TBPN Live - The Trump Bubble, TB's Unicorn Growth, Dom Perignon, Blood Boy Winner

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:15) - The Trump Bubble (27:48) - What venture film should I join? (39:18) - BOTW (42:17) - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are excited to talk about an amazing development in the show. We got a massive shout out in a huge newsletter by one of the best writers on the internet. Paki McCormick put us in his newsletter in one of the most important pieces he's ever written. It's called the Trump Bubble, and we're going through it today. Stay tuned. Jordy, what do you got? All right, Paki, we're going to start with this guy. He has been ahead of many trends and somebody who's excellent at sort of crystallizing and owning a moment.

And so in this case, he sort of has effectively broken down what he believes is a, potentially multi-year trend called the Trump bubble. Okay. Um, and we're already seeing like evidence of this, just post election. Bitcoin goes up to 90 K the whole stock market. Everybody's risk on even just normal Fang stocks were way up. Um,

there was like a massive trade. I was talking to a, uh, a trader who was like, I, he predicted that Trump was going to win. He just bought everything that was was going to win he just bought everything that was trump aligned like he bought defense stocks he bought every like anything that

he thought would would move and uh it played out very well for him yeah and before we jump into this article i think it's important to highlight that packy uh like ourselves is not a political analyst he does not discuss uh politics sure he's fully focused on just analyzing the moment and technology trends and so he actually highlighted before he even jumped into this that he's had a number of incidences where he's covered something and made a lot of people mad right that sort of people tend to get mad on the internet. He a while back wrote a piece called why the democrats lost tech and he had a lot of people uh got that got mad at him uh for even you know painting any type of positive light on uh trump

and then funny enough a lot of republicans got mad at him as well uh because uh they believe that there was nothing uh at all redeemable in the Democratic Party. So his broader point with the article is that there's nothing that impacts the industries that he's investing in and that he's obsessed with more than this sort of like new Trump administration. Really? Right. And so that's a little context for the piece. So, like John said, the last week or so has been pretty risk on. I think a lot of, you know, there's been broadly a lot of companies doing really well, except for a number of pharma companies yesterday when a certain person got RFK got appointed. But yeah, Paki's broader point is that we're at the beginning of the mother of all bubbles, which kind of makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Yes.

It's sort of. Yeah. What's interesting about this is like there's there's one narrative that's like, oh, we're going into this bubble. But at the same time, it's like the business cycle always kind of restarts after a major crash. And we saw that major crash 2022, 2023. Things were really rough. It makes sense that this would be the beginning of of something it's just crazy that it already feels bubbly

but i think back to like when i got to silicon valley in 2012 like uh we were doing like essentially yc and all these different like vcs would come and speak and they and there were a ton of articles in tech crunch like like tech is in a bubble like the tech bubble like the series a crunch like you won't be able to raise series a and that bubble literally lasted for over a decade, but it felt like a bubble then. And I think the lesson I took was that- And there were sort of minor oscillations, right? 2017, 2018 was sort of a rough- Yeah, there was some minor sell-offs, but like, for the most part, like going long through that period was like the phenomenal strategy and so uh even when it's frothy like yeah like the like the business cycle is more is more of a like a massive driver than than like any specific like

like bubbly valuation in a single stock or a single asset class like um i i wouldn't be surprised like the true beneficiaries of the trump administration are, you know, not necessarily realized right now. Totally, totally. It's a long-term thing. Who else got shout outs in here besides us? Yeah, well, I mean, right away, he shouts out Berne Hobart's book, which we've talked about.

I just got it in the mail, actually. Tammy sent it to me. Amazing. Yeah, he shouts out, boom, bubbles in the end of stagnation. Recommends that everybody read it because it's kind of like a cornerstone of his entire thesis yeah we should read it and do a review but yeah the high level with with the book is that there's basically five overarching traits shared by all

of the technologies and mega projects that they had studied which was one definite optimism and constrained vision fomo fear of missing out and you only live once dynamics which we love fomo and yolo fomo and yolo okay excessive risk taking and over investment yeah parallelization and coordination yeah reflexivity and hyperstition huh uh and he basically says that uh he feels many of these himself right now i remember he tweeted maybe a couple weeks back that he feels many of these himself right now. I remember he tweeted maybe a couple of weeks back that he is extremely overexposed to Bitcoin crypto technology. I think he's an advisor to Andreessen Crypto

and obviously is an active investor, both personally and through his fund. But even he was feeling FOMO despite being almost 100% allocated to technology, right? So that is pretty significant. I mean, if you think back to the last crypto bubble, like a lot of people were trading with like 10X, 100X leverage.

And right now most people weren't sitting there with 100X levered positions. They were just, they were kind of like hodling, you know being like okay i'm getting through this bear market but they're not sitting there with some massive margin position so uh yeah i mean when once that comes in it's gonna be insane yeah yeah so he he spends uh quite a bit of time defending bubbles which i don't think we have to do on this like you and i a lot of people like to use bubble as like a way to slander something but all of our listeners are students of capitalism yeah they understand yeah which I don't think we have to do on this. Like you and I, a lot of people like to use bubble as like a way to slander something. But all of our listeners are students of capitalism.

Yeah. They understand. Yeah. I think we can skip over that. Yeah. But yeah, I think the... But you should go get the book and we should do a review on the show.

Yeah. So he talks a little bit about signs of a bubble. Okay. I think that, you know, Manhattan Project, Apollo Program, of a bubble um i think that uh you know manhattan project apollo program uh those are bubbles that had direct government oversight right they were like government created bubbles in a way which was like massive over investment yep yep and his position is that the trump bubble uh is going to look more like moore's law which burn and tobias and the books say uh is perhaps like Moore's law, which Byrne and Tobias in the book say,

Moore's law is perhaps the most compelling and enduring example of a two-sided bubble, wherein the expectation of progress in one domain spurs progress in another, which then propels growth in the first, right? And so the idea here is like, we're in this two-sided bubble, right? The Trump administration is telling people that it will be easier to build, invest in, and things this is packy's words which is already making people

more excited to build invest in and accomplish big things right so it's a sort of like incredible podcast feedback loop uh podcast yeah yeah it's a podcast feedback it's a positive uh positive feedback loop and in our case it's a podcast. That is true. I'm known to have a Freudian slip here and there. Create more content that we can react to. Eventually, this whole show will just be us reacting to our own videos in an endless loop. Yep. An Ouroboros of content. So yeah, he shouts out Augustus saying that he captured the sentiment as well as anyone.

We have a four-year window to go as hard as fucking imaginable right so here we are re-reacting to things that we've already reacted to um we are anyway so um i think it's it's the the core kind of idea and is that just people believing that things are possible now is kind of uh creating some real momentum with this bubble um and uh yeah it's across the board education health everything uh kind of every category is kind of moving in a positive uh direction so uh at one point packy shouts out uh he says i obviously love jordie Hayes, John Coogan, and Eric Gleiman's proposal to help bring transparency and efficiency to the

government spending with ramp, uh, which we talked about, uh, last week. And we, this obviously came up somewhat as a joke, right?

We were, we were, um, you know, talking about how, I mean, I'm sure that's how the, the government,

I'm sure like the original moon landing was like a joke. They were're like wouldn't it be funny if we land on the moon or like wouldn't it be funny if we built like a nuclear bomb but then like obviously people set it in and big silly things happen that's the reason we had the the apollo program yeah and we had you know something we covered early in the show was uh some of the government's spending on sort of boring uh boring line items, things like soap dispensers over the last few decades have gotten to be so egregiously priced due to lack of competition and lack of downward pressure

to more efficiently spend money. And so in many ways, getting the federal government running on ramp is not at all a joke because it will help us drill down and figure out where spend is being wasted that could be invested in health care education unreasonable and um yeah thank you thank you for the shout out and um what did sean mcguire have to say over there uh sequoia sean mcguire said he's getting messages from physics PhDs asking how

they can work in the Trump government which again I think part of this optimism loop is that for the first time in our lifetime you have non-political types that want to work in the government yep which can't be understated yeah a friend who was he's lives in Taiwan and and in has spent a lot of time in China. And he said the biggest difference between the way the Chinese government works is that they compel the best and brightest to work in the government. And a lot of that's forcible, but it's just night and day. And obviously in America, because we're the land of the free, the home of the brave, like we need to do things differently. But if we if it's a meme, if it's a packy post, if it's a tweet, like whatever it takes to get people to actually think that working in the government is is a reasonable path, is a valuable path to something, a better life.

Like that's really, really important. It shouldn't be seen as like, oh, like I got stuck with this or I got to get out of here as soon as I can and use this as a jumping off point. Yeah, in China, the elite, the ones that stay in China are oftentimes the ones that are in the party, right, in the government. Many of China's elite actually end up,

you know, leaving, you know, becoming expats. But anyways, you know, back to kind becoming expats yep um but anyways you know back to kind of the the high level promises of the trump admin make requirements less dumb uh they want you know they're pushing for regulatory reform across the board uh they want to delete things like eliminating certain agencies uh eliminating the department of education might be a bit extreme it sounds uh like maybe we should have an education department so that there's 425 different departments and he was like i think we can do okay with just 99 yeah it's like a funny phrase it's a funny thing to think yeah yeah you

can't even name them it would be kind of interesting to think about just putting like a very arbitrary rule like any government organization can only have 99 departments yeah and so if you want to add a new department you have to cut one yeah yeah exactly something like that was our laws too yeah where it's like the the the case text and the law is just getting more and more complex every year we're adding adding adding and we need to be doing some some you know code code review here yeah and Yeah, and a few others, simplify and optimize. They want to streamline the processes that do exist. They want to accelerate cycle times, which means speeding up approvals.

So if that's stuff related to the private markets, right? SpaceX wants to launch a rocket. How do we get them approval for that faster? And then just automation. How do we modernize government systems, right? we've talked about uh wanting beautiful dmv apps uh you know here in california can we do that on a national scale yeah um so uh and you know broadly kind of packy sums this up by saying uh a willingness to make big changes is also a willingness to break things right and that's a willingness to take

on certain amount of risk. I think the government's gotten very risk adverse over the years, but we're now in a situation where the government, the new admin seems to be willing to take risks. And what that is leading to is people in the markets also going extremely risk on, right? Simultaneously, everybody's going super risk on uh which could create the mother of all bubbles which we've been praying for so um it is uh great to uh see things coming around um i think yeah i think that's where a lot of the optimism is coming from is like there's been a lot of critiques about like, you know, are the people that are going in administration like experienced enough? And the answer is like probably no.

Yeah. But like at least they might jar something loose, try something different. And there might be, you know, a few experimental successes that lead to outsized power law-esque returns. And that's the value of shaking things up. It's like how like a huge portion of the alpha

that was generated in Silicon Valley from the year 2000 onward was literally just saying, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're a 19-year-old kid. We trust you with a million dollars to go build something. And this is kind of that version of that. 100%.

