TBPN Live - X is Absolutely Printing, The Tale of Temu, Promoted Reviews, Larp as a Size Lord

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

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(00:10) - Breaking News (14:26) - The Tale of Temu (01:12:56) - Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. Today is Thursday, February 6th, 2025. Jordy, we got some breaking news. A Technology Brothers exclusive, really. X, the everything app is now profitable. Let's go. There we go. There we go.

Yeah, we didn't scoop this, but we scooped it from the timeline. Shkreli has a fantastic post here. I'll get into it. Julian had shared earlier, he says, X also reported to investors 2024 adjusted earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion. Investors said that was a better picture than they had expected and that X's finances hit an inflection point a few months before the November election. In 2021, Twitter reported adjusted EBITDA of about $682 million and about $5 billion in revenue. That was the last full year before Musk took the company private.

So, Shkreli basically calls out X's worth around the purchase price right now, which is $44 billion. If revenue keeps growing, $100 billion valuation is not unreasonable, crazy turnaround. So many people were trying to, at some point, stance on X's grave, said that Elon was running it into the ground. They did face, you know, the turnaround of Twitter was always going to be a challenge. It got exponentially more challenging as every major advertiser left the platform. And so they are coming back in a big way. We're going to cover that show. Yeah, we'll cover that soon. A lot of heavy hitters are bringing their ad dollars to the platform again, which we love to see because it's more money in every poster's pocket.

And overall, we love this app. We built our careers on it, and it's great to see it win. It provides an exceptional amount of joy and value to us here on the show and many of our listeners. So I love to see this. They had marked down, you know, the major investors had sort of marked down their positions at some point last year to around $20 billion. And now looking at this, if you have a business that's doing $1.25 billion in EBITDA, that's like the place that the most important conversations in the world are happening live every single day. It's easy to see how that business, especially with its potential, having these advertisers come back to the platform, launching a bunch of new features.

I agree with Shkreli. It's easy to see how it gets to a hundred billion dollar company and goes public again, probably on the Texas stock Exchange. And I look forward to, hopefully we can we can buy some some X shares, you know, prior to them, but I look forward to owning it in the in the in the public.com portfolio, baby. Yeah, there we go. Yeah. I mean, when this news hit, everyone was saying he overpaid, which it was, I mean, unequivocally, it was a rough time in the market because he bought it right at the end of the Zerp. And it probably would have been cheaper if he'd waited. But he got the deal done.

And all that matters is that it's an extremely important app with a really, really strong network effect. And he's an operator. And Elon posted, you know, hey, maybe I'm actually good with money. And, and there was a question about, you know, unfortunately the previous team at Twitter, it turned over, there were multiple CEOs, there were lots of people trying things, but it clearly just needed a more aggressive approach. And a take private is like the, this is the quintessential example of when you want to do

a take private, because this would never be allowed to happen in the public markets. The stock would be all over the place. So instead you take it private, you do some crazy re-imagining of the business, even change the entire business model. People were saying, maybe they should just charge for APIs, or maybe they should just do subscription. Maybe they should subscription gate the entire app. So you have to pay to even view. There were so many proposals and they all, uh, and, and Elon got a chance to try them all and then see what works. And clearly he's onto something here. What do you got? Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the day, he bought what in many ways at that price was somewhat of a toxic asset, right? It's not making a lot of money. But inside, there was this nugget of potential. And I think that I think that he found it. And he's now,

you know, giving it, you know, even more life. And yeah, there's been a lot of complaints from certain posters over the last year, because their reach has dropped. But guess what else has dropped, John? The quality of their posts. That's true. You can't just, you gotta work, the algorithm will work for you, but you gotta work for the algorithm. And I'm sick of sloppy, low effort posters thinking that they have 100K followers,

that they deserve 100K impressions on a post. You gotta earn it every day. And the platform will work for you, post you gotta earn it every day and uh you know the platform will work for you but you gotta work for it so uh congratulations to the x team i mean we had to cut the episode short yesterday because of tyler and jacoby uh but uh but we got a lot cooking with x that we're super excited about and we're very excited to take this live show to X, hopefully starting next week. I think we just want to be back in the studio for it. So, yeah, best app ever, worth a trillion dollars in my heart. And now probably around $44 billion, you know, mark to market.

I agree. Well, moving on, let's talk about some breaking news. Eric Gleiman at Ramp has bought an ad for the big game. Let's go. The big game. Tune in on Sunday, the big game. I'm not exactly sure what that is. I know the Super Bowl is on Sunday. The big game sounds like maybe related to the big game, to the Superbowl, but they're running an ad and they got Saquon Barkley, uh, in the studio shooting, uh, a beautifully directed ad. Very funny. Uh, go check it out. Uh, Jordy, can you break us down on what this means for ramp? What this means for the future of advertising at the big game? So I gotta be

honest with you, John, we got a a little insight we got the scoop on this uh last week and they said you know we're running an ad with with saquon barkley i go amazing i love ads you gotta tell me who that is and then they go on to say you know future mvp future hall of famer he's you know he's playing in the big game. I said, what's the big game? They said the Super Bowl. And I said, I will be tuning in now. I'm excited to see this ad. But no, I think it's amazing.

There's evolutions, right? You go from posting a couple posts on X, then you maybe run some meta ads, and then maybe you do a little organic TikTok, and then you do some out do some out of home ads and then eventually you're running Super Bowl ads. And so I think it's just the evolution of the ramp advertising engine. And I'm excited to see it. I love the constraint of Super Bowl ads. You have so little time.

You have to deliver a message that is going out to all of America. It's like it's the best channel to reach a truly diverse audience. It's, you know, football shouldn't be politicized. There's people from all walks of life and industries, from employees that will be users of Ramp to business owners that will, you know, sign up for it themselves, to CFOs that are already using Ramp and are just excited to see Ramp running ads on the big game. So great moment. It really hits the core value prop in just 10 seconds. Everyone in business has been in the position of filing expense reports. It very clearly shows how much that sucks

and how much of a distraction that is. And it gets across very quickly. And the, and the line, you know, basically, would you pull Saquon Barkley off the field to file expense reports? Perfect analogy for your team, your team, you're hiring, you're paying all these amazing people to do work on your business. You're going to take them off the field, doing the real work and have them file expense reports. Bad idea. Run on Ramp, save him time. And it's awesome that he's an investor now in Ramp and actually aligned with the future of the company.

It's really cool. I see many more Ramp ads in the future with Saquon. So I'm excited to see how this plays out. Yeah. And I'm really excited. Obviously, like Ramp markets to CFOs. And I think this will be a very interesting case study for Ramp to share with their audience of CFOs. You know, obviously, this is a very top of funnel, very broad brand marketing strategy here. But the more interesting thing to me is I want to hear how much they spent. Did they get the ROI? How'd they track it? Because I think a lot of companies look to Ramp as a high growth company and they say, I want to be efficient.

I want to grow similarly. And if Ramp can put together a really great case study on, hey, we took this big swing and here's what happened. Here's how we tracked it. Here's how we think we did. And yeah, we think we got positive ROI.

And this is a, this is a proper Superbowl ad. You can go and spend six figures to get slotted in, in some tiny County in Nebraska and you got a Superbowl ad. And if you're tuning in at that moment, people will see it, but this is going to be a national ad. Everybody's going to be seeing it and you're going to be want to be locked in for this one uh might we might have to do a live stream during the show and just wait wait for the ad to go and then maybe a little champagne you know it's a big moment i think of

i think of sunday really just as a showing of this ramp ad and then they're playing some football around it to help promote the ad yeah yeah yeah yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The Super Bowl is really to promote the advertising. Exactly. That is the intermission to me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well said. Well, let's move on to another size gong moment from none other than Cursor.

They just hit $100 million in ARR. Let's go. I wish I was there to hit the gong for you, John. It's not the same, but, you know, you can do a little self-hit gong for you, John. It's, it's not the same, but you know, you can do a little self hit there. It's a mess. It's a mess. We do it working the size gong and the slides and the mic. I'm doing the best I can. Usually, usually we, you know, we hit the size gong for M and a fundraisers, but this is even more special one to a hundred million in ARR and I think it's like 1.9-ish years, some crazy number. And developers really love this tool. I feel like in many ways, I already say they can't live without it. So

love to see it. Incredible progress. This was a painful one for me. When Kershaw started blowing up, I clicked to the founder's profile. He had been following me since like 2021. I didn't realize, wasn't there to invest. But you know, every once in a while you leave a hundred bagger on the table. So, uh, live and learn, baby, live and learn, live and learn. But the funny thing, so the funny thing here, somebody quote posted this and said, actually pumped up fund got to 500 million of actual net revenue in a year. So you have cursor, whiz, deal together, core weave, open AI, DocuSign,

all taking a victory lap and then pumped up on America's favorite illegal online casino. Doing $500 million in a year with a fraction of the team. We really got to do a deep dive on a market map on these new coding agents because I don't know that this is a winner-take-all market at this point. I know there are a number of other companies that are doing really well. Cognition is growing a ton in a very different segment, going for enterprise, the super up market.

And it'll be interesting to see how these all play out. There's, you know, Devin is building agents, Cursor's building a code editor. There's also, what's that other one? Is it called Tailwind? Yep. You know, Tailwind's a CSS thing. It's Windsurf. Windsurf.

Windsurf. You got Poolside. Poolside. Yep. I actually read a thread. There's a whole breakdown on all these different ones. And they're all slightly, they're all good for slightly different things.

