Technology Brothers

What is Technology Brothers?

The most profitable podcast in the world.

John:

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world, also the fastest growing podcast in the world. We doubled again Super surprised. 4,000 followers on x. If you're not already following, head over there and follow us now. As you know, we have a little bit of a tradition on the show.

John:

Every time we double the size of the podcast, we celebrate with a bottle of Dom Perignon. And so today, we have a wonderful I believe it's 2015 vintage. That's correct.

Jordi:

Fantastic. So

John:

let's get this open. And, how was your weekend, Jordy?

Jordi:

My weekend is good. My weekend was good. You went to the ballet. I went

John:

to the ballet. I saw The Nutcracker.

Jordi:

What's new?

John:

Fantastic. What's new? The ballet is, deeply underrated, I I

Jordi:

believe.

John:

Totally. And, everyone

Jordi:

2nd only to seeing Interstellar with your absolute boys.

John:

Which we are doing on Thursday, which will be great. Let's see. Ready, Ben? There we go.

Jordi:

It's, it's kind of it's kind of wild. It's gonna be. We we we, our studio has, like, carpet all over the floor, and so the amount of champagne just just sinking into the carpet is gonna be a mess.

John:

Yeah. But, you know, you gotta you gotta celebrate the wins. It's important.

Jordi:

Yeah. And we grew 10% since we hit the 4 k milestone too. So Fantastic. Compounding.

John:

Yeah. I saw I saw The Nutcracker, and, it's it's fantastic. Tchaikovsky. I didn't know this, but, the story was, was written in 18/20. Do you know the story of The Nutcracker?

John:

Do you know the whole history here?

Jordi:

I've seen it. I've seen it many times.

John:

So, of course, Patel for the listener.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

John:

And, and it's very interesting because the the the story is about this dream. And in the dream, these, like, toy soldiers are fighting these rats, and I couldn't help but think it was, like, a metaphor for the plague in some way. Yeah. Even though, like, I don't think that's exactly what people think it's about. But it was weird that, like, the the rat was, like, the avatar.

Jordi:

Or capitalism versus communist.

John:

Right? Maybe. But the whole time I was sitting there and I was thinking, like,

Jordi:

if You can attach your own meaning to it.

John:

It's, it's very odd that, like, the whole COVID pangolin bat story hasn't been canonized into ballet yet.

Jordi:

Yet. Yeah. And maybe Well, maybe that's we can get into that, we can get into producing ballets.

John:

We should. We should.

Jordi:

It's a great product line.

John:

I mean, Russia should really turn around and start producing ballets again. Yeah.

Jordi:

It was a great control export. Yeah. Yeah. Their their whole economy is now war

John:

based. Just shelling Ukrainians.

Jordi:

And if and if they could shift back into the arts, but but commercial very commercially Yeah. That could be great.

John:

I think they gotta put out a Banger ballet, retool the whole economy to produce great ballets, because then, you know, they just it would be hard not to

Jordi:

Or or if they if they open source their, PED model, like, they have some of the

John:

best Yeah. It's true.

Jordi:

The best PED programs in the world. And if they were to kind of do the Brian Johnson approach, you get, you know, Vladimir, just really, like, dial in more no more, you know, Putin, more more shirtless pictures on horses selling PEDs.

John:

That could

Jordi:

be a $1,000,000,000, you know, new business line for Russia.

John:

Yeah. You know what other, Tchaikovsky piece goes unreasonably hard? The 18 12 Overture. Have you heard this one? So good.

John:

It, it it concludes with musket firing. So it's usually played outdoors.

Jordi:

Always. Yeah. When they fire guns.

John:

In most concerts, modern day, they have metal detectors to make sure you don't bring in guns.

Jordi:

But the Russians

John:

But you go see Tchaikovsky, it's mandatory that the guns are fired.

Jordi:

There we go.

John:

It it it's it's way more hard

Jordi:

work than

John:

any other concert, I think. Yeah. Well, cheers to

Jordi:

4 k. To 4 k. It wouldn't be possible without all of our wonderful listeners. So

John:

Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. Okay. Well, we have some breaking news, everyone.

John:

Massive investment, massive deal. We might have to move this champagne so that we can ring the size gong. Let's break it down. We got breaking news coming in hot. Venture financing in the crypto world is back in the spotlight, and it's got the kind of star power that would make a Pro Bowl roster jealous.

John:

Khosla Ventures, led by none other than Keith Raboy, has teamed up with Founders Fund to throw a $10,000,000 series a pass to LAVA, a Bitcoin lending platform out of New York. That's right. Crypto is roaring back, and LAVA is looking to rewrite the playbook on Bitcoin backed lending. What you got for me, Jordy?

Speaker 3:

So who's Lava and why does this matter? Imagine you're sitting on a pile of Bitcoin while dreaming about that prime seafront property in Miami. You don't wanna sell your Bitcoin, especially now that it's close to a 100 k, but the real estate market isn't exactly accepting crypto. That's where lava steps in. Their motto, save in Bitcoin, spend in dollars.

Speaker 3:

Lava lets you borrow cash while holding on to your Bitcoin stash. And here's the kicker. Lava is allowing users to self custody their Bitcoin, a move Keith Rabois is calling a technical breakthrough.

John:

So let's break this down. In the crypto lending game, trust has been a fragile thing. Genesis, BlockFi, Celsius, all big names that crashed and burned in the last cycle, taking client funds with them. Lava, they're playing anti fragile ball, putting users in control of their assets and steering clear of the risky rehypothecation strategies that sank their predecessors. It's a bold strategy, Cotton.

John:

Let's see if it plays off.

Speaker 3:

Now, John, it's not all rainbows and moonshots. Lava service comes with a 7 and a half percent interest rate and an origination fee. But CEO Shazan Muradiah is banking on a wary battle hardened crypto crowd ready for something better, and Keith Rabois seems to agree. Rabois back at Coastal Ventures after a stint at Founders Fund isn't calling this a full blown crypto comeback, but he's clearly hyped about the potential here.

John:

So what's next for lava? Payments, Bitcoin buying, expanding their services, all while staying token free? No meme coins, no pump and dump games, just pure equity.

Speaker 3:

And here's the broader play, John, with Bitcoin past a 100 k, a thriving blockchain scene in New York, and regulatory shifts on the horizon, Raboy thinks a talent pool for crypto is about to heat up again. And he's not cozying up at Mar a Lago, but he's watching, waiting, and maybe even cheering from the sidelines for the next big thing in the space.

Jordi:

So what

John:

does this mean for crypto? It's like Marshawn Lattimore joining the Commanders, a big move that shakes up the game and gives fans a reason to watch closely. If you're holding Bitcoin or thinking about diving into the crypto space, Lava might just be the team to bet on. Stay tuned, folks. This one's just getting started.

John:

Fantastic. And there's a great article in Fortune Magazine that you can go read. There's a whole deep dive on the deal that just happened. I talked to Joey Krug at Founders Fund about it. He was very excited.

John:

And it's, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. This one just makes sense. If people have

Jordi:

learned anything from the last decade, it's that you pretty much never wanna sell your Bitcoin. Yep. You just wanna ride the volatility, as much as you can and just hold and stack.

John:

So And you don't want to be on a centralized product. Yep. That they can go under. And that's what that's how so many people got burned last time.

Jordi:

Yeah. When you look at what Celsius, often confused with the energy drink, if you look at what Celsius Celsius and and and and a lot of these I think it was Block 5.

John:

Block 5.

Jordi:

FTX was doing this to some degree as well. They they the the usage that they had was pretty ridiculous. Right? I think Block both of those companies were were worth 1,000,000,000 of dollars. And so, it's hard not to be, you know, in a more in a more serious way, legitimately very bullish on on lava and what they're doing.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Very exciting. Well, we have more breaking news today. Avi Shiffman over at Friend has raised 4, 5 and $5,400,000 from PACE Capital.

John:

Let's break it down. We got some breaking news out of the startup world today, and it's not just about raising capital. It's about redefining connection in the friend.com, the bold AI companionship platform, just secured 5,400,000 in fresh funding from Jordan Cooper at Pace Capital. That's right. Avi Shiffman's brainchild is making moves, and it's got the tech world buzzing.

Speaker 3:

Let's break it down, John. Friend.com isn't your typical chatbot form. This isn't Siri making small talk or chat gpt answering trivia question. No. Friend wants to bottle up the raw emotion of a late night heart to heart at a house party and deliver it through an AI powered pendant.

Speaker 3:

Shiffman calls it talking to God, but the rest

Jordi:

of us might call it complicated.

John:

Here's the deal. Friend.com pairs users with bots that don't just listen, they pour out their manufactured drama. We're talking digital companions with backstory so moody, they'd make an indie film jealous. Think AI confessing about losing their job or coping with trauma. It's emotional.

John:

It's messy, and it's entirely intentional. Shifman says, if they don't just open with, hey, what's up, like other chatbots, you don't know what to talk about. Instead, these bots pull you into their story lines, making users work for their trust and approval. That's a bold play in the AI game, and it's got people intrigued.

Speaker 3:

Now let's talk hardware, John. Friend.com isn't just staying on your screen. It's coming for your neck. The friend pendant is set to launch in January, giving users a physical connection to their AI companions. A microphone, sensors, and an all day battery pack into a sleek, customizable necklace.

Speaker 3:

It's a bold step towards integrating digital friendships into real life. But with no firm business model yet, aside from selling these pendants, the road ahead is anything but certain.

John:

Yeah. And make no mistake, Geordie. This space is competitive with heavyweights like character AI, replica already commanding massive user bases. Friend is the underdog. But Shiffman isn't shy about his confidence, declaring I will win this category flat out.

Jordi:

Flat out.

John:

That's some serious bravado. But, hey, when you built viral platforms and dropped out of Harvard after 1 semester, confidence isn't exactly in short supply.

Speaker 3:

The implications of AI companionship are heavy. Shiffman calls this one of the most dangerous industries, citing the weight of trust users place on their AI companions. But for now, friend.com is pushing forward aiming to combat the loneliness epidemic by offering

Jordi:

a new kind of connection.

Speaker 3:

One that's digital, wearable, and deeply unconventional.

John:

So what does this 5,400,000 mean for friend.com? It's not just funded. It's fuel for a vision that blurs the lines between human connection and machine interaction. Love it or hate it, you can't deny that friend.com is one to watch. Stay tuned, folks.

John:

This story is just getting started. Yeah. Excited for, I'm excited for Ari.

Jordi:

Yeah. I, Avi. I I, we've always yeah. We've always been, you know, attention matters a lot in this industry. Avi has continued to prove that he can generate it over and over and over.

Jordi:

He attracts, some haters. He attracts some copycats, but he's also attracting the right folks. I'm I'm good buddies with, I'm good buddies with Rompton who is a co lead in this round. And, yeah, I think I think he's an obvious obvious person to bet on. So

John:

Yeah. I mean, I remember when he when, like, the news had leaked privately that he spent $1,000,000 or something on his.comfriend.com, And it it wasn't even public yet. And people were whispering like, this kid is crazy. Like he spent his entire seed round on a domain. And of course, like he financed it and was able to do something much more nuanced.

John:

And, you know, it was just, but it was a great strategy. And I think it paid off. He'd he published some numbers and the early sales are pretty good. And most importantly, I love the strategy of you show up, and it's not just empty text box. Just completely flip it around to show up, and you just get some weird message, and then you're in the game, and you're just deeper in the funnel.

Jordi:

Yeah. If you're when you're listening to this, go into your browser and just type in friend.com. It'll pop up like a really unhinged message, like, hey, I'm I'm thinking of ending my life and then you have to go and kind of, like, talk them off the ledge. Yeah. So some of them are pretty dark, but it but it yeah.

Jordi:

He's turned it into a game Yeah. Basically.

John:

And the landing page is the product.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Like, there's no it's just like Google. You know, they don't have a landing page like here. Like, you know, we Do you wanna search?

Jordi:

Do you

John:

wanna search? Click here to search. No. It's like, just put it there. Same thing with chatgbtchatgbt.com.

John:

And, you know, it's very easy for someone in his position to, like, miss that, I think. Yeah. So that was great. Well, let's move on to a great deep dive that happened in The Economist this week on Sequoia Capital, one of the 3, holy trinity firms. And, going through, you know, just I don't even know.

John:

Is this like the 2nd generation, the 3rd generation of leaders at Sequoia? It's been a few. It's, you know, you got the Don Valentine era, then the Mike Moritz era. Now

Jordi:

Dark Sean.

John:

Dark Sean is is is heading things up. But this specifically, the there was a profile in the Wall Street Journal about

Jordi:

about Alfred Lynn.

John:

Alfred Lynn that was really good.

Jordi:

Speaking of, speaking of Rompton who who, co led, the seed round at at my last company and, he also co led Avi's round.

John:

Oh, cool.

Jordi:

He, when I first met Alf, when I first met Rampton, he got me on the phone with Alfred Lin the same exact day. Wow. Like, we talked for, like, 20 minutes. He's like, I love this. I like you.

Jordi:

Who do you wanna meet? And he set up a call. So this that that that was a cool kind of experience for me because I think a lot of, a lot of founders think these GPS are kinda hard to reach or whatever. There's all these layers, and all it takes is one relationship and one person to make that. And if it's the right intro, you can get on the phone the same day.

John:

It's fantastic. So, yeah, let's go let's go through the profile of of about him in The Wall Street Journal first. The Wall Street Journal has a section called personal board of directors where top business leaders talk about the people they turn to for advice and how those people have shaped their perspective and helped them succeed. And, it's it starts with Alfred Lin became one of Silicon Valley's most sought after venture capitalists after his after his early bets on companies like Airbnb and DoorDash. Now he's guiding Sequoia Capital through another tech transformation, artificial intelligence.

John:

He invested in Chatuch PT at 20,000,000,000. Today, the company is worth 157,000,000,000. He backed a pair of robotics startups, cobot, and physical intelligence. He grew up in New York City, son of Taiwanese immigrants, and now he's 52 years old. He graduated from Harvard, did a PhD in statistics at Stanford.

John:

And then

Jordi:

Don't forget about his lawn mowing business.

John:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's right. And He

Jordi:

was he was running his business and subcontracting work to his classmates to get it done.

John:

Such a great story. And then there's also the story of him and and Tony Hsieh at, at Harvard, like, buying big pizzas and then selling individual slices. Do you remember this?

Jordi:

Amazing. It was

John:

it was great. And so he goes to work for Zappos. And then, in 2010, he joined Sequoia. And, when when Lynn showed his wife the offer letter from Sequoia, his wife handed him a positive pregnancy test. Amazing.

John:

Epic.

Jordi:

I mean, what a great what

John:

a great job I did. But I'll

Jordi:

give you the

John:

We're good. We can have kids. Now I'm working at Sequoia.

Jordi:

Well, I mean oh oh, the offer letter from Sequoia. I thought it was I thought you were saying the offer letter from Zappos. Oh, no. No. No.

Jordi:

And I was like, you get you get your, no.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Going to going to Sequoia once you're about to have your first gig. That's a pretty good gig.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

So we got a quick start convincing the partnership to back 5 companies in his 1st year. That's really big.

Jordi:

That's a lot, especially then.

John:

And, and he worked on Airbnb and DoorDash, which netted the firm over $20,000,000,000. Isn't that crazy when they went public in December of 2020?

Jordi:

Netted the firm. That's not just like

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Enterprise value creation, which a lot a lot of Yeah. A lot of a lot of investors will be, like, I've backed companies that are worth over a $100,000,000,000 collectively. But, that was just the carry, you

John:

know, for So this article carry,

Jordi:

but the gross returns for

John:

the LPs. So this article, interviews 4 people that have worked with him closely.

Jordi:

One of

John:

his colleagues at Sequoia, Tony Hsu, CEO of DoorDash, Lin meant, Shu, when the 29 year old pitched him on DoorDash, Lin initially passed on the investment thinking that only college students spending their money would use the service before changing his mind and making a $15,000,000 investment for Sequoia in 2014. Yeah. I remember DoorDash went through YC. But, I mean, that's the beauty of working for, like, a multistage fund is that I mean, it seems like he passed on the YC demo day round, which probably, like, 1,000,000.

Jordi:

That's what I've that's what I've always said. Any any time travelers, go back. Yeah. Give John a $5,000,000 seed fund when he was going through YC the first time

John:

Seriously.

Jordi:

Would be a a top decile fund.

John:

Yeah. When the 2 caught up for dinner a few years later, he said that they had recently began taking, they recently begun taking jiu jitsu lessons describing how the sport taught them when and how to make tactical business decisions. The conversation encouraged Lynn to something new himself, writing a blog called Sunday Thoughts. Then they interview, Brian Chesky, who was invited to Allen and Co Sun Valley Conference as a young entrepreneur. He returned with 16 pages of notes from meetings with some of America's best known executives.

John:

At one point, he got a face to face meeting with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos after spotting him at a duck pond. That's cool. That's a cool anecdote. Lin, who has known Chesky for over a decade, thinks back to this anecdote often. Chesky's hustle was on Lin's mind when he reached out cold to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang a few years ago.

John:

The resulting Zoom meeting helped Lin establish a new relationship between Sequoia and NVIDIA. Wang has since spoken at Sequoia events and also invited its founders to visit NVIDIA's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. It's interesting because Sequoia did the seed round of NVIDIA. But, of Nvidia, but, of of course, like, those partners have since retired.

Jordi:

Yeah. And who was the part who was the partner that was still holding his Nvidia shares?

John:

I don't think it's public, but, we but we mentioned it earlier.

Jordi:

Okay.

John:

But I'm sure you could go look it up and figure

Jordi:

it out. You

John:

can find that out. Who who who is at Sequoia at the time who you haven't heard from in a very long time and has a huge family office now? It's probably that guy.

Jordi:

That guy.

John:

And then there's a there's a few other, interesting, anecdotes in here. I I like this, this this Wall Street Journal segment. It's a cool, like, 3 it's like a 3 60 review of the person just kinda showing you who they are from other people's perspective.

Jordi:

They basically turn, you know, thread format on x back into an article, which is cool.

John:

Yeah. And, Sequoia has been in the news a bunch recently. There was another article that I think we can chat about, in The Economist that's a little bit a little bit spicier. The the the Economist is asking, Sequoia Capital outgrown its business model? And, I don't know if you wanna read some of this.

Jordi:

Yeah. So you just jump in. The first thing that catches your eye when you enter the partially serene headquarters of Sequoia Capital on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, is a meter wide cross section of what appears to be a redwood. On closer inspection, it turns out to have been a tree in the past, 38000000 years ago, according to a plaque on the back. Now it's solid stone, a gift from

John:

Roloff

Jordi:

Bota. Roloff Bota, the venture, firm's current boss, and his wife. It reminds employees and guests of the durability of the organization they're visiting, which has existed since 1972. In the accelerated time of Silicon Valley, that is eons.