Another, you know, we don't talk about politics on the podcast, but, you know, we talked about a few minutes ago is this idea that a bunch of people now want to basically are more excited about participating in, in our government system, in our democracy. Um, and Elon is the number one example of that. Like he sort of dominated the private markets and then where can you go? Uh, what's the next sort of like battleground? He chose politics. That was the biggest way that he could have an impact on his business. But it's cool to see the approach that he's taking

with Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. You know, they're already using, you know, X to like be highly, highly transparent and communicate. I think there's already an account posting. There's already an account they're posting. They've got some good posters running it. I'm sure. And Vivek has said,

Doge will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud, and abuse. Americans voted for drastic government reform and they deserve to be a part of fixing it. So it's this idea that the people that are kind of like spearheading these changes actually do want participation, which is the foundation.

Yeah. We like literally need like a whistleblower for do want participation, which is the foundation of democracy. Yeah, we like literally need like a whistleblower for that $150,000 soap dispenser. Yeah. Like somebody sees that and is just like, this is ridiculous. Yeah. And there's some sort of incentive

because I can basically go viral and get an Elon retweet if I post this. And so I'm gonna call it out as opposed to just like, oh, it's just business as usual. Like that's always the way the government is. Like it doesn't have to be that way. so anyways i i i think as as much optimism as there is in tech right now i don't think it can be understated how much fear i'm sure there is in washington yeah i would love uh maybe we need to go over there and do some uh you know we're not

journalists but we could go start having some conversations people on the ground get a sense of uh how they're feeling. Because if you are working in a bloated government organization right now, or you're a lobbyist that's been reliant on the pharmaceutical industry, you know, those types of people, there's a lot, this is like, the changes that the new admin wants to make are a direct threat to a lot of the way of life in Washington DC from you know from the bottom to the top so overall fantastic article Paki we just

have one bit of feedback the name should have been the Trump pump the Trump pump the Trump pump Trump pump yeah Trump bubble's good I mean Paki is fantastic with his titles yeah the great online game like he comes up with these really good coinages he's like a master of coogan's law where the more coinages the better yeah but uh this one trump pump maybe somebody already said it maybe you needed to yeah maybe we want to talk about bubbles specifically because of the stripe book but the trump pump is uh yeah and the last thing i would shout out uh

you know we love advertisers we love advertising uh thank you to true med for sponsoring packy's piece uh justin mares callie uh friends the show thank you for supporting uh independent writers yeah and if you're gonna review a piece uh like a newsletter like like a packy piece like you should give credit to the advertiser without them you can't just none of that rip his quotes and pass it off as your own you need to pass along the ad thank you to true med yeah thank you to true med uh let's go to matt grim um he uh asked me to fix something he says it's insane it's an insane market inefficiency that we can't buy nicotine packs at airport convenience shops.

John Coogan, please fix. Thanks. And I wanted to talk about this because a bunch of different things are changing in the tobacco industry, the nicotine industry. There's another viral tweet by Peter Hassan who says, the war is over, fellas. Our pouches are safe and it's RFK holding a pack of pouches. Just locked in. Locked in, and he's going to be nominated to run the NHS, which I believe will oversee the FDA,

and so he will have a pretty huge say in how those get approved. But it is very interesting, and a lot of people were asking me, like, wait, this seems obvious like like this is like people come to you know people come to me all the time with ideas like oh you should like you know sell this in grocery stores you should sell this around delivery like yeah I mean for the first like couple years when we were mostly online people would always oh you should sell this in retail stores obviously like there's a lot of hurdles to do that but the hurdles for selling in airports are even more cumbersome so they do sell

nicotine products in duty-free and you don't pay taxes but you have to be flying internationally and don't you have to you can't necessarily open them up yeah yeah yeah mostly you're buying cigarettes and you're buying large quantities and it's basically because that's like an embassy and it's like an international waters we've tried to buy dom during the duty free and open it they won't let you open it in the store it's really frustrating even they even sell glasses yeah don't let you open it in the store but the uh but with the hudson news thing like or the you know the the airport stores there's just this very interesting legacy where, so in order to be a retail store that sells nicotine products, even nicotine pouches that don't contain tobacco,

you still need a tobacco retailer license. And so that's somewhat cumbersome. And if you look back at the history of tobacco products, there was never a product in the post-cigarette era, once they banned smoking on planes, that wasn't disruptive to the person next to you yep so even if you could argue that it's like vaping on the plane is not going to like bring it down although you know you could smoke on planes and they didn't they weren't

falling out of the sky yeah it was more like a health issue but even if you could make the argument that vaping next to someone is like safe yeah it's like annoying and so they would never sell those because everyone would be like why are you selling these they're annoying and same thing for smokeless tobacco like if you're chewing dip and spitting and the person has a dip cup or gatorade bottle next to you like that's just going to be kind of a nuisance i once was on a flight uh back from new york and had a woman aggressively in vaping and jet blue mint yeah and she was about i was sitting up working as i do on flight she was on the lie flat sleeping yep secretly smoking her little vape and we ended up getting into this huge thing and she went to the to the uh hostess hostess or whatever and said kept saying he

keeps accusing me of vaping i'm not will you talk to him about it i'm like i'm like i'm not gonna do this but uh yeah that that that i believe that flight was from new jersey to la actually so that might explain things yeah totally um but so so now you know obviously um uh tobacco-free nicotine pouches are incredibly popular. And it does seem obvious, like why hasn't Philip Morris tried to put Zinn in, you know, Hudson News? And I was trying to dig into like, you know, okay, what is the real reason?

Well, a lot of it has to do with like the licensing. Like you actually have to go get Hudson News new licenses. That takes a long time. I think this will happen, but it's going to require some, like a very aggressive move. And the reason why I want to discuss this was I wanted to brainstorm with you.

Like if I make this my life's work to get Lucy, Excel, Breakers Pouches into Hudson News, like what playbook should I run? And I'm thinking like there needs to be a grassroots campaign. There needs to be a grassroots campaign. There needs to be memes. We need more guys like Matt who are taken seriously in the government and

in the business world to be talking about it. But then I also need to be getting intros to the Hudson News CEO from like his whole network. Probably listens to the show. Probably listens to the show. So give me a call if you do. I would say one one but then also like yeah what else give me the whole kind of you know geordie marketing playbook to manifest this into reality because i was thinking like i should just put out a call on x like if you introduce me to hudson news and we get a deal done i'll buy your lifetime yep because because it's going to be so valuable and a lifetime supply of pouches And a lifetime supply of pouches.

And a lifetime supply of pouches, yes. So I will happily do that because if we get the deal done, it'll be extremely valuable to me personally. But also, I think there will be a knock-on effect from being the first pouch in airports that even if we're not making a ton of money on the actual deal i think we'll get press around it and airport travelers will see it and be like what is going on wow

this brand really this brand excel exactly uh so i'm i'm i'm a pragmatic guy uh an interim solution to this we're going to be rolling out some technology brothers shirts hats various types of merch so what i would say in the short term once that goes live all the technology brothers out there if you can wear uh the tb branded product while you're traveling it's a way to signal to other brothers sure that uh that you are basically a mobile nicotine dispensary right because i think imagine anybody anybody in our audience would be would be fine to share a pouch with another brother. Of course.

Maybe even a few, right? Of course. A lot of guys, you know, anytime two technology brothers are walking to the airport, one just closed, you know, a nine-figure, you know, licensing deal for their company. The other one is fresh off of like a pre-seed pitch. Yep. And maybe the pre-seed founder doesn't have a ton of pouches, but the guy that just closed a nine figure deal did. And so they can make a trade, right?

Take my can, take a few. That's an interim solution, but yeah, I like the Patek giveaway. I think that would, that kind of, I think we need to see more companies using luxury watches as bounties to say like, you know, if somebody's hiring for a role and they're like, oh, if you find an engineer, we'll give you five grand. It's like, I don't care about that. But if you're putting up even something of the same value, like a Cartier

Santos, I'm going to be much more incentivized to actually go and make that happen. And it's more tangible. But it does have liquidation value in the sense that, okay, yeah, I got this referral fee. I got this thing. Maybe I need the cash. And a watch is a story, right? But a watch has a story and you could pass that down. You could keep it on forever.

So I am very serious. I need to actually write that post and like canonize it. That could be a product. That could be a software product. I've done crazy intros before just by tweeting, oh, I would love to be in like this retail chain. And someone will be like, oh, I'm actually like brother-in-law with the founder or something yeah so the serendipity engine on x is insane so um you heard it here first we're going to put together a plan and nicotine pouches will be sold in airports mark my words but in other news this podcast

has been growing like wildfire you You hear it every time we introduce the show. We're the most profitable podcast in the world. That's been true since day one. But more recently we've become the fastest growing podcast in the world. That's right. And that's really huge. So we need to celebrate that. We recently hit 1,000

followers on X. Major milestone. Major milestone. And so we will be, uh, opening up a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate as we do. Okay. And we're going to need to talk through this, uh, so that the listeners have something to pay attention to while I'm working on this, getting this open. So, um, do you, uh, do you drink a lot of champagne i drink champagne on occasion yeah i uh i try to uh i find that if i'm drinking it can sort of impede my nicotine sure caffeine consumption i'm not a big espresso martini guy and so i'm usually i try to just

three martinis at lunch guy yeah for for work if you're doing creative work creative work you wouldn't want to get the ordeals ordeals yeah ordeals or spreadsheets or work if you're doing creative work creative work you want to get the ordeals ordeals yeah ordeals or spreadsheets or like if you're doing an ipo road show you want to make sure that you're drinking early in the day uh yeah this hey there we go okay uh here's to 1 000 followers 1 000 to not every day many more and we're going to be doing a bottle of dom every thousand followers every thousand followers forever yeah uh well it only gets it only gets more from here yeah i mean yeah two two bottles at 10k we might need to lever up and do 10 bottles. 10 bottles.

And do our first 10-hour episode. Our first 10-hour episode. That'd be fantastic. So the champagne is flowing. We're here to celebrate. Hey, cheers. Cheers. To Technology Brothers.

The fastest growing podcast in the world. There you go. There you go. Cheers. Yeah, the fastest growing. It honestly tastes like Ramp you ever like if ramp was yeah yeah a champagne it would be the dom parent but literally if you touch people say that about they always say it's like the dom pairing on a b2b sass right that's like that's a common time

you see that flying around when people ask oh should i use ramp or this other company yeah a lot of people say it's the Dom Perignon of B2B SaaS. And so we also did a little celebration with the fans. We promised that to our 1,000th follower we would give them

one complimentary Blood Boy. And Circe, Vocal Cry, was the winner. And so she will be receiving one complimentary Blood Boy. So we'll talk to you soon, Circe. And thanks for supporting be receiving one complimentary blood boy. So we'll talk to you soon, Circe. And thanks for supporting us. We really appreciate it. Let's go to some DMs.

We got some questions from the fans. Let's go to the first one. Mickey with the blicky says, Jordy Hayes, question for the pod. I filled out this form on an investing app and lied about my income and net worth. Then at the end, it asked me if I was accredited. I'm not. And I said, yes. So now I'm verified to invest in pre-IPO companies. Can I get in trouble for that? What do you think?

