do you want to get so early deep dives and we can yeah so credit credit to them you know the the areas where they i think they've done well uh they were early 2002 yeah like early to be doing a smart home audio system uh and the design has always been great and the

heart and and the we talked about it but the sort sort of physical reliability of the actual devices. Do you know the story of what the guy did before? So the founder is John McFarland. And now they do over a billion dollars a year in business. And the company was founded back in 2002 when most people were listening to music on CDs. At that time, music streaming was barely a thing. There was Rhapsody, but very few people used it if you wanted surround sound in your house you had to wire it up and drill into your walls and connect the speakers it was expensive like getting a nice

sound system in your house it's like 100k it was so you could start building a collection with like a 300 speaker a thousand dollar sound bar and for like 5k all in you'd have like a really solid setup yeah um but before he i i don't know where it is but before he started this he owned software.com let's go isn't that a great domain and that company had gone public in 1999 and they merged with phone.com let's go isn't that amazing let's to become openware the major early player in mobile email when the dot-com crash hit they left and decided to start something new their insight was that wireless networking was the next major wave after dismissing an idea to do in-flight wireless they founded they focused on multi-room audio seeing the rise of mp3s and napster and napster

people were starting to put wi-fi in their homes, so the founders wanted to leverage that to play digital music seamlessly in every room. We got to do a deep dive on the merger between phone.com and software.com. Amazing, amazing. One of the most iconic, two of the most iconic domains of all time. Which at the the time if i was investing in in that in the in the combined company i'd be looking at it and saying all right well software.com 10 million dollar domain minimum phone.com i give it almost 10 to yeah so between the two of them look this is 20 million dollar company i'm sure it was trading at like 2 billion yeah straight it's and they probably had nothing under the hood um it would have been extremely hard to do the TB award for domain acquisition of the year in like 1999

we should do a flashback the greatest domain acquisition of 1999 we should dress up as like fathers with wigs I think we talked about mp3.com they went public with just the domain and the business plan no software written

that's so crazy one iconic jumping ahead a little bit one iconic moment in sonos history is when they decided to partner with ikea oh really the other consumer product company that makes people want to kill themselves during setup um really an incredible restoration hardware it's there's uh ikea and sonos announced a collaboration to build sonos's technology into furniture sold by ikea so you you after four hours you've got you've got this you know like set up and then and the real task begins you're all warmed up and now you got to set up this smart speaker yeah uh that's really funny uh i didn't know this but they they use this like super famous branding firm to come up with a name lexicon branding uh would and lexicon

had come up with the name pentium talk to them swiffer we talked to them briefly about naming the podcast right yeah yeah we ended up with they wanted like a few hundred grand we ended up with, they wanted like a few hundred grand. We ended up going with someone more expensive. But it ended up being worth it. Pentium, Swiffer, BlackBerry, PowerBook, and Zune. Sonos is a palindrome and part of the logo design can be flipped or turned sideways. Still reading Sonos. Naming agencies have to be like the best business models. Incredible. After you get a couple bangers like blackberry and

stuff like that it's just like yeah we'll name your company yeah it's you know it's 100 you know it's gonna be like a million dollars it's gonna take 12 months and then it's just and that's just a group like us being like you know that there's a there's like a whole separate industry of like naming firms just for pharmaceuticals. I bet. Because you always hear these names like it was Zemthic. It sounds like an English word, but it doesn't trace its roots from anything. Where does it come from?

And I was trying to get LLMs to create more drug names, and it was really hard. It is somewhat of an intractable problem. You need just some sort of human to come on names matter a lot but but the sonos name is incredible and i remember first the first time i flipped the speaker over and the and the palindrome like it's the logo reads correctly whether you mount the speaker like this or like this upside down which is actually an amazing feature for a speaker that needs to be mounted. I wonder if it still reads correctly if you throw it off a 20-story building. If it shatters into a million pieces, can you still

read it? I think people know because they're just like, oh, it's a Smash speaker. It must be a Sonos who frustrated its owner. You've got to calm down with all the robot abuse because when the robots rise up, they're going to be like, this guy's a serial killer. No, I respect robots. I'm trying trying to give them guns i'm trying to give them ars we're working on this yeah you know you have it you have a robot apocalypse uh the sonar speaker

will be like the lowest cast have you seen the guy on on instagram did i send you these he's got chat gpt hooked up to his go there so i'm talking to him in like two hours if you want to jump on um uh it's gonna be great that's great um let's go through some other stuff uh i mean for a long time they were doing really well 93 of sono speakers that sold in the last 13 years are active today so people just mount them and then they just stay forever but active not for long with given how bad the app it's so bad uh active and boasting like oh we still we still do over-the-air updates for products even from 2005 and it's like yeah but those work with a different app bro like come on it's interesting normally when you when uh hardware companies

the real concern is that you ship you ship hardware that ends up being malfunctional and then you have all this hardware that needs to be replaced yeah and so it's interesting that their problems seem to be just totally opposite of what the typical concern is for hardware founders software is always like oh that's easy we'll just ship updates and fix it yeah but this is a fascinating little timeline so uh 2002 they incorporate they changed their name they were ring con they changed their name to sonos in 2004 so these guys clearly made money in the dot-com boom because they're just like they haven't really raised that much money for a couple years uh but then they they launched their first prototype which is just it actually links into existing speakers so So they weren't even making speakers.

It was just an amp that then would connect to like whatever speakers you had. That's cool. And that still exists. And that's very cool. If you have a speaker system, you can just plug in the Sonos thing, or at least it used to be before the app went to shit. So it went pretty well. Walt Mossberg called it easily the best music streaming product he had tested. It cost $1,200.

It was expensive. Sales were slow. But they kept iterating. In 2006, they added support for Rhapsody. 2007, the iPhone arrived. Before that, you had to have like a dedicated Sonos controller, which was like a really low-budget iPad, basically. It was cool, but it was like really junky. It was like a universal remote. Like it's going to be

crappy. So they launched the iPhone controller app in 2008 instead of their hardware controller. Much better Android app in 2011. Three years later. Wow. Really disrespectful. I guess Android was pretty new. And then by 2012 they phased out their own controller altogether.

In 2009 they released the Play 5, the S5, which is their standalone wireless speaker. This was 400 bucks, and that was in the more mainstream market. And then by 2010, they raised 25 million from Index, and they launched the Play 3 at 299. So they're really going down market,

and this is when everyone started buying these things. They integrated Spotify. And in 2012, KKR million dollars and red point red point um shout out to logan um i another streaming service they integrated with that that does make sense is they integrated with mog mog what's that is this real yeah no it's real they partner with over 100 streaming services but mog is interesting to me because the Sonos, Mog's the user, so are in the setup that it's just a match. It's a perfect match.