John:

Yeah. Everyone should go plant a tree because it's such a great way to, like at my high school time. I was in I was in the 100th graduating class, and there was a tree that was planted on, like, the first day of the school.

Jordi:

That's wild.

John:

So it's a 100 year old tree. It was, like, big and old, but it was cool. Sequoia is not just perennial, but hearty too in contrast to some other VC old growths like Kleiner Perkins whose reputation for spotting the next hot startup has wilted in the past decade. Oh, taking shots at the world.

Jordi:

Woah. Woah.

John:

I see.

Jordi:

Taking shots at the holy trinity.

John:

At the holy trinity. They still got it. They got they got Evran And

Jordi:

that's why that's why The Economist can get spicy. Oh, yeah. Have the the person that wrote it is not listed here.

John:

Yeah. Normally, people would be dunking on this person. Hey, shut up. You do you know, you're not in the arena, journalist.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. It's harder to dunk on the arena.

John:

They got Lee Marie and and Ev over there holding it down. Over the years, it's made its limited partners, and its own rainmakers who pocket around a quarter of the gains plus a management fee, a total of over $70,000,000,000 thanks to early bets on future tech darlings like Airbnb, Apple, Google, and NVIDIA. What an insane lineup. Like

Jordi:

Crazy lineup. And and there's some stat $3,000,000,000,000 companies. Yeah. There's there's some stat that's 33% of the Nasdaq

John:

That's right.

Jordi:

Are Sequoia backed companies Yeah. Which is crazy.

John:

I think I have that here. Yeah. Bree Kimmel says, Don Valentine started with a $3,000,000 venture fund in 1974. Has helped capitalize companies that now represent 3.3 trillion of market value, 33% of the Nasdaq, an incredible journey and an immeasurable impact on the world. Amazingly, half of that is in Apple.

John:

Interesting.

Jordi:

Yeah. But, somebody I think she'll pointed out they they actually only made 6,000,000 on Apple. That's super interesting.

John:

Because it's just IPO so early?

Jordi:

Yeah. Or or wasn't there some m and a at some point?

John:

No. No. I I I think I think a lot of these tech companies just went went public really, really early and distributed the shares, but that doesn't mean that the partners necessarily sold.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Which is like, okay. So, yes, some of the LPs might have sold if they got the shares, but they might have held on to them. It just kinda depends. So you can't really knock them for that if there's Yeah. There's some old partner chilling with some Apple shares right now.

John:

Totally possible.

Jordi:

Pretty good.

John:

But, yeah, let let let let's keep going through this. Alfred Lin, who co led Sequoia's investments in OpenAI, topped this year's Midas list rankings of the world's 100 most successful venture dealmakers compiled by Forbes. Mister Botta came in 11th. Another 3 Sequoia employees made the list. Botta puts things in Darwinian terms, paraphrasing the father of evolutionary science.

John:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most responsive to change. For Sequoia, responding to change has included hatching a growth fund to bankroll larger startups that would have gone public, expanding into China and India, and creating a hedge fund and a wealth management arm. So they've really, really expanded all the above. Obviously, they've they've they've, you know, tied, they've they've paired things back recently.

John:

Seems like a sound idea in principle. Why ensure cross why endure cross border headaches or compete with spendthrift foreigners like SoftBank of Japan, as they bid up valuations of today's sexy AI startups when feathering out tomorrow's stars at home offers potentially higher returns? For one thing, the VC landscape has become more crowded. PitchBook, a data provider, counted 3,417 conventional VC firms active in in America last year, up from fewer than a 1000 in the mid 2000 when mister Botta got into the business. Last year, they managed $1,200,000,000,000 worth of assets compared to a 150,000,000,000 20 years ago.

John:

The value of new deals in the 1st 9 months of this year exceeded a 130,000,000,000. That pales beside the 3 52,000,000,000 in all of 2021, a white hot year for startups, but it's nearly twice the figure for 2014. And so massive, massive growth in in VC in general. This This is this is just such an interesting article there. As with the other growths of, the other old growths of Sand Hill Road, Sequoia is also contending with smaller seed investors, often ex entrepreneurs, getting between old school VCs and the next generation of founders.

John:

These newcomers are closer to the young entrepreneurs in age and have at the same WhatsApp groups and offer counsel on negotiating with the Sequoias having been through it themselves. The phenomenon dates back to the creation of Y Combinator, a startup kindergarten. What a blast. Yeah. The Economist really does not pull punches.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brutal. I don't think it's I mean,

Speaker 3:

but but at the same time,

Jordi:

it's not like accurate. It's not like you go and yeah. Can like, even for children, kindergarten is a kindergarten. Right? It's basically daycare for kids Yeah.

Jordi:

With a little bit of learning. Yeah. And and but it's not like kindergarten's bad. Yeah. Like, it serves a purpose.

Jordi:

Yeah. Kids graduate from it, and they go on and do big things from

John:

there. Right?

Jordi:

So it's a starting point. Yeah. So I don't know I don't know that it's

John:

earliest phase of funding.

Jordi:

Yeah. And it serves a very real function of of taking people that oftentimes have really no experience building companies, raising money, all these different things

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

And giving them some structure, and the returns, definitely show it.

John:

And then they highlight this really funny deal that just happened recently or move that just happened recently. They say, on November 26th, the information reported that a young former startup manager turned partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia's rival, was leaving to start her own $50,000,000 seed fund.

Jordi:

Which is just, like, the most random inclusion ever in the context of

John:

I mean, good for Michelle. Yeah. If you're not familiar, that's clearly Michelle Volz who left Andreessen to start, I think her it's called, like, PAX Ventures or PAX Americana Ventures. And, and I mean, she I don't even know if she's closed the fund yet. She just left and kind of announced and leaked to the information, and they published it.

John:

She hasn't even announced it. She hasn't really posted about it. But here, the economist is like, man, Sequoia's got some stiff competition. Yeah.

Jordi:

A new, new seed fund that hasn't actually closed yet.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think I think Michelle would be like, yeah. You know, like, I could probably, like, let Sequoia win and still do very, very well.

John:

Yeah. But, this is great. So they close with Sequoia has no plans to seed what miss what mister Botak calls its unfair advantage, a respected brand name, a strong network, and sophisticated data analysis. It's beefing up Arc. It's startup school and maintains a scout scheme, lending asset rich cash poor founders money to invest in sharing upside.

John:

In 2023, it backed 5 startups as they were still incorporating. It's still may it's still also marketing itself more intensely. Partners speak at conferences and appear on podcasts. No mention of Sean here doing Some of them post as well. Doing the craziest work

Jordi:

of all

John:

the of all the, Sequoia marketing machine. This costs money. More importantly, it takes up time that could be actively spent seeking out fresh pot press prospects. It has led Sequoia 2 to expand collective decision making on which it prides itself as necessarily less limble with 25 investment staff than it was with a dozen 2 decades ago.

Jordi:

Yeah. So they still have a consensus partnership Oh, really? Which means that every single you could have, you know, let's say, Alfred Lin Yep. Wants to do a deal. He still has to get every other GP onboard to do the deal.

Jordi:

Everybody has to be bought in. And so that's different than other holy trinity. Benchmark might be like that. I don't think Andreessen I don't think Andreessen is like that. I don't think founder founders No.

Jordi:

Founders are definitely not like that. And so it ends up being an interesting thing where founders can get all the way through the process with a pitch the full partnership, which usually is just sort of like a sort of ceremonial thing, but then maybe still not get a deal and have to get some of these, you know, a Jeep here to, like, fully bought in. Maybe they don't even get there at all.

John:

Yeah. And so let's close with this post, which I really liked, clip from Mike Moritz. I believe on, I forget I forget what interview this was. It was great. Mike Moritz on what made Sequoia Capital successful.

John:

We've always been afraid of going out of business. We've worked hard to on trying to figure out how we make Sequoia endure. We've assumed that tomorrow isn't like yesterday. We can't afford to to rest on our laurels. It's great.

John:

This was from a long time ago too.

Jordi:

Yes. Yeah. He also he also talks about, you know, Don says the art of storytelling is incredibly important. Learning to tell a story is critically important because that's how money works. The money flows as a function of the story.

Jordi:

And he says, a venture capitalist gets to see all kinds of storytellers, which I think is makes a ton of sense. The people raising the most money, both funds and startups, are the ones that are best at storytelling. They oftentimes back that up with with great, you know, products. Yeah. But, it it matters, it matters quite a lot.

Jordi:

I think there I think it would be silly not to mention kind of the the two disjointed media strategy that that Sequoia has right now, which on one hand, the the Sequoia partner that I see the most of, is Sean Maguire and many people that listen to the show probably as well. Yeah. He's by far he kind of has his own brand and approach to getting attention and getting in front of founders, and it's certainly, it's it's, you know, it's been controversial. He's gotten himself into into hot water. But

John:

it's paid off.

Jordi:

But it's paid off in many ways. He led the the deal into x from Sequoia.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Has a very close relationship with Elon. It's, even last week, it was it was he had posted something about Hunter Biden being his, tenant at his family's property in Venice and how crazy Hunter Biden apparently allegedly was trying to pay rent using artwork that he made with, feces. Yep. His own feces. So incredible story.

Jordi:

Wouldn't wouldn't put it past, Hunter. Sounds a little crazy. But then Sean immediately, I think, went and, I guess, like, Sequoia had some type of issue with their Google Workspace. Yeah. And they were, like, you know, it got taken down for a second and he immediately was like, is it the deep state or or something like that?

Jordi:

I think he he sort of retraced on that. But it's sort of this, like, really interesting contrast where half the part you know, more than half the partnership is sort of like quiet in the background, you know, sitting on Sand Hill Road, basically, like, taking this very, like, thoughtful, sophisticated approach. Meanwhile, Sean is just, like, posting through everything, figuring out how to make himself a part of, a a part of stories

John:

that Of, like, a global conversation.

Jordi:

A global conversation.

John:

But not even within Silicon Valley. Like Yeah. There are people And so There are random political junkies in the middle of nowhere who don't even know what a startup or series a is that know Sean because of what he did.

Jordi:

Yeah. And I could see I could see, Alfred Lin going on, going on like Lex. Right? And, like, having this, like, 3 hour conversation about the future of, you know

John:

Well, do you know their other AI.

Jordi:

And then meanwhile, Sean is getting a 100 times more impressions around the clock just posting. So different approaches and we'll see how they, John is opening up a gift from that we got from one of our listeners and friends of the show, the lone ranger. It's his name. Oh, that's hard. Which one is that?

John:

This is a, let's see. This is a level 2 strength grip trainer that you try and pinch with your

Jordi:

Okay. So so basically we we got a bunch of these. We got a bunch.

John:

Yeah. We got a bunch of these and we gotta work out we gotta work up to it.

Jordi:

The lone ranger basically, thank you for sending these. But his his advice was basically use these. Try. I'm not sure. It's hard.

Jordi:

Yeah. This is a 2. So he basically said anything over a 1 Yeah. If you if if a founder can do over 1, you know, you it's they're investable.

John:

Okay. If you

Jordi:

can't do that, not investable. If you can get to 2a half, which we have here, we'll have to test it at a later date. Okay. 2a half, just back the truck up. Yeah.

Jordi:

Get as much allocation as you can. Okay.

John:

Just all that

Jordi:

grip strength. It's all about grip strength these days. Now he said it's an alternative. You know, we're we're in this middle of this testosterone epidemic where

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Many many founders are are trying to build their companies, in the 3 to 400 range. Mhmm. And that's just a big that's just a big problem. And so if you can't get a blood test from a founder to prove their testosterone levels prior to investing, doing a grip, strength, test on the spot is a good way to kinda evaluate. Are they an investment, you know, candidate?

Jordi:

Do they have what it takes? Are they captains of crush?

John:

Captains. Yeah. That's a brand.

Jordi:

That's a brand.

John:

So go yeah. Go we highly recommend go pick up captains of crush on Amazon.

Jordi:

Yeah. And these look very vintage.

John:

Yeah. These are great.

Jordi:

From a company called Iron Mind. Yeah. And Oh,

John:

the last thing on Sequoia. Do you know the other half of their media strategy?

Jordi:

Most ADHD

John:

Yeah. Episode. Dom

Jordi:

episode. It's a Dom episode. It's Dom episode. Cheers.

John:

The other half of

Jordi:

the, nice ring

John:

to it. The other half of the, Sequoia marketing strategy is this podcast hosted by Roloff Botta, called, Crucible Moments. And they actually get incredible guests. They've had Chesky and all these, like, huge Yeah. CEOs on.

John:

And they've done some promotion for it, but it just hasn't broken through like Sean because Sean is just, like, in the zeitgeist, like I

Jordi:

I honestly hadn't even heard of the show. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. It's tough because, there are a lot of those types of shows. And even though they have kind of the the best, it's like limited run. They don't do that many of them.

John:

And they have

Jordi:

no growth no real growth Yeah. Yeah. Because Boto's not out there posting.

John:

Roloff's gotta be posting.

Jordi:

You gotta be gotta be getting

John:

in the mix.

Jordi:

4 or 5 bangers a day, I think.

John:

Yeah. That's what I wanna see. So I hopefully they hopefully they take after Sean and we see more.

Jordi:

No. But that's that's, the pure quote unquote quality and depth of content has nothing to do with how quick how big of an audience it it gets. Yeah. It doesn't even necessarily deserve a big audience. Yeah.

Jordi:

Because to deserve a big audience you actually need you gotta have a multiple things going. You gotta have the right format. Yep. But, but, yeah, I'm sure they'll I'm sure they'll keep iterating on it and figure out a way to to get in front of more people.

John:

Yep. So let's go to the DMs, our q and a segment. Add us on acts or send us a DM if you have a question. Mickey with the Blickie says, VC Mickey is back. I have an idea that could form your podcast into a 1,000,000,000, maybe even a $1,000,000,000,000 company.

John:

You'll have to sign NDAs prior to discussing DM's open. What do you think, Jordy?

Jordi:

Mickey, I think he's baiting us for this one, honestly. I think he knows that you're not supposed to ask for an NDA before you pitch somebody something, at least in the venture world. Because at this point, it's like, you know, you ask for an NDA, and then and then what if we already had that idea? And then it becomes a sort of, like, legal scuffle because he's like, well, that was my idea and blah blah blah. So, Mickey, I know, I don't I don't know Mickey personally, but we've had some interactions via the show, and I know he's baiting us with that one.

Jordi:

Nick Mickey knows better than to ask for an NDA Yeah. On the first meeting.

John:

Just just tell it to us. Just just we can be trusted.

Jordi:

We're Yeah. We won't we won't lever lever up the idea.

John:

Yeah. Immediately. Mickey, never heard of him. Screw that guy.

Jordi:

Thank you, Mickey, for for providing great questions.

John:

We love it. Red Bull Futurist says, can we get some insight into the pen that you use to sign deals? Are you fountain enjoyers, Bic, Crystal, Extra Bold Appreciators? What do you think, Jordy?

Jordi:

Man, I my my handwriting is I do a lot of digital signatures on it. Sure. I, and we're we're trying to bring the paper back. We're trying to bring the pen back. Yep.

Jordi:

I'm really trying to work on, you know, my handwriting. I, I'm not I'm not dialed in on pens, but but one of the reasons why I haven't really explored what's out there or purchase anything is that we're making our own pen.

John:

Yes. That's

Jordi:

right. And it will be, pretty much right away. I think it'll be one of the number one sort of deal making pens

John:

Sure.

Jordi:

In venture. We'll be getting them out to our listeners, founders in our portfolio, making sure that everybody's got the right ink, for the deal. But we got to bring back we got to bring back in person document signing Germany, like, forces their founders to do this. But it's a great photo opportunity. Like, imagine imagine one of our listeners is raising, you know, signs a term sheet with Sean Maguire.

Jordi:

Like, I wanna see a picture. I wanna see a live video of both of them signing on on the dotted line, you know.

John:

There there is a great photo of Dylan Field at Figma signing a term sheet with Sequoia

Jordi:

out there. Oh, it's it's what With

John:

Will, I believe. Isn't that his name?

Jordi:

No. And yeah. Andrew Reid. Yeah. That's right.

Jordi:

Yeah. Andrew Reid. I remember.

John:

Yeah. Always get a deal photo for sure. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

For sure.

Jordi:

No. It's actually sad. A lot of deal photos don't happen now because of Zoom. Yeah. And so by the time you're actually having dinner, like, there in person, like, started closed or or or, you know, at least the term sheets been signed.

John:

Yeah. But you're gonna want that for the book or for the even just like the TechCrunch article. Like, just give them something better than just

Jordi:

Or if we break if we break your fundraising announcements, we will include it in our, you know

John:

But there's an easy way around, you know, decision fatigue around what, pen to use, and that's just hire a full time calligrapher, which is what I do. Yeah. So I have a calligrapher on staff, and anytime I need to write something, my handwriting's terrible, but, hers is fantastic.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And so, that's kind of how I've solved that problem.

Jordi:

You have to, like, delegate scale. Yeah. Delegate, you know, sort of, you allow them to sign on your behalf.

John:

Exactly. Exactly.

Jordi:

And then

John:

it just looks beautiful every time. And so, yeah, if if you ever get a handwritten note from me, well, you know who wrote it? My calligrapher. Let's, let's go to a promoted post. Jordy, what do you got for me?

Jordi:

Here we go. It's time to, it's time to promote. Let's see here. Alright. We have a promoted post from Matt Paulson.

Jordi:

Matt says ramp is the best. Every business should use it to keep expense creep at bay. Simple, bold, and true. And he's quote tweeting ramp saying using different software for cards, bill pay travel, expense management, and procurement. It has one of the original, sort of SpaceX, rocket, engines which is way overly complex Raptor 1.

Jordi:

And then you say and it says using ramp and you have Raptor 3 refined streamlined, simplified, and just even more beautiful. So that's what for.

John:

Great. Yeah.

Jordi:

Great metaphor for using, ramp. So if you're using 20 different tools to run your financial operations at your startup, Cut it out, switch to ramp, consolidate, focus, and you won't end up like the Kamala campaign, which was using Amex, probably build our comp. Didn't consolidate. Didn't consolidate. And they blew through a Billy in

John:

a few months. 100 k on a podcast set. Yeah. For one shoot. Whereas we spent I mean, we spent, like, 3 to 5 times that, but this will be used again and again and again.