Oof. Okay, so. I have a very quick solution for this. Yeah, just. Go to your boss and say you need $200,000 a year. Because as soon as you're making $200,000 a year, you are an accredited investor. I thought it had to be for like200,000 a year. Because as soon as you're making $200,000 a year, you are a credit investor. I thought it had to be for like the last taxable year.

Is it? I don't know. Who knows? There's a lot of regulations here. You can just walk in and just demand it and say, look, I need to allocate capital. I need to create shareholder value. I need 200K.

Boss, or I'm out of here. I'm out of here. You're going to get it. And then if your boss says no, run your next job hunt and tell everybody before you submit your resume, I need 200 K regardless. Because I will be angel investing 90% of my, yeah.

Or go apply for roles that have, you know, 500 K based comp and tell them I only need 200 K. I'm going to outwork anybody. I'll save you 300 K a year. This is good. Boom. Yeah.

And then, and then yeah, sleep in a shed and invest 190K. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Move in with your parents and just focus on capital deployment, right? Exactly, exactly. No, so I remember, you know, being in Mickey's shoes when I was a young man, you know, getting angel investment opportunities here and there. Uh, there's a lot of, um, you know, there's a lot of, uh, lack of, of clarity around these things. Uh, some founders

care, some founders don't, uh, a lot of more seriously, uh, run companies, uh, sort of, uh, well, I don't see a lot of formal accreditation checks. I write most of my checks out of a fund, uh, now, so it's so it's not as much of a thing. But yeah, here's the thing. It's actually much less of an issue for the individual. I don't think Mickey's going to get in trouble for doing this. It really comes down to the company. So if Mickey is on a platform deploying money and- They could kick you off. Well, yeah, of course they could kick you off. I imagine if Mickey's not using an alt,

he will after this podcast goes live. Hopefully. We might have just burned your angel investing career. But no, the bigger issue is... It sounds like he actually hasn't made an investment though. And I think that's where the securities laws come into. It's probably not illegal to sign up. It's probably a securities issue if you actually do the deal.

Yeah. The bigger issue is for the company and the platform. If Mickey makes a bunch of investments that are very risky and they go to zero and Mickey and other people that were not accredited say, hey, I wasn't accredited. They marketed these sort, investments to me. Um, and the main thing, Mickey, uh, angel investing is very, very high risk. Uh, you will not get your money back for five to 10 years, maybe nothing at all could go to zero.

It is, um, one of the silliest investment activities of all time. It pays if you're good at it. But what I would say is whenever you are officially accredited or in your current state, start small. Don't invest all of your liquid assets too quickly because then you'll start seeing better deals in six months and you won't have any money to put to work. So good luck out there. Good luck. Let's go to another DM we received. Hi, John and Jordy. I've been investing in a large growth equity VC arm of a crossover fund, and I'd love to move to

one of the Holy Trinity firms. Can you give me a little insight as to how they differ culturally? So he's talking about a Kleiner, Sequoia and founders fund legacy yeah i mean fantastic firms i mean obviously i'm super biased here so i can't really comment that much but i can tell a little bit culturally um i mean founders fund everyone knows it's like kind of the the the pirate ship of the three yeah it's a little bit crazier a little bit uh weirder yeah weirder and like it's always been very freewheeling in terms of like the press strategy like you have on one end like peter writing a book that sits in airports and is like universally recognized as like a great business book found that the almost the foundation

of this podcast yeah yeah and then you have like delhi and just like being a madman on twitter and just like posting all sorts of crazy stuff too Mike, too. Yeah, and Mike. And just both of those are acceptable. And that's very – it's a tier of rivals. And the other cultural thing at Founders Fund, and I think the reason that founders gravitate to them quite often, is the entrepreneurial nature of the partners. So many of the partners have a fast-growing venture-backed startup yeah that they're also doing yeah ton of incubations um peter with palantir trey with andrel uh

and there's going to be more so um it's been yeah it's been it's just a very entrepreneurial firm no matter where you sit in the organization there there's everyone, you're never gonna get like here's your task list for this week. And at some, I mean, specifically growth. If this guy's at a growth equity crossover fund, there's probably an element of dialing for dollars. Have you seen this? Where it's like we need a price for every company,

so we gotta get in touch with every single IPO candidate, every single candidate that's late stage. Just call all of them, get the data, just pound and pound and pound. And Founders Fund is much more like whatever your strategy is, we're cool with that. It's not a consensus partnership either, right? So let's move on to Sequoia. I mean, Sequoia, obviously, long-term rival. Can't say too many nice things about them.

But we've talked about this before. We love Sean Maguire and what he's doing to pivot that brand to... Dark Sequoia. It's essentially Dark Sequoia. Like, you know, Elon has done the Dark MAGA thing, and Sean has brought a very unique energy to Sequoia that...

Kind of bucks historical trends. I mean, literally, everyone thought he was going to get fired for what he's doing because it's so bold. And there's been even articles about like the pushback that he's got on like, hey, maybe are you taking like, are you too aggressive on some of these positions? Yeah. But he's fought the war internally and it seems like he's won, which is amazing. Because fundamentally, like all these intra VC rivalries, like I don't care about as much as what the VCs are doing building technology for America versus our enemies abroad.

Yeah. The other thing you have to imagine, Sean has a bit of leverage given his close relationship with Elon. Sure. He's creating the new deep state. Yeah, exactly. So. Yeah. And then you go back.

I mean, like, I love some of the founders funds,' funds, legacy investments, the story of Ballantyre, the early Zuck deal. Pretty much crushed your champagne, nice work. Like the early Zuck deal is legendary, Airbnb and Stripe, but like Sequoia is just in a different tier when it comes to the legacy stuff, like NVIDIA, Google, right?

Isn't it four out of the $5 trillion companies? Or by the holy trinity everything sequoia did maybe they did they didn't do facebook apple nvidia and they didn't do microsoft yeah but yeah but because microsoft didn't really raise but uh but yeah apple nvidia uh google and then kleiner you go back even further and you have a whole other tier of like amazing legacy and you know it's almost like a vacheron it's exactly like vacheron it's like under underrated now but has like an incredible historical legacy and of course there's like the the talent wars of the holy trinity that people talk about a lot right now where you know everett randall moves over to Kleiner. He brings Lee Marie Braswell from Founders Fund. Keith goes to Coastal.

Keith goes to Coastal. There's a lot of trade deals going on right now. Yeah. But I remain extremely bullish on Sean and extremely bullish on Ev. I think Ev is just a fantastic dude. We're just bullish on risk, right? Exactly.

Anybody that's taking a risk, we're excited for you. Yeah. We're happy for you. And so to Exactly. Anybody that's taking a risk, we're excited for you. Yeah. We're happy for you. And so to answer the question of like where you fit in, you need to understand like, okay, what is your strategy and how much are you want to push things culturally? How many systems do you want in place? How entrepreneurial is your deal-making process?

And I think that's kind of, you go into a client or there's going to be a larger staff. There's going to be more support infrastructure. And that's going to be, and some people are going to flourish in that environment. It is harder to break into the holy trinity than the MBA. Yeah. Hands down. Yeah. Right. Just statistically. Statistically. Yeah. Yeah. So good luck out there. start networking and start sending some of those firms good deals because you know start sending us deals yeah send us deals and uh yeah happy to make a warm intro and we'll make some intros um let's uh go to another dm we got this is

hilarious when i first read it uh i'm gonna keep it anonymous but someone uh dm me and said where does founders fund keep its cash between investments? And I love this. Great question. I love this because it sounds like they're going to do a bank heist and they're going to try and steal the money that Founders Fund has.

But it also is a very legitimate question in that I don't think a lot of people know, obviously most of our listeners know, but a lot of people don't know where VC firms actually do keep the cash and just the mechanics of raising a fund. When you raise a billion dollar fund, that doesn't sit in your bank account. That's just commitments from LPs. And then you make capital calls on a per investment basis. So the money might- Or like programmatically quarterly. Yeah, exactly. So like you're not necessarily just sitting on a billion dollars

in some money market fund. It's sitting with your LPs. And when you want to make an investment, you call the capital. It moves through your account very quickly. And you only have a few days there. And then there are also credit lines that allow you to pull things forward

if you're off by a few days. Yeah, and so the reason that that is important is it increases the performance of the fund, right? reason that, that, that, that is important is it, is it increases the performance of the fund, right? So if you call the billion dollars, if you have a billion dollar fund, you call that capital on day one, uh, but then you deploy it over four to five years. That's money. That's just like sitting there, not really generating a return for your LPs. And so they would rather spread out those calls over time and be able to keep the, that, that capital in, in uh actively in the

market in other investments or treasury you know uh bonds or or whatever yeah exactly and this was a big thing during like the the sbb crisis a lot of firms were you know they did have some money tied up but it wasn't exactly a situation where the vcs were going to lose like all their money because most of the most of the funds that have been raised are invested just in liquid assets because the LPs have funds money sitting in. We should do a, at some point we should do a look back at the SVB crisis. Oh yeah, for sure.

Because I'm happy to provide my point of view of running a neobank at the time. I was inside Founders Fund at the time and we were getting accused of like causing it. It was the most insane thing. And our buddy who we mentioned before, Bryn Hobart, was the one who like deep dove SVB early and broke the story, essentially,

that their balance sheet was messed up. So yeah, we should do a whole thing. I've touched on it before in content, but we could easily do an hour on that. But now let's go to brother of the week. Each week, we try and honor one technology brother who exemplifies what it means to drive innovation forward, to allocate capital efficiently, to live the lifestyle, to enjoy luxury goods,

to be a capitalist and a consumerist, to be materialist. And this week- Loud and proud opulence. Loud and proud opulence. and proud opulence yeah so and this week was tough there were there were it was a really tight race yeah um yeah there were a lot of really solid candidates and this candidate kind of a cut above cut above uh and we'll start by saying that he is in the exclusive club, which is residents of the Venetian Isles in Miami. And this name might be new to some, but I don't think it will be new to many.

Somebody who has inspired a generation of investors and operators. He is a historian in his own right and also a capitalist right yeah he's somebody that has made a living and a very good one at that um sort of telling these stories of the history's greatest entrepreneurs handful of investors here and there um and he's somebody who less than three weeks ago uh we met with in miami and uh we talked to him about the podcast at the time we were recording one day a week and he said uh you guys uh are not taking this seriously enough uh you need to uh go home to california go to your studio and lock in uh and we certainly have done that otherwise we wouldn't be opening a bottle of champagne today

celebrating you know a very large number entering the four figure club on x yeah and being not only the most profitable podcast on earth but the fastest growing so uh today's uh brother of the week this week's brother of the week uh david david senra himself so congratulations david uh you will be receiving your brother of the week plaque plaque uh in the mail soon um and we just wanted to highlight one uh one particularly great david senra post uh he writes henry ford and meetings and uh it's a screenshot from some of his notes he said ford didn't like meetings at all sometimes in the middle or at the beginning of one he'd spring up as if he had to go to the bathroom or mumble that he'd forgotten to check on something

always giving the impression that he'd be right back he never came back there you go i love so in many ways you have to imagine that chesky and his recent tirade against meetings was inspired by Henry Ford. And he probably is a founders podcast listener. So thank you to David for the encouragement and exemplifying what it means to be a technology brother. Thank you, David. Let's move on to the timeline. And we will start with Lulu Masservey, one of my good friends. She writes, it's incredible that there's a Ramp Lovefest on here every few weeks.