I can see why they would partner there. You imagine you go on Mog and it's all just like Sigma male theme songs. It's like do-do-do, do-do-do. It's all funk and drift core everything's slow honestly though but it's it they they you know in 2012 uh they set up uh this was around around the same time they did the kkr round they set up a um uh like an entire sono studio which was like pretty cool and groundbreaking for a consumer electronics

company. They had an art gallery. They would host different artists, Solange, Lonely Island, Beck, things like that. To me, it's way cooler that they work with such an iconic private equity firm like KKR. To

have KKR buy your equity is the kind of thing that every young man one dream what you know dreams of that might have been where the idea came from to cut costs and stop developing software yeah totally i could see them coming in being like okay where are your costs um well why don't you cut the cTO the VP of engineering the senior manager and every developer take it offshore no more H1Bs we're just cutting everything this is a hilarious

anecdote so when they launched it all things D this is what 2000 2005 yeah 2005 they launch at the all things D conference this was before what, 2005? 2005, yeah, 2005, they launch at the All Things D conference. This was before Apple had announced the iPhone,

before Apple had those major keynotes. Yeah, they were so early. You got to get them so early. Even though they're net, they haven't been early to getting their net income positive. They've been a little late on that but uh but so so so steve jobs is at the all things d conference and he introduced the apple airport express which is the wi-fi router that apple designed and they still had good they still had good names back then yeah they got the apple tv the apple tv the apple tv plus apple tv plus app on apple tv they made apple tv plus shows within apple yes yes it's so bad

but uh at that conference so steve jobs is uh is announcing the wi-fi router and then uh john uh john mcfarland is announcing the Sonos amplifier. And it's like a match made in heaven. You should just go buy both of those because they're both going to work really well. But Steve Jobs is super pissed, and he goes up to John at the conference. He walked up, pounded on my chest, and said they'd sue us out of existence. Wait. on my chest and said they'd sue us out of existence i push because uh wait so steve jobs goes up to john uh the founder of sonos john mcfarland founder of sonos and basically the sonos the control uh app to control like what music was playing where once you hook up the amplifier it had a scroll

wheel that was like derivative from the iphone or from the ipod remember the ipod yeah yeah of course so so they'd use that same design element and steve was like you stole that from us and so he walks up to him pounds him on the chest and says i'll sue you out of existence and john pushes back pointing out that we had no overlap with their patents he checked steve jobs checked realized we were in the clear and the relationship improved after that. That's cool. But I like that Steve Jobs just walks up to him

and he's just like, I haven't checked the patents, but you're wrong. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny because it would have been great for consumers in so many ways if Apple had acquired Sonos. 100%. Because Apple is the best in the world

at making it seamless to set up a device. And software integration. it's gotten so so so yeah good yeah uh i need to go buy a new iphone at some point this week and i'm not even worried about it i'm gonna get in and out of the apple store and yeah like you know i mean they eventually launched a competitor so they launched airplay 2 which we had so-and-so like functionality and then they've launched the HomePod and the HomePod 2 it is an interesting it's such an interesting miss because they had

so much legacy as a company in music so many iconic campaigns it would have made sense for Apple to like I wish I could have Apple speakers on my desk like next to my monitor and it does seem

again it wouldn't have been a huge business line for them but they probably it's a hundred billion dollar annual revenue yeah opportunity and apple could have probably gotten 20 of that or 10 10 of that at least so it wouldn't have been as big as airpods so patrick when did all the like we should get into the let's get into the drama okay um you know the stuff with google and there was quite a bit with amazon as well was there not uh i'm not sure so patrick spence the ceo who was just fired uh he joined from blackberry in 2012 i know i know it really writes itself but he was there for over a decade and I guess did pretty well until he botched the app. What's a satisfactory right now?

And so, yeah, I mean, I think the drama that you're alluding to is that Amazon, Google, and Apple all realized that, well, kind of dumb speakers were not particularly critical to their core business strategy and like their value chain once you put the ai assistant in them and you connect them to the internet then they become an important yeah point and i and i we it'd be interesting to understand i think that amazon what want needed to be in the market because they assume that people would just be walking around their home and be like, hey, Alexa, order more paper towels. And I had an Alexa, and I actually never,

I don't have any visceral angry moments with my Alexa. So they did a good job and they did well. The sound quality was never as good as Sonos, but they did well in terms of setup and usability. But I think they were thinking, okay, this is like a new ordering mechanism. We're the place that consumers go to purchase. Yep.

Like we need to be here. Maybe didn't really turn out to be the case. And voice, I feel like, has just continued to take L after L. Yeah. Even AirChat shut down. I don't know if you saw that. Oh, they did?

All right, let's see. And people were saying like okay if if this didn't make it this was the best shot on goal for audio like it maybe just isn't the thing yeah um so um but they also had run-ins with google yeah yeah so so basically the stage like 2012 they raised that round from kkr they. They launched a $200 speaker, so it's much easier to get into the Sonos ecosystem. From late 2013 to late 2014, the revenue grew by

75%. They're really taking off at this time, but then simultaneously in 2014, Amazon announced the Echo and Alexa at $99 for Prime subscribers. Sonos had never considered building its own voice assistant, and the smart speaker era took them by surprise.

McFarlane later admitted that they were late to recognize the impact of voice in mid-2016. Sonos finally announced... BlackBerry goes, nobody's ever going to want to type on glass. It's just not going to happen. Boom, shut. Sonos is going,

nobody wants their speakers speakers to be smart our users like that it takes 45 minutes to set up one of your six speakers i mean i think just this is another case of like slop being massively underrated like yeah i think that you know i'm not a crazy auto audiophile but i can tell the difference between like a nice surround sound sonos setup yeah like an amazon echo so but i think many people don't care. I enjoy music. I don't enjoy live music typically just because of the crowds and stuff like that. I rarely go to concerts. But my neighbor is the biggest audiophile that I've ever met.

This is Stefan Simkiewicz. He's a pretty high profile art collector uh and um he if you go in his house there's just speakers everywhere like every surface and it is truly incredible but all the stuff he does is he's like this amp is made from this guy in Denmark and he makes 10 of these a year and he's been doing it and it's like watchmaking in a way so I think we should eventually get yeah you got to come around on live music I'll take you to the LA Phil we'll see doodamel the Phil is the Phil is different I don't I don't like being in I don't like being in places where there's sweaty strangers oh I'm imagining like a box yeah yeah some

champagne yeah the Phil how people do live music in a different way? Don't act like you've never been to hard summer. EDC? EDC. You went to the first EDC, right? No, not the first one. It was a long time ago. Long time ago.