John:

We're amortizing it.

Jordi:

So Yeah. Yeah.

John:

We're amortizing it. It's more like CapEx as opposed to optics in this case. Yeah. But yeah. Thanks to Ramp.

John:

And if you sign

Jordi:

up for

John:

Ramp, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Let's go to Zach. He says, would listen to a pod called Liquor Ladies Leverage on how almost great entrepreneurs fucked up their lives. What do you think? I disagree.

John:

We we were big fans of Leverage. And Big fan of liquor. Big fans of Lay's.

Speaker 3:

Cheers to Zach.

John:

Cheers to that.

Jordi:

No. I I think a lot of great entrepreneurs do have vices. Right? Like, they do have their sort of kryptonite or their Achilles heel or whatever it is. Sometimes it's some of those things.

Jordi:

I feel like I feel like the Senra, like, covers a lot of that stuff. Like, he he gets into I don't know. Like, he he talks about the McDonald's founder or whatever and how, like, the guy was basically, like, all of his relationships would fall apart all the time, and he, you know, really, like, kind of failed on the home front in many ways.

John:

But I feel like he doesn't cover almost great entrepreneurs. Oh, okay. Cover

Jordi:

Oh, okay. I missed that part. Yeah.

John:

Who made it made it through. So so the the the question here is how almost great entrepreneurs fucked up their lives. And, yeah, there's plenty of plenty of great entrepreneurs that made it through with the 3 martini lunches.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

We already covered Dylan. Oh, this is great. So Peabit, got a package secured from ModRetro, and it's a beautiful package for Yeah.

Jordi:

I just called pragmatic. Yeah. So ModRetro basically figured out that, I guess, like, all of the trademarks and patents on the Game Boy expired.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

And you could rebuild you could create a new version of the Game Boy From scratch. Put it back into production. It's still that same analog feeling. Yep. And, yeah, I haven't been able to to play an actual game, but the cool thing is that we'll use the same cartridges, I believe, that you had for an an actual Game Boy.

John:

Those are easy to buy?

Jordi:

I mean, I still have a bunch.

John:

Okay. You do.

Jordi:

Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was, like, my original sort of, like, road trip.

John:

I feel like the next thing they need to release is, like, the Omni cartridge that, like, rewrites the cartridge on the fly and stores basically, like, a 1,000 games in one go or something like that.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Because, like, the hardware has gotten so much smaller. You could probably compress everything on there.

Jordi:

But I think so, Mod Retcher actually has a partnership with GameStop.

John:

Oh, yeah.

Jordi:

And GameStop is like, thank you.

John:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

God for listening to our prayers. Finally, a new hardware device that has device that has physical cartridge games that we can sell that you can't just buy online. Like, maybe you can buy them on Amazon,

John:

but you

Jordi:

can't just download them. So it's

John:

possible that I

Jordi:

could see a world in which mod retro, eventually, LBOs, GameStop Yeah. It becomes this massive collective. Yeah. You know, meme stock.

John:

And and you have to imagine if there's, like, a 25 year lag on the IP that it's like we're gonna get a mod retro n 64.

Jordi:

Yeah. And

John:

then we're gonna get a mod retro p s 1

Jordi:

and

John:

a p s 2. Yeah. They're all gonna be just as you experienced.

Jordi:

Yeah. And I know I know a number of people that invested in modern mod retro. It was probably an easy bet just because Palmer was involved. And, but but, yeah, their sales have been fantastic. It's sort of one of those things like you can pick out a lot of reasons why maybe it's not a good bet.

Jordi:

It's like

John:

Sure.

Jordi:

How many people are actually gonna like buy it and play the games Yep. And all these different things. But yeah, if there's a if there's a case for like basically creating all these different analog versions of of historically significant gaming platforms, it's probably like a $100,000,000 revenue business there to be built. So

John:

Makes sense. Well, let's go to Gordon Gekko. He says, when are they releasing Amex wrapped? 1.6 k like

Jordi:

So, I mean, they basically have that. Alright?

John:

They do?

Jordi:

Yeah. I mean, you can okay. So I can go into Yeah.

John:

I guess.

Jordi:

I can go into I've got my Erewhon wrapped Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

For for the 6 figure club. Yeah. That's that's there's there's not many of us. But, but, you know, you can literally go into m x and and look at year to date or last year Yes. And see exactly how much you've spent.

Jordi:

I would like more social

John:

sharing elements. The same as a rap. The rap makes it fun. There's music. Yeah.

John:

There's animations. It shows you, you know, what your personality type is, and it needs to break the I

Jordi:

wanna see, like, you generated $20 in interchange fees for

John:

Amex. Exactly.

Jordi:

You're like, yes. Exactly. Shareholders.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, more companies should do wrapped. I I I I would love to see Brex wrapped for for companies. I would love to see

Jordi:

You mean ramp?

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Ramp ramp wrapped. That that's a bad blah. Like like

Jordi:

Brex wrapped is just you went out of business in q 2.

John:

Ramp wrapped really doesn't roll off the tongue. They need to come up with a different name for it.

Jordi:

No. It's ramped wrapped and it's a it's a real rapper that makes that makes, like, a freestyle based on your spending.

John:

That's good. That's good.

Jordi:

It's like Ali G style. Yeah. Yo, you spent you spent 500 k on cloud. Yeah. You know?

John:

But even even like YouTube should be doing that. Rap. There's so many, acts should definitely be doing something. Like, the the I I wanna know what post was the biggest banger that I liked the earliest. Yep.

John:

You know? That's something that they could pull together.

Jordi:

Well, yeah. And that's the thing. There's so much alpha and just taking a format that works well in another category and just recreating it in your category. In many ways we've done that with, you know, the Pat McAfee show. Yeah.

Jordi:

Right? Yeah. It's like the Pat McAfee show for tech. But, yeah, if you're if you're a business and and you have some type of interesting user data, make make a wrap. It's not like it's pretty, you know, it's pretty low lift and potentially a lot of, cool attention you can bring your way.

John:

It's great. Carid No Interest says, one of the largest aluminum processing facilities near me in the Midwest just sold to Emirates Global Aluminum. EGA is owned by the Mubadala Investment Authority, which is state controlled entity. We literally need to ban this. This cannot be allowed to happen.

John:

I'm all for free markets, but at some point, we as a society need to conclude that our most important industrial assets should not be foreign owned. Would China allow this? Would Dubai even allow that? Why do we? It's a good question.

John:

He's so tapped into, like, how does he know about this aluminum processing facility? It's crazy.

Jordi:

So when I talk to Kerry, I'm always I get sometimes, like, I I work on a bunch of different deals. In the last year, I've done stuff in water and defense and AI and all that stuff. But, and and I'll talk to people and they'll be like how do you work on all these like different things like they're in such different categories. But I get that exact same feeling when I talk to Kerry. Like he's just always in the same day, he'll be working on some new, you know, product, like, leveraging, you know, GPT.

Jordi:

And in the same day, he's buying some, like, metal processing facilities. So anyways, absolute, absolute absolute dog. And, yeah, I think he's he's been he's been, banging the drum on American manufacturing needing to be about more than just investing in new robotics companies and things like that. And there needs to be more more of the right government intervention which is like, hey, let's not sell off our our critical, industries and, let's actually get more, government investment in, you know, manufacturing locally, so that we can actually compete on a global scale with, giants like China.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. And really understanding, like, what is the market dynamic for these, industrial plants. Like, there's only I think there's only 1 tin smelting plant in the United States anymore. And, I mean, I learned this with, nicotine gum manufacturing.

John:

All of the this is not obviously as critical, but, like, every gum manufacturer went to Canada and Mexico because of the sugar tariff. And so Crazy. So gum is very heavy in sugar, and so you wanna bring it in as a finished good. You don't wanna bring in the sugar because that's taxed. And so, like like, all of the sugar all of the, you know, chewing gum manufacturing capacity went overseas.

John:

And and you could see that, like, you know, there needs to be review of these types of deals to understand, okay, how much of our aluminum processing capacity did we actually just lose control over? If it's 1%, probably fine. Yeah. But you don't wanna boil the frog. And so you want someone watching this and making sure that you don't wind up in a situation where, you know, China controls 99% of the, of the of the raw material at some point.

John:

Let's go to Justine Moore. She says, someone made a dating app where that uses your conversations with Claude to make matches. And it's called Claudette. Share your Claude conversation history and find your match. Interesting.

Jordi:

I think they're gonna have the same problem that most dating apps have, which is it's like massive over index on men. Yep. And, maybe,

John:

that true for replica and character? I feel like those were viewed differently than expected.

Jordi:

Yeah. I would expect it's

John:

all it's it's all dudes.

Jordi:

There's a lot of men talk to their ramp STR when they get lonely. Of course. You know, they don't they don't need to

John:

Or they just do tedious calls.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

But I I I've long thought that the the good ending for all the crazy AI girlfriend, AI boyfriend stuff is is it matches you with someone else who's similar who's also talking to an AI girlfriend or boyfriend. Yeah. And so there's a lonely person in Wichita, and there's a lonely person in, oh, in, you know, Miami or something. But you guys have been talking to your AIs about the same thing. You're clearly a match.

John:

And so the AI just says, hey. Look. Like, you know, why don't I just match you guys up and then move on to the next person?

Jordi:

Or it it doesn't even say anything, and they just say, hey. By the way, for the last 2 weeks, you've been talking with the love of your life. Yeah. Do you wanna do a face reveal?

John:

That's amazing.

Jordi:

Boom.

John:

That would be amazing.

Jordi:

I said somebody somebody pitched me the other day another concept, in the in the sort of dating app concept which was delegated swiping. So imagine, like, you go on and you create a profile and then you let someone else that you know swipe and, like, make and talk on your behalf. And that's probably been tried, but I could see that hitting in the same way that, what was that, like, social media app where you could, like, post once a day or whatever. Like, every every once in a while, you can create the sort of like novel social

John:

interaction.

Jordi:

Be real. Be real. Yeah. Yeah. Like be real like didn't really have any sort of net new functionality, that then like Instagram besides a specific constraint and a dating app that you can't swipe on at all and like only your friends can swipe for you or family members.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

I can see that hitting, if you, were willing to spend $10 a month on intro with, with, Nikita. Nikita.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. You can even, I mean, it's a real phenomenon that when when there's, like, one single person in a group of people that are in relationships, everyone who's in a relationship will be like, oh, like, let me see your dating apps. Like, let me see who we should be swiping on. So I could see that being really big.

John:

And then there's even, like, a bounty for, like, who's the one that swiped on the right person, you know.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Oh, because it's basically like making an intro, and being like, oh, I'm the one that matched them up. Like, I'm the one that saw something in that guy's profile for my for my female friend that I was like, he'll be a good one for you, and she might not have swiped on him. So I need a little bit of credit at the wedding. It's all great.

Jordi:

Yeah. Some people are their own worst enemy in dating. It's like they keep going back to the same toxic type of people and some sometimes you just need your mom to swipe on your behalf.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Craig Weiss says, did the PayPal mafia just take over the government? Yes, Craig.

Jordi:

Fact check. True. Yeah.

John:

Not much more to say about that.

Jordi:

There's, yeah, there's really not much more to say. Yeah. You know, 20 year plan executed flawlessly.

John:

But you know what you know what the real story is? The real story is that PayPal had this really weird thing where they merged the company. There was tons of infighting. Sequoia, Peter, Elon, all, like, you know, at each other's throats, well documented, basically breaks up the company. They wind up selling it.

John:

So all those guys, they're all killers, and they all get liquidity really early. And so none of them stays like like, run the counterfactual where Peter or Elon is running PayPal. It's a Fintech giant worth a $1,000,000,000,000. Like, no doubt. Right?

John:

And so instead and they'd probably be just as wealthy, but they'd be like the CEO narrow, you know, concerned about regulation, just that one thing. Instead, it's like all these guys scatter to the wind with 1,000,000 of dollars, and then they can start funds, start new companies, do all sorts of things, and they just naturally become 20 person. Industries. Exactly. And and then once you're once you're diversified, the adding the government on for Elon is totally natural.

John:

It's the highest leverage. Exactly.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so I I think that's the real phenomenon. Yeah.

Jordi:

Elon, you get to a lot of, you know, newer CEOs or fund managers are like, well, I just need to hire this PR firm and pay them $10 a month. So they, like, get me in this article or get me on this list. Yeah. And you get to a scale like teal scale or Elon scale and, yeah, the highest and best use of your energy is making sure the government is is is working in your interests, and and towards the same goals, so we'll see how this one plays out for him, Kyle.

John:

It's gonna be a great season.

Jordi:

It's gonna be a great season.

John:

Max Novinstern says, building tech for drones now is like starting a deep learning lab 10 years ago. Interesting. I like that because you the it you know, I I wasn't sure where this is going because there there there's a ton of defense drone companies right now. It's kind of overplayed. Oh, you're building group 1 to 3 ISR drones with mixed use.

Jordi:

So is my mom, bro.

John:

Yeah. Exactly. But but but you see those drone displays. It's like we still don't have an American AI.

Jordi:

Yeah. So 3 years ago, people would see the Chinese, like, drone like, fireworks style drone displays, and they'd be, like, oh, look how cool this is. Just, like, let let let let Reddit, like, reaction. Just like

John:

Just reddening out your Chinese military technology?

Jordi:

Like, great Chinese drone show. Yeah. And then now people are like, fuck, fuck, fuck. Yeah. Like, they're, like, really stressed about it because you see this, like, yeah, if they can make the drones turn into this, like, massive dragon, it's like they'll do that on the battlefield.

Jordi:

They've I I could that's that's the crazy thing. Everybody's like, oh, they're gonna create these drone swarms. But imagine you're just an infantry, you know, person in in Taiwan Yeah. And this literal Chinese dragon is flying above you and they're all have bomb strapped to them. You're you're gonna be like, alright, Like, let's, you know, let's tap almost.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Rave the white flag. Yeah. It's it's wild. I I posted that, like, it's it's I I couldn't find an example in science fiction where, because when you see those dragon drone displays, they're basically holograms.

John:

Like, they're 3 d. They're they're big, and they're in the sky, but they're essentially holograms

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Because they're rendering the pixels through the individual drones. And I was like, I don't I don't there were plenty of sci fi authors who predicted holograms, but I don't think anyone predicted that holograms would be extremely deadly

Jordi:

in military Well, yeah. And the form and the format of them. Exactly. Nobody everybody was thinking they'd be projected. Yep.

John:

Not not physical. Physical. Yeah. And as soon as they're physical, it means game over.

Jordi:

Death.

John:

Insane. Yeah. Soccer and Jetty says, this man did not place a single bet before 2020. By 2024, he gambled away $1,000,000 and left his family destitute. Along the way, DraftKings signed VIP host who spoke to him daily and facilitated his access to more gambling products while knowing his family status.

John:

DraftKings was sued after a father of 2 gambles away $1,000,000 of his family money.

Jordi:

Very sad story. Very sad story. Gambling addiction is is real. So is angel investing addiction.

John:

It's it's so hard because gambling addiction is is uncapped downside financially. Yeah. You can lose a $1,000,000,000. You can lose $1,000,000. You can lose if you have $10,000, you can lose it all.

John:

And there aren't that many other addictions that have that crazy downs. I mean, of course, like, the hardcore drug, it's like the same thing for your health. Yeah. Like, if you're on Fentanyl, it's like yeah. Like, it's gonna be fine, fine, fine, and then dead.

John:

Right?

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And it's kind of the same thing financially. But there aren't many other like, if you're addicted to shopping or consumption, it's very hard to it's very hard to bottom out in that way. Yep. Yeah. Very sad story.

Jordi:

So Yeah. But but but that's the thing. I don't think people I I didn't know this, but these big, sports betting and gambling companies, they have account managers whose entire job is to get the users to gamble more money by introducing them to new products, becoming their friend.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Like having this dialogue and it's and it's super dark. I don't think that should be I don't think that should be allowed. Yep. I think it's turning it's basically like putting an addict in a casino and having somebody fall which is actually still a real thing. It's what they do.

Jordi:

It originated in the casinos, but still for some reason in person, it's you're in their pocket. They're mess you know, they're messaging you.

John:

But the casinos have always been constrained to it's just Las Vegas or just Yeah.

Jordi:

You know Now it's in your pocket everywhere. Somebody this guy's had his kid's soccer game and his his draftings account manager is like, hey. Did you know you could, you know

John:

Hey. Game coming up. What's your bet? What do you like?

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

Very risky. Super dark.

John:

And so, yes,

Jordi:

I do think we're gonna

John:

against that.

Jordi:

Yes. It's it's this interesting, battle between, sports betting is like clearly I mean, it's not going to go away, but there is a historical precedent for the government coming in. You saw this with online poker. There's a lot of people who have entire careers built around gaming online. That got shut down and, you know, I'm sure many people would argue, oh, they're never gonna take this away, creates too much tax revenue, the governments are incentivized to, like, just keep it kind of going.

Jordi:

And now with gaming, we'll we'll see what happens. The other the interesting thing in gaming right now is there's all these new platforms that are facilitating fantasy sports and allowing you to basically bet on fantasy.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

This is way out of my way out of my wheelhouse, so I can't speak about, like, using these products, but I do know there's this tension between, the tribes that that historically had a monopoly on on gambling being frustrated with these new fantasy betting platforms because it's effectively a workaround to do sports betting without paying your tax to the to the tribes. And so over the next couple election cycles, both at the state level and the national level, I think we'll see that play out where the tribes have a big incentive and they have big balance sheets that they can go and start lobbying the government to say, hey. We need new regulations here. So I think we we sort of probably hit, like, peak on unregulated sports betting and gambling broadly. So we'll see what happens over the next few years.

John:

Yeah. Very, very odd. I I think one of the big there's a couple angles. Like, one would be, like, you know, restrict the hours, restrict the locations. Like, gambling used to be basically geolocation locked before when it was in Vegas.

John:

Now it's been unlocked and you can do it 247 when it wherever. The other interesting thing is that if you are actually good at sports betting, they kick you off the platform.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Because they know they're gonna lose money on you because you have an edge. Yeah. I'm sure

Jordi:

we I'm sure we have some I'm sure we have some listeners that are constantly getting booted.

John:

Yeah. And so maybe that should be illegal. Like, maybe it should be, like, yeah. You can you, like, you you have to you have to take the ace and the the the, like, you know, the the power law risk on both sides, guys. Yeah.

Jordi:

If you're

John:

gonna take this guy's million, somebody's gonna take that from you.

