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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, 06/25/2025. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology.
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 1:The capital of capital. Let's run you through the headlines right now. Wall Street is panicking over the prospect of a socialist mayor in New York City. The Jane
Speaker 2:Street Panicans.
Speaker 1:Jan Jane Street's boss says he was duped into funding AK forty sevens for a coup.
Speaker 2:Happens to the best of us.
Speaker 1:Shell is in early talks, not late talks, early talks. Not advanced. Advanced talks. To acquire rival British Petroleum BP. NVIDIA has ruffled tech giants with a move into cloud computing That's DGX Lepton that we've talked about a few times.
Speaker 1:Bumble is cutting 30% of its staff, and its stock is up Stock is up. Percent. As the online as online dating hits an inflection point, I'm sure there's some AI story there. There's a whole bunch of other interesting trends that we'll dig into. China is tracking down its rare earth experts and taking away their passports.
Speaker 2:Doesn't sound
Speaker 1:And we wanna discuss the future of venture capital marketing. But if you're
Speaker 2:The most important question of them all.
Speaker 1:Yes. Is. It is. But quickly, let me tell you about Ramp. Ramp.com.
Speaker 1:Time is money. Say both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have some delicious drinks in front of us today. This is day two of asking.
Speaker 2:They're not on camera.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're not on camera.
Speaker 2:Pick them all up.
Speaker 1:So day two of
Speaker 2:asking for
Speaker 1:the Williamson to come on the show. Day two, we got five five Yoramates from Mataina. That's Andrew Huberman's project. And one new
Speaker 2:time I just shotgunned one of these.
Speaker 1:You did?
Speaker 2:Right before the show. Yes. Hadn't done that in in a few years, maybe a decade. Yeah. But it's good to be back.
Speaker 1:I mean, mentioned yesterday on the show that you you did a a dry fast and it was pretty pretty it was subtext. Reading between the lines. It's pretty clear that you've been hitting one too many cheeky pints.
Speaker 2:Cheeky pints?
Speaker 3:To dry out. Dry out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just eat regularly just no pints.
Speaker 1:No. Exactly.
Speaker 4:It's a
Speaker 2:dry fast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, let's go through the news. Mamdani, the entire world is melting down particularly on tech Twitter. Everyone is is very nervous about what Mamdani means for the future of New York City because San Francisco kinda got a dry run of this and it didn't go so well. And now we're gonna see what happens in New York City.
Speaker 1:So Dave Friedberg
Speaker 2:Voice of Reason.
Speaker 1:Of Reason. He says, it is vitally important for America that Mamdani get elected mayor of New York City. He can help maximally and swiftly tax the rich, stand up government run grocery stores, eliminate the police force, freeze rents, and make public transportation free. It is unlikely that taxing the rich will cause them to move to other cities collapsing NYC tax revenue, or that city run grocery stores will fail to increase fresh vegetable consumption in the inner city, or that the elimination of the NYPD, will cause a rising crime and a decline in quality of life, or that freezing rents will drive landlords to dump properties, collapsing prices and property tax revenue, or that free public transportation will result in union led kleptocracy. No way.
Speaker 1:I'm sure this time socialism will be different. If Americans don't want to learn the lessons of the lessons of socialism's failure elsewhere, we should aim to learn them here as quickly as possible. Let's make sure one or two cities and states fall apart fast, so the rest don't have to elect Mamdani. After accruing $2,000,000,000,000 in student loan debt that they will never be able to read that they will never be able to pay down. It is no surprise that the college educated in New York City are supporting Mamdani 61 to '39.
Speaker 1:The current system has failed them. But the truth is more government may not be the answer when too much government, indiscriminate few federal student loans, regardless of cost or quality of degree or institution, may have gotten them into this moment. A gentle reminder though, that an articulate ignoramus isn't more correct than his less charismatic authentic political rival. Facts, data, truth still stand above theory, innuendo, and BS. Socialism won't work.
Speaker 1:If we have to relearn that lesson the hard way, let's do it fast and elect Mamdani. Very interesting interesting analysis. Now Sacrificing the capital of capital. Sacrificing
Speaker 2:New Yeah. Couldn't I don't think Ken Griffin was hitting the timeline but he certainly was looking smart.
Speaker 1:Yes. So, I mean, a few things in here. He is interested in taxing the rich. He did I was listening to Mamdani's interview on the Breakfast Club, and he was talking about taxing adding a tax to anyone that makes over a million dollars in the city. A 2% tax, they would pay 20 k, but obviously that scales up to someone who's making a 100,000,000 would be paying much more.
Speaker 1:And he and he thinks that that's like a very doable tax. He he has talked about government run grocery stores, which I think sound like a disaster potentially. I was joking with you about
Speaker 2:If he had, you know, decade plus of experience, you know, running something like Costco
Speaker 1:Yes. You know, might be Could be possible.
Speaker 2:Might be bullish.
Speaker 1:Yeah. My I don't
Speaker 2:think that he's had a job.
Speaker 1:Yeah. My riff on it was, like, imagine if the grocery store was as was as seamless as the DMV. Or imagine if taking the free bus was as was as smooth as getting through TSA. Or imagine if looking for a house was as simple as filing your taxes. Like, that's what the government could bring to these institutions.
Speaker 1:And that's always the risk of these things. Now, on the issue of of eliminating the NYPD, Mamdani has changed his tune on that. He was saying defund the police five years ago. He has since changed his strategy and his messaging dramatically and is no longer anti defunding the police and has said directly, like, I do not want to defund the NYPD. But the but the reaction continues.
Speaker 1:Cold Healing says, it is still not a guarantee, but Zoran winning feels like the first time that I can see a populist Internet left taking the corpse of the collapsing Democrat machine the way MAGA took the corpse of the right in 2016. Don't think they've had any victory this significant. And I agree. I mean, AOC was the first kind of example of that, but it is interesting that this is very much the Bernie bro left is now actually winning elections. And it does speak to, you know, the the Democrat machine just just failing basically.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is that one of the takeaways from the twenty the twenty twenty four election was like the podcast election. It's the podcast election. You gotta be doing all these podcasts. Mamdani didn't actually do that Yeah. It was more more driven by his TikTok.
Speaker 1:So I remember we we discussed it, and I was saying, like, the next thing after the podcast
Speaker 2:election he do something with Derek Thompson? Yes. He did Joe Weisenthal. Yeah. He did a few, but it feels like he really dominated in short form video.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Really sort of direct.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the viral clips.
Speaker 2:Good branding around his sad policy suggestions.
Speaker 1:And and the viral clips were not from his podcast appearances. So even though he went on The Breakfast Club and gave a big talk there, he did like a forty minute interview. He like, that was not what went viral. What went viral were his his scripted and well edited TikToks, basically. And his the the stats that he put up on TikTok were pretty staggering.
Speaker 1:I was pulling him up. He has almost a million followers and is just absolutely lapping everyone else he was going up against. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And Cuomo was engaging in a little bit of hubris. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Leveraging his his network and his Yes. You know, sort of various allies to put together this coalition Yes. And kind of wanted to ignore the new way in which candidates actually need to run campaigns if they're competitive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was an it was an odd choice because he was he had to step down. Right? And he was like he was pretty like racked with controversy. And it just feels like that's an odd pick for the Democratic Party to actually go back and like double down on.
Speaker 2:Should we play one of mom mom Donnie's rap songs? You know, he was a rap musician historically.
Speaker 1:He's he's moved on from that. But if there is a good one, I I I think playing the clip from his interview that we have I believe pulled up would
Speaker 2:be Okay. Tyler, I just sent you you remember Vivo Yeah. On YouTube? Yeah. He's got one of his songs.
Speaker 2:He went under the moniker Young Cardamom.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And from eight years ago, there's one on. So Tyler, why don't you listen to this and let us know if it's worth, you know, throwing up.
Speaker 1:Okay. I mean, with with regard to Cuomo, I think the problem is his car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do
Speaker 1:you know what he drives?
Speaker 2:Is it was it was it the Scat Pack?
Speaker 1:He drives a Dodge Charger. Wide body. It's a high performance vehicle.
Speaker 2:It is. But It's very American.
Speaker 1:It's not quite there. I think he would have won if he'd gone with the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon one seventy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the Scat Pack wide body, it's up in the 500 horsepower range. It's got a v eight. It's not supercharged.
Speaker 2:And he was getting a little flack for kind of parking wherever he felt
Speaker 1:like Apparently. During the campaign. Apparently, got like seven speeding tickets or something like that.
Speaker 2:During the campaign?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like in the last year or something. He's gotten just like a ton a ton of
Speaker 2:Happens to TBPN interns. He does. Anyways, I think we got a video ready. It is not the rap song. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It is an interview. Let's play it.
Speaker 5:Dollars a year. State budget, about $252,000,000,000 a year. There is money. The question is what we spend it on, and what I've proposed is that we raise $10,000,000,000 to pay for our entire economic agenda and start to Trump proof our city, because we know he'll use federal funding as leverage over this city, and we will do so in two key ways. The first is to match the state's top corporate tax rate to that of New Jersey.
Speaker 5:We are at 7.25%. They're at 11.5%. Corporations can pay it over there, they can pay it over here. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't just apply to corporations headquartered in New York City, because when you say this, people will say, well, they're going to go to Florida. Wherever you are headquartered, as long as you do business in the state of New York, taxable for that corporate tax.
Speaker 5:We're talking about corporations that are making millions of dollars, not in revenue, but in profit. And the second is taxing the top 1% of New Yorkers. We're talking about people who make $1,000,000 a year or more, taxing them just by a flat 2% tax increase. And I know if fifty Cent is listening, he's not gonna be happy about this. He tends to not like this tax policy, but I wanna be very clear.
Speaker 5:This is about $20,000 a year. It's a rounding error. And all of these things together, they make every New Yorker's life better, including those who are actually getting taxed.
Speaker 6:Now you also wanna cut
Speaker 1:I think least Yeah. Yeah. We we can cut it there. It it is it is it is funny because during this interview, Charlemagne keeps coming at him for the rap thing and basically being like like your rap was not good. And and so mom Donnie
Speaker 2:How someone does one thing is how they do everything.
Speaker 1:Right? But mom Donnie keeps it keeps having to be like, know you're not a fan of the rap stuff but like let me let me go back to the issues.
Speaker 2:The thing that the thing I gotta give him credit for is Zoron. Zoron? It's a cool name.
Speaker 1:It is a cool name.
Speaker 2:That's that is what I will give him
Speaker 1:credit So Polymarket nailed it. As usual, the news breaks on Polymarket beforehand. Signal breaks it down. He says, what's tragic isn't only that Mamdani won, it's that this was the best alternative to the system produced. You don't beat populism with legacy, you beat it with real competence and vision.
Speaker 1:But instead, was Cuomo. Cuomo, that's malpractice. Democrats learn nothing from Kamala. And yet Cuomo doesn't seem to have be he didn't seem to break through in any meaningful way. Sophie says hold up.
Speaker 1:Let him cook to Bill Ackman who says I have a great idea on NYC. I will share it as soon as I can. I was a bit depressed when I woke up this morning, but now I am optimistic. And so you know, a banger is coming, long post is coming from from Ackman.
Speaker 2:Apple needs to make a a signature iPhone
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For Ackman Yeah. That can that allows him to see the entire body of text, you know, while typing on the phone. You know? Something like a five foot long iPhone, I think, would be the right range.
Speaker 1:Be fantastic. Zoran Mamdani, the young Democratic socialist state assemblyman who has waged a surprisingly strong campaign for mayor of New York City, hasn't just frustrated his opponents. He's made them jealous, says Eric Latch at The New Yorker in a very interesting profile that I read last night. I regret not running for mayor in 2021, state senator Jessica Ramos said this month during a televised Democratic primary debate when asked if she had any regrets in her political career. I thought I needed more experience, she explained.
Speaker 1:They're talking trash. But turns out, you just need to make good videos. So he was polling at 1% and then started going on this generational TikTok run and just compounding and compounding and compounding and just got escape velocity. If you watch those videos, very well edited, very well, very well executed. Jasmine's son had a breakdown in her, substack, which I've been really been enjoying.
Speaker 1:She says, I'm excited for Zoran even if I don't buy every policy. We need to elect leaders, especially young people who are affirmatively excited about versus establishment heirs who hold their nose who people hold their nose and vote for without that energy. Democracy is dead. And there were a couple of other people that chimed in on this showing that yeah. Lulu was talking about this.
Speaker 1:It sounds so basic, but he's he's too likable to lose. Friendly demeanor, smiles with his eyes, seems earnest. Being liked outweighs policies, experience, nonsensical plans. I just have a good feeling about that person. Can override almost anything.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, mean, it's like, he's clearly not an expert in the stuff he talks about, but he's able to play the same notes. And Solana had a good take on this idea that like Cuomo was making very abstract arguments about like Trump, and Mamdani was like rent, buses, like things that people care about for the idea of a mayor. Like, what is a mayor even supposed to do about Trump? Like, it it's it's so unclear like how that would even track as opposed to like the
Speaker 2:Well, I think I think if you saw what happened in LA Yeah. And you're more of a and if you're in the Karen Bass army, you might think that the mayor does have a responsibility in
Speaker 1:law. But even then, like, I I I think most people in LA would say, the mayor would be more responsible for dealing with like fires, than dealing with whatever happened with Trump. Like like I don't know. I I think immigration has become a
Speaker 2:local issue.
Speaker 1:Even in New York, they don't have a border with anyone. Like, it's got such an odd thing to I mean, I get that it it animates people certainly. Like, people people pay attention to it. And so it definitely grabs, like, the attention of of folks. Anyway It was interesting to see the breakdown Yeah.
Speaker 2:This was fascinating. By income.
Speaker 1:From the New York Times.
Speaker 2:Under $50,000 annually, Cuomo was dominating. Dominating Yeah. 50,000 to a 100,000. Mamdani had six points and then over a 100,000 Mamdani had over 13
Speaker 1:points. The luxury beliefs. Beliefs.
Speaker 2:Beliefs. Narrative violation a little bit. Yeah. But not really if you're paying attention.
Speaker 1:No. No. I mean, this is the this is the Peter Thiel thesis. This is the the thesis of like, who has been failed? It's the people who went to college and are saddled with that.
Speaker 1:Not necessarily the folks who are working class and like grinding their way up. They're actually
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You see this in Miami with like the the Cubans that come over and are anti communist. Yeah. Because they're like, this is like, yes, I'm making under 50 k, but I'm making more than I did last year and I'm actually upwardly mobile
Speaker 2:I understand that.
Speaker 1:The downwardly mobile.
Speaker 2:Lamborghini Urus Performantes were never made in communist states. So if that is an, you know, sort of ideal that you would wanna aim for. I think, I mean, now is probably a good time to highlight this email from Peter Thiel to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Hendriecin and a handful of other Facebook board members in 2020. So Peter says, are many themes that could be developed more here. Let me make a few quick points for now.
Speaker 2:Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism but when 70% of millennials say they are pro socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them Mhmm. By saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why and from that perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me. Namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate.
Speaker 2:And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then they may well turn against it. And so, this sort of explains why there's a certain voting block that is just generally in favor of increasing taxes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they just gravitate towards that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the, you know, sort of
Speaker 1:feeling like that that directly benefit America project Yep. Get you on the capital ladder, accumulating assets and investments early in your life, literally when you're born.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And then deregulation of housing to build more, build higher, build bigger. And so that as supply increases, price goes down, not price controls that never works. Instead, you need to build a ton Right? And then and then, yeah, with the and then there's probably a solution to the to the college debt crisis in the form of underwriting those Yep. Underwriting those loans differently.
Speaker 1:So Yep. If you're going to try and major in something that's hard to get a job in, it's No. To pay for that. But if you wanna pay for it yourself, you can.
Speaker 2:He did highlight something in one of his videos that I thought was interesting. Apparently, the street food vendors oftentimes can't get a permit themselves
Speaker 1:This was for their cart. Is good.
Speaker 2:And so they rent a permit from someone else Yep. Who just happen to have one. Yep. And the permits rent for $8.17, think, to $22,000 a year is kind of the market rate.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so there's just somebody who's just like rent seeking on a permit that they got a long time ago
Speaker 1:that they're of the the government is inefficient. And I I like that. Yeah. He called it he wants to set up a mom and pop czar. Basically, someone specifically to to go and basically doge all of the local regulation that requires from a single owner operator business in New York City that you wanna do something.
Speaker 1:You wanna open a store and it's gonna take you six months or a year just to get started. And then there's huge fees. And all of those just don't matter and and and are just I so so I actually love that. And I feel like maybe maybe he tries to do both. Maybe he opens the the government run grocery store.
Speaker 1:He learns his lesson. He learns it the hard way, and it fails. But then he has a bunch of If
Speaker 2:he actually does that, the the meme the the value of the memes that come out of it alone will be incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's like
Speaker 2:Potentially priceless.
Speaker 1:We kind of know the economic logic, like the the the physics of this system, the physics of the economy to the degree that, like, we know it's going to fail, but some lessons have to be learned the hard way. And so that that's kind of what Friedberg is getting at. And so, yeah, go and go and build one government run grocery store, see how that goes, and then and then go in Wow. I saved and sleep
Speaker 2:I saved one and a half percent Yeah. By, you know, historical Yeah. Grocery store margins are are very, very slim. So you could have a grocery store that's like Trader Joe's except, you know, the the the it's maybe more packed, less well run Yeah. Dirtier like most government, you know, sort of run things are.
Speaker 1:You're like And
Speaker 2:then you save one and a half percent which is pretty interesting. Yeah. Tacky.
Speaker 1:To pass that one and a half percent on to the customer, you have to run it as ruthlessly as the private equity guys that own grocery stores. Right? Pretty smart guys. And so so they're running their businesses extremely efficiently, and then they're keeping the one and a half percent. So you have to run it as efficiently, and then you can pass on the one and
Speaker 2:a
Speaker 1:half But that's the best scenario. Yep. No one's saying that there's 20% to go squeeze out of these things.
Speaker 2:Yep. Paki said, I will say this. If Zoran really can make the city more affordable by simply saying things should be more affordable, a lot of mayors are gonna have a lot of explaining to do. And maybe Zoran is taking a page out of Trump's book by just saying, hey, hey, guys in the oil markets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's not
Speaker 2:the I'm watching you. Yes. Yes. I'm watching you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also, I mean
Speaker 2:Disregards There's a little
Speaker 1:bit of like truth zone here because a lot of people are saying like, he will never make the rents go down. But then they're also saying like, everyone's gonna leave and rents are gonna collapse. And so, you know, maybe it's a head fake. Maybe he makes maybe he makes it so unattractive to live there that people leave. The rents actually do fall.
Speaker 2:Had a good bit you had a good bit earlier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You had
Speaker 2:a good bit earlier. Zoran is in favor of the congestion tax. Yes. You were saying, what if you implemented just a constant It was an hourly fee that you pay from being in the New York City
Speaker 1:City Tax. Yes.
Speaker 2:Exactly. On people.
Speaker 1:On on anyone. So if you go there for a day, you know, you're paying $30 an hour. If you're there for the whole year, that's like probably $203,100 k just
Speaker 2:to live But
Speaker 1:it's gonna it's gonna decrease demand for housing or even Totally. Even stopping by. It's gonna decrease tourism.
Speaker 2:If you just destroy demand, then Price price will go down. Price will go down.
Speaker 1:Price will go down. And if that's
Speaker 2:the goal maybe something there.
Speaker 1:Different ways. You can increase supply, or you can decrease demand. And and it does feel like he's at least at least we're seeing. I don't I I don't actually buy the idea that people are gonna be like, yeah, we're moving to Florida or whatever. I think the people that live there are are gonna a, he still hasn't won.
Speaker 1:Even if he wins, actually getting the stuff through See,
Speaker 2:the thing the thing is is
Speaker 1:Eric Yeah.
Speaker 2:Eric Adams is producing a really high volume of iconic moments that are doing well on social. Mhmm. Not really oriented around policy
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:As much as just sort of saying funny things. Yeah. But there it's resonating Yeah. In a way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it could be a much tighter race. Yeah. What is the like
Speaker 1:the whole freeze the reaction. People think people think he's like like, the immediate proposal will be like, all rent will be frozen forever. It's like, there are already rent controlled apartments in New York City. He's just proposing to be like more aggressive. So he's like, he's saying is like, I will be turning the volume knob to the left.
Speaker 1:And But the volume knob is not necessarily gonna go to zero. It's It's not necessarily gonna go to 11 with another with another mayor. And so I think a lot of this is is is rhetoric and when if he gets in office and tries to implement this, some of the stuff, it'll be blended in certain places over time. I I I would be surprised if there was, like, a mass exodus from New York City. But maybe it's maybe it's time to go along Miami.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Anyway, Liz Wolfe broke down who she saw canvassing for Zoran. She said she talked to a dozen or so canvassers, and they were all so sweet. Also, vast majority of them were white men in their thirties, literally all of them were childless. God bless them all, but there's a fair bit of peer pan syndrome I'm sensing.
Speaker 1:I don't know exactly what that means. It is so nice that they think they know how best to design and improve all of our lives, but my goodness, very few of them have big boy jobs or families or real standing in the community, you know, venmo ing a mutual aid fund every once in a while. Ain't it dog? Maybe I'm extrapolating too much, and maybe we'll all become close friends in the bread lines. But she, Liz writes for Reason Magazine.
Speaker 1:But Zoran's campaign is amateur hour on every level supported by many folks who don't really understand what their fellow New Yorkers want or need or how this works on a macro level. Interesting. Well, it doesn't matter because they came out and voted, and he won the primary. So, anyway, King Griffin Joe
Speaker 2:W. S. Says Oh, yeah. Who's voting for someone that promises city owned grocery stores?
Speaker 1:I don't I don't get that. What what is he saying? I mean, a lot of
Speaker 2:people are. But Yeah. No. No. He he he's just He doesn't he's just wondering.
Speaker 2:I don't think he has any. And and maybe if he looked in the last 20 people that he texted
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nobody nobody wanted to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sophie Dan Loeb
Speaker 2:says, it's officially hot commie summer.