I was not born yet. I wasn't born. It was 2003. Yeah. And so, oh, yeah, the other thing is car speakers. Are you familiar with this stuff? So basically there's this guy that designed the perfect arrangement of speakers. He, like, ripped out the dash and custom, like, 3D printed a mold for perfectly placed speakers in a car where the audio quality is just 10 times better

than anything you'd get even like a Bentley or Mercedes or Rolls Royce. But what they found was that when they actually tried to market that technology, no one cared. They all just wanted a headline number, number of speakers, number of ones. Or bows.

Yeah, or bows, exactly. By the way, I blew out one of the subwoofers in my turbo. Yeah, it's so annoying. I kept having to turn down the bass because I was like, that just doesn't sound that good. It's rattling. And then I actually made it worse because I was like, oh, yeah, sure, sure, sure. So I have to take it in, but it hasn't been a priority. Oh, that's brutal.

I'm so sorry, man. That's like the roughest thing i've ever heard i mean all right there's people whose houses burn down but i mean you're right out there with them god uh yeah uh so yeah uh send jordy a comment uh tell him thoughts and prayers for his uh broken speaker in his turbo uh but yeah i mean uh lots of competition obviously the i i think the success of the alexa and and the google home is just like check the boxes on features and make it super super cheap and you'll just get crazy distribution and people will put up with some of the other other junk because yeah i don't it's interesting if you think about how there was a phase where it seemed like people cared about audio and beats by dre was part of this but i don't think that people actually that was still

a status symbol right like people just wanted to wear the beats by dre yeah and then um the airpods are the same thing people clear the average consumer clearly does not care about audio quality right they're not optimizing for that that's about signaling to people that you're not afraid of emf exactly you're not afraid to afraid microwave your head exactly i i don't live in fear do not live in fear yeah the emfs have a positive effect exactly exactly um but yeah so so this is interesting so in january 2020 sonos um sued google over copyright infringement relating to several patents including the ability to sync audio over multiple devices in august 2021 a judge ruled in favor of sonos the international trade commission also ruled in favor of senos as a result google

was ordered to remove certain features from its devices, including group volume control. That's got to be so annoying to get ordered by the ITC to make your product worse, basically. Google was ordered to pay Sonos 32 million in damages, which is literally nothing. So I'm sure Google was like okay like yeah whatever however a judge a judge tossed out the verdict in october and criticized sonos for abusing the patent system

wow following the verdict google redeployed the features it had previously removed wow um and uh anyways so yeah so not the first or the last sonos ui or ux innovations that you're just like i get that you could patent this but it'd be much nicer if this was just in every app like pull to refresh was one of those that was actually developed by uh i think a company that twitter bought and then twitter said hey we're not going to defend the patent. Like anyone. So now you have Instagram and everybody has it basically. Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I,

I, it doesn't. And this, this is, this is the kind of stuff like founders will join YC. They never built a company before and they'll go into their first partner meeting, whatever.

And they're like, yeah, we're filing our patents for this. And YC will give you the good advice of being like, you should absolutely not do that. That is a total waste of time and money. Doesn't really matter. You can't.

And patent stuff is weird. Interestingly enough, the Ridge guys have just dealt with so much of this because they actually have designed patents around a physical hardware device. And even that, they spend like a million a year or more like just like going after people that are just ripping it off through a patent patents on aurora or just on a patent you want a patent yet i don't i don't actually think i got my first patent approved on what uh breakers breakers first capsule nicotine pouch very cool yeah it was a big moment yeah it's like i was that's like that's it that's ip that you can defend it's important to defend it because if philip morris tries to

come after it you're gonna be able to come after them for like hundreds of millions exactly if they are selling a lot of yeah um but it's fine i still gotta get the tombstone made of like the the plaque when you get like a patent you can go and say like okay i want to buy like a like a trophy yeah yeah i think that'd be good for the office i i don't think of myself as like an inventor but uh it's cool to like have my name on a technically an invention yes it's fun a lot of designers in big tech will have gotten on patents at some point engineers i know a guy who developed a google cloud platform like their aws competitor and he has a ton of patents around how cloud computing works.

It's really cool. I think they get assigned to Google. It's an interesting thing where you don't own anything related to it, but you get a little credit. He's a bitch from Google, and then he went to another startup and then another one, made tons of money. He's all good. He's okay. Anyways, well, where are they today?

Struggling. Stock's down. In May 2023, their revenue, well, where are they? Where are they today? Struggling stocks down in 2020, in May, 2023, their, their revenue, they had a 24% drop in revenue. They've had a bunch of layoffs, which is unfortunate because it is a big employer in Santa Barbara. Um, and there's not a ton of, uh, technology companies here. Um, I wonder where they should go. Like should they get acquired by apple or someone like would that even get through like elena khan's out maybe the antitrust stuff is a

little bit looser i don't think apple too late i don't think apple would actually buy them now because think about it hey we could spend we already have airpods yeah we have audio devices that do crazy numbers really we had the best you know sonos launched a headphones they launched oh yeah yeah yeah they were like it's like why would i want buggy or headphones yeah i don't know yeah i don't know i think they're they're not gonna get bought by apple because apple could be like well why don't we spend a billion dollars developing a better speaker and sell it through our thousands of stores yeah but i mean they've been doing that and it hasn't really been working like you know yeah but also

clearly yeah this is known as isn't working one thing one thing is that the phone the phone kills speakers in so many ways one of them is that i will often just put like this as the phone speaker has gotten louder oh yeah my need for speakers you just listen to it because like what's the song we use for the ashley vance piece that hasn't dropped yet the uh right above it yeah yeah all you need is it often in the morning i would go into the kitchen and make my son breakfast and i used to go to sonos and try and put on some music and it got too hard and so I'll just play it for my phone. Seriously, it's just like this phone speaker is fine.

He doesn't care. I don't care. Whatever. Honestly, take your Sonos, hang out with your kids, take it apart. I used to really my dad used to do that. With old electronics with me and my brother, he would just say like, let's take this apart. He'd be like, this is this.