Imagine how cracked the team has to be to organically build a fandom for a B2B SaaS finance product. And it's a screenshot of someone quote tweeting a question about should they go with Ramp or someone else. And they say Ramp by 100x margin. And yeah, it is it is incredible but it's a testament i i it's interesting because it's like the the ramp fandom is it's deliberate but i don't believe it's ever been in a deck like i don't think they ever wrote we need to build a fandom it's more just like the founders and the people that they associate the network is really great and it includes David Senra. It includes Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

It includes Lulu. It includes Lulu. Yeah, exactly. And Senra in Miami. Yeah, so if you're following Lulu and you're like, I fuck with her.

I like the stuff that she's putting out. Who else is she fuck with? Yeah. And it's Ramp. It's Cognition. It's Anderlele and so you're like i'm in here's the thing this is cool so a lot of people think to have a great brand you need to

spend a lot of money on a branding agency and uh you know we spent you know multiple six figures on on our you know technology brothers branding which is still you know rolling out uh not that you need to do that but we felt it was important and more podcasts should do it. But here's the thing. A great brand is not the font that you choose. It's not your logo mark. It's not how pretty your website is

or how many times people copy your website or how many times people copy your choice of color. A great brand is what it stands for and how it times people copy your choice of color, a great brand is what it stands for and how it makes people feel and something that people want to be associated with. So in the case of Ramp, Ramp stands for operational excellence, right? And they came up in a time,

they came onto the scene during the Zerp era. And so their position of, actually, we're going to help you save money was very contrarian at the time. Everyone else was spend, you know, spend, spend, spend, spend, check out all the rewards you can get. They were saying,

no, we're actually going to give that money back to you. And we're going to help you spend less on your cards, even though that's not directly beneficial to us. At the same time, they have built a, is it a DecaCorn yet? Is it close? Something close, will be soon. They've done that in a five-year time horizon,

which pretty much only Donald Trump has done in the last five years. So not only do they stand for operational excellence and help companies achieve that, but they have done that themselves and they've set that example, right? And so they've created this halo effect around the brand that other companies want to be associated with.

So now if you just incorporated your company on Stripe Atlas and you want to make a statement to your team about what your company stands for, you're going to use Ramp, right? It's how we're able to achieve our ridiculous profitability, even at a small scale. Yeah. There's also something interesting about them kind of building almost like a

non sequitur brand around the engineering excellence of the organization. Like most people would be like, I don't even know if I need IMO gold medalists or IOI gold medalists to write my B2B software. Like I'm good with like mid-tier programmers most of the time. They don't know that that's what they want. And they want like the real polish in their software. And they want the software to be an expression of almost art.

But it's really stuck out. And the last company I know that did that was Google. Have you heard about Jeff Dean? You know this guy? He's like, he leads their AI, but he was like the most insane programmer during Google's rise. And there's like these arcane websites out there of Jeff Dean jokes. And they're basically like Chuck Norris jokes. And it's like Jeff Dean's keyboard only has two keys, one and zero. Because he like programs in binary.

Yeah. Or like, you know, and then there's like 20 more jokes and you really need to understand computer science to get the joke. But they, like Jeff Dean was just this insane phenomenon and it really set the culture at Google. And you could almost say the same thing. Like, you know, people, like, you know,

do you need gold medalists to write B2B SaaS software? Well, do you need Jeff Dean to write search and ad software? Like, yes. Yes, you do, actually, because there's a big opportunity. It's really important. So get the best. Yeah. I had having the opportunity to go to dinner with Lulu, Eric and Kareem uh, in, in Miami a few weeks ago, and they invited one of their,

uh, engineers who had actually was moving over to marketing. So one interesting thing about ramps organization is it's so engineering led that ramp CTO Kareem actually runs marketing. And they oftentimes are focused on recruiting engineers to their marketing team because they want to take an engineering-led approach. And I can't comment on some of the things that they're doing in order to drive customer acquisition using that method, but they're a step above any other team, right? They didn't go recruit out of some big New York City marketing agency, right?

They're like engineering culture through and through. Let's go to Josh Kaplan. He is posting a deep dive on the Gundo from the Blaze called Hard Tech's Main Street. It says, Augustus Dorico on the Gundo practice of office checks. If you're not in the office at 12.04 a.m. chugging white monsters and popping zins you deserve to get your funding cut and this is this is interesting uh because great picture yeah i mean fantastic picture but i've always said that it's underrated

that the gundo guys beat the allegations of being too Twitter brained and too addicted to posting. And they very, very elegantly switched from just constantly posting and needing to do all the work themselves to get attention in media, to the media comes to them now and they just sit down. Because it's a very interesting story.

And I bet this got like a ton of reach. It's very valuable, very important for SEO. And it was probably like you know a one hour lunch yeah and they took some photos high leverage and augustus it's very high leverage exactly yeah it's way yeah and i would in credit to them they're some of the best posters of the generation fantastic but they didn't get too into it where they're like no they post way less than the ai people the accelerationists for. They post way less. They're averaging. Yep.

And I think that's good because they're actually able to go and build something real and take time for the important things. And then they can still pop up and post, but it's very much like, you know, shower thoughts. It's really like Slack time. They're not sitting there being like, let me write a whole segment for Augustaus shower thoughts when he's when his drones are flying yeah he has a second to yeah yeah yeah i mean that's basically uh yeah i mean like like obviously they need to um on that note they need to maintain attention oh yeah promoted post quickly uh we wanted to shout out that Augustus is at Rainmaker, who is featured in that article, is hiring, hiring, hiring. Need more engineers. Please, sir. My tech development timelines are starving.

So if you are an engineer, feel free to ping Augustus directly, apply for a job or DM us. And we're happy to give you our opinion on company and working with Augustus as he's a friend of the pod. So a great, great opportunity for the right engineers out there and make haste. Yeah. I think it's a rainmaker.com. If you want to make rain.com, make rain.com. There you go. If you want to learn more, we highly recommend it. I've made a whole video about the gun dough. There's a great Jason Carmen video about Rainmaker plenty of ways to learn more and find out if a job at Rainmaker is right for you let's go to Blake Robbins good great investor just great guy all around he says the inevitable AI side

hustle is to flood tick tock reels and shorts with AI edited subway surfer video plus top Reddit posts plus text to speech. Is that inevitable or is that like already happening? I think it's already happening. So Blake is a good example. A lot of people go say, oh, touch grass, get offline, go walk in the park. Blake's like no i'm gonna stay more online yeah i'm going to take uh pitches while he's the investor i i was pitching while talking while playing video games yeah yeah it was amazing and i was asking him if he's an example of in our very online world i would uh anybody that tells you to get offline uh is maybe uh doesn't have your best interest at heart because blake is a fantastic investor and found some great companies over the years very early. But yeah, we've seen this. A lot of people are saying,

you know, you can make $10,000 a month making some AI influencers. Not sure about that. But the clipping strategy is very established as a way to, you know, at least generate a lot of attention. And you don't need to be particularly an expert in anything yourself to get great at clipping. Yeah. And when we get into more of the, the, the VC trade deals, the, the, the, you know, who's, who's working where, who's moving from one firm to the other, we got to analyze Blake because he was at Benchmark. They let him go start another fund. He was at that Detroit fund for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he's moved around a bunch, tons to analyze there. Would have been a top draft pick for me if I was running one of the major venture firms,

but. Holy Trinity. You know, we'll see. We'll see how he ends up. I like that he has his own fund though. He's a master of his own destiny now. Yep. Santiago says, wait, did you just say Dutch East India Company? Dude, they were the OG venture capitalists. VCs today are soft herd animals. These dudes were hardcore. They'd be like, there's an island that produces something we want, and if we get it, we'll 30,000X our investment. And it's, I guess that's him.

Yeah, yeah. With the OCV, which is the, the Dutch East India trading company logo on Rogan, which is funny. Yeah. It's funny. Yeah. Aaron was talking about, you know, cornering the nutmeg market, but yeah, it's funny to think about the Dutch East India company looking at, you know, a venture capitalist today is typically pretty happy with 100x, 200x. That's kind of the range where you start to go, okay, this was a good bet. And, you know, they probably looked at something like that

and being like, man, with the risks that we're taking on, like I need at least a 2000x. I mean, now it's even lower. Like a lot of the growth equity funds are just like 20% IRR deals, no zeros. Yeah. Like imagine, I mean, it's a good strategy. Like it's worked, it's smart, it's rational.

It's private equity. It doesn't feel like, yeah, it's private equity. It doesn't feel like venture. Venture needs to be, there's a 90%. There's a 5% chance this is a trillion dollar company. 90% chance it goes to zero. 5% chance the founder goes to jail and I'm disgraced and I never work again.

Here's a company that's the venture company that, that practices a friend of the pod, uh, Justin Mayers, uh, and Lee, the, the team over at long journey, they practice true venture today where they will back a, uh, founder who's still working in some university on some like crazy project or a poster. That's like the most absurd thing you've ever heard yep uh and they take you know they're they're they're they're making these bets where they'll invest very small six-figure checks at very reasonable valuations given the risk profile and uh i'm extremely bullish on the strategy it makes me feel like an idiot for entering companies at 15 posts yep

or 20 posts uh i mean i was talking to lee the other day he he was the first investor in crusoe yeah like fantastic company like crushing and also they i was talking to cyan about something they they invested in a diamond company yeah like yeah where is that on any market map yeah but they were but they were like yeah we want to be investing off market yeah yeah yeah off market maps for sure i think that the thesis was like well like lab-grown diamonds are gonna get cheaper people will eventually switch over but now it's like oh actually diamonds are important to like chip fabrication in some weird way here's somebody i texted a i texted a market map to my friend amar the other day and he goes damn that market

map looks like the menu at a tgi friday and i was like that is a good example of like if the market map looks like a tgi friday's menu probably stay away don't don't make your first bet stay away because the game is well stay tuned for the technology brothers market map we will be mapping out uh every poster that we mentioned on the show. And we're very excited to drop our first market map. Let's go to Ken. He says by 2026, there will be two jobs, HVAC technician and YC founder. Everything else will be done by computers and the HVAC technicians will have higher average annualized revenue. So here's the thing. I had uh there's a guy a guy i use for like random like handyman stuff around the house uh and i were talking the other day

he's helping me with something and he was like dude i've been taking these like engineering classes i've been like learning to build websites and uh i i i i didn't try to dissuade him from doing that because I think it's like you should know how to build a Web site. You should know how to make an application. Right. Like those sort of things are like basic skills, like replacing a screw in your house almost. Right. You should know how to like paint a fence, maybe something like that um but i told him i was like look every single person out of the last 400 people that i've texted could make a website today and ship it like a tiny fraction of those people like know how to uh properly like clean a gutter and maintain the gutter in a home right and an even smaller fraction are going to know how to like, you know, service an HVAC unit.