Some of them are focused on designers, front end. Some of them are focused on designers, front end. Some of them are focused on backend stuff. Julius Rahul Ligma's company, Rahul Sunwalker, is building kind of a cursor for data science. It lives right in an IPython notebook. Obviously, there's things that you can do right within ChatGPT. And so this market's evolving really fast,

but it's super clear that if you're paying a developer six figures, getting them the best possible tools to amplify them and make their work go harder, faster, and just more enjoyable. Like everyone's always raving about, oh, like it's so nice

not to have to write boilerplate code because I have the agents now. And you're getting to that Andre Karpathy mindset of vibe coding, just kind of steering the AI. It's beautiful. And I think this is going to be a trend, not just in code development. We're going to see these AI agents roll out for everything. We saw this with OpenAI deep research. We're going to see this in docs and spreadsheets and all sorts of financial modeling tools. And I'm just super excited to finally have some software that just has a really tangible impact.

So congrats to the Cursor team. Get out there. One thing, you got to give DocuSign some credit here. Out of these companies, I think they're the first company to 300,000 employees. And so... Every time you mention DocuSign, you add another 50K. I add a zero. I add a zero. I add a zero every time. DocuSign has an amazing milestone.

It crossed 10 million employees today. It's so good. Okay. Well, let's move on to our deep dive for today. Timu, we got cut off earlier, but we got a solid hour to break down Timu for you. It's a fascinating story. And it's one of the sloppiest apps out there right now. It's the cream of the crop. It's the slop of the slop. It's the slop of the slop. We'll get into why it's the slop of the slop let's start uh let's go back in time first and talk about the founders uh incredible you know sort of history getting getting to this point because he's really he's really an absolute dog even though he's making slop he's a dog right so you want to you have a somewhere you want to start or you want me to dive in

yeah i mean i wanted to start with these tweets just to kind of set the table. The first one is from L3TweetEngineer, MegaBaseChad. I think he's been on the show before. He said, just downloaded Timu. New users can sign up with Twitter. You're immediately greeted by a $250 coupon. Scam likely. The homepage is showing me fake sneakers bdsm stuff and a gun

i love it uh this is from 2023 he was early so timu is a spinoff of pinduoduo pdd uh which will break down the whole history here but uh timu was brand new they launched in 2022 and then they rocketed to, to massive numbers very quickly. But, uh, I, I had the exact same experience where I, I opened up Timu to look at something and it was like, you just won everything in the store for free. And it's just, prices are suspiciously To put this into perspective. I think a lot of people started to Timu hit their consciousness when they ran a super bowl ad that's true early 2023 they ran this terrible ad that just said shop like a billionaire and it's just all these like slop products yep and so um so yeah uh i think he posted this because around so this is you know

probably 10 months after the initial super bowl ad, but they had gone number one in the app store again. So a lot of people signing up for the product when this was shared. Yeah. So we'll go through the full history, but the Timu explosion is crazy. So they launched Timu and it is a subsidiary. So the business is already going, but they launched it in September of 2022. I think the headquarters was in Boston, interestingly enough. And then they run a Super Bowl ad and they're just spending billions of dollars advertising Timu. And by August of 2023, so less than one year, they had reached $18 billion in gross merchandise sales for the full year.

Isn't that insane? 15 million active users. We are going to absolutely, we're going to be dunking on this slop for the next hour, but I'm not here to take away from the execution. What they've done, they're selling absolute garbage, but what they've done is extremely impressive. You got to hand it to them.

The founder's an absolute dog. And if he were in America still, we would be popping Dom Perignon for him. This guy is one of us. He just happened to be playing for the wrong team. So get back over here and we'll break it down because this guy was in America for a while and should have stayed here.

Should have built the slop apps for us. Send them over there. So the reason this is at the top of everyone's newsfeed right now is because recently there was a change in tariff structure that could put Timu and Sheen and these Chinese dropshippers effectively out of business. They've been exploiting a loophole. Let's break it down from Melissa Chen, who is quote tweeting Ryan Peterson. Ryan says, day minimus entries from China shut down effectively Tuesday. Melissa Chen says, winning. This is huge. Timu, Sheen, and all these tacky fast fashion companies that sell mostly crap

have long relied on an unfair and unwarranted trade advantage. They have long been beneficiaries of what's called the de minimis loophole. This loophole allows goods to be shipped directly from overseas to American consumers, so long as the value of each package is under $800 without any customs declaration. It's cheap, direct, untaxed, and unregulated. It's a law that existed since the 1930s, long before the internet and the existence of e-commerce retailers. Last year, the US received a billion packages from China through this loophole. CBP cannot possibly inspect items at this scale, so things do slip through the crack. Unsafe items, knockoffs, products made with forced labor from Xinjiang, and yes, chemicals that can be used to make fentanyl. Wow. To put things in context, in 2022, Gap paid $700 million

while H&M paid $200 million in import taxes. Timu paid zero. Free trade, once again, is not free. It's flooding our markets with cheap, crappy, potentially toxic goods, gutting our own retail markets, and allowing unsavory foreign competitors to exploit loopholes and gain unfair competitive advantage over retailers who have to play by the rules because of geography. Now we have closed this loophole for goods coming in to China and Sean McGuire's there to say great tweet. Uh, so we love, we love to see breakdowns like that, but let's move on to the history of Pinduoduo PDD,, and Teemu and how we got here. So 2015, Colin Wang, who was working at Google, establishes Pinduoduo. And let's give a little bit more backstory

because he wasn't just working at Google. He went to college in the US, joins Google the year that they IPO. So he literally joins at an incredible time, probably one of the best pre-IPO company probably to join in history. Incredible timing, right out of school. And yeah, so he benefits right away. He basically immediately gets a bag from that, which ends up helping him start his entrepreneurial journey. He then goes on to actually launch Google in China. And so this was from, you look back at my notes, from 2006 to 2010, he's the lead on launching Google in China. And it absolutely goes terribly. It doesn't really get adoption there. I'm sure they're fighting a lot of sort of regulatory stuff internally in China. China didn't want U.S. tech products to get real market share

in China. And so by the end, he basically in 2010, they just give up Google pulls out of China. And he and so in many ways, I'm sure he did well, personally from that, but it wasn't exactly a huge win. But it did give him, you know, I'm sure high quality experience in terms of building the most scaled consumer products, you know, of all time. I mean, the guy seems like a great engineer, master networker. Somebody said, you know, that Jeremy Giffon tweet that's like uh if you're you can basically post your way onto a private plane if you're a good poster like the most elite in the society like the absolute aristocracy will just pluck you out of obscurity and it seems like that's what happened he he was he was posting something or, or, or cold emailing or

something and gets linked up to the effectively the Warren Buffett of China. And that guy becomes his mentor. And then, and then that guy pays like 250 K to have dinner with the actual Warren Buffett. And so there's a picture of Colin, this, uh, brings Colin, brings colin the timu founder yeah this dinner yeah and so and so very quickly colin is uh moved out of you know rank and file at google obviously early obviously doing very well but it's a huge organization he's not really going to be able to steer that that giant cruise ship to networking with both the warrenett of America and the Warren Buffett of China. And, uh, and that sets himself up just to immediately raise tons of money and just do, you know, amazing things. Yeah. And so around this time he had built, this is prior to

actually incorporating PDD in 2015, he had built, uh, he had built some mobile shopping apps. So his time at Google had got him excited about shopping he did all right from those he had a couple exits and then he starts a gaming studio which is sort of foreshadowing for all the gamification of timu and pdd that comes later um and the gaming studio is just thrown out absolute slop too so if you ever remember being a kid and getting ads for like mafia city that was a game that his game studio created which was like an early version of one of these games that was meant to be highly addictive that you were meant to come in a lot of people would just come in and pay play for free briefly and then they'd get

certain whales that would end up spending a ton of money and he also had some less uh less uh savory apps on there where you could build a harem of girlfriends that you could then go around and fight other people with so you could build it was like an app that you'd build your harem and then you'd you'd take them out and go on the attack so uh colin colin's an absolute dog for that one oh yeah and but i'm sure he found some some users uh and that that company ended up getting um acquired and then changed hands a couple times and mafia city is actually still a game that you can download in the app store and and use yeah so go check it out yeah everything about this story is just

unbelievable evidence that colin plays hard nose smash mouth football on the business gridiron. He's a Saquon Barkley of business in China. 100%. And you don't become the richest man in China, even for a small amount of time, without being absolutely the most aggressive you can be and just maxing out every single loophole. There's a whole bunch of things in here about, uh, about like importing like gambling style mechanics and gamification and, and, uh, financialization. And it's just like, let's do all of the most extreme business practices. Uh, what's the tariff loophole? How low quality can we go on the goods? Let's add gambling and, and, and, uh, pay it and buy now, pay later. It's just the most extreme, uh, like dynamics to absolutely squeeze out every penny of performance from the business. Yeah. Uh, so let's go through the timeline here. Uh, we'll,

we'll, we'll focus just on PDD. Uh, so, uh, former Google engineer, Colin Wang, uh, establishes in Shanghai as a social e-commerce platform focused on agriculture and group buying deals. Uh, early angel funding of approximately $8 million is provided by Wang and other investors. And so, um, uh, the, the idea here was you, you, if you're in China and you're in like the middle or lower class, you want to buy a whole bunch of mangoes, they would focus on just, hey, you're going to buy 12 mangoes. Two of them might be rotten, but it's going to be so cheap that we're basically not going to invest in quality control at all. And also they're bringing in this like social mechanic where group buying, basically you click on the item you want and then