I mean, honestly, like turning it into a dumb speaker is like pretty good because like yeah this is fine wire them up wire them up turn into you know when you put two cans in a string you know something like needs to be that dumb yeah something like that um anyways i i hope they turn it around i think i think if they just make smarter, smart speakers, continue to focus on design, actually get their software right, there's definitely a billion-dollar revenue business here. They've done damage to their brand, but I hope one of these founders comes back and says, you know what? I'm going to buy speaker.com, form form a new company merge it with sonos do a reverse take private yeah and uh you know come out speaker.com yeah you know run it back because um yeah or the founder does uh if spax are back he speaker.com spack it acquire sonos fresh start

yeah i mean the real lesson here is like if you're frustrated with being a sonos customer like you'd be better being like a seed seed investor in sonos and have sold at the top yeah just make them just be on the be on the capital side yeah consumer side this is like you were your word of advice to those um ski patrollers was just like try out you know instead of being a ski patroller be you know get into private equity you know launch your own billion dollar fund and just buy a place and yeah the kkr guys are all doing well enough that they can just have a full-time audio engineer on staff and yeah yeah or just a live string quartet exactly that's probably the better is just have a string quartet in your house yeah and be a patron of the arts you know

have a guitarist yeah you've used in certain someone that plays the harp a drummer morning a drummer a drummer you know the the you know that uh like peruvian style drum oh yeah yeah that'd be great having somebody play mute you know the apple alarm uh, like Peruvian style drum. Oh yeah. That'd be great. Having somebody play mute, you know, the Apple alarm clock app, I really complained about it. It's terrible. I'm like dragging this thing around. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be much better. It's very, it's very confusing where you're like, Whoa, is the alarm on? You don't really, is the volume right? Like there's a lot of stuff about it that I don't think is great, but I really should just stop complaining, hire, you know know somebody to play

the violin for like 120 grand a year yeah and all they have to do is just show up and play start playing the violin out my window where i am at four so you can get the gym yeah um anyways uh interesting company go uh if you're looking to uh for a challenge, go buy Sonos. It is a great American company. Do you say buy a Sonos or buy Sonos? Both. Both. Take them private.

Turn them around. Turn them around. I think for our audience, the latter will be more relevant. Yeah, that's right. That was great. Cool. Let's move on to the timeline. Let's go to Moses Kagan he says if you didn't

get much from those before you financially morally or whatever you have the opportunity to be a very specific type of hero the founder of your family I put this in because I feel like you've been you've been you know

tooting this horn beating that drum for a while around creating new rituals, traditions. And yeah, I think it's important. I don't want to go out and say that this resonated with me because I think it's a mentality that everyone can have. I think it's the same thing. If you're an employee, act like a founder, right? Like how would you, you know, what would your founder do in that situation? Just doing a gentic.

Yeah. That you can do. And so, yeah, I don't want to, you know, my parents had good traditions and there's a lot that I, you know, carry on. But at the same time, you can, creating that family is more than just creating the humans and getting married it's more but it's more than about having kids it's about creating the culture um the culture of the family yeah and the financials obviously yeah the generation well yeah yeah and uh the trust yeah yeah for sure um uh speaking of deliver, you need to be delivering 100%. Uh, Nick St.

Pierre says someone should start a weekend man school that teaches men how to be men proposed curriculum, grappling, carpentry, fire, fire, starting cooking meat, fixing flat tires, public speaking, power tools, one-on-one knife sharpening, conflict resolution, barbecue mastery, basic survival skills, basic electrical work fitness fundamentals sourcing healthy food emergency preparedness electronics troubleshooting how to shake a hand like a man fixes for common household problems so i'll take this one step further i think this would be great as a parent kid class right where because i wouldn't i wouldn't I wouldn't do this solo. I agree. I'm not going to go on a Saturday and be like, it's weird. Tell your wife, Hey,

I'm going to go hang out for eight hours and learn barbecue mastery. I'd be like, why don't you just barbecue for us? You know? But if I said, Hey, I'm going to take the kids and we're going to go how to pick lock, learn how to pick locks. We're going to learn how to start a car, you know, without a key. Now I'm just going after the the ones that are yeah i mean really disastrous situations mozart didn't have to ask people how to write concertos you know yeah so there's a little bit of like if you're the type of person that needs this like man school like you're maybe not no again again this is the kind of stuff that you know my dad taught me how to tie knots and whittle and start a fire and stuff like that but yeah there's also other stuff on that list that he man school is just hanging out with

your dad maybe yeah like there's a little bit of like what you've just described is like maybe it's not our own thing maybe it's just like actively being a part of your family recreating life this is like with pmf or die we're recreating life right we're recreating locking in we're productizing locking in yeah there is this relentless pursuit of productization here where it's like do you need a course for this or can you just go do it like a lot of these things it's like go watch a youtube video buy a book on it and you'll just know how to do it or just practice and learn from first principles like you can just barbecue and the first steak you make will be burnt and then the fourth one will be delicious like it's not it's not that insane um yeah anyway let's go to jordan schneider he says real talk and he's

quoting roon he says the thing about america is that it's clearly always functioning at like 10 of its power level due to the costs of freedom and yet manages to win anyway due to the incredible benefits of freedom. Counter example is like China, which can reorient the entire ocean liner of its economy in a new direction if they want to go to war against COVID or whatever, and yet managed to fuck it up. So old, this is a throwback post. Good resurface from January 16th, 2023. 16 2023 yeah i think so i think there's an entire uh an opportunity for a poster to get hundreds of thousands of followers and their entire job is just resurfacing i can't hangers yeah because right now the algorithm actually

much prefers a screenshot like that than a quote tweet totally and so your job is to be the archivist of x yeah just go back find steinman bangers from from 2017 yep when he's or you know 2017 he's in the trenches in washington yeah saying the same stuff that he's saying now yeah yeah um go find you know runes like first true banger yeah you know yeah resurface it yeah resurface that curator yeah curator it's good but yeah you could easily get a hundred thousand followers doing that but i i like the core point there because you see like it is very easy to like lean into authoritarianism because you're just like wow things are so dysfunctional over here right now like wouldn't it be amazing

if like the government could just come in and like build high-speed rail in like two seconds and it's like that would be good but what And it's like, that would be good, but what would it cost? Like the cost would be freedom potentially. And, uh, it's often just like this hidden cost that just like sit there in the background. You don't really take it for advantage, take it for granted. Uh, it's easy to take it for granted. Um, so good post. We should go to a promoted post.

It's been a while. So I'm jumping to a promoted post it's been okay so i'm jumping into a promoted post uh i don't have it printed out today but it is a cool one so we recently acquired an iconic four-letter domain uh from uh our uh domain broker rob shuts no rob rob rob uh cool background he was um he was one of the founders of roman and also bark bark box yeah bark uh let me confirm it's just bark company yeah yeah yeah i don't know so he yeah so anyways started some really big companies and just got obsessed with domains. And so as he phased out from Roe, he decided to launch Snagged. It's at Snagged on X or Snagged.com.

And he was able to help us get this amazing fourletter.com. I sent him the domain that we wanted at like 6 a.m. He had secured it by and done an entire deal to secure it at a ridiculously low price by I think like 9 a.m. It was like the fastest turnaround. So he's amazing. But I wanted to highlight. So back in 90, this is a post from the Snagged account.

It says, back in 94, the internet was a total the snagged account it says back in 94 the internet was a total free-for-all you could grab almost any domain and in many cases domain registrations were free at the time chris clark was a 29 year old consultant in maryland maryland on a whim he registered pizza.com why he thought maybe just maybe some pizza business would bite on his domain but nobody did so he slapped some ads on it a little cash, and left it to collect digital dust for 14 years. Fast forward to 2008, Chris heard that Vodka.com sold for $3 million, so he listed his domain with a starting bid of $100. The next morning, it was at half a million, and by the end of the auction, it hit $2.6 million.