Speaker 1:Yep. And And Sophie closes it out with Ken Griffin got Zoran elected to pump his Miami real estate bags. 200 IQ move, five d chess.
Speaker 2:You love it. Zach Weinberg says, true pro crime candidate and cash bail.
Speaker 1:Crazy that Zach Weinberg is quote tweeting libs of TikTok. That is what's crazy. These posts are five years old. He's completely changed this. He's he's changed his policies on all this.
Speaker 2:It is interesting, though, that this is like s this is like what SF was, like, basically run on. Yeah.
Speaker 1:During the 2020 to 2025. We yeah. We ran this experiment. You But
Speaker 2:maybe he learned from SF.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, does seem like he's pulling back on almost all of these, basically. At least in the in the current Eric.
Speaker 2:Net cap girl says Ken Griffin got so wrong, elected to pump his Miami real estate bags, 200 IQ move, five d chess. He is investing a billion dollars in a in a complex in Miami.
Speaker 1:But also he was never a New York guy, he was he was a Chicago guy.
Speaker 2:Yep. So Well, and him, he hit when he left Chicago that that has done material damage to Chicago's
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I figured they still had I I figured they still had, like, a pretty large operation there. They were more just, like, expanding and growing and, you know, re headquartering, but but like still a huge presence in in Chicago. But maybe they really relocated the whole firm. I mean, these it's it's hard to relocate a whole firm.
Speaker 1:You talk to many of VC firms that like tried to kind of relocate and if, you know, it's like, oh, yeah. We still have a ton of people up up there or whatever. Anyway, if you're designing your next move, get on figma.com. Big think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
Speaker 2:You can build a website as fast as you can design one. Oh. It is magic Anyway on Figma.
Speaker 1:In the high finance world, we have news from Jane Street. Gordon Gekko breaks it down, says all this Zoran news is distracting us from the fact
Speaker 2:that Jane Street Do you notice he says Zohan? Zohan. Yes. Zohan.
Speaker 1:He misses maybe miss misspells it. The fact that Jane Street tried to overthrow Sudan. So Jane Street boss says he was duped into funding AK's for coup. And another account says, Jane Street tried to overthrow the Sudanese government by supplying Harvard educated rebels with AK 40 sevens. And you think Mamdani is going to be able to raise taxes?
Speaker 1:LMAO, get real. It's a good point. I'm calling I'm calling for a complete stop on Jane Street until we find out more about what exactly OCaml is doing to the brain. I love that because it's their programming language. And Joe Eisenthal says, things you never want to say, hashtag Jane Street boss says he was duped into funding AK 40 sevens for coup.
Speaker 2:Quantium says, obviously, Harvard never had the juice, but what an embarrassing l for Jane Street that they couldn't even successfully orchestrate a coup in a mid sized African country with a deeply unstable government.
Speaker 1:It's wild. Well, the story is in Bloomberg and says, the indictment reads like a cinematic plot. A Harvard fellow and another activist allegedly wanted to buy AK 40 seven's Stinger missiles and grenades to topple South Sudan's government. What they lacked was enough cash. Now Jane Street cofounder Robert Gruneri concedes he put up the money, saying he was duped into funding the alleged coup plot.
Speaker 1:The role played by the wealthy recluse behind a Wall Street trading powerhouse emerges from The US per prosecution of Peter Ajak, the Harvard fellow who was accused last year of scheming to install himself atop the East African nation. What a what yeah. I mean, yeah. It does seem like something out of a out of a movie. Gruneria is a longtime supporter of human human human rights causes, his lawyer said in a statement.
Speaker 1:In this case, the person Rob thought was a human rights activist defrauded Rob and lied about his intentions. The case came to light in March of twenty twenty four when federal prosecutors in Arizona charged Ajak and Abraham Keach with conspiring to illegally export arms to their home country. Both have pleaded not guilty. While prosecutors haven't said where the defendants obtained several million dollars for an attempt to buy military grade weaponry, Ajax lawyers pointed to Granary in a recent filing saying the 53 year old financier was vital to the plan. Without the significant financing that mister Gruneri couldn't agree to provide, the alleged conspiracy would have been impossible.
Speaker 1:And somehow George Clooney's involved. We're gonna get to that in a second. They wrote the in the document late May.
Speaker 2:Did he provide the the lubricant, the tequila?
Speaker 1:I don't yeah. I don't know. Here he is Gotta
Speaker 2:be pretty
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We'll we'll get to it. I mean, this is a fascinating story. So the lawyers accused authorities of selectively per prosecuting two black men, even though support also came from Grunarian Gary Kasparov, the What?
Speaker 1:Chess champion and prominent Russian Russian dissident. The US hasn't accused either of them of wrongdoing. Well, yeah, mean, make makes sense because like, somebody comes to you and they ask you to raise, hey, I'm starting a company, wire them a million dollars to build that, and then they go off and do something completely different with the money. Like, you're definitely a victim in that scenario. But I guess the question is like, did they know more?
Speaker 1:And and that's what this article is digging into. But it feels a little I don't know. I'm not seeing a lot of evidence here. Let's let's continue to dig in. So Kasparov came to know Ajak when the chess master was the chair of the Human's Rights Foundation.
Speaker 1:He later connected Ajak with Grunari, according to people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified. My record and my values are clear, and they remain unchanged, Kasparov said in a statement sent by a spokesperson. I have spent much of my life standing up for civil rights and promoting democracy around the world. To industry outsiders, Jane Street is probably best known as the former employer of Sang Bankman Free. That's not how people know Jane Street.
Speaker 1:They know them as the maintainer of OCaml. Of course. The programming language.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:And and also a high frequency trading firm. Should know about Jane Street. But yes, SBF Also sponsor of Dworkash. Pattel's podcast. That's right.
Speaker 1:There's so many different reasons to know Jane Street besides SBF. That's ridiculous. This is a but I guess SBF is the most like headline grabbing. So Bloomberg needs to write it that way. But across Wall Street, the marketing the market making firm is a source of fascination known for turning mathematicians into traders who mint profits.
Speaker 1:Generated it generated $20,000,000,000 in net trading revenue last year, helping it leap past the likes of Bank of America and Citigroup. Wow. They're making more money than BofA. That is crazy.
Speaker 2:Mogged.
Speaker 1:Despite James Street's ascent in the industry, Gruneri has kept a low profile. He's gotta go on the door cash podcast. You know they're connected. I mean, yeah.
Speaker 2:New
Speaker 1:show. Yeah. The new show would be great for that. I mean, there's a bunch of shows that invest like the best. He'd be great on.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, he can come out and tell the full story.
Speaker 2:He might have to do a press tour.
Speaker 1:He should. He should. I mean, I He should just to talk about OCaml and
Speaker 2:He's like the trader. Who was a small bet in a large portfolio and I was misled.
Speaker 1:I I don't think there's any evidence of that. It's alleged alleged alleged.
Speaker 2:Alleged, of course. Anyway No. I think it's totally believable that he would meet some charismatic young people that that have a record of caring about human rights abuse. And make some type of donation to them for their cause. And then they could turn around and use those funds for something that he had no awareness of.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean it's frustrating.
Speaker 2:It makes sense that people that would try to throw overthrow a government would wanna drag down anybody that they could and just try to drag them into the mud and start wrestling. Wrestling.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, this happens literally all the time. Because once the money's wired into a nonprofit, it's very hard to track like, okay, did you hand out the mosquito nets? Or did you buy a yacht?
Speaker 2:Like Yep.
Speaker 1:Okay. Now I need a now I I I you know, you you wire part of what makes Silicon Valley so great is like, you have a handshake deal, you sign a safe, and there's kind of an expectation that I don't need to check up and make sure that you're not defrauding me. It's pretty rare that that that true fraud happens
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because Silicon Valley is built on trust. But when you're gallivanting around the world, even if you are trying to invest in humanitarian efforts all over the place, much harder to keep track to keep tabs on every single deal you've done or every single donation you've made. It's very hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and if it was effectively a donation, I don't, you know, I don't know the exact mechanic, then he's way less likely to pay attention to it Totally. Because he's he's donating to a good cause.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:And he's not trying to generate a return. Yeah. He would he might ask be more inclined to be like, hey. Investor update.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Know, what's going on? Yeah. If you're a seed investor in FTX and the company grows and grows and grows, and then you're starting to see that, wait, how is Alamedia linked to get exactly? Like, this is material.
Speaker 1:This is, you know, this is $500,000,000 to me now. It's not just flyer anymore.
Speaker 2:You wake I
Speaker 1:need to dig in.
Speaker 2:Four years later.
Speaker 1:You're surrounded by journalists. Well, Gruneria is certainly worried about being surrounded by journalists. He's kept a low profile. He's one of the firm's four founders. I didn't know this.
Speaker 1:He's the only one still there. He's not featured on the company's website and public photos
Speaker 2:of him. We gotta figure out what the other three founders are doing because if if they're, you know Imagine they
Speaker 1:just made no money and they're just like PMs at Big Tech or something. Just like Yeah. Just making like a million of money. They just didn't vest out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They just like, yeah. We had a cliff, and I didn't hit it. They bailed. Somehow I don't think that's what's going on. The firm's success has allowed Grunerri to pour money into other ventures and causes.
Speaker 1:He helped build the the Scarlet Pearl, a casino resort on the Gulf Of on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi. What a funny place to
Speaker 2:Park
Speaker 1:put money. I mean, it's probably a good business.
Speaker 2:It's voted best casino resort.
Speaker 1:We gotta go to the Jane Street Casino. Get in there. Do some high frequency slots. Let's do it. He was a major financial backer for Republican presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, and has donated to the Equal Justice Initiative and the Institute for Justice.
Speaker 1:He also channeled money into causes Kasparov backed around the globe. So he's buddies with Gary Kasparov. South Sudan is is slightly larger than France, became the world's youngest country after seceding from Sudan in 2011 following more than twenty years of civil war. And there's a photo of George Clooney here. The bloody regional conflict
Speaker 2:George is like, how did
Speaker 1:how did We're getting to George Clooney. We're gonna explain how George Clooney is related. So the bloody regional conflict displaced millions of people, drew attention from human rights activists, and gained gained mainstream awareness after actor George Clooney championed intervention in the early two thousands. Despite emerging as an independent nation, stability still eludes its people. Big lesson in there for regime change.
Speaker 1:Like, it it this stuff is hard. Like, clearly, in this scenario, like, there there was enough there was enough momentum to create an entirely new country, and they were still actually setting up a robust democracy. It was difficult, and they didn't get there. So Ajak aimed to change that escaping life as a child soldier in Sudan in the nineteen nineties, he resettled in The U United States as one of the lost boys. He went to study at Harvard at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government before returning to Sudan as a World Bank economist.
Speaker 1:Pretty sick. After South Sudan's independence, Ajak became a prominent opposition activist and political prisoner there, later seeking asylum in The United States. One sticking point in the court case is how much, if anything, The US authorities knew about Ajak and Keetch's alleged plan to topple South Sudan's government. Attorneys for both men have signaled in court that they plan to pursue a public authority defense, essentially claiming that US officials had supported their plan. Prosecutors said Ajak was told by the state Department in October of twenty twenty three that it wouldn't fund plans for nondemocratic regime change.
Speaker 1:Ajak and Keetch are accused of forging ahead regardless. For that, they needed financial backing. The financing took shape early last year amid a flurry of meetings. Some were at the law firm of Paul Hastings, where HX former pro bono attorney Renata Paras worked according to a May filing. Another attendee was public relations specialist, Michael Holtzman, who previously advised the State Department.
Speaker 2:Is Michael the is he like the lulu of Overturing government?
Speaker 1:Of the deep state. Of the State Department. Something like that.
Speaker 2:Maybe.
Speaker 1:Based on the government's indictment of Peter, it would seem he lied to me and others about his intentions from the outset, Holtzman said in a statement. Paras didn't request didn't respond to request for comment. The search for cash culminated in a Midtown Manhattan condominium building that February according to prosecutors. That's where Gruneri first met Ajak. The next day, charging charging documents alleged, Ajak sent an encrypted message to an undercover agent writing, we are getting the funding.
Speaker 1:The financier later transferred $77,000,000 in two stages according to people with knowledge of the payments. Within a few weeks of the condo meeting, prosecutors say Ajak and Keetch inspected a cache of weaponry inside a Phoenix warehouse. They were soon arrested.
Speaker 2:That is so gnarly, and I'm disappointed that the story is ending here.
Speaker 1:I know. I know. I was like, but certainly there's certainly there's six more pages of this story.
Speaker 2:Is fascinating. Cliffhanger.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's take a break to tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, there is an m and a bombshell hitting the timeline that, no pun intended, Shell is inter in early talks to acquire rival British Petroleum, BP, but Shell denies the Wall Street Journal's report that it's in talks to acquire BP. So we have a little bit of an update to the story.
Speaker 1:And M and A, just in the last twenty months, Morning Brew is breaking it down here. Shell BP is clocked at maybe 80,000,000,000, but the deal's pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a $60,000,000,000 m and a deal. Chevron and Hess, deal still pending, but it's at 53,000,000,000. D Back and Endeavor, don't even know those companies, but $26,000,000,000 deal there.
Speaker 1:ConocoPhill and Marathon at 17,000,000,000, and Occidental and Crown Rock at 12,000,000,000. So if you think the AI m and a deals are hot, you gotta go over to big oil.
Speaker 2:Big oil. Oil and gas.
Speaker 1:Big tech, big oil, big pharma. These are these are the industries where the where the big dollars get thrown around. They don't they don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the in the Decacorn exchanging business. True. Pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:So the immediate market reaction to Shell's potential deal for BP. BP jumped 7%, and Shell dropped 2.6%. I wanna know what they're doing more recently. It looks like BP is up now 1.5% on the day. How is Shell how is BP doing over the week or the month?
Speaker 1:This is the week?
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. They've they've both kind of retraced since Shell said, nah. Yeah. We're not talking at all.
Speaker 1:So by market cap, Shell's around 207,000,000,000, BP's around 87,000,000,000. Those are big companies. Big big companies. Anyway, we can run through the Wall Street Journal's report here. But first, if you're planning a complex post merger integration, you gotta get on linear.
Speaker 1:John, your
Speaker 2:commitment your commitment to just using linear everything
Speaker 1:is No. But of course, if you're if you're building if you're building modern software, if you need to streamline issues, projects, and product road maps, you gotta get linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products and plus they got linear for agents. But, you know, oil and gas companies do need to
Speaker 2:build software. Worried about getting
Speaker 1:paper clipped. They should be on linear.
Speaker 2:If you're worried about getting paper clipped, get your agents on linear. Yep. They will thank you for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So a deal for BP, which has a market value of roughly 80,000,000,000, would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies. Super major is a better term than Mag seven in my opinion. We need that for the tech companies, the super majors. Super majors.
Speaker 2:Are you in the major leagues? I'm in the super majors.
Speaker 1:Good. So talks between company representatives are active, according to people who are familiar with the matter, leak into the Wall Street Journal. And BP is considering the approach carefully. Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron. It would be a landmark combination of two so called super major oil companies, a group of multinational behemoths that dominate the production of the world's most important energy sources.
Speaker 1:Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned, and a tie up is far from certain, but the discussions are moving slowly. BP is currently valued around 80,000,000,000, taking into account a premium. A deal could end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the $83,000,000,000 mega merger that created ExxonMobil at the turn of the century. It would also be easily the biggest m and a deal of the year so far in a market that has been rattled by president Trump's antitrust policy. And so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in
Speaker 2:the Do you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon still?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember tracking it very closely in the Thunder Horse tracks.
Speaker 2:Were you monitoring the situation?
Speaker 1:Monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading equity research reports about BP from the from the sell side banks, and I and I understood it to the level of knowing that the that the tract that they were that they were drilling into was called the Thunder Horse Tract, which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into.
Speaker 2:So crazy. So BP's total costs associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup fines and settlements, reached approximately 65,000,000,000. So nearing their total enterprise value Massive. Moment.
Speaker 1:Also, great movie. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie, Deepwater Horizon.
Speaker 2:Is it a documentary?
Speaker 1:No. It is a it is a it is a, you know, nonfiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the on the oil rig. And I believe
Speaker 2:Mark Walberg's movies like that.
Speaker 1:It's awesome. It's it's a really, really great movie. Highly recommend it. A Shell spokesperson said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value the capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification.
Speaker 2:Wow. Nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantastic. Basically saying like, hey, no comment, but, you know, also, like, we're we're shilling for shell over here. We're shilling for shell.
Speaker 2:A TBPN spokesman said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused capturing the value in TBPN through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification, John.
Speaker 1:We should never you should never decline to comment. You should always just do an average comment like that. Just do an average. Bacon in the LLM. This is Switch
Speaker 2:your business to ramp.com. Do you have any comments on on your your intern allegedly, you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business, Ramp.
Speaker 1:As we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Shell comes into the talks from an operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years. Shell, which like BP is based in The United Kingdom, but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than $200,000,000,000. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy. It's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters.
Speaker 1:And so it seems like, actually, their their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because, like, the the those M and A sell side research reports that I was reading during the Deepwater Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact, the long term impact of that crisis on the stock immediately. Yeah. So it was priced into the stock very quickly, and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off. But then they were kinda set up to kind of rebuild, and there weren't many surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years. And so more recently, Elliott Management, which owns more than 5% of BP shares, has pushed for changes with the energy companies.
Speaker 1:It's interesting
Speaker 2:that BP had been performing not you know, had had basically been down only For two since the financial crisis, and then Deepwater Horizon hit. Yep. And it was just down even.
Speaker 1:When asked publicly, Shell's chief executive officer said that recently, the company's bar for big deal making would be high. Shell, in May, announced a multibillion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series of big share repurchases. Shell has been working with bankers on a potential sale of its chemical assets in Europe and The US, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. For Shell, acquiring BP would take years of integration complicated by culture clashes and possibly the sale of overlapping assets, but a deal could give Shell's global trading business greater reach and bolster its dominance in areas like liquefied natural gas. Analysts and investors also see a good matchup in the company's Gulf Of Mexico operations, which The US now calls the Gulf Of America.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. All of the oil companies had to had to change their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg News
Speaker 2:reports earlier.
Speaker 1:Right? I think it's sticking. Yeah. Until the next election and there'll be a new EO and it'll go back to something else.
Speaker 2:Well, would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it Yeah. Something other than the Gulf Of America.
Speaker 1:Well, we there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing. I was on a call recently with a GP at a very big fund, and they were asking me about strategy and where the future is going. And media is obviously evolving very quickly. And I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different things. But what I came to was maybe this idea that that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that like you it is not available to everyone.
Speaker 1:They are in the business of selling money, but not everyone can buy it. And so that kind of puts it in the same league as, you know, ultra high net worth wealth management products or even Rolexes. High horology Rolexes that are in demand. People, they still advertise Rolexes. They advertise them at at at LAX.
Speaker 1:The clocks are Rolexes. Or if you go to an f one match, you'll see a lot of, you know, advertisements.
Speaker 2:Tech will put an ad for the Cubitus in an airport.
Speaker 1:Every every issue of the of The Economist comes with an ad for basically a holy trinity watch on the back, whether it's Vacheron or AP or Patek. But you can't just go and buy those. And so it's very odd that they're doing this, like, luxury brand building without a product that you can just immediately go buy. And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing. And so my my thought was that maybe maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. Let's talk about the current strategy. Right? Yes. Current strategy is post on X.
Speaker 2:Yes. Go on podcasts.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You can start your own podcast. Yes. Many people have done that. Yes. The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted Yeah.
Speaker 2:By making a wide variety of investments. Yes. And that has to a form inform their opinion on different markets. Yep. And so if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard.
Speaker 2:Because you can't go on there and say, x y z company is clearly dominating. Yep. You know, if you look at the data and you look at, you know, what customers are saying when if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back. And so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great media products Yep. Because of that conflict.
Speaker 2:Yep. Now, you can still get around this, right? And there's different ways, and there's different approaches. You can do an interview show Mhmm. Which allows you to but that's just like one type of content.
Speaker 1:And the problem And that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guests.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the person.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's like, yeah, the person's a good interviewer, but like, what do they actually believe?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking, you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing. Yep. Can't get away from it.
Speaker 2:It's all marketing all the way down. Now, these sort of subcategories I think that are interesting. I've I've always said that Sam Lesson, right? He's got fans, he's got haters, but he creates he has a unique media product and the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord and some people it resonates with them. Other people wanna dunk, but it is an effective format in order to provide commentary and it's very efficient.
Speaker 2:Right? He doesn't need a big marketing team to actually pull that off. So I think it's super key to find a specific format. But then the the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves Yep. You could do something like what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:Yep. I I when I think of like the four really great or like a few really great VC marketing examples, I think of Zero to One by Peter Thiel. He's never tweeted, but he's tweeted once and it was a link to his book. And that book was such a good outcome that it sold in in airport bookshops. Right?
Speaker 1:And he just dropped an amazing book, and then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of like building his brand. Naval has a similar story where his his Twitter posts, the how to get rich without getting lucky went so viral. And when I think about both of those, and then it was eventually turned into a book. Yep. But when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near term thesis or they're not they're not news products.
Speaker 1:They're reflections on how the world works. Reflections on, like, timeless principles. Right? Then I think about Paul Graham's blog. It's not on a regular cadence.
Speaker 1:You know, it's on a weekly substack. It's not a news product. It's reflections on, like, how did Steve Jobs run his company? And maybe he'll draw maybe he'll like pump his bags a little bit by like talking about Airbnb, but he's talking about like what Airbnb did in like 2009 or something. And it's like, it's completely irrelevant and it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm getting a buy rating on the stock right now.
Speaker 2:It's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct. Exactly. Exactly. Of the early writing Yeah. If you like, and even commentary on Sam Altman Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just clearly ended up being true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A 100%. And and it's not and he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or or Airbnb at this moment. He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release. He's talking about Brian Chesky as a person years ago, and it's reflective.