you send that link to everyone else in your social network on WeChat. And the more people that buy, the lower the price goes. And this makes sense. I mean, in America, there's plenty of times where you buy one t-shirt, it's $30. You buy 10 t-shirts, it's $20. If you're buying a thousand t-shirts, you can get the price down to 10 bucks. But it's like, what if you could do this for anything on Amazon immediately, just with your social network? And that creates insane growth. It's like this insane viral growth mechanism. Shopping has historically, and in the West, it still is primarily the single player experience. You go on, you buy the product. He turned it into this multiplayer experience that

had this crazy viral loop of just building out these networks where one person wants mangoes and suddenly 20 people are buying mangoes. And one thing that they did, you can think of what PDD early on is similar to what Amazon did with books. Amazon picked books for very specific reasons. They onboarded sellers, which were bookstores and individuals that had books they wanted to sell. And what PDD did was, was, you know, at the time in China, there were a ton super, the sort of agricultural production in China was super fragmented. And so you had tons of individuals and small farms that would be producing goods, and they had to sell through distributors, which would then go into actual like retail stores and

other markets that you could purchase them. And what PDD did was similar to Amazon, where they said, hey, why don't you just come on and list your product for sale, and we'll find you the customers. And you're going to make more money than you would if you were selling through this distributor. And they were basically like, cutting out the historical middleman that was there was two middlemen, basically, there was the distributor, the sort of rep, and then the actual retail store. And so PDD took over both those roles in terms of bridging the farmers and producers and the end consumer. The other thing that PDD benefited from is that there was mobile devices had penetrated into the agricultural regions of China. And so farmers would start selling their products on social media using

like videos. And I remember during this time, some of these videos would start going viral, it'd be like, yeah, be scrolling. And you just it'd just be some guys like, I, you know, like, showing his man goes off or whatever, he'd be like, Alright, I'm on the wrong, wrong side of the internet. But But anyway, so this was like like basically benefiting from social commerce, the influencer explosion, the explosion of, you know, mobile device usage all across China, not just in in cities. And so the timing here, he really, you know, benefited from. Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. Like product led growth, innovation, like a lot of trends coming together and just wedging more and more things. And then just like rolling them out in the app super, super fast. Like when, when there's an exploit, he capitalizes and that's, uh, and that's what's fueled the growth so quickly.

And another thing they did, they, they basically sold the product at cost. And so they raised 8 million bucks to get this thing off the ground and they were fine if they didn't make any money on the on the direct sale they just wanted market share yep and they also took a more sort of asset light approach than some of the other players that actually owned logistics they owned warehouses and stuff like that and so pdd was was fully focused on like enabling this sort of direct to consumer model where you know producer would put would list product on the platform, they had their own social presence, they have these group buying experiences, but then third party logistics and warehouses would actually do all of the fulfillment. And so PDD could afford to basically sell products at cost without taking massive, massive losses that, for example, Amazon had to take, you know, really aggressive losses for quite a long time?

Yeah. I mean, the Amazon versus Timu or PDD comparison is crazy. Take a look at this. So you can think about Amazon right now versus PDD. Amazon's almost 20 times the size, but in terms of net income in 2023, Amazon produced 30 billion PDD produced eight and a half billion. And so the margins are just the net profit margins at Amazon 5% versus 25%. And, and a lot of that comes down to just super asset. He looks more like a software business and Amazon looks more like a grocery store, right? Totally. From a market profile standpoint. Totally, yeah.

And massive revenue growth. Interestingly, I wanted to answer the question of like, is Tmoo actually putting pressure on Amazon? Has there been like a market change in Amazon's business because of the Tmoo threat? And what's interesting is that, uh, like I found like 95%, 98% of Timu shoppers also shop on Amazon. The Timu, like the slop that they're buying is actually additive. It's more like gambling money than actually

shopping money. Cause if you want just, you know, if you're actually in the market for like, I want Kleenex and I want it to be good and not fall apart and give me allergies or something like you're going to go to Amazon, buy the name brand and count on that. But if you're just want like, Oh yeah, some random thing. That's like a funny joke. Like, yeah, I'll, I'll buy that on Timo. Yeah. I, my biggest frustration with Amazon is I wish that I could shop on Amazon by sorting only for brands that have existed for more than 50 years. Lindy filter. The Lindy filter. Because one of my, yeah,

the greatest annoyance on Amazon is like I'm shopping and I want something as simple as like a paper towel holder. And then I order it and i get it and it's like the worst product that i've ever got i'm like this should just be a piece of metal into another piece of metal and it should be solid and because of the hyper optimizations and all these sellers competing and things like that you end up having to dig through pages you might might take you four pages to find a product that costs marginally more, but it's going to last for 20 years versus the Timu version, which will last for a year and not even function well. So Amazon has been forced to launch Amazon Haul, which is their Timu competitor.

And they have price caps for items that you list on Amazon Haul because they want to be competitive. And the price caps are shocking. Like $13 is the max price you can charge for a guitar. I think of a guitar is like a several hundred dollar purchase at least couches, couches. I think of a couch is like, you know, to get in the game, it's like a thousand dollars. Maybe you go to Ikea, a couple hundred bucks. The max price for a couch at Amazon hall is $20, $20. That's just like scarily low. I don't want to sit on a couch. That's only $20. I know that there's people that are running Airbnbs right now that are like, this is amazing for my margins. Like I got to just buy this $20 couch, but it's like at that, at that price, it's like, it feels dangerous. Like how can you

possibly make a couch for $20? Like you're not even using wood at that point. Like what are you making it out of? Yeah. And the, the dark side of this story is that many people have accused PDD and Timu of using slave labor. So if you strip out all of the labor costs, but even then it's still hard to kind of conceptualize how the actual material costs would be less than $20 for something as significant as a couch or a guitar being $13. So anyways, let's get back into the timeline. Yeah, so they raise a bunch of money really, really quickly. They incorporate in 2015 with that $8 million round. 2016, they raised Series A, Series B, $110 million. Gowrong Capital, formerly Banyan, does the a strategic investor they get a 16 percent stake

that's 20 billion bucks uh sequoia capital china gets a six percent stake pre-2022 multi-billion dollar value uh and then there's a couple other uh founders and early executives that all made hundreds of millions of dollars you already know from listening to this but like this guy didn't come out of nowhere he was a went to went to college in the U S goes and works at Google actually leads an entire, you know, go to market into China while at Google, then as a couple smaller successes in mobile shopping, then launches a successful mobile game studio. And so by the time he's doing PDD, he is very well set up to take on this much capital in this short of a time because he's a savage operator, right? And the actual performance really backs it up. And so

they're raising all this money, but it's on the back of just taking a ton of market share with a product that was very early for its time, right? We didn't see, you remember in 2021, 2022, every Western VC was talking about social commerce and live streaming and all these things. All of that was because that PDD was just dominating in China and they didn't really, it's not that live streaming with, with T, uh, T it's TEMU, right? Uh, that would be the respectful way to call it. I call it Tame. Tame. Uh, we'll stick with Tame. Um, who knows respect. Um, what's crazy is I was actually, so I was in, um, I was living in China, like during this era, uh, in 2016, uh, and I was working at a startup accelerator that was, and helping a company that was taking a bunch of international vendors,

specifically in shopping and sort of luxury goods and trying to sell into China. And they had raised some funding. It was fine. But the CEO and the CEO and the, were based in Israel and they absolutely hated living in China and their entire business was based around China. So they would come in for like two weeks and then like bounce. And I was like, guys, like, this is, I was just an intern, but I was like, yeah, this is if you shouldn't probably hate the country that you're trying to sell into. Um, but, uh, but anyways, meanwhile, Timo is just focused, you know, just absolutely dominated. Yeah. They're just ripping. So, uh, established in September,

2015, they've raised over a hundred million dollars by 2016 series C comes in early 2017, less than a year and a half. They, they raised, uh, 213 million in a Series C round. And by late 2017, their gross merchandise volume, their GMV, reaches $15 billion just two years after launch. And so even with super slim margins, they're well over $100 million in ARR. And this is one of the fastest growing companies and businesses in history. And, of course, that's going to rock at the stock. So they do a pre-IPO funding in April of 2018. They raised $1.2 billion Series D, led by major investors. They're valued around $15 to $20 billion.

And then July 26, 2018, they go public on the NASDAQ, raising $1.6 billion. The IPO values the company at $24 billion and marks its rise to over 340 million active buyers in under three years. But then things get tricky. There's a counterfeit crackdown shortly after the IPO. PDD faces scrutiny over counterfeit and pirated goods. So you just go on there and you get some complete knockoff that was just made in a fake factory that wasn't actually made by that company. Of course, companies are going to be upset. At one point, Amazon has a price match like service where if you are selling on Amazon and then you go over to Walmart and you undercut Amazon, Amazon will not give you the buy box. They won't let you win the top slot if you're not price matching on Amazon. But Temu or Timu was so aggressive and so sloppy that they couldn't basically implement this process. And they were like, look, we're not

even going to enforce it with Temu products because it's just slop. It's not even close. And so a lot of stuff was just absolute junk. And that was kind of the model. And also everyone kind of knew that. Those products were widely available when I was in Shanghai. You could go to, there were specific markets that where they would have retail stores. It'd be like the Nike store, the Adidas store, the Canada store, and everything in them was 95% less than like the traditional retail value. Yeah. And about 60% is good. Yeah. But the demand you can imagine for sort of name brands that are 95% off effectively, uh, it's insane. So the super funny thing here is that it's not just American companies versus Chinese versus PDD in China. There's actually Chinese companies that are like, hey, we're Foxconn, we make iPhones for Apple. Don't make fake iPhones here. This is screwing us and we're a Chinese company. And so Chinese companies are accusing PDD of

counterfeiting and pirating goods that they're making and selling on Amazon. And so there's an investigation by China's market regulator. And this leads PDD to purge 4.3 million suspect listings and tighten its policies. But of course, like, how long would that last? And so in January of 2019, there's the security incident where hackers exploit systems, a systems loophole to steal tens of millions of yuan and discount vouchers. This always happens whenever there's like some referral program or some discount program. I remember there was some guy on Twitter who was bragging about basically defrauding Uber eats with like all these referral tokens, just getting people on Mechanical Turk to sign up and get him money. And he was like, I have free Uber eats forever. And I was like, you shouldn't publish

about this. This is a violation of the terms and services. Also, it's just wrong. Also, just wrong. It's also just morally wrong to steal. How have we gotten so lost here? And so PDD cooperates with authorities to apprehend the perpetrators and patch its systems. They continue to expand their markets in 2019. The gamified team purchase model drives explosive growth, making PDD China's third largest e-commerce site by GMV and active buyers.