The buyer, a shady company which ended up getting busted for money laundering they couldn't handle their dough rob's a great writer well what a great story even though even though pizza.com is still out there it's stuck in the early 2000s with the sites and aesthetics and info no major pizza chain has ever bought it chris's one regret not registering more domains back in the day opportunity knocks but patience that's how you win so what's the next pizza.com only time will tell so that's so insane imagine being 94 you're just like registering and people were doing this a little bit with eth addresses right and solana addresses and i i knew i knew somebody who had like youtube.soul or something like that and it's like i just don't see google

like actually buying that yeah um but uh there's some great ones out there if you can't see the future can't speak highly enough but i love that because uh you think about domain brokerage and it's like a pretty boring behind the scenes job but amazing content marketing that sounds like a great account to follow just to get interesting tidbits of Internet history. And I just love that so much. So shout out to him. And if you're looking for a domain, hit him up and tell him the technology brother sent you. Let's move on to a bucket poll.

Jordy, we got one from Ben. He says, yes, professor. Due to my brain rot diagnosis, I need to have subway surfers playing during every lecture somehow this got no likes when we printed it out i don't know wait so ben so ben this this is the guy who i just said he's posting bangers all morning i was like we need to hire this guy i love this guy this is fantastic uh very funny the The subway surfers is such a, such a meme. I wonder how much the subway surfer trend is real, or if like the Gen Z kids are like in on it.

Do you think that they're, do you think that they're like aware of like the brain rot and it's like, they're laughing with it? Or do you think there are some people that are actually like, this is more engaging? Yeah. What do you think? I,

whenever I pull them up, I just look at it. I'm'm like i'm so annoyed that this this yeah this other video is playing yeah but but it's partially because i was born like i i'm five days too old to be gen z sure or something like that so it's like i just think i'm not it's just a different generation yeah yeah the other thing is like if you look at like espn or cnbc like those have brain rot elements where there will be tickers at the bottom, picture in picture. You go to Bloomberg and it's like someone's talking while they're giving you the news facts on the side. Like this idea of having a feed of content that's sending you multiple pieces of information all at once.

Like it's definitely a thing. Okay, we got a. a yeah we do that on our we do that on our videos people don't realize but there's a lot of alpha in the ticker the ticker on whenever we post videos on x yep tb spn uh let's go to trey stevens he says the offer is still on the table jason we had over a quarter million raised for charity within just a couple hours maybe don't chicken out this time. At Scientist, at Palmer Lucky. And so this was a clip from the All In podcast where Jason Calacanis and Dave Friedberg were discussing J-Cal getting in the ring with Palmer Lucky

and Trey, who loves fighting sports, was offering to get in the ring. A lot of people were talking about this. This was during COVID when this first broke yeah it's interesting that jason jason loves attention more than anyone that's that's very clear he's leveraged it in a you know and mostly you know he's built an accelerator he's got his fund he's got all this stuff he's definitely played his game well he understands that like attention is, whether it's positive or negative. Yeah, but he is a bully. Yep.

And it's interesting that as soon as the bully is actually getting invited, saying, step into the ring, he's saying, oh, I don't know what I did. His excuse was that Palmer was much younger or something like that. I thought it was that Trey was the mountain, he said younger or something like that. I thought it was that Trey was the mountain, he said, or something like that. Yeah, but Jason could just get off of Zempik and just get huge.

He can train. He can hire Zach's MMA coach. I think you said that Trey was younger than him. Oh, yeah. Trey and Palmer are both younger than Jason. Yeah, but I mean, it didn't stop Mike Tyson from stepping in the ring. He's a 60-year-old man. Yeah.

I don't like the excuse. It's a duck. In UFC, it's called ducking. And Jon Jones has been doing this with the out of um the uk where he just is making up all these excuses saying well i need 50 million dollars if i want to fight him or uh it just doesn't make sense that fight doesn't make sense right now and jason would clearly just rather keep antagonizing yeah you know on the timeline i mean i don't know if we're at this point i'm i've been like fooled too many i've gotten my uh my like excitement levels up too

many times with the zuck elon fight why hasn't there been a high profile the highest profile one is literally nick carter and that was like pretty tiny but that was very crypto yeah i don't even think well he was going to fight the bankless guys right but then the bankless guy uh got an injury and posted a photo of like he slipped a disc or something and so he was like i'm sorry i just can't fight you because i'm like injured and there was a big guy there was another big um onsome in crypto got they got the in a bit boy crypto guy they were fighting there's there's a fight yeah there's shots of BitBoy getting an asthma. Didn't Sam Hyde fight someone too?

The YouTubers are really good at this. The content people, they are always fighting. What's the guy, Bryce? Bryce Hall. Bryce Hall has gone into bare-knuckle boxing and performed. Really? He has done well. And bare-knuckle is gnarly because if you make a mistake or you get clipped, your entire lip will get cut out.

Luke Rockhold, the former UFC middleweight, went in and was fighting Mike Perry. And Luke just gave up midway because his face was getting, and this is a former UFC champion. His face was getting so damaged. It just was like, I'm not going to do this. And Bryce Hall, it goes in and does that. Yeah. Does well.

Fight club stuff's tough because like, it's really hard to balance out all the different factors. Like even the Zuck Elon fight. It's like, I think Elon has like five inches of height on Zuck, something like that. and so yeah, size matters.

Size really does matter. But then Zuck's been training for a lot longer so it depends on like if the fight was today maybe zuck's technique would work but if you give him a year technique so the thing about get up to speed so it really was like 50 50 for me you take two amateurs yeah and size is going to almost always do it unless it's mma where you can get a knockout yeah and and so or or jiu-jitsu is cool yep because smaller dudes can just destroy like size matters less like i would have like all my i would have like a bunch of uh buddies around malibu over to do jiu-jitsu rob from heberman would come and some other um dad friends and it's just funny

you have like a former like old miss linebacker yeah just kidding fighting like a college like basketball player and they're like super even even though like they in a true street fight like it probably wouldn't isn't there i saw someone on x talking about uh doing some sort of like founder fight club They wanted us to fight. That was Chris. I thought that was kind of funny. Let's go to Atlas Creatine Cycle. He says, many of you used to be technology accounts.

