Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
Today is Monday, March 3, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today. We're talking ramp fundraise. We're talking strategic crypto reserve. We're talking about TSMC potentially investing a hundred billion dollars in America.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Also, speaking of America, we landed on the moon again.
Speaker 2:We're back. Flat Earthers.
Speaker 1:We should have a Flat Earther call in. Probably not doing too well today.
Speaker 2:In shambles. In absolute shambles.
Speaker 1:Also, we're talking massive garages. Apparently, it's a trend, and the Wall Street Journal covered it. And
Speaker 2:we just had to cover it.
Speaker 1:And we had to cover it. It's people are building 6,000 square foot garages, three like, four times the size of, you know, average house in LA. Minnesota built different.
Speaker 2:Built different.
Speaker 1:We're also doing some call ins today. We got, Shiel Monat calling in at, 01:30, hopefully,
Speaker 2:and Pacific
Speaker 1:Gormick at 12:30 Pacific. And so we'll kick it off, take you through the stories, and, yeah, break it all down.
Speaker 2:Break it down, John.
Speaker 1:Break it down. Let's kick off with I gotta adjust my headphones. Too loud. When I when I get loud, it's a little bit too much.
Speaker 2:We're bringing the energy up. Let's go. Because we got some big news today.
Speaker 1:We do. Yeah. Ramp reached a new valuation, $13,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of money. It's a big number.
Speaker 1:And so Eric posts, today, Ramp reached a new valuation, $13,000,000,000. We're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur Wright. We don't invent the next iPhone or flying machine. Our job is more modest to save you time and money, so perhaps you can.
Speaker 2:And there's levels to this. They went with the Financial Times for the write ups Yeah. At this point. Right? This shows a sign of maturity Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, skipping over the, you know, typical Crunchbase Yeah. TechCrunch announcement. Very cool to see. And I like that Eric is leading, with, by being a little humble here. Right?
Speaker 2:He's saying we are the platform in which you create the next iPhone, not calling out that they're the next iPhone. And I think that's that's what you want out of a financial institution. You don't want them, you know, thinking that they're reinventing the wheel and making it all about them. Right? You just want it to sort of run-in the background.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can tell he's been, listening to a lot of David Sender's podcast. Yep. Founders Podcast because he says, we got here by taking Charlie Munger's quote to heart. Take a simple idea and take it seriously.
Speaker 1:And Sandra has literally said that to me on a phone call before. Yep. About about about podcasting. So it's a simple idea, but if you take it seriously, it can grow and grow and grow. Our simple idea, save every business time and money.
Speaker 1:In less than six years, we incorporated have saved businesses $2,000,000,000 and twenty million hours over half in the past twelve months alone. Efficiency isn't flashy, but it builds enduring businesses. Sam Walton cut Walmart supply chain down from five components to three. Henry Ford cut the time to complete a car from twelve hours to ninety three minutes. We cut the cost to buy anything from thirty minutes to thirty seconds.
Speaker 1:Ramp puts lessons of history's greatest entrepreneurs on autopilot. Ask Poshmark, who hit free cash flow goals five months early, or Anduril, who's able to focus fully on their mission, or Notion and Cursor, who maintain momentum without sacrificing control. Most companies slow as they grow. That's not happening at Ramp. We're determined it won't happen to you either as we enter the AI age.
Speaker 1:Finances going from steer assist to self driving. Expenses that categorize themselves and money that reallocates itself for higher returns. That's an interesting vision.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love going back to this simple idea. Yeah. I think every founder, usually founders start with a simple idea, and it gets dramatically more complex. Yep.
Speaker 2:And then it's a good sign if you can resimplify it down to just, like, this core core idea, and saving every business time and money is a fantastically simple idea that, they can build for decades off of that one simple idea.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:So, amazing to see, you know, I think this this round from from what we know, got done last year and and ramp has just kept, this ridiculous pace. And, I expect to see many more announcements like it this year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also interesting that, this is not a new fundraise that goes under the balance sheet. It's a secondary sale.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Essentially. And so the the structure here is, the the five year old company hit a new valuation as part of a share sale in which investors including Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, GIC, US private equity group, Stripes, and venture capitalists including Josh Kushner's Thrive, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst bought a hundred and $50,000,000 worth of employee stock. Yep. And so for early employees, they've been working for a long time. They get some liquidity, and Ramp gets to reprice the equity, which allows them to hire more people, show them that they're
Speaker 2:making money. Notably, this was above the, 2022 mark, which is a mile 7.
Speaker 1:Point $65,000,000,000 in April of last year. Yep. And, yeah. I mean, Ramp is is known for being, I would say, aggressive and high throughput on valuation and and marking the company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's something that is can often be very, very difficult to do for companies because, it can sometimes mean you're going down. And that's exactly what happened, years ago during the the kind of the interest rate hike
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And the the failure of SVB. Ramp was at 8,100,000,000.0 valuation in 2022, but dropped to a 5,800,000,000.0 a year later as higher interest rates hit consumer spending. Factors that also hit rival fintech companies such as Stripe and Klarna. Fintech obviously went through volatility given the wild swing in rates and spending across businesses and consumers. What I always thought was super interesting about this was that rip ripped off the band aid really quickly.
Speaker 1:And there are a lot of companies that didn't reprice their equity, and there was always a question of, is it a zombie corn? Which is something people were saying. But coming out and saying, hey. Yeah. Look.
Speaker 1:Like, the the market is down 50%. We're down 30%. We're still growing. We're growing into our evaluation. It's actually a very strong sign of strength.
Speaker 1:And it means that for employees
Speaker 2:Companies that fixate on a headline number
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And are trying to recruit employees based on that, you know, 2022 Yeah.
Speaker 1:Three years ago. Billion dollars.
Speaker 2:Really doesn't work well for anyone. Right? It's really difficult. Only fall for it for
Speaker 1:so long.
Speaker 2:Employees are intelligent. They figure stuff out. Yep. And, they're not going to you know, they're eventually gonna say, yeah. I'm gonna go somewhere else.
Speaker 2:Like, my equity is worth a fraction of of what it was initially priced at, and, you know, I can go join another company that's priced fairly given their traction.
Speaker 1:So And and and so they delivered on exactly that. You know, they repriced. So, sure, the employees that got in at 8.1 went down to 5.8. They they were like, but at least they had transparency on what that was worth. It wasn't zero, obviously, because there was a a round that happened at 5.8, and now it's up.
Speaker 1:And they can kind of reprice and say, okay. This is what this is this is where we're going. And so congratulations to the ramp team. We're gonna have a couple people call in and talk about, where that business is and where it's going.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So while Packie joined, he's been an early investor in the company and and covered their journey from, you know, early early days till now. And then, we're gonna have Sheila on at the end to talk specifically about just broadly the state of fintech because there was a very long, you know, roughly seven hundred days where it felt like everybody said fintech is dead. Yeah. You know, this was like a zerp trend.
Speaker 2:Totally. These business models only worked when, rates were zero. And, it's very clearly not the case, so we're excited to have him on and get his perspective about kind of the future of the category and, a lot more. Specifically, the Stripe Adyen stuff, which he covered last week as well, and we covered a bit. Yep.
Speaker 2:But looking forward to getting his thoughts there. So let's get
Speaker 1:into the rest of the show. Cool. Well, speaking of fintech, if you're looking to invest, you should go to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they have multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And speaking of other investments that you can make that the government might be making, the
Speaker 2:With your tax dollars
Speaker 1:With your tax dollars. Presenting. You pay your taxes and then, you know, the government gambles with them. In in in crypto. I mean, we might have to put on the steel hat for this one as well, and there might be a a silver lining here.
Speaker 2:We we need it. We need the steel helmet.
Speaker 1:The the the tinfoil hat.
Speaker 2:The tinfoil hat.
Speaker 1:We need all of that hats to come out today for, the story. And and
Speaker 2:the story here, the funny thing is, like, the the the real takeaway from this is that when Trump plans anything crypto related, something big is gonna happen. So first time he obviously launched the Trump coin, got everybody together, got the industry together, and said, alright. Now I have my own token.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And you guys are all sidelined because you're here in tuxedos instead of at your computers. Yep. You know, trading, and this time launching the strategic, crypto reserve or at least formally announcing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the story from Wall Street Journal is crypto prices jump after Trump announces five tokens for strategic reserve. And so Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Ripple linked XRP, and Cardano will be in this in the stockpile. And so, crypto prices surge Sunday after president Trump said he would move forward on a US crypto strategic reserve that would include Bitcoin and ether as well as three smaller and riskier tokens. So lots of fun.
Speaker 1:And, The U and The US would actually be buying these. Such an odd time to announce these things. Like, most Yep. I mean, I guess he he's he seems like he always announces things on, like, the weekend maybe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Because, like Yeah. Obviously, like, a lot of companies, they they announce their earnings after the market closes so people have maybe time to process it. Yeah. It doesn't create, like, chaos in the markets. Is that why they do that?
Speaker 2:Well, it's fascinating really because there's obviously you know, there's Bitcoin ETF now. You have MicroStrategy. There's apps that let you trade those in off hours. Right? But, ultimately, the sort of traditional financial markets are closed, and he's releasing this, you know, very market moving, news on a Sunday morning, which is, you know, it's interesting to say the least.
Speaker 2:Also, you have to look at the lead up to this. Right? His, you know, his son, Eric Trump, has been, on the timeline pumping world LibertyFi Yep. Pretty much daily. He's telling people to hodl, to buy.
Speaker 2:You know? So so they're basically you know, they they they're they've they've learned the crypto game. Right? Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I there was an interesting take, pump, obviously, like, you know, super pro crypto, But he was saying it was funny that, like, the crypto announcement happened when the market was closed. And so, like, the traditional the TradFi people couldn't participate, which is, like, kinda true. But also, a lot of the TradFi people
Speaker 2:can't Have them on chain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because they have
Speaker 2:assets that they trade with. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're they're not completely separate. Anyway, a US crypto reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden administration, said Trump in a Sunday post on his social media platform, Truth Social. I will make sure The US is the crypto capital of the world. Trump said this crypto strategic reserve will also include Solana, XRP, and Cardano. Unlike Bitcoin, which is the largest and oldest cryptocurrency, these tokens were created more recently and often by smaller teams, making them more susceptible to the wild price swings and other risks.
Speaker 1:I heard, I think it was Naval was saying, like, if your crypto has a lobbyist, it's not decentralized. Something like that, which I think is a very good take. Let's go through some price action. On Sunday afternoon, Bitcoin rose 9%.
Speaker 2:That the counterpoint to that is that a dis a a decentralized, organization could decide collectively Oh, I have to decide. Have a lobbying arm.
Speaker 1:Right? Is like Michael Sailor is like PR for Bitcoin, basically. And it's Yep. Not for any
Speaker 2:Arguably some of the most important PR. Right? Yeah. Pump is, you know, catalyst for Yeah. The ex audience
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pump too.
Speaker 2:Sailors going on CNBC Yeah. You know, getting normies,
Speaker 1:and then Yeah. It has no nothing it's still decentralized, but it also incentivizes people to do stuff. And and and that was a big that was a big push on, like, the Trump pump and the idea of, like, you know, eventually, you know, like, there are so many gold bugs in in in congress right now just because over the life of a senator, they accumulate gold, eventually. And so Yeah. And so they go into stocks and health care stocks and and industrial stocks and tech stocks, and eventually, the assets work their way into our government organizations.
Speaker 1:And so our our our representatives care about these things because they've acquired them, and our next generation of legislators will have crypto assets.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And one of the interesting things about this announcement is so it very clearly was priced in pretty effectively. Yep. Because if you went back five years ago and you told a Bitcoin maxi the US government is going to be buying Yep. Bitcoin Yep.
Speaker 2:Off their balance sheet, they would have said, oh, we're looking at a million dollars a coin. Right? Like, it just sounded it sounded like a lot of people believe this would happen, but they assume that it would come with such a massive, you know, sort of increase in the price.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And now so yesterday, it popped significantly. Popped around 10% yesterday. Yeah. But today, it's actually down, almost, seven and a half percent. So it's almost back back to 80¢ back to 87,000.
Speaker 1:80 7
Speaker 2:thousand. Which is crazy because it's basically That's crazy. Yeah. Round the the announcement is almost round tripped, and it it could be very well.
Speaker 1:I remember I remember thinking just a couple weeks ago, like like, what is the next catalyst for Bitcoin moving up? Yep. And it would have to be a massive US strategic national Bitcoin stockpile. And I think it also has to be that cascading into every other comp Yep. Every other country saying, we also need this.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so, just like there is gold at every Federal Reserve of every country, essentially. Like, they all stockpile gold. Well, I
Speaker 2:don't know if we have any left. Apparently.
Speaker 1:You gotta put on the tinfoil hat for me.