So it's Alibaba and then JD.com, which I don't think is related to JD Vance, but it's certainly a big beast over there. By the end of the year, the platform approaches over 500 million active buyers, so they are on a tear. Then early 2020, the agriculture focus and COVID response amid the pandemic, PDD doubles down on its agricultural roots by launching programs to help rural farmers sell produce online. This is huge because China had insane lockdowns. Everyone is ordering online more than ever, especially produce, especially groceries. People need to get food more than anything else. And so it's another explosive growth period for PDD. They just can't miss. Then in 2020, Colin Wang steps down as CEO,

appointing Chen Li as the new chief executive while remaining chairman to focus on long-term strategy and research. And I think there's something going on where the pressure is starting to build. PGD is becoming a more controversial company. And Colin's like, yeah, I'm going to dip before I get Jack Ma, you know? Because like, yeah, when you scrape the heavens in China and you become the richest man, you get a little bit of a target on your back so yeah you gotta just uh pivot into you know teaching english somewhere and and resting on your laurels a little bit a little bit it's a dangerous dangerous position it's a dangerous game over there you become the richest man you don't exactly get to be the right hand man of the person who runs the country unfortunately yeah america's just built different you know yeah uh

over here you get a you get a dot gov email address yes uh and so economic challenges in late 2020 drive more consumers to pin to pdd for affordable essentials with annual active buyers reaching 585 million by year end yeah Yeah, they have this interesting demand dynamic where if the economy is doing well, then people have like a bunch of extra cash that they're willing to just blow on. Basically, PDD is like slop, you know, gambling on consumer goods.

Hey, I'm buying this product for $3. Maybe it's good. Maybe it's actually fine. You don't know. And then simultaneously, if the economy is not doing well there's also an increased demand because people are saying i don't want to you know it'd be like saying i don't want to go shop at target i'm going to go to this like discount store and and because i can spend 50 and get a lot more for my money so same dynamic somebody might be saying i'm not going to go on Alibaba or the Chinese target equivalent.

I'm going to go on PDD and just get more for my money. Yeah. And so in January 2021, there's this work culture controversy. This is terrifying and very sad. The deaths of two employees within a short span spark public outcry over the brutal 996 overtime culture in China's tech industry. And I believe someone affiliated with the company made some callous comment being like, yeah, like we work hard, people are going to die, which is obviously way too far, way over the line. And the founder eventually steps down. Colin Wang resigns as chairman and leaves the board to pursue research in food and life sciences, while CEO Chen Lei assumes the chairman role

after Wang relinquishes super voting rights. That's the Chinese equivalent of, I'm going to go spend time, you know, long overdue time with my family is I'm going to pursue research in life sciences. Yeah, it is crazy to work people to death. That's unacceptable and something that only happens in China, unfortunately. I is, it is crazy to work people to death. That's unacceptable. And something that only happens in China, unfortunately. I mean, that's not, that's not true. We just had that,

we just had that issue. I forget which bank it wasn't. Uh, yeah, I did see that. Jeffrey and it wasn't Jeffrey's. Um, no, I've been seeing that, but no, there, there was, you know, a investment banker, a young investment banker that was being worked you know basically 20 hours a day for a long period of time and was telling his friends like that he wasn't doing well and then just died from basically overworking um and anyways yeah and in that case the investment bank had slides that said that were basically promoting the fact that their associates were available around the clock. Yeah. And so that again, it's not it's not just a China thing, but but yeah, work. It's possible to work too much. Yeah. I mean, it's like we always say you got to

like Naval says, work like a lion. There are days when you should be working 20 hours a day. But if it's 20 hours a day for a year straight with no days off, you're going to burn out. That's not good. You got to be ready. Or even four weeks in a row, right? It's not sustainable at a certain point. Sprints here and there, super important. We are working up to 140 hours of content a week. Our goal is to get there. So thank you. Thank you, everybody, for your patience,

for trying to just ramp up to it. Yeah. And so in May of 2021, Shanghai's Consumer Council criticized PDD for issuing fake products, false advertising, and poor after-sales service. Regulators ordered the company to rectify consumer rights problems,

prompting PDD to pledge stronger merchant oversight. In late August of 2021, PDD posts its first ever profitable quarter. So from 2015 to 2021, just six years now, they're profitable. Two billion yuan operating profit and an 89% year-on-year revenue jump. So they're still basically doubling six years into the business. Just fantastic growth. Instead of taking the profits as cash, the company announces a $10 billion, 10 billion yuan agriculture initiative to reinvest in agri-tech, farmer support, and rural development. And so in 2022- Yeah, one thing that might sound strange to some people, but we think of Timu as just like slop consumer goods. In China, people are still using it very actively to buy produce and things like that.

So they want to invest in the actual agriculture industry in China because PDDs, China business specifically, is a grocery store alternative. It's not just these ultra low cost consumer goods. Yeah. And so they're continuing to grow. The platform is now handling 4.9 trillion yuan, about 590 billion in GMV, and generating annual revenue of roughly 14.7.7 billion, solidifying its profitability.

And with all this money, they come to the United States and they launch Timu. The parent company, now PDD Holdings, launches Timu, a discount shopping app targeting overseas markets, because it's specifically taking advantage of that tariff loophole. Timu goes live in the United States, offering ultra low price goods shipped directly from China and quickly climbs the download charts. And I think this is so interesting because it like I've been in e-commerce for, you know, 15 years or something now. And, and, and the, and the, the, the, the wisdom has always been,

you got to get on prime. You got to be faster with shipping. Everyone cares about page load speed and shipping time. And Americans are willing to pay for that. And Colin just realized that there is a contrarian position here, which is, hey, maybe there's certain products and certain segments of the American market where people are more than happy to trade fast shipping for lower prices. And so no one is really looking at it. It comes down to a value exchange thing. I'm happy to pay slightly more to get a product tomorrow with zero effort on my side. And then on the other end, there's people that are happy to wait a week to get something if they're going

to get 10 items for the cost of two items, right? Exactly. So it's just a value exchange thing. Yeah. Yeah. But it was really, really overlooked in the e-commerce market. And so with the launch of Timu, the company reorganizes under PDD Holdings, a new holding structure encompassing both PDD and Timu. In December, fast fashion rival Sheen initiates legal action against Timu marking the start of a high profile legal tussle. And I didn't know this. Do you know where the name Sheen comes from? It's she in, and it's like, she's in, she's in. Yeah. Like, like, like she's they were, they were sitting in Shanghaianghai being like yeah we got the name this is it this is so cool and this also by the way just to reference an earlier point so this

is around this is like right around the time that they launched they launched the super bowl ad that we mentioned yesterday and i do remember the uh not yesterday sorry earlier in the show um i do remember when that ad dropped and And I remember seeing it live, thinking to myself, this is the worst ad I've ever seen. It's like very, it's not westernized at all. This is obviously a Western audience. It has this tagline that says shop like a billionaire, which felt felt super out of touch. Yep. But ultimately, I wasn't the target audience for it. I've never purchased anything on on Timu. And, and if you think about that, that that concept of shop like a billionaire, some people are thinking, okay, billionaires are just buying like, you know, infinite amount of goods at all points and not caring about the price. And that is the experience that they provide, right? You can go on there and buy 30 items and it'll cost you, you know, the same price as, I don't know, a small like grocery. The funny thing is if you ever go over to a billionaire's house,

like it's always like the most sparsely populated house. Like it's not just junk everywhere. Like, yeah, it's because their items are spread across like at least five homes i guess but even then it's like you know most most super rich people are pretty pretty discerning with like do i really need another kitchen aid no like no it's it's the kanye it's the kanye thing of of i was sleeping on the plane and i woke up next to this water bottle and it's like great now i have to look after this water what do i do with this water bottle exactly And it's like, great. Now I have to look after this water. What do I do with this water bottle? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and really,

it's like, we talked about this before, but like the thing with the billionaires is like, when you're, uh, when you're like middle-class, like you have an item and you do it yourself, like you cook for yourself. When you're become a little bit wealthier, you have an app that, you know, DoorDash brings you the food. And when you're a billionaire, you have a guy and it's your chef. And so, you know, a billionaire does not buy any kitchen cooking equipment ever because the cook handles that and they don't even think about any of those items. And there's that for every single item in their life. You have a personal shopper who brings you 50 items. You try them on and you keep seven of them. You know, size. Just make sure that there's clothes in my closet in every house.