So I told them, I was like, look, you're already very skilled in these areas. And if you really productize what you're doing and get smart about building a team and marketing, I guarantee you that you already have momentum in this area. Like you're going to be making more money than the average web developer in three years. Yeah, it's like taste and like arcane knowledge that doesn't

exist on the internet is like what's valuable like yeah i've seen what i what i'm seeing in the creative market right now is the truly truly talented creatives that uh that have incredible impeccable taste and execution and have built great teams around them are busier than ever yep uh then the the bottom half of the market like the historical web developer like i'm gonna make 200k you're developing maintaining a website like almost like blown out like non-existent like not not a great uh career path anymore i'm gonna be an accredited investor for very long yeah yeah exactly if you want to be a credit investor, do not become a website. Commoditized web developer.

Maintainer. Let's go to Trey Stevens, one of my colleagues at Founders Fund. He says, what do we want? An Anduril merch store. When do we want it? Now. And he is commemorating the launch of the Anduril merch store. Very cool CGI render.

They're going to be dropping something. I don't think they've actually talked about what they are dropping but i i've heard it's a very unique and cool plan we'll have to do a live opening yeah we'll do unboxing i'll get yeah so here's here's the thing so the most hyped merch drops on on on x right now are andrel and palantir but the issue is they both stand for very similar things yes there's not a lot of like conflict. It's hard to really pick a side. Yep, yep, yep. We need a third player to come in the mix so that people can kind of like, you know,

there needs to be conflict. Otherwise, there's no opportunity. And I mean, I just imagine when I see a lot of Anderle and Palantir gear, it's a lot of t-shirts. It's a lot of sweatshirts. It says quiet luxury. It says, hey, I might have written a seed check in this company. Now it's a lot of t-shirts it's a lot of sweatshirts it says quiet luxury it says hey i might have written a seed check in this company now it's worth 100 billion dollars yeah i'm wealthy but that's not the future the future is loud opulence loud opulence you need

to be screaming yeah so i think there's an opportunity for a defense tech you know firm to come out that's maybe competing with these guys and say we're going loud yes we support kipping pull-ups gold-plated drones we support you know palantir has been very clear they do not want you drinking or doing kipping pull-ups while wearing their merch exactly and so that creates an opportunity for a maybe pro crossfit pro drinking wait wait they said no drinking in the yeah yeah oh this is a huge problem no more than no more than two drinks no more than two drinks okay i wonder if we can get like a dom perignon's uh exception yeah i think that i think that's essential no more than five bottles of yeah i mean we're gonna finish this bottle of that there's no problem come on let's go uh matt turk says

business trip to europe 6 30 am. wake up check phone, accept cookies. 9 a.m. I already see where this is going. I haven't read this one. 9 a.m. meeting, use laptop, accept more cookies. 12 p.m. taxi to lunch, accept cookies. Yes. 4 p.m. new Czechs news, accept cookies.

11 p.m. Netflix, but first cookies. 1 a.m. restroom, this is a joke but somebody ran the numbers and they said something like europeans will spend billions of hours accepting cookies it's insane it's just like a constant it's so insane that there's no like opt out this is like the worst thing like europe's going known for being known for great pastries to being known i mean even even apple's doing this where it's just like every single app, I have to say, allow app to track or accept or deny. And you always do because you want to support

advertising. I literally do because I'd rather have targeted advertisements than non-targeted advertisements. I want to see an ad for a Patek Philippe. I don't want to see an ad for some Hublot. They should know me by now. Exactly. So, yeah yeah very disappointing europe

i i really hope we can push back back against this in the united states because obviously i i never go to europe i don't travel for apple for apple it was a brand thing they realized that they had an opportunity to be the privacy big focus big tech company even though they know everything even though even though they yeah yeah even though they know every single thing about us already and it doesn't matter. Big tech feels like being a user of big tech products, like when you're using Facebook or when you're using an iPhone, it feels like you have divorced parents. And it feels like Apple is actively in a fight with meta. And it's like, I'm trying to use, I'm trying to log into my sunglasses. They work together.

They work together. Like, I'll drop the kids off.'m trying to log into my sunglasses. They work together. Like, I'll drop the kids off. Exactly. And you pick them up. And then they kind of bicker at each other. Like, oh, oh, oh, you want to use these meta glasses? Like, well, do you want to, are you sure you want to accept the terms? Do you want to do this? There's 20 different pop-ups.

You said you were going to pack lunch for the kids. Exactly. And when I picked them up, they said that they didn't have any lunch. Exactly. What's going on? It's so frustrating. And yeah, I'm getting close to burn it all to the ground, but we'll let

them keep going. The Apple company is not happy with me, but I'll keep using that shit. Let's go to Ashley Vance. He says, my exclusive today is on the biggest investor in brain and longevity science that you've never heard of. James Fickle turned a crypto fortune into a research

empire. I love this. We need better elites. This is an example of better elites. Is he sun gazing right now? I think he is. He looks like it. Face, face. Yeah, there you go.

I sun gaze before the podcast. Yeah, I try and like tease it in. I try and go for a run outside. I don't raw dog it like some people that we know. I try and run outside and catch some rays in the early morning. I mean, if you can get to the gym or to whatever you're doing on the run and the sun's coming up, nothing's more inspiring than that.

It's fantastic. But yeah, I don't know. Longevity and brain? Yeah, I think, honestly, Ashley is, I think, a great journalist. She writes some great pieces. And I think that she is... Hey, hey, hey I think, a great journalist. She writes some great pieces. And I think that she is. Hey, hey, hey. Easy, easy.

I'm just saying certain journalists, you know, are friends of the pod, adjacently friendly, and others are, you know, less friendly. But, no, I think Bloomberg has been making moves. Credit to them, right? They got Kate Clark last week. They've got Ashley. Emily Chang. Emily Chang.

Big momentum over. And a lot of people. Yeah. It's great. Shout out to the journos. Let's go to Nick Milinovic. He says, D-reg expectations are creating a lot of upward movement for public fintechs.

So I brought Nick up on the show before talking about how his strategy, it's very dangerous as a VC to just pick a single category and just make that your entire identity and focus. And Nick's strategy to date has been to have smaller funds and make sure that he's actually generating real carry. Phenomenal investor. I think he's had a community and a media platform forever and really has done a good job of making sure

that I think anybody that is building in fintech that's worth backing is probably aware of him at this point. And he kind of, as much as there was a crypto bear market, there was also a huge fintech bear market. In the public markets for sure dave.com less than book value and it's up 40 percent yeah a bunch of others um so uh wait is this the last seven days oh my god like i'm looking at this and it's like sizzles up 103 percent i think it's the last seven days like i'm not sure but yeah maybe nick should open a uh public he needs to yeah start a hedge fund

man yeah but yeah i mean i know i know a decent amount of these companies but there there's a ton on here it's uh yeah it's good to be back it's good to be good to be back matt freed writes i don't know i feel like waymo can solve most of their problems by adding just one additional seat so waymo is counteracting the bird turret on you remember we've talked about the bird I feel like Waymo can solve most of their problems by adding just one additional seat. So Waymo is counteracting the bird. You remember we've talked about the bird, how bird really suffered in LA because it became the new hot thing to throw a bird off of a 10 story skyscraper. So we've seen Waymos get into similar situations where they're alone in a street and maybe a bunch of people decide to start doing donuts around the Waymo and maybe jumping on it and lighting it on fire.

So anyways, I think Waymo would be smart. I would look at potentially partnering with Anduril and getting some of their FPV drones that just sort of like follow the Waymo. Flock safety. Protect it. Flock safety works, but I want like something kinetic, right?

Like you need that kinetic potential didn't they acquire some of the drone company but it's not non-kinetic non-kinetic so now waymo needs uh you know suicide drones trailing it and there needs to be laws to protect ai right because i think humans are a bigger threat to ai right at this moment than ai is a threat to humans so to make sure we don't piss the ai off too much we should allow uh ai rights yeah self-defense is a threat to humans. So to make sure we don't piss the AI off too much, we should allow AI rights. Self-defense is an important principle. Yeah. I mean, everything about the decision to start in San Francisco

just feels better and better because it's like an extremely chaotic city where, I mean, they obviously did the pilot in Arizona, which was like a super safe, like super wide open streets, like always like dry, no hills. And then once they got that going, they went straight to the hardest mode, like level 1000 going into San Francisco,

like crazy streets, tons of pedestrians, like shoddy streets, like all sorts of weather, fog, and also people that will vandalize you. So if they can solve that, it's going to be a breeze to go to Chicago or LA la here's here's going to be the big unlock for waymo so when waymo instead of doing uber black because all waymo cars are like clean and fairly spacious and it's nice inside so maybe black doesn't matter but they should have a waymo turbo s functionality right there you go

call a 992 turbo s yep and just say like hey, drive however you want, but just try to keep it 15 over the speed limit, which is maybe like where police aren't going to bother you, but just stay under that. And let me really enjoy the car while I'm in it. Right. So Waymo, please roll out Turbo S's. We will pilot them around Los Angeles. Yeah, this is correct. Elon says, use Grok for answers that are based on up-to-date info. ChatGPT has no idea on whom Donald Trump has assigned new responsibility of enforcing our borders. Grok is real-time. ChatGPT is outdated. Interesting. I mean, there is something great about Grok being integrated with the timeline. I love that. But I actually haven't used it that much.

I've used it for a couple like generative images. Yeah. Because I feel like it's a lot less restrained there. So if you want to do something fun for like a kid and you want to do like, oh, it's going to be Mickey Mouse and Paw Patrol together. Boom. Boom.

Go to Grog. Yeah. I think, I haven't been going for just like the, the, the news, the, the, the default LLM.

It's not in my home row in that way. Yeah, I think we should go on record and say that we support AI. We are excited about all the foundation models. But we are excited about ways that these foundation models can differentiate, right? And this is one of them. Not only is XAI have sort of an interesting distribution hack through X,

but they certainly have found ways to resonate with a broader audience outside of the college students that are using ChatGPT to solve their homework problem or write an essay for them. Yeah, that's great. So got to mix that in more. I use Perplexity. I use ChatGPT. Claude every once in a while.

Really? I kind of go back and forth on it. I kind of subscribe and unsubscribe. Because every once in a while you see the meme of like, oh, Claude's doing really well. Like the responses are really good. And it has been good, but the UI honestly is great for me. So I back off.

But I think if you're programming, Claude has become like the default integration for Cursor. So yeah, I think we could be seeing some bifurcation, some specialization. Well, let's go to the other AI founder. Sam Altman says, more generally, I am feeling good about a bright future for cryptocurrency.