Speaker 1:And I think that that works really well. Marc Andreessen, similarly, the ability to go into The Wall Street Journal and write an op ed is is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that that idea, but it has to be from the individual investor. I don't think it's something that can be like formulated from a team necessarily.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's this like, there's kind of this like, I feel like we're gonna see more of like this barbell strategy, where the future might be like, when the GP has a really really insightful piece of commentary, they take it to a Wall Street Journal op ed, or a book, or a thread, or a screenshot essay, or you're just seeing the brand. And you're seeing the brand on the back of And I was thinking like, what is the equivalent of like the Patek Philippe ad that appears on the back of The Economist every week? It's like, was thinking venture capitalists should go and buy the back of like the Stanford Review. Or like the Waterloo, you know, campus newspaper. Like, that should have an ad for venture capital
Speaker 2:Thompson newsletter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Like like But
Speaker 2:I think aligning with these iconic properties.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People who are doing their life's work.
Speaker 2:Page ad in
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In in the journal.
Speaker 1:But most importantly, like like, when when Patek Philippe sponsors The Economist, they are not trying to shift The Economist's coverage towards, like, being more bullish on Swiss watches. They're just like, we don't even know what you're gonna put in this issue. We're just gonna be on the back there looking good and telling you the vibe of
Speaker 2:So John, a full page color ad in the journal Yes. Costs around $248,000. Yes. Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, like truly great producer for their own show. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so is it gonna be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the journal for a day? Yeah. Or have your own podcast?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there are more narrow properties too that are like, the the journal's extremely broad in all of business. There but there but there really are more narrow products that Yeah. Would work. But every time they've gotten there, it's been it's been it's been misaligned around, like like like, what the actual coverage is.
Speaker 1:But I don't know. I mean, maybe we'll see maybe we'll see an f one team. Maybe we'll see JetSuiteX, the terminal, like, sponsored by a VC firm. That would make a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Like, you get off
Speaker 1:in in Silicon Valley at the JetSuiteX terminal, and boom, you're presented with a an ad for a VC firm. I don't know. We'll see. We'll we'll keep covering it.
Speaker 2:Something there. Something there. Well, we have David Senora coming into the studio. We're gonna ask him about VC marketing.
Speaker 1:We're gonna ask him about the the
Speaker 2:New York election. We're gonna ask him about all the things that you've been just waiting to get Senora's opinion on because he cares so much about current events. That's all he cares about. It's venture capital and current
Speaker 7:events. Yep.
Speaker 1:That's his jam.
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 3:Can you hear me?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I'm the
Speaker 3:the the great Malibu blackout of two thousand twenty five. So I went to our mutual friends and passed esteemed past TPBN guest, Rob Moore's house. He's lucky enough to let me post up here on my laptop and talk to you guys. So we gotta thank Rob
Speaker 7:for this.
Speaker 2:Your neighbor.
Speaker 4:Your Your neighbor.
Speaker 1:Wondering if you if you were renting a house, how you got so many books lined up already, but it makes sense.
Speaker 3:Could you imagine? No.
Speaker 6:I told him.
Speaker 3:We were looking for places to to set up just now. I like, dude, you can't beat this background. Like, this library that has
Speaker 1:this incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The only thing I the only thing I like is when people, they organize their bookshelves by color. It drives me fucking insane. So that's the only thing. Whoever designed this room had a great
Speaker 2:you don't actually read is just organized by by pretty colors.
Speaker 3:It bothers me. They should or organize it by episode number like everybody else does.
Speaker 2:Like I
Speaker 3:do at my house.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And this does.
Speaker 1:You're not making a podcast, what is the logical, better way to order? Is it alphabetical? Is it by year? No.
Speaker 3:No. No. I used to do it by in order that I read it. So you kinda see your interests evolve over time. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then you have a separate, like, intake shelf for things that you haven't read?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I'm reading the bottom half of my all my bookshelves is the one that I record at my home, like, the studio I use. It's all unread books. So it's, an order by episode number, then the the bottom, like, I don't know, two one third is just unread books. And then anything out on any bookshelves in living room is just all all unread books.
Speaker 3:I have, like, 600 now. Have to stop buying
Speaker 1:Yep. When when are you gonna start are you gonna start, like, printing and binding the materials that you put together for the for the shows, the episodes that you do that aren't based on a single book?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I already do that. So I used to put them in binders and now now I actually send them to a print shop and they actually do, like, a spiral binding.
Speaker 7:That's
Speaker 3:I actually have something. I'll give you a preview. I had I don't think I've talked about this publicly. I went to when I went to Charlie Munger's house, I knew I was, like, a biography amateur because he he made his own biographies. And so he I asked him, like, Charlie, can I go through your bookshelf?
Speaker 3:And there's two realizations of why, like, I no matter how long I do this, I'll never be as good as he was, is he doesn't take notes. So, like, he would have, like, a random, like, word in, like, every, you know, 100 pages where I have to, like, run through all this stuff. But at the very bottom because he told me that he thought that the the remember you always wanna have me come on here and have this debate about who's the greatest entrepreneur of all time?
Speaker 2:Goat debate.
Speaker 1:The goat
Speaker 3:debate. Goat debate. Charlie said that it's obviously Rockefeller and that Standard Oil is the best company ever created.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And there was this interview that Rockefeller did at the end of his life, and the transcript of it is, like, 1,700 pages long. And Charlie printed it out and put it into binders. Wow. And so I actually, a friend of mine who does this podcast called the Rainmaker pod, he found the 1,700 page transcript for me. And then so app if you go to my house right now, it's gonna take me fucking months to do this, but I have a 1,700 page essentially 1,700 pages of Rockefeller's own words.
Speaker 3:So that's probably gonna be the longest episode of Founders I'll ever do. It's probably, you know, it's probably, like, five hours long or something. So, yeah, I already do make them.
Speaker 1:Why wouldn't you just break it up into multiple episodes?
Speaker 7:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Maybe I should know. I think I I don't think I think I'd break it up into multiple recordings. Because sitting down if if if you see like, if I do an hour long episode, right, that you know, usually, I'll talk for, like, two or two and a half hours. Like, I kinda do, like you ever heard of Rick Rubin's idea of, like, the ruthless edit? I thought it was, like, really interesting.
Speaker 3:He's got this highlight when he went on Lex Freedom's podcast. I thought it was really good, where he's working with an artist, and he's like, hey. Let's say you make 30 songs. Let's just assume we can only pick five. We can only pick five on the album.
Speaker 3:What are the five best ones? And so then they put the five on that. And then, okay. If we're gonna add to these five, reason for six is to be really good. And so now you have 25 to pick through them.
Speaker 3:What's this six like, the next one that's just as good? And I think going through and, like, ruthlessly editing everything is really important, especially if you want a high value audience because they just don't have a bunch of time to, like, just churn through shit. It's just like your job. It's like what you're doing for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's something interesting there about like, I I I've I don't have all the numbers, but I feel like some recording artists, you'll hear stats like there were 12 songs on the album and they recorded 200 songs before they cut them down.
Speaker 3:So this is actually the episode I wanna talk to you guys about, which is Michael Ferrero or Michele Ferrero, but I'm gonna use the the American the English translation. I mentioned that in the episode that being prolific is highly coordinated with greatness. Just because you're prolific doesn't mean you're great, but if you're great at what you do, you're undoubtedly prolific. Mhmm. And so I'm reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography right now, and there's a lot of crazy stuff in there other than, like, the thing is, like, this thick, and he wrote it out by hand multiple times.
Speaker 3:He wanted to make sure every sentence was like, should be in the book. And so he'd, like the only way to force him to do that is to rewrite it. Like, what kind of psycho does that? The psycho that's probably, you know, recorded thousands of songs and only published maybe less than 10. I just read Prince's autobiography, which is the strangest autobiography I've ever read.
Speaker 3:I can't even do an episode on it because I don't understand it. But when he died, he had so many, unreleased songs in his vault that he could release a new album every year for the next century. Wow. So you see this over and over again with, like, Michael Ferrero who essentially, like, I'll just give you, like, the high level thing because most people have never heard of him, and there's no biographies in English of him. So my friend Cameron Priest, who's another psycho that reads all these other biographies, he translated from Italian for me.
Speaker 3:And Ferrero owned a 100% of his company. He the company has $20,000,000,000 a year in revenue. No outside shareholders. He worked on it from the age of 19 until he died at 89, so he has got seventy years of experience in building his company. He vertically integrated the entire thing.
Speaker 3:He went to, like, absurd lengths. He wound up monopolizing, like, hazelnut production in the world. So, like, one out of every three hazelnuts went to his company, Ferrero, and then he also became the largest not only producer of hazelnuts, but he also sold them to other companies.
Speaker 2:One thing nut, by the way. It is. It's a great one. Under disgust.
Speaker 3:He this is the guy that invented Nutella, Tic Tacs, Barrero O'Shea, the Kinder brand of chocolate. He's like the real life Willy Wonka. He would commute to work by helicopter because he lived in Monaco. Right? This is something it sounds like Jordy would do.
Speaker 3:Jordy came to my house just straight, and I'm watching up the hill, and I see this the the TPBN all black Maybach come up the hill.
Speaker 6:And so Michael Ferrero is
Speaker 2:Pulling into your palatial house.
Speaker 7:That that wait. Cut that
Speaker 3:part. So the the funny thing is this guy lived in Monaco. Right? And and he actually moved because he grew up in rural Italy. He grew up poor, which is really fascinating, but there was all these kidnapping attempts in Italy.
Speaker 3:So he's worried about, you know, being he was the richest person in Italy for a very long time, one of the richest people in the world. This the joke is, like, I titled the episode, like, oh, Michael Ferrero and his $40,000,000,000, you know, chocolate empire. Because if you Google him, they're like, oh, Ferrero's worth 40,000,000,000. No. It's it's worth multiples of that.
Speaker 3:The guy's doing like, it's insane, what that company would sell for, and his son still owns all of it. Wow. And so, anyways, this guy would commute from he was so obsessed with quality. He would commute from Monaco by helicopter and go to every single one of his factories where the product was produced and insist on tasting the the like, what they're producing that day himself because he says, like, you have to control the quality yourself. He was completely obsessed.
Speaker 3:But the reason I bring up the prolific part is because in his lifetime, he ran tens of thousands of different experiments on different, like, mixtures of the stuff that he's making. And in one case, like, they said, hey. He'd get in the tasting room, which he considered a secret laboratory. At, like, eight in the morning, he'd stay till dusk. They would cover like, they'd run experiments all day on one single one of their products, and they'd run, like, 70 to, you know, over a 100 experiments on on one single product each day.
Speaker 3:So this, like, idea of being prolific, you see it over and over again. Like, how many how many three point shots has Steph Curry put up in practice?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:How many songs has Bruce Springsteen written? How many different iterations did Steve Jobs do on his products over his lifetime? It's it's just incalculable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The prolific thing is fascinating. I feel like there's there's a massive underrated hack in just doing something daily if you can work it into your lifestyle. Like I'll give you two funny examples. Are you familiar with Beeple, the NFT artist?
Speaker 1:Yes. So he made a three d rendering every day for the first thousand days. It was like, it was multiple years. It was almost like a decade of work. And then and then he was he was at a point where his career was was taking off.
Speaker 1:He had been mentioned on Joe Rogan. His Instagram was growing. He was getting consulting gigs to do motion design and rendering consultancy for like the Super Bowl. So he was like making good money as a as a commercial artist. But then when his work went to went to went to auction during the NFT boom, he made $70,000,000 like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And it
Speaker 1:was just all the value captured
Speaker 3:I think it was 69,000,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Classic. But he sold some other stuff. So I think he walked away with 70,000,000.
Speaker 1:He famously like swapped it into USD immediately because he was like, nah, I don't think he was like a crazy crypto person, but he just realized that like, I've been building for this forever. This is the time to value capture and so I'm gonna do it. The other funny one is Jake Paul. Jake Paul has that has that rap song, it's everyday bro, often lampooned online. But it really does if you if you flip it around to instead of asking the question of like, do you like Jake Paul's work personally as an artist to just Yeah.
Speaker 1:Why is Jake Paul successful? Why is he the name that we know? It's very clear that he was vlogging every single day for years and got extremely, extremely good at it. And and and it built up this muscle where he can produce something, and it just got better and better and better and better and better until he was able to just dominate the Internet.
Speaker 3:I there's a quote there's a clip going around about Michael Phelps about this where he you know, on his run when became the most dominant swim swimmer of all time, he's just like, if you any day that I took off, I was it could be behind two days. Mhmm. And so there's this idea of just and he he went through, like, his schedule, and then he's I forgot. He he had the numbers. Like, you know, a couple thousand workouts
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:For every like, to get ready for Olympics. Like, he count counted how many workouts that he did. Yeah. There's actually the the idea of being prolific have you guys had Jackson Dahl on the show yet?
Speaker 1:Not yet. We got him.
Speaker 2:Oh, we've invited him a
Speaker 1:couple of
Speaker 2:times, but it it we're we're working on it. Our people are talking to his people.
Speaker 3:Okay. Perfect. Because he actually has a tweet about this that I think is really important, and and I think Jackson's doing an excellent job. Like, he's one of the best he has one of the best new podcasts, Dialectic. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I've been talking to him a lot about his podcast as much as possible. I just saw him in New York last week. But he talked about the I'm just gonna read this trope read this tweet rather. He says, when you never linger anywhere or on anything, you don't get the chance to sink into the feeling of it, to trace the grooves, to notice what little details you love can be improved. And so Jackson from his post and his podcast, obviously, a very soulful dude.
Speaker 3:But I think one of the things I took away from Ferrero and any really, like, what I'm trying to do with the podcast is like, hey. They don't write biographies about people's lives that do something for, like, a year or two or five years. It's like, in almost any case, at the very minimum, you know, it's two, three, four decades of their lives that they dedicated something. And in Faroe's case, it's, like, seven decades. So when he was able to improve, I mean, I talk about vertical integration, it's like, took it to another extreme where it's like, I'm gonna monopolize all the raw materials that my product needs.
Speaker 3:But then, like, he wouldn't he he also had to be one of the first people to to mass produce chocolate. And so he invented his own machines. And so it starts out, like, you don't do that unless you're spending so much of your life thinking about what you're doing and folk this extreme level of focus. And he applied it to marketing, to distribution logistics, to the machines that he built, and he he talked about having a love affair. He thought, like, the robots he built had soul.
Speaker 3:The way he talked about
Speaker 1:It's AGI built.
Speaker 3:It it's really funny because he he comes of age in after World War two. Right? So he's in his early twenties in post World War two Italy where there's not even electricity. It's, like, hard there was two machines that the company had that could that could had enough power to run electricity at the beginning. Everything else had to be done by hand.
Speaker 3:And then when he started talking about this love affair that he has with these robots that make this product that he deeply loves and cares about, I'm like, oh, there's another obsessive guy that came of age after World War two. It's almost the same age that was in Italy, and it built one of the best brands in the world and worked until his die until he died. It was Enzo Ferrari.
Speaker 4:Ferrari. Literally. Say Ferrari.
Speaker 3:Yeah. When when Enzo built his first car, it talks about in his biography. It's like he couldn't even find electricity. Imagine trying to build the best race car, and you don't you don't even access to electricity. Wow.
Speaker 3:It's just it's incredible. And then it's there's a great post picture on Twitter that's that I think I retweeted one time where it's like Enzo Ferrari's house that he builds right here, and then around his house is the test track.
Speaker 1:It's like,
Speaker 3:what work life balance does this guy have? He just he, like, it's he's in his kitchen, and
Speaker 1:he's And
Speaker 2:my my my favorite thing, you know, people people hit 30, and they're like, oh, is it too late for me? It's like Enzo didn't start Ferrari until he was 45.
Speaker 3:That's crazy. I don't know if he was a 40
Speaker 2:five. Was working in in racing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The brand didn't start.
Speaker 3:Well, he the funny part about that is he didn't actually give a shit about the cars other than, like, he cared that they went fast and they won races.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But he realized, I just have to sell them to rich Americans so I can fund the racing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And so, like, there's a we talked about this a few weeks ago when I was on here. He has that great quote. He's just like, I don't care if the door gap is there. I just care that when the driver hits the gas, he shits his pants. That's great.
Speaker 3:Because he just wanted to go fast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna dig into the idea of focus more. I was I was texting with someone earlier today, and they were they were ask I was like they're like, you you have so many opportunities. You could start companies. You could raise funds.
Speaker 1:Like, why are you just focused on media? And I was like, well, really, like, probably David Senner. Like, I've studied all the history's greatest entrepreneurs and just kind of realized that they all focus.
Speaker 2:So David Senra studied history
Speaker 1:Yeah. He told me we
Speaker 2:can study David Senra.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. But but really but I I felt like I was saying something so stupid and because I was just like, well, it's the pattern of success everywhere is that there's focus. And and it's like, it should be mind blowing and let and yet we're talking to we're talking about people all day long who, like, love your podcast, but don't actually go and focus and they don't actually do it. And so I'm interested in, like, the parameters of focus because Michael Ferrero Ferrero did did branch out into Nutella and Kinder and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs, but it's all within the same empire.
Speaker 1:And you've seen that with with Steve Job. And so there are areas where you can have multiple products within the same organization, the same focus, but your but your your your impact or the output is slightly different.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Think people struggle with
Speaker 1:that because the people will often justify, well, like, having a having a fund and a new kind of start up and actually, like, three start ups is all part of my focus on my massive empire. And it's like, are you really focusing? Is always the question.
Speaker 3:I mean, I I think the person that's built the most impressive company in our lifetime is Jeff Bezos. Mhmm. You know, it's like, obviously, less SpaceX and I have Starlink at my house and all that other stuff. It's just like, if you look at, like, what he started out at, the just financial performance of it, like, all the the complex logistics behind it and all the different businesses. And so, like, I just if you're gonna do that, just think you just just follow Bezos' lead, literally reread his shareholder letters, which I'm gonna do every year.
Speaker 3:I think I've done four episodes on the now. I think you know? I think the greatest description of that was just, like, reading Bezos' shareholder letters is, like, the person like, getting a, like, a history lesson from the person that mastered a high growth Internet startup before the playbooks are written. You know? And he kinda, like, just tells you what he's gonna do and just goes and does it.
Speaker 1:Does
Speaker 3:it. But for, like, Ferrero, in his case, it's like, depends on your level of ambition. And I don't mean this isn't, like, a derogatory way at all. Like, I'm just happy, like, building, like, my little podcast that I'm completely obsessed with. Now my business can scale.
Speaker 3:There's, like, millions and millions of people listen to it. So, like, my impact can grow, assuming I'm good at it and other people tell. But, like, there's another life where I think, for a would be like a Jiro, where he's just like, no. I'm just gonna Jiro dreams of sushi. I'm gonna have a, you know, a 10 seat sushi restaurant in a a Tokyo subway, and I'm gonna be the best in the world.
Speaker 3:But Ferrero had different ambitions where he's like, he grew up poor. He never forgot what it was like to be impoverished, and his and everybody around him was like, hey. You're dominating Italy. Like, why don't you just stay there? And he's like, no.
Speaker 3:I'm going to build a global brand. If we don't ex he said this multiple times. He's like, if we don't expand outside of Italy, then we have failed. And he wanted to be one of the not only the best chocolate company, but he wanted to be one of the biggest. And when he died, the day before he died and she dies on Valentine's Day, which is, you know, somewhat, like, ironic.
Speaker 3:Maybe it's the wrong word. But he he wound up being the third largest confectionery business in the world the day before he died. And so, yeah, I think it just really depends on, like, what you do. Now there's also this this really interesting thing where, like, people do a bunch of small things and are are like, they'll do, like, a bunch of small start ups. It just depends on who you are as a person, though.
Speaker 3:Like, I I don't even have an opinion on them other than, like, I am the kind of person that just wants to focus on one thing, work on it seven days a week, think about it when I wake up, think about when I go to bed. I can't I'm just not interested in working on multiple things. But I think so when people hear my lifestyle and how I try to focus, like, I've heard people have literally told me they're like, they find it disgusting. Like, that lifestyle, like Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They literally that's the word they hear. Like, this is disgusting. I like, the world's a big place. I have other interests. And I'm like, that's fine.
Speaker 3:But I'm trying to, like, be narrowly focused and the best in the world at what I do. And so I
Speaker 1:think Yeah.
Speaker 3:You got distracted you
Speaker 2:you had a fund and you were spending all this time with LPs, you wouldn't have spent yesterday part of yesterday just reading, which is allow allows you to just
Speaker 3:do Every day reading. Like, before I met with Rob just now, like, you know, we picked this time for a certain reason because every morning if you call me in the morning, you know what I'm doing. First of all, it's going right to fucking voicemail because my phone's on DND, and I'm reading. All my job is very simple. It's just like wake up every day, wake up, workout, then read one of biography of Hitches Creek and Strange Verse for three to four hours.
Speaker 3:Then you can have lunch, and then reread past highlights in the afternoon, and then do it again over and over again seven days a week. It's just like, couldn't get more simple than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's also the element of, like, you probably shouldn't add a second thing or a second project until you've really nailed the first and you're creating something that's great, and then you kind of earn the right to work on the second thing. Like, I'm sure that if I go through for the the the history here, like, it's not like Nutella and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs, those were all the same year. It's probably that Nutella was No. Of absolutely an oiled machine, a banger company doing great, and then that earned the right to go kinda add on the second SKU.
Speaker 1:And still, that's all within the same company.
Speaker 8:So let let me give you
Speaker 3:an example. Everybody I have this week, last week, two months ago, two years ago, I have all the big publishers in my inbox saying, please write a book. Please write a book. Because I also sell the podcast obviously sells a lot of The audience is full of entrepreneurs, investors. Entrepreneurs, investors probably read a 100 times as much as the average population.
Speaker 3:The average population doesn't read at all. Mhmm. And all the best entrepreneurs and investors are reading all the time. And my idea was just like, I'm never going to write a book because that's not a podcast. Now there's a founder's book being written right now.