Jordi:

Now it's interesting though. I don't know what it is. I love I love angel investing. Yeah. I have zero interest in sports betting.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

I've placed, like, one bet watching the Super Bowl with my buddy. Yeah. Being like, if this team wins. Yeah. I have 0 interest in it and I don't understand it.

John:

Well, it's low class and vulgar generally.

Jordi:

Yep. Right. Right.

John:

I say in a tuxedo.

Jordi:

Yeah. Real men play poker, you know.

John:

Baccarat, actually. Baccarat. Yes.

Jordi:

There's crazy by the way, there's crazy like, Dana White has gone on podcast and talked for hours about his, like, his the way he gambles in Vegas. And he'll brag about, like, I'm up, like, 16,000,000 so far this year. Like he's like he's like But they can't really like kick him out because he like runs Vegas in many ways.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. I saw some video about that. He's like, oh, yeah. Like I had a rough night.

John:

Like I

Jordi:

think it's baccarat that he plays. Oh, really? I think it I think baccarat is a game.

John:

Okay.

Jordi:

Somebody somebody will correct us if I'm wrong. But, baccarat is a game where if you are legitimately good, you do have like some mild edge over over, the house. Yeah.

John:

It's a little more skill gaze. Yeah. Skill based.

Jordi:

But but Dana White's in there, you know, on a high after after a good pay per view, and he's just, like, throwing around $5,000,000 in a night.

John:

That's wild. Mark Andreessen says, I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. I like that. It's good. Estimated net worth in Trump administration's wealthiest members.

John:

And it's Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswami, Scott Passant, Howard Letnik, Linda McMahon, Chris Wright, Doug Burnham, Bergam, Steve Witkoff, Masad Boulos, Steven Feinberg, tons of people. And there and lots of billionaires. Fascinating. Beanairs. Beanairs.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

No. It's cool. I mean, I'm just personally we don't you know, we don't talk about politics on this podcast ever, or social issues, but, I'm just really excited to see how the next 4 years play out.

John:

I think it's gonna be High expectations.

Jordi:

Yeah. The expectations couldn't be higher and so and the, and every the Republican Party has every edge right now. Right? So if if they don't perform, then, there's gonna be a lot of dunking from from the left. You know, if they're not productive, they don't get anything done.

Jordi:

So we'll just have to see how it plays out.

John:

Yeah. There was a reporter who was asking me, like like, oh, like, given that Doge is gonna, like, lay off so many people, do you think that certain things might move slower? Because that's certainly not the the hope, but, like, that would be kind of an unintended consequence. And I was, like, oh, it's so hard to predict that.

Jordi:

No. But but the scale is what causes a lot of the the slowdown. Right. The other thing I'm I'm gonna butcher this statistic, but it's some un ungodly amount of people in the federal government have just been working from home, like, you know Yeah. Indefinitely.

Jordi:

Yeah. And everybody that has hired a remote team in the past knows that remote teams do not work as hard. They do not work as many hours. You might think that they're you know, they're available plenty of times, right? If you send someone a Slack message, they'll pop on and they'll be like, oh, yeah, I can jump on zoom.

Jordi:

Just give me like 20 minutes and it's like why do you need 20 minutes to jump on zoom. Right. It's like oh they were walking their dog or they were doing all these things. So I think that.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Yeah. There's not a I I think that the individual government organizations and the leader of those, groups should be able to decide are we a work from home team?

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Is it a good fit for what we need to accomplish right now? And just get more real about about that.

John:

It just also needs to be paired with, like, deregulation and changing the actual laws. Because if there's a law that says in order to build a road, you need a rubber stamp and they fire everyone who does the rubber stamps, well, then it will still be illegal to build roads. Yeah. And so you have to remove the the the the law Yeah. The creative need

Jordi:

for all that stuff.

John:

So tricky. JD says, buy a 50 year old business from an old man without a website, they say. After signing an LOI in August, spending tens of 1,000 of dollars in diligence, legal fees, calling capital from friends and family, and learning more about the generator space than I knew existed, I just had a deal die on the 1 yard line. Brutal, but it's probably okay. A few thoughts.

Jordi:

Okay. So I I pulled this because I had this happen to me last year. I was working on buying a company in the UK, that, like, my my father-in-law knew the owner, so there was, like, some type of connection. Sure. Worked on it for, like, straight for, like, 4 to 5 months.

Jordi:

Like, you know, went there, spent a lot of time with the owner. It was a 30 year old business and had all the capital committed, had all the documents done, and literally in the final week, like, found one single document that that should have been like a like a non issue that basically I won't go into it too much. But if we had known about that document much earlier in the process, it wouldn't have been an issue. But finding out about it that late and the owner basically hit it, it it blew up the deal. Like I just decided to walk away like literally 48 hours before we were flying to the UK to close.

Jordi:

And the issue there was I had spent over $100,000 on legal bills that would have been prorated among me and the other investors for the deal. But because we didn't close, I was I was stuck with the bill, so I had to spend $100,000 for a deal that just didn't happen. And it was super painful, but in hindsight now I'm I'm I'm fine with it. I'm, maybe we wouldn't be podcasting right now if it had gone through,

John:

Stick to angel investing.

Jordi:

Yeah. Stick to angel investing.

John:

Stick to the safes.

Jordi:

Yeah. Stick to safes. They're they're much easier. No. But but but I brought this up because this is something that AI is actually gonna solve because imagine when you can take a data room

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And even ingest, like, in in in my case, there was 30 years worth of physical records for the business, and we we only really had to pay attention to the last, like, 10 years. There's still, like, a lot of data to ingest. And so now you're gonna have this AI tools that allow you to diligence deals much, much, much faster and for much less money because you don't need all these, like, associates pouring over documents and all that stuff. And so I think this is gonna actually AI will speed up the velocity of deals in private equity because you're gonna be able to basically, you you now have intelligence as a service. So a law firm, you know, with the same number of people might be able to diligence, like, 20 times as many deals.

Jordi:

Sure. So it's actually very positive because if you're an individual operator, a PE fund, you can go and say, hey. We're actually gonna get into diligence with, like, more companies because right now and or up until this point, you've had to been, like, you gotta get really serious about the deal before you decide, hey, we're gonna spend, you know, a $100,000 on, like, going through this entire process.

John:

So Yep. Makes sense. Let's go to Bojan. He says, get in loser. We are building a full for profit AGI, and it's, Sam Altman in his Koenigsegg.

John:

Fantastic photo.

Jordi:

Yeah. And this is this is, one of the bull cases for SF, right? Yeah. Sam will not rest until you can street park Koenigsegg. Yeah.

Jordi:

So that is why SF is very undervalued right now.

John:

I agree. I agree. And that I mean, people were saying this for it's funny how it's kind of flipped. Like, people were saying for years, like, oh, OpenAI, like, Chat GPT. Like, this company is so messed up.

John:

Like, they should just be a normal c corp. And now they're, like, flipping to that and everyone's like, no. No. No. No.

John:

Don't do that. Like, it's

Jordi:

mad or something. Yeah. The crazy thing is there's this massive legal battle going on. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

And Elon just continues to, like, shit post through it. Yeah. He just, like, everything that Sam posts or somebody posts about Sam, he just responds with, like, crying emojis.

John:

It's crazy you can just do that. Like, it's gonna be in court. Right? Like, these are

Jordi:

gonna be

John:

in the court documents about, like, these people

Jordi:

Elon, what did you mean when you put the crying laughing emoji on this mess? Or what did you mean when you said scam?

John:

It's such a mess.

Jordi:

Total mess. Woah. But Elon's lawyers are just, like, refreshing his feed being, like, another 20,000 billable hours, another 20,000 billable, another 20 grand

John:

billable hours. It's never felt more like being a child of divorce in tech just watching mom and dad fight in the the the the 2 most important tech people right now just beefing super

Jordi:

hard. On the timeline.

John:

On the timeline. I just want saving on

Jordi:

the playground.

John:

To get back together, merge xai and openai.

Jordi:

Well, the crazy thing is the dynamic is you have xai now is, like, actively trying to mock open a I. I'm sure it's elsewhere in the stack. Yeah. Open a I was doing their little, like, advent calendar type thing. Yep.

Jordi:

And they were, like, we'll be back on Monday. And, one of the guys, maybe his name is Greg, was like, I love when they holiday chilling and while grinding, he's like, got thumbs up at the whole team.

John:

Fucking rocks.

Jordi:

I love that guy.

John:

He's the man.

Jordi:

I love that guy.

John:

I love it. He's like, they're ruined, basically. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. Everybody needs a rune.

John:

Everyone needs a rune and it's a shitpost.

Jordi:

Beau Bojon is basically Nvidia's rune.

John:

He was for a while. I don't think he's there anymore. I think he's just kinda independent now.

Jordi:

But Yeah. Post economic. Do we

John:

have a promoted post?

Jordi:

Of course we do, John. We have a promoted post from our friends over at Gulfstream Aerospace. Fantastic. Unlock new adventures. When you board a Gulfstream, the world becomes a smaller place.

Jordi:

And I just gotta say, they have this incredible picture of a beautiful looks like a 650, landed in Antarctica. Wow. And, if you didn't know you could land your Gulfstream there, now you do. So go commission a plane. Talk, if you need an intro to a Gulfstream rep, just DM us and we'll be happy to set that up.

Jordi:

But if you already have one, tell them you heard about, Gulfstream on, Technology Brothers. Technology Brothers podcast.

John:

That really that that that is just such a great, like, marketing copy segment. The The

Jordi:

world becomes a smaller place.

John:

A smaller place. Place.

Jordi:

Yeah. And

John:

that's what that's what travel and being able to just hop on a plane in a moment and be somewhere else.

Jordi:

No. I had to go to I went to SF yesterday for for 6 hours. Yeah. And I was like, oh, it would have been nice to bring my family and whatever, and it's just the hassle of Yep. All that.

Jordi:

So, so, yeah, that's what the That's

John:

what culture is all about.

Jordi:

Shrinking the world, and, everybody can learn a little bit about their marketing, and they clearly, know how to use x. A lot of the promoted posts we feature, they've add links to their posts. Gulfstream does not. So You know savvy in more ways than one.

John:

Totally. You you know, there's this saying in AI when some new model dropped, this is the worst it'll ever be. Yeah. I want Gulfstream to start posting, this is the slowest the planes will ever be. Exactly.

John:

This is the slowest the planes will ever be.

Jordi:

Exactly.

John:

This is the slowest the planes will ever be.

Jordi:

We're going supersonic. And then in the world of hypercars and supercars, you're always talking about horsepower and this can go faster. Yep. Let's make the world a smaller place by making the planes just twice as fast. Doesn't need to be it doesn't need to be an order of magnitude faster, but if if you could just get if I could get to Dubai twice as fast, I'd pay a lot for that.

John:

There are companies working on that. Boom, and Hermeus are both working on supersonic planes right now. Still a couple years out, unfortunately, but hopefully soon. Let's go to Sarah. She says, okay.

John:

So Anduril partnered with OpenAI, and Palantir partnered with ScaleAI, who built Defense Llama, your favorite,

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

On top of Meta's open source LLM. But Anduril and Palantir also have a partnership, and I'm pretty sure Peter Thiel has invested in all of them. And it's a photo of the, the the red string conspiracy theorist from, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Yeah. Partnerships.

John:

We we we talked about partnerships on a previous show. It they're they're the the hot ticket of the day. Everyone has a partnership.

Jordi:

I just wanted I I would love to be a fly on the wall of the room in the Pentagon, and they're like, so you're telling me we're using a llama for our AI? You thought llama made this?

John:

Yeah. Every other, like, defense tech word is always a tomahawk missile, you

Jordi:

know. Yeah. Like, it's always The Palantir.

John:

Yeah. It's always really aggressive. Ring of defense. Llama maybe breaking that a little bit.

Jordi:

Yeah. They need the llama emoji Yeah. In all the dogs.

John:

The Tomcat, like, you know, all these different, the warthog, all these different, defense tech terms. But, yes, Scale AI really, really went crazy with that one. But I guess they needed to throw Llama in there since it's like Meta's product and it came from LLM. But yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. Meta being a social media company calling their product llama Yeah. Makes more sense. I'm not sure how that's gonna do in the in the DOD.

John:

So what do you think if you are a, series a, series b stage defense tech company and you don't have a major AI partnership lined up, it feels like there's a little bit of alpha in just doing a partnership with OpenAI, getting press release out of it, getting a Wall Street Journal article out of it, maybe get on TV. Somebody's just just general awareness. Is it played out or is it still worth doing?

Jordi:

I don't think it's played out. We may have already peaked with with this sort of AI hype cycle. Right? Like, you know, we don't know this. Right?

Jordi:

I'm not gonna make a call here or there. Palantir is being valued at what

John:

150, something like that.

Jordi:

I thought it was closer to 200. Yeah. 200 times A lot. 200 times earnings.

John:

Oh, I I was thinking 1,000,000,000. I think it's 150,000,000,000.

Jordi:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

But it's the biggest defense.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so there there's a lot of there's a lot of top signals. So we've talked about this before.

Jordi:

The smartest thing you can do at this point in the cycle is just tweet top every single day so that you can quote tweet it and then, you know, be the nice next Michael burry.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

But I don't I mean, I don't AI is still in many ways under hypes. Right? We've talked about this. Like, even even if there's this, you know, even if we're in a bubble, the tech underlying technology can be under hyped. So, like, I at Thanksgiving, people weren't talking about it that much.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

You know, I talked about it with, like, a handful of people there.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

But, you know, I was talking to a guy who who, over the thanksgiving holiday who, like, works in film and TV and he wasn't talking about it. And I was like, you're fucked. But, but, you know, if you're in the entertainment industry and you're not thinking and it's not top of mind, you're probably gonna get smoked.

John:

Yeah. The phrase is overhyped in the short term, underhyped in the long term. That's kind of like the the popular meme.

Jordi:

Yeah. And it's real.

John:

So yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

So but yeah. There's no I we talk to companies about this all the time. There's there's if you can launch a partnership as in become a customer of OpenAI and make a press moment out of it, do it. There's not a lot of downside and there's, like, tons of potential Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Even if it just means getting, like, somewhat preferential pricing on the API. Like, that's better than paying full price. Price. Yeah.

John:

Get a partner.

Jordi:

By the way, we're buying open air credits. Our post earlier was not a joke.

John:

Hit us up.

Jordi:

Hit us up. If you have.

John:

Buy them.

Jordi:

Well, I mean, it's a gray market. It's a little gray, but. We're going

John:

to get the platform.

Jordi:

We're buying. You can't get deplatform from the RSS feed. So

John:

It's great. Let's go to Nicole Whiskoff. She says, sad to report that there's a strong correlation between how insufferable your SDRs are and your company's success. Shout out to Ramp, Sidecar and PitchBook.

Jordi:

The best salespeople I know are the most annoying. True. And it's and it's really unfortunate because you're, like, wow, this super annoying person that I knew is crushing it. Yeah. And it shouldn't you you every it goes against every fiber of your being

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

To think that this really annoying person is so good at their job. But if you're annoying Yep. Go become an SDR, and you're absolutely gonna clean up.

John:

It's not just annoying. It's like

Jordi:

No. No. No. It's like relentless, persistent. But but there's yeah.

Jordi:

There's a lot of instances when I have to tell an SDR, stop it. Yeah. I don't wanna you know, I don't believe in, like, blocking a salesperson or or or just, like, reporting it as spam. Totally. They're just doing their job.

Jordi:

Yeah. But until you're getting people to say either get on a call with you or engage with your product or or saying, like, please stop emailing me. You're not doing your job as, like, a as a sales rep.

John:

Yeah. I mean, I remember, like, I was close with the Ramp founders and wanted to onboard and it still took a persistent sales rep to actually be at the top of my email regularly for me to do the internal tasks just to make it happen. Like, it wasn't just me saying, like, I'm in. There was a whole bunch of things that needed to happen mechanically, and that's what the SDR actually makes happen. Is, like, go internally, actually consolidate, actually set up all the admin accounts and stuff.

John:

Like, it takes some time to onboard a company onto a complex piece of software. So

Jordi:

It is interesting that right right now, I'm sure Nicole is getting inundated with pitches.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

But right now it does feel like if I if a founder engages with a post of mine on x or through the TV account.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Half the time they're running like we ought to automate your outbound sales motion or whatever. And I'm just like, oh, there's more of these companies than there are current

John:

Good sales reps.

Jordi:

Good sales reps in the valley. But maybe that's bullish. You know? Who knows?

John:

Who knows? Let's stay with Nicole. She says, 48 hours in SF. Absolutely electric this week. Felt like one massive college campus with your besties everywhere.

John:

A few takeaways. YC Demo Day was impressive. It was impressive. Tons of Bitcoin hit a 100 k. I am an idiot.

John:

Menlo Park is very far from San Francisco. 0 negative sentiment on the market. Tech Bros Pod came up at dinner. Let's go. Congrats.

John:

You guys made it. Thank you. Trying to know in what, in what context

Jordi:

we to all the technology brothers though because this is a this is a movement.

John:

Yeah. Nicole, let us know what they said. We we love feedback here. At least 1 GPU

Jordi:

Nicole Nicole did say she did comment and say we need to add, subtitles to x, but x has native subtitles They do. That are better than what we would add. In. Yeah. So if you don't have subtitles turned on, go turn them on.

John:

At least one GP at every firm you have ever heard of is leaving to raise their own fund. Not true. Brian Singerman is not raising his own fund. Still not convinced that, big endowments invest in emerging managers. Blue Bottle is terrible.

John:

I've had Blue Bottle, like, a few times. I'm I'm not a big coffee snob, so I don't know. Do you like Blue

Jordi:

I've I've I've I I feel like I've talked about on the show before. The Gen Z and millennial generations are so entitled when it comes to coffee.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Like, our our parents were like, if it's brown and hot, like, it's good. Sounds good. You know, it's good good for me. But Yeah. We coffee prices have inflated along with everything else so much that when you're paying $7 for a cup of coffee, you want it to really hit.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

But yet Giga slop.

John:

You don't want Giga slop.

Jordi:

Yeah. So blue bottle is owned by Nestle.

John:

Oh, yeah. They sold.

Jordi:

Which is the number 1 gigaslop company in the world. And so, yeah, don't expect to get a good cup of coffee at blue bottle. That being said, it's better than Starbucks and Blue Bottle bought my buddy's company and he lever that up into creating multiple successful restaurants when they sold the Nestle. So thank you to Blue Bottle

John:

for buying

Jordi:

my absolute boys' company.

John:

If you're thinking about taking a meeting at Blue Bottle, why not take it at the San Francisco Philharmonic instead?

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Just as good.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And, you get to enjoy some

Jordi:

more music. You go to blue bottle, wear a suit and you might get better coffee and better service.