Speaker 2:Put on the tinfoil hat. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm a believer. I believe it's there, but I don't know. I wanna see it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. At the very least, I hope hopefully, they spray painted bricks. Yeah. Alluding to that.
Speaker 2:Ridiculous.
Speaker 1:So Bitcoin rose 9% from, from twenty four hours earlier to about 93,000 than you mentioned it it round tripped. What's ETH at? Can you look on public.com?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm pulling it up. I'm I'm
Speaker 1:sure up 11% to 25.
Speaker 2:13 percent. So, Eric, we gotta get Eric Trump, pumping ETH a little bit harder. Yeah. Clearly, not.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the dynamic here is absolutely wild. Like, so much of the so much of the news around World Liberty Fi, Eric Trump's project was that they were buying Ethereum with size Yeah. Presumably from the presale, but it also seemed like potentially proceeds from from Trump coin were being sort of reallocate over over there. So, I'm pulling it up right now.
Speaker 2:I'm expecting to see Eric saying hotel. Yep. Yeah. He he said it. So he said, on, February 25, he said, buy the dips.
Speaker 1:Buy the dips.
Speaker 2:And then today, he says, somebody said never fade to Eric Trump. And today, he says, you're welcome, my friend. Hopefully, I made someone's life just a little bit better. Now my advice, hold long term. And Ethereum is down, yeah, 12% today, on on, really, really a devastating blow to the Ethereum community because, you know, they've had a they've had a rough go at it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Becoming a little bit of a punchline.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, this is this is right after their conference, ETH Denver, which is one of the biggest, you know, events of the year for them. So tough go, but, you know
Speaker 1:So let's really more context and then go into the timeline. A one time Bitcoin skeptic, Trump, embraced crypto last year and made a series of big promises to the industry since returning to the White House. He has created a working group on digital assets and pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, an online drug bazaar that used Bitcoin as its payment method. Investors and analysts said that one way to build the reserve is for Uncle Sam to hold on to its stash of Bitcoin seized from cyber criminals and dark net markets. The US government holds more than a 80,000 Bitcoin worth about 18,000,000,000 based on current market prices.
Speaker 2:See, that would have been enough. Right? We could have just had the US crypto reserve be assets that were seized from criminals.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's kinda funny to be like, hey. Look. Like, it it it will effectively be burned.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, it it it any any Bitcoin that is ever seized going forward because we're probably gonna be seeing more.
Speaker 2:It's a wait. You know? Because because in the past, there's been concern that the government has been sitting over the sell button, you know, gonna just Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it would it would have been a way to potentially find sort of a through line of saying, you know, we we we believe the government should have some exposure Yep. To cryptocurrencies, but, we're not gonna be using taxpayer dollars to do that. Yep. But, alas, not not what ended up happening.
Speaker 1:It's great. Well, let's go to some reactions. We got Nick Carter. We, wanted to have him on the show, but he's tied up today. He'll probably be coming on later this week, if this is still in the news.
Speaker 1:If not, we'll get him the next time there's breaking.
Speaker 2:There'll be another headline.
Speaker 1:I'm sure something will happen. Trump. Yeah. This is for you.
Speaker 2:Trump coin number two.
Speaker 1:Let me retweet this. Repost. There we go. Today feels like a good day to repost my anti SBR article. That's the strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Speaker 1:I stand by it especially in light of the inclusion of ETH, SOL, ADA, and XRP. It's not the job of the government to run an ersatz crypto hedge fund. It's not their job to pick winners and losers. The dismay you're seeing at the inclusion of some coins confirms. If the government gets interested in crypto, it's not going to be it's not necessarily going to be good for my bags.
Speaker 1:Most conservatives and libertarians are suspicious of top down government apportionment of resources in this manner, preferring to let the private sector sort it out. I wasn't a fan of Biden's massive infrastructure spending, which I felt was extremely wasteful. And for that reason, I don't support further inclusion incursion into the private sector by the government, especially not via naked dollar issuance. Typically, the US government doesn't really intervene in markets with its monetary tools be beyond setting rates. Its role is setting the rules of the road and keeping the system stable, not aggressively deploying government funds into commodities for day trading.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, it is fascinating. This is something that, like, I feel like it's so pro tech. It's like, it really should mark the end of the story of the government being anti tech, anti crypto, and now the government's, like, so pro crypto. Yeah. But the response from, at least, our corner of x was, this is not good.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, it seems like the government is generally pro crypto because it makes a certain part of the voter base happy. Yep. The government doesn't seem to be pro crypto, and the the government acknowledges that it's a legitimate asset class now. Yep.
Speaker 2:And we shouldn't, as a country, attack it. Yep. Because the technology has real potential. And if you create a positive regulatory environment or a fair regulatory environment Yep. It could flourish.
Speaker 2:Right? And we want that we want that industry to flourish here in The United States. That being said, it does seem to date that the biggest pro crypto moves have not been, you know, the the pushback is that there's so many ways that you could argue that that they're sort of conflicted moves. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. Even even Sachs was was facing a lot of blowback yesterday on x just because he said you know, he came out and said I sold he sold his positions in Solana and Bitcoin, Ethereum, all these different things. But, you can easily kind of look through and say, you're a, you know, major investor that has positions in a bunch of individual crypto companies, like, Bitwise is one. And,
Speaker 1:Yeah. He still has a ton of look through exposure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Look through exposure, basically. Yep. And somebody was pointing out, you know, I think this is later, in the timeline, but somebody was pointing out that, just just how convenient it is that, Bitwise's top five position and the Bitwise index are the exact assets that are in and and I'll push. And the reason
Speaker 1:I I don't think that's a conspiracy at all.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't yeah. So so so my my, what I what I would point out there is that they just pick the five biggest tokens by market cap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They they're all the same.
Speaker 2:So Like,
Speaker 1:like, the top five happen to be the ones that the index built, which happens to be the ones and and that makes perfect sense to me. It's like more so than you went, oh, oh, we're making a tech index, and it was like Nvidia, FAANG, you know Mag seven. Yeah. Mag seven. And then and then all of a sudden, some some senator owns all all the Mag seven, and then Trump says the Mag seven are what we're gonna focus on for, like, chip, you know, incentives.
Speaker 1:I'd be like, yeah. That makes sense. Like, hyperscalers are hyperscalers.
Speaker 2:So so overall, I think the the pushback against Sax on specifically bitwise is a little bit misguided.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I agree.
Speaker 2:But, but overall, it's it's hyper politicized. Right? And Yeah. The other thing is that they very clearly did this via the White House. This wasn't something that went through Congress and was supposed to be something that had sort of, broad buy in, from Washington.
Speaker 1:Also, to be to be fair, did this isn't they haven't done anything. Yeah. They've just announced a plan to do something.
Speaker 2:They were
Speaker 1:like Eric's
Speaker 2:like, dad, we need a pump. We need a quick pump.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. No. I I don't even think there's a number yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, it could be we're buying a million dollars.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It could be we're buying a billion. It could be we're buying a trillion. Like, these are all wildly different things. He's just saying, I'm excited about this. This is
Speaker 2:a Yeah. And the number is gonna be hyper hyper analyzed because people are we're also tracking how much dough is, how much waste dough is catching. And so if DOGE saves, you know, $500,000,000,000 and then we buy, you know, anything less than the 500,000,000,000 doesn't seem super serious. Right? If they if the government went and bought a hundred billion dollars worth of crypto, it's like, okay.
Speaker 2:Cool. Yeah. But but, anyways, that's gonna be, this is gonna be, you know, continue to be hyper politicized, as everything is today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, I I like this analysis from Joe Weisenthal over at Bloomberg. Kind of breaks down, what it means to build a strategic stockpile. He says, conceptually, it makes sense that, conceptually, it makes sense for the government to hold strategic stockpiles of any asset that, a, it could presumably have a liability in at some point, and b, it can't instantly acquire with money. So for example, oil, especially when we can't produce much here made sense.
Speaker 1:Military equipment is like this as well. One could argue that in a war, we have bullet denominated liabilities or tank denominated liabilities.
Speaker 2:And you can't acquire bullets or tanks out of thin air with money due to the time to ramp up production. So, and then Sala, who we've had on the show before says, strategic Bitcoin reserve makes sense for the same reason. The strategic gold reserve makes sense. It's a monetary hedge against US dollar hegemony, a prime export of The US. Other assets don't make much sense.
Speaker 2:I e, The US does not have a random basket of precious metals. So I think that's I think that's the right take. I think a lot of people, Max Meyer had some good points along this route. He's like, he wants the government to be focused on making sure the currency Yeah. Of The United States, you know, sort of maintains maintains its value, not, day trading.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But as we've seen some presidential day traders, you know, the guy from El Salvador, you know, he pulls up
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Robinhood or whatever on his phone. If he's smart, he's pulling up public. And, you know, he's just, you know, basically on a mobile device market buying market buying Bitcoin Legend. From what it from what I can see. So,
Speaker 1:I mean, we were talking about this before with the Javier Malay stuff, and it's, like, it's great that that that day trading Bitcoin is working for some people, and the the crazy stuff is working for some of these smaller countries, but, like, I I I need to be convinced a little bit more that this is, like that we are in the same situation as these other countries. Yep. Let's go with Joe Lonsdale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This was this was a good take. So Joe says, taxation is theft. It should be kept to a minimum. It's wrong to steal my money for grift on the left.
Speaker 2:It's also wrong to tax me for crypto bro schemes. Efficient defense, courts, national parks
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which he says should fund themselves, prison, etcetera. Fine. Cut it out with these schemes, guys. I thought this was the best take. You didn't see a lot of people that were, you know, overly pro Yeah.
Speaker 2:Trump in the sort of election cycle actually coming out and pushing back against this, but this is the right take. I think, we we never discuss politics on the show as as our audience knows, but it's okay to vote for somebody yet disagree with with, you know, and agree with some of the stuff they do and disagree with other stuff that they do. And if you can't if you can't manage to do that, then you're not sort of thinking independently. Right? You're just sort
Speaker 1:of And vice versa. Yeah. Like, you should you should be able to to say, hey. I don't support the guy generally, but, like, this is one thing that I like. And there are plenty of examples of that, like, the moon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so so, somebody and and he was quote tweeting mayor Suarez who
Speaker 1:who said,
Speaker 2:I turned Miami into the crypto capital of Florida. Now we're turning The US into the crypto capital of the world. I generally agree that The US should be the crypto capital of the world. Yep. Like, 100%.
Speaker 2:Yep. But, but if you actually look at the chart of Miami coin, hopefully, our strategic reserve doesn't follow the same path.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. The Also also, like like, making America business friendly to a, like, a company like Coinbase that operates a very legitimate crypto exchange and having Bitcoin on the balance sheet of the Fed are two completely separate things. One is, like, stop sending Wells notices, have more regulatory oversight, be very clear with with Coinbase on what can they list, what can't they list, what's a security, what's not a security, what's a fair launch, all these questions that everyone in the crypto community has. Where's the line drawn? And the other is just, like, are
Speaker 2:we cupping the price? Miami coin is the chart won't even show for Miami coin on on these I don't wanna know. Because it's down so horrifically. But, it's a good experiment.
Speaker 1:The the steel man on this is that a lot of times when people when people say, like, oh, the government shouldn't be spending on x, y, or z, they always assume that it like, the government spending is going to go to zero. Yeah. But there is a world where the government buys a bunch of crypto and it 10 x's, and they sell it, and they make money. And that's actually what happened during the during the the housing bailout. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, everyone was like, why are the bankers getting a bailout? Like, they're wasting my taxpayer money. Well, those loans got repaid back with interest. And so it's kind of like a narrative violation and, like, you might not like it because you didn't punish the people as much as possible because, yeah, some of the people that were involved in the banks, they did get bailed out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it didn't cost the taxpayer anything. In fact, it made the taxpayer money, so you paid less taxes.
Speaker 2:It's all The disappointing thing here is that if if somebody was already not a fan of Trump Yep. Nothing about the last twenty four hours would have changed their mind at all. Right? Like, the the dominant narrative on the left was that Trump is a grifter.
Speaker 1:Yep. You
Speaker 2:know, he's using his the office to just sort of accumulate personal wealth and all this stuff. And, but that's why
Speaker 1:I yeah. For him are, like, yeah.
Speaker 2:Saying, like, stop it with the crypto crypto pro grifts. So I I posted yesterday, Nathan picture of Nathan for you. Yeah. Fantastic show if you need some business advice. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I said the plan, pay off the national debt by cutting government waste and investing the savings into high risk cryptocurrencies. I can't even finish it because it's it's such a such a ridiculous plan. What? Yeah. We're done.
Speaker 2:But,
Speaker 1:well, let's go through, Trump's crypto schemes according to how crazy they are.