Speaker 3:I can actually tell a story because this has to do with this little company that I know you guys happen to know and are a big fan of called Ramp.
Speaker 1:Let's go. So
Speaker 3:let me tell you a Ramp story. And I wish you guys would repost that video you had when you did
Speaker 9:the ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp
Speaker 1:ramp ramp.
Speaker 2:Ramp We'll send you the file. We'll get it on Spotify.
Speaker 3:No. No. I I you should be able Spotify. I I played I saved the video, and I played it for my son, and he like, for
Speaker 1:I'm two days after that. Dude,
Speaker 3:he ran around the house
Speaker 9:ramp ramp ramp ramp, ramp. He doesn't know
Speaker 3:what it is. And he knows, like, Kareem and everybody else. Like, he plays with our sons play together.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:So the the funny part was I'll tell you about the founder's book and the issue of focus, is me and Patrick did this event at Ramp's headquarters in New York. Yep. Ramp. And it's a guy named, like, Wooter. I can't pronounce his name.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:But he's, like, this new podcaster guy. And he's, like he went and spent, like, thousands of dollars doing he listened to every single episode of founder, spent thousands of dollars design and then flew from, like, The Netherlands or some shit to New York to hand me the book.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:He's trying to launch a podcast, and, like, we we, you know, we talk about this all the time. Most people get podcasting really lazy. This guy, like, tried to do a episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew's like, oh, sorry. He, like, pushed him off.
Speaker 3:He's like, I only do it in person. He goes, okay. It's fine. Wooter flies fifteen hours, microphone in hand, does that. He interviews Eric Lyman, writes a 40 page book on the history of ramp, and gives it to him before the podcast.
Speaker 3:So I think I I'm attracted to people that take what they do seriously, and effort's always rewarded. So the what happened was he shows up at this event, and Patrick now knows what he did. I introduced him to Kareem, and Kareem was there. Eric already knew him. And so after the event, me, Patrick, Kareem, and Eric spent time with this young kid.
Speaker 3:I think he's in his early twenties. They think about the value of, like, getting Eric and Kareem's time. They're running a $16,000,000,000 company, like, all the crazy shit that's going on. Those guys work seven days a week. And now because you were so you had so much effort, you have these guys literally, like, counseling you and giving you advice for free.
Speaker 3:And so what I told him, I was like, listen. If you are willing to make a world class book I'm talking about, like like, what our friend Eric Jorgensen did with the Almanac and Naval. Naval. That book changed my life. Like, I read that all the time.
Speaker 3:I hand it out like it's candy. I was like, if you wanna build that for the stuff you feel you've learned on Founders and it you make something I'm comfortable reading that I want myself, I will advertise it for you for free on the podcast. Well, we have to put it for free just like what Nivol did. You put it anybody can read it for free online. If you wanna buy a copy, you can buy a copy.
Speaker 3:And any money you make off the book is yours to keep. I don't wanna make money off of the fucking book. I don't care about that. But I am interested in because people have asked for it. One, I I can't be a bottleneck.
Speaker 3:Two, you're willing to do all the work. And then I want something out there that, you know, it's a tangible, like, lessons for the for the podcast. And I think it'd be cool to help this, like, young kid that's really trying to hustle and trying to, like, do something with his life and to be, like, to the degree that I can be like, hey. And I I already hear the ad in my head. Like, I'll tell the story.
Speaker 3:And just like, if you, you know, have $20 burning a hole in your product or whatever it is or in your pocket, whatever it is, like, let's fucking support this kid. Like, buy companies buy them for your entire company. But, yeah, that I I think that's a way to, like, get something into the world but not take away from the focus I must have on, you know, what I feel I was put on this earth to do.
Speaker 2:Love it. FedEx. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Bro, I am so sad. Me and Rob are talking about that. Like, that I didn't get a chance to meet Fred Smith when he he passed away. He's got the craziest I'm gonna, what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna reedit the it's episode one fifty one of founders when I read Fred Smith's biography, which is one of the craziest biographies you can ever find. It's really hard.
Speaker 3:The the book is out of print. I I will read the opening paragraph for your audience real quick because I think it's, like, worth it's just don't understand. Like, everybody sees the planes. Everybody sees the trucks. They don't understand how difficult it was to build that company.
Speaker 3:The opening paragraph of
Speaker 2:this When when when we were reviewing what the initial operation looked like, how capital intensive it was, how how crazy, just like managing the the logistics
Speaker 1:Insane logistics dance.
Speaker 2:The idea that you could do that and make money.
Speaker 1:The hub and spoke models.
Speaker 3:The the guy that wrote the book, his name is Vance Trimble. He also wrote an a biography of Sam Walton. And he wrote Sam Walton first and Fred Smith, and he goes, oh my god. Like, I thought Walmart was difficult to build. But but FedEx is like, if you had to build Walmart, you could build one Walmart at a time, then expand.
Speaker 3:He's like the analogy he used in the book was like, FedEx is like if you had to from day one, you had to have a thousand Walmarts, or it doesn't work. Yeah. Let me just read this opening paragraph because it's so nuts. The guy that does my short form videos, which I think are really, really good, and I think he's a fucking genius, just sent me literally, right before I got on, he texted me one that he did on Fred Smith, so I'll put it out later today. But this is the opening paragraph of the create this is still the craziest beginning of any biography that I've ever read.
Speaker 3:And it says at age 30, Fred Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father's greyhound bus millions. He was in Hawk for 15 or $20,000,000 more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo jet planes and also his wife.
Speaker 3:His own board of directors had fired him as CEO, and now the FBI accused him of forging papers to get a $2,000,000 bank loan, and he was and trying to send him to prison. He thought of suicide. That's the first paragraph in the book. Like Insane. The it's such a
Speaker 2:great his dad at four. He's a Vietnam War veteran. He had written about FedEx in college, got an average grade on it.
Speaker 1:Took a decade to go from the paper the actual business corporation.
Speaker 3:You have you have people like Michael Dell, who's, you know, one of, my personal heroes and wrote one of the best autobiographies I've ever read. And in his autobiography, he talks about Fred Smith being a hero of his. Mhmm. It's just insane. And there's another paragraph that says, thinking of suicide is ridiculous, he's much more likely, instead of jumping out a window, he's more likely to throw you out of a window.
Speaker 3:He was just, like, a relentless dude that was, like, you know, just unbelievable high tolerance for pain and just refused to quit on this dream of his. And, again, like, I I just personally find those stories, like, very inspiring. It's like, dude, like, this guy if this guy can succeed in in under those circumstances, like, surely, we could keep going on whatever b to b SaaS app we're building. Like, come on.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. You wanna wrap it up there? Move on? What are you thinking?
Speaker 2:No. That was great.
Speaker 1:This is fantastic. We'll see you soon, David.
Speaker 2:I'll see you later.
Speaker 3:Real quick. I just tell you guys every time I see you, I'm excessively proud of everything you guys have done over the the the last six months. I absolutely love what you've done with TPBN. I'm gonna say it every single time you let me on your show. I think you guys are killing it, and I don't expect to see anything different or any I I expected to see you continue to do that for many, many years in the future.
Speaker 3:But I tell you guys privately, I'm really proud of you, but I wanna tell you publicly, super proud of you guys and very happy that to call you friends.
Speaker 2:We feel the same way.
Speaker 1:Thank you, David.
Speaker 2:We love you.
Speaker 3:Alright. Couldn't be a surprised. Week, John.
Speaker 2:I'll see you later. I'll see you later.
Speaker 3:Alright. Yeah. See you next week. Cheers.
Speaker 7:Bye.
Speaker 1:Speaking of b two b SaaS, let's tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free at adio.com. Should we bring in our next guest, Yancey from Meta Label?
Speaker 2:Yancey. Hey. What's going on? Welcome to the show. It's great to have you.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for joining.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you
Speaker 9:for the music.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. We're trying to be a real newscast here. I would love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself.
Speaker 1:I wanna go through some of your history then artist corporations then we can kinda dig through the the more modern era.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Sure. I'm a my name is Yancey Strickler. I'm a writer and entrepreneur. Started out as a music journalist and running a tiny record label and being in the world of early digital music And then was a cofounder of Kickstarter
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And helped make crowdfunding a thing. Was a cofounder and then CEO.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And very much kind of an accidental entrepreneur who started as a creative person whose idea just took the form of a business and kind of crash course in what it meant to make a technology product in a very different era of the Internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And what it meant to build like a real marketplace.
Speaker 1:What was the first Kickstarter project or the first one that, like really went big and you kind of watched it unfold and you realized that this would work?
Speaker 9:It was it was three weeks in. It was a musician from Athens, Georgia named Alison Weiss who was like making an EP. She had a $2,000 goal that she smashed through in eight hours. And up until then, we didn't show money you raised above the goal because why would anybody make more than their goal? Like, just had it even occurred to us.
Speaker 9:And she, like, introduced the first stretch goal that same day. And, like, really, the the template that is still what people follow in crowdfunding was, like, one woman in her dorm room, you know, that really laid the template for how you keep an audience engaged and, like, what you do when the Internet is bringing more love to you than you expected.
Speaker 1:What do you think the secret of success to that first $2,000 fundraise was? Like, a lot of, a lot of crowdfunding these days or even even if you're building an audience on something like Substack or Patreon, it's like you kind of need the audience already there, and then you go and convert it to money, you know, with some sort of project, and you're kind of building up all this goodwill. And people kind of expect, oh, they're like, I've gotten so much value. It's rare that you see someone come out of nowhere with, you know, a successful project. So what was the story there?
Speaker 9:It was that where there had been a page template, she made it come alive. She was funny. She was personable. She talked to camera. Like very modern.
Speaker 9:It feels At the time, you're like, woah. Like my computer is talking to me, you know? And it it just felt very personable and there's a level of energy that just she just knew what the Internet wanted and knew how to create that dynamic. And I really, like, still as a role model for for what I think it is to be a creator online. But it also was a different era of the Internet where people would share links.
Speaker 9:Yep. Where, you know, there was that level of generosity and curiosity and it wasn't just like selfies or Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Take me through some of the eras of the Internet and
Speaker 2:kind of first, have a I
Speaker 1:have a
Speaker 2:good Kickstarter story. A childhood friend of mine, Miles, came to me when I was just graduating college. And he had this crazy idea for a consumer product. And he pitched it to me. He'd already like basically taken a loan from his parents.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. A lot of like basically like college debt level loans. So this idea that I thought was completely I thought it was a little bit silly Okay. A little bit crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He was like, I'm working on this. I'm gonna launch it on Kickstarter. You know, do do you wanna help me with it? And I'd love Miles. He's always creative and talented but I didn't I didn't get the idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And basically like six weeks later, he launches on Kickstarter and he did like a million dollars in the
Speaker 1:first day. Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:And it was just this amazing story. Was so watch him take this massive risk. He had this personal risk. He He needed to spend money to get the product to the point where they could launch on Kickstarter and and did all these deals to make it happen. And it was just it was just incredible to watch and enable him to to build this company.
Speaker 2:And and I think what's what was magical from the side of the entrepreneur is every launches are such a key part of business and oftentimes people put too much Mhmm. They put too much emphasis into launching like a SaaS company. Because you're gonna launch and people don't care that much about SaaS. Maybe you have a good video or maybe your investors talk about it positively. But Kickstarter is just like, it felt like it can be this very like binary thing where you just don't know what's gonna happen in consumer products specifically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is very hard to judge what consumer products will hit before you just put it out there. And the kind of the variable nature of it, I just think is is fascinating to watch. So thank you for building the platform. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it just has created so many great stories.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you take me through some of the different eras of the Internet? I'm interested to hear about all the different ways that kind of money and funding has changed. You know, you have the, you know, the Kickstarter era or format or anything to, subscriptions on an ongoing basis to even things like the TikTok creator fund where you're getting paid out based on views. What what how how do you think about the buckets?
Speaker 1:And then what do you think is great? And what do you think maybe needs work?
Speaker 9:Well, I have zero preparation for this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 9:I've always I've always wanna do like a David Halberstam history of the Internet, like Yeah. Big picture. But, yeah, I would say like, I mean, there's the bulletin board zone up until like two thousands. And I would say 2000 to o six is like hardcore, hard mode.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's when we were first trying to make Kickstarter and you needed a server room and a dude with a ponytail to like have a blog. You know, it was like Totally. A high bar to get over but even during the time we were struggling like AWS, EC two launched. Yeah. Amazon payments launched.
Speaker 9:PayPal extended its marketplace product. So you started to see the first building blocks where nontechnical founders like us could actually make a product and could make a successful business. And those things really came online, yeah, like 07/2010. And then you have, I think, the good old days of twenty ten to twenty sixteen of, like, we're all exploiting the hell out of the Facebook social graph and it's, you know, gray you could gray list the Twitter connect to find every person everywhere and like the Internet's just this playground of like, what can we do together?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then I think twenty sixteen to twenty twenty was the defection, the collective defection where it's like Substack, OnlyFans, you know, more dark forest, like, more and less and less mainstream media, more and more, like, I'm going into the rabbit hole of something online. Like, that is where I make money. Sure. And then there was just an event that I did with other Internet where where people talked about this, but it ends up that, like, a room full of 20 year olds called, like, COVID crypto era is just, like, just scam period. And then they call period 2023 on to where we are now as scammer be scammed.
Speaker 9:But like AI, crypto, SaaS products, like recurring subscriptions, all of it is leading to this feeling of like someone's gonna ding your credit card or like rug you or whatever. Like, no matter what, you gotta like be on your toes and do that back
Speaker 2:at people. My favorite is it's like almost impossible to truly cancel a credit card now because like you tell am tell amx Credit
Speaker 1:card update.
Speaker 2:You tell amx like
Speaker 1:It's the feature.
Speaker 2:Hey, like I don't want this card anymore but I wanna keep my service with you. And then they're like, well, here's a new card and a new number. But, like, we're gonna give it to all the people that you subscribed to, like, five years ago. Yep. And it's just this incredible tax.
Speaker 1:Well, where are the pockets of of positivity on the Internet right now in I don't know if you wanna call it the creator economy, but whatever whatever term that is. Yeah. Are you seeing anything that's
Speaker 2:Before before there. How did you react to the greater the greater economy becoming a popular phrase among
Speaker 1:venture capitalists? Yeah. Venture capitalists kinda discovered they kinda created the creator economy. You kinda took a you you have made
Speaker 2:the groundwork.
Speaker 1:You know, it was better than
Speaker 9:the passion economy. That that one gave me a harder record scratch. So the rebrand but yeah. I mean, listen. Every one of these phrases is a VC talking their book.
Speaker 9:Like, that's it. You blog blog your book. That's the move. But but I don't think it's wrong. Mean, what's what's wild is that this job of being a creator, I'll define as like a full time self expressor on the Internet, a commercial self expressor, that's like a 15 year old profession.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And it is also the most desired profession for people under the age of 20. Mhmm. And unlike being an astronaut, like everyone can become one. Sure.
Speaker 9:And and the the right now, we have this perspective that, like, the creator economy is maybe a bubble and, like, it's, you know, some convergence of technology that, you know, who knows, like, it'll probably dissipate. If you step back a little bit and look at the longer history of the space, it's actually shockingly recent to where even like commercial, artistic production, like movies and music and books and the way we think of them now, that industry is less than a 100 years old, really, if you look at like a lot of the big players. But even the word and concept of creativity, the concept of creativity was invented in the nineteen forties by United States Defense Department grants that were trying to find
Speaker 1:divergent Let's give it up
Speaker 2:for the military industrial They created the
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically. Love them.
Speaker 9:They looking to find divergent thinkers for the military.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:So they studied artists and engineers who would like pull all nighters. And like what makes them tick, what's their drive? And they discovered that there was this innate drive that they theorized was a democratic essence of genius that could be taught to anyone and it was the concept of creativity. The word entered the dictionary in 1966. The United States education system was remade in the sixties to become creative.
Speaker 9:So like creative writing programs, brainstorming entered the school system. So I'm a second generation creative American. Yeah. And like but the whole idea of self expressing as a form of improving things or as a way to create more commercial value is a is a extremely recent idea, like just two generations old.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So if you think of the idea of being a creator, like, that is just building on something that was already there. And what I've come to see is that, like, we're 25% into the twenty first century right now, 2025. And I think the main forces of this century so far are Internet, phones, AI and creativity. Mhmm. Cultural expression.
Speaker 9:Like, takes up more space, more people do it and it's just gonna grow. And a lot of my work now is just thinking like, well, let's take this seriously Mhmm. And let's treat it as a real industry. Let's treat it as a real business. Let's treat it as, like, a way that people can get health care and have real jobs.
Speaker 9:And so if we take that approach and also take the Internet seriously, you know, what's missing? And that's really been what I've been about the last
Speaker 1:few years. There there there's a bunch of interesting places we could go with this. I'm I I I wanna get to the artist corporation and how these how these, I don't know, influencers or new creators like Scale, but I'm I'm also interested in this idea of what actually has changed. Because this show, we have kind of discovered and done a bunch of different tests and explored the space and changed things a lot. We're obviously deeply leveraging the Internet.
Speaker 1:This will be clipped on X and Instagram and TikTok, and it will go out all over the place. We are using modern distribution tools, but in many ways we keep coming back to this idea that you know, we are making daytime television. This is a talk show. And so we are retreating in many ways to the formats that work and when we find that we go back to what has been you know, Lindy or discovered or has been around for a while, we see that that's what people still want. And I and I've thought about this in the context of mister beast.
Speaker 1:He's he's making a game show and game shows have been popular for a long time and he's distributing them in a different way and there's a different style and editing style. But like what really has changed since
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, the the big change is that the person, the creative person has full control. Not full control but ownership over the production Yes. And the distribution Yes. Even if you just own the account.
Speaker 2:Right? So you're Yes. You have an account that you don't really own the production, you don't end the own the end app Yep. But you own the account that that gives you a lot of range in order to do things. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We've talked about this like, we'll pull up a post from somebody on on our stream and and that was posted like a minute ago. Yeah. And like television could never do that because they would have to like, you know, make sure that they
Speaker 1:had to
Speaker 2:clear it and and do all these different things. So I think that's the biggest the biggest change is that the creative people owning those two key
Speaker 1:Just being more entrepreneurial and
Speaker 2:then the cost to
Speaker 1:sales thing, know, if we handle that internally. So, yeah, I'm super fascinated in like, what what actually is new? What pieces have stuck around?
Speaker 9:Well, think that and I include us in this affectionately. I think it's the revenge of the losers where in the past, you know, all media was, like, heavily gate kept and you had to go to whatever school and, like, the seats were so limited. YouTube was for losers. YouTube is if you couldn't get on real TV. Like, all everything on the Internet was that.
Speaker 9:Every part of the Internet creative stack was like, you aren't good enough, so thus you're here. But there's more of us than there are winners. And and if you give us the same tools and you give us time, many people are very smart. Many people can, you know, take in a lot of information and create a talk show like out of out of your minds and out of a limited set of tools. And the notion of the notion of hierarchy for where we go for things has been erased as a result of this.
Speaker 9:And, you know, it's it's for all legacy players, it's total havoc, and they have no idea what's going on. I think for anyone who's a consumer just coming up now, like, the world honestly makes kinda sense. It's pretty wide open. You can find or get access to whatever you want. But, like, you all are able to generate a lot of attention and drive a lot of things, but what you own is an interesting question, actually.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Like, you own the your brand IP. You know? Do you own your followers? Do you own your what of your relationships do you own in which way?
Speaker 9:Like, it gets fuzzy. Mhmm. But there is for sure, like, a cultural equity that is being built up by this project. Equity that because you have sponsors, you can convert into revenue, you can convert into an investment, you can treat as a proper business. And that's what more and more people are finding creatively.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And so like to make a media business or to bring in multiple revenue streams or the things that a modern creator is finding is a different way of operating like a small business or a studio than people have experienced in the past. Yeah. And we're all sort of speed running this. There's not a lot of communication between groups. Like, people are there's Well, the interesting thing Like, there's a lot of weirdness.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing, the reason the the creator economy as a venture trend broadly failed and because a large amount of the investment dollars were flowing into building kind of business infrastructure for creators and and misjudging that creators are ultimately just businesses and they can use ramp, they can use like, they can go to Bank of America and get a bank account.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're talking about the niche specific finance
Speaker 2:And so and so even though even though the creator kind of wave and trend has just exploded and continues to to create all these amazing things, the investment dollars that flowed into the category
Speaker 1:Sure. Broadly broadly
Speaker 2:did not return.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I'm also interested in the idea of the the actual structure. There's a lot of like, on that note, there's a lot of influencer businesses where really, like, most of the value accrual is in the actual talent. And they could shut down their accounts and go to Hollywood and get a deal that would pay them directly just as a w two employee. And you see that with, you know, folks like I believe I was thinking about the example of Jim Kramer or actually going back through talk shows, Johnny Carson was unique in that he owned his show's IP, but then The Tonight Show and The Late Show are now owned by the networks.
Speaker 1:And if you watch Jimmy Kimmel, he's essentially a there might be a production studio that he owns a piece of, but it's mostly just he's on a really high salary from the studio and the network. And that seems to work fine. I mean, Jay Leno never owned his show. He has a huge car collection. He seems to have done very well.
Speaker 1:But then there are also folks who are building c corps and trying to build corporations, and they realize that that maybe the best way to monetize attention long term is to launch a product like what mister Beast has done with Feastables. And it's an it's a new corporation, then maybe that gets spun out and maybe that becomes its own thing and they sell that and then and that's less tied to his face and his talent. So there's a whole bunch of different paths. Walk me through what you think, like, reasonable cases are or or or the good or bad or have I missed anything? And then talk to me about the future of where all this goes.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So right now right now, if you're a creative person looking to go more pro or scale what you're doing, you know, there's there's very different categories. Like, an online creator is a very specific set of, like, you're probably getting a direct deposit from an ad, you know, from some ad partnership or something hitting your bank account. Yep. There's a question of how should you accept those funds.