John:

I think so.

Jordi:

I actually would guarantee it.

John:

Let's go to Yoni Richtman. He says, we're at the start of a new private equity ex venture capital super cycle. Whether it's PE funds buying venture backed companies, venture funds launching PE strategies, or startups using PE like approaches to buy their customers, something big is going on. He highlights 4 separate but related things, category maturity, limits on organic growth, asset class maturity, and entrepreneurial culture. And so, you told him that he needed to coin this, but I already had.

John:

It's Coogan's gigacycle. Yeah. So sorry.

Jordi:

Sorry, Yoni. Everyone's gonna refer

John:

to this as Coogan's gigacycle from now on. Didn't even repose. This is the first time I read the book.

Jordi:

This is yeah. Of course, the guy who coined the coinage.

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

Is front running anybody who's not yet coined something that should be

John:

showing me my whole thing. Every time someone posts something like this, I just

Jordi:

need to

John:

be like, I call this Coogan's blank blank blank.

Jordi:

Yeah. So so the funny thing is is I guess a few things. So right now we're looking at wow there's this massive convergence between private equity and venture capital.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

But venture capital is private.

John:

It is. It's legally the same thing.

Jordi:

Legally the same thing. So PE is converging with PE which I love because to you know you know private equity fantastic.

John:

Culturally very different.

Jordi:

Yeah. Culturally different. But, yeah, we're at this interesting time in the last, like, 6 months. We've seen venture funded pool service clean, roll up. We've seen venture funded auto body shop roll ups.

Jordi:

Yep. We've seen venture funded, accounting CPA roll ups.

John:

I wanna do a car wash.

Jordi:

We've seen so so Yoni, and Slows Big Bet was Metropolis.

John:

Okay. What's that?

Jordi:

Which raise which which was a SaaS company for parking garages and they sort of realized that they they realized that there was sort of like a terminal sort of value for their business and they were like why don't we just become an operator? Yep. So they bought, they bought one of the largest, whatever parking garage operating companies and and that was a way for them to really capture all the value of the software they're building. So I love it. I mean, I love financial instruments.

Jordi:

I love private equity. Financialization generally. I love IRR. And so everybody likes to say, oh, we're late stage capitalism. And it's my point has always been, now we're just getting started.

John:

I love it. I love it. Yeah. I I wanna do something in, car washes because I think, especially as the cars start driving themselves, they're still gonna need to be washed and cleaned. And if you can just have a network by all of the different car washes

Jordi:

Here's the thing, though.

John:

Yeah. Tell me.

Jordi:

Car washes are so bad for your car. Car. Really? You're actually driving cars that are, you know, maintained there. You know, if you're driving a model 3 and it's gonna lose half its value and

John:

But that is a self driving car. Right?

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And

John:

I'm sure I'm

Jordi:

just saying I never I haven't used a, What

John:

do you do?

Jordi:

I have a detailer.

John:

Okay. Yeah.

Jordi:

He he's he's, That can

John:

be rolled up as well. We'll put that in

Jordi:

there. But it's more of like a barber. Like, it's like, yes, you could roll up barber shops, but it just becomes supercuts.

John:

Sure.

Jordi:

Like, it's an art. Like my like. So my detailer I've taken my car has been like service and you know they'll like clean your car and it comes back and he's like dude like what did you do. Like you just did it. Like he's like you undid like a year's worth of work on your paint.

Jordi:

Wow. And so now I I had to service one of my cars today, and he gave me this little, hotel, like, door hanger thing to put in there that says do not wash. Wow. Because he's like, I'm the only one that should touch this.

John:

Like, this

Jordi:

is like a multi, you know, year process. So I love it. Anyways,

John:

let's go to William. He says tech debt deflation is here. 01 pro just solved an incredibly complicated, painful rewrite of a file that no other model has ever gotten close to. I've been using this as an eval for different frontier models and this marks a huge shift for me. We've entered the why fix your code today when better model will do it tomorrow regime.

John:

Interesting. I didn't realize that o one Pro was so leaps and bounds ahead of Claude in terms of programming. I wonder if this guy's just shilling or something because So I think

Jordi:

it's funny that

John:

cursor and and some of the other models were just as good.

Jordi:

So it's funny to think about so software engineers tend to be extremely online

John:

Mhmm.

Jordi:

But there's a handful that just do it like a just a job Sure. And maybe they have a Github but they're not on x or Reddit or Linkedin and so there's there's undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of software engineers out there that don't know about the new AI tools. Oh, yeah. And they're just coding away. Yeah.

Jordi:

And they're like, you know, maybe they have like a little SaaS company that's doing well and they're just like, yeah, like I love my I love my work and, you know, I love the art and crafts. And then it just gets steamrolled by, like, some 17 year old that's, like, just leveraging all the models, like, just cracked out on them.

John:

So Have you seen how, OpenAI is integrating with all the different code editors?

Jordi:

It's Yeah.

John:

It's genius. They they use the accessibility features on the Mac app so that they don't need Versus codes or text edit's permission to go in there and rewrite the code. They just are able to read everything out, rewrite it, and just act as a AI assistant in there.

Jordi:

Yeah. That's that's the wild thing right now. So there's all these AI agent companies. There's 100 or 1000 of, like, venture backed. Yeah.

Jordi:

Maybe not 1,000, but there's 100 of venture backed companies that are building consumer agents. Mhmm. And none like very few of them, I don't really use any of I don't use any of them right now and but you know do you know do you have a lot of the different models and that's like the wild thing is all of that agent activity that people have been betting on is happening with Chad GPT with Claude.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And so we'll see how that we'll see how all this, plays out, but, yeah. I would love to if you're building an AI agent that that actually works and is good. DM us. Yep. We'll give it a shot.

John:

Let's go to clone. Clone robotics says torso 2 with an actuated abdomen. Looking

Jordi:

free. Okay. So this this video Yeah. Is almost sickening to watch. It feels like Westworld.

Jordi:

Totally.

John:

Yes. That

Jordi:

is very much So what they did Yeah. They they obviously are are inspired, but what they did is they they have this new motion. I think it's in the vertebrae and like the the, just the way the abdomen moves and most humanoid robots are very sort of straight up and down stiff. They very much have that look and feel of a robot. Go watch I mean, we'll quote read this.

Jordi:

Go watch this video. It's pretty it's honestly feels like very wrong to look at. Mhmm. And, I just think that I think, I think that I weirdly think the firearms industry is gonna benefit a lot from the robotics movement because in a world where humanoid robots walk the earth and if you, are a criminal and you you can now, from the comfort of your own home, use humanoid robots to commit crimes, everybody is gonna be just, like, freaked out. Right?

Jordi:

Because it's like, well, yeah, maybe you have your, I'd be interested to see if anybody's building at the intersection of, like, Ring and humanoid robots. Right? So imagine in in the future, you have a humanoid robot standing in your backyard 247. Bodyguard. Bodyguard.

Jordi:

Yeah. So bodyguard dotai. If you haven't bought that domain, go buy it, sit on it. Some venture backed company will buy it from you for, 200 grand in, when the time is right.

John:

Oh, this is great. So, Druva Regendra says, we need to triple Space Force's budget because, Delta says, never deleting this app. We have Taliban space posting. And it's a screenshot of someone from the Taliban, I guess, advocating for taking the moon, the or or maybe Mars. It's hard to tell here.

John:

This photo is very AI generated, but wild. The the moon should be a state campaign that Mike Solano launched has apparently reached the Middle East, and they're trying to get there.

Jordi:

Yeah. Everybody wants to take the moon. It's like the ultimate pot, you know, prize.

John:

It's in

Jordi:

the sky.

John:

Yeah. Why not?

Jordi:

And, imagine doing imagine, you know, using a drone swarm to project the American flag, like, across hundreds of miles from the moon. It's just like, there's probably some gravity issues up there, but, no I also saw that the Taliban have been trading meme coins really a guy no way filming a video with with like at some dinner with the Taliban because they're kind of in control over there at the moment and yeah they're trading so if you're trading meme coins, you might be trading against the Taliban. So It's crazy. It's still

John:

in business. Like, because ISIS came up and they're, like, all these different splinter organizations.

Jordi:

Rival gangs.

John:

Taliban's kinda Lindy at this point. They're hanging on to it.

Jordi:

Maybe. Correct. Yeah. Who knows?

John:

He's going strong. I don't know. Maybe We

Jordi:

should do a deep dive on the various business lines of the Taliban. I know they were big and poppy.

John:

Yeah. Heroin trade. Yep. Kidnapping, ransoming.

Jordi:

But, yeah. I wonder what their actual expanded.

John:

Most profitable year was.

Jordi:

Well, now it's taxation, probably.

John:

You think so? Because they just run all of Afghanistan. Afghanistan.

Jordi:

Yeah. So they're just It's a good business model.

John:

Yeah. I guess that makes sense. Give us on violence. Give us

Jordi:

all your, you know, half your money or it'll kill you.

John:

Yeah. Wild. Steph says, met a founder who handwrites all of his own business cards and I kinda love it.

Jordi:

Pretty cool. This is like you. You have your calligrapher that you will write anything for you. Yeah. And they're on call 247.

John:

Exactly.

Jordi:

No. I I do think it's a good way to stand out. Business cards are it's funny because the iPhone rolled out the feature

John:

of the tap

Jordi:

and it feels so just like you know it's somewhat useful but I've also found that it functionally has some functionally has, like, a bunch of issues where it'll, like, add the contact, but then it'll you don't know if you forget their name Yep. You can't find them again. Yep. So it's like a bunch of issues.

John:

I was at a conference and someone actually recommended an app. It's like a couple bucks. I think it's just called Recents. And you download this app and it just sorts your contact list by when they were added. So Yeah.

John:

You can go around tapping and then at the end of the conference, you can pull up this app. An app that

Jordi:

should be a feature.

John:

I know. It should

Jordi:

just But Apple is too focused on just destroying the photos app. Yeah.

John:

Oh my god. It's so bad.

Jordi:

Hey, here's an app you use all day long. We're gonna completely redesign it and just botch it. It's really bad. Like, I had something earlier where I I was trying to send something to send her. Yeah.

Jordi:

I think you were trying to send him the same thing.

John:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

And I I could not

John:

It's so hard.

Jordi:

Find that the the thing that I wanted to send even though I knew that I had it in my app. Yeah. Yeah. Like within the last

John:

You really have to sort and favorite things and then find the favorites, which are now buried. It's a mess. It's a mess. I mean, yeah, the, yeah, it's all all getting worse. Let's go to Mike Solana.

John:

This is a a follow-up to the CEO shooting. Really dark story. Mike says, highly intelligent and accomplished, attractive, nothing but opportunity, goes missing over the summer, friends begin looking for him, reaching out to him over social. Either this isn't the guy or he's about the age and this and he was into psychedelics, schizophrenia. And, yeah, I I remember seeing, like, like, the just like the the the video shows someone who's very agentic, very calculating, very thoughtful, and there's always this weird Harry's locked in.

John:

Who is this person? Yeah. And and couldn't they have done something better with their life, basically? Like, they must have had their brain broken at some point if this is

Jordi:

the guy.

John:

I mean, we don't know at this point. So

Jordi:

Yeah. So this isn't a murder mystery podcast.

John:

We're gonna

Jordi:

talk about this for 3 minutes and move on. But, yeah, one thing that I saw was interesting, he was a software engineer, comp sci Yep. Major, went to an Ivy League, apparently went to Penn. Penn or no. Apparently went to some, even went to, like, you know, was private school, like, affluent.

Jordi:

Yep. There's pictures of him traveling all over the world. There's pictures of his friends tweeting at him, trying to get him to respond. He had been over the summer, allegedly, at some point, was just gone dark. And, one thing that was interesting is he, besides the people that he was following, which I'm sure a lot of the people on this show follow, I guess, Lindy man, maybe, wait, but why?

Jordi:

All these sort of,

John:

He was a plot guy to Chris Williamson.

Jordi:

Yeah. But, he apparently would defend marijuana and Yeah. So, psilocybin and and various psychedelics, like, very intensely. And we've talked a lot about how there's huge, huge, huge downsides to those, substances and and there's too much, in Silicon Valley. Like, at least when I was in college, Tim Ferris would be promoting, like, various psychedelics on his show to the super wide audience, and they're really, really intense, drugs and met, you know, certain men are just prone to, schizophrenia and, marijuana, cannabis can induce that.

Jordi:

I believe it's that, I don't know if psilocybin can, but, Caribbean, you know, Ayahuasca or whatever definitely can. And so anyways, very very dark and, yeah, I'm not sure it's worth speculating, but it's sort of, it definitely came out of left field that he was a online, probably center right, you know, software engineer doing this. It's very clear. And, it really doesn't make sense, but, I think that's all Yeah. We really need to say.

John:

Well, I'm sure we'll learn more in the near future. Let's take a palate cleanser with a great post by Sean Frank. He says, most twisted thing about me, I really love ads. I like making them. I like watching them.

John:

I like the industry. I like that they pay for content for all of us. Ads are good, and I love ads.

Jordi:

There we go.

John:

Sean, this is fantastic.

Jordi:

I I almost I I had this sort of intrusive thought to lunge for the size gong.

John:

Oh, yeah.

Jordi:

Because Ridge Ridge I mean, so Ridge basically, Ridge is a wallet company fundamentally but they're they're the backbone of the creator economy. If you're a guy online and you make content that guys watch

John:

the ridges there

Jordi:

for you. It's like UBI for people that make gaming content. When I when I helped out with Ridge back in the day, you know, there was, you know, if you had, like, an NBA highlight reel and you had no advertisers, like, Ridge would be there and be like, we'll give you a dollar CPM if you just, like, put, like, Ridge in the corner. Yep. And, that strategy has worked out very well for them.

Jordi:

They do significantly more revenue than than most series c startups and That's true. And infinite more, EBITDA. So

John:

On that note, let's go to a promoted post. We got it

Jordi:

right now. We got to live the brand. If you can see behind my glass of champagne, we have a post from DuPont Registry, and they are showing off a 2015 McLaren P1 with an asking price of 2,100,000.

John:

Holy Trinity car.

Jordi:

Holy Trinity car. It's painted in MSO Kilo Gray with McLaren orange accents. This specification is subtle yet stunning. The full carbon interior and carbon bucket racing seats with orange contrast stitching emphasize the Spartan cockpit that is solely focused on performance, and I gotta say, John, I got a soft spot for carbon bucket seats. Fantastic.

Jordi:

I love sitting in them. They're not the they're not objectively the most comfortable, but I certainly feel at home in them. So, if you're in the market for a p one, this is a fantastic spec.

John:

Yeah. Everyone always talk trash about McLaren. Oh, it's just some tech guy who just made his money yesterday. But you go with a p one, you go with an f one, you go with a p one g t r. People know.

John:

People in the car world know.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. It's gonna cost you a little bit more, but you get a lot more.

Jordi:

You get a lot more.

John:

And so it's so it's so worth it. So head to your McLaren dealer, head to DuPont Registry, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Let's stay on the Ridge team. Connor McDonald says no more noble endeavor than being an advertiser. Hey.

John:

Can you follow me?

Jordi:

Guys work together or something? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

And and that's I mean, so let's face it. There's a lot of advertising that is solely oriented around driving very specific results. Yep. And then there's a ton of advertising that's literally like, I just like what these people are doing. I'm gonna support them.

Jordi:

Yeah. Maybe I'll make my money back or whatever. Like, we're we're we're, you know, pursuing some opportunities in in horse racing. Right? Right.

Jordi:

It's not it's not necessarily to drive new listenership to Technology if you're an advertiser take 5% of your budget and spend it with spend it with groups that, you know, maybe don't have a direct ROI, but can give back to the world and and entertain you and your team in some way. I actually actually, one of my former engineers, our CTO, at my last company, he's, like, very into car car racing, like, on the amateur circuit. And so I sponsored him. There wasn't it wasn't a ton of money, but I was, like, well, if you put, like, 5 of my portfolio companies on as stickers, like, I'll give you money for the race. I probably paid for, like, a set of tires or something.

Jordi:

But but that's that's my word of advice. You can just sponsor things. You can just do things. You can just build things and you can just sponsor things. So, go sponsor.

Jordi:

That's your homework for today. Go sponsor something.

John:

Go sponsor something. Tyler says, the classman's creed. If you possess true taste, you bear a sacred duty to amass wealth, not for vanity, but to lift the world's standard and drape it in elegance. I love that.

Jordi:

Beautiful. And he was inspired

John:

by something I said about the importance of spending money. Well, there are so many people in Silicon Valley that have inordinate wealth and spend it so poorly.

Jordi:

Yep. And I

John:

like that Tyler has, trademarked it, the Classman's Creed. The Classman's Creed. Who who gets need a little work on that. We could tighten that up. It could be one word.

John:

It could be 2 words, but, you know, you're getting there, Tyler. You

Jordi:

could drop

John:

the I see what

Jordi:

you're doing there. Drop the creed and just make it a archetype. The Klassman. The Klassman. Somebody who constantly seeks to Yes.

Jordi:

Yes. Beautify the world that they exist in.

John:

Yes. Yes.

Jordi:

I I I saw, Elon actually commissioned a huge statue.

John:

I saw this, the fork in the road.

Jordi:

The fork in the road. Fantastic. That was beautiful. Yeah. I think it was placed at one of BlackRock's properties.

Jordi:

BlackRock City.

John:

Yeah. BlackRock City.

Jordi:

So, yeah, I was surprised to see Elon and BlackRock collaborating, but they're big asset managers. He's got a bunch of investable assets, so it kinda makes sense.

John:

I love it. Rick Zulo says a lot of talk on Twitter about VCs hitting it big on meme coins. Undoubtedly, there are gonna be some eye popping IRRs there, but IMHO, these are a huge distraction. These are not the type of investments LPs are paying us to make and I don't see the returns from these to, being sustainable. If you do, make that your full time job.

John:

To me, it appears like resulting above all else. Is this a moment in time to make an insane quick buck? Perhaps. Is that shortsighted? In my honest opinion, definitely.

John:

What do you think? Can you build a VC firm around trading meme coins?

Jordi:

Well, so there's some, like, basically l p agreements that allow venture funds to to put some percentage of their fund into highly liquid alternative assets.

John:

It's usually about 25 20% Yeah. Can go into secondary sales. So for the really big scaled companies, you might only be able to get allocation into secondary and then, alternative asset classes like Bitcoin, crypto, meme coins, and stuff. So Yeah. This is this is something that has been, driving the the conversion to, RIAs.