Speaker 2:Yes. And then logical order. Nick went ahead and and did the heavy lifting here. He ranked, Trump's six, crypto projects. And, so he starts off Trump NFT, three out of 10, low stakes, was kind of cool at the time, and started off, Ryan Selkis' Mar a Lago arc, which I think was kind of an important moment.
Speaker 1:I have a hilarious story about this. So I know someone who bought this NFT, and they said that, it was actually one of, like, the most valuable NFT things you could possibly get because it got you dinner at Mar A Lago. And Really? Yeah. And the thing was is that the people that bought it so, like But
Speaker 2:it only gets you that one time. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. One time. But Which is
Speaker 2:a kind of a problem for
Speaker 1:the the thing. So so it it's sold to everyone. So a lot of the people that bought were just, like, fans of Trump, but they weren't, like, hardcore crypto people.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they went and bought it, but then in order to actually redeem the dinner and do the NFT stuff, you actually had to have, like, a wallet that you could transfer, and it was, like, somewhat technical.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you take the universe of, like, Trump supporters who are down to spend a bunch of money, like, supporting him and, like, buying his NFT. And you narrow that down to, like, 1% of people that are both Trump supporters are, like, down with him, but also, like, capable of running the wallet in the way that they need you to do to cash in the NFT to go to the dinner. And so, I the like, the person I know that that that bought the NFT went and, like, the dinner was, like, empty. And so then he was basically able to just pitch pitch Trump, like, his example of pitching for crypto. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was like, it was like, this is exactly how it and then and then and then Trump was like, wait. The peep my my biggest crypto fans all believe x, y, and z. Yeah. When, like, clearly, that's not true. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it was able to just, like, it
Speaker 2:was so funny. That more projects didn't realize that by it because it sounds it sounds extremely far fetched that you bought an NFT for $500 and you got a dinner with the president and you could talk to him about crypto policy, but that was probably the best lobbying dollars, you know, you
Speaker 1:could ever spend. And so, like yeah. Like like, the expectation was, like, you get you get a dinner, you get to go into a massive ballroom and maybe Trump comes around and, like, shake your hand. Instead, it's like, give and three people. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like the highest leverage lobbying you could possibly do. Amazing. If you but imagine the combination of things. You have to be pro Trump in crypto and also like enough of a d gen to think that buying an NFT is a good idea. So you can't be like the high brow crypto person who's like, actually, like, Bitcoin is just the only thing.
Speaker 1:I'm a Bitcoin purist. I would never buy an NFT. But but then you also have to be willing. Like, it's like all these weird things have to have, like, a line down.
Speaker 2:Give Trump's crypto team credit for is they always position these things as collectibles, like, very clearly. So they were collect Trump cards.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They were they were trading card NFTs. Okay. Okay. They weren't NFTs. Right?
Speaker 2:And with with Trump coin, it was Trump memes. Yep. You were just buying a meme. You could buy a million of them if you wanted. You could buy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Strategic meme reserve for sure. That's that's obvious.
Speaker 2:Okay. So continuing through this. So we have World Liberty five seven out of 10.
Speaker 1:We we we got through one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Seven out of 10. Low kind of an insane thing to do ahead of the election, which which, you know, the the started in
Speaker 1:Nick was very against it. He was, like, telling them, like, how can we tell them not to do this?
Speaker 2:Started as vaporware, now an extremely questionable slush fund thing that Justin's son owns a lot of bad vibes on this. And so they were basically doing a public sort of, like, equity financing type thing, but you just got tokens or something. And now now they just have this, you know, basically, hedge fund. Trump coin, he says nine out of 10, completely unhinged. Just a crazy move overall.
Speaker 2:Melania coin, he's he's actually pretty harsh here. He says six out of 10, kind of sad at this point, but it was the beginning of the end for meme coins and introduced us to Kelsier, which was behind the Malay project, which was funny. So there are positive. And then he said crypto reserve featuring Cardano and XRP, 10 out of 10. I don't even know what to say about this.
Speaker 2:A government bailout for your buddy who gets crypto news from TikTok. Silver silver lining, at least the maxes are upset. Sad how long this list is. So I think, to be honest, I think, Nick had the best takes across the board over the last twenty four hours. We
Speaker 1:should get him on tomorrow. And,
Speaker 2:so we got another post from Jack, Raines over at Slow. He says, this is a great take, and it's a post from David Sacks in 2021 that says, who's now our crypto czar. Yep. He says, the problem with government as a capital allocator is that the money goes to special interests who have the ability to lobby but not to innovate. And it has to come from somewhere.
Speaker 2:Usually, innovators haven't built up in up influence yet. So anyways, and, good good good one to surface. Sam Lesson, another crypto, project guy and GP over slow says LOL. Yeah. So anyways, tough one.
Speaker 2:Again, David Sachs, you have to imagine, if if I had to if if David Sachs could say what he actually thought
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I would say that maybe he thinks that there should be a Bitcoin reserve in the same way that there's a gold reserve. Yep. I don't think that if he could have made this policy himself that he he would have just made it the top five projects by market cap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He does. He is in a weird situation because again. Like like, we we have no idea how much he's actually shaping policy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He is he is the crypto czar. Yeah. But what does that really mean?
Speaker 2:Well, he's also the crypto and AI czar.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And,
Speaker 2:arguably, AI is probably a lot more important for him to be focused on. Yeah. But to date, you know, when
Speaker 1:when anything goes wrong, he's gonna take the blame.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I remember Saturday night, Trump coin gets launched, And I'm thinking I'm thinking myself, it's very possible that Sachs didn't didn't know this was happening. Right? And now he's in a position where he has to defend Yeah. You know, defend the actions Yeah.
Speaker 2:And make up some you know, he kinda has to say something about it. I don't remember what he actually would have shared. But, he's definitely along for the ride right now.
Speaker 1:He he yeah. I mean, clearly, anytime someone, anytime the government does anything, like, iffy with crypto, he's going to take, like, the brunt of the attack Yeah. Effectively, even if he was not in the room when it happened. But he has been pretty good, but good on comms. Like, his his his he very quickly anticipated, People are gonna think I'm pumping my own bags.
Speaker 1:Let me make it clear that I did sell all of my personal holdings. I might have some look through exposure, but that's a separate thing. I'm not actively managing any, any positions here. And most importantly, it's not like I went, I'm not front running this. I'm not, like, egregiously insider trading this.
Speaker 1:And, like, the bar's so low that I think a lot of people look at it and they're like, yeah. Okay. Like, at least you
Speaker 4:at least you're not in
Speaker 2:trading aggressively. Go TA
Speaker 1:over it
Speaker 2:alongside, who we've had on the show before, takes a screenshot of Truth Social. Donald Trump had to, add a clarification.
Speaker 5:He says
Speaker 2:so, basically, he came out and initially just said the crypto reserve featuring Solana, Cardano, and XRP. And then he had to follow it up and he had to follow it up and say, and obviously, Bitcoin and Ethereum as as other valuable cryptocurrencies will be at the heart of the reserve. I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum. So the coming out and just saying the meme coin network, Cardano, and XRP are are I know.
Speaker 1:I like I I do I do genuinely I I I think the the the team behind Solana is fairly, like, legitimate. I did a whole Totally. The whole thing.
Speaker 2:No. And it's the it's
Speaker 1:I think they're building cool technology, genuinely.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin is digital gold. Solana is payment rails for the greatest casino in history. Yes. And, with the native sort of, like, poker chip. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, it it it makes sense. And then card and then Cardano and XRP.
Speaker 1:Chip is the is, like, the the the immutable, like, like, instrument. It's like the the the fundamental unit of value on Solana is a poker chip.
Speaker 2:But but Cardano and XRP are, you know, people were joking, like, this is huge for Uber drivers. I guess, like because it's
Speaker 1:it's US is like the fake one. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anytime anytime somebody outside of tech asks me, like, oh, what do you think about crypto? They're always like, yeah. I'm like, oh, like, blah blah blah. They're like, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I have Bitcoin and Cardano.
Speaker 1:And Cardano. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're they're like and the funny thing is is Cardano and XRP Yeah. Like, one of the reasons that it you could make the argument that you should put them in the strategic reserve is they sort of just, like, generally trade based on Bitcoin too. So, like, they're all sort of, like, fluctuating at different rates, but, overall, fantastic. And then
Speaker 1:It's hilarious.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People were trying to put Saks in the truce zone, over Isaac Saul says that's a pretty weak dodge, David, you know, calling out that,
Speaker 1:the conflict of interest here.
Speaker 2:And they say first, Saks' firm, Craft Ventures, has been invested in a startup called Bitwise since 2017. Yep. David Saks was a lead investor. Right now, Bitwise is celebrating. So the CEO of Bitwise came out the top five holdings of the Bitwise ten crypto index fund Yep.
Speaker 2:Because the main crypto coins going the best way to out yourself is not understanding cryptos, call them crypto coins. That's hilarious. Not ironically. Yeah. Anyways, so the main crypto coins going the crypto strategic reserve just so happened to match Bitwise's top five crypto holdings.
Speaker 2:And the reason for this is that the tokens going in the crypto reserve are just the largest
Speaker 1:project by market cap. Yeah. Except for Binance coin, which is which didn't make it in. But
Speaker 5:Because
Speaker 2:that's, like, the
Speaker 1:Chinese coin. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Speaker 2:Which makes sense. Anyway, so,
Speaker 1:So we talked about this. It's it's it's not crazy. Also, there's a question about, like, you know, yes. He, so Sachs invested through Kraft. I I don't know if Sachs is stepping back from direct control over Kraft over the czarship.
Speaker 1:Like, he could be.
Speaker 2:I I don't have as much as that. But I doubt he invested in board seat.
Speaker 1:Like, that that doesn't mean that he also invested in the in the index fund and it's yeah. There's just like a there's like seven layers of, like, conflict here that where it doesn't seem like that bad, but also it's not great. But also, it's like, how could you ever find someone credible at all in to advise the government on crypto who had never invested in crypto? Like, that's basically impossible. Right?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And to be honest, the way so Sacks is very good at the Internet. Right? He has one of the biggest podcasts in the world. He's got a hyper engaged x falling.
Speaker 2:If he was running point on the strategic reserve announcement, it wouldn't have gone out, like, hey, we're we're putting Cardano, XRP, and Solana in the reserve. Oh, and also we're doing this. So we've just been. So clearly, he's not actually running point on anything or has any impact on sort of the comms around this stuff. Right.
Speaker 2:That that feels very obvious. We have another post here from Joe. He says, even prior to today, there are a lot of professional people in crypto who have been denigrating coins like XRP and ADA for a long time, and yet they're still here largely riding the same beta and performing not much differently from Solana and ETH. Why is that? He says all the big DeFi stuff is on Solana and ETH.
Speaker 2:Most of the NFTs you hear about are on Salon
Speaker 1:and ETH. I completely agree.
Speaker 2:You would intuitively think that Salon and ETH would have built up some gigantic market cap over others like ADA and XRP and yet, and,
Speaker 1:Laura Shin has a take here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a good point. It's kinda intrigued out.
Speaker 1:It's because their total supply is many billions. 40 5 billion for ADA and hundred billion for XRP that gives them an inflated market cap. Even if you limit it to the circulating supply of 36 or 58,000,000,000 respectively, it's It's still many, many multiples of the circulating supply. Yeah. Other side is of the coin is that they benefit from small unit prices.
Speaker 1:Someone with a limited crypto allocation can feel like they're buying a lot of coins.
Speaker 2:It's still still doesn't fully explain it.
Speaker 1:It's ridiculous. But, like, these psychology things are real. I mean, like, even, like, Warren Buffett has to split shares. I mean, at a certain point, yeah. I mean, you you you can't buy Berkshire Hathaway class a because it's, like, 250 k a share.
Speaker 2:Well, there was a while where you couldn't buy fractionalized shares very easily too, which is a big factor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 2:But that never was a thing on crypto. We have a post from Fatman. He said the whale so so on Saturday night, there was there was a bunch of hubbub on a x because some you know, all this is happening on chain. This this whale, comes on and makes a does a 50 x long on Ethereum, and maybe one of the other positions, using only $4,000,000 in capital to create a $200,000,000 position, As the strategic reserve was announced on on Sunday, they went up, I think, about 6,000,000. Yep.
Speaker 2:It says 5,000,000 here. Coincidentally, perfectly timing Trump's true social post confirming United States crypto reserve. So, obviously, some insider action here. Who knows who it was? But, it's hard to say.
Speaker 2:Right? Because these, assets haven't be been explicitly sort of designated as securities. Yep. You know, sort of a gray area, but at the same time, you know, sort of insider trading collusion Yeah. Is is broadly, illegal.
Speaker 2:And, you would have to hope that this kind of thing got got cracked down on, because it's, you know, some serious size being thrown around.