Yeah. And that's the lifestyle. And so did you see the SNL spoof of the Super Bowl ad? We got to stay on the Super Bowl ad because one interesting fact is that Super Bowl ad was not shot for the Super Bowl. That was the ad that they had been promoting on youtube to millions of people that ad before it aired on the super bowl had millions of ads so in one way like they'd kind of ab tested it and knew that that ad worked but at the other way it's like super it's still just

super lean culture they're like oh yeah we got a super bowl slot we're paying millions of dollars like we don't need to shoot something special for this or get a celebrity let's just run the the ad that we've been posting on Facebook for the last, like, like in many ways it's very counter to the approach again, that, that many, many of their competitors,

which would take, which is, Hey, Amazon is going to spend is probably planning their 2027 Superbowl ad now. And it's this multi-year thing and they want to try to win awards. And Timo is just like shop like a billionaire, baby. Yep. Budweiser is going to shoot a new Clydesdale ad,

probably three of them for this, for this Superbowl. And it's going to tell a story and it's going to be heritage and it's going to be very cinematic. And Teemu is just like, yeah, like what's working on Google right now. Oh, okay. Like just throw that. Oh, it's new in the ad slot. Throw it up. Yeah, no problem. Again, kind of beautiful.

I don't know. I think it kind of worked for them. I bet they got good ROI on that. But the SNL spoof is hilarious. They call it, it's like some portmanteau between Timu and Shien. It's like, it's like Shimu or something like that. And it's like some some portmanteau between timu and shian it's like it's like shimu or something like that and and it's like dress ten dollars shoes five dollars working conditions fine don't

ask about it and they're just like how is it so cheap it's like now with no lead and they're like that makes me feel like there might be lead in here like the whole idea of like suspiciously low prices is so funny to me i just can't get enough of it it's like yeah at a certain point like 20 couch raises more questions than it answers yeah and to be honest there's a very real scenario where colin realized that he was going to be the fall guy for china would say actually there's so much evidence that China uses slave labor, and they have labor camps. And, you know, it's very dark. But Colin would have been the perfect guy to pin it all on for the CCP to be like, Oh, yeah, actually, this was happening. And like,

here's the guy, he was the guy selling all these cheap products. And and like it was on him even if they had fully endorsed it and so i think uh yeah he he so far it seems like he properly avoided being jack mod but um i haven't seen him on any podcasts lately so you know let's get him on 20 minute vc colin colin come on x go on 20 vc let's do it I'll have you on the show. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get to the bottom of this. You might be a little contentious, but. So they launch in September of 2022. By February of 2023, six months later, Super Bowl ad, number one shopping app in the US. Massive growth.

They expand their market presence. They launch in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in March. Then they launch in all of Europe. And they also relocate their headquarters, I think, to Dublin, Ireland. And then in March of 2023, shortly after the Super Bowl ad, they get suspended from the Google Play Store due to malware found in off-store versions. Although Timu is unaffected, the incident raises security concerns and the app is later reinstated after necessary fixes. And so they were doing some sort of exploit with like, you know, the APIs and the app. And everyone's like, man,

these guys are playing dirty. Yeah. I mean, Nikita Beer would be proud. Across the board, this is a company that undoubtedly does not care about anything other than flooding the market, gaining market share and growing. Right. Of course, many American companies at the end of the day are like that, too. But they're a little bit less blatant about this. Like the entire history of PDD

and Timu is issues around counterfeiting, supply chain practices, labor practices, data privacy. Like this is a company that probably is battling like a thousand to 10,000 lawsuits at once continuously. So, um, while they, they're not making us ad agencies, uh, money on Superbowl ads, I'm sure their legal bills back home are, are steep and I'm sure they're, I'm sure they're a good client to some us law firms. And again, they're fighting other Chinese companies. So Timu and Sheen are in a legal battle in July of 2023. Timu filed an antitrust lawsuit in the U.S. accusing Sheen of market abuse, while Sheen secures a temporary restraining order against Timu

over alleged copyright infringements. Legal actions ensue across multiple jurisdictions. What do they call this? Slop-on-slop violence. Slop-on-slop violence. Slop on slop violence. I love it. And it's so funny because- The great slop wars of the 2020s.

The great slop wars. It's so funny to me because even though we're looking at this through a business context, through a geopolitical lens, and obviously we have the take that this is exploitative, this is a loophole, it's destroying American businesses, et cetera. But there are tens of millions of Americans that to them, Timu is just, oh, cool, I get stuff for cheap. I like it. And no, I don't run a competitive company. I don't have an e-commerce business,

so it doesn't affect me. And the number of people, the number of constituents in the American democracy that are being negatively affected by Timu is in absolute terms, much lower. Because if you're like the number of people that are competing and getting their lunch ate by Timu is probably a million e-commerce people that work in e-commerce or drop shipping

or something like that. But the number of people that benefit is in the tens of millions. And so it is this popular thing. I got to, I got to push back there because it is more complicated than that. Uh, if somebody, you know, is shopping or they, they decide, Hey, I want a water filter. And they, they look at, at they go to Aurora.com. They're like, this looks great. They've got all the certifications. And then they look on Timu and they see a similar water filter. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't,

but it's 90% less and then they buy that. That is dollars that could have gone to an American company that supports a bunch of other American businesses and manufacturers. supports, you know, a team here in the US. And so it is very complicated. And so we have no idea how many billions of dollars of Timu's GMV would have just gone to America, you know, it would have bought in less products. I completely agree. Has a bunch of downstream effects. Yeah, I completely agree. I'm merely making the statement that that for a lot of Americans, they are addicted to consumerism. They're addicted to shopping

and, and they don't think about the second and third order effects of, Hey, if I'm, if I'm really supporting this app and buying, yeah, yes, I mean, I am getting these really cheap products, but maybe it'll make it harder for me to find a job or maybe my town will be hollowed out because they're, because the, just the economy is not there anymore be hollowed out because they're because the just the economy is not there anymore in the U.S. because we're just purely an import based society. So I think that's the backbone of the tariff renegotiation is, is this a fair deal for America? Yeah.

What were you saying? I was going to say, well, if we eliminate Timu and Sheen and we just get every American addicted to buying cheap stocks. There we go. The potential there. Massive. Massive. Buying early.

Yeah. Awesome. And so in 2024, they're in 50 countries in 16 months. On January 17th, Timu officially launches in South Africa, marking its 49th country since debuting in the US. Its footprint now expands over North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and parts of Latin America and the Middle East. So they are willing to ship anywhere. And the reason they can do this is because it's so asset light. All they need to do is just allow, there's just a software platform that allows factories in China to ship as soon as they can get those packages to the ports.

They can really go anywhere. So they just need to localize the website and they're good. It's not like Amazon where they have to set up a local distribution center, hire local drivers. There's really nothing. And it's not really building up the local economies. It's actually hollowing it out. And so in February of 2024, they do another Super Bowl and they hit user records again. They offer $15 million of giveaways at the Super Bowl. And early in 2024, the platform

announces it has surpassed 100 million active users in the United States and over 130 million app downloads globally. So yeah, 100 million people in the US have shopped on Timu and that is a big constituency. What I'm getting at is like, it's similar to TikTok, where the number of people that are negatively affected by TikTok are the people that are thinking about security, cybersecurity, geopolitics, thinking about competitive dynamics with American companies. But there are still a hundred million people that are just like, TikTok is where I go for entertainment. Don't turn off my TV channel. And so it is this complicated, uh, there is a constituency there. They're not highly politically active. They don't donate to politics in that way. But, uh, if you

just, if you just pulled the American people, should you ban Timu? A lot of people would say, no, I like, I like cheap stuff. It's fine. It's where I spin a wheel and get free stuff. Like, why are you banning my fun thing? And that's it's it's in the same way that um pump fun is a is a digital casino you could see you know pdd or timo is like a carnival right where it's just like yeah i'm spinning the wheel i'm winning it's entertainment it's social it's you know. Yep. And so the company refines its logistics model to manage scale while PDD Holdings faces increased regulatory scrutiny over counterfeiting supply chain practices and data privacy. And the legal battles between Timu and Sheehan have continued into 2024. Today, in less than a decade, PDD's parent company has become a global e-commerce powerhouse,

which includes Pinduoduo in China and Timu abroad, reported $34.7 billion in revenue and $8.5 billion in net income in 2023. I'm sure it's higher in 2024. I don't know if they've done earnings yet, though. PDD remains one of China's top online shopping destinations with over 800 million users. That is staggering. That's what it's a billion person country. So that's like massive market penetration. While Timu's low prices and viral marketing have captured significant international market share. The company continues to navigate rapid growth, fierce competition and regulatory challenges as it looks to the future. And so we will be staying on top of that. One thing that's interesting. So they have the benefit of, so Timu at some point,

do you have the specifics, but I believe they rolled back in Timu, which was independently listed into the main PDD holdings. And so the original Timu that went public on the NASDAQ is now just a part of PDD holdings, correct? Yeah, that's right. And so the benefit of that is like, even under all this scrutiny, lawsuits, all this stuff, you're gonna be shocked. I'm on public right now. The stock, the stock is up. How much is it up? Give me the data. Give me the public data. So they're sitting at the PDD holdings is sitting at $111 right now. Wow. And it was in March of 2022, it was sitting at like $40 a share. So they're still like a juggernaut and have done tremendously well, just again, under fire from all of these lawsuits and things like that and being, but they just steamrolling

the market. And I think that's really in many ways because of that, you know, they truly are a software company. They're not a, they're not a retail. 100%. Let's go through, uh, who got rich off of this. I think that's always an interesting question to ask. Obviously the early team made a ton of money. There was an interesting transaction where the, uh, where the, uh, uh, uh, as in 2020, Colin Wang transferred $7.7 billion worth of shares to the partners, effectively giving slices of his fortune to the top lieutenants. I thought that was very interesting that he did that after the fact. They'd already grown. Obviously, they had stock grants early on, but he was just like, I've made so much money. I'm just going to hook up the boys. He's either an absolute, you know, brother of the week, Chinese brother of the week potential,

or they were all going to throw him under the bus so hard that they said, if you don't give me, if you don't give us billions of dollars, like you're going to be the fall guy for all of this. And we're going to, you know, drag you through the streets. Yeah. Jack Ma style. Yeah. Jack Ma style. Yeah.