Here we go. Risk on. Risk on. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the interesting things. A lot of the AI people have been very, very bearish on crypto because they see it as this zero-sum rivalry. Either the VCs are in AI or crypto. They're going back and forth, and that's somewhat true.

Same thing with talent. Developing for crypto is hard. Developing for AI is hard. So you need the best talent. You need the best talent. You don't want to be sucked away by some person that's like, oh, I'm getting so rich working at a crypto company. But it's good that he has this perspective at the top end of saying,

this isn't zero sum. We actually probably need both. Especially as we go to like, you know, more global payments, the stable coins, the prediction markets, the speculation, the digital goal. Yeah, I think part of it is there's real competition in the capital markets for there's sometimes the capital feels infinite, which is an incredible feeling. But more often than not, these bigger allocators are looking at, you know, all right, we should be deploying into crypto this year.

We should be deploying into AI this year. And both industries in a perfect world would want to take all that right and so um but we we've talked about this before with sam uh one of the i honestly haven't followed world coin closely enough it does feel like they're building some pretty crazy momentum from like a talent standpoint super bullish on world coin from day one just because sam's involved yeah oh yeah and you said like sam just makes money yes period so um let's go to the bear case for crypto currently or maybe just some cautious optimism from robert leshner he says a cheat sheet of things that could blow up at 200k btc

crazy volatility spot exchanges missing missing coins I think that's like maybe like a Robin Hood thing is that what spot exchange missing coins mean like if you're trading like yes then essentially synthetic Bitcoin and you don't actually necessarily own the under the underlying asset derivative exchanging exchanges miners that overwrote call options defy borrowing markets hedge funds high leverage traders including you plan accordingly It's all the lessons from the last bubble, basically. I first heard that as miners, as in like people under the age of 18.

I mean, so many literal miners were huge in crypto, especially NFTs, especially in the ICOs. Lots of young kids. Can you imagine the NFT boom during, like if you were in middle school and you had like a crypto wallet? Yeah, yeah. And you get like a hundred bucks

and you run it up to 50k. Yeah, but the thing that's interesting about here is people always think about like systemic risk in crypto as being prices dropping a ton. But the meteoric rise, and I think this is a great call out. And I think I've talked to Robert like one time years ago, but like very early and right with crypto. But, but yeah, people aren't sort of prepared for the systemic risk that comes from just the market crap of crypto potentially doubling in the next few months.

Right. Do we have any more promoted posts today? Good question. Actually on the note of, financial markets, we have a promoted post from BlackRock. BlackRock says, our chairman and CEO, Larry Fink, highlights in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, which we love, that the most realistic path to reducing America's debt burden is through growth. He discusses the opportunity for U.S. capital markets to drive growth by building hashtag infrastructure,

particularly in data centers and hashtag ai technology larry says any realistic path out of debt has to rely mainly on growth we need to increase the size of our economy so that what we owe becomes smaller relative to what we make so incredible uh we we should consider printing this out and just kind of putting it on the wall because it's worth coming back to but um hey this is this is fascinating i heard this interesting take from ben thompson that um that if you're if you're a government and you're in debt there are two ways out of it one is to kind of unstagnate yourself and yeah and bring about economic growth which is what larry is arguing for which i strongly support it's a very hard problem there's a piece of deregulation there's a piece of innovation there's a whole bunch of things that need to go right to actually get gdp above two percent to like the three four five

percent range that would be yeah we've talked about this on the podcast going from two percent annual gdp growth to four percent would solve like pretty much pretty much our problems exactly so yeah but the other but the other way that governments are tempted to solve a debt crisis is always inflation. But democracy has this like built in kind of escape valve for inflation because inflation hurts the average voter, the average consumer so much.

Because even though right now, like inflation has declined, that's the rate of inflation. The prices didn't go back to before the inflation. Look at the tech. Yeah, and so a lot of people are still hurting, even though, yeah, the prices aren't going up anymore. They're still high relative to what people perceive,

you know, a banana should cost or a gallon of gasoline should cost. And so there's a lot of pressure. And most of the US elections are like referendums on the economy referendums on the right track wrong track how is the country doing and so there's this hopefully over time there's this forcing function to like do not inflate the debt away instead let's focus on growth let's focus on and and going back to the trump pump the sort of virtuous cycle of

saying let's get government spending in control. Let's spend more efficiently. Let's spend in the right places. Let's accelerate. And let's focus on growing the economy, which I think is a core tenets of the new administration, regardless of your political beliefs. Yeah. Let's go to Buko Capital Bloke. He says, private company SaaS employees hearing that the IPO window is closed with markets at all-time highs, Dogecoin mooning, and Carvana up 800% year-to-date.

And it's a picture of Shane Gillis from a great sketch with a gun in his mouth. This guy's very sharp on SaaS broadly. I have no idea where he works or whatever, but he's clearly an insider within that world. And I think what he's actually speaking to is all of the, if you're in the top 20% private companies right now, every single one of those companies is looking at, we are going to go public within the next two years. It just takes time. Like the IPO window is open. Here's the issue though. There's thousands of other private unicorns that are backlogged that are no, that just don't have the traction or momentum okay and so he's talking about these employees that are maybe at the number 49 oh yeah yeah uh unicorn fast company who's like yeah we have 30 million of arr but we're only growing 40 a year and yes the ipo window is

closed for you right just because you shouldn't probably go public that makes sense i i just think like generally they shouldn't be hearing the IPO window is closed in that scenario. They should be hearing the IPO window is about to open up in a big way. We are good enough. We need to double down. We need to grind. Yeah, we need to get into gear because this is the opportunity if they want to go public. Or I think some of those companies, maybe they end up merging with others and creating enough revenue.

Let's go to Adam Singer with a related post uh he says dogecoin is up 170 percent in the last month and it's a picture of someone throwing the intelligent investor by benjamin graham in the trash that photo i feel like is is very lindy over the last few years almost every single year you could use it in some capacity uh almost every single day or month a friend who bought dogecoin Dogecoin right before the election. Dogecoin. Dogecoin. I wonder if it's related to like literally like the Doge,

the Department of Government Industry or efficiency. I think it ends up, I mean, Doge obviously is always traded to some degree based on Elon's attention towards it, right? Which is hilarious because the founder like completely distanced himself from this. You know the history of Doge? No. So the founder of Dogecoin created it as a joke because he was anti-cryptocurrency

and thought that all cryptocurrency was a scam and a fraud. And so he created the dumbest possible thing, the dumbest possible token, Dogecoin, based on this stupid dog based on he effectively kicked off meme coins meme coins it's the first meme coin yeah he's the reason that pumped up fun has done like 200 million of net he created an entire industry yeah and he sold all his doge and he's been very against it and he's put out these like long posts saying that like this is everything wrong tears with a hundred dollars a hundred dollar bills i think he sold too early i don't

know maybe he still has some did you hear did you hear about the um the the best trade of the last week was a trader that turned 17 dollars into about three million with peanut peanut and that i've never heard but i heard so so and that made me think meme coins are the new american lottery yep for the terminally online yeah right and anybody like just that one trade will probably inspire a billion dollars of new investment in meme coins totally right yeah so i mean i remember during the last dogecoin pump there was this guy who was like the dogecoin millionaire and he was doing podcasts about how he put his life savings in dogecoin ran it up to a couple million it completely tanked.

He had like 10K, was broke. And then he was like, I'm not selling, I'm not selling. So I hope he didn't sell it. I hope he's back up because we'd love to see that. I want to put the word out that we're back up. Let's go to Sikhi Chen, Blader. Is that how you pronounce it? We'll see.

Blader. Next year feels like it will be the best year in history to be in tech. As a founder employer employee investor anything you got 1k likes it has that vibe right build in winter never felt so real and so good i love ck i've actually never met him in person but just he runs runway online interact uh runs runway he started that company i think he was an early vp yeah he started um yeah i'm blank on the the name of it but it's the irl vr yeah no not playground um yeah i forget what it is ben what's the name of the vr company that ck started it's in yeah it but they had a really tough time

in covid yeah exactly because it was in-person vr experiences but now he's got this amazing company called runway that uh i think gary's an investor yeah gary invested in andreason's in it uh cool a niche uh my friend over there i think cool did led one of their rounds um but uh siki's uh always been uh just extremely i would say like tech positive yeah he's obviously um and uh his company runway is doing something really interesting they're they're basically applying um some of the same like kind of mechanics that you have in figma to pnls and pro formas and helping everybody at a company better understand uh the numbers in their business yep uh do we have another uh promoted post yep uh this promoted post is from cartier uh they say in steel rose gold or paved with diamonds the tank americana celebrates the

casual chic spirit of a continent on american time hashtag cartier tank so anyways uh if you are a technology brother and looking for a nice gift for a significant other. Yep. The Cartier tank is a great option. It's certainly an investment, but it's something that has stood the test of time. Are you familiar with the history of the Cartier tank? I don't know the tank. I know the Santos.

Oh, yeah. No, the tank is like fabulous. Of course I know the tank. Yeah, but it was worn by Jackie Kennedy. It was worn by Muhammad Ali. Yep. And Andy Warhol. And so it's this interesting blend where it is seen in some ways as like a feminine watch,

but it's been worn by arguably like the most masculine guy in history, Muhammad Ali, and also this like interesting artist in Andy Warhol. And so it's cut across all of the cultural barriers in a really fascinating way. And it's just a really striking design. It's beautiful. The Tecamerican is a little bit more rectangular, a little bit more accented. But it's a fantastic watch,

and I highly recommend it to anyone who's in the market. Well, and thanks to Cartier um let's go to uh Mary Gunarate uh she says uh Genius Bar employees asked me what I do for work and I didn't lie we're so back what does she do so Mary has a crypto protocol okay I invested oh yeah so the last couple years were rough yeah they uh her and her co-founder luke have just uh weathered the absolute storm focused on fundamentals and actually building products that that uh their users love uh they've iterated multiple times they've stayed focused um i i love the team over there they didn't listen to jason calacanis who

told me to pivot to AI. Yeah, they had a lot of people like J. Cal telling them pivot to AI, pivot to AI, pivot to defense tech. Refused. Anyways, brilliant team. And I'm happy to see that Mary's no longer embarrassed to say what she does for a living

because she is a phenomenal founder. And cheers to Mary. Cheers to Mary. Potential future brother of the week. Yep. Let's go to Zach, the founder of Bridge. Sold his company to Stripe recently. He says, in the last week,

I've heard that a dozen developers building with Bridge are raising rounds slash have term sheets. It makes me so incredibly happy. We're entirely focused on empowering these builders, supporting their success is all that matters so it's funny when when bridge got acquired for 1.1 billion about a month ago uh everybody was just like oh stable coins bridge stripe that makes sense yep i don't think it was talked about enough that stripe likely made that acquisition because they saw that the brightest

most exciting companies building in stable coins were using Bridge, which was exactly what Stripe built their entire business on, was making sure all the best new founders in the Bay Area were using Stripe. So anyways, people that felt like that was a crazy price to pay, or they were like, they only have 15 million of revenue,

or they're paying this crazy multiple on revenue to acquire the business uh stripe was basically i imagine making a venture style bet into a company that they saw themselves in so excited to see uh what comes out of uh developers building on bridge and and congrats to zach again yep uh reggie james says the cost for lack of vision a crowded market yep underrated tweet 63 likes deserve 6k low tam banger banger uh really good point really good point this is the market map thing if it's on the market map so you don't have a vision here's an example so world coin yep clearly has vision it's had a lot of critics over the years. Oh, why do you have this orb? Why are you scanning everybody? Literally vision scanners.