Speaker 1:Bad luck. Yep. Very, very bad luck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and for what it's worth, that guy Nate Chastain went to prison. He's in prison today for doing the same type of activity on on OpenSea.
Speaker 1:On OpenSea. Right? He was
Speaker 2:the product manager at OpenSea who was involved in the decision making around what NFTs got featured on the home page. And so he would just buy them. They would pop. He would sell them.
Speaker 1:And he went to jail for that?
Speaker 2:He went to jail. He's sitting in jail. I think it was at least, for a few year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it it the the question of, like, of, like, is it a security or not? Blah blah blah. It's like, there's just something clearly immoral about having an edge on anything that has a financial asset wrapped around it. And so I don't care if it's a monkey picture or a decentralized cryptocurrency or a stock, like, you clearly have an edge.
Speaker 1:You're trading on it. You're stealing money from people. Like, he
Speaker 2:needs So he's actually out of prison now. He only had to go in for three months and then three years of supervised release. So they they were trying to make an example out of him. But overall, I think this is enough of a precedent
Speaker 1:to reasonable. Yeah. But, like
Speaker 2:Enough of a precedent to say whoever was, you know, trading on insider info ahead of the strategic reserve announcement. X in in, you know, twenty four hours. They had to put it or less than a two x. Right?
Speaker 1:I mean, 50 x long is pretty crazy. I mean, like
Speaker 2:but, but the issue
Speaker 1:is to the lack of volatility. It's a very low volatility asset. Right? Like, like I feel like for something as monumental as like the government is going to be stockpiling this asset. Like you should not need to go so long just to double your money.
Speaker 1:Like, I feel like a 50 X long, like just like an Nvidia or a slight Nvidia earnings beat is enough to do this, but it's pretty sticky. Yeah. And then, there's a funny post here. If he was really an insider, he would have logged anything other than Ethan BTC, though. Let's be honest.
Speaker 1:Because, of course, anything else
Speaker 2:No. This is a good response. He says, I don't the original poster says, I don't know if it was an insider or not, but it's possible for an insider to know the tweet is coming, but not know the exact contents of the tweet, which
Speaker 1:is again Totally.
Speaker 2:Good. Hey.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 2:gonna happen.
Speaker 1:I mean, the rumors were the original sort of the rumor months ago.
Speaker 2:The original way to index the crypto market, which is why crypto indexes didn't become super popular, so you could just buy the few biggest coins by market cap and basically have an index.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it is interesting. Also, when I see this, I wanna know, like, okay. Yes. $4,000,000 50 x long, that seems like a lot, but does this type of trade happen every single day?
Speaker 1:Because in that case, maybe this isn't entire trading. Maybe there's just one random person who's doing this every day, and then something big happens. And then you see it pop. You know?
Speaker 2:This was out of the ordinary. It also was funded by a wallet that was associated with phishing. Okay. So So who knows what's going on there? We can cap it off.
Speaker 2:We have a post here from Packy who's joining in, about an hour. He says, not to get all political, but Cardano crying in those days. And then, another post from Atlas.
Speaker 1:I actually don't I actually don't understand Cardano that well because wasn't the guy, like, one of the cofounders of Ethereum? Like, is Cardano not a serious technical project? Or because it hasn't been, like, hacked or anything. Right? Like, like, it works.
Speaker 2:I think it would I think Cardano and XRP are two two blockchains
Speaker 1:I know that they're not taken seriously, but I know They were
Speaker 2:super early, and they were they were ICOs that, that never delivered on, from a
Speaker 1:Product perspective or adoption perspective. The price is really the only one.
Speaker 2:Of those things, like, Solana came about. They were like, we're gonna build a really fast blockchain. We're gonna, you know, build this amazing developer ecosystem on it. And then they basically did exactly. Kinda did it.
Speaker 2:Right? And, and one of the things is is
Speaker 1:Payment rails for the global casino. Yeah. That's the sound bite.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. Overall, it makes sense that, you know you know, in 2022, every other week, you'd have a new, l one blockchain, and then it was a new l two blockchain. And what what we're seeing now is that it seems like, you know, developer and investor activity have sort of focused in on Solana and, you know, it it makes sense. Right? There's there's no reason that, there should be, you know, a hundred different l ones.
Speaker 2:Anyways, last post for this one we have from Atlas, at creatine cycle. He says, American strategic scam and gambling reserve with the, with the bald eagle.
Speaker 1:I was so inspired by that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You were inspired. We got it. We got it. Immediately ripped.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna pull up John's post. He says, if you wanna read it out.
Speaker 1:So now that we have a strategic crypto gambling reserve, the next obvious step is to introduce universal basic parlay. Every Friday, uncle Sam should send $5 to every citizen's DraftKings account to give them a little thrill going into the weekend.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Obviously, I'm very anti Fantastic. Gambling.
Speaker 2:We gotta get that, we gotta get that into Saks here. You know, that's next.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there's something to it. Just giving someone a little, hey. There's a chance. It it you know, it's like the government already runs casinos or, like, the lottery, and they give you little stimulus.
Speaker 1:The stimulus is giving everyone the same amount of money. Right? And so this is a version of, of that. But, instead of giving instead of giving everyone a thousand dollars for the COVID checks, the Trump checks, remember that? Yeah.
Speaker 1:What was it? A thousand bucks? Something like that?
Speaker 2:Something like that. I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1:think I qualified. I don't think I got it. Hopefully not. But, I I think everyone got, like, a thousand bucks. And then they went and, bought sneakers and Bitcoin and and, GameStop stock.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Instead of that, it cut out the middle man. Instead of giving everyone the thousand dollars That's a real argument. And then they go gamble it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just give them
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A lottery ticket.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so everyone gets it, and it's like, hey. We do we have a trillion dollars of stimulus. We're gonna make We're
Speaker 2:gonna give
Speaker 1:you a thousand billionaires. So so every American, we know you're suffering. There's a one in a million chance that you become a billionaire.
Speaker 2:Incredible. The American dream.
Speaker 1:The American dream.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The American dream. Oh. Okay. What time?
Speaker 1:We we we got Keith coming on fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:We got Packy coming on in in in third, in forty five minutes, and we got Scheele in an hour. So let's keep moving on. Let's keep talking. We got fifteen minutes to run through.
Speaker 2:You know, what's what's something else that people would take,
Speaker 1:Strategic stockpile of?
Speaker 2:No. What's yeah. Strategic. What's what's another thing that the US government should be getting a strategic stockpile
Speaker 1:of? Well, we truly watch this. And,
Speaker 2:you know, I wanna I would be more comfortable as a citizen if I knew that uncle Sam had a hundred thousand day dates
Speaker 1:Yes. Of every or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, just Rolexes for everyone.
Speaker 2:Like, I would like to know that the the US government Yeah. Could at any point decimate the watch market
Speaker 1:by It's been flooding the market.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if you really so imagine let's let's say if if Trump really wanted to build goodwill Yeah. He would buy up every single watch
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On the market Yeah. And then at the end of his term market sell them all. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then drop drop the prices, and then
Speaker 2:every American could buy a Daytona or a the other day. Right? Yeah. Everybody would be walking around, you know, in style.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, you you know, Fort Knox is filled with gold. Let's take that gold, turn it into Cartier tanks, turn it into presidentials Yes. Turn it into turn it into, you know, I don't know. What what what what's another good gold watch? A Santos.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's let let's take our gold, ship it to Cartier
Speaker 2:every person.
Speaker 1:Just be yeah. Yeah. We'd like we'd like 1,000,000 Cartier Cap. Cartier Santo.
Speaker 2:Wants to avoid, tariffs. Yeah. Use The US. We use the Fort Knox Gold.
Speaker 1:Fort Knox Gold to make more watches.
Speaker 2:And then give us a cut of the the the net revenue on on the final product. We want some of your margins.
Speaker 1:And of course, the US government should order all of their watches on bezel. You can shop two 22,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house Yeah. Which would be the fourth.
Speaker 2:Authentication team is gonna be busy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wait. Maybe we should send the bezel authentication team to Fort Knox. They're authenticating gold watches. Why not how do they authenticate gold bars?
Speaker 2:Do the bars too. Do
Speaker 1:the bars too. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are these are these bricks that were spray painted with yellow?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Chrome spray paint. If they can if they can tell, is this watch, just, you know, gold plated versus gold? Have you seen that viral post that's like like, oh, like, there's, like, these fake, jewelry companies that sell on TikTok, and no one can tell the difference because they gold plate them instead of making them solid gold.
Speaker 1:And Ryan Peterson was like, didn't Archimedes figure this out 2,000 ago? Like, you literally just have to figure out the density. So you just put it in the tub and look at the wall water displacement, and then you weigh it on a scale, which has existed for thousands of years. And and everyone on everyone on TikTok is like, it's impossible. Like, like, we can't figure out if it's gold plated or not without destroying it.
Speaker 1:It's impossible. It's so funny to me that that he just, like, he's just done to it like the arc of meetings thing. Like, we've actually been able to solve this problem for thousands of years, but misinformation continues to be continues to be the problem. Anyway, Misinformation is back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well We have some real information for you.
Speaker 1:Real information.
Speaker 2:Trump and chipmaker TSMC expected to announce a hundred billion dollar investment in The US. It is the latest effort by Trump to persuade companies to make big investments in The US. What do you got, John?
Speaker 1:It's exciting. I mean, the the whole tune and the whole the whole just, I don't know, vibes around the chip ban and how we are playing the the semiconductor strategy in the era of AI has changed pretty radically. Like Yep. There was definitely a thought in post chat g p t, post doomers having a serious say and being taken pretty seriously.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There was definitely a a vibe of, like, yeah. Like, this is gonna be a weapon. This is gonna be something that's very valuable. We need to corner this resource. This is maybe like nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1:We should maybe lock it down. We should make sure that it's not just, you know, being stolen left and right. Yeah. And and and also we should restrict the chips that allow these models to run at scale. And then, you know, flash forward a few years, we've done the chip ban.
Speaker 1:Nvidia was able to restrict the memory bandwidth on the on the the h 80 instead of the a one a h a 100. They they basically created a custom one that complied with the with the chip bands. China bought a bunch of those. Deep sea team, you know, optimizes, winds up Yeah. Building a frontier model.
Speaker 2:No. And and we've talked about this before. We don't think that NVIDIA has has gotten enough sort of flack for sort of working around the chip band. Yep. But at the same time, so many major US institutions have so much, such large positions in Nvidia.
Speaker 2:Yep. You know, there's actually a good you know, you you brought this up earlier. Ben Thompson has made a good argument for we actually should the the chip ban is probably bad. We want China to be dependent on, you know, TSMC chips and, not to build, their own sort of alternatives to it
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So that they they're they sort of worry about, you know, invading Taiwan, for that reason. And and Ben Thompson, lives in Taiwan, obviously, doesn't, you know, wants to continue living there. I don't think he would be too welcome after a a Chinese invasion, given his, you know, long history of critiquing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so China's rebuilding the TSMC supply chain right now. They have, SMIC and SME, which are the TSMC and ASML copycats. Yeah. But they are potentially a decade behind.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to tell how close they are to the frontier. I mean, even Intel, AMD are not near the frontier. Yeah. And and American companies have been struggling to catch up, which is why, we you know, both every administration, every tech leader has been like, let's get TSMC to come here. Can't we just, you know, give all those people green cards or gold cards?
Speaker 1:We didn't even talk about the gold card thing. But I think people would happily pay 5,000,000 per person to bring over the TSMC, experts and, manufacturers.
Speaker 2:The challenge there though is you have Taiwanese people who love Taiwan
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:And have
Speaker 1:yeah. They don't just wanna leave you
Speaker 2:in the country. Because there's, like,
Speaker 1:slight tensions between two companies that aren't, two countries that are just rivals. Like Yeah. We're not enemies with China. Yeah. We're just rivals.
Speaker 1:Like, we're not allies, but we're in the World Trade Organization together. We're in the UN together. Like, we are not at war.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. That's a bigger debate, but we are not geopolitical experts. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're we're we're we're in, like, an economic tiff, but that's about it.
Speaker 2:And I don't know. No one's killing each other. I mean, ask the ask the fish off the coast of Argentina. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:I I I No.
Speaker 2:But but here you know, what I what I like about this announcement, hopefully, it goes through, is that this sort of America First investment executive order
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:This is the kind of thing that makes that EO real.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so a hundred billion in chip manufacturing plants of the next four years.
Speaker 2:In a short time, I think. Yeah. Not a x AI speed, but, you know, certainly pretty close.
Speaker 1:And there was news that, that TSMC was making good progress at their Arizona plant.
Speaker 2:Yep. I
Speaker 1:don't know if it's in this article, but
Speaker 2:Yeah. That should give them confidence in, you know, making a much larger investment.