The dynamics over there are very, very hard to get right. So Gowrong Capital, formerly Banyan Capital, was an early VC investor. It's a Beijing-based VC firm. They led the Series A round. And Zhen Zhang, Gowrong's founding partner, first backed Colin by leading an $8 million investment round when PDD was just an idea. This gave them an 8% stake pre-IPO.

It was probably a higher round and then got diluted down a little bit. Tencent came in and they were able to leverage WeChat to fuel PDD's growth. Tencent joined in the Series B and later led a huge $1.4 billion Series D in early 2018. And so they had 16% at IPO. Sequoia Capital China, led by Neil Shen, they've since rebranded to Hongshan. By the time of the IPO, Sequoia was principal shareholder, even agreeing to purchase 150 million shares at IPO to support the listing. Sequoia's stake post IPO was on the order of six to 7%. In March of 2021, Sequoia Capital still held 6.4% of PDD. And so they are just printing over there. Sequoia Capital, Sequoia China is really the Sequoia of China. You can't make it up. IDG Capital is one of China's oldest VC firms. They were investors during the growth phase. They participated in the Series C round. New Horizon Capital was a PE fund that went in the Series B. And then Lightspeed China also got a bite of the 2020s

for decades to come. And open invite Colin, come on the show anytime. We'll put you in the truth zone a little bit on the data privacy, labor, supply chain crises, things like that. But if you're ready for that, you want to take some heat, come on. But we will also sing your praises

for massive wealth creation. We'll pop a bottle of Dom Perignon with you. We'll hit the size gong. It'll be a mix. It'll come out positive. Yeah. It won't be a puff piece. It'll be hard nose.

We will ask you about the Uyghurs. We got to know. We'll also ask you what kind of car you drive. Yep. And what kind of watch. What kind of mansion you're building. And how many watches

you bought on bezel. Yeah. It'll probably be the best interview you'll ever do. It'll be great. Come on. Well, let's move on

to the timeline. Thanks everyone for sticking around for our Timu deep dive. We got another, oh, we got a solid 40 minutes of timeline today. This is great. Very excited. Let's kick it off with this post from Restructuring Day in the Life of an Investor at U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund. Hate to admit it, but sometimes

Wall Street Oasis has some hilarious content. Jordy, you threw this in the feed. Why'd you like it? Well, so backstory, they, they, they did an executive order to create a U S sovereign wealth fund. So Trump signed this, I think a couple of days ago at this point, a lot of people are speculating on what's going to go in it. A lot of people, you know, a friend of this show, Jack Raines said, uh, we already have a sovereign wealth fund. It's called spy. Um, but, um, but anyways, I, i just thought this was hilarious

so i'll read it so this is somebody who's an analyst in private credit he says it's 7 a.m i wake up in my georgetown apartment to a text from my md need a deck on strategic lithium reserves by noon use the dod template i have no idea what that means but i nod sip my government subsidized coffee and i get to work by 8 30 a.m I'm at my desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office building, surrounded by former Goldman guys who rebranded as patriotic investors. Our mandate? Deploy one trillion of taxpayer money into high priority national interests. In reality, we're LARPing as PE bros while writing checks to companies with more lobbyists than revenue. By 10 a.m., I have an IC meeting.

The Secretary of Commerce dials in asking why we aren't buying up more farmland. The MD replies, Sir, we already own 15% of Iowa. And then I get cut off there. But we nod solemnly America first. I'll keep reading. Lunch is catered from the White House mess hall. I sit next to a guy from the Pentagon's AI readiness task force. He assures me that investing $500 million into a surveillance drone startup run by a 24-year-old Stanford dropout is critical for national security. I write synergies in my notes and take a bite of my taxpayer-funded steak. By 3 p.m., we're structuring a bailout for a failing EV battery company. Treasury wants it to be a loan, but the MD insists on pref equity with board seats. We're not just capital.

We're strategic. Everyone nods, except for the one career bureaucrat who still thinks this is about fiscal responsibility. At 6 p.m., I'm working on a term sheet for an emergency lithium mining JV with some guys in Wyoming. The deal terms? Equity upside, mineral rights, and a direct line to the Fed for

liquidity. Somewhere, Larry Fink sheds a single tear of pride. By 9 p.m., the interns are arguing whether we should issue high- single tear of pride by 9 PM. The interns are arguing whether we should issue high yield bonds backed by military surplus. Uh, someone jokes about tokenizing social security. Everyone laughs, but someone writes it down at 1130 PM. I closed my laptop and stare at the framed photo of Teddy Roosevelt in my office. I realized I'm no longer just a finance guy. I'm a Statesman. This is the most prestigious exit. This is paradise. This is paradise. Yeah. So anyways, this would be applying, you know, if tech is Doge, the sovereign wealth fund is going

to be all the all the PE brothers just just having a heyday. I think it's cool. I think it's cool to think about. We'll see how it plays out. Obviously, the BTC maxis say that the sovereign wealth fund should just be a trillion dollars of Bitcoin. And I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of stuff got in. But it is funny how these these if there was a sovereign wealth fund, I imagine that it would ultimately be Trump as playing Masa, where people come and pitch him crazier and crazier, bigger and bigger ideas. And then, cause that's what happens in many ways. That's what happens. And if you're going to try to raise, you know, a billion dollars from, from Saudi Arabia for some project,

MBS will at that ticket price, MBS probably has to like verbally sign off on the deal, right? Maybe he's not taking the pitch meeting, but you know, these, anytime you're raising money from what's effectively a kingdom, the King's got to sign off or he's got a guy who is, you know, responsible for making sure that they don't do anything silly. But then when you're playing with dollars of that size, you end up doing, you know, he's jokes about giving giving a 24 year old $500 million, but you know, it's only, um, 50 basis points of the fund, you know, why not just, uh, or no,

even, even less, even less crazy. This is so funny to me because I like the idea. I I'm very pro the idea of a U S sovereign wealth fund, but our country is in massive debt. Like we don't have a surplus right now. We don't have money to put into a sovereign wealth fund, I think. I don't know where it would come from. We need to pay down our debt first, right? I think that's how it works. On leverage. Yeah. I don't know. All the rules have been thrown out. It's a new day. Anything is possible. But good to see some analysts having fun on wall street oasis uh let's move on to lulu uh lulu writes a good slogan is critical for starting a movement

make america great again yes we can time to build no taxation without representation keep calm and carry on move fast and break things just do it workers of the world unite think different the best slogan is one that gets stuck in people's heads and represents one central idea. And this is quote tweeting Emmett, former CEO of Twitch. He says, the way you influence large language models or a bunch of humans is not by writing persuasive prose, but by coining new words or phrases, which are useful and also make it easier to think certain thoughts over others. And she actually tagged me in this. She said, this is Coogan's law. And I was super excited to see Coogan's law going

viral on the timeline once again. I'm very proud of that coinage. I stand by it. I think it's extremely valuable. I need to coin some more. Jordy, give me your take on this and then I'll riff a little bit more. I don't have much more to add here. I think we're just big proponents of coining, coining constantly, iterating, attempt to coin things. You're not always going to be successful, but when you hit something, when you hit it like Kugel's law, I mean, that's a billion dollar coinage right there. It is.

And I was actually giving this advice to a GP who reached out to me and said they were writing a piece on the intersection of these three trends. And my primary advice was, you need to condense it down into five to six words max, so that you can, if that, if these trends play out in the way that you think they will, that you will get credit for sort of creating that, uh, and, and sort of, uh, encapsulating that trend and something that is memorable and something that can sort of live on. And so, uh, Brody here says, um, you know, calls this out. Well, Brian Johnson has done this incredibly well with don't die two words that, um, that sort of encapsulate his movement and everything that,

that he's, he stands for. So, uh, always be coining, always be coining. Um, I mean,

Peter Thiel did this with zero to one, but also he popularized the idea of the power law, which was really, uh, like it's obviously he didn't create that, but he popularized that in the venture term. Uh, and,

and, uh, owning a coinage and popularizing a coinage is super valuable. I actually looked up all the different ways you can coin a phrase around your name. So Coogan's Law is out there already. We're working on Hayes Law, Geordie's Law. The Hayes Paradox. Hayes Paradox is coming soon, dropping soon. That's when you find something so funny. It's so funny that you're literally laughing at your own joke and then no one else finds it funny. Yeah.