Speaker 9:If you're like a visual artist or someone like that, your legal structure will determine whether you can get a grant. You're eligible for certain funds and, like That's right. That is actually the only way to get money if you're that type of artist. So right now, people face there's a couple decisions. One is do you orient your career around seeking philanthropic money, which if you're a classical artist is really kind of what's there for you.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Or if
Speaker 9:you're a creator, are you an LLC? Are you an s corp? Are you trying to, like, properly raise money? Are you a c corp? Yeah.
Speaker 9:And there's a whole big whole big mess in the middle. Mhmm. Where I ran into with the I'm part of a collective of writers called the Dark Forest Collective, and we published a book together that's done a $100,000 in transactions all running through a split that we made on metal labels. So all the money just automatically distributes to each of us as a royalty through Stripe. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And I'm running that without any sort of legal structure, which is not the smartest thing. But started thinking about what if I made an LLC for this? Like, what should I do? And ended up when I've been talking to artists for a long time about their different needs and saw an opportunity to try to craft a different type of LLC that would give creative people more economic security, better access to health care, and the ability to grow wealth and equity. And so to do that, we're structurally taking a making a version of an LLC that will have within it a set of specific provisions around creative purpose, certain rules about governance, certain separation of creative rights and financial rights, setting in how an equity structure would work, including rules about how you can get pool together to get access to better health care rates with a bunch of a corps together.
Speaker 9:And just creating a a little wrapper shield that allows any sort of creative project to instantly go from, I'm now incorporated with legal protection for a very cheap amount, and I can scale to, like, an investable business using this form up until a certain point. Sure. There's two paths to making that happen, and we're pursuing both. One is to, like, you pass laws. So you say, hey.
Speaker 9:Let's define what an a is. Let's make it something you could legally register as. We're pursuing that path. The other is most of these things are things you can already do with an LLC. They're just you requires lawyers and a lot of, like, specifics.
Speaker 1:Extra confidence.
Speaker 9:Path is to make it as a a software protocol.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 9:And so just make a a corp in a box in a way that any Internet native group of people can begin to build and access collective equity. Yep. And so both of the we're working on both of those at the same time. The ultimate is to get both.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:But, but, yeah, we see it as a way that people to
Speaker 1:to cooperate. Is what what's the history of these new corporate structures? I remember I feel like b corp is relatively new. S corp also feels somewhat new.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very cool to be like, oh, yeah. By the way, you can just create a new entity.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Yeah. Not just a new entity. Do this. A new type of entity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I feel like LLC and c corp have been around for probably hundreds of years, but there's a bunch of new ones. What have you studied? What have you learned? And, like, what's the actual path?
Speaker 1:Is this federal leg legislation? Do you just go to Delaware or something? How does that work?
Speaker 9:Yeah. S s corp was the nineteen fifties. Mhmm. There have only been a handful of new corporate forms made this decade or this this century, PPCs.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:Certain types of co ops, l three c's. But, yeah, it when I was CEO of Kickstarter, we became one of the first PPCs, and so I just happened to watch that log it made, and it always paid attention to the fact that it was really technical and boring and just worked. And so I just thought about that same playbook, and could you could you do that? So corporate law is passed on a state level. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And depending on how law is written, people can register and be domiciled, you know, from anywhere in that state.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so we're talking to legislators and the bar associations in a few specific states and sharing with them our draft that our lawyers have helped make and, you know, talking to them about what does it look like to try to put a bill together.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:And so our target is to have something passed next year and to have first pilot programs, and we'll definitely have this protocol, like, you can do it with some skin of an LLC that we'll have out sooner.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. I one of the ideas that I thought was interesting was this idea that, as an artist or a creator, you wouldn't necessarily need to prematurely select a path between nonprofit donations, grant money, tax incentivized donations. I love that.
Speaker 1:I think that like the the elites are not funding enough like, libraries and museums and all of these different things. I think that just making it easy for that to happen is is is actually a key unlock. But then also, I love the idea of somebody being able to, you know, actually build up a subscription business on top of it and write regularly and have supporters and earn cash flow and and pay employees. I I want to get your take on OpenAI's structure because they have an they it feels like it does something similar, but at a thousand times larger scale with a nonprofit that owns a for profit, and there's a GP, a LP. And that feels like kind of a nightmare scenario.
Speaker 1:But are there any learnings there, or or are there any areas where you'd be worried about someone potentially, like, abusing a system that allowed someone to take nonprofit money and for profit money? Or it would be confusing where somebody would say, hey. I made a donation, but now you're licensing this into a movie. I wanted you to make a a painting and and or an installation or something. And now Disney's paying you a billion dollars.
Speaker 1:Like, I I I want my share. So, yeah, walk me through some of that stuff.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about OpenAI or ESG, I mean, I think form follows capital is the lesson, you know, which is people are gonna shape to whatever is most investable. And, like, one of our core constituents as we're working through this process are investors. So Mhmm. There will be an, like, an investor advisory board that's like, hey.
Speaker 9:Look at our sheet here. Let's make sure that we're not, you know, we're not screwing something up and that we're actually speaking to the ways you get returns and the way that we create value. But yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, there's infinite ways for things to go wrong. I think that
Speaker 1:I mean, people abuse LLCs today, of course.
Speaker 9:I think, yeah. I've had the attitude of I like that like the bar to be an entrepreneur will and it's not qualifications. And I think the bar to be an artist and a creator is about will and not about qualification. Yep. So the the way I've tried we've tried to structure it or think about it is easy to start.
Speaker 9:But as you want to do things that have a financial implication, like, say, take in nonprofit funds
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:There's maybe a step you go through before that, where you're not a full nonprofit, but, hey. Like, don't abuse this and screw it up for everybody, which I think is what happens with, you know, trust gets earned and spent. Yep. And so you're trying to protect it from being spent in the worst ways. Yep.
Speaker 9:But you you have to have some of those safeguards. And so With every option I think about that's about setting
Speaker 1:deciding the courts. Right? Like, that's what happens with the other structures is that they get defined and then and then precedent is set across a whole bunch of different legal filings eventually. Yeah. I you're in New York City.
Speaker 1:Right? And you've been in in in the New York City tech scene for years. Correct?
Speaker 9:That's right.
Speaker 1:Can you give me your reaction to the Mamdani, like, news? I mean, massive come from behind moment. Did you predict it? What what what have you been seeing? Are you excited about it?
Speaker 1:What are you optimistic about or maybe pessimistic about? I don't know.
Speaker 9:I mean, god bless anyone who's the mayor of this city. Great greatest city in the world, hardest thing to govern. You know, talk about a tough executive job. I'm reading The Power Broker at the moment actually. Finishing that so you get a real appreciation for the strangeness of New York City politics.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, I think it's I I I'm excited to see youth. I'm excited to see energy and not old corruption is nice. I also think the realities of New York City's political system are like Byzantine even to experts, and I don't know what will actually happen as a result of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So it's hard. I think probably almost all concerns are overblown and just, but, I don't know.
Speaker 1:We'll see. Do you think that, we we we were toying with this this this idea I'd like to get your feedback on. Just that out of the twenty twenty four election, there was this narrative around the podcast election. The idea of like the bro casters that got Donald Trump elected because Trump was much more aggressive or maybe just open to podcast invites from Andrew Schultz and Tim Dillon and Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan. And the Kamala campaign maybe was less aggressive or turned down some of those opportunities.
Speaker 1:But when I was mapping it out, I was just seeing that the total number of minutes that Americans spent watching each candidate, I think Donald Trump probably outnumbered by a 100 to one, just because there was a four hour Joe Rogan with him with 20,000,000 views. You math that out, it's a lot more than the twenty minute Kamala Harris interview on sixty minutes or whatever. Mamdani feels like he's done some podcast, but it feels like almost the first iteration of the next next generation of going direct or owned media channels producing his own content successfully. People have plenty of politicians have put out a TikTok. None of them have actually broken through in the sense that he doesn't have his own podcast.
Speaker 1:He didn't go on the big podcast. He hasn't done either Rogan or Pod Save America or I don't I don't even know if he's done Choppa or anything. But he has he has he's gotten a ton of attention. And I'm wondering what you think that says about the future of the shape of social media and getting attention and the and the future of politics.
Speaker 9:Well, I think you could see, yeah, lots of owned lots of owned media because what even is other media anymore? I mean, such a it's such a crapshoot, and you can absolutely drive drive attention that way. There was a Wall Street Journal piece a couple months ago that talked about how it's like some shockingly small number of the population. 10% buys 80% of the alcohol in America. So those numbers are probably wrong, but it's like a small percentage buys almost all of it.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And it made me think that, like, I wonder if every brand is ultimately like that. That there is like a a small percentage of the population that's a hardcore. Mhmm. And that is like the true brand value something.
Speaker 9:Someone like Trump who maybe is broadly unpopular but has, like, a 38%, like, hardcore 10 Q rating makes him maybe the most powerful person in culture. Mhmm. And I think that we're seeing with someone like this, it's like that it is the high Q rating with a devoted minority online that is we keep underestimating how powerful that can be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He has the thousand true fans, if you wanna use that analogy. Like and that means that those folks will not yes, it's only a thousand views, but it's a thousand views on every single post, and it's comments, a thousand comments, a thousand reposts, and that multiplies to and it might be a 100,000 true fans for him. It might. He said he wanted to knock on a million doors.
Speaker 1:He has several 100,000, I think 800,000 TikTok followers like like that that but he has true fans whereas a lot of the other candidates, I feel like just, like, the difference has always been true.
Speaker 2:Plus a category of people that are saying anybody but Cuomo.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And if you like, 2024 to me, you know, all social media is an ad. And so podcasts, like, these these are non ad spaces. They feel like the real spaces. So if your brand is only living in, like, broadcast social, like, you're just a CPG advertiser, basically. Like, you aren't you aren't engaging in a real way and, like, this is this is people know this is real.
Speaker 9:And then over there in the feed that we're around is, like Yep. Largely bullshit. Like, we all we all know. And that's that's how we're processing everything now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Anything else about
Speaker 2:This was great.
Speaker 1:Kickstarter or anything? Yeah. This was fantastic.
Speaker 2:Think you should lobby Zoran to get 0% corporate tax on the a corp.
Speaker 1:There we go. Could be
Speaker 2:some way
Speaker 1:to get some momentum, you know. There's some way to do that with the
Speaker 2:Borrow page out of big business,
Speaker 1:you know.
Speaker 9:Talk talk to Wiesenthal about it when he's done.
Speaker 1:See what he's He will.
Speaker 2:We will.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks so much for hopping
Speaker 2:Thanks, Yancy. This was great chatting.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to We
Speaker 2:gotta tell the great TBPN nation about Finn.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Can pull up Finn AI? Can we pull up the website? It's absolutely beautiful. We have had OWN on the show. We are excited to formally partner with Finn and the intercom team.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service. It's number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake offs and it's the number one ranking on g two.
Speaker 1:Let's go. And,
Speaker 2:OWN is so confident that the fin team is so confident they have a $1,000,000 guarantee Woah.
Speaker 1:In form. Okay.
Speaker 2:And it is why companies like monday.com, Anthropic and a bunch of other heavy hitters are using the product. So if you are serving customers which many businessmen and women do, you got to get on Finn Yeah. Yesterday.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's hit the gong for
Speaker 2:Let's hit the gong for Finn and a $1,000,000 guarantee. Excited about this. I have We've consistently loved Yeah. Point of view.
Speaker 1:A journey
Speaker 2:is like. We need to create a a founder kind of therapy corner because Oh, for our own has the ability to just kind of like cut through the noise. Yeah. And we're very excited to partner with them. So fin dot a I slash t v p n.
Speaker 2:Check it out. And with that, let's bring in The legend. The stalwart. Let's go. Future mayor of
Speaker 1:New Are you are you safe? Are you doing okay? We've heard that there's a cultural revolution going on in New York City. For the capitalist journalists. Swear.
Speaker 1:Are there breadlines already? How bad is it? Give it to us straight from directly on the ground.
Speaker 6:I'm safe because we had Zoran Mamdani on our podcast. So we're one of the good ones.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 6:I'm already I'm already doing my work to sort of make sure that I'm on the the correct side of the revolution. So I'm safe. I don't know about everyone else in my building here in the office.
Speaker 2:Is it true that I
Speaker 6:think I'm in I
Speaker 1:think I'm in good shape. You're in good shape. That's good.
Speaker 2:Are the rumors true that Mamdani wants to seize all the enterprise SaaS in the city
Speaker 3:and make it and
Speaker 2:make it state in cities city owned.
Speaker 6:Is he I have no I have no idea. I have not heard anything about Okay.
Speaker 2:Is the rumor that he wants to
Speaker 6:Bloomberg Terminal whether the the Bloomberg Terminal will be turned into a into a public City upgrade. Everyone has, like
Speaker 2:well, we can only know That's most hyper capitalist thing,
Speaker 1:though. Every citizen. Dollars. Every The most It should be universal basic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The most hyper capitalist policy would be every citizen Universal basic terminal. I'm firmly Healthcare costs are similar to a terminal cost.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm cautiously optimistic as long as he doesn't ban podcasts that are ad supported. As long as
Speaker 2:he doesn't put a 100% tax on AI researcher signing bonuses because that at this rate, that could generate billions of dollars for the city, in a few weeks.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think for now for now, I think look. He hasn't won yet, but, for now, I think it's more modest more modest goals like freezing the rent. But we'll we'll see we'll see what happens on some of these more the more ambitious visions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the the freezing
Speaker 6:We're not quite there yet.
Speaker 2:The the No. This is the this is there's a few months
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where people
Speaker 2:get very strategic. What apartment do you wanna be in? Does your family wanna be in for the next hundred years?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Could be a flurry Get in the
Speaker 2:right spot.
Speaker 1:Freeze the rent. I mean, the but I I think people are, like, very jarring Yeah. Jarred by the idea of freezing the rent, but, like, there are rent controlled apartments in New York City today. Right? And so what he's actually talking about is, like, adjusting the rate of the rent controlled apartments.
Speaker 1:Is that correct?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So there is already a pretty sizable slug of nonmarket rate housing in New York City. It's actually been frozen at times before. I think Bill de Blasio at one point froze it for about a year, but there's, a board and they have, you know, a certain annual adjustment.
Speaker 6:And he's just saying there's not going to be there's not going to be any adjustments. Sure. And, you know, my guess is that from a the perspective of a landlord who has some market rate units and some, you know, rent regulated units Yeah. My guess is that they'll increase the rate or the rent on
Speaker 2:the regulated ones.
Speaker 6:And they'll they'll they'll get
Speaker 2:the order back on the ones.
Speaker 1:But The
Speaker 2:number one the number one landlord on G 2.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Stalwart.
Speaker 1:The Stalwart. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Well, I I I I own a place here in in Manhattan. So if I ever rent it out, I don't think that'd be rent regulated, and I think I can charge whatever I whatever I want. So
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, how how are people thinking about Mamdani that feels like there's this narrative emerging about, like, oh, maybe, come from behind. Like Yeah. His, you know, people were we were acting like the Democratic primary was the election, but, of course, it is not the election. But is there a chance here?
Speaker 2:Yeah. For us California boys, why is it why is it why was that the election?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, look. Generally speaking, New York City is kind of a one party city. The Republicans keep putting up the same sort of, like, semi serious candidate each time who doesn't really launch a real campaign.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Curtis Leewa. Incidentally, he's the red beret guy. So someone coming from outside might think that that's the socialist in the race, but he's not even though he wears a red beret. And then our existing mayor, mayor Adams, didn't run-in the primary, but he's gonna be in the general election on his own line. And he's been pretty unpopular, but it's I it seems like what's gonna happen is a lot of people are gonna try to rally behind him.
Speaker 6:Crime has come down a lot in the last couple of years. He's taken the trash problem seriously. He's taken the rat problem seriously.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So I think there will be probably a fairly serious effort to make it a competitive race. But Mamdani's victory was so, you know, such a blowout. It was so compelling just from a numbers standpoint, and it isn't really true. I mean, this the expectation was that he was gonna do really well in the sort of, like, liberal educated white areas and then do less well elsewhere. He actually did really well in pretty much the entire city.
Speaker 6:So even that stereotype didn't really hold true the way people expected. So I he put it's a dominant performance. I mean, the expectation was that Cuomo you know, we have the ranked choice voting, that Cuomo would win the first round and then, you know, they would eliminate candidates. He won the first round. It wasn't even particularly close at all.
Speaker 6:I mean, it was he crushed him. A lot of people voted. This wasn't like the AOC election. When AOC won, there were not a lot of people who voted in the primary that year, and her team was pretty well organized. This was just a much bigger scale, much more impressive victory than that.
Speaker 6:So political earthquake, whatever cliche you wanna use, like, is pretty accurate to describe last night.
Speaker 1:Interesting. One narrative that I've heard is that Mamdani was incredible at focusing on local issues. So rent, grocery prices, things that Yeah. The buses, like that subway, things that feel tractable for a mayor. Whereas Cuomo was focusing more
Speaker 2:Or the fact that the food cart guys are having to pay some crazy Yeah. One.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Versus Cuomo talking more about national politics and what's going on with Trump. How how real do you think that is? And and and do you think that there's yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think that's very real, and I think, you know, a few things. I mean, one is I think Mamdani really made gains in the small businesses, the people who own the food carts, the people who own the bodegas, etcetera, really getting into some of these voting categories that are harder to reach. He also, as you said, really direct things related to day to day life living in New York City, like rent. And I mean, look, whatever your view on the sort of broader politics are, you have one candidate who is talking about the rent and you have another candidate who is talking about, like, you know, other you watch the Democratic debate and the first question was like, well, what is the first country you're gonna visit?
Speaker 6:And a bunch of them raised their hands and said Israel. Regardless of how you think about those politics, you're running for New York City mayor. So you have here's the rent guy, and here's the guy that's trying to make the race entirely about Israel. The rent guy won. I'm not totally surprised that that worked better at a citywide in a citywide election.
Speaker 1:So so I wanna talk about, like, if I was if I were running for mayor in New York City against Mamdani and I and I and I bought in on the idea that New Yorkers care more about rent, is is it reasonable for me to argue for I'm gonna drive the rent prices down by deregulating building or I'm gonna subsidize building or give a tax break to builders? Like, what are the other tools? Because the consensus amongst, like, the economics crowd is that rent controls don't increase, don't decrease the price of rent. They don't increase the number the the supply of building. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but what what are the what are the policies that you think people a, what do you think might actually work? And then b, how do you package that?
Speaker 2:Trump will tell the oil markets to
Speaker 1:settle down. Trump don't don't
Speaker 2:don't keep keep and he Don't raise prices. I'm watching.
Speaker 6:Don't wait. And I'm watching. Yeah. Don't raise rents.
Speaker 2:So you can say the construction workers oil markets. Don't even think about raising
Speaker 1:Prices.
Speaker 2:Prices. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Builders?
Speaker 2:Builders?
Speaker 1:Don't even think.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Why not? I do think look. I do think it is really hard Mhmm. For any someone running for office to sort of make that wonky argument.
Speaker 6:Oh, what we really need to do is deregulate this, and then we'll get supply. You know, it's not as compelling or satisfying as free as the rent. Right? But to be fair to Mamdani, over the course of his campaign, he's not doctrinaire about the sort of role of market rate housing. And he talked when he was on our podcast and in other interviews he did.
Speaker 6:He said there is a role, of course, for just sort of expanding supply. And he's talked about upzoning and all of the kind of things that, like, wonks like to talk about and sort of deregulating. So I think that accomplishes two things. One is he does sort of recognize that there's more to affordability than just sort of government fiat. You can't raise the rent.
Speaker 6:That's just a small portion. But I think also by talking about some of these other things, I think a lot of people sort of like normie Democratic liberals who are kind of in the center or whatever, they found him to be really disarming and even charming. They weren't threatening by threatened by him. And I think if you, you know, clearly and you see in the vote, a lot of people who probably make decent money and probably who themselves don't could have consider themselves to have radical politics, they might not have ranked him first, although clearly many did, but they weren't, like, anti him. They didn't feel like it was really important to stop his candidacy with, like, an anybody but Zoran vote.
Speaker 6:And so between the sort of young socialist activists who are really powerful in his campaign, and then you just didn't have many people who found him to be, like, that threatening or that scary. And I think that was sort of the the key to victory, the fact that people who sort of think Normie thinks, yeah. Why don't we just make it easier to build? We're also sort of cool with
Speaker 1:him. Yeah. Talk about his media strategy. Yeah. You're you're a you're a male podcaster, potentially brocaster.
Speaker 1:Manosphere. Get him
Speaker 2:a popular member of the Manosphere.
Speaker 1:Did you get him elected by platforming him? Are you the the Donald Trump or the Joe Rogan to his Trump?
Speaker 6:You know, yes. We might be no. I don't know if we are, but, you know, that episode came out May 23. If you look at the prediction markets, it was basically two days later that he started shooting up. I The market may bring the stalwart.
Speaker 6:I cut I actually I don't know. We've been debating this today. I'm sort of of the view that we may have played some modest role
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 6:In normalizing him to a certain group who hadn't been that exposed to him before. It's hard to say. Can I prove it? Yeah. But, yes, by entering the bro pod the bro podcast that I cohost with Tracy
Speaker 1:Elliman, of
Speaker 6:course. I thought it may have it may have it may have helped, and then he did a bunch of media after that. I think that was his sort of first, like, true, like, mainstream one. So, you know, part of Bloomberg.
Speaker 1:It may be Do you do you think what do you think was most most more important, and how would you weight them? Like, his his owned media stuff, his TikToks, his viral videos. That's that's what I saw first.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then once I'd seen those, then I searched his name in Apple Podcast, saw Odd Lots come up and I was like, oh, this is great. I saw he did the Breakfast Club with Charlemagne and a few other and a few other hits. But it felt like it was kind of a kind of an inversion of the Trump strategy, which was very podcast first. His strategy seemed native social media owned media first and then other people's platforms second. Do you think that's the right narrative?