Is he just reflecting on the shift to politics? Yeah, I felt like this was a subtweet of me. But it was actually just everybody. But it was as the fires I think catalyzed a bunch of people to say I'm going to stop posting about Peck for a few days and just focus on Mayor

Karen and the Newsom fires. And you stack all that on top of what happened to your speaker in your car and you must have just been rocked. so makes sense that you were you know you just broke broke character couldn't talk about tech anymore yeah i had to go to politics i'm happy to be i'm happy to be back talking about tech even uh we got a city we got a city to rebuild and uh and we could get back into tech because there's there's still

really interesting stuff going on but but when big political things happen like you got to address them because uh tech is increasingly political because the stakes are so high the businesses are so large and you know elon is at mar-a-lago hanging out with trump and so clearly technology and politics are going to be continue continue to intertwine for a long time yeah but yeah you can't ever slip fully into politics it's just it's just boring should we do another promoted post uh let's see here we got some locky groom or you want to move on i actually got a promoted post from uh our uh sean and connor and sean uh sent this over connor and sean over at the ridge wallet they say 500 free ish ridge wallets up for grabs we donated 50 000 to la fire relief this week and are trying to find more ways to contribute wallets unfortunately are non-essential items so donating product doesn't make a lot of sense but

money goes a long way so here's what we're trying if you submit proof of a 50 plus dollar donation to any LA fire relief organization, we'll send you a Ridge wallet for free. We'll do this for the first 500 people who submit. It's the cheapest you'll ever get a Ridge wallet wallet, and you'll be doing good details below for how to submit. So,

uh, very cool. Uh, if you've wanted to get a Ridge wallet, um, now is the time to do it. If it's not too late already, I don't think it is.

That's great. Um, now is the time to do it. If it's not too late already, I don't think it is. That's great. Um, so thank you to Sean and Connor for, uh, helping raise money for fire relief, uh, here in Southern California. Cool. Let's go to some DMS that we don't have printed out, but I have here on my phone. Um, Michael Tostad says the tech bros pod should have quote, is this secret communist section really bring back the mccarthyism and you said haha that's great looking forward to the segment uh we pay too deep digging

into secret so i think we should have i think i think we have a new segment can be kind of sporadic yeah where we sort of try to figure out who are the targets like the venture communist well so so karen bass was the target okay sure sure sure it turns out her political career well i guess this was just the beginning of her political career she was a very active communist working directly with the cuban government yeah in the 70s um so yeah i just think uh i talked about this before uh people have been you know looking for new slurs communists there's been a there's been a bull market fixation on slurs and so venture capitalists hey john that market map makes you look like a junior vc you know slurs like that um you know

communist mouth breather low t yeah uh low magnesium levels there's plenty so there's there's plenty um let's go to the next uh comment that someone said uh no uh is a photo of us and they say no cases on their phone yeah these guys have exits and then uh nate nate chimes in with the geordie Hayes stack. No phone case, no socks, no shampoo. Harrison Rexha, where Ethan is? This is in the reply to Ben's post. He just threw it in. Ben's, so Ben's, producer Ben.

His account's been exploding. His account has been. Get in now. He's a couple hundred followers. He's blowing up. It's great. That's great. Here's a good question for us.

Britton Winterose says, tasked with hosting an event VCs will want to attend, the options are Porsche racing experience, skiing, a panel of three other VCs, or other comment below. And Mario says, Tech Bros Pod should have good insight. Jordy, what do you think? You want to attract as many VCs to the event you're throwing what do you go for honestly that the last time i saw true flock was the gundo oh we remember that last year last like a like a flock of vcs a flock of vcs yeah because it was just in a we need a name for

that you know how like if you get a group of lions, it's called Pride of Lions, or you get a bunch of crows called Murder of Crows? I think a flock is good because you have... A flock of VCs? Some of them are seagulls, like the rats. You know, the rats of the air. Some are pigeons.

Also kind of, you know, they're foraging. They're just trying to nip off. All I need is half a percent. That's my ownership target. You know, they're justaging. They're just trying to nip off. All I need is half a percent. That's my ownership target. You know, they're just trying to get a crumb. Yeah, those are the, you know, more of like the eagles, you know, like the ones that sit high above. And I'd put. That's not what you call eagles, though.

No, I know. But I'm just saying we're going to broadly. We're going to flock of birds, I think, is fair. So we got to kind of bucket in a few different. A group of eagles is called a convocation of eagles. Convocation. That's good. The convocation of an army or a Congress.

But do you remember that when, when the Gundo, I think you catalyzed it in some way with your documentary. It was already building. Yep. And then every, every one he see was, was like,

yeah, I'm going to, uh, let me know if you're around i'm gonna be in the gunda this week you know um and uh it's cool i mean so you would say if you want to host an event with vcs just go like the hottest new sub market that's blowing up yeah like a high influencer and then just take them on a tour of startups in the area yeah that's probably good that works i would say big game hunting would also be good.

Yeah. The number of GPs that are secretly taking multiple trips a year to hunt elephants, owls, lions, really exotic. Mostly predators. Predator hunting. Yeah. Hunting's really big right now. Yeah.

Also Porsche racing experience, that's fine, but you'd be better off doing the Dakar. Yeah. Putting a group together, driving from... Yeah, the Gunwale 3000. Yeah, the Gumball was also good. Great, great...

Great post. ...option. Let's see. What else? Oh, my God. Someone just did Guess the Podcast, and it's just photos of us,

I think. Like, this? That's hilarious. When is that to do? Yeah, I think. This? That's hilarious. When is that today? Yeah, I guess I just posted this. I like this. That's great. Oh, that's bad.

You posted that. You took some photos. They're Prada slides. That's great. Ben's out of control. Following Ben right now is like buying Bitcoin. Oops. Following Ben right now is like buying Bitcoin. Oops. Following Ben right now is like buying Bitcoin in

1981. It just gets older every single time we promote something. Let's go to a bucket poll. We got Juicy saying, dudes be having the worst day of their life and still keep sending memes to their homies like nothing happened. 100k likes. I completely

agree with this. Even during the fires, you lost cell service but i was still sending you memes and i was like oh he hasn't replied in like hours like this is bad this is like very uncouth but yeah this is the way like no i think people i think yeah i think um i was i was kind of processing this i was thinking about this last week because i was sort of oscillating between being extremely angry at the response of our leaders in california and then also needing to kind of process it through humor yeah of course and so yeah i mean i can i can remember that the svb the period when svb was collapsing it was very impactful on our on our business but

then i also had a family health emergency at like 2 a.m that thursday and thursday and friday was like the last money you could get money the last day you could get money out so but i still remember everybody was just like memeing it like internally like it was like the biggest the most existential crazy existential moment for silicon valley where we were like did we did did this startup economy just get nuked yeah and then everybody was you know the group chats were having a moment you know of course of course as they do never stops um let's go to mark andreessen he says well this is really going to cramp my style and he shows a screenshot a message block the semantic email security.cloud service has detected content in an email that matches the following policy

inappropriate content 5.x.x please remove any language inappropriate for business and resend the message. The funny thing is, like, this is clearly, like, on A16Z's network, right? I imagine. Or maybe it's for a different company. But it's just funny that he's, like, triggering the content flags. He's mouthing off so much. I love it. True technology, brother behavior.