Yeah, yeah. They're scanning eyeballs like all over the world. And in one of the world's most competitive industries where people switch between products very rapidly, they'll cycle through multiple protocols in the same day, crossing across different l2s to l1s to l3s not caring they've carved out a lane and have a vision and you could maybe argue that they don't have competition in what they're doing um so uh you know reggie's very unique entrepreneur and uh i think historically has always tried to do the same right like have that uh unique point of view and focus yeah he also just always focuses on like taste and design and like these interesting things that always get forgotten by the core Silicon Valley folks.

The YC crowd. Yeah, well, it's not just the YC crowd. It's like you can dismiss design and taste if you're just a developer and you only care about like, what is the programmatic truth? What is the mathematical proof of this thing? And maybe design takes a backseat to that. Or if you're just the business guy

and you're just like whatever makes money, maybe this taste thing or having good design or having a strong opinion or a vision, that doesn't make sense this quarter. But Reggie has always been good about like looking further into the future. And I think that calls back to like an earlier era of Silicon Valley, which I really respect. Let's go to Gabby Goldberg.

She says the Hawk to a girl ships faster than most of us on this app. And it's a quote to a tech crunch saying the Hawk to a girl launches Pookie tool, an AI powered dating advice app. And it's fine. Yeah. And I love this. You had a good take about this.

There's been a lot of doubt in AI recently. Yeah. My thing, I was happy to see she wasn't discouraged by the recent potentially scaling sort of wall within AI. There's a lot of fear in AI. She's not. She's just shipping. She's building. That's what everybody should basically be doing.

You can't be afraid. You just got to ship. And here's the thing. And there's a lot of hate on rappers right now. There's a lot. Oh, you shouldn't build a chat GPT rapper. Well, what what does she have she has a cornered resource in her audience she's got attention where yes who knows if this is that much better than just asking vanilla chat gpt but if she can drive people to this app she can monetize that she's effectively acting as like

an affiliate of open ai here and sure it's not going to be a trillion dollar company it's not going to disrupt open ai but it's going to create a trillion dollar company. It's not going to disrupt open AI, but it's going to create a lot of value. And that's what matters. So here's a potential thing with the internet. So historically,

people would have their 15 minutes of fame, right? Hawk to a girl. You know her website? No. 16minutes.com. 16minutes.

That's great. Fantastic. I soon saw that. She's smart. She clearly has a smart team around her. I actually know she does her podcast with Joey.

Yeah, I know. Better. But look, historically, you'd have your 15 minutes of fame. And then the traditional media would move on because you were no longer interested. And you wouldn't have captured any of that audience. You couldn't capture anything in that moment. No, but she has millions of followers already. Now you can get 15 minutes of fame, get your 5 million followers, however many it is,

and then continue to monetize that and ship against it and iterate and so i think that's underrated more people should be trying to get their 15 minutes of fame because it can actually convert into a very very uh meaningful career for her i'm sure she's having the time of her life so yeah it seems great so classic american story of making a sex joke or having some sex related video and then turning it into a career like the Kardashians. Yep, fantastic. Let's go to Chris McFrank. He says, some are calling Elon the George Soros of the right. That's not really accurate. He's more like 44 George Soros's of the right because Elon Musk has 320 billion dollars and George Soros has seven. Here's the thing. Okay, put on the tinfoil hat we're in we're

in the conspiracy zone the conspiracy scientists are out of the room it's bro scientists now yep let's hear it experts take a step take a step back so here's the thing i'm fully in favor of this i like that we're rebuilding the deep state we're making a deep state great again great that said i do have to imagine that george soros who has uh done some of the most heinous uh political acts in the history of the country is the kind of billionaire that would want his uh sort of a net worth to be under uh like under projected right okay the real billionaire class is saying i don't want to be on the forbes list yep uh if i have to be put me down at saying, I don't want to be on the Forbes list. Yep.

If I have to be, put me down at this much. I don't want people to know that I have $200 billion. Like I'd rather people just think that I'm like, you know, a brokey bean air with, you know, $7 billion. Sure, sure, sure. Like he, at a certain point, once you're a billionaire, like any sort of adding numbers to it doesn't do much. You're a bean air.

And Soros is harder to clock because it's all in this fund and stuff it's not like yeah with elon it's very easy to just say okay he owns 20 of this big company and i have to imagine he's very pro taxation just across the board you have to imagine that he uh does some creative things with his um accounts including uh offshore activity that would mitigate that so shout out to uh the new soros elon musk fantastic uh let's go to zeke uh at zeeked up uh he says i can't wait to pump my system full of niche tech twitter influencer john coogan's proprietary lock-in chemicals. And then he quote tweets and says, my mom told me not to smoke cigarettes.

She didn't say shit about online chewy chemical brain boost pouches sold by a handsome conservative investor with a podcast about combining technology and frat bros. Incredible. Put it on the wall. Frame it. Frame it right now. I don't even think I could reply to this

because I didn't even know where to start. It was just like thumbs up, I guess. Wait, when we posted about the Blood Boy giveaway, somebody said RIP. Oh, yeah, Zeke is RIP. He's going to be the Blood Boy. I don't know. Does he have Blood Boy physiognomy or something? Yeah, we're going to have to do kind of a deeper analysis there.

Okay, yeah. But before we get into the next tweet. Oh, yeah, we got a promoted post. Let's go. Promoted post from Langchain. We asked, you answered, our state of AI agents report is here. We surveyed 1300 industry professionals from developers to business leaders

on how they're using AI agents today and the results are in. What are the top use cases for agents? What are the biggest challenges when building agents? Who's finding success after deploying their agents to production? Go to langchain.com slash state of ai agents to get the full report and uh thank you to langchain yeah thank you to langchain um let's go to gabby goldberg she says

coffee shops yeah gabby's in here twice she's she's crushing it this week uh coffee shops opening at 10 a.m is the sign of a crumbling society. That's always been my issue in New York. You ever go to New York and you wake up? I thought it was the city that never sleeps. You can always get coffee and pizza. No, seriously. I'll wake up in New York.

I've got to wait like three hours. What? Is that real? Yeah. The coffee shops open up super late. Weird. You've got to find these random. I feel like in L.A. like Starbucks opens at 6. That's the thing.

Everybody's like, oh, the city that never sleeps. No, New Yorkers are not getting coffee at 6 a.m. Interesting. Maybe it's because the people that are actually getting up at 6 a.m. are just getting coffee at their office. Or they're drinking cocaine. That's always been my, yeah, that's always been my frustration with New York. New York's got to get it together.

It literally is hurting the economy that people can't get more cups of Joe around the city at earlier hours. So figure it out. Let's go to gary tan this is great because we see the follow back icon that means he already follows us but this is the first time on the show because we haven't followed him after we post we're going to follow him and then he will be an honorary technology brother yep um potential brother of the week maybe um yeah he he might deserve brother of the week for the recent SF election.

I mean so many wins with this guy, it's just W's every single week, it's gonna be hard, he's gonna be in the running a lot, I can feel it. Yeah, many plaques on the way. So Gary says, designed for super early startups, seems like it has become increasingly a lost art. This is kind of what Reggie was talking about. Great simple UX that has clear call to actions,

obvious nav, good use of contrast and no distracting ornamentation. Sadly waning. How you do anything is how you do everything. What a great post. And it makes sense

because Gary is a designer. He designed the Palantir logo. You know this? I did not know that. It's crazy. Yeah, he was like one of the earliest employees of Palantir.

Did he do Coinbase's logo too? I don't know if he did Coinbase's logo, but I mean, Coinbase was in my YC batch summer 12. Gary was around there. I'm sure he's super close with them. And then I think Initialize did like one of the major rounds

or something. Made a ton of money on that. Wait, so you were in Coinbase? Yeah, with Brian. So how much did you invest? I didn't have any money. We're going to have to cut this out of the show. But you know what was crazy?

In our YC batch, the referral bonus for going on coinbase at the time was one bitcoin that's wild it was like dude if you sign up i'll give you five bucks in the form of one bitcoin that's amazing uh yeah i would say like small example here is the reason that more startup there's no excuse not to have great design as an early stage company is all it takes is one person with good taste yes and even one person with a freelancer that has good taste yes yes that's uh that's that's all it takes right it doesn't you simply have to care about it a tiny little bit yep and you can make it happen yep and more people just like hire the designer that they know yeah or they go online or the one one who's really hot and has already...

There's this weird trend where there's someone who has a lot of taste and then they start scaling their operation and they start delegating and you're still paying $300,000 for B-tier, C-tier talent because the real tastemaker is working with the Fortune 500 clients now and you're out of the game. Yeah, and Party Round had great design early because the first hire that we made was Brandon Jacoby. He was the first person to join the team. He had been at Cash App for four years. He was still like 23, 24 at the time. So it wasn't like we had, you know, it wasn't like he was like, no, I need to make 350 K a year base.

So I think that investors should be extremely judgmental of companies that have poor design because it's basically you should figure out a way to get it done for almost zero dollars. And then all it takes from that point on is hiring one person who's a great designer and you should be able to attract that person. Otherwise, you're not compelling as a founder. Or if you don't care about design, great designers will not want to join your company. Yep, I agree. Bifrost Orbital says, the youngest teenagers to have built satellites

at the age of 16 have made it to Y Combinator. Ankar, CEO, now 19, and Geffen, CTO, now 23. So one incredible accomplishment. Yes, congrats. Congrats on YC. So one incredible accomplishment. Yes. Congrats. Congrats on YC. Pretty good.

Pretty good traction on this post. That said, I wanted to invite these guys to send us a note and we will help you learn to post because this could have been way, way more viral if it was from the actual founders account and it was a deep dive into tell me more. Not in the third person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tell me more. Like, what were you doing at 16? I would want to show me a picture of the satellite i want to see like first line we built our first first satellite at 16 now we're in yc here's the story boom exactly so anyways we yeah we don't do this often but pro bono consulting pro bono consulting will help you guys learn this will pop for sure and i imagine these guys you know within the next 10 years we'll get brother of the week yeah i agree i couldn't agree more so hit us up we will help you thanks moving on dennis says a gpt wrapper of chat gpt itself yeah it's five million dollars a month and you know you know that is

crazy there was there was a time where you could search chat gpt in the app oh yeah and not crazy stuff because it was all just like iterations on the name, like the same exact name, like a bunch of trademark issues. That's why they bought chat.com. And OpenAI doesn't actually have to do anything really because they're all just paying OpenAI anyways. It's all just front end.