You got to post that. I think that's good. I think that can live on. But you have multiple shots on goal. So we can get Hayes law, Hayes paradox, Hayes effect, Hayes principle, Hayes razor, the Hayes trap the hayes critique the hayes hayes syndrome the hayes equation and it's funny hayes wager because lulu didn't put going direct on here which is her yeah her uh well she didn't coin that really she popularized it and this is another thing about the coogan coogan's law there's also

coogan's paradox which is that oftentimes the person that popularizes the coinage accrues more value than the person who actually does the coining yeah that's funny i always thought she created it no no i i think it might have come from bology or someone else she also gets credit because she helps so many companies now do the thing, which is going direct. Totally. And yeah, and coining truly is not, coining is not just coming up with the phrases, also doing the work to popularize it and beat that drum. And I can tell that people are, people are circling around Coogan's law ideas. And if I don't stake my claim with a banger every week or every month, re asserting my ownership over that meme it will get twisted

and repopularized and i will lose it uh and i've been talking to solana about this with moon should be a state he has a great phrase uh and you can see that as this gets bigger and bigger this movement could move beyond him and someone else could take it and all of a sudden he's no longer the moon state guy. And that would be a huge loss. I want to keep it in the salon. Yeah. The risk, the risk for him is that, is that there's two people that could really take that Elon and Trump. Yep. Positive thing is if you get your, your phrase taken from one of those people, you still, you still get to be infamous for, you know, creating, creating a movement so totally totally uh and so

did you see this mattress drama we have to cover it mattress drama on the timeline mattress drama to me the drama here was that it was an air mattress and not a eight sleep she wouldn't have caught this kind of shade if she was shown off her her pod for ultra on the floor but i think san francisco's so normalized to the fact that high performers sleep on eight sleeps that you can't really be taken seriously in san francisco if you're not on an eight sleep yep um i'm very excited to launch uh officially launch our eight sleep partnership very soon uh but on but on that note, uh, I thought it was funny because she clearly, um, I think it was like one person that just like dunked on her and then like kicked off this entire firestorm. I thought her original post was totally fine. She said, she's clearly joking.

Yeah. She's, she's joking and like, she's having fun and she's like playing into the culture. But, um, but I think people saw it a little bit as stolen valor you know it's like uh you're a vc the mattress on the floor has been reserved for you know the struggling founder the john coogan in 2010 you know sleeping on a mattress with 200 bucks a month to spend on you know food uh so anyways day she says day two learnings vcs are hated in sf and people think that their junior vc job is a lot more glamorous than it is it's not lol another great reminder to focus on what you love versus being concerned with external validation uh i don't think the second point i think she kind of missed the point i don't think vcs are hated um i think that. I don't think anybody thinks that junior VCs are so glamorous. It's more so that

unless you're working for the world's smallest micro fund, you're probably making an okay income and you don't have any risk of, am I going to run out of money in three months yeah um and so uh anyways megan megan dunks on her again uh and says vcs sf lmao you guys this is a this is a call to action for i don't know exactly what firm monica works for but uh if you're the gp of that fund uh get monica and eight sleep immediately uh and then also maybe get her a cardi a crash to show off in when she's at a partner yeah you know yeah a loaner cartier crash would go a long way to establish and why not a company car while we're at it i mean uh you you know something nice that she can take you know maybe a mclaren f1 it has two seats you can take the cto and the ceo on a little drive don't you want to save some money, go with the I-8. The doors still go up.

You'll still be respected. Yeah. Don't LARP as a bootstrap founder. LARP as a sizelord GP. Exactly. Get her a Bentley. Get her a crash. Get her a sleep. Get her a $50,000 a month. Let's put those management fees to work. Let's do it. It's not meant to be just pure net income for the partners. It's about moving the firm forward. Yeah. And you have the proof on the timeline. I think this is an indictment of austerity at VC

firms. We need GPs kidding their associates out and their principals out and their junior VCs out with the absolute best, the creme de la creme. Let's move on to a promoted post. Wait, what you got? After we do this, I got some promoted reviews. So let's jump in with Sky. Let's do this promoted post. I'll read through this. This is the job I expect is a dream come true for many software engineers.

We're hiring for engineers to join the internal AI team here at Anduril Tech, where you will build agentic tools that power damn near every work stream across the company. If you want to have access to the biggest foundational AI labs as your partners and work on enabling everything from sales to marketing to internal comms to manufacturing to hardware design to field sustainment while being part of the leader in defense technology apply and so go to uh andrews uh job website on greenhouse check out the job that sai has posted he is in a he's in a a massive war with luke metro over at andrew to be the top poster at Andoril. And so give him a follow, go apply for this job. Seems like a dream job, honestly. Company's ripping.

Absolutely. It's an exciting place to be. Thank you for the tag, Cy. Go apply. Go DM Cy. This is an insane opportunity. You'd be stupid not to take it. Go work for America, work for Anderle, and defend our national interest. Let's go to some promoted reviews because we've been getting five-star after five-star review on this podcast. They don't stop coming. And as a reminder, if you leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, we will read your review live on the show. And we encourage you to include an ad in

your review. It's free real estate, folks. Take it. Jordan, what you got for me? This block of promoted reviews is sponsored by AdQuik. AdQuik is the number one way to buy out-of-home ads for your startup. They make it programmatic. They make it super easy. We're planning some of our own out-of-home campaigns on AdQuick right now for TB as well as PMF for Dye. So they're amazing. You can just go to adquick.com and sign up. They've got some great sales reps over there that'll walk you through it.

Or if you need some campaign ideas, hit us up. We're happy to support there. And I'm going to jump into some ads now. This is from Dr. Brian. He says, Technology Brothers is a wonderful podcast. Just like my 2020 vision, I don't take a single episode for granted. This five-star review is brought to you by Graytalk Family Vision Care. For over 30 years, Dr. Mark Graytalk has been dedicated to providing exceptional eye care to families in Western Pennsylvania with locations in Greensburg, Legionnaire, and Harrison City. And now with

the recent addition of his son, Dr. Brian, I love it. Keeping it in the family. Our commitment to your vision is stronger than ever. As a father-son team, we believe that eye care means we care because your vision deserves the best. We offer comprehensive eye services, including dry eye treatments for the 10X engineers who are glued to their screens all day, creating shareholder value in products such as blue light blocking glasses for terminally online X posters who seek banger archive acclaim. Don't let sport vision prevent you from seeing the next big trend in tech.

Call now or book online. Gray Talk Family Vision Care, where I care means we care. That's a fantastic review. Fantastic post, fantastic ad. Thank you for sharing that. gotta love promoting family to go to the eye doctor in a long time thankfully um but uh but i would i would love to actually be treated by them that they sound amazing thank you for the review guys and for listening i can read the next one if you want. Okay. Uh, it sounds funny. It says

it's mewing for the brain, a five-star review, creatine and raw eggs castle equals calcium cannons blueprint slash Brian Johnson equals YB stiffs. I don't know what that means. Oh, I think I know what that means. Actually, uh, technology brothers equals a fully rocked up brain. If you want to beef up the brain matter, all you need to do is take some creatine and put on these two citizens of the world. Current events, deep takes, and a style sense that would make

the ice queen and a winter quiver. Babe, wake up. Just found some good old-fashioned ear candy. Everyone that matters. Stu, thank you. Dude, absolute dog. What if there was no ad in there? I would have liked to promote something for you. Yeah. But you always get a second chance because you can review us on Apple podcast and

Spotify. You get two shots on goal guys. Uh, should I read the next one? Next one. Next one. I got one from SC. He says, and this is from Blaine Davis. He says business thrives on deals and deal makers thrive on Technology Brothers podcasts. Those who love leverage and luxury listen daily. Take it from us, a pair of passionate listeners who like you, love business and decided to do something about it. We're building a platform to pay homage to deal makers

like Emil Michael and Michael Ovitz. So today, before allocating capital, allocate your network. Make a new connection for a new company to help them land a customer and we'll wire you capital the same day. We want to build a business platform of the future where connections you trust could be the new customers for the companies we trust. We are super connector.com and we approve this message. There's an amazing company.

I would think of it as like almost like an expert network, but for helping you find customers. So if you're trying to sell into healthcare, they have healthcare executives and people that are hyper-connected in that industry that you can basically hire and just pay on a per lead basis. And so super cool platform, love the domain to super connector.com. Just ripping through these. You want to hit the next one? Yeah. Tech bros for the win. If you've ever wondered what happens when two angel investors with LinkedIn level enthusiasm and Chad-like confidence get behind a microphone, look no further than Technology Brothers, a world where

AI isn't just a tool, but a co-host and blockchain is the answer to every question, even the ones you didn't ask. Five stars. This review is sponsored by jay kramer corp transform your dream home into reality with jay kramer corp southern california's premier general contractor this is extremely relevant for us with over 30 years of experience we specialize in luxury new constructions intricate remodels and innovative designs our award-winning projects have been featured in architectural digest andest and Dwell, showcasing our commitment to excellence, whether it's navigating tight coastal spaces or building on challenging terrains, we handle it all with precision and care. Visit jkramercorp.com and let's build your future together. I mean, we got to build a manor for TV. uh, studio will be looking like Louis the 14th. Jay Kramer. We were going to just

lease a studio, but I feel like now we got to build one ground up to be honest, John, nothing like reading these reviews literally makes my heart sing. It's like one of the, it's just so fun. Everybody gets into character. I absolutely love it. Um, thank you guys for the support and for listening. And it's the least that we can do to, um, to add, uh, you know, to run ads for your incredible businesses. So absolutely love it. Let's get back into this timeline. Okay. So Connor says number of early stage founders. I know who are not struggling to hire zero and Monica from an earlier post says, what's the bottleneck? It's an employer's market, isn't it?