Yeah, we're trying to encourage people to bring back intensity to the workplace. Yes. And part of that is saying not words like the R word, but saying like the F bomb. Yeah. You know? Yeah. All caps. Get it fucking done.

You know the thing about Ron Conway? How every email he sends is all caps. Really? Yeah, incredible. Everything you open is just screaming basically. I don't know. That's great. You got to turn the volume down before you open an email from Ron Conway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure. Let's go to Andrea. She says, much respect to us who have one Twitter account where we shit post, conduct business, and socialize from Sigma Moves. And I agree with this. There's the classic question of like, oh, I got some spicy takes.

Should I set up a non-account? And I don't know. I think that, yeah, you just got to find the correct line and only post things that you're comfortable living on forever and being baked into the the the god in a box feeding the iso right the llm yeah so the ai yeah that's part of it we're gotta every one of us is training these models through the stuff that we're putting online yep and so if you want the model to be more politically incorrect be more politically incorrect right yeah and do it on main yeah it's no you know i bet you i bet you they i bet you xai really you know tries i bet they're really good at detecting bots for xai oh yeah for sure you know they don't want any of that slop that says like in my you know check out my bio now yeah you know but like some of that stuff or even just like uh chat gpt just destroyed grok and

anthropic like 10 amazing discoveries below like these stupid threads like all those need to get filtered out um there is something to be said about like that mixed use account that's really cool like nikita broke it down where he was like look like you're not going to have like some deep insight or some you know revolutionary deep dive every single day so you should just be kind of like hanging out at the water cooler telling jokes effectively shit posting yeah do that uh like just whenever something comes to you a couple times a day and then but then you need to mix in a serious post like once a week or something so that yeah and andrea is like joking around but she does some of the best

analysis exactly on the consumer package goods industry and it's the most entertaining so i think it's it's definitely and when you share stuff that is personal like your personal interests like for me i'm always surprised if i share anything ufc related i get a bunch of people that i that i'm friends with that i didn't even know like the sport and they'll and we talk about it yeah whatever i mean that's the beauty of x is that it's not designed like siloed reddits so yeah you don't need to like go and take your account over to watch twitter or tech twitter or media twitter ufc twitter to engage those people you can just kind of like follow a few people,

engage post and the algorithm will send, sometimes it sends posts off to a different region of X and you're like, Oh, okay. And there's a whole different community here and they love me or they hate me. Who knows? Maybe I got to lock my account. The Canadians.

Yeah. The Alaskans. The Alaskans got me, got me good. But, uh, let's go to Rune talking to Grimes. Grune says,

if you guys aren't careful i'm going to start writing essays in the on the immigrant experience and let me just say nobody will enjoy that and then grime says honestly if you would just write any essay at all i would be happy lazy fuck incredible writer proceeds to only proceeds to only tweet and not create a body of work upsetting and then runes is lmfao okay grimes is kicking my ass i gotta do it and then grimes says are you serious you can't say it because then you won't do it please write something long form and for the love of god print it on a pamphlet and let's not have another sub stack let's show some grace to the written word and also get some branding moxie around the ideas percolating in Silicon Valley.

And then he says, yeah, Substack is lame. X articles is lame. The vibes on both of those have become bad. And, yeah, I mean, I think there's some great Substacks out there and some X articles are cool. You don't want to get censored. So you got to put that up there, too. But definitely print it out. Definitely send it to people in print. Did you see max meyer's new project yeah the love letters

to america is that what it's called letters to capital project under really cool under arena so you can go subscribe and and you'll just get a nicely you know delivered letter in the mail and we're building a uh mailing list a physical mailing list So send us your address if you want to get drops. We're going to be dropping a bunch of fun stuff in the mail. And I think you should be keeping a Rolodex. These things often build up around weddings. You get everyone's address there. Keep that up to date.

You need a real Rolodex. It's not enough just to have someone's phone or email these days. You got to be able to send them physical stuff and stand out. Should we do another promoted post? What you got? be able to send them physical stuff and stand out uh should we do another promoted post what you got uh i got i got one we gotta do the chair at some point yeah we'll do the chair we'll do the chair next look uh do you have some backstory on this chair uh well it was recommended by uh the obscure hobbyist of the year oh really wilmanitis yes he said he said he's buying it okay okay okay let. Let's actually just run this. So I got an extremely important promoted post today,

and it's actually a recommendation from none other than Will Minitis. He's going to be so pissed that we're leaking this out. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I doubt he's bought it, actually pulled the trigger yet. So we're going to sell it out, Will. He had a couple other options. We're highlighting the one that we think most aligns with our brand we have a fantastic looking chair here this is the william jefferson clinton oval office chair from the history company it's only

three thousand four hundred and seventy five dollars and uh you know this thing just looks fantastic is this the action is this it's it's a replica it's a replica yeah okay it's designed to look like an oval office chair. It should be at least 40. And I think it's great because, you know, if you're an associate at a venture capital firm, you come in, they give you some slop chair. You got to get that out, bring in your own chair. No one's going to bother you if you just, oh, I need a more ergonomic chair. I got back problems or something.

It's a health issue. They can't stop you. So VC associates, you'll see around SF, a lot of them driving like Valkyries, like, you know, some of these hyper cars. No, i8s. i8s are big too. Wrapped i8s. You got to get the doors to go like this. The Valkyries have the price range. As long as the doors go up, it's good by me.

Valkyries, GP money. Yeah, yeah. The i8, that's... Yeah, there's some associates out there that um maybe they're nepos i know yeah i i met a guy in the alps a couple weeks ago that um worked for a pretty prominent venture capital fund and uh is a billionaire through his through through his father's uh you know past success but um so some of the you know but anyways great looking chair. Yeah, I highly recommend it. Check this out. I don't actually like these metal knobs here,

but what's really going to be in Zoom is this top section, and it looks very regal. Yeah. And some other options. But yeah, I highly recommend getting a nice chair. Check out the History Company, and tell them the Technology Brothers and Wilmanite has sent you. Yeah. Let's go to a bucket poll from Allie. and tell them the Technology Brothers and Wilmanitis sent you.

Yeah. Let's go to a bucket poll from Allie. She says, dating a VC must be so funny because imagine being in the middle of a fight. And he says, babe, let's think about this from first principles. Wait, let me see this. So this, wow, 2.5K. Nice. That's a banger.

Nice work, Ali. Ali's fiance or husband or boyfriend, I don't actually know. No, he's Ali's significant other. Yeah. Posted in late December, if I can get a Robin Hood gold card, I will tattoo the Robin Hood logo on my arm. So this guy, Brexton. And he got his gold card. Yeah. And he got a Robin Hood tattoo on an absolute piece on his shoulder.