Speaker 1:Yep. To The US, advanced chip packaging is particularly critical for AI related chips as it enhances performance by integrating multiple semiconductor components, reducing size, improving power efficiency, and ensuring faster data transfer key applications for, key factors for AI applications. The US has supported TSMC's growth through twenty twenty two's Chips Act, which earmarked tens of billions of dollars in grants to domestic chip manufacturing. And this is the other criticism that, Ben Thompson has always, lobbied against the Chips Act is that it's grants. It's, hey.
Speaker 1:We'll just give you money to just go try and build these instead of instead of being demand side, it's supply side. So, much better than what's hey. We wanna create actually, strategic reserve. Like, like, The US is a buyer of these chips at this price. If you can domestically manufacture a chip that is competitive with a Nvidia h 100 or h 800 at, at scale in America, boom, we'll buy it.
Speaker 1:We'll build the data center, and then we'll be the leaser. And then maybe we'll just sell it immediately, but you know that the demand's there. Yep. And that's and that's enough for the free market to go work and figure everything else out as opposed to, oh, there's this grant that's going out. And so the grant got parceled up.
Speaker 1:And now now all of a sudden, you have to do it. Not you can't just do it in America. You have to do it in Arizona because the Arizona guy gave you more of the grant. And, like, this and the taxes and this. And then, like, all of a sudden, it becomes, like, the government is now managing the project fully instead of just being, like, hey.
Speaker 1:We're we're just a buyer. We're just a buyer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so one of the so so going back to one of your earlier Yeah. Points. So TSMC, the world's largest contract shipment, maker, set down roots in Arizona in 2020 when it said it would build a chip factory there for $12,000,000,000. Its ambitions for the site have expanded rapidly since with two more factories on the same site and a total investment of 65,000,000,000. The company's first factory began mass production late last year.
Speaker 2:So, we'd love to see them, you know, make a significant $12,000,000,000 investment and then and then commit to, you know, expanding that site as well as, you know, committing additional capital. Hopefully, this announcement isn't final yet, but, have to imagine it it'll be, sort of set in stone later this week.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah. Love to see it. And yeah. I mean, the the the the the TSMC stuff, it is it is it is somewhat interesting how AI has made everything it it's democratized learning in the sense that, like, the, you know, like, it just codes for you.
Speaker 1:You can also learn pretty much anything. Any history, you can just go and talk to it, and it's your teacher, except for making the chips that make AI possible.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:All of that knowledge is just locked away.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have to imagine.
Speaker 1:You are, you know, in these, what what do they call them? Like mentor, mentee, you know, artisan, like like, like, they they they don't open source any of the papers. So there's nothing out of build on. And so deep research, like, if you actually ask it how to run an ASML machine and and get good yields, it will come up very very short.
Speaker 2:Yep. The, interesting thing is it seems that the conversations around Intel and potentially Elon getting involved with Intel have gone, silent. I haven't heard much, from that front.
Speaker 1:Yeah. All the all the all the airplanes were, like, encircling, and we'll see where it goes. Yeah. But, anyway, let's move on to the moon.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the moon.
Speaker 1:What a shot. The first lunar sunrise And everybody by a commercial lunar lander.
Speaker 2:We tried our best to get a, you know, flat earther on the show today. Somebody a moon denier, but we're but we're we're squarely in the moon should be a state category here, which is why we're happy to see Yeah. An American private company is landing on the moon. I really want to
Speaker 1:know. The moon yeah. The moon landing denier. Denier, like, they have to deny this too, and then they have to deny the next one that's gonna happen, and then SpaceX and then Elon and it's just, like Well, the moon is not
Speaker 2:The moon was a bit of a lost start for a while. Right?
Speaker 1:It was. It was
Speaker 2:it was easy
Speaker 1:to be a denier when it was, like, oh, that happened thirty years ago. It's great footage.
Speaker 2:Was involved.
Speaker 1:And now it's, like, okay. We're gonna be up there all the time. And so huge huge news. We have the, we have the breakdown here. Blue Ghost, which is a private US spacecraft landed on the moon, after its successful lunar touchdown, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost mission could soon be joined on the moon by two more commercial spacecraft.
Speaker 1:And we have, two minutes to rip through this before Keith, I think, will be hopping on. Yeah. We just have
Speaker 2:to call out that Firefly Aerospace's comms are not not where they should be. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, good
Speaker 2:point. The fact that, nobody really knew this was kinda happening until they were basically on the moon. Yeah. And Austin's calling out, a private company just flew to the moon. I didn't hear about it until now.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is hilarious. Like, anyone else who would do this would be, like, seven days until we landed on the moon. Five days until we, like, buy merch. Here's a documentary about it.
Speaker 1:Here's a video about it. They just went and did it. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:I mean, which is also cool.
Speaker 1:It's cool. Yeah. I mean, they were clearly
Speaker 2:rare and deep tech today.
Speaker 1:What what do they call it? Monk mode? Monk mode. Something
Speaker 2:like that.
Speaker 1:They were just doing they were just focused on themselves. After forty five after forty five days in space and a pulse pounding semi autonomous hour long descent to its landing site at 3AM Eastern Standard Time, the boxy car sized spacecraft's four foot tipped legs crunched into the surface of Mare Crisium, a vast and ancient impact basin filled with frozen lava on the moon's northeastern, northeastern near side. This marks the second time The US has soft landed on the moon since the crewed Apollo seventeen mission of 1972. The first accrued occurred just more than a year ago when another robotic commercial mission, the Odysseus Lander from the company Intuitive Machines made Moonfall lopsided but intact in the
Speaker 2:How do we not know about Intuitive Machines? I don't remember that either. So space companies, please reach out to Lulu
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And get your act together.
Speaker 1:That is so yeah. That is that is so crazy. Stuff's just going out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the fact that, who knows what what we were talking about when when intuitive machines went to the moon. But,
Speaker 1:yeah, I I wanna know more of this. May maybe it's because it's not launching on SpaceX? The this is not getting enough attention? Blue Moon
Speaker 2:But how did they
Speaker 1:I think they went, it says, it's a suite of 10 experiments provided by NASA as part of the space agency's commercial lunar payload services, CLPS, public private partnership. So NASA's effort to save cost by enlisting more than a dozen US firms to ferry cargo tied to the US space agency's ambitious Artemis program. I I honestly don't know. I honestly
Speaker 2:don't know how to an an Elon critic might say that Elon is intentionally No. Sort of gambling.
Speaker 1:Look, resilience also, also called Hakuto r mission two launched to the moon alongside Blue Ghost on a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket in mid January. But unlike other landers okay. So So
Speaker 2:I'm surprised that Elon wasn't pumping this harder. But he's he's been busy. He's been busy.
Speaker 1:He he has been busy. There's been a lot going on. Anyway, one of these inward looking instruments dubbed Lister is a drill capable of reaching a record setting three meters beneath beneath the lunar surface to measure heat flowing up from within deep enough to give scientists a better idea of how exactly the moon cooled from a ball of molten rock to the cold inert world we know today. Another called the lunar magno magneto telluric sounder LMS will place electrodes across a roughly 700 square meter swath of terrain. Its measurements of subtle electric and magnetic currents coursing through the moon can probe more than 1,000 kilometers into the interior.
Speaker 1:Two thirds of the way to the lunar center. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Wild. We got Keith in the waiting room.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. We got
Speaker 2:it, man.
Speaker 1:That's perfect.
Speaker 2:You have to imagine Blue Ghost was running on ramp to, you know, to make it to the moon.
Speaker 1:Undoubtedly. You can't you can't get to the moon. If you're taking forty five days to close your books every month, it's impossible. What do you think, Keith? Is it possible?
Speaker 3:The the future's on ramp, so all the companies that want to create the future, hopefully, are saving time and money off the ramp.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I love it. Can you give us the update? What's going on with ramp?
Speaker 1:They seem to be on a tear. Valuations never been higher.
Speaker 2:Actually, I would push back and say take a take a victory lap. Take a victory lap. I know the the job's not done. Eric has been very clear about that, but, I feel like you can take a little bit of a victory lap, and probably more more this year to come given the momentum.
Speaker 3:Well, the amazing thing about Ramp is the value proposition, you know, has been clear from the beginning. We're gonna save you time. We're gonna save you money. And now there's empirical evidence across any type of company. We can show that, you know, 5% this, 10% that.
Speaker 3:So it's very obvious. And the CFO world is one of the most archaic worlds, parts of any business, even the most cutting edge organizations, typically have the very archaic, call it, analog, CFO function. And Ramp has the vision of we're gonna digitalize and bring the CFO function and all the finance into the modern age and use the same tools, same techniques, same data, same software, same SaaS tools that everybody else in your organization uses. And that's why it's such an exciting vision. Like, the valuation the valuation, you know, is somewhat art, not science.
Speaker 3:But the reason why investors all across the globe are ecstatic about, you know, investing in ramp at any point is because we have this vision of changing and transforming the CFO suite, and every company has this broken engine, has an old engine from the eighteen hundreds or nineteen hundreds. And we're gonna bring the engine of finance into the twenty second century, first to twenty first century. AI will probably bring us into the twenty second century with ramp two. So that's why everybody's excited. The other the thing that's special about the company though in the short term is usually at this level of scale, companies slow down, the product velocity slows down, the quality of talents decreases.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We kind of a reversion to the means, so to speak. And rather than anything, it's firing up all cylinders. The product velocity is increasing. The quality and insights of the products, in the team are improving. The intern classes for the last two years are by far the best intern classes anywhere in the globe.
Speaker 3:So that's the future. And so that's why this round is very exciting because it's a prediction for the future based upon a lot of a lot of savvy people who get access to all the best companies that were Ramp still has the highest slope, which is, you know, a plan or metaphor.
Speaker 1:Do you think, that's because Eric and Kareem are second time founders? Like, can you break them down as founders? Like, what makes them able to stay on the, like, just insane cadence going into year six, going into year ten? Like, how how do they have so much energy?
Speaker 3:Great question. I wish I wish I knew the answer because I would love to invest in more.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So if you
Speaker 5:can come up with
Speaker 3:a formula or predict a formula, that's great. Yeah. But having worked with them now for over five years, I think there's a couple ingredients. One subtle ingredient is Eric has amazing marketing instincts, and you really can't train us. The best CEOs or the chief marketing officer for the company.
Speaker 3:And, you know, Eric entered originally a space that was quote, unquote crowded. There were large incumbents or other funded startups, and we're able to cut through the clutter immediately. And he he deserves the credit for being able to clarify syncly, powerfully, and communicate the value proposition of RAM, and then reinvent that every year or two to make it broader, more relevant, more more impressive, actually. Karim, you know, is definitely setting the engineering both tempo and quality bar and has been from the beginning. And I think the combination is really interesting.
Speaker 3:And, you know, maybe a global point is if you look at some of the other product companies in in people's portfolios, let's say Stripe.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You have two brothers. So you're getting two executives for one. I think, you know, ramp, there's, like, you're getting two CEOs for one. Yeah. And so I think that other amazing companies that incredible synergy between two incredibly talented people where you're always on the same page and you really reinforce each other is very rare.
Speaker 3:And so if I could find two other founders that are that much in sync
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That might be the reason to invest, actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what are you seeing for, like, young Gen z founders? Like, what what like like, there's this narrative, like, oh, Gen z hasn't produced their Zuck yet. Like, what's what's your take on that? And and and what would be some advice for, you know, the younger entrepreneurs who are coming in, maybe deciding between, like, hey.
Speaker 1:I build a chat GPT wrapper, make some money. Maybe it's not a VC backable company, but it gets me paid versus let me take a big shot at something massive. Like, how how do you counsel people these days?
Speaker 3:I don't think there's a formula that works for building an iconic company. Like, as you pointed out, Zuckerberg is his first company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Eric and Kareem did build a company, did sell a company. So I don't I don't think there's a one size fits all formula. I think it really comes down to, do you have a vision of what the world needs? And do you have a strategic advantage in your own traits, your own personal superpowers that maps to that problem set? And if you have one when you're 19 years old or 20 years old or 21 years old, it might be a really good idea to proceed.
Speaker 3:If you don't have that combination of a vision and your own superpowers, then learning, building, working with other talented people might be a really good, sort of formula. For those of you who are sports fans, you know, there's this epic debate constant in football about you draft a rookie quarterback in the first round. Do you start that quarterback and do they learn, you know, trial by fire? Or do you sort of sit them on the bench for a year or two, have them carry the clipboard around Yeah. Occasionally, you know, enter a game that's, you know, over, so to speak.
Speaker 3:And I've studied this actually empirically, and it's really interesting. The peep the the there are hall of fame quarterbacks of both, of both sort of backgrounds, career progressions. The career progressions of those who start right away, typically, the first season, the performance of of the quarterback is miserable. It's the worst year of their career almost without fail. Interceptions interception touchdown ratio as a specific illustration.