I would say like a lot of that revenue is probably just going back to OpenAI. I do wonder what the margins are on this. Like, are they able to market up enough and kind of fool enough people? I'm sure they're making money. It's a very cynical job you only need one probably two engineers to build that product the one thing that i really hope is that i hope this is a kid i hope this is some really really young founder who will learn from this and wind up you know

making some money putting something away and then winding up and going and doing something much more ambitious soon because just just seeing five million a month show up in your stripe account moving it around hiring people stuff like that we're gonna claim credit for this uh 10 years ago it was trading sneakers was like the hustler thing now it's a chat gpt rapper for sure the riz app all these different things like yeah tarot card reader i want to see the rizzler yeah drop a hawk to a girl I want to see the Rizzler drop a... Hawk 2 girl. I want to see Brianna, the chicken fry girl, do a chat app that you can talk to abusive Zach Bryan on.

That would do some numbers. Here we go. Do we have another promoted post? Yep. This one is from Akash, who is over at Ramp. He says, the TriRamp web engineering team is hiring. Let's cook. And he chose this tweet because...

So this is a post specifically for Ramp as an employer. As an employer. A place to go work. Yeah. So if you're an engineer, go check out the jobs they have. Is there a link? And the reason that we chose this one is that uh adam over at rep view oh yeah ranked uh a bunch of potential 2025 ipo candidates and whiz was just a hair above ramp ramp was

almost the number one uh ipo candidate oh by 0.07 wow yeah so very um we would honestly could be we kind of need to yeah let the experts dig in i think we need to put that in the truth zone yeah we're gonna have to put this in the truth zone yeah but uh go dm akash if you're interested in joining ramp or apply on uh ramps uh ashby job yeah dream job uh let's go to sharif sharim he says nobody gives a damn about your road maps or strategy decks just show them a demo so insanely great it feels like you stole it from five years in the future 1k likes i love that yeah i agree i i i am pro roadmap and i'm pro deck i don't know about pro strategy decks are the funniest you don't

need to necessarily show them to people other than you know investors need to see a deck but i think there's still something valuable that's the thing that investors don't investors don't need to see a deck if you have a banger demo and you are super compelling. It helps if you're an insider, it helps if you speak the language, it helps if you've maybe interned at a venture fund or whatever it is, but build a phenomenal demo, get some users,

show people that you can ship and ship quickly and then still make a great deck because it'll help you get that, you quickly, and then still make a great deck because it'll help you get that, you know, maybe two X evaluation if you do it right. Yep. Michael Miraflor says the Patek Philippe Generations campaign, obviously we're a big fan of this here, has been running for years and years now. One of the best of all time, in my honest opinion, and I couldn't agree more. It's the famous tagline. You probably know this, you never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation. And it's a side by side of an old ad and a new ad,

and it's essentially the same campaign. And it really speaks to the value of like, getting your marketing message correct early, building that brand essence, something that you can live on for, live and die by for generations. I remember talking to the guy who did Warby Parker's early brand development. And he said that Warby Parker, they landed on this idea of quote, the literary life. Are you familiar with this? So you've never seen it in a Warby Parkerer ad it's never been on a billboard it's not a catch phrase

that they that they use anywhere on their website it's merely just the brand essence that they keep in mind when they're doing other stuff what is warby parker it's the literary life so that answers the question of what do their pop-up shops look like they look like libraries because that's the literary life what what does the website look like? Well, it looks bookish. It looks like something that someone who reads in a coffee shop would enjoy. What about the colors, the tones, the music, the fonts? Everything comes from that essence. And getting that right early is just like once the arrow has left the bow, it just sails. And so the Tech Philippe is a fantastic representation of that. And even though it's a watch brand, you can apply that to your tech startup. Absolutely.

Absolutely. We see it with ramp. Let's go to die. Work where Derek guy, uh, he says, Oh, I'm going to jail because Donald Trump has nominated Matt Gates as the eternal general for the United States. And, um, yeah, so these guys have an amazing history. Basically Derek, uh, Derek creates a lot of beef with powerful people. Powerful people tend to wear suits and Derek has

a lot of opinions and knowledge about, uh, suits. I'm sure when he sees this video, uh, hopefully we don't get dunked on too hard. Uh, Derek, if you're watching this, uh, go, you know, you can, you can dunk, but then give us some pointers in the dms all right uh but anyways uh derrick has historically you know called out matt for having some actually absolutely horrendous fits over the years like truly some some like worst fit ever worn in the white house type stuff uh and so that created some beef okay uh and you know this new administration is ambitious right there's a lot of people in washington and uh some some some posters that have been living out that are a little bit uh worried yeah could be could be rough but uh

you know we stand with posters generally so as long as he doesn't go to blue sky or threads as long as derrick you stay on X you're safe. You're one of the good ones. Uh, let's go to Kelsey. There's a bunch of drama. Uh, Rajveer says the Kelsey founder has to be trying to get himself arrested right

now. It's just an intention game because, uh, Shane got his phone rated by the FBI. We support Shane. We support poly market here. And then, uh,

Sarah says leaked email shows Kelsey growth executive tried to plant a news story containing false claims about wash trading and money laundering on poly market Kelsey appears to be spreading misinformation about poly behind the scenes and it is a crazy time if that is a real I don't know if it's true I'm not that's a real email I don't think we can we're not journalists so we're not uh we're experts yeah many things but not true sound but we're not journalists yeah we're not fact checkers but it is it is crazy how how hot the fight between the prediction markets is i mean it feels like uber and lyft right now where you know if you're not in poly market you got to get into kelsey and raj is going to battle it out is it going to be a power law

winner is it going to be more oligopolistic? Like you don't really know. So they're testing the waters. In many ways, the Kalshi versus Polymarket thing was a political battle of platforms, right? Polymarket stands for many of the principles that the new administration is for. Kalshi is for regulation. They've gone after being like we are the regulated prediction market. And in many ways, the campaign's tracked, right? So Kalshi was spending a million dollars a day on Facebook just to get into the charts. regulated uh prediction market and in many ways the campaign's tracked right so cal she was spending a million dollars a day on facebook yep uh just to get into the charts polymarket had a

lot more organic adoption and organic uh media so um in many ways there's parallels not surprised that the current administration is is trying to come after uh polymarket indeed let's go to uh do we have another promoted post uh promoted post okay let's do it the new york philharmonic oh i love the new york phil sounds of the season a festive holiday matinee featuring new york phil musicians conducted by jeff tizik on december 14th and 15th so learn more and buy tickets at nyphil.org slash sounds of the season. And I would say this could be something where we get the technology brothers community together.

We all be great on suits and let's go to the New York, uh, Phil. I mean, we are recording this like blocks from the LA Phil. I'm a huge Gustavo Dudamel fan. My dog is named Gustavo Dudamel. Not a joke.

Uh, I played a pretty big Instagram account. Yeah, he does. He's 20k um but yeah i mean i love classical music it's a great way to uh i find it just very meditative because you go and sit listen to beautiful music you're off your phone it just clears your mind and it's still an opportunity to dress up meet interesting people, the class of clientele. And immerse yourself in truly loud opulence, right?

Truly, truly, truly. Music is opulent. Yes, yes, absolutely. And so can't recommend the New York Philharmonic enough. Please, if you're in New York or you're stopping by, go buy tickets and Google it, NYPhil, probably newyorkphilharmonic.com. And we're happy to support them on this show.

Let's go to Michael Dubrovsky. He says that there's a beta testing opportunity. Hate pricking your finger, but love biomarkers. We launched a new product at CyFox, his company, and I need five people to beta test and provide feedback. Use the link in comments to get 50% off. We've got to try this. I mean, I think you can literally test your

testosterone on an hourly, minute-to-minute basis. Amazing. Seems like a massive breakthrough. And this, Michael is the man who studied the testosterone levels of YC founders at his off-site. And so now he's gone a step further. He's being proactive. Okay, we need to talk to this guy. We do.

We should get it. We should get yeah This on our arm while we record and track our levels throughout throughout the pod. Yeah Yeah, where's the spike is during we are ready is during the brother of the week, you know There's a lot of different places where you need to be maxing out I mean, that's a big part of why we recorded 11 a.m. Every day because that's when your testosterone is peaking Let's go to Eklat. Eklat says, if you're 20 to 30 and your main circle isn't discussing buying another country,

terraforming, building a new city, lengthening winter days, creating rain, building a vast industrial base powered by nuclear, then it's time to find a new circle. Couldn't agree more. I am proud to say that our circle is discussing all of those things. Yeah, it's like, okay, this is praxis dryden trying to buy uh greenland uh terraforming that's thomas puero and augustus creating rain that's augustus uh building a new city there's a bunch of people we know a ton of nuclear people that are doing that uh doug burn hour at radiant just raised 100 million dollars to do nuclear uh it fantastic. And then the industrial base obviously

goes to Aaron Slodov and Chris Powers at Hadrian. Thank you to the absolute brothers. The boys. For the gang. Doing your part. Yeah. Shout out to all of them. I wouldn't have my circle included. Any other way. Any other way. Any other way. It's fantastic.

Do we have one last promoted post? One last promoted post? One last promoted post from Daniel Mason, a close friend. And Daniel says, we've received 5,574 job applications in two weeks. We've interviewed four people. Why? We're looking for a very specific kind of engineer, the kind who makes everyone else uncomfortable, which I like that, right? Oftentimes, 10Xers kind of freak everybody out a little bit. engineer the kind who makes everyone else uncomfortable which i like that right oftentimes

uh 10xers kind of freak everybody out a little bit they're like maybe their keyboard just has a one and a zero on it there you go yep makes sense uh anyway so daniel says know someone my dms are open so go to at dg mason on x uh if you're interested. And there's more context on the role on his profile. Go check it out. And we're happy to promote that on this show. Let's close out with, X gamers make great entrepreneurs. A post from Tom Beanham.

We're used to locking in for fucking 13 hours straight sometimes. LMFAO. Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. Many, many cases. And we've talked about this before, but very interesting correlation between the great gamers,

Elon, one of the greatest Diablo players of all time, SBF, one of the worst League of Legends players of all time. And look what happened to their companies. Clearly wasn't taking it seriously, wasn't locked in, was a fake gamer, which is the worst thing you can possibly do. The key is to figure out a way to find that early love for video games that many of us had and apply it to Excel, right?

Like you and I were up until, God, probably 3.30 last night in the Technology Brothers model. Like just tweaking. Making sure the profit was maximized. Yeah, and in many ways, like it felt like being in a cod lobby. It felt like playing StarCraft II, right? Couldn't agree more.

Those early days. So apply that same zealous for the game to the game of business and become a student and player of capitalism. Yes. Become a student of capitalism, a player of capitalism. And that's our show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe.

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