It's big, too. It's pretty big. It's pretty prominent. I'm curious if it's his first ever tattoo. He should keep doing this and just get logoed up everywhere. Yeah. Like a NASCAR. It would be interesting to go to these companies

and say you know i'll get this logo but i need a hundred dollars a month for the rest of my life and it's like a bulletproof contract and it's like you can pay it out early yeah you know at like you know for like 80 years yeah if you want to just get it all up front or you can just keep keep me on the payroll forever yeah so great you load it up and you could probably get a UBI off that. That might be one of the last jobs is just getting a walking billboard. He was looking pretty jacked when I saw him. Yeah, yeah. I think he just wanted an excuse to flex.

Yeah, for sure. Nice work, Brexton. Allie. We respect it. Fine. I'm curious. We should get Allie's opinion on the Robin Hood and tat. I'm sure she's got opinions. I think it's great i love when my my partner does uh stupid gold

card better be live up to the hype yeah um it does look beautiful um let's go to luke metro he says it must be really it must really suck to be too smart to make money in crypto but too dumb to make money in ai that's just brutally real yeah that hey podcasting i mean there's podcasting is a nice a nice you know middle ground keep seeing these you keep seeing these uh what's the latest coin fart coin that just mooned or something there's so many just super stupid ones and it's like yeah anyone rational or intelligent would just be like this can't possibly happen but then really gigabrain they can figure out that no this one's gonna meme yeah the joe boden coin or whatever yeah but even that one ended up flopping yeah i mean they all do but it's about the timing it's about ponzi nomics and playing it correctly. Yeah. But, oh, well. There's always some opportunity.

There's always a bull market somewhere. Yep. Let's go to Jack Suslow. He says, one cold email at a time. I built my life. I thought that was cool. Yeah. Who's at A16Z Games?

I wonder if I would like to see the cold email that he sent to get that job. Share it, Jack. Let's hear the story. I would like to see the cold email that he sent to get that job. Share it, Jack. Share the story. It's funny because everybody has, you know, I would hope that everybody listening has positive stories around cold emails. But you always remember the negatives. There's this one guy.

It wasn't even a fully cold email that I met in college because there's one company here in Santa Barbara, Decker Brands. They own Hoka, Ugg, and a bunch of other companies. Great business, $20 billion company. Shoe companies, when they have hit shoes, do really well. I met him at the gym, and he's like, I love, let me intern for you, work for you, whatever, I'll do

anything. Here's what I'm good at. He's like, yeah, just follow up via email. Longest, most thoughtful email. No response. K kept seeing him at the gym well didn't i just like that's just a hair stabbing but the 75 emails 75 emails send emails until they they beg you to stop or give you a job but they do it a hundred times you got to do like the volume is so exactly the volume so um this is like but you know the baldo method like he didn't just send a couple good replies he sent hundreds and he kept going crafting and i'm talking to him in a

couple he's actually a great poster it's yeah fantastic yeah like he's he's also just gotten become a better poster yeah no but cold emails are like little lottery tickets like every time you post on x it's like a little lottery ticket. Yep. You're buying with your time. Yep. And. But keep it concise. Send it. Yeah. Keep it concise. Let's do another promoted post.

Promoted post. We got a promoted post from Max Brodererbos. Max, I'm sorry for butchering your name. But he says he has a company called Gumloop, which got out of just got out of YC and they're doing some it looked like something within the realm of Zapier I'm trying to remember now

I don't have any actual backstory on it but the more important thing is they raised a 17 million dollar series straight out of YC. And Max says that Gumloop will be a 10 person, $1 billion company. They have six spots left. So this is a company that got four,

four people took them to a $17 million series. Wow. So they must be doing something cool. 17 or seven, 17 million, 17 million series. Yeah. Yeah. Okay uh sean from my

first million is in there cool um but anyways cool opportunity uh go hit up max and um tell them the technology brother sent you tell them tb sent you oh i like this one casey says i got a bucket poll here casey says i cannot overstate how valuable it is to have a regular gathering you can invite wonderful people to as you meet them. It's often the difference between, that guy was cool, I wonder what he's up to, and gaining a new friend

and or collaborator. So this is like the bro movie nights that we do. Is that? You can say Casey. This is just a bucket poll. No, this is cool. I mean, it's so this is um people do this one of the poker nights there's cigar remote and kind of sort of working remote yeah because people in la i feel like just have to kind of if you're in tech you have to be like pretty remote in terms of how you work with people and meet people because there's not that

many people here and um that is a downside of like well there's only one friday night every week yeah if you want to get a bunch of people together and then it's once you have kids you know you're sacred if you're meeting up with you know work oriented people you're missing out on time with your family so this is why i think four five six ten twenty people together at once yeah has a pretty amazing this is why it's so important to get a box of every f1 race because then there's always something coming up you can just say oh i'm in i'm in austin texas this is this is my we're gonna let's go my miami guys we're gonna start doing daily tv meetups at the new york stock exchange yep so one of the brothers recommended

this um and i think it'd be very cool let's meet at the bowl every morning every morning just pray you know pray to the ball pray to the bull um we got time for one more post and then we gotta jet but we'll see you tomorrow because the pod never sleeps uh wilmanitis let's close with him he says i think it will shock everyone how short-lived the agi fortunes will be secular nuts and bolts rationalism will not produce modern rockefellers they have failed at real institution building they have weak family structures polyamory etc and no transcendent morals it's a once in a generation bag fumble we're about to watch hundreds of billions get made and wasted on small dogs luxury marina apartments and tasteless napa homes roasted roasted but i i mean i i completely agree like you look at the uh uh i mean have you seen citizen kane uh no oh man fantastic movie it's a

beast to get through it and what it's a very different experience than like a modern movie but uh you know it's it's basically the story of william randolph hearst hearst built hearst castle have you ever been to hearst castle it's like in central california and it's like this insane castle it's literally just a castle has like these ornate pools indoor pools outdoor pools just built by this like magnet and it just like became this structure that like couldn't just be like absorbed by the market. So it became this museum essentially. And that's always my hope when people say like, you know, the elites aren't bad. We just need better elites.

Like you need elites that care about aesthetics, care about taste. Exactly. Matt Friedman is going to build something that will live on past him. Yeah. Both in the company sense and also in I'm sure whatever he winds up building in the festival world. A lot of gold. Monument. Yeah. Both in the company sense and also in, I'm sure, whatever he winds up building in the festival world. The Lodgill monument. Exactly. So yeah,

if you wind up making an AGI fortune, call Will, make some good decisions and build a dynasty that will live on for centuries. And thanks for tuning in.

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