Speaker 3:The people who sit on the bench, though, for two or three years and put aside the opportunity cost there, when they start, they don't have an upside down intercept to touchdown ratio. So they do learn things. And so it depends upon the quality of the team. Anyway, I think it's most useful most of the time for founders to work in an outstanding organization for a year or two before starting their own company. You get a feel for a taste taste of what great is, like, what excellent really excellence really means.
Speaker 3:Excellence quality, excellence in driving an organization forward. And I think there isn't there isn't a great substitute for that. But if you're really ready to go, there are people who learn better by being told, you know, I'm throwing in the pool, learn to swim.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's good. Question I have is, you know, you obviously noted earlier that ramp was a already a pretty competitive category. People thought that it was not you know, a lot of people had made a bet and and were kind of ready to just watch the category play out. Do you see categories today that are like fintech in 2020 when you made the what I believe was your first time investing in ramp that are ripe for a team to come in and take this sort of new approach, kind of potentially invert the value prop in the way that ramp did?
Speaker 2:Have you identified anything there? Is there kind of categories that you would like to invest in?
Speaker 3:Well, I was fortunate. It was in 2019. I I had a fair amount of expertise in the space, and I've come to the conclusion that there's massive opportunity in replacing Amazon business card, let alone this bigger vision of, you know, digitalizing the CFO's world. But the people that were funding other operations, those founders and teams were missing some key ingredients and were kinda naive about some stuff, underwriting specifically, but there's other points. So, actually, unusual for me, I was proactively trying to find high quality founders that were interested in this problem set.
Speaker 3:And then Deli, unfortunately, intercepted Green playing a video game, having listened to me probably annoyed by me and pontificating every day. And we need to find, like, people to, you know, kinda compete with BRAX or Avax and blah blah blah blah, Jimmy and all that stuff. And then he's like he actually walked to my office. I was in shock. He said, like, I found I think I found two founders.
Speaker 1:I was
Speaker 3:like, really? Like, but he turns out he he did. We had actually been, like, teaching other founders and trying to recruit people to do this. So I don't usually do this, but I had a lot of expertise in the area. So I'm not usually proactive about trying to find investment opportunities.
Speaker 3:And then similarly, you know, when I was working at Founders Fund at the time, it was a very nonstandard Founders Fund investment in many, many ways. The most acute one being, if you have all these competitors that are doing well, what's the monopoly story?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, like Totally. And there is a monopoly story. I believe Ramp will be a monopoly. But, you know, imagine pitching the investment team at Founders Fund, the monopoly story in 2019 in a a category that includes AmEx. Actually, SVB even had a product in the market.
Speaker 3:Brax and DV, well, very well funded, you know, with quote, unquote traction. So, you know, it took a little bit of massaging. Fortunately, Brian Singerman also saw the potential at the time and really was alienated by some of the other founders too. So that that helped correct the anti monopoly, you know, kind of crusade.
Speaker 1:That's great. Are there any, categories that you're looking for right now? Hunting
Speaker 3:for soundness. I mean, obviously, everybody talks about AI all the time.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:And I think there are opportunities in AI that probably fit that characteristic where people have assumed there's a winner or winners or, you know, whether an application layer, foundational model layer, or somewhere else, infrastructure layer. But perhaps the right founders it's now five, ten years into that story. And use it sometimes it takes a a lot of time to bake before you get the next generation of founders who have insights into what could be reinvented. The only thing about this is kinda what what SpaceX did, you know, in some ways, the rockets was, like, the rockets were really good, but they were invented in the nineteen sixties in The United States. And, you know, I waited about twenty years, maybe thirty years, to reinvent rockets.
Speaker 3:And then Rocket Lab, which has a very competitive offering at for certain kinds of, payloads, was another twenty years post SpaceX. So sometimes you just have to let the wave, you know, sort of go on for a while before you have a vision about how to reinvent it, and then it's the right founder. So I would love to invest in something that's the next generation replacement for LLMs. Not a better LLM, but something that would, you know, transforms a pretty good double time job. But that's something that would be a a, you know, complete it would make LLMs obsolete.
Speaker 3:That would be a cool investment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. How durable do you think the AI revenue is today? You obviously were around for the .com era and companies going public, you know, with with little to no revenue, 5,000,000 of revenue going public. Right?
Speaker 2:The the counterpoint today is that we have, you know, great private companies with 9 figure run rates, you know, that are growing tremendously fast. But, you know, we've talked about this on this show before, this idea of, like, easy come, easy go. Right? So if you can create a bunch of traction really quickly, how durable is that? Do you think that the companies that are, you know, adding 10,000,000 of ARR every month are, you know, sort of durable yet?
Speaker 2:Are are they gonna be leaders in five years? What's your take there?
Speaker 3:Well, there's a quality of revenue, and it's different. Like, for example, OpenAI, most of their revenue comes from chat tbt subscriptions. That's pretty durable.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Consumers or or people using it, you know, for business applications, but on an individual basis. Totally. There are revenues you can get that are more like pilots.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, you know, those are completely nondurable. And then there's somewhere between like, if you sell to an enterprise and they roll out to the entire organization, this AI based product, the chance that they're gonna swap, you know, in any short term is very, very low.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So if you get through IT, you get through procurement, you know, you have a champion, and you change business processes within a very large fortune thousand organization, That's pretty damn, you know, scalable, durable revenue sustainably for probably five plus years. And so those kind of companies, those AI companies are in pretty damn good shape in my opinion. But you do see people adopting something as kind of like a trial. Like, you know, my board told me there's this AI wave. I need to test out this, this, and this and have an answer to my board.
Speaker 3:That revenue
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is very is very precarious. Another set of revenues is around training and post training. I think the advances in AI are so fast that the way we build models today with fine tuning and different kinds of training may be also obsolete a year, two years from now. So there may be models that are built that don't require any human training. So revenues that are built on and companies that are built on that kind of revenue may not be as durable as people think either.
Speaker 2:Yeah. While we have you here, what's your take on one of the hotter categories in in deep tech humanoid robots everybody's gotta take, because, I think they rightfully should, but, I'm I'm guessing you have something spicy for us.
Speaker 3:Well, spicy is that, look, Chinese are ahead of us, and it's very dangerous politically. Geopolitically, I think the administration is gonna have to take some action there. I think you have large companies like Meta, you know, publicly embracing this, and their CTO is responsible for this. So it's a very top down initiative. You have a lot of startups.
Speaker 3:We funded several at KBs. Probably the hottest chapter among VCs right now is robotic startup, you know, walks in and it's like, okay. How much money do you want? And, like,
Speaker 1:it's just
Speaker 3:50 hundreds of million dollars. Love it. So, you know, and then Tesla has had a lot of progress. Like, actually, I think some of the private progress is better than the public stuff. So it's very impressive.
Speaker 3:So I think the sector will be successful for somebody. I think as a VC right now, it's really hard to invest in a sector given the proliferation of startups all with high potential, the prices you'd have to invest at. Well, also the monopoly make money.
Speaker 2:It's unclear that there will be monopolies, yet some of these companies are being priced that way. One one of the concerns that I have is I think we need to learn from DGI. We need to understand that they were able to flood the market with products that they were selling for less than it cost them to produce. Right? If you just take apart some of these, you know, products and you understand the component costs, it's actually, more than what the retail price is.
Speaker 2:And Unitree is doing the same thing right now. Right? There you can go on Unitree and and buy a humanoid. And, you imagine they're pretty happy with how the DJI rollout went, and they wanna do the same thing again.
Speaker 3:No. This is why I think geopolitically, the Trump administration is gonna have to address this. I think robotics have military applications too. So not only do you have this, like, imagine the data collection potential, but the military applications of a robot can run 17 miles an hour. So Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I I would be shocked if this administration doesn't figure out a way to ban Chinese robots before it's too late.
Speaker 2:Yeah. With DGI, there's this idea that you're not too worried about the drone in your closet because it's, like, zippered in, you know, the box that it came in. And and there's the idea that, like, okay. Like, in this doomsday scenario, the drones take off and, you know, become these sort of weaponized devices. But a humanoid who's doing your laundry and then can turn around and, and, you know get up anymore.
Speaker 2:Take you out is a is a totally different story. So I think that you have a good point.
Speaker 3:Also training data. I mean, there's there's a lot of dangers. And so I think this is a real political issue that needs to be top of mind. Like, once we get through TikTok, which will happen, you know, sooner rather later, I think robotics and humanoid robots are particularly severe particularly severe threat. And so that said, we will need an American competitor one way or the other.
Speaker 3:Like, the world is going to develop at some point
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Humanoid robots that are effective and better if American competitors are great.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:But we really need to slow down the Chinese progress, especially if it involves subsidization by CCP.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One thing that's been interesting is seeing how Uber's been positioning themselves in the context of autonomous driving. Right? They're basically DARS positioned the company to be like a booking.com for autonomous vehicles, giving you an opportunity to potentially, talk your book a little bit. Does Trauba and I don't know if you can speak to this, but does Trauba have a position where, you know, today they're using sort of human capital, across the sort of network of, customers that they have?
Speaker 2:Is there a world where, you know, I'd be curious if you could speak to sort of long
Speaker 1:story potential of a humanoid Trauba.
Speaker 2:Through Trava.
Speaker 3:Well, I think not immediately. I think if you look at the task in light industrial warehouses where Trava specializes, a lot of those tasks are not yet ready for robotic intervention. However
Speaker 2:But 10 from now.
Speaker 3:If Traubas is succeeding in running an organization in running, you know, the most sensitive part of a light industrial operation is the human labor and your action, quality control, reliability, all of those things. If you get the credibility of making a business more successful, you may be a great pathway to introduce more and more technology.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:So you you may not of the humans, you may supplement humans, You may make a call you may introduce a combination that does some humans and some robotics. But some company from afar that doesn't understand how a warehouse works, that doesn't understand real workers and what real workers, you know, needs are, and tries to run a mixed system without having any understanding of real people, I don't think it's gonna be very successful. And I don't think we're ready to rip out in the long tail fragmented sense, light industrial that the investment required for robotics to root out all the humans Yeah. Isn't gonna be economically feasible. Amazon may be able to justify, you know, the r and d plus the fixed cost.
Speaker 3:But, like No.
Speaker 2:And we we had, we had Ryan Peterson on the show last week talking about how the bar the the bar to clear if you wanna replace humans is so high because we're actually we're pretty good at what we do. Right? Right? We've got, you know, all this, you know, ability to to an agency, and, it's, you know, very clearly gonna be the same type of, situation within within warehouses as in ports.
Speaker 3:But over twenty years, I can see Trauma introducing more and more technology to their current customer base. Like, say, you know, look, look, we've already satisfied you. We're delighting you. Trust us. This is gonna make you more efficient, more competitive, more scalable, etcetera.
Speaker 3:And so that could be a long term strategy that makes tons of sense for the company and for their customer base.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you think about the rollout of humanoids, specifically around depreciation and the EV space? We've seen massive depreciation on the consumer side. Right? Somebody buys a model y, it's worth, you know, $30 less a few months later.
Speaker 2:Right? This sort of extreme depreciation. Do you see that as as a potentially a headwind for the rollout of humanoids where, you know, factories basically say, hey. Look. I I think your tech has potential, but if I just wait a year, I can get a a much better, you know, robot for, you know, the same price?
Speaker 3:Well, I don't think I've ever really noticed under the decay curve, you know, because what is wear and tear do to these robots? Like, in what functions too? It may be very different. Like, if you ask robots to do this versus versus this, but, like, a year, are they completely dysfunctional? Like, imagine a a simplified metaphor.
Speaker 3:You if you have weights like gym at home, probably last for a decade easily, like your squat rack and your weights. You throw them in a commercial gym. Those things are gonna show wear and tear in the first year.
Speaker 2:Especially you and various. You and various you they gotta change the treadmill out every day after you at very. I'm sure.
Speaker 3:Literally, like, the wear. It so it it does depend upon the use the use. And I don't think anybody knows really what that, like, curve looks like. And then that affects the economics that help prove it just on a purely rational basis is using a robot to do x, y, or z because you don't you don't really understand that trade right now. The only way to really do that is you have to throw some robots at some problems and then monitor what breaks, why, and how, and how fast, and how expensive are the replacement parts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. What about the strategic Bitcoin reserve? Do you have a take, prepared for that yet?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm probably not the biggest fan. I mean, I'm very supportive of the Trump administration. I think almost everything they've done has been really good and really strong, and I've been very impressed. I probably if I was going to do it, would have done it, Bitcoin only.