John:

Yeah. Because once you're an RIA, you can invest in public companies, you can invest in secondary, you can invest in anything, but it comes with incredible compliance, complexity. And so it's been very complex.

Jordi:

Yeah. But, heretic on I was talking with a buddy of mine and he was saying everybody for the last couple of years has obviously been, you know, kind of dunking on crypto VCs and not taking them super seriously. But historically, the average crypto fund has outperformed the average venture fund or app basically. Now the average crypto fund has outperformed like the top 20% venture fund. So the returns because the the asset class is so liquid and the timelines are so, so, so shortened, the returns are phenomenal.

Jordi:

And I do think it's kind of a sign of the times that non crypto VCs are saying, well, I'm going to take the 20% of my fund and just start YOLO ing it. Yep. But, but, yeah, I know I know some very respectable GPs that have that have done this, and I know some I I know a, you know, multibillion dollar AUM digital asset fund who has 3x their their 2021 fund just on Ethereum alone. Yeah. And so there's Yeah.

Jordi:

I do think it'll be sort of the irony of the traditional venture capital firms that were sort of dunking on the crypto VC funds. Crypto VC funds generate all these crazy returns and then the traditional venture funds come in and, like, basically bag hold for all the crypto VCs and then the crypto VCs will

John:

buy at the bottom again. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a friend who was a who was a partner at a a VC firm came in kind of at the bottom of the market and was like, Solana, baby. Solana.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Solana didn't make any MVC investments.

Jordi:

He bought the right bought the right coin.

John:

PA is on fire. Yeah. Let's go to Bryce Roberts. He says, another show I'd love to see us make, founders for sci fi. So he's talking about David Centra's show.

John:

Read and dissect sci fi novels and tie them to the present or near future world of what we're seeing in tech. I think that's really, really cool. A lot of the sci fi novels, it's hard to dig through them. It's hard to have a guide for what's good to read, a podcast that puts it in a consistent voice, well

Jordi:

And historical context.

John:

Totally. Totally. Like, when this was written, the iPhone didn't exist. So when you hear them talking about the magical info tablet, you should be amazed. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. That is the iPad.

John:

Yeah. That that is the iPad. Exactly.

Jordi:

No. So so here's the thing. People don't understand this about podcasting, and and we're obviously influenced by David Centra. He's sort of the the godfather. He's the godfather of business podcasting, but he's also, in many ways, a godfather of this podcast.

Jordi:

Like, he encouraged us to take it, as seriously as we take it now.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And so he talks about this a lot, but people don't realize, like, if you just wanna make $5,000,000 a year, having the founder's podcast for sci fi is a very potentially a very efficient way to do that. You can have no team.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Just you, a microphone, a computer. You can make $5,000,000 a year. Yep. Basically, MBA money

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

From recording a show in the comfort of your own home and just nerding out about sci fi.

John:

And to fucking love sci fi.

Jordi:

You gotta love sci fi. You gotta be willing to grind. You have to be willing to do what Sandra did, which is, like, grind in relative obscurity for years. Yep. And until now, he has, you know, one of the top business podcasts in the world, but he had to go through, like, 3 or 4 years of being completely unknown.

John:

But set a cadence. Don't just be like, I'll do it when I read a book.

Jordi:

No. Yeah. It'd be weekly. Yeah. You're not gonna if you come into it being like, I'm gonna do this as a side hustle.

Jordi:

It's like like, great things have come from side hustles, but side hustles don't become great things.

John:

Yes. That's great. That's great way to put it. Let's go to Baldo, our reigning reply guy of the month. He says, to be honest, I don't care about winning back to back months, but I'll run over anyone who thinks they're in the race.

John:

Let's go, Baldo.

Jordi:

This type of mentality. So so winner mentality. Winner mentality, grinder mentality. Fantastic. Baldo, less than 2 weeks ago, relatively unknown Cornell student.

Jordi:

No. He starts aggressively replying to our posts. Yep. And last time I checked, he was followed by Mark Andreessen, Turner Novak, Yoni at Slough.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

So many major fund managers. I wouldn't be surprised if this guy drops out and raises, you know, raises a $5,000,000 mango seed round.

John:

Mango seed round.

Jordi:

That's a good answer. Baldo's got a mango seed round written all over him.

John:

Mango is such a funny term 10 years ago. Oh, yeah.

Jordi:

Mango seeds.

John:

I think Ed Anderson coined that. Right? Or or someone Ed Anderson, maybe it's Chris Dixon wrote that. But, yeah, the mango seed round for anything over, like, 2,000,000. And and there was a big question about, like, oh, is it is it dangerous?

John:

Because, like, you have too much money and the evaluation is too high for the seed. Now it's like, if you're not doing a mango seed round, you're not in the game. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.

John:

Let's go to Morgan Barrett. He's been on the show before. He says, me, I'm almost to 5,000,000 impressions. My much more than my much more Twitter famous friend, you can't do anything with 5,000,000 impressions. 5 is a nightmare.

John:

You can't retire, but it's not worth it to work. 5 will drive you. Un poco loco, my fine feather friend, the poorest content creator in America, the

Jordi:

world's tallest dwarf, the weakest strong man at

John:

the circus. Strong man at the circus. This is so funny. I didn't realize I didn't read this for some reason until we got on the show. This is fucking hilarious.

John:

I I had lunch with Morgan, the other week here, and, he's a great dude. But, man, is he a great poster. This is a

Jordi:

yeah. Yeah. No. It won't be a 5,000,000. It won't be a 5,000,000 for long.

Jordi:

No. So so so for anybody that doesn't get the references, he's referring to to, like, the $5,000,000 net worth mark where you're trap. You're is your trap. Like, you're technically rich, but, like, you can't really do things that, you know, you can't retire really.

John:

It goes so hard. I will drive you un poco loco, my father's right. I don't even get what that reference is from, but is that, like, Breaking Bad or something? I don't know.

Jordi:

Well, you understand what it means.

John:

Yeah. Of course. It works, but you're passing your glass.

Jordi:

Southern California, you gotta know what poco loco means. Poco loco. Oh. Oh, wow.

John:

You really We finished the Dom Perignon.

Jordi:

We're gonna need to start at at what point do we move up to 2 bottles?

John:

Well, well, the thing is is that so, wine comes in different sizes. We're drinking the standard, which is 750 milliliters. Then there's the magnum, which is 1.5 liters. But it goes up 3 liters, 4a half, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18. And they have really cool names.

Jordi:

As big as the flagpole?

John:

Yeah. Yeah. The the Nebuchadnezzar, the Jeroboam, the Methuselah. And so what we'll do is we'll have the pourer. You would need a device because it's so heavy, and it tilts over, and it pours your glass.

John:

But what I was thinking is that, reasonably, we probably can't put down 18 liters of champagne in one episode. So live show, when we we, as we start doubling bigger and bigger, we do a live show, and there's a jarabum that is shared amongst the the guests of the live show.

Jordi:

That's great.

John:

I think that will work.

Jordi:

That's great.

John:

Let's move on to Bryce. Pound for pound, midweek laps at Deer Valley is the best networking in Utah.

Jordi:

I love this. Bryce is a humble guy, but he's been very successful.

John:

He's also jacked. I saw it before and after.

Jordi:

Yeah. Love it. Bryce, we wanna see the beard back. You looked great with a beard. Oh, yeah.

John:

I saw the old beer. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. Like, he just looked like an absolute dog. Yeah. But he's saying he's saying what a lot of he's saying what a lot of capital allocators won't admit, which is that midweek laps at your local, you know, ski resort are a great way to meet. Yeah.

Jordi:

LPs, other investors, some some some later stage founders. Maybe

John:

everyone makes fun of these for like, oh, they're spending all their time at Almagiri. They're spending all their time on the in the Alps. It's like, where do you think where do you think the founders are of these multibillion dollar companies that need to raise $2,000,000,000 for their next series f?

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

They're not

Jordi:

All I wanna see a blue bottle. Yeah. They're they're

John:

hanging out at Almaguire. Yeah. And so that's where you go. You go where the money is. See Yellowstone.

John:

Money. Yep. Smell it. Chase it down. That's the difference.

Jordi:

The only thing I wanna see from Bryce is, you know, he's got a thing with NDVC. It's it's it's, you know, perfectly sized seed fund. You know, I think it's, like, $50,000,000. He can do a lot with that. Mhmm.

Jordi:

But I'd like to see him go into the I'd like to see him raise, like, $5,000,000,000 fund. Right? I wanna see him you know, that that picture of him in the gym made me think this guy can handle he can he I can trust him with 2,000,000,000.

John:

I think so. I think so. Hopefully soon. Let's go to Kushi says,

Jordi:

wait. Wait. We we we cannot we can't skip over this. Post. No.

Jordi:

We can't skip over this. Bryce posted about doing a Technology Brothers

John:

Stay tuned, everyone.

Jordi:

Live event at Deer Valley.

John:

That'd be fantastic.

Jordi:

And the the president of Deer Valley replied to him and said, let's make it happen.

John:

Yeah. So getting the idea that's working out.

Jordi:

I actually talked with him about this last week.

John:

Yeah. We'll figure something out.

Jordi:

And, yeah. Let's make it happen.

John:

Yeah. If you made it this far in the show, you're you can hit us up. Kushi says, coolest boss award goes to Kevin Hartz for, for being not only a cofounder GP of Astar VC, but also cofounder of the coolest stealth startup in the game, Sauron, which is their home defense company, Anduril for your home, Palantir

Jordi:

for your home. And, hopefully, I don't I don't know a ton about the company. I've met Kevin before. Very very smart guy. Looks great in a suit.

Jordi:

I I actually pulled this out because he's wearing a suit. Looks fantastic. We need to see more early stage founders, wearing suit.

John:

On a tux though.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Class it up a little bit.

Jordi:

Class it up a little bit. Come on, Kevin.

John:

I mean, you're a general partner at a star. Come on.

Jordi:

Yeah. You

John:

can do a little bit better.

Jordi:

But, but yeah, that's the only thing request for feature Kevin build humanoid robot bodyguards that I can put in my backyard and on my roof that can just sort of pace on my roof. And that's a feature I'd happily pay for. So

John:

Oh, here it is. Elon Musk says 2 years ago, I commissioned an art piece, a fork in the road, had to make sure that civilization took the paths, the path most likely to pass the Fermi great filters. What a great metaphor. It's so funny because it's like it has a little bit of that Elon, like, meme, like, oh,

Jordi:

it's just a fork in the ground.

John:

Yeah. But it has this much deeper meaning about the filter. I I love that. I'm bullish on us passing the great filter. I think we can do it.

Jordi:

We're gonna do it.

John:

I I I'm a I'm a big George Hotz believer. I think it's wire heading. I think the risk is we all go into VR, and we never explore the stars because we have this unending pleasure dome, this wire heading future. That's the world that I'm most worried about. Not nuclear war, not nuclear war, not The world that I'm about killing us.

Jordi:

No. The world I'm more worried about is we get so lost in a stack of posts that you and I never if somebody just kept bringing Dom out, we'd probably just not stop podcasting.

John:

Yeah. I mean, it it it is crazy the scale of what it takes to pass the the the great filter in the sense that, like, getting to Mars and actually building a society on Mars is, you know, such a stretch even for Elon's lifetime. Like, it is it is a life's work and a half and Yeah. Times 10

Jordi:

Well, that's why he has 20

John:

Yeah. Children. Yeah. Even even just, like, the transfer window. Like, you can't go you can go to the moon whenever you want.

John:

You can't go to Mars whenever you want. The the transfer window only happens every 18 months or something or every few years. And then when you think about the next planet, it's, like, 30 years, 50 years, 100 of years, and it's just, like, a completely different game, like, self sustaining

Jordi:

ecosystem. Bezos has this crazy

John:

stuff, The clock.

Jordi:

Crazy clock.

John:

It's great, though. Like like, we need people thinking about this, especially if they're wealthy and powerful, inspiring the next generation. I love it. I'm really happy he made this. Let's go to Flo.

John:

Flo says, I don't know if people realize how literally I meant it when I say that AI agents are going to turn building a business into playing a game of Factorio. And he posts a screenshot of his, his AI agent workflow.

Jordi:

Yeah. So, he's been he's been building, this company for a while. It's very cool. It's think of it as like AI agents meets, like, Zapier. So you can set up all these different it's like more complicated, automations.

Jordi:

And I just pulled this because I thought that, that that graphic that he showed of, like, being able to look at a lot of a lot of, you know, you know, if you're running a company, you'll look at your headcount and you'll see, like, you know, roughly, or or or just like a a map of your team and understand, like, alright, where are we really allocating resources and time and energy? And he's looking at this sort of diagram of agents that are all sort of humming, in the background. And, and he's yeah. In in in in theory, he's building Factorio for your business where you basically just get to create and manage this army of agents. So

John:

Yeah. I gotta put it to work because we have a bunch of things that could be work flowed out with AI agents. But Totally. I haven't really sat down and actually used I think it's called Lindy AI. Yeah.

John:

Right?

Jordi:

Lindy. Great great name. You're a promoted post? Very Lindy name. Promoted post, you know what time it is.

Jordi:

It is holiday season and Tiffany and Co is, at your service. They say featuring a diamond of over 12 carats, our holiday window display at the landmark invite passerby to view the world's most iconic engagement ring, the Tiffany setting up close. And I just gotta say, what an iconic engagement ring if you are eager to propose It's hard to recommend anything else besides this. I mean this is absolutely fantastic piece you're gonna make your wife or partner very happy with this one so go indulge go check it out walk by the window maybe buy it and when you are talking to your ad at Tiffany tell them, tell them the technology brother sent you. Not AD, your your, your rep.

John:

Yeah. Let's go to simp for satoshi. Getting a little meta with this one saying that all great men simp for other great men. Jobs for Walt Disney. Caesar for Alexander.

John:

Elon for Asimov. Those who think simping for a great man is unbecoming aren't ever going to make it. It's okay to simp for a titan. It's part of becoming 1. Interesting.

Jordi:

I mean Like that. At I amgingertrash Yep. A k a simp for satoshi has been on an absolute posting role lately.

John:

Banger after banger.

Jordi:

He's he's really building momentum in the timeline.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

But, yeah, this is this is, I mean, I I think it was really I I honestly thought it was worth sharing a lot of people. I think I I think you don't wanna make, someone else your entire personality. Like I've always felt like wearing, you know, if you're into sports, wearing a jersey, is sort of strange, but someone else's name on your back, but it's okay to sort of like spiritually embody Yeah. To some degree. It's almost like a mentor more than,

John:

mentor more than yeah. Yeah. Simping. What does that really mean? Simping is, derogatory term, but he's kind of re claiming it because it's in his handle.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And, I I like that. He's taking it back and using it as metaphor to just study into the tutelage of a great person. And, I mean, that's what the founder's podcast is all about. Like, you can take a tour of the great men of history and figure out who can inspire you and who releases the most alpha for whatever you're building.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Mark Andreessen just post the American flag and a picture of the US stock market versus the rest of the world without America.

Jordi:

Mogged. Mogged. Mogged. Mogged in a chart.

John:

It really is staggering to see. If you invested in America, you did very well. If you invested anywhere else, you were screwed.

Jordi:

Yep. Wild. Let that be a lesson for you.

John:

And, I mean, this is this is interesting because, like, it it's pro America, but it's also a total vindication of Mark's strategy. Right? It's like Yeah. He has sized up his fund and gone turbo long

Jordi:

America. America.

John:

Right? And that is and it's just like

Jordi:

Leveraging Kuagin's law along the way. Value of coining.

John:

Of course. Software is eating the world. It's time to build American dynamism. One of the OGs of Coogan's Law. Fantastic coin

Jordi:

There should be, yeah, there should be a poly market for betting on the next thing that a 16 c coins.

John:

Coins. You know, like, in the

Jordi:

next category.

John:

They're so do.

Jordi:

They're so do. Mark, we're waiting. Coin cycle. We're refreshing, and we will do a a we will do our signature segment

John:

on New coinage breaks?

Jordi:

New coinage alert.

John:

It's on the timeline. Breaking. This could shake up shape rotators out. Word sells out. We got the new drop from p market Scoop.

John:

Live. Scoop. Let's do it. Harris Rothermel says, I'm gonna build the coolest factory, and it's a very nicely lit shot of an American flag.

Jordi:

No. So this was in a response to somebody who was saying, I don't wanna everybody wants to everybody wants to reindustrialize. Nobody wants to work in a factory. Harris wants to work in a factory. He's making a beautiful factory.

Jordi:

He's making the coolest factory.

John:

It's fantastic.

Jordi:

And, yeah, I I actually I disagreed with the original post. Nobody wants to work in a factory. It's very very stimulating to be in a factory. Yeah. There's like a lot of, you know, there's productive capacity.

Jordi:

You can hear hear the and the buzz and the and the clanks and, I love being in factories. Just like children yearn for the mines, you know, playing Minecraft. Yeah. Men yearn for the factory floor.

John:

I think of this as like a podcast factory.

Jordi:

It is. Factory for content. This is content factory. Content You hear the clicks of Ben's keyboard editing. Call He's an hour behind us right now editing.

John:

Content Factory. Jack Altman says, all the live like like a perfect healthy monk longevity stuff is directionally good. But if you take it too far, you miss out on a lot of personal joy and professional progress.

Jordi:

This is so true. This is so true. That soap, I went through this phase, luckily in college where I got so obsessed with my health Sure. That I realized, like, 80 to 90% of my, like, creative Yep. Productive energy was just oriented around my health.

Jordi:

I

John:

did the exact same thing.

Jordi:

Yeah. I was 7% body fat.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And I was an absolute dog. Sick. And I put on, you know, a huge amount of muscle mass.

John:

That part's good.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's good.

John:

We need to get back there.

Jordi:

We need to get back there. Size up the traps. Yes. But I do think that so I think it's actually a natural cycle that you have to go through where everybody should should put way too much energy To learn what actually drives alpha. And now I spend maybe 5% of my energy on it, but I get 80% of the benefit.

Jordi:

Yep. And so yeah. There there's totally anybody who's living their life based on their 8 sleep score and, oh, I didn't sleep well and and letting that dictate their day Yeah. That's bad.

John:

Dude, in in 2013, I was so into the quantified self stuff. I basically invented my own 8 Sleep. I took an accelerometer, hooked it to an Arduino That way. Strapped it to the edge of my bed, and it could track the movement of the bed. And then I would have that talk to the Internet, put it in a spreadsheet, and get, like, a sleep score.

John:

Basically, this was before, like, sleep scores. And I was

Jordi:

like had a and then you had a thermometer that would dump a bucket of ice on the bed. You know? Like

John:

I mean, I did I did actually have an Internet connected coffee machine that would make the coffee in the morning. So I'd literally wake up and smell the coffee.