Speaker 6:I think that's I think that's probably correct. His own videos are so good, though. And, of course, his mother is a famous filmmaker. Oh, I know. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And his videos, it's not just that they're short form. They're really good. They looked really good.
Speaker 2:They were
Speaker 6:shot really well. The color balancing on them was really good. The audio is good. The angles were good. Yep.
Speaker 6:He's a sharp dresser. He's a good looking guy. He smiles. He's really comfortable with himself. Like, he's just clearly a generational political talent, and he sort of package packaged it up extremely well for social media.
Speaker 6:Just seems like a very normal, likable guy. And I think put it all together, I mean, it was a campaign for 2025, and all of the different tools that people use to reach voters, he really had the knack on them.
Speaker 1:I I noticed this during a a previous election cycle with a a congressman who was running on the second amendment, and he she released this video, and the sun was blasting on his face. And I was like, that is violating cinematography one one zero one, which is like
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:You always wanna backlight everything. You want the sun behind you. And and it's like, yeah, I just didn't We didn't find the right person that understood the basic rules of cinematography to understand. You need a soft source, you need it to be behind you, you need to backlight things. And so, yeah, just actually having those tools, I I think that is probably an underrated narrative and something that we might see people actually take seriously and try and solve solve going forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 6:that's I think that's totally true. We're sort of just used to the face, you know, short oh, we're I'm gonna do short form video. I'm gonna say something. His looked great. Like, the angles are really good on them.
Speaker 6:And I know that seems like sort of a ticky tack thing to talk about, but it's clear that this is someone who comes from knowledge about how to package media really good.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. What can we do to get Robert Gruneri, the founder of Jane Street, on Odd Locks?
Speaker 6:I saw that headline this morning about how Jane is funny.
Speaker 2:You're you're hashtag not what you ever want to have to say or whatever it was.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You know, there's all these things, you know, like executives over the years, and they get into a scandal, and they're like, oh, I I regret doing x or y, and they're usually something about, you know, inappropriate. And they said something awful in an email and they have to find an awkward way to apologize. It's really funny to me that Jane Street is this extraordinarily successful trading company that makes billions and billions every year making markets. And the now the only two things that, like, the average person would know about Jane Street is that's where Sam Bankman Fried came from and now that the cofounder accidentally funded an attempted coup.
Speaker 1:What are you talking about? We we we know that they are the maintainer of the OCaml programming language.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. Their needs
Speaker 1:These are yeah.
Speaker 2:They're inventors.
Speaker 1:And they are sponsor of the Dwarvesh Patel podcast, which is a fantastic podcast. So I know I know four things about that.
Speaker 2:So good causes and maybe less good causes.
Speaker 6:Yeah. These are these are the these are the two things that every or this the the the the yin and yang
Speaker 2:of
Speaker 6:Jane Street. But, yes, to the average person on the street, there is quite a collection of headlines that they are amassing for Yeah. What is actually, like, a fairly normal, extremely successful firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is, like, I I I read this, and and and they describe in the Bloomberg story, they describe Jane Street as, like, the place where where Sam Bankman Fried worked. And I'm like Yeah. They they they don't deserve that heat because was like an intern. He did all the bad stuff later.
Speaker 1:Like, it's not it should not be a stain on James Fried whatsoever. And then this article, like, we were reading it, and we were like, certainly, it's gonna go on five more pages. It's so intriguing. It's so good. And then it just kinda drops off.
Speaker 1:And and it didn't seem like there was any real wrongdoing. I'm sure the story will
Speaker 6:evolve. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but I but my big hope is that it winds up with him doing a podcast tour and explaining the actual business of Jane Street because I would love to hear it because the the firm has been very quiet for a long time.
Speaker 6:Well, we could compete with you in who
Speaker 1:gets him first. Oh, it's gonna be a tour. If it's gonna happen, it's gotta
Speaker 6:be a He'll do the short form with you and the long form with us or vice versa. That's totally fine. There's enough spoils all around for for these guys to do their media tour.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about prediction markets. Sure.
Speaker 7:They played
Speaker 2:a role. There's two Yeah. Cal Shi announced around at 2,000,000,000 Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Today. And then and then the poly market round was like kind of leaking. I don't think it actually got announced but enough people were sharing it around. They're here, they seem to be mainstream when when big events are happening. You're on x and you're just constantly, you know, seeing screenshots and and things like that.
Speaker 2:And and, obviously, you know, we we gotta get into The Middle East, of course
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In a little bit. But how how main it's it's hard because we're in a bubble. How mainstream do you feel prediction markets have gotten?
Speaker 6:Well, look. Let's put it this way. Like, if you post a chart of any prediction market and there was even one it was I think they had one on the screen in Times Square. And I think there was even a video of Zoran looking up, and he's like, oh, gambling is haram. They shouldn't do that.
Speaker 6:But they're everywhere, and there's a price on literally everything. And for my you know, I think about when I was, you know, thirty years ago, I guess, or maybe twenty five years ago, If I wanted to you know, I would go to the Drudge Report or something like that because I knew that that was like this really good digest of everything that was moving in the world. And Polymarket has become this sort of like one of the few websites that actually check as just you know, who goes to websites anymore?
Speaker 9:Well, that's
Speaker 2:the thing. It's it's it's it's people that are basically making bets, investments, gambling, whatever you wanna call it. On event. But then it creates a public benefit, which is I have never made a single trade on Polymarket. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Any predict I've never made any type of prediction like based trade. And for both, you know main reason being that like it wouldn't be ethical for us to like cover what's happening in prediction markets and then just be like, you know, betting on them. Yeah. Yeah. And but and and be until the world gets this benefit of seeing tomorrow's headlines today Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which I think is a cool thing.
Speaker 6:Here's the way I think about it. So, like, you know, let's say last week when it seemed like Cuomo was going to win. And the ever most people would have said, yeah. Probably Cuomo will win. But you can actually, like, get now you know, there's, like, put a price on what that means.
Speaker 6:Is he a 60% favorite? Is he 80%? Is he 90%? Like, that's useful because the difference between he's 60% likely versus 90% likely is sort of useful in terms of gauging that. So actually putting a more specific price on conventional wisdom is useful.
Speaker 6:You know, one of the criticisms people make is like, oh, prediction markets get things wrong. Right? They're like, oh, it didn't actually predict anything. It's just following the polls.
Speaker 2:The crystal ball only works 50% of
Speaker 1:the time.
Speaker 6:And that's true. I I actually think that's, like, basically true, but I think that's the wrong way to look at their utility. The way you described it, that even if you're not trading on them, you get some benefit because you can see the price of essentially conventional wisdom right now on anything. Yep. I think as a public look.
Speaker 6:Is it really a public benefit to have people gambling on everything? I don't really know. At some deep level, I guess I'm concerned by the idea that we're betting on literally everything from, like, what are the odds that The US is going to drop a bomb on the Iranian nuclear site, which people are betting on, which incidentally started spiking on the morning of actual bombing over the weekend. You know, how great is it that people are always betting on all this stuff? I don't really know.
Speaker 6:But from a sort of like, I wanna know what's happening in the new year.
Speaker 2:I wanna
Speaker 6:know what's developing. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's pure utility that's free on polymarket.com.
Speaker 1:Also, I I I would like to, you know, toss in here that I am I'm almost positive that the vast majority of volume on prediction markets comes from something that looks a lot less like a gambler and a lot more like a hedge fund. And so a lot of these traders have scaled up. They have pretty mature operations. We saw that with that the big market moving pro Donald Trump bet. The guy had done his own research and paid for people to go knock on doors and do new surveys.
Speaker 1:And so I I think that the narrative of, like, this is as widely distributed Yeah. Like, they're whales, but they're they're, like, almost financial institutions less than Yeah. Gambling. And so, yeah, I mean, it still is a question. Like, I I would not want, you know, the the the the true gambling, like, it is this fine line.
Speaker 1:But but I do know that, like, many of the volume drivers have scaled up their business because they're good at it. They they have a more they they they're like, with the bombing example, they are tracking, like, the Domino's Pizza Index, right, or the the Pentagon Pizza Index. And then what is upmarket of that? They're probably finding another signal that's even upmarket of that and then feeding that in.
Speaker 6:And look. There there there's a reason for it, which is you wanna be able to big institutions, they wanna be able to hedge very specific risks. So if they have oil exposure, then they want to be able to hedge out the specific exposure that's gonna come from volatility, if there's going to be a wider war in The Middle East that would disrupt flow. So like all these are like sort of legitimate needs. And then the other thing I would say is that and I I've said this for a long time.
Speaker 6:Many legacy financial markets are literally prediction markets. Most notably, the treasury market. So it's like, you know, a short term treasury market is literally a prediction market on what the 12 members of the FOMC are gonna decide about rates over the course of x period of time. And then there are derivatives on those treasuries and so forth. So already, markets are a core part of just sort of TradFi legacy financial institutions, etcetera.
Speaker 6:And this just sort of extends the range of risks that you can isolate and hedge. And so I'm not surprised at all that now that, like, they're basically you know, the regulatory aspect is coming into place, the infrastructure is coming to place, that for many different instruments, they have value to people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about how you were tracking what happened in The Middle East. I my thought would be, I'm looking at polymarket for specific details of will this strike happen on this day? But then I'm looking at the price of oil Yeah. And maybe just the overall stock market because if World War three is gonna happen, I would imagine the futures would trade down.
Speaker 1:But how do you process that information? And then what did you see?
Speaker 6:It's a really good question. I mean, look. To some extent, it's all very sort of linear, and you probably could have gauged risks just by looking at oil futures, which sort of moved along together with, you know, the odds that US enters the war in some way or whatever it is. You know, it was really striking. I I mean so the attack.
Speaker 6:God. My brain is so scrambled.
Speaker 1:Think Saturday night.
Speaker 6:On the nuclear Saturday. Right. That day, that contract, will The US enter into like, really started spiking that morning. Yep. And that could because could have been because people were sort of, like, reading between the lines of Trump's truths truth social, various other things like that.
Speaker 6:But it wasn't obvious, you know, and it started moving. And it's like, okay. Like, you know, there was a lot of money riding on this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There was no oil. Podcast.
Speaker 6:And look. Yeah. And it's it's nice on a weekend. I mean, again, this gets to the thing, like, is it really good that people have to that financial markets are twenty four seven? And it's obviously gonna be very soon that all stocks and everything are be gonna be twenty four seven because you could just have prediction markets
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:On the stock market or prediction markets on a certain stock or a crypto token or whatever. Like, all of this is happening. It will all be twenty four seven in a fairly short period of time. There probably is use for weekend risk and overnight risk in times when traditional markets aren't trading to sort of be able to put on hedging trades or just gauge, monitor the situation through prices. So, yeah, I think I think this is here to stay and, as you say, gonna get more sort of institutionally real.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like So was
Speaker 2:everything was everything priced in at the beginning of the year? We've gone through
Speaker 6:a trade war.
Speaker 2:We've gone no. But the but the Nasdaq and S and P, they're just flat. They're basically flat on on the last six months. Happened. So nothing
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's insane. I mean, it's that blows my mind when I look at that year to date number. And I just think of all of the things that have happened, all of the Doge stuff, which people have already forgotten about, the cuts, all the uncertainty with regards to the budget, Obviously, the tariffs in the April, all of which is basically unresolved. There aren't really any deal deals.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And the ninety day deadlines are, like, coming pretty close. Then, obviously, the for the escalation of war in The Middle East. I mean, people have been talking about a possible bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities for decades Decades.
Speaker 1:I think.
Speaker 6:So the fact that we've gotten all that in 2025, either it was all priced in or AI is just such a powerful driver of everything right now that that's actually just the story that nothing can slow the AI boom.
Speaker 1:Well, it's
Speaker 2:an interesting in all the time that you've been reporting on all this good stuff, has there ever been a period of this much overall stability yet max volatility in the interim?
Speaker 1:The mid the metric I wanna track
Speaker 6:is That's a great question.
Speaker 1:Of emergency Joe Wiesenthal podcasts. Oh, yeah. Of times that Joe Wiesenthal is getting called
Speaker 2:to PRP
Speaker 1:new pizza tracker. The new metric.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Actually, someone, we did, like, 25 episodes in April. Yeah. And someone made a joke, and in reg and I hate the fact that they were correct about this.
Speaker 1:They're
Speaker 6:like, oh, we must be near a bottom because the Outlawds hosts are saying the exact time stamp of when they start the recording. It's like, we are recording this at 10:15.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They bottom they bottom tick to April 8.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. And so I was like, shoot. Like, they really have us dead to sights here. Yep.
Speaker 6:But, yes, you get and one day, there will be a prediction market on how many Odd Lots episodes that we do in a month, and that will be a useful derivative to understand some some slice of the roll
Speaker 2:of pictures. Just interesting how many different Someone
Speaker 6:at Jane Street will be making
Speaker 1:that trade.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's interesting how many different groups benefit from the volatility. So media benefits from volatility because people are gonna open cnn.com or the app and be like, what is going on? What did Trump say on true sun true you know, true social benefits from volatility.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even Trump benefits, but then he can say, I I I tried to do the tariffs and then I yeah. I had to roll them back a little bit, but I'm still the pro tariff guy or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then Wall Street Wall Street is
Speaker 6:like if
Speaker 1:you can make
Speaker 2:if you can make twenty percent one day and ride down
Speaker 1:a hedge fund buddy, it's a bull market in the VIX. You're really go long vol. Like this is the time because he was kind of like, yeah, market's kind of up and down and not that good. Was like, it's a it's a great time to be volatile.
Speaker 6:It's a great time to be in the news business and we are long volatility in the news business. Yeah. Is a great time to be in the news business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We had one slow news day here. We had our first, like, we were like, woah. It's a slow news day. And we didn't really realize, like, what that was like.
Speaker 1:And then, fortunately, it hasn't happened since. Some worse.
Speaker 2:It's even worse. Right? Yeah. And it feels like monitoring the situation has become a national pastime.
Speaker 1:It has.
Speaker 2:It really is. It really is like an it's basically it's a it's a new kind of hobby. Right?
Speaker 6:I've been monitoring the situation my whole career, you know, like I get up. I used
Speaker 2:to get up but now every day I'm now
Speaker 6:doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're professional.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Gotta I gotta find new source of edge now that we're all situation model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then and then the other thing, you know, with with Tesla, the funny thing is Yeah. You know, we're we didn't even talk about the, you know Robotaxis? No. The just the Trump Elon blow up.
Speaker 2:Oh, Yeah. Going over. And then Tesla is still down year to date 13%. But given what's actually happening with the car business and then the Elon Trump blow up, you'd you would think you'd be bigger than that. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 6:That's there there's something to be said. You know, the alternate view of this is, yes, it is a great time for volatility and there's plenty to trade. It's also been a good time for the sort of buy and hold people who actually have a life because they you know, the it's like, oh, buy make your investments and maybe check-in once a year or sick every six months.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They could unfortunately, those people who are very obnoxious when they say that, because I certainly don't do that, but they're very it's very obnoxious when people say that, unfortunately, they keep getting vindicated. Yeah. That actually, you should just have a life and not check-in on the market every five minutes. Yeah. Unfortunately, they're right.
Speaker 6:And that is sort of also the weird part, which is that they keep the passive the passive bros are still doing are still doing well.
Speaker 1:I mean, you probably saw the Lakers $10,000,000,000 biggest sports franchise ever. But if you look at the rate of return over the thirty year period, it just didn't quite beat just the average of the S and P.
Speaker 6:That's the thing. They're so just buying and holding the S and P and literally doing nothing continues to be such an insanely good people would all I sometimes wonder. I've asked this question on the podcast. Why does the financial industry exist? The answer is not entirely obvious to me because there's all the no.
Speaker 6:For real. Like, because there's all these people and all they do is spend all this time getting learning the minutiae of every stock, this or that or whatever, and yet you could do just fine. In fact, better than fine, some incredible returns by essentially doing none of that. It's still not obvious to me why any of us really have any
Speaker 2:It was a simulation created for Jane Street to win at. Yeah. You know? And just dominate.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Exactly right.
Speaker 2:How any any are you getting who who do you think is really smart on trying to understand the impact of autonomous vehicles, robo taxis? We are in this interesting dynamic. We saw the Austin rollout. Was it Sunday or I think it was Monday morning, we had a guy call into the show Yeah. From a robo taxi seems to be working in a limited area.
Speaker 2:And then the potential there, you know, Waymo's vehicles are $200,000. Mhmm. They're teleoperated today. We don't really know what's going on under the hood at Tesla. But but still it just feels like something that can have this, you know, enormous impact on different aspects of the economy and Yeah.
Speaker 2:It doesn't feel like
Speaker 6:This feels like I would say, like, autonomous vehicle seems like one of those things. I I was comparing it a little bit to the state of the mobile Internet in, 02/2004. Right? Where, like, where we all sort of knew that it was coming, but it was kinda janky. And remember, you know, oh, do you get do you get access to three g here or what?
Speaker 6:Remember there used to be competing standards?
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 6:yeah. We didn't really know, and it was sort of a bad now the user experience going into a Waymo is obviously a religious experience, but it's patchy and you don't know and you can you get to x or y? But then it changed the world. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:So then fast forward ten years later from 2005 to say 2015, and it's clear that the mobile Internet literally just changed the entire world in a way that'll never be the same. I think that's the same with AVs where it's like, okay. It's oh, that's interesting what they're doing in San Francisco. That's interesting. Okay.
Speaker 6:Austin is and then in a few years from now, we're gonna have to just completely rethink how cities are structured because of autonomous vehicles. It feels like actually for as much hype as they're getting, they probably should be getting more because in my mind, they could, like, potentially rethink everything about how we structure a city or how we do commutes or how far out from your job you're willing to live if you're able to, like, be on your phone the entire time of the drive. So bigger I think it's gonna be almost a bigger deal than people currently appreciate even with all the hype it's getting.
Speaker 2:Thanks a Last question from my side. We've seen Meta making some crazy talent acquisition deals, you know, spending being willing to spend a $100,000,000 for somebody that will never Yeah. Have a public face, right? You know, a researcher all the way up to, you know, billions of dollars for individual talent. Is there much precedent for that in the have hedge fund deals gotten into the billion dollar territory at any point we've heard about?
Speaker 6:So You do yeah. There are. You know, the it's actually interesting. To my mind, Emily Sundberg, who you've had on the show before, had a really interesting thing talking about the media and how media is becoming like sports where individuals who have a big name are sign you know, signing these big deals or leaving their firms and going independent, etcetera. It feels like this is gonna be the story of all industries.
Speaker 6:Right? So whether we're talking about hedge funds, whether we're talking about AI researcher, whether we're talking about journalists, etcetera, where there's just gonna be this even further extreme bifurcation where individual talent is just gonna get paid so much because they can accrue so much value. It feels like that is the story of our time.
Speaker 2:Like, the question is what
Speaker 6:what industry isn't that hap yeah.
Speaker 2:What industry isn't that happening? Well, Tim Cook can't even crack 75,000,000 a year.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's
Speaker 6:poor Tim.
Speaker 2:Poor Tim. We've talking about this all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it's a good time to be in the news business then. It's a
Speaker 2:good time to be It's a
Speaker 6:great time.
Speaker 1:It's a great time. And thanks for joining. Anytime. Anytime. Maxine.
Speaker 1:Is my so much fun.
Speaker 2:Minutes on the show.
Speaker 1:It's the best.
Speaker 6:Thank you so much. I love it.
Speaker 1:Well, take care.
Speaker 2:Talk soon, Joe.
Speaker 1:Bye. Bye. If you're looking to get it on the action in the finance world, which maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, maybe you just wanna go along the S and P 500, get on public.com. Investing for those, take it seriously. They got multi investors
Speaker 2:to take it seriously.
Speaker 1:Industry leading yield. They're trusted by millions. And next up, we have Alex Atala from Open Router on the show talking about foundation models, who's using what. How you doing, Alex? Great to meet you in person.
Speaker 1:You might not know this. We went through the same YC batch. YC winter sixteen.
Speaker 8:Which company?
Speaker 1:Lucy. Lucy nicotine. Yeah. Similar to what you were building back then. It makes sense.
Speaker 1:But I remember seeing your pitch. And I remember everyone kinda thinking like, oh, that'll never be a thing. Like like most YC things
Speaker 2:Is that the same company or a different company?
Speaker 1:That that was the previous company. Okay. Cool. OpenSea.
Speaker 8:That was OpenSea.
Speaker 1:Which became Oh. The dominant NFT marketplace and and and absolutely took over the world.
Speaker 2:How did I miss that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's
Speaker 2:You can tell how much research we do on
Speaker 1:the past appearances.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 7:great to
Speaker 2:have you on, Alex.
Speaker 8:It's great to be here. Thanks for thanks for hosting me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I, why don't you kick us off with, I'm I'm interested in the introduction on OpenRouter, but specifically the business model because it's a fascinating place to sit in the AI infrastructure stack, and I can imagine a bunch of ways value will accrue. But how how are you either currently or planning to make money?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So we're you can kind of think of us as a control plane for language models, like a Stripe meets Cloudflare for language models. So, like, both of those companies, we orchestrate and route traffic to the best GPU host for you based on the type of model that you want, your price preferences, your performance needs, where you are in the world. And so it's kind of like a one stop shop for all the models where you get, like, the most models, the best prices, best performance, highest uptime. A lot of these models are down a lot of the time, so load balancing is just needed.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 8:Goes through, like, intelligence brownouts
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Like Harpavi's been saying. And and so we you need you need some way of of keeping the utility, like, lit
Speaker 1:up. Yep.
Speaker 8:A lot of apps will just, like, rely on a 100% available intelligence.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:So we you can pay you you like, users pay us directly. We sometimes do volume with different providers
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:So that we can get good volume economics
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:On the supply side. And and then and we kind of make money mostly there.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about what Microsoft is doing in the category. Satya Nadella at Build was talking about something around model routing, and they also have this unique deal with OpenAI where it seems like they will be able to hold on potentially to that as an API on the cloud infrastructure side, and we might not see OpenAI GPT four, CP 4.5 vended through, say, AWS or GCP. How is that relationship? Or do you sit on top of all of that? Are you kind of indifferent to it?