And Connor says, the best talent have many options to choose from. Very hard to find the right cultural skill and expectation fit. You can hire people more easily by lowering your standard in some capacity, but there's no free lunch. And this is real. Everyone says, oh, AI is going to kill all the jobs and everything, but it hasn't happened yet. There's still a very tight labor market. And with Cursor and Devin and all these extra tools, it's gotten a lot more fun to work at a startup. It's gotten a lot more productive. And so great engineers and great product builders have the pick of the litter.

What do you got for me? Yeah, I mean, to me, this is playing out. A lot of people said that, have been saying, the job of the software engineer is going away and we've got another year maybe, but it's gonna be gone. And who knows really what's gonna happen. But one thing is clear as these engineers, as engineers get more efficient with tools like Devin and Cursor and windsurf and

poolside and the whole list goes on uh it seems like there's just an even bigger and bigger and bigger demand for engineering talent because then companies say okay we're more efficient now let's build even faster right and so you see these companies that are hitting these incredible revenue milestones and building these really full featured products in record time. And so, yeah, it's a great time to be talented and looking for opportunities. It's a tough time to be hiring. And every single one of the companies, you know, we talk, every company that we talk about on the show is actively hiring, right? And even they're hiring and OpenAI themselves is hiring engineers, right? And I'm sure they are frustrated

with how competitive the market is right now. So an awesome time to be in the market to join a startup. Yeah, I always think about that Pavel post about, oh, software engineers are cooked. No, everyone is going to be competing with software engineers because the tooling is so advanced now that, I mean, you see this at Ramp. their marketing organization has tons of technologists in it.

And there's every problem that you have, whatever your business is, whether it's sales, like having programming skills or being able to think like a programmer, it's just steroids. So deep research does PhD level research now. And that is software engineers building that to compete with not other software engineers, but he's been more so I you know, he was on DoorCash and basically talking about how, yes, it's going to be transformative, but it's not going to eliminate all jobs in 10 years. Right. Like these trends are going to take quite a long time. So why don't you get into this? Yeah. So Alex Stapp says, buckle up folks. And he's sharing a screenshot from Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen writes, I have had deep research write a number of 10 page papers for me, each of them outstanding. I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD level research assistant and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, maybe more,

except deep research does the work in five or six minutes. And it does not seem to make errors due to the quality of the embedded O3 model. And what I've realized is that I've gotten better at prompting deep research and now I'm having fun with it. I asked it when we did the deep dive on Temu, I specifically asked it who made money from Temu? And it was very good about citing very specific articles to figure out who the investors were. And then I also asked it, write in an analysis of Temu's effect on Amazon. And it was able to look at the financials of PDD and the financials of Amazon and really compare those. It was a little bit boring when I asked it just like,

tell me the whole story of Timu, because it doesn't really know what I want. But when I ask it very specific questions and questions that I don't know the answer to, or I can't just Google and actually require some analysis and some piecing together, that's where it really shines. And that's where it would take a long time to pull up the financials, maybe get into Excel,

compare them. So I am loving it. And I think it's a big advancement. What do you got? Yeah, one other note. I saw Michael Mignano from Lightspeed posted. He's been on the show before. We covered his blog post, I think, on Monday or Tuesday. He said, deep research marks the first time.

I've been convinced that AGI is already here. The discussion is over. I agree. I think that people are realizing that we've talked about this on the show before, right? Everybody was saying, you know, we're building AGI, you know, it's almost here. And then everybody kind of looked around and said, hey, what we already got, you can already sort of say is artificial general intelligence. And so the goalposts just got shifted out to artificial super intelligence and agentic systems. And, you know,

well, it's that is that AEI concept, the artificial economic intelligence, in my mind, it's like, at a certain point, these evals mean less than just how much money are these AI systems making. And that's a real, that's almost a measure of the unhobblings, like the PDF upload we like to joke about. But really the question is, can deep research integrate into a system where it's creating real value? And is that measurable? And then really it's just, it's just, what's the revenue of the application layer? And that is a metric. And once that gets really, really high, well, yeah, we've crossed some sort of quantitative layer. And that is a metric. And once that gets really, really high, well, yeah, we've crossed

some sort of quantitative threshold. And these questions about like, is the system human level intelligent or not? It's almost less relevant than is GDP moving up? Are we at 5% GDP growth instead of 2%? That would be amazing. That's what Tyler Cowen's a little bit worried about because he thinks that there's a lot of jobs and a lot of roles that are just completely hardened against AI, at least in the short term.

But certainly the ideal is that all these systems get better. They create more value, values captured by the shareholders, by the consumer, by the user, by everyone, and it's just a new American boom, which I would love to see. Let's stay on this topic, move forward a few slides, Ben, to Juwan over at Ramp. He says, front-end engineers equipped with AI slash ML skills will be the most desirable employees by the end of 2025. Thought this was an interesting post because a lot of the back end

and the actual instantiation of the idea of software is becoming commoditized and becoming easier to do with these AI tools. But you still got to know what to build, how to design a product, and how to make it usable to a human at the end of the day. And so that's why I think he's saying that front end engineers, designers, people with product sense might be uniquely poised to benefit from advances in AI. But what do you think? I just got to do a golf clap for Juwan because it feels like just yesterday he came out, started asking for raises on the timeline. Been on a tear. At this point, I think he's beyond earned it. The guy's been on a tear. He's getting millions of impressions a month, putting ramp on the map, making them a target

for super smart, young, uh, engineers to go and join ramp. So, um, I think he deserves a raise. I'll go on record and say it. Uh, maybe I'll even text, uh, Eric and Kareem. Uh, but, uh, anyways, congrats on the run. We got a promoted post from Emmett. Emmett Schein. He is looking for a designer to collaborate on branding and product design in this style. Metallic, chrome, grain, detailing, Americana.

If interested, DM Emmett on X or email him at Emmett at littleplains.co. And we're big fans of Emmett on the show. If you're not familiar with him, he was what, Gin Lane? Yeah, quick summary. So Emmett started Gin Lane like probably 15 years ago, one of the most impactful branding agencies that led the charge on D2C. So they worked with all these different companies from like Warby Parker to, um, I think they did Harry's to sweet green, things like that. Um, so absolutely incredible human and creative mind. Uh, he's also a coach for PMF for die. We got a big announcement for PMF for die coming tomorrow. Uh, so he'll be on that show and just a pleasure to work with. He

did the Rora branding. You can see it in the back left there john so we work with him there but incredible opportunity for the right designer to go in there and uh get to work with the goat well let's go to another promoted post uh not from bezel but for someone that should be shopping on bezel because brody fan of the show, asks the question, what should I put in these empty watch slots? He has three watches. He's got 10 slots, seven to fill or eight to fill. Or actually, that's 12. That's a 12 watch case.

So he's got plenty of options. What would you put in there, Jordy? One more. He should have circled that Apple Watch, and you can get that out of him. You're not going to see Apple watches on bezel. I think that watches are such a considered purchase that I highly recommend if you're interested in getting one, not impulse buying anything because the watch that you think is cool today. And if you just start watching YouTube videos on watches for just 30 minutes a night for a while by a month. And you'll, you'll, all the watches you thought

were cool. And the first, you know, the first week suddenly, or, or, you know, you're, you're beyond them. And so, uh, I think it's a journey. There's no rush to fill it up. Um, and, uh, and anyways, I would say like work on building up your wishlist on bezel before you do, uh, before you make any specific purchase. Um, also also brody brody launched a cool um he launched a marketplace yesterday that's a marketplace for startups to offload their um startups to offload like you know if you're moving offices and you have extra chairs or you bought monitors that you don't need um i don't think i don't know if we have it listed here, but either way, check it out. I think it's vcsubsidized.com and, you know, potentially get some Herman Miller for 90% off.

Yeah. And there's a lot of options. So download the Bezel app, start scrolling and watch some YouTube videos and watches. Let's move over to another somewhat promoted post and then we'll wrap up the show. Patrick O'Shaughnessy posted today his fabulous conversation with Graham Duncan. And we wanted to highlight this because we covered this on the show because the interview with Graham Duncan was on the cover story of the first Colossus review, which we highly recommend going and subscribing to. It's a fantastic publication. We have it somewhere here in the studio. But we wanted to highlight this because previously this conversation was only available on the paid Colossus RSS feed. But now in a great turn of events, it's available in an ad sponsored format.

And so Ramp has partnered with Invest Like the Best. They are the presenting sponsor. And you can go and listen to Patrick's conversation with Graham Duncan for free on the ad supported Invest Like the Best RSS feed. And so go check it out. He breaks down starting an investment platform, sourcing, compulsion, grip, and levels of investing, of the investing game and evaluating people. So if you don't know Graham Duncan, he is the guy who picks the guy. He seeds new investment and asset managers. And so if you're starting a new hedge fund or a new investing firm, you go to Graham, if he likes you, you're going to get a lot of money for your fund. And he's done very, very well. And he breaks down how he thinks about talent. The guy spends three hours a day on LinkedIn, he's an absolute beast.

It's very broadly applicable to just everything from picking, you know, founders that you want to angel invest in to picking, you know, friends and business partners. And anyways, his, his lessons are tremendous. So definitely check it out. Yeah. So thanks everyone for tuning in. That's our show for today. We'll be back tomorrow. We have tons more stories, tons more news, and I'm sure we'll be breaking stories and getting exclusives like we always do on here.

Every time. So don't forget to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave an ad in your review. Send us any questions. DM us. Submit banger archive posts.

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Thanks for watching, everyone. Thanks, folks. See you tomorrow. Have a good day. Bye.