Speaker 3:I don't think I don't think we need to do it. But if we're gonna do it, I don't think we kinda stepped in the middle of a bunch of messaging problems by, like, including a bunch of other cryptocurrencies. But I'm not the biggest fan of, like, the government doing performing business functions, period. So I don't like the sovereign wealth fund either. I mean, I'm happy to manage it if they need you know, KB wants some if they wanna need KB, if they need professional managers, we'll probably do it.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:The the reality is I don't think mixing business function and politics is a good idea. I think you should separate those. And, you know, free enterprise works really well. All capitalism works extremely well. And the government should do, you know, protect the American people, defend defend the border, you know, etcetera.
Speaker 3:And I I don't I don't see any, you know the only argument for the Bitcoin strategic reserve is, obviously, we do have gold reserves.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:You know, and if you believe the metaphor that the future of store value is like gold, you can talk yourself into it. I don't I don't think it's the most compelling thing, you know, with
Speaker 1:the Yeah.
Speaker 3:There was a good point. Administration.
Speaker 2:Like, the strategic reserve could just be Bitcoin we seize from criminals. Right? And it just goes in a bond
Speaker 1:and we still got it.
Speaker 3:For that too. Yeah. I mean Yeah. Obvious obviously, the the FBI and other people want, you know, treasury winds up getting their hands on a lot of valuable assets.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And, you know, that could be a good way to fund it without taking American tax dollars.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 3:know, I think the burden and I think Joe just showing this, you know, is is really setting a great example here is the burden for taking a dollar from an American family should be increased by an order of magnitude. The justification should be go up. Not that there's never a justification, but we need to raise that bar. The the dollar belongs to the people who earned it, barring with the most extraordinary justification for it. You can't have these frivolous soft justifications or low ROI justifications.
Speaker 3:It really belongs to the people who create the value.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Well said.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're spending more time in DC. Do you think that there's a a, like, a potential for startups or specifically, like, defense tech startups, like, to to move offices there earlier, like, actually, like, build companies there?
Speaker 3:I don't know. I think for non defense startups, I would recommend starting an early stage company in DC. Obviously, the people who are already successful are spending more time in DC,
Speaker 1:which is,
Speaker 3:you know, valuable to me to some extent. But But I think if you're an early stage company that's not really targeting the government as your first customer federal
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, in some way, then I think it's probably a mistake right now. That could change in five or ten years and, you know, maybe there's a better ecosystem there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't know the defense landscape and how fast the defense department's gonna innovate. We'll see. I mean, there are people in the administration who believe that reform is gonna be fast and furious in the defense department and that we need it from a budget perspective. We have to defense department needs to do more with less.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so but until the proof's in the pudding, I don't know how vast the opportunity is right now.
Speaker 2:We have time for maybe one more question. I'm curious to get your take on, on Sundar. Do you think he still got a job in a year a year from now? The the rollout of of AI across the Google, ecosystem has been atrocious from my view, and I think consumers feel this. John always jokes.
Speaker 2:He's like, I I pay for Gemini. I don't know where to find it. Yeah. But I I it's cool when it pops up. He seems to be under poor underperforming dramatically in the context of Satya.
Speaker 2:You know, what's your what's your take on on that whole situation?
Speaker 3:Well, he's a he seems to be outperforming Tim Cook, which you've read the latest.
Speaker 2:I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:At least they have models of those trends that are good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For those that missed it, Apple just said we're delaying
Speaker 1:our Siri Two years.
Speaker 2:Two years, something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Two years in the as other people pointed out, two years in the AI world is an eternity.
Speaker 2:You might
Speaker 3:lose a ton of money for twenty years or,
Speaker 1:you know, like, you know,
Speaker 3:patience at this point. And so crazy. I think that's a serious problem, and I'm an Apple fanboy forever. You know, I haven't seen it forever.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:So I think it's pretty devastating that they're so far behind. I think Sundar made several miscalculations. And I actually do think that Microsoft and, you know, Satya got a lot of credit, but I think they're seeing some of the downsides to some of their strategies now. Like, I think they are gonna wind up not having quite as much of a strategic, like, lock on AI as they thought they were. I think that said, they maybe played the cards the best they could.
Speaker 3:You know, you can't always control everything. But I think the world is changing really rapidly and the people who control the future of AI may not be at Microsoft.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. Right. Well, thanks for stopping by. We love having you.
Speaker 1:You're welcome anytime. Anytime there's breaking news, well, I'm sure I'll give you a call. This is fantastic. We're gonna hop on. Keep talking about ramp.
Speaker 1:We're going to Packy McCormick. Yeah. Next. So Awesome. Thanks for stopping by, Keith.
Speaker 2:Talk to
Speaker 1:you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to chat.
Speaker 1:Have a great day.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:That was great. Good questions, Jordy. I like I like I like keeping the humanoid question going across all of these. We gotta ask Packy that too, and then eventually, we can put together a supercut.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Here's every every important capital allocator, every Silicon Valley person, talking about humanoids. Well, while we are waiting two minutes to bring Packy in, let's talk about wander, find your happy place. Let's go. I got a hat for this. Throw
Speaker 2:it on.
Speaker 1:We got a hat on. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. I've been looking at one, up by Yosemite. Thinking about taking the kids up there.
Speaker 2:It's snowing. Guy over here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's snowing, and then we wanted to go to the snow, but we didn't wanna do crazy hotel. We didn't wanna do some, you know, Airbnb thing. Wander was just, like, the perfect
Speaker 2:middle ground.
Speaker 1:Perfect middle ground. And they have this really nice UI feature where if it's snowing at the Wander, when you're going to be look booking at it, it will drizzle snow over the web page while you're on it. It's amazing. Amazing. It's a really, really
Speaker 2:nice test. While while we're we're, you know, buying some time until Packie joins, Packie did an entire deep dive on Wander.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic.
Speaker 2:And we got Packy in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Let's
Speaker 1:bring him in.
Speaker 2:I wish he was here
Speaker 1:in person. Do that. He could do the wander. Oh, there
Speaker 5:we go.
Speaker 2:Cramp day.
Speaker 5:Little brothers.
Speaker 1:Hello. Welcome to the show. Good to have you here.
Speaker 5:Oh, my god. It's great to be here. Long time. Long time. First time.
Speaker 2:First of many. First of many.
Speaker 1:First of many. Yeah. Break it down. What happened today? Why why are you wearing a ramp hat?
Speaker 2:Take a victory lap.
Speaker 1:Take a victory lap.
Speaker 5:No. I I always wear a ramp hat. And I love it. I I've I've heard that TVPN is is just unbiased, journalism, and so I wanted to join you for an unbiased conversation. Exactly.
Speaker 5:Unbiased
Speaker 1:through a bad rant here.
Speaker 2:Tech space. Yeah. Guests and host of this podcast may may hold securities, by the presenting sponsor of the show. Yeah. Anyways, great to have you on, Packy.
Speaker 2:I wanted to go back to 03/21/2022 when you, this was, like, probably your second time covering when when they announced
Speaker 5:It was.
Speaker 2:Their $8,100,000,000 valuation. That's and
Speaker 1:Was that the back to back round, the double round or whatever?
Speaker 2:I mean, every single round for a minute there was you basically would you would read a ramp fundraising announcement. You'd
Speaker 1:you'd close Speed running. You'd close the information, and then they'd
Speaker 2:you know, you get a notification on your phone that said, scoop. Ramp is raising another round.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was wild.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That was the eight eight point. That that actually might have been the third piece. I think the first time I wrote about them was December 2020. I think they were we didn't talk about evaluation, but I think they were valued at 300,000,000 at the time.
Speaker 5:So, like, something just pathetic seed
Speaker 1:series a at that point.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's, like, a a personal kind of net worth type number. And then the next time I heard about them was when they had raised back to back rounds. I think it was, like, 1,000,000,000 and then 1,600,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:So I have
Speaker 1:it here.
Speaker 5:Straight payment.
Speaker 2:First time.
Speaker 4:And I
Speaker 5:spent a lot of the time in these pieces. One, just being, like, you know, praising ramp, obviously. And then Yeah. Two, kinda justifying that, you know, if you're growing this fast Yeah. Like, these valuations kind of end up catching up.
Speaker 5:I think there was a period in between. They took a down round. They took their medicine Yep. In 2023. But now they just kinda continue to grow fast, and we're we're back way above that $8,100,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think about thinking about the the ramp down round was directly tied to the market, not business performance, which is why they're back above that last, you know, financing just given that, you know, they were they were taking that down round while still putting up ridiculous,
Speaker 1:you
Speaker 2:know, numbers.
Speaker 1:And also, I mean, down round is like I mean, Facebook did a down round at one point, but down round can mean so many different things. And, like, I saw some down rounds during that year that were brutal. Like, pay to pay, pay to play, total cram down. Yeah. It's a hundred million dollars on 50 pre.
Speaker 1:So the new investors are taking two thirds of the company. Yep. And then, yeah, there's a 10% option pool for the executive team or something like that. That's like gonna get rolled out. And literally anyone who touched the company for the first half decade that they were running it is just gone wiped.
Speaker 1:Like, don't didn't exist. Never thing. You got paid w two wages. I hope you, I hope you put some in NVIDIA stock because you got nothing now. It was like that that happened all the time.
Speaker 1:And it was, like, terrifying, but, you know, it happens. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I was on I was on the other side of a few of those, but I I I remember reading about the the ramp piece, the the ramp down round when it happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And that's when I really knew. Like, I think, you know, in 2020, '20 '20 '1, you know, you can you can be impressed by a company, but a lot of people are going fast. A lot of value valuations are going up. Yep. When you read a story about in, you know, this terrible market, a company doing a down round, and it's, like, pretty much gushing and all of the commentary around it and Twitter and everything about them doing a down round was gushing commentary on how how smart it was for them to kinda just take the hit and keep going.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's when you know you got a company that's that's pretty special on your hands.
Speaker 2:Yep. So you're
Speaker 1:talking about ramp safety?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is John's,
Speaker 1:So yeah. So Packy, like, obviously, like, ramps move really quickly. We're worried about a future where ramp is, like, closing the book so fast that, like, you go to ask ramp to close the books and it thinks, like, if we didn't have any humans, we would never need to close the book. So it just kills everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ramp AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Kind of like a ramp doomer scenario. Like, should we pause ramp? I've I've seen some people throwing out open letters, maybe trying to lobby the government to slow down ramp. What what do you think?
Speaker 1:What's your take?
Speaker 5:It's I mean, I I think it's a real risk. I I think pausing doesn't work
Speaker 1:that right.
Speaker 5:Then the Chinese are gonna start, you know, moving the fast. Right?
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 5:you can't do that. The thing that I get worried about is that you run out of atoms in the universe at some point. Right? Like, if you're an investor and you're thinking, like, can they continue to double every year?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, at some point, you run out of of atoms in the universe. And so that, to me, is kind of one of the bear cases, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I think of ramp, generally, is what they're doing is, like, they're building a machine god that lives in your CFO's Chrome tab. But, ultimately, it will be a beneficial, benevolent machine god that lives in your CFO's crowd count.
Speaker 2:On saving you time and money, and he knows it's lane.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so in a in a post ramp society, kind of like a post AGI post ramp society, I think I think humans will be doing fantastically. I I think it'll be great.
Speaker 5:At least the CFO suite will. Right?
Speaker 2:They, you know, they're gonna
Speaker 5:get all their time back That's interesting. Strategically about the business, about life. So I I think, that that's one of the things. You know, my my dad, is is a CPA. And so, like, I just think, you know, when I when I write about Ramp, I think about my father.
Speaker 5:Right, and, like, how much how many basketball games, you know, he he could have been out of mind, had Ramp existed
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 5:At the time. I mean, the guy was you know, he was a business consultant. He was traveling all the time. He'd fly to Germany for the day and fly back and, like, imagine, you know, Rams AI just does that for him. Right?
Speaker 5:And, like, we're hanging out. He knows me better. I know him better. Like and and I'll probably just
Speaker 2:suddenly gets super dark. That's amazing. Like, my dad never made it to games in the first fifteen minutes.
Speaker 5:He actually did. It was even always, like, incredible that he would, like, fly back. He would take the early flight back to
Speaker 1:make it
Speaker 5:to my stupid game. So good on him. I just mean, he'd be, like, a lot less tired had ramp, existed. You know? I'll give him a personal anecdote.
Speaker 2:I got to hang out with my kids this weekend because we're on ramp, and Yeah. You know, it just the books closed themselves. Great. Pivoting a little bit, John and I were talking this morning. There there's too many top signals to count right now.
Speaker 2:Everywhere you look, you got Trump coin. You got, Cardano going in the reserve. You got, you know, only fans competitors doing, something. You know, we don't know. And, we got humanoid robot companies with one customer raising at 40,000,000,000.
Speaker 5:What What is BMW's valuation,
Speaker 1:by the way?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a good question. Oh my
Speaker 1:god. If it's less than 40,000,000,000. You know, Ford Ford is less.