Speaker 1:Or how or or how is it playing out there?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So unlike most other resources and software, AI is pretty unique. It's it's a battleground with lines being drawn around the models, and and the models are just not available in all clouds. Like, Gemini is only available in Google Cloud, obviously. And and you have Anthropic, which is available in AWS and Google Cloud, but not Azure.
Speaker 8:And then you have Grok, which is available in Azure Yeah. And directly from X, but not Google Cloud. And and, like, nobody can keep this these things in like, the top of their head, and no one can track them. We track them, and we sort of allow you to, like, orchestrate across all of the clouds
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:So that you can get all the models in one place. So it it I do I'd see this continuing where, basically, the the war draws these lines around the models, and, and no one collab will have them all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What companies should I understand in order to understand this business? I feel like if I was throwing something out, I would say Snowflake, but I don't know if that's at all relevant. So feel free to steer me in a different direction. But I I'm interested in this idea of a of a company that sits across the hyperscalers and and does not necessarily just load balancing, actually you mentioned Cloudflare, but it feels like Cloudflare has a lot of their own infrastructure, their own data centers.
Speaker 1:I'm interested in a company that has built large durable business on top of GCP, Azure, AWS, etcetera? Yeah.
Speaker 8:Good question. I don't know of an exact analogy that fits that. We're a bit of a unique player. But Cloudflare, I mean, started as a as only a layer on top of all the clouds.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:It it was like a plug and play safety net
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:To prevent you from from, like, denial of service attacks and to turn on, like, security for for, like, any web app. And OpenRouter started in a different way, like, as a way of just amplifying supply and choice for people. But in a similar fashion, we add, like like, more complexity of it to the compute layer that we provide before it hits the the clouds themselves.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Are there things that you're I I wanna know about the different models, capabilities, what the different labs are working on. And I'm wondering if there's a like, what are the important design criteria or or what do you need to think through if you are doing this type of load balancing? Like, I'm imagining if I'm if I if I'm serving an app that's built primarily on, let's call it Claude, and then all of a sudden it fails and there's a brown out and it rolls over to Grok. And all of a sudden, like, I'm now in, like, the anti woke world and, like, the the the the flavor of the model has changed.
Speaker 1:I could probably do some prompt engineering to kind of get them onto a similar standard or looking at if I'm using a million token context window, with Gemini and then I'm falling over to something with a 100,000, token context window, I might need to do some chunking then. And so what on the engineering side are you seeing people doing either with prompt engineering or just throwing a four loop around something to kind of actually make the different products identical from an end user perspective?
Speaker 8:So we we very rarely see people fall back to a completely different model.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:Usually, the the load balancing that we do is for a a specific model.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 8:But we kind of orchestrate between, like, between two and sometimes 20 different providers for it.
Speaker 1:Vendors of this model. That makes sense.
Speaker 8:Right. But the second half of the question that you asked is more is much more interesting to us because we there are even for one model, there are, like, providers that provide all different kinds of context lengths, max output constraints
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Features. Some support tool calling. Some don't. Some support structured outputs with a JSON schema allowed. Some only allow you to output a JSON object, but no schema is allowed.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's it's like a really crazy wild west that we're just trying to tame in one spot. So, we have, I would say, the fundamentals live
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:With a lot more to come, which basically just allows you if you send a really big prompt, then we only send you to the providers that support big prompts.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:If you want a whole ton of output, we only send you to a provider that can actually, like, fit that much output in your request. And if you want both of those things and JSON and some crazy features that nobody's that nobody supports
Speaker 3:Yeah. We give you a heads
Speaker 8:up that it's not gonna go anywhere.
Speaker 1:Got it. So
Speaker 8:more to come to help with that, but that is, like, our bread and butter. That's what we're good for.
Speaker 1:Can you, give me kind of your state of the union on how the different labs are positioned? You know, some people think of Anthropic as the safety focused one, and, you know, it seems like Zuck is kind of in a rebuilding phase of the LAMA project. Grok's been showing a lot of promise, maybe not on the cutting edge, but this very interesting stalking horse for the other labs. OpenAI seems to be running away with it on the consumer side, but b to b is a little bit more of a bidding war. So how do you see the market right now?
Speaker 1:What are you recommending to different Yeah.
Speaker 3:Entrepreneurs that
Speaker 1:are building on these What's what's services?
Speaker 2:You guys have probably one of the most interesting data sets Yep. In AI. And you publish a lot of it yourself. Yep. Some some, you know, companies opt in to to sharing their data.
Speaker 2:So I'm interested to hear where, you know, even about kind of like disconnects between like attention that certain companies are getting and maybe valuations and then the realities of sort of usage. Right? So like one of the most popular companies on open router right now is is Klein. She's a coding agent and I'd never actually heard of them. We haven't had them on the show yet.
Speaker 2:And so that that was kind of a surprise. But but anyways, kind of interested to get your your take on all that at a high level.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So Kline is for those who don't know, it's similar to Cursor, but it allows you to bring all open router models to it. And, and they they invest a lot in in making all models work really well. The the our approach to helping people choose models is kind of a do it yourself DIY research approach for the most part. We have a router that you can use that will pick the model that that we think your prompt is best suited for.
Speaker 8:But right now, what we see most people doing is go into our rankings page or go into that the home page. You when you mentioned that Klein is is one of the top apps, those are all apps that have opted into Yeah. Being shown publicly. You can just click on one of those apps like Klein. Click on right now, and you can see Sonnet three seven is the top model this month, followed by Sonnet four, followed by two point Gemini, 2.5 Flash.
Speaker 8:As you can just see what the what the what users are doing. And in practice, what this means is you're seeing what power users are doing because power users consume exponentially more tokens than everybody else. So the the the principle here is to let people learn from power users because power users are just investing the most time and money into this. This is why tokens, I think, are a good way of measuring now because they're it's both a measure of time and money that users are investing in the models. So to answer your first question, we we generally we generally don't, like, directly recommend but we'll we'll we'll, like, work with some customers and understand their ideas and, like, recommend models that way, and it's usually very specific based on, like, the kind of workload, the, you know, the the amount they wanna spend, the their tolerance for for performance and speed.
Speaker 8:But what a lot of people do is they just check our rankings page. They look for apps that are similar, and then they pick the ones that are trending or Yep. Popular.
Speaker 1:Makes a ton of sense. I would love to have you back on when there's another big model release. I'm sure you are a endless source. I mean, I imagine even, like, hedge funds would reach out to you for, like, hey. Is this model getting adopted quickly?
Speaker 1:I'm sure a lot of the data's open source so you can grab it. But this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. Have to have you back to chat more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see you again soon. Models.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:good one. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you later. Really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 1:And breaking news, TPPN will have a few billboards going up in Manhattan very, very soon. And so
Speaker 2:Campaign rolling out with Adquick over the summer. Over the summer campaign. Very excited about billboard campaign.
Speaker 1:Well, we have our next guest in the studio, Clem from Conduit. Welcome to the stream. And there's someone with you. Would you mind both introducing yourself? How are guys doing?
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 1:You're live.
Speaker 10:I think we're mixed up here.
Speaker 2:They're the next guests. They're the next guest. Oh, This is the Orca team.
Speaker 4:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:I was like, are these guys in the same place?
Speaker 1:Sorry. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Let's just do it live.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're booking these folks back.
Speaker 2:You guys are here. Let's go. Let's give it up for the Orca team.
Speaker 10:We Thank you for having
Speaker 1:us. Yeah. Thank you. This is the Orca team. We have had we've talked about you multiple times on the show.
Speaker 1:Goated marketers. You've go goated marketers. We've both worked in consumer packaged goods. Very excited to talk about the product. Why don't you give us the update, introduce the company, introduce yourselves, and break us down for how things are going?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I'm Michael. This is Nash. We we make orca. It's an energy water packaged in this
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. Their can. Stunning. Yeah. We we started because
Speaker 10:we were solving problem with energy drinks
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 10:Which is that they all tasted like candy to us and really sweet. And after drinking them every morning for years, we were like, why can't we just take all the caffeine and put it in water? And so that started us on our journey two years ago. It took us a really long time to put it in this can, which we've covered on Twitter, and it's gone kinda viral. The Wall Street Journal wrote wrote about it.
Speaker 10:I think that's that's how you guys find out about us probably. We launched on Amazon finally in March of this year, and things have gone a lot better than we anticipated, a lot quicker than we anticipated. And so now we're in the middle of a fundraise and sort of looking to hit the ground running here.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Isn't it strange with consumer packaged goods? You're like, the company's ripping, but you're like you're like, wait. Why are we like, why does it feel like we're going broke? Because we need to buy so much inventory.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's, it's tough.
Speaker 1:Getting paid in terms supplier will be in queue.
Speaker 2:Give us give us a quick backstory on making making it. I I feel like you people love the packaging and then you've also caught heat for it online for
Speaker 1:people who Did you invent it yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did
Speaker 1:you invent this in a cave with a box of scraps?
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of people that have never built
Speaker 1:anything. Standing on the shoulders of giants. They hate standing on the shoulders of giants. Yeah.
Speaker 11:We, from the offset, we knew that the product had to be in clear packaging
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 11:Because we wanted to show the consumer what was inside
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 11:Compared to our competitors. And when we saw the clear can, we were like, this is it. It's perfect. It's shaped like an energy drink. You can see what's inside.
Speaker 11:It it tells the story of the product, like, right off the bat. And we had started actually teasing it online before we launched and, like, saw that it was going viral. And so when we had all these manufacturing issues and, like, spent a full year and tons of money and time trying to figure it out, that was our north star. We knew, like, if we can if we can figure this out, it's the perfect packaging.
Speaker 1:And so Yeah. So you stayed away from I I imagine there were off the shelf clear bottles available from, like, you know, Fiji or Dasani. Like, there's probably an industrial complex for just clear plastic bottles.
Speaker 2:Just regular bottles of water.
Speaker 1:Yes. Just regular bottles of water. But you wanted something that fit the energy drink kind of shape and dimensions. Is that were you thinking about, like, if you get into a convenience store, you need to slot into the same form factor as, like, Red Bull and Celsius? Because I feel like it's always hard when you come in.
Speaker 1:Oh, we we we have a really cool square can.
Speaker 2:You wanna innovate, but not too much.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think a lot of it was just identifying what category, like, the category plays in that from the beginning, and we kinda think of ourselves as creating a new category, which is energy water. And so we were thinking about the packaging. We thought that well, we knew we wanted it to be clear, we thought that a normal water bottle would be too far in the water direction.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:And a can normal can would be too far in the energy drink direction. So this was, like, the natural perfect middle ground that, like, Nash said, just you see it and get what the what the product is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You also don't want confusion if somebody picks up it and they think, oh, this is just a nice refreshing bottle of water. Like, they might people might be okay if, like, oh, it's sparkling. But if there's a hundred milligrams of caffeine in there, you're like, what the hell?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk talk about the marketing strategy to date. I I remember seeing one one of your campaigns, which was this was the guy just reading off the the signs. Right? Am I right there?
Speaker 2:Is that an
Speaker 11:Corbin Bleu. Not just any guy.
Speaker 1:Not just any guy. Yeah. Yeah. What? Like, that was the wildest give yeah.
Speaker 1:Break that down. How'd that come together? Give us all the numbers. Like, what was the result? If you could share, like, how yeah.
Speaker 1:Anything about that, we'd appreciate that.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think we're just kinda trying to do stuff differently from a marketing standpoint. And so, like, when we when we were thinking about the launch video and did research on, like, what makes a successful launch video, it was, like, very short to the point Mhmm. Optimized for conversion, whatever. And we're like, alright.
Speaker 11:Like, what would the exact opposite of that be?
Speaker 1:This is gonna
Speaker 11:be having Corbin Bleu list road signs for nine minutes.
Speaker 1:So,
Speaker 11:yeah, we're we're
Speaker 2:Have you guys won any awards for that yet?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like this could be, like, ad week or, like, some sort of, like, ad ad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Big ad probably hates you guys because you're you're tearing up the rule book. You know? You're throwing it out.
Speaker 3:It's great.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Similarly, on our Amazon page, if you go to our Amazon and just scroll down, instead of, like, a like, a brand section, it's just a full exploration of Napoleon's withdrawal from Moscow and
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 10:And so we've been meeting with, like, Amazon agencies that we're about to bring on, and they're like, you know, love what you're doing here, but maybe not the most optimal. Like, we can we
Speaker 1:can This is hilarious. Wow.
Speaker 2:Like, you don't understand. We're we're Just pull this up immediately. Level. Yeah. Pull it up.
Speaker 1:Pull this up right now. This is great.
Speaker 2:So what so what what you you guys cooking I mean, it's it's, like, great when you go viral, you have a good idea. It hits, and then the attention fades. You kinda just have to figure out how to keep are you guys, like, working on building that muscle of of how do we do this kind of thing multiple times a year? What does that look like?
Speaker 11:Definitely. And and a big part of the raise is building revenue we can scale. So, like, online advertising. So, like you said, we don't have to hope that we go viral every week, and then launching into retail here in Southern California.
Speaker 1:Speaking of muscle, who's that behind you? Where where are you guys? That's such a funny mural.
Speaker 10:We are, we're in the attic
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:Of our house. We've got three roommates. Nash lives downstairs. I sleep in that bed. This is an influencer named Jake Shane.
Speaker 10:We sent influencer gift packages. We sent a case of Orca and then, like, an AI photo of their dad jacked. Just we sent we sent him jacked, but he was out of town. And so we just kept it. We're
Speaker 1:like, we just keep it.
Speaker 3:That's great. Breaking through.
Speaker 2:Good. Good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Most people think, oh, yeah. I use AI mark to market and it's like, oh, you chopped up your b roll a little bit. This isn't why
Speaker 2:What were you guys doing before this? Yeah.
Speaker 11:We were both in tech. We were we were buddies at Georgetown. Yes.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's go. Let's give it up for big tech.
Speaker 2:You said buddies where?
Speaker 11:Georgetown College.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Amazing. But we gotta get some here in the studio. We've been I mean, this is Yes. I yeah.
Speaker 2:We'll do it
Speaker 1:I mean We wanna crush
Speaker 2:it. John can choose.
Speaker 8:We were on
Speaker 10:the show before you tasted it because I know
Speaker 1:appreciate it.
Speaker 10:You're you're unbiased, but I know that that can play a factor.
Speaker 2:Well, now we're biased because we like you guys.
Speaker 1:We're have to give a positive. These are turning to the fact that that, Matayina yuromate tastes like it was made by someone.
Speaker 2:This is the only category A new tonic. Of of, like, partner that we don't have exclusives on. We don't. We we we just, we're connoisseurs of energy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Energy connoisseurs.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like how The Economist the back of The Economist is a different high horology, a different watch brand every single every single edition. Every single show should have a different energy drink percolating through the show. We love it. But thanks so much for coming on, guys. We will talk to
Speaker 2:you soon. Yeah. Good luck with the race.
Speaker 1:Good luck with the fundraise. Good luck with distribution.
Speaker 2:Hopefully see you guys around LA sometime.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll see
Speaker 2:you soon. Thanks, Later. Bye.
Speaker 1:We are working on bringing on more people, but let's go to the timeline and let's do some ads. Let's tell you about Wander.
Speaker 2:Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 1:Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a
Speaker 2:vacation I have funny story.
Speaker 1:Please. This
Speaker 2:is 100% the truth. My first thought this morning was you reading the Wander at. Really? It's so drilled into my brain.
Speaker 1:It's incredibly
Speaker 2:That I just woke up and I and I and my first thoughts was find your happy place, book a wander
Speaker 1:with inspiring use, hotel great amenities.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:like goes tough to play. Oh, no. You know, it really runs in my dreams at this point. You're say it so fast. And and I was I was talking to Yannick over at public.com and he was he was like like, no one can read ad reads faster than John.
Speaker 1:Because I read them really really fast now. And I was like I was like, tell me like show me a man who says that they skip the TBPN ad reads and I'll show you a liar. Impossible. I think it's impossible.
Speaker 2:By the time you get to your phone,
Speaker 1:it can across the room. Finger on the trigger. I will be done before the finger hits the glass.
Speaker 2:And then you skip real content.
Speaker 1:And then you skip real content.
Speaker 2:And you lose.
Speaker 1:Like like speaking of real content, Nvidia hit an all time high. Let's go. The GOAT. He's been to conferences. He's done deals all over the world.
Speaker 1:He's bringing AI factories to different countries. He's selling GPUs to gamers. He's selling GPUs to foundation model companies, and he's at a new all time high. We love to see it. We wanted to go through the archives.
Speaker 1:Jensen Huang visited Greg Brockman and brought the first NVIDIA DGX h 200 to in the world, hand delivered to OpenAI and and dedicated by Jensen to advance AI computing and
Speaker 2:The hype the hype market here is is brutal. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:It's a picture
Speaker 1:of us. Dude, I guess. Yeah. And then the other news around NVIDIA is that they've launched DGX Lepton Cloud, which now connects Europe's developers to global GPU compute. It's kind of like
Speaker 2:A technology win for Europe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but Lepton is, you know, at one lower level abstraction than OpenRouter. So OpenRouter's routing you to all the models, but if you have a model, you need to serve it on GPUs, how can you get that how can you get GPU capacity all over the place? This is one of the options now and
Speaker 2:it's Semi analysis has story. Today at GTC Paris, Jensen Huang announced DJX Lepton with the goal of effect to of effectively commoditizing inference compute at global scale. This means customers will be able to automatically shift their inference workloads through different clouds while in theory maintaining the same software user interface and experience. If DJX Leptin is successful, they have created a standard user experience value and performance across all Neo Cloud which will lead to Neo Clouds being in a rat race on pricing. It will effectively turn
Speaker 1:Neo Cloud margins into ultra low commodity
Speaker 2:You know how
Speaker 1:It's unclear.
Speaker 2:Semi analysis is, you know how it's handwritten? Yeah. There's always he throws in some grammatical errors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let you know that it's not Just let know
Speaker 2:it's handcrafted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, obviously, we're seeing with the with the neo clouds a lot of different strategies around, are they going after energy or are they going after stranded energy like what Crusoe does? Or are they really focused on just building capacity faster? And so, yes, DGX Lepton is trying to be the aggregator of supply and then be the front door, but this is a story that is is evolving. The Wall Street Journal has some story here, covering it, saying it's ruffling tech giants.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA is ruffling the tech giants with moving to cloud computing. Things are getting awkward.
Speaker 2:Cloud incumbent. Ruffling sound effect. Ruffling. This will do in the meantime.
Speaker 1:For cloud incumbents as the AI chip giant eyes their turf. Cloud computing generates big profits for amazon.com, Microsoft, and Google. We know this from AWS, Azure, and GCP. Now that cash cow faces a nascent threat with the rise of artificial intelligence cloud specialists and a new industry power broker NVIDIA. AI chip maker NVIDIA launched its own cloud computing service two years ago called DGX Cloud, but they've been improving it.
Speaker 1:It has also nurtured upstarts competing with the big cloud companies and investing in AI cloud players CoreWeave and Lambda. We've had Lambda on the show. We've had Chase from Crusoe on the show. Gotta get CoreWeave on the show at some Maybe all of them at once for a big Neo Cloud day. That'd be fun.
Speaker 1:These moves have yet to make an enormous dent, but a competitive shift is easy to imagine if computing demand continues to shift toward AI and NVIDIA remains the sector's principal arms dealer.
Speaker 2:Dylan's also saying AMD is making big moves and winning over the neo cloud ecosystem through their balance sheet at the same time NVIDIA is alienating many with TJX Leptin.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:M I three five five is great per per performance per TCO against h HGX Total
Speaker 1:partnership. But
Speaker 2:it is not rack scale unlike GB 200.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's kind of summarizing four different stories there, but the AMD thing is interesting because if AMD says, hey, we just make the chips and NVIDIA's over there like, yeah, we'll sell you the chips, but we're also gonna try and beat you at your own game. Well then maybe as a cloud provider, as Neo Cloud, you wanna start figuring out how to get on AMD before Nvidia eats your lunch and the actual cloud provide provision. Right? At the same time, AWS, GCP, these there's a ton of other services.
Speaker 1:They all have their own inference chips too. And so NVIDIA is getting squeezed by the TPU. And so GCP, Google has the TPU that competes with the h 200. Right? And that's why there's that big model context from Google.
Speaker 1:And then now NVIDIA is going and saying, hey, we got a GCP competitor Yeah. In many ways. And so those businesses are limited by their narrow focus on AI computing, referring to the neo clouds, and they pale in comparison to the more than 107,000,000,000 in sales Amazon's market leading cloud business generated last year. Let's hear it for Amazon generating a $107,000,000,000 in sales for AWS.
Speaker 2:Hit the Gong. Well
Speaker 1:We have our next guest in the studio.
Speaker 2:We have our next guest
Speaker 1:Did you
Speaker 2:hear that? Nakun with a major trade deal.
Speaker 1:Major trade let's hear it.
Speaker 2:TBPN to discuss it's great to finally have you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to finally have
Speaker 2:you on the show for
Speaker 1:We've printed your posts. We've reacted to your posts and now you're finally here. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself though?
Speaker 7:Thank you so much for having me. It's been my claim to fame is being your first under a 100 followers and What? Following your journey.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so it's it's been an honor honor to come on here. Thank you. And yeah. I I I'm Nikunja. Spent ten years building startups, everything from logistics, networking hardware, real estate, and I just joined a new fund.
Speaker 7:Okay. Thanks. Joined this fund called FPV Ventures.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 7:Awesome. Yeah. The two GPs. West that's with West Chan and Pega over the two GPs here. And, yeah, very excited to be here, after, you know, dipping into my investing foray at Coastal Ventures for a year.
Speaker 1:So Very cool. What does FPV stand for, and what is your focus at the fund?
Speaker 7:So FPV stands for founder's point of view. I think that's what kind of, like, really drew me into joining this fund. We mostly just care about, like, what the founders are doing. We're a generalist fund. We just raised our fund to, $525,000,000.