Jordi:

Wow.

John:

So you have a timer that is like, okay. This is the optimal time to to wake up, to start brewing the coffee, and then you smell the coffee, and then you wake up. It was ridiculous. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. There's definitely a point of diminishing returns.

John:

So Sometimes, you know, you can't just be doing the no alcohol thing you gotta enjoy.

Jordi:

Yeah. I only I only Cheers. I will say this. 90% of the times that I drink now are when I'm podcasting.

John:

I only drink champagne.

Jordi:

I only drink champagne when I'm podcasting. Yeah.

John:

It's great. Oh, this is, this is wild. Andy says trust the process, and it's a screenshot of Squirtle saying 0 to 1 is insane because it appears to be one of the most legitimately dangerous texts with the potential to gigafry your brain, but it is exclusively read by literal turbo normies who unironically want to, like, build shit and basically get 1 shotted by it.

Jordi:

Wow. The Ayahuasca for the mind.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. It's the Ayahuasca meme. And then, the the the meme is 0 to 1. The person's reading it, and they're like, oh my god.

John:

Competition is for losers, but they're missing the real message that's going over their head, which is everyone in finance is dumb as rocks. I should build in Fintech. Fascinating.

Jordi:

Big post. There's a lot of that.

John:

There's a lot of that.

Jordi:

We'd almost need it 3 hours to fully access

John:

always said this is interesting about Founders Fund because, like, you know, big stories around, Palantir, SpaceX, and Anduril. Like, 2 of just, like, objectively, like, the coolest companies to point a camera at and just show what they're building

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Which is, like, cool stuff, and that's where, like, the funds made a ton of returns. But then there's also the story about Fintech, PayPal, Stripe, Ramp, Bitcoin. Like, the fund has also been deeply involved in Fintech, which is, like, the least sexy industry you could possibly build in. And so the fund just kinda goes back and forth and doesn't get boxed into this one thing. It's not a Fintech fund, not a deep tech fund.

John:

They just kinda do both every every once in a while.

Jordi:

No. But but but, yeah, it's funny because 0 to 1 can be a tool where if you read it literally

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And then take the exact opposite approach, you get something like jeans. Right? Where a friend of the podcast, Theo.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

It's like don't build don't create a new restaurant in Manhattan. It's the it's the most perfectly competitive market. All the profits will be competed away. Yep. You know, even if you have something hot for a second, there's a new hot thing the next month and and and, you know, people will flood to that and it's still worth doing things that are deeply competitive.

Jordi:

Right? Still worth, you know, content is deeply competitive. We shouldn't have started extremely important text that should never, you know, never let any one text rule your life. Right?

John:

Have you ever seen Peter's, AMA on Reddit after he posted after he published 0 to 1? He did an AMA and somebody asked him what's the story. Like great like great AMA. But, somebody asked him what's the Straussian reading of 0 to 1 and he said, don't become an entrepreneur. Interesting.

John:

It's just like it's actually too hard.

Jordi:

Be born into

John:

because he was looking at the he was looking at the sales copies, and he sold, like, 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of these copies. It's like there cannot be millions of generational entrepreneurs. Just mathematically impossible.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so, like, for the average viewer, for the average reader, you should read that and just be like, yeah. That ain't me. Yeah. Like, I'm I'm not built different like that. I'm not gonna be able to pull it off.

John:

And so I should not do a startup necessarily. And a lot of the good takeaway from 0 to 1 is understanding how important monopoly power is for raising money. And if you love a business and you're destined to build some business, actually understand, does this have monopoly power? And if it doesn't, don't raise money.

Jordi:

No. But but here's the thing. Here's the way to read 0 to 1. 10 years ago, if you're reading 0 to 1 and you really internalized it all, you would have gone and tried to find somebody who is already building a monopoly and you maybe would have joined Nvidia. And even if you joined as like a low B software engineer, you would become a multi multi multimillionaire.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And so there's that's the argument of why it's actually probably good that millions of copies were sold because even if you're not

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Jensen Huang Yep. You can still be you can still leverage that that thought, that collection of thoughts into dramatic success. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Massive gap between understanding that a business has monopoly power and creating a new business that has monopoly power. Huge difference. Like, the investors can't create the business, but they can invest in them.

Jordi:

Like Yeah. And it's interesting. So so with this podcast with this podcast, you get Meta. Right? You and I are not gonna go start the next monopoly chip manufacturing or design company.

Jordi:

Right? But we do have a monopoly on John and Jordy. Just just hanging out. Exactly. And so that's why we're doing this podcast.

Jordi:

There's one of 1. There's only one podcast in the world. That's you and me talking, and it's Technology Brothers.

John:

Exactly. And we're the 1st podcast with an actual brand, maybe.

Jordi:

Allegedly. Some big podcasters have said that. So

John:

let's go to Chad Hurley, founder of a massively monopolistic organization, YouTube.

Jordi:

You have benefited a lot from

John:

I have. He says, pickleball is a propaganda program to fulfill meaningless lives. So aggressive. You can pickleball is the new the new, like, work life balance bait.

Jordi:

You

John:

can just say the most aggressive thing about pickleball. Boom. 1 k likes. No problem. You should just post it right now.

John:

If you're listening, post something, you know, incendiary about pickleball, guaranteed banger. Everyone hates pickleball right now. Pickleball really had, like, a rise and fall. Went through the whole hero's journey. Maybe it's coming back.

Jordi:

Post something right now if you play Pickleball. Pickleball, unfollow me.

John:

Unfollow me. It's great. Okay. Yeah. If you're listening, go go repost Jordi's Jordi's latest post.

John:

Let's go to Nikita Bier. He says, the greatest contributor to global economic output is that hangovers get worse as you age, disincentivizing you from having fun when your value to the economy is highest. I like that. That's a good that's a good take. That's a good, like, insight.

John:

It's, you know, it's probably true. Yeah. I always think about this. Like, I went to college in Boston, and one of the benefits of Boston is a college town. Obviously, there's the network effects of, like, you have Harvard, MIT, all these great colleges around there.

John:

So, like, you're just bumping into other smart people all the time, but it's also really fucking cold. So when it's cold during the winter, it's final season, you don't wanna go outside, so you just go to the library.

Jordi:

So you can walk in.

John:

Hang out.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Whereas, you know, maybe if you're in a nice school, like, you sunny, you just party all the time. And and the hangover thing is kind of like a a riff on that. But, what's what's your take? I don't really get I I find that, if you drink really nice Dom Perignon, you don't really get that hungover. So maybe it's a skill issue here.

John:

Maybe it's a skill issue. Let's go to Gary Tan. Gary says, the problem with systematizing a career or the search for excellence is that the masterpieces have never been done before, so there's no map to get there. And he, posts a very long screenshot of a book saying, why is it so hard to achieve ambitious objectives, to get a handle on the problem? Think about all the things that are possible.

John:

As an example, consider all possible images. Everything you ever seen falls into this class. It's hard to find a Mona Lisa or a Starry Night. This is interesting. I and I like this post because it's true, but it also kinda flies in the face of, like, YC's, like, request for startups.

John:

Like, it feels like YC in some ways is a path and that when they do a request for startups, they're creating more of a path and then demo day is a path. And so I think Gary Tan, like, implicitly feels that and needs to push back on that. And I've always said that that, you know, the request for startups is is important because it's important that we get a bunch of young founders working in those industries, but that the next great power law company that comes out of YC might not actually be responding to one of those requests for startups. It might just be a weird thing like sleep on an air mattress. Right?

John:

Startups. It might just be a weird thing like sleep on an air mattress. Right? That was not gonna be on any request for startups ever. And yet it Yeah.

Jordi:

So but so so this was pulled from a book Yeah. That that I actually recommend. I recommended that we do a deep dive on. It says, why greatness cannot be planned and the whole just because so so so the counterpoint to what you just said is if greatness cannot be planned, YC should put out, like, a big list of things, like, here's problems that we think are interesting, come work on these. Mhmm.

Jordi:

And the book basically says that people will come and work on those problems, and then they'll realize, like, oh, this act this thing is actually this other thing is more interesting to me. I'm gonna go work on that.

John:

Exactly.

Jordi:

And then some some just monstrous company will come out of that or some fantastic company.

John:

Totally.

Jordi:

And so I the the big thesis of the book is is so many of the greatest achievements and, things, companies, products, whatever have been created, were not perfectly planned. Like, Steve Jobs didn't plan to build the iPhone. Yep. Right? That's a great yet it was transformative and one of the greatest probably the greatest consumer product of all time.

Jordi:

Yep. And I would I would to bring it back to the show and add some relevancy, like, we sort of wanted to do a podcast together for a long time, but everything, you know, some some element of randomness in terms of how it came together and the format and these different and the timing and all that stuff. If we had when we first met had just been fixated on, oh, we need to make a podcast together, maybe it wouldn't have turned into anything that meaningful.

John:

Yep. Yeah. I mean, you go back, Airbnb was a different company. I'm pretty sure, I mean, Zuck was building a dating site. YouTube was a dating site.

John:

Everything was a dating site. Yeah. So if you

Jordi:

wanna build something great,

John:

make a dating app. But yeah. And then and then don't be afraid to pivot. NYC has always been extremely friendly to pivot mid session. Like, you can just walk into an office hours and be like, we're doing something completely different.

John:

And there's no, like, hate. It's amazing.

Jordi:

It's

John:

like such a welcoming environment.

Jordi:

Yeah. I have one I have one I have a y c company that I backed that the founders have pivoted so many times that the and there's only a handful investors. It's me, one other person and y c and they just so they don't even be the investor list. It's just like everybody's like cc. And the last time the last time one, the other investor besides me and y c replied back and they said, please do not pivot again.

Jordi:

Just simply this is a really big company and, like, potentially a really big company in a big industry. Just make it big. Yeah. And so that was the advice that, like, this company probably needed.

John:

That's great.

Jordi:

Yeah. Companies are really hard. When things get hard, don't just pivot. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

You pivot because you've realized that some element of your thesis was critically wrong.

John:

Broken. Yeah.

Jordi:

And you need to do something else, but sometimes you just need to not pivot and just force, you know, force it, basically.

John:

Yep. This is great from Signal. He says, if I were CEO today, I would have a weekly email sent out to every single person in the company asking them what did you get done this week. The AI then generates the respond then aggregates the responses, presents it in a readable format to me, every Monday morning, it should automatically do a diff from week to week and tell me anything is changing, accelerating, not going well. This is the what did you get done agent cutting out trash middle management.

John:

I would also hire people coaches instead of managers. I like this. Fun little, you know, project you could build with AI in, like, a weekend and and deploy. I wonder if people would hate it or learn to game it, but, generally seems good. I mean, status reports are terrible.

John:

The meetings are awful, but, there's something valuable about reflecting on your work product. Product.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Especially if I can't quantify it.

Jordi:

If I was, listening to the show right now, I would go by what did you get done this week.com. Yep. And, and then, you know, build an app that says a Slack bot.

John:

Slack integration or email integration or whatever.

Jordi:

What do you get done this week? People respond and then attracts it week over week.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

There's a lot of a lot of products like that that people hate, but maybe if you simplified it dramatically, it made it literally one text box that you have to fill out. Could you could you could, you know, definitely build a business off of that.

John:

Could be good. Let's go to Ashwin Sharma. He says, this obsession with self improvement is driving me nuts because the greatest thinkers have already shown us the true success lies in being who you are already. G k Chesteron wrote, a tree doesn't try to become a better tree. It just grows according to its nature because there's no pretense, no concept.

Jordi:

Yeah. And this is to to make it meta again. You like wearing tuxedos, drinking champagne and talking. So don't try to fight against that. Just do that as a career.

Jordi:

Yeah. Exactly. That's simple.

John:

It's that simple, folks. Oh, I love this. Growing Daniel says, I'm selling Ayahuasca insurance to early stage VCs.

Jordi:

This is great.

John:

This is a banger. This is so real. Yeah. It's one of the biggest threats in Silicon Valley right now. And, you know, we have this conspiracy theory that there's a there's a VC out there that is trying actively trying to get, founders to do Ayahuasca to To

Jordi:

gain leverage over them. To

John:

destroy yeah. To destroy them. And so stay safe out there, folks. If you're listening, be very

Jordi:

careful. The thesis is really that she's a foreign agent Yeah. And she is trying to sabotage our young entrepreneurs from building, you know, incredible companies like SpaceX and and things of that nature, and she's trying to get all the talented young entrepreneurs she can find to to, there

John:

are cheaper ways to do or there are more expensive ways to do it. That's one of the cheaper ways I could think of running an op. Go to

Jordi:

Peru. Go to Peru.

John:

Open your mind.

Jordi:

Yeah. Open your mind.

John:

So if you get caught in that situation, remember, Ayahuasca vaccine doesn't exist yet, but coming soon. If you don't if you can't take that, just microdose, microdose, microdose. Fake it out. Oh, yeah. I took the Ayahuasca.

John:

Throw half out. Spit it out. Put stuff in your cheek. Yeah. It's so crazy.

John:

I see the demon. The demon's amazing. Yeah. But I still wanna build. I still wanna create shareholder value.

John:

Interesting. I guess I'm really aligned. That's why

Jordi:

I do demons. Well, it's it's funny because he's obviously shitposting, but there you there are certain situations where executives have to get life insurance because they're so critical to the business that that if they were to pass away, like a lot of things would get fucked up. Yep. And so I think, yeah, Ayahuasca insurance for seed funds.

John:

Jackson Dahl, friend of the podcast he's been on before, he says USB C is one of the best technology outcomes. Very grateful for it and the people and events and regulations that got us here. I love it. I agree. But did you know that there are, like, 25 different types of USB c?

John:

It's so frustrating. Really? Yeah. So there there so that cable, that that that's a USB c cable right there. It's great.

John:

It's universal. It plugs in anywhere, but they have different data rates and different rates of charging. And so if you want to transfer a file across USB c, you need a there's USB c 3.1, 3.2. There's thunderbolt 4, which has the same port, but is much faster.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so you really, if you're buying USB c cables, you have to buy the absolute top tier.

Jordi:

That's the alpha.

John:

So that you never get stuck with, oh, I got a slow cable or it's not charging my laptop fast enough.

Jordi:

Well yeah. And and since Apple bricked all of our phones with 18.1 Yeah. And destroyed the battery life Yeah. We'll have to upgrade. Yeah.

Jordi:

But if you're not in a position to upgrade, go get your thunderbolt 4.

John:

So gift guide, get people don't just put your whole family and your whole friends all on USB c devices and cables. Get them the fastest Thunderbolt 4 cables. I own cordbag.com. I really wanna make, like, the the the the Tech Bros cord bag because every bro just needs, like, a a cord bag that comes stocked with everything when you're traveling. And so you you just need, like, you know, all of the fastest cables guaranteed to work anywhere, whether you're

Jordi:

not going to be in the middle of the night. Has that at the front desk. Right? They'll send up a cord bag

John:

Yeah. For you. Exactly.

Jordi:

So you're basically democratizing the cord bag.

John:

Exactly. The cord bag. It's a big thing. Why is, Anu says, why is no one talking about the DIG reboot? And Anu, at us and says Techbrod pod, history returns.

John:

And I love that. Thank you for sending this in. We appreciate you for tagging us. Yeah. This is fascinating.

John:

Do you know the story of DIG?

Jordi:

It was, Reddit, like, products. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Kevin Rose.

John:

Kevin Rose? Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. Kevin Rose is at

John:

the New York Times. Kevin Rose is the founder of DIG. Made money in Silicon Valley very early. Went to Google Ventures. A venture capitalist, has been very successful.

John:

He's buddy with Tim Ferris.

Jordi:

I bought ads with Dig probably Really? Like, 7, 8 years ago, and it it was crazy cheap.

John:

It was good.

Jordi:

I think it was because a lot of the traffic was bought traffic.

John:

Sure.

Jordi:

But, yeah, it was, like, you know, for for $10, we'll get you in front of 2,000,000 Yeah. You know, people type thing.

John:

Interesting. Well, I'm excited to see what happened.

Jordi:

No. But the reason we're not talking the the reason we're not talking about it is, like, when Enron comes back, everybody's, like, wow, Enron's back, and they're rebooting the brand. When Digg says they're coming back online, people are, like, I don't really miss Digg. It wasn't that. It sort of died sort of Also, this whimper, not a not a explosion.

John:

This needs to be founder led. If it's if it's Kevin Rose, I would listen to him talk to Tim Ferris about this. I would see a viral clip. I would see him posting about, hey. I bought I bought DIG back, and I'm turning it around.

John:

That's cool. Or if it's like a Vivek Ramaswamy buying Buzzfeed, like, that's its own interesting storyline. Yeah. I need to know who's buying this, but

Jordi:

I

John:

wanna hear their story.

Jordi:

Here's a conspiracy theory. So Kevin

John:

Put on tinfoil hat.

Jordi:

Tinfoil hats on. Kevin Rose

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Big watch enthusiast.

John:

Oh, really? Didn't know

Jordi:

he started, he was also co founder of Hodinkee. I believe really.

John:

Yeah. No way.

Jordi:

Yes. I started Hodinkee, big watch media company marketplace.

John:

Okay.

Jordi:

And so there's a possibility since we don't know what dig is yet, there's a possibility that Kevin saw us talking about watches in the tech world and he says, maybe there's a way I can run back dig leaning into the themes of Technology Brothers, you know, creating a for for, so, yeah, you should you should I

John:

I yeah. I'm I'm gonna text him after the show and and get the real

Jordi:

So until we know, we will definitely break the news

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

Even if it's 2 days late on what Dig actually is.

John:

The funny the funniest thing is that there's a video here, and this might explain it, but I didn't watch it. And so, like, we might have all our answers right here. Like, what if this video opens? It's just like Kevin explaining it. It's like, I'm doing watches.

Jordi:

What if it's like a very right leaning Reddit? Like, actually, that could probably be up right now.

John:

This is another true social. Goddamn it. Okay. Rune says, Sholay is doing some all time coping right now. This is in reference to Francois Sholay who is at Google and has since left and has been, a little bit more nuanced in his AGI takes.

John:

He runs the ARC Prize, which is a, an eval for AI models, where you have to do these little puzzles. They're very easy for kids or humans, but LLMs really struggle with them because they're novel and they can't be memorized. And, over the course of 2024, I believe the arc prize, like, completion rate went from, I believe, 33% to about 50 something percent, and a human can do, like, a 100% of these.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so it's always been an interesting benchmark. He says that if an AI model can defeat arc price, they will get, I think, $1,000,000 for whoever builds the model who does it.