Speaker 7:Just closed a few months ago. Then we have a thank you. We have a billion dollars in management.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And it's a generalist fund, which means like, you know Cool. And they they put the money we put the money where our mouths are. We've done everything from biotech to all the way to consumer fintech Mhmm. To a rag infrastructure to anything you can kind of think of.
Speaker 7:And I think as I was kind of figuring out what I wanna do next, the world is very exciting and kind of like both atoms and bits. AI is affecting kind of every small detail and, you know, excited to be here and be a small part of the team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love a typical generalist fund says, yeah, we're generalists. We invest in enterprise software and AI, usually at the intersection.
Speaker 1:I mean, speaking of that, do you think the the the ship has sailed for the investments in the foundation model companies? Is the game over? And now we're in the vertical AI, application layer AI, consumer AI. Is that where the most interesting companies are getting started and scaled today?
Speaker 7:I think as the large models are kind of stabilizing, like, a lot of the value is in the application layer application layer because now you can kind of build on top of that. A lot of the infrastructure has has been built. And so now every company, every enterprise is kind of being like, okay. We can automate large percentages of work that can be done.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Do I think, like, a large model is kind of the shipper sailed? Unless you have, like, new completely new architectures, I do think so. Like, if every if you're just building on the transformer side, it's hard for me to be excited given the data. And from a money perspective too, you're just kind of outbid. But I'm seeing, like, a lot of small models kind of come up and more application focused models come up.
Speaker 7:I used to work a company called Meter. I know you had Anil on the on the on the podcast a couple of days ago. They just raised their knowledge around. Part of one is to build a networking model, which, you know, they control the infrastructure for, and they're partnering very closely with Microsoft. That kind of data is not available anywhere else.
Speaker 7:Right? Oh. You can't get packet data. And so I get more and more excited about that. There, like, unique data that you're capturing?
Speaker 7:And then can you translate that to efficiency? I think that's where that can still be placed and you can see outsized value. Otherwise, like, I think on the large model side, it seems a little bit hard unless there's a brand new architecture. Architecture. And I'm really excited.
Speaker 7:I've been reading technical papers trying to figure out, is there a new architecture? Is there a new transformer, like, model that will come up? So
Speaker 2:Totally. How do you think about the convergence of every company into being an app builder? You highlighted, I think, a post sometime in the last twenty four hours. Now you have Replit, Bolt, Figma
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Lovable. There's a bunch of different players. Basically, if you if a company if a big company is doing a launch and around AI, you can guess that that maybe there's 50% chance that it'll be some type of, you know, prompt based software builder. Is that do you think a lot of that, you know, it makes sense in a lot of different contexts. But at the same time, it feels like there's some FOMO element companies seeing, you know, this tremendous growth from some new players and saying, maybe we should have a a horse in that race.
Speaker 2:But but how are you looking at that market?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, Airtable announced theirs as well. If you look at Retul, they announced theirs as well a week ago. Our portfolio company, Canva, has won. I think there is there's some companies who are doing it for defense because they're seeing the replets and the boards kind of coming at it and taking a lot of their business away, especially if you have, like, you know, you can build internal tools then, like, why would you use?
Speaker 7:And so I think some some of it is coming from defense, but some of them are coming from offense because they see that they can go deeper into the workflows. From my perspective, a lot of it is for context also. Right? Like, you're able to pull in context from all these different sources, it increases your retention. You can have people do more things on there.
Speaker 7:It makes it easier for you to highlight them in one place. And I think we are we I think we all agree we're in the era of bundling. More and more companies, like and more and more enterprise want, like, one solution. They don't want to pay for, like, five different solutions, and so you're able to see all of that kind of combined there. It is it is wildly interesting to see on the sidelines.
Speaker 7:I have no predictions on kind of how it goes. The the the rise of, like, Lovable, Replit, and Board all doing such insane revenue numbers is probably, like, what's causing some people to play defense. But it just means software is just gonna keep growing and growing and spend on software is just gonna go parabolic in the next five years.
Speaker 2:Totally. How do you how do you think about, how are you looking at application layer opportunities in the context of companies like OpenAI just want, you know, having this tremendous appetite for data. Right? You know, we talked about on the show, clearly has this sort of interesting experience of this sort of being able to get the power of LLMs passively. Right?
Speaker 2:Just sort of in an interview or, you know, putting putting our intern on Clearly so he can answer random questions that we have. That feels like something that OpenAI will will, eventually, you know, if if it works, they'll wanna roll it out. How do you think of that, the kind of competitive dynamic between kind of upstart application layer companies and and some of these bigger, labs?
Speaker 7:I think it's the question, like, kind of, like, every decade you can pick up dominant incumbent and ask what if x does this. So, like, you know, everybody open the the the difference this time though is the pace is just staggering. Like, in the last few months, OpenAI has launched, a meeting with no recording notes and pulling in context. And so I think that's what's scaring people. But I do think, like, building a horizontal and vertical at the same time with deep workflows, it's just hard.
Speaker 7:It's like how many how many things can you do and then the interface becomes like a jumbled mess, and then how do you kind of do that? And so there is a lot of lot of depth in each application, each job, each vertical. There's so much to do. I don't think, like, OpenAI or a single company can capture all the value. OpenAI is uniquely positioned where they have a dominant consumer company in, like, ChatGPT and also market leading APIs.
Speaker 7:But there's Claude that has incredible APIs for Corjan as well. But, yeah, I I think there's, like, plenty of depth. I do think, like, companies that are on the edge of productivity or just building small wedges or, like, features that they don't have the founders who don't have the depth to, like, think through, like, how does this go in the next few years. I think those, as in the past, will continue to get, like, decimated by incumbents. But I still think there's so much value to be had.
Speaker 7:I mean, you just it's the the the size of the pie is too large for one company to own it. Yeah. And and I'm opening as they can stand, but I still think there's plenty to do.
Speaker 1:So How are you thinking about go to market for new AI products either in consumer or or b to b? There it feels like there's multiple strategies right now. You know, you see that cursor chart, and it's just it's aligned directly straight up because they just got to hundreds of million are they at 500,000,000 now or something? 500,000,000 ARR.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we had we had Amjad from Replodon yesterday going from 10 to a 100 in a matter of months.
Speaker 1:So fast. And then and then you see the the Clulis of the world and Avi at Friend dot com did another strategy, which was very virality driven. And so there's there's kind of two two strategies that I'm seeing pop up with the new products. One is kind of like build silently, let the product kind of just grow into this behemoth, and then everyone starts talking about it because of the growth. The other is is take over the timeline, become popular ahead of growth, and then use that to convert into subscriptions or revenue growth.
Speaker 1:Are are are you looking at both types of deals? Do you see one as kind of more of a positive signal than the other? How are you thinking about how the next generation is growing their businesses after they build something?
Speaker 7:It depends on who they're targeting. I think it is being a media arm of a company is important now. I think it's hard to, like, get away from the noise unless you are showcasing your product in some way. That's why we're seeing our timeline flooded with launch videos. But that's also getting saturated now.
Speaker 7:So I think more and more what I've been probing for these bottoms up companies that are trying to go after, like, the individual is understanding, like, hey. Where are you spending your time? Are there any channels? If you're just doing yet another Twitter launch video, then maybe that's, like, an oversaturated. Like, what are other channels?
Speaker 7:Do you go multi pronged? Are you, like, you know, are you doing local events or, like, local communities where you can kind of own it and just build such a good product that people will do? So virality in PLG has been there for ten years. It's not new. I think, like, virality on Twitter is just the newest element of it.
Speaker 7:And then and then on the enterprise side, though, and this is one of the reasons I joined FPV, like, Pega on our team, she's incredible at, like, really working with the team and understanding, like, you know, who's the ICP? What's the org chart looks like? How do you break in? Is this, a bottoms up play in the enterprise side? Are you top down?
Speaker 7:Do you need the decision maker? How do you get them in a room? Is this a burning problem? Is this not a burning problem? Where are they, like, actually evolving?
Speaker 7:Is this in budget? Is this not in budget? I think those are the questions, people need to ask. Very few companies like Cursors or, like, know, if of the world are able to break through. Like, you know, Cursor, like Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Kind of grew from the bottoms up to to the point where enterprises had to come knocking to them and said, hey. Can you build us an enterprise plan? I don't think they even had one. But that's more of a rarity, and sometimes I think people take hype on Twitter or just, like, everything needs to be PLG as the gospel, which I I don't buy that that's the only way to do business. So
Speaker 2:How are you seeing the PM role evolve? Do you have any predictions? Or or, you know, one way to make a prediction would just be to kind of identify, like, what's happening today. So I'm curious what what you're seeing.
Speaker 7:So one, I like, I never treated my PM role as a PM role. I always took GM responsibilities wherever I joined. So even at Meter, I had PNL responsibilities at OpenDoor. Like, you know, growth was my last job there, I took tried to take as much PNL responsibility. And I think if you were just, like, being a product manager and just wanna project manage and kind of just, like, you know, not do sales or not do marketing or not just kind of, like, you know, I'm a product manager and a product owner.
Speaker 7:I think that job is dead. Think you are going to be out of a job very quickly. I think it's all become a yes and. You kinda have to own multiple things and kind of treat your job as like, hey. I'm gonna sell this product.
Speaker 7:I'm gonna figure out what the marketing copy is. I'm gonna work with everyone. I do think the role of an orchestrator is what all of us will do. Like, I think more all of us are gonna have we already have, like, know, I was, like, playing with Claude Claude yesterday. I had five instances running, and I was watching TBPN.
Speaker 7:I was just, like, sending the call to him, and I was
Speaker 2:just Yeah. Nakun Nakun said, like, TBPN clips are perfectly timed with, like, you know, running basically.
Speaker 1:For us. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I I I wrote a long piece on this. I actually think sorry. It's slight tangent,
Speaker 9:but I
Speaker 7:actually think entertainment is going to have a massive ups thing because what do you do? You're for fifteen minutes. That's why x's numbers are actually through the roof. I can't like I I I can't have they don't have any like stats from them. But it's like, well, you're driving you're having an agent do the work for you.
Speaker 7:What do you do? You need a dopamine rush. You go to x. Yeah. Watch TVPN.
Speaker 7:And so I actually think that's the future. But going back to the PM side, like, on the orchestration side, PMs are excellent orchestrators. Like, maybe you kinda have to keep all of these things handing. So I think the PMs who are, like, up leveling themselves, learning what sales is, trying to figure out what marketing is, doing some of the white coding prototyping themselves, and then being the core orchestrator, I think they'll do phenomenally well. Because I think, like, most engineers you talk to, most marketers you talk to, they don't wanna deal with, people problems.
Speaker 7:They want, like, an orchestrator. But if you're, a PM who just wants to hold on to, like, I have a PRD and I'm a project manager, the work behind the work is dead. Like that is just gonna die a slow death in the next like three to five years. It'll take a while to trickle down to the larger companies. And I'm seeing it in startups.
Speaker 7:No startup is coming to me and saying like, hey, want a PM. Everyone's like, cracked engineer or cracked marketer, cracked salesperson. That's that's all they want. Nobody's asking me for like a PM today. At least to the like 50 people.
Speaker 2:What about, pricing? Are are non AI companies getting, valuation lifts just by nature of raising at the same time as this AI boom? Are, you know, are you seeing that when you're when you're kind of looking at opportunities in other categories?
Speaker 7:I I was the question, like, are are AI native companies, like, just seeing a massively
Speaker 2:high No. No. So it's very clear that, like, AI native companies are getting this massive valuation just Yeah. Lift. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you think that's benefiting sort of non AI businesses by just nature of of of investors being like, well, I just did a seed round at 60 posts.
Speaker 1:My grocery store is making 1.5% profit, but with AI could 10 x that. Who knows?
Speaker 2:But, yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious, like, you you let's say you look at some company that's doing, you know, farming focused biotech. Are they just naturally getting like a slight lift or or is maybe maybe it's too anecdotal?
Speaker 7:It it really depends. I I know that's a bullshit answer, but like I think it like some of it is kind of like how much data do you have? Like, you know, if you were we've been working on a good example is case text. Right? Like, case text spent eight years figuring out the perfect case text law and GPT 3.5 came in and they just like skyrocketed.
Speaker 7:Yep. And so I think a lot of investors that trying to look outside of purely AI native mostly to understand, are there things are there, like, built in brand reputation, data reputation, things you've done in the past that allow you to then kind of layer AI on top as an accelerant? And I think those could be good to go invest in and sometimes help bring in the talent that can help do them. Or it's like, you know, the atoms world physical world still has a lot of alpha. It's still out there.
Speaker 7:I think, like, you know, I think software as that gets democratized. There's a lot of things happening. That's why in bio and robotics and, like, manufacturing supply chain, like, robots in the field, you're gonna see a lot of people, a lot of excitement there because they see that's the next world that's kind of incoming. The problem with venture is momentum backed. And so as a venture investor, you want to see, like, that inflection points.
Speaker 7:And sometimes if you're not AI native, and one of the hard discussions is like, well, they're a great company. We're seeing some inflection, but we're not sure yet. And if you're not gonna see the inflection, then it's hard to be a venture backed company today. That's showing up in the series a that or in, you know, the I don't like the word, but the zombie concept we're seeing from the last few years.
Speaker 9:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And thanks for helping get Alex on who's coming on next.
Speaker 7:It was amazing.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:You for having
Speaker 2:Yeah. And congratulations. I'm I'm super excited for you in the new role.
Speaker 7:Thank you.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. Soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Get bezel.com. Shop over 20,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. And let's bring in our next guest, Alex.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:How are you? Alex.
Speaker 4:Great to hear. Sorry that I was really involved.
Speaker 2:No. Yeah. You're like the most online founder yet for two hours there. You were
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also doing some
Speaker 4:regular It's a it's a flex. Leaving you on a wreck.
Speaker 2:Congratulations on the acquisition. Break break give give us some quick background on you and Superlocal and then and then the deal, and and then I'm sure we'll get into a bunch of stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, I I guess I built Superlocal for a while. We we build a a bunch of products. I mean, initially, was just me working on on one thing totally unrelated. But in in sort of, like, the last iteration, super local is or is a very personalized map. So you can kind of imagine it like Google Maps and Chatuchu tea had a baby with some OG Foursquare vibes sprinkled in.
Speaker 4:And, I mean, that basically means it does three things. Like, it has, it automatically maps all the places you've been, so your map just populates without you doing anything. You can also check-in, like, that's the OG Foursquare part, and then that sort of builds you a persona or, like, the automatic stuff builds you persona, like, where we understand who you are by the places you go to. Like, MyMap knows that I don't really like Starbucks. I'd rather go to Menatis in Venice.
Speaker 4:So it knows, like, that's my personality. So when I search for places, it takes that into account.
Speaker 2:Awesome. How did the Foursquare deal come about? Had you known the team for a while? Was it the kind of thing where you were, you know, friendly with the CEO and and it just made sense at some point? What what did that look like?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I I've known them for a while. I don't Then it just came up, and then I thought it was a good idea.
Speaker 2:Nice. And so you're May you're you're continuing to to scale super local?
Speaker 1:Are are are we happy about the acquisition? Are we ringing the go? Oh,
Speaker 4:yeah. No.
Speaker 2:So there
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 4:I obviously obsessed with Foursquare since I dedicated, like, the last five years. Congratulations. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So what how does how does Superlocal fit into Foursquare's overall strategy going forward? You're continuing to operate it independently?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, we're just operating exactly like we used to. I mean, that's, like, the current thing. We're just building what I was building before, but without, like, the constant fear of potentially always dying as a company.
Speaker 1:Amazing. What what what are the what are the business models that work here now? The the story of Foursquare was, like, it's gonna be the next Facebook, and it's gonna be just an ad network. Then there were stories about, you know, targeting for advertising. That seemed like a good model.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you could just pay for the app and subscribe. There's a whole bunch of different business models. What do you think is most promising over the next few years in this category?
Speaker 4:You mean, I I know, like, they're they're mainly focused on their b two b stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So I I don't know as much about, like, the b two b side. So I'm basically just focused on growing our consumer app.
Speaker 1:And what do well, yeah, what what are you bullish on on the consumer side? Like because some I mean, this is happening in the context of AI. Like, there's a lot of people on the $20 plan for ChatGPT. A lot of people use the free version. Some people are on the $200 plan.
Speaker 1:Google has a $500 plan. So there's clearly a willingness to spend on consumer AI apps that are just on your phone. At the same time, advertising is undefeated. It's one of the greatest business models ever. And if you can get to scale, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:So how do you see this playing out for you?
Speaker 4:I mean, I I feel like PlaySearch actually has maybe, like, some of the easier monetization in general because, like, if we have, like, hotel search, things like that, there's, like, pretty good ways to make money from, like, Expedia by booking people out. I mean, we we've done stuff with subscriptions, and they've actually done quite well. But that was actually before we had any AI AI search things in it. They always did rather well just to, like, little gamification features. So I know that'd be a cool thing to scale.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Things like that. Think it's kind of
Speaker 1:like How are you thinking about the cost side of the business? I feel like the reason that we wound up in the paradigm of, like, $20 ChatGPT subscriptions is because the GPUs are on fire. And we talked to George Hots and he was like, I OpenAI is losing money on me because inference cost is actually material as opposed to, you know, database queries which are essentially free at you know, for an individual user. Has has your AI bill ever been stressful?
Speaker 4:No. Not really. But I guess it's also another advantage of place search. It's not like you need a new place every day. So it's like, like, I would never like, your app technically is, like, a just purely, like, DAU app.
Speaker 4:I feel like it's probably, like, weekly, monthly whenever you actually need a place, and that's that's not that frequent. I mean, I think it depends on, like, the city. Like, I'm sure in New York City people look for places more than LA and things like that. But
Speaker 1:Foursquare's a pretty famous New York company. Are you moving out there? Stay are you in LA now?
Speaker 4:Oh, no. I'm gonna move to San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Same as this guy.
Speaker 4:A month or so.
Speaker 2:What are you gonna do without Airwon?
Speaker 4:I know. I I even have my Airwon water right here from this morning.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:He's committed. Committed. I would always run into him when I when I lived in Venice. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I see him all the time.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Awesome, DuBull. Congratulations. Congrats. And, yeah, I I wanna see like over time the feature on Super Locals, like you basically can like remove the fog from the world. So Yes.
Speaker 2:You can basically see like how like a video game basically.
Speaker 1:I know I know the guy who posted that. Aiden. He posted that original viral image that went super viral of of the fog of war on Google Maps, and people were talking about building it. I I
Speaker 4:We had it before that, actually. You did? That was super random feature we built. Like, we were
Speaker 1:in another better place.
Speaker 4:We were, like, a butcher's daughter, and one of our engineers brought it up. He just made it over the weekend, and they they just crushed it.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 4:Unexpected thing that did really well.
Speaker 1:I love that. Yeah. Bringing in, like, almost a little bit of, like, the wonder of, Pokemon GO and and kind of IRL virtual experiences like that's
Speaker 2:It's crazy how little the map would change because we
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Leave home.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Go to work.
Speaker 2:Go to the gym.
Speaker 1:Come back.
Speaker 2:Get breakfast. Go to the studio. Go home. Let's just do that over and over and over.
Speaker 1:Just the pogbores just like the pipe on the one freeway that we go on. It's a circle.
Speaker 2:Come right back. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining, Alex. Congratulations, and hope to have you on again soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Better rest of the day.
Speaker 1:Have a good How did you sleep last night? I I put up decent numbers. I think I might have you beaten. I'm up from yesterday. Remember yesterday was an 82 for me.
Speaker 1:Today, 87.
Speaker 2:I did terrible.
Speaker 1:Get that Ashton Hall sound effect ready. 87 for John.
Speaker 2:I did terribly. My
Speaker 1:son. 3% quality, 81% consistency, six hours and fifty one minutes.
Speaker 2:I love my son.
Speaker 1:How'd you do? Well well, give us the number. Don't hide it. Don't hide it. You're trying to dodge it.
Speaker 1:Seven. Oh, well, it hasn't showed today. I thought you put up a great show. I thought
Speaker 2:you really put up a great I didn't let it get in the way.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 2:I it was funny this morning because the my son decided at 4AM Yeah. That that sleeping was over. Obviously, got in bed. But then the issue is is is my bit my side of the bed was heating up as like the heat alarm clock. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is just once you
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Use it. To eightsleep.com. Use code TBPN.
Speaker 2:And but he started realizing that like my side of the bed was just like really warm.
Speaker 1:Oh, cozy. Yeah. And so he
Speaker 2:just like kicked me off bed until I was like, okay.
Speaker 1:I told you my four year old, I I had to text Matteo, the CEO of Eight Sleep. Make my my my four year old has demanded an Eight Sleep. I'm not kidding. And, you know, hopefully, there's news to share there soon. But we I I I might I might get him one, a big one, and just wrap it around the edges because he's a huge fan of it.
Speaker 1:And he's he's very excited. He wants a he wants a third zone in the middle because he says that's where I sleep. We're like, nobody. That's not where you sleep.
Speaker 2:Anyway. Well, I have a post to pull up
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which we close
Speaker 2:out with. Wrap. So this is a post from Poohl Teh, The US director of federal housing. Mhmm. He said, after significant studying and keeping in line with president Trump's vision to make The United States the crypto capital of the world, today I ordered the great Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses to count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage.
Speaker 2:No way. And there's a great post here if we can get this pulled up guys.
Speaker 1:You're stacking sats.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be Rob says these mortgages are solely collateralized on fart coin.
Speaker 1:That will happen.
Speaker 2:That will I'm sure they will value meme coins slightly differently.
Speaker 1:Hopefully.
Speaker 2:And then you know the majors.
Speaker 1:Hopefully. Anyways,
Speaker 2:super fun show today.
Speaker 1:Yep. I think that's pretty much it. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 2:And if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, if you're listening there, put an ad for your business. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Then we'll read it on the show. Thank you
Speaker 2:so much for watching. Have a beautiful afternoon and evening. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow. Bye. Cheers.