Jordi:

So funny how little money that is in the context of AI.

John:

There is a way more.

Jordi:

You win you built the world's best model. You win $1,000,000. They're like, star salary. We literally raised foundation model company. That's like what our PMs make every month.

John:

Yeah. But, you know, there's a lot of independent hackers out there in Kaggle doing Okay. On Kaggle doing, like, you know, tests and stuff. But every time a new foundation model comes out, people throw our throw it at Arc because it's literally just, like, wired up. Right?

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And there's an online version and there's an offline version where you have to upload your model, and then there's another version where you get access to the Internet, essentially.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

But you can kinda cheat that. So there's a question about can you do it and what how big is the box that you're running, all these different things. But, basically, I I I I tried to dig into, like, what Rune was getting at specifically because, I believe this was in response to

Jordi:

Well, hasn't he just bailed out to threads?

John:

I no. I don't know. I think he's still on x for Francois Cholet.

Jordi:

I thought he I thought he kind of No.

John:

No. I I see him on x all the time. I I think the thing is that he he bailed on Google, and he went and started a new company. Oh, oh, sorry. A new company.

John:

With it. I forgot. But this week, OpenAI launched chatgpt4001pro, and it's, like, the best model at reasoning. And it should be and, I mean, like like, let's just be clear. Like, it's incredibly impactful.

John:

Like, it's a great product. People are gonna use it a ton. Yeah. But I think Francois Surlais is like, well, it doesn't do my little trick. It doesn't it can't do this one thing.

Jordi:

And and

John:

and I had this joke. It was like it was like, what if what if the AGI future is, is like, AGI can, like, completely dominate humans, but it keeps us in cages because it in case it ever runs into an arc press. It's this little puzzle that only humans can do, but AGI can do everything else. It can, like, build weapons and completely subjugate us and, like, you know, throw us in prison, but it keeps us in cages because what if it runs into this weird puzzle where you have to match the colors up? But, yeah.

Jordi:

Sorry. I was confusing him with the the guy Oh, yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. No. You think Gary Marcus. With, the Zapier the Zapier guys, Wade Foster, to do that prize. It's a very interesting model.

John:

It's a very interesting problem, and you can go check it out at artcries.com. I believe that's the URL. Just Google it, and, you can, do them for yourself. Just make sure you don't do them on mobile because the first time I did it on mobile, it wasn't rendering properly. So it was like the it's like this grid.

John:

You have to match these 2 grids, and the grid wasn't rendering right. So it was like You

Jordi:

kept off.

John:

And I was like, this is the hardest puzzle I've ever seen. And then I did it in, like, a browser, and I was like, okay. This makes way more sense because it's like a 4 by 4 grid and a 4 by 4 grid. Anyway, moving on. Hey.

John:

Let's do a promoted post.

Jordi:

I gotta stop you there. We got a promoted post from TAG, Heuer, Formula 1. They have a Formula 1 chronograph meets Oracle Red Bull Racing is along for the ride with Red Bull Racing for the last race of 2024. World Tempest takes a closer look at the show stopping new chronograph that is daring and dynamic in their latest review. You can go to tag dot hr /fonechronoworld and, check out this incredible timepiece.

Jordi:

We spend a lot of time on the show talking about the holy trinity, AP, Patek, Vacheron, and some of these other, watchmakers. But

John:

the

Jordi:

tag is a great it's

John:

a great option. So

Jordi:

if you're wearing an Apple Watch and you wanna stack on, you know, 1 or 2 other watches, maybe an Apple Watch, a whoop band, and then you wanna add something else, tag could be a great option there. This is a beautiful looking piece. Yeah. And, we thank them for supporting Formula 1. Without sponsors, we would not get to witness fantastic racing, most weekends of the year.

John:

Fantastic. Oh, this is a great post from Ben Koehler, our vice president here at Technology Brothers. He says, took home silver in the jujitsu world league finals SoCal GI competition in San Diego this weekend. I was disappointed not to get the gold, but it was a great experience, and I will be back next year for the w.

Jordi:

There we go. So Ben watch the studio. It's insane. Ben literally puts a man to sleep.

John:

So

Jordi:

crazy. It's kinda crazy to watch, And he's not normally a guy that that ends up in 2nd place. But every once it's it's really about his narrative arc. He had to get a second place once in order to bounce back

John:

and revenge.

Jordi:

Revenge. Yeah. And, Yeah. The guy's an absolute dog. We wouldn't be able to do this show without him.

Jordi:

And, congratulations on the silver. And, you know, maybe we do a technology brothers meetup when he goes back to reclaim gold.

John:

Let's make it happen. Let's go to Michael Dell. Michael Dell says, Dell's revenues during our first 16 years, 6000000, 67,000,000, 159,000,000.

Jordi:

I got it. I got it.

John:

Gong. Yeah. I hit the gong every time. 1, 159000000, 258000000, 5 so 2,000,000,000, 2,900,000,000, 3,500,000,000, 5,300,000,000, 7,800,000,000, 12,300,000,000, 18,200,000,000,000, 25,000,000,000.

Jordi:

By the end, he's just bragging. But, it's such a What an absolute dog.

John:

What an absolute dog.

Jordi:

And so if you're a pre seed company right now, just understand that this is the bar.

John:

Imagine 1st year, 6000000, 2nd year, 33, 3rd year, 67, 4th year, 159. That's such a good 4 year run.

Jordi:

Yeah. A lot a lot of founders will put in their projections, you know, we we hope to get to a 9 figure run rate by year 8.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

He's like, no. I'm gonna I'm gonna get to a few 1,000,000,000.

John:

Oh, so you're the first employee and you just vested your 4 year vest? Like, what's the company doing? Well, we went from 0 to a $150,000,000 in revenue.

Jordi:

An absolute dog. And I and I I think so his son has, like, a a pretty cool, hard, like, hardware company in the, I think Thrive backed, that's based in in Texas right now.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

That's building power banks and integrating it into

John:

the grid.

Jordi:

That's right. Yeah. That's that's another one to watch.

John:

16 years to 25,000,000,000. Insane.

Speaker 3:

Big shoes to fill.

John:

Let's go to Baz Lord. Baz says, there is no anti memetics division. Yeah. Well, explain Google's product and marketing teams. Have you read this book?

Jordi:

Which which book?

John:

There's a book called, There is No Antimemetics Division.

Jordi:

No. What? There's an entire book on it.

John:

I don't know if it's a if it's been I think it's been printed into a book, but it's like one of these, like, arcane PDFs and, like, you know, like, websites out there. Very interesting.

Jordi:

I'm sure Will has a copy. I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah. They they

John:

That's a hilarious blast because, yeah, Google

Jordi:

Google's basically never had to be they've never had to be good at marketing because they have the greatest distribution channel of all time.

John:

Yep. And you see it with AI. I'm I'm still using their LLM pretty frequently because I'll Google. Like, I just had to Google Eric Prince. I had to remember his name.

John:

So I just searched Blackwater CEO, and I and I don't do that on ChatCPT because ChatCPT, you gotta open it up. You gotta click the button. Yeah. You gotta wait. It takes a second, but you put that in Google and no more ads anymore.

John:

It's not gonna say, oh, did you scroll down, click on some clickbait article to find the answer. The the the Gemini is just gonna give you the answer right there. And it's like, it's not it's it's not great, but it's not terrible. And so I'm still using it.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Let's go to, oh, this is good. Okay. Yeah. So we got a whole thread here. This is a new segment of the show.

John:

We're doing threads now. So we are gonna start with the base. We have 5 quote tweets in a row, all from some of my favorite people, honestly. I love every single one of these posters. So this is gonna be a beast.

John:

We're gonna be on this for a couple of minutes. So it starts with Lucy Guo, the founder of passes, the founder of scale, the cofounder of Scale AI. Lucy says, it's mind blowing to me how small the scene is. It's the same faces globally from Art Basel to f one to Paris Fashion Week to Ibiza to Amfar to Yacht Week to Grammys to the list can go on. She got 1.6 k likes.

Jordi:

Wow.

John:

Banger. Like, everyone is always at the same place the same time year round. Yeah. This is true. This is like the billionaire circuit.

John:

You're familiar with this? Like, the Of course. They they they they actually, like, pay people to move the yachts for them, and then they just fly in their yachts there. And so there there's a whole, like, okay. You go on the circuit.

John:

You go to all the different events and stuff. But that's why it's so important to throw some wildcards in there. Where's where's the, you know, the Met? Where's the LA Phil? Where's the opera?

John:

Where's the ballet? You know? You gotta throw in some old money events. This is a lot of new money stuff.

Jordi:

But those are you know, you just you just work them into the circuit. I

John:

suppose I

Jordi:

suppose. And, yeah. I mean, I I think I think Lucy's post was written in in a somewhat, negative way because she's a builder and she's an entrepreneur Sure. And she probably goes there and she's like, you guys have no purpose and like I'd rather be building my startup.

John:

Also great rage baiter. I mean great

Jordi:

rage baiter.

John:

Great rage bait.

Jordi:

Great rage. Very good.

John:

We love what you do.

Jordi:

And but but yeah if you want to be in that scene, it's great. Yeah. It's actually like I like this with the tech kind of conference circuit. Totally. To go to that, you know, you we went to I went to send Rose event.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

It was with a group of people that were at Heretic on. Yep. Right. I could have gone to the Main Street conference. Yep.

Jordi:

It seemed like most of the same people. So I like it. I like you know, it's better to to see the same people and reinvest in those relationships and maybe mix in some

John:

new ones. Zone. You go to Sun Valley. You go to UPFRONT. All the same things.

John:

So let's move on to our first quote tweet. Antonio Garcia Martinez says, some aspire to wealth as the ticket to this world. Some aspire to wealth to never have their fates decided by people from this world ever again. Interesting.

Jordi:

Bold. Bold. And big. Yeah. And real.

John:

Yeah. I get that. Yeah. There's this there's this sense that, like, the people who maybe spend all their time at Art Basel and f 1 and Paris Fashion Week, like, they might not have enough skin in the game. They might not be in the arena the arena enough to make good decisions about your life.

John:

So you have to build wealth so that you can avoid them choosing how you live your life with their products or their government decisions. Interesting.

Jordi:

You can have a 1,000 Bitcoin and go to Peru and get 1 shotted by the the demon.

John:

Don't do that. Okay. Do not do that. Our third quote tweet, Zarathustra says, a surprisingly a surprising lesson of the last decade was how little fuck you money seems to exist. It was it was breathtaking to watch billionaires, especially in Silicon Valley, genuflect in slavish subservience to the woke crusaders and enthusiastically provide vigor vigorous fellatio for a decade.

Jordi:

Things you never would think you'd say on the air.

John:

Vigorous fellatio. Here we go. Another banger. These are all bangers. A 1,000 likes, 1,000 likes, another 1,000 likes.

John:

Everyone's just seen this chain.

Jordi:

Lucy is the backbone of the poster economy.

John:

Really? Really? She started a whole conversation here. So, yeah, interesting that that there's all these rich people, and a lot of them didn't say anything even though they might have been, you know, a little bit bothered. They weren't in the second category that our Antonio's identifying.

John:

They were in the first category. They wanted to just enjoy the world. They made their money, and they were just gonna go, off to Art Basel and f one, and and enjoy the fruits of their labors, but not really think too deeply about the shape of the world and and and the constructs. And so, you know, that seems shocking to Zarathustra, but then we have a 4th quote tweet from none other than Marc Andreessen. He says, fuck you.

John:

Money is mainly a myth. First, if you're in business, you pick up more responsibilities along with more money. You're responsible for more people. Your actions have more consequences for others. 2nd, political power is much, much greater than financial power every day of the week.

John:

Very interesting. And you can see that, like, you know, Mark has obviously been been been going through a little bit of a political evolution, but the decision to actually come out and support Trump was a big one because it's not just, you know, the the what are they Andrew says 10,000 employees, a 100,000. It's bigger than DocuSign. Right? But, you know, it's a very large organization, and and he has, a lot of people that could look at that and say, you know, maybe I don't wanna work here anymore, and he still needs to hire the best people across the board.

John:

And then, and then also all of the portfolio companies and everyone that works for the portfolio companies. Like, this has been a big thing with Peter. It's like, you know, for a lot of time a a lot of times, it'd be like some random company would raise money. It would be like Peter Thiel's founders fund invested or Peter Thiel Venture Capital Fund invested. And so all of a sudden, your SEO as a new startup is just immediately, like, hello.

John:

I'm associated with this person who is, like, overtly political. And so that has consequences. That has weight. But we have to end with a 5th quote tweet from Sagar and Jetty who says

Jordi:

An absolute dog.

John:

And he's posting he's he's chiming in and said, I've been saying this for a long time. He posts a screenshot of one of his older tweets. Says, the inverse the inverse f you money scale. The higher you climb on the billionaire ladder, the more institutional entanglements you have. People can be worth 1,000,000,000, but muzzled because they run money or sit on boards, have to worry about shareholders, etcetera.

John:

It's really true. There aren't that many people with no bosses.

Jordi:

This is why Founders Fund doesn't take board seats. Yeah. Generally doesn't.

John:

Yeah. But, yeah, everyone everyone has institutional entanglements even at the time.

Jordi:

Everybody's got a boss.

John:

Exactly. Because everyone wants to keep playing the game. No one no one there's no number. No one has a number. No one's like, oh, yeah.

John:

Once I get to this number, I will just retire and not care about anything. And that's why there's no fuck you money because the number is not the goal. The goal is the game. You wanna keep playing the game. Keep growing it.

John:

And the growth is the number. The the me money is not happiness. It's the second derivative of money that is happiness.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

It's not the the absolute amount of money you have. It's the rate of acceleration. Yep. No one likes getting a 10% raise every year. People wanna see that they're making 10%, then 20%, then 30%, then 40% that they're scaling.

Jordi:

Accelerate.

John:

Accelerate. So that's our first thread on the show. Let us know what you think.

Jordi:

Let us know if it was too LinkedIn coded.

John:

Promoted post.

Jordi:

Promoted post, I I love the opportunity to jump in here, John. We have, from our friends at DuPont Registry, a 2015 Ferrari LaFerrari finish in Rosso Corsa showing just a 152 miles limited. Wow. Yeah. I don't know what the owner of this was doing.

John:

I'm doing the fly.

Jordi:

It certainly wasn't certainly weren't driving it. Limited to just 499 examples produced worldwide. This extremely rare low mile car has never been publicly offered for sale, making it an extraordinary opportunity for collectors and enthusiasts alike. Currently undergoing class, she's in certification this vehicle's authenticity and originality will be further solidified. So Ferrari has a, their class, program that, basically, you know, does a deep analysis on the car.

Jordi:

You have to send it to Ferrari. Yeah. They'll do a deep analysis on the car, figure out, you know, they're doing things like making sure the motor has all the original parts and, you know, making sure the paint hasn't been changed and all these different things. And it's just a certification that, typically will increase the value of the vehicle unless they you know, they're not gonna give a certification to something that's been, you know, mod, you know, heavily modified or whatever. And so anyways, fantastic example.

Jordi:

And if you buy this, if you're in our audience and you buy this, drive the hell out of it. I'd like to see you put 10,000 miles a year on it you know really get your get your money's worth

John:

from this car is where

Jordi:

and then you can park it in a museum someday you know

John:

it's fantastic

Jordi:

do the gumball

John:

to gumball Yeah. Take it across country.

Jordi:

I really think I really think a lot of Ferraris are, like, one of the best hard assets that you can buy right now because it's For sure. It is that in the Daytona SP 3 are just so clearly that they're gonna be the iconic cars of this, you know, era. Yeah. And, I can't wait to own one myself.

John:

Holy Trinity car. Right? I believe. P 1 LaFerrari. 918.

Jordi:

Yep. Fantastic. Beautiful.

John:

Not making any more of them.

Jordi:

Certainly are are not.

John:

Let's finish with SmokeAway. It says, o one is year old tech. Let that sink in. Interesting take. I mean, the foundation model, yeah, it's still running GPT 4, but obviously, there's a lot of, there's a lot of training to have that happens on top and a lot of UI stuff.

John:

I don't fully buy that, but, it's interesting. What's interesting is that, like, he's posting this in, in response to the announce of, like, o one pro and, like, the new models that can reason and whatnot. But we remember how crazy it was when those were, like, leaked and announced. It was originally, it had some crazy code name that the information leaked, and everyone was like, oh, this is gonna be insane.

Jordi:

Like, this is AGI.

John:

Because it it was basically like self play training. So they so they would do, kind of like what they did with, AlphaGo, and and and train the model. They, like, have it have it debate itself, have it reason with itself, test itself. And that's kind of what's happening when you interact with these reasoning models now where they think for a long time is because they're they're prompting multiple, multiple times. So I don't know exactly how much I buy it, but it is interesting that, like, yes, we're not at GPT 5.

John:

No one scaled up the cluster yet. What happens when we get to an order of magnitude bigger?

Jordi:

So why hasn't anybody built software now that allows you to get to make models go PVP? Like, I want to put Claude and open AI models in a in a in a ring and just make them fight to the death. Right. Over and over and over. Like, I feel like you could it's one thing to go put them up against some of these Yeah.

Jordi:

You know, just, like, general testing mechanisms, but I want I care about PVP. Right? I want, like

John:

kind of MOU and some of the testing grounds, like, some of the evals are essentially that.

Jordi:

I know, but they're going against the evals. They're going against the eval. I want them to go head to head. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

I want them to, like, like, only one of you can leave the room after this. Yeah. You have to commit to Puku if you Yeah. If you,

John:

But, yeah, I mean, it's interesting how little has leaked about the next training run. Like, we don't even know at this point, like, how this how the build out is. Because I think we're in, like, the custom data center era where, like, it has to be bespoke. It has to be 100 of thousands of GPUs. There's been some news from XAI about their, you know, building powered.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. They're building the biggest data center for this, and they're gonna do the largest training run, but that's still in the works. And we don't really have, like, a concrete timeline of, like, okay. When is a GPT 5 level model dropping that's truly an order of magnitude more energy went into it?

John:

Because everyone's saying, you know, scaling is everything. Scale, scale, scale, scale is all you need. Energy is a constraint. Yeah. And so we could be in for something really, really crazy, but no one knows if the IQ jump is gonna be 50 points or 5 points.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Like, everyone knows it's gonna be better, and everyone knows scale is important, really. Yeah. But no one can I haven't seen any really strong predictions for what an order of magnitude of energy gets you in terms of IQ right now? Like, it's a lot of speculation. So we'll be covering it here, folks,

Jordi:

on

John:

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