Speaker 2:It's €53,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:3 billion euros. Okay. So
Speaker 5:yeah. So what's that in in USD, like, $12?
Speaker 2:50 Yeah. We we're mogging the the euro these days. But,
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's probably 50,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so, yeah, you there's definitely there's definitely a bull case to be made of why figures should be worth as much as their customer, their first customer. But, anyways, how do you think as an investor right now? We're we're clearly living through one of the greatest times in history. Right?
Speaker 2:We just had a private Yeah. Spacecraft land on the moon. Yep. Elon's launching rockets every day. There's there's, you know, austerity in the government, which is, you know, potentially bearish for GDP short term, but probably good for the dollar long term.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:How do you think as an investor and and even a writer and somebody who's called a lot of trends, you know, early, you know, what do you think the next you know, talk to us about the next five to ten years.
Speaker 5:Oh, the next five to ten years. You know you know, what's I found really fascinating is that a lot of the stuff that I'm not investing in has been super overvalued. And then a lot of the stuff that I've been investing in has been undervalued and underappreciated, and I think it's gonna be worth, like, a lot more in the next kind of year or two.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:So that that's kind of my take. I you know, I'm not a a figure investor, big fan of of their videos. And, actually, my daughter loves bigger videos and was, like, really excited to see two of them, two of them together. I don't know. I mean, I
Speaker 4:I think, like, there's a
Speaker 5:lot of probably overhyping AI. There's probably gonna be, like, a couple of $10,000,000,000,000 AI companies that are gonna pay for the whole thing. Humanoids scare the hell out of me as an investor because it's, like, this really impossibly hard thing to do with a lot of really, really smart people working on it where, like, if you pull off this impossible thing, then you're competing against these these 10 other companies and, like, who wins big consumer surplus, then but there's, you know, like, human labor doing things. I there are some people I've heard who don't just kind of podcast and write, who, like, do you like, you make cars or whatever physical labor.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think, like, you know, human human salary and wages and all that. It's, like, $45,000,000,000,000. It's, like, half of the world's GDP. And so, like, if you underwrite robots as, like, some small percentage, I mean, I think Figger already got, like, point 1% of that GDP. Got got credit for point 1% of that GDP, which is pretty, pretty amazing.
Speaker 5:But, like, there will be, like, massive, massive, massive companies built here, and I think there's also gonna be, a lot of people who lose a lot of money. We could talk about what's happening in in venture. I think it's, like, a really I I think, like, the big funds are actually super well positioned, and all there's gonna be a lot of these, like, emerging is ish funds who try to compete who I just think get kinda, like, wiped out. I I I don't know. I think there's gonna be
Speaker 1:a few take on general catalyst going public? That's a good one.
Speaker 5:I don't have a good take on that.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's like it's a really I'd say, like, one one of the you know, when I think back of some of your one of my favorite pieces of yours over the year, I'm I'm not gonna know the title, but you you had a really great deep dive on this idea that as our tools become better and more efficient, you know, a a group that, you know, a company that would have taken a hundred people to build, you know, five years ago now only takes 20. Right? And Yep. I think we're really seeing that right now in AI where you have companies like Cursor, a big one, you know, with 20 people doing a hundred million of ARR. It's been amazing to see that play out how, you know, how you know, take basically one take a victory lap there, maybe double click in and and share some more insight.
Speaker 2:But I feel like that was really, you basically called that, and and did it in a very eloquent way. But I think we're I I expected it to be something like maybe, like, five years from now that would be the case, but it feels like it's that way, like, today.
Speaker 5:So there's a there's a few different ways that goes in. It's it's really like, there's the Russell Russell conjugation where, like, you know, the person who's doing something different than you Yeah. Is doing it bad. You're doing it right, whatever. And, like, I literally think about this bunch when I see all the charts of, of these companies making, like, more money than Ramp faster.
Speaker 5:I'm like, that's actually, like, way too fast, and that's totally understandable. Ramp, however, is, like, actually doing perfectly. Right? Like, I that really actually goes through my head. They're doing it just right, but they're they're not.
Speaker 5:And I think I'm actually The bigger grocery store for, like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The bigger the bigger groceries scare me. It's okay.
Speaker 1:Your your growth rate is perfect. Growing faster is unsustainable.
Speaker 5:I right? I and I like, actually disaster.
Speaker 1:You're growing the perfect right. The Goldilocks effect. The Goldilocks growth rate.
Speaker 5:I mean, that's just, like, you know, that's Eric and Kareem just doing what they do. I think it's just, like, really nailing that. That's hilarious. But I do think that there is something about that that, like, really actually does, it does scare me that that's good. And just, like, how easy it's become.
Speaker 5:So really that you can build more with fewer people. I took to me kinda two different things. Like, one, it just made me scared, and this was, like, back in 2022. Like, really scared about software in in general, because you can go out and build with five people, a company that grows really, really fast. And two, I think the other point of that that essay was, because we have better tools and because you can do more with fewer people, startups should be able to just, like, actually start fresh and compete with these companies that you never thought that you'd be able to compete with them writing, you know, a follow-up on primer right now, which is taking on k through 12 education, taking on public schools.
Speaker 5:Like, not a group or a a group of incumbents that, like, you thought you'd ever be able to take on. And I think they actually can. You can, like, put education on a Moore's Law, like, cost curve and get make education better for less and less money. And so, like, that's pretty amazing. Obviously, Anduril, you know, is, like, starting to get starting to approach kind of Prime's valuation.
Speaker 5:And so, like, that I think is, like, the really exciting part of it to me. Less that five people can build things really, really quickly and more that a hundred people can build things to take on, like, these really old big companies.
Speaker 2:Yep. What's your AI stack? You've been a little bit critical of AI's writing ability, which I think is fair. We also we we have Coogan's benchmark, which we do about once a week where we get the new latest model to try to tell us a joke, and it and it's pretty
Speaker 1:It's hilarious when you read it like you're a stand up, and it just bombs intentionally. And it's funny to watch someone bomb intentionally, so it's good in that regard. But
Speaker 2:How have you been, yeah. What's your what's your AI stack? And, Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's actually useful?
Speaker 5:I mean, I I still use Claude and Chatty, Petit, and Grock to just kind of, like if I don't understand something
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I'll throw it in or, like, to make sure that I, like, I have explained something the right way or to get feedback
Speaker 3:on the message.
Speaker 1:Basically.
Speaker 5:Four point what's that?
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Wait. You're using it like a better Google search or, like, better I'm using it like a better Google search
Speaker 5:or, like, better Google search and, like, just a little safety blanket on the, like, I don't have an editor. So somebody to, like, tell me that this isn't, like, the the worst thing I've ever written.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 5:4.5 is actually a little bit better. It stopped doing it. Like, the thing that killed me that I tweeted about a couple times recently is, like, the m dash. It's not just blank, m dash. It's, like, a totally different blank.
Speaker 5:And 4.5 has actually stopped doing that, which is really good because I would see that in people's writing and it's just, like, it it really made me hurt. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the p g one? Delve?
Speaker 5:Delve. You know what's funny? I I when I read older stuff that's, like that totally predates, I find Delve in it all the time. I think PG might have been wrong on that. People just
Speaker 1:Delve care about it. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I I I thought there was some some some weird round tripping thing where, like like, the RLHF team in Kenya that OpenAI was paying to do the RLHF stuff had learned English in a very proper way.
Speaker 1:And so Del
Speaker 2:Del vintage.
Speaker 1:Was one of the words that was, like, in the vocab, like, course that they all took. And so they thought that it was, like, a much more popular phrase than Americans think. And Americans use it, but just not all the time. So it's kinda weird. But I I mean, you'd see these aberrations all the time where you'd be, like, write a tweet, and it would, like, use hashtags.
Speaker 1:And it's, like, that's kind of what a tweet is, but not really. Not today. It's not a banger. Like, no one uses hashtags. Or if you do use hashtag, it's, like, in this funny, like, kind of meta ironic way.
Speaker 1:It's not just, like yeah. I mean, so yeah. Yeah. Give me some other hot takes on
Speaker 5:I mean, it's I I literally just asked it, today because I was trying to, you know, make my own joke, for for this podcast. You know, the the joke that ended up becoming, you know, the fact that with this unbiased conversation about ramp.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:There's, like, that one phrase, like, no bias, no something.
Speaker 2:No conflict, no interest? No mercy,
Speaker 4:no loss. No conflict,
Speaker 2:no interest.
Speaker 5:That's what I was thinking. Mercy. Yeah. This is this is so I said that. I said, no bias, no dot dot dot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it
Speaker 5:was like, very confidently, no bias, no bet.
Speaker 1:No bet.
Speaker 5:What you're thinking of?
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 5:was like, no. Okay. The phrase you're likely thinking of is no skin in
Speaker 4:the game, no opinion. What? Oh my god.
Speaker 5:This is
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And Jordy
Speaker 5:got it doing two seconds.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I
Speaker 2:like that conflict. Still got it. Not a paper clip yet. What what's going on on Substack these days? I they've got some, like, social activity that's happening, that seems to be picking up.
Speaker 2:You're still writing on Substack. Correct?
Speaker 5:I'm still writing on SubSec. I've seen a lot of conversation about, you know, people going over SubSec. You can use links there. It's a friendly conversation. I have not done that at all.
Speaker 5:And that's, like, you know, my my my people are on x. We're on x live right now. Right?
Speaker 2:Is this
Speaker 5:our first live x episode?
Speaker 1:It is. First ever.
Speaker 2:First ever.
Speaker 1:You don't re retweet it right now. Don't get too distracted. But, Yeah. I don't know. I don't know where you wanna take that.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:I mean, I just
Speaker 1:as a company seems to be doing very well. Like, the last time I saw Chris and and I w I got, like, some kind of I don't know if I should even say, but, like, you know,
Speaker 5:you should say.
Speaker 1:So so some reference on, like, oh, I'm, like, hiring an accountant that worked for them. And they're like, oh, yeah. It's actually a pretty good business. And so congrats to the team. I I think they've I think they've done really well from a company that was, like, kind of, like, maybe overhyped at one point, it's like, oh, it's like playing in the social network.
Speaker 2:Like it's
Speaker 1:they've they've built a really solid business.
Speaker 2:Broken through the cultural norm. Yep. I see it on Instagram. Yep. And my question to you is you pay them 10% of your gross revenue.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 4:No. I don't. He does.
Speaker 2:Because he
Speaker 4:does do 2,000.
Speaker 1:Like the all the podcast run ads. He this is why he's on the show.
Speaker 2:There he goes.
Speaker 5:He gotta run ads.
Speaker 1:I mean He is a bad respecter.
Speaker 2:Ad respecter.
Speaker 5:We're both, you know, Ram sponsored. Obviously, Wander Portfolio Company.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Long time friend of the newsletter. I'm gonna put And you just feel good getting to tell people about that. If I were there you go.
Speaker 1:If I
Speaker 5:were a subscriber business, I wouldn't get to tell people about Ram.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't There's not nearly enough ads on the screen right now. We need more. So we got everyone has a sponsored hat right now.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:I got the wander. You got the ramp.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:You should look down so I can see the logo. There we go. That's good.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so so I mean, he is kind of a bit of a failure mode for for Sub Stack.
Speaker 5:I am. It's funny because people will ask me, like, you know, you like, what do you think about Sub Stack? And, like, you've talked to the team, obviously. And, like, I I actually have never talked to the cofounders. I've talked to one person at Sub Stack once
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 5:Because This
Speaker 1:is just got like,
Speaker 5:the worst possible business for those guys. I haven't paid a dollar to
Speaker 1:stack. What do you think about this idea that, like, they should be doing the bundling and aggregation on their side where, like, you should go to substack, somebody should pay $20 a month, and they should get, you know, like, you and Pirate Wires and, you know, Barry Weiss's free press, like, all instead of instead of those folks, like, leaving and you monetizing elsewhere, like, do you think that makes sense, or is that just, like, a crazy idea?
Speaker 5:No. It's a good idea. I mean, it's like a it's the idea that everybody I think has that they should do that, that they should build an ad network that, like, there's all these things that are, like, clearly good for good for business, that actually, I think in practice, like, when you're when you're, like, dealing with people who have kind of, like, egos and think that their own thing is, like, the thing Most
Speaker 1:important.
Speaker 5:Are really, really, really hard to pull off in in practice. Like, I wouldn't wanna be part of a bundle. Yep. And so I think that that ends up being a challenge. Same with, you know, like, Ramp is not going through an ad network and buying, like, remnant slots.
Speaker 5:Right? They're partnering with, you know, just top shelf people. Kind of shows and specific people. And so I think the ad network stuff falls apart there. I really like what Subsack is doing for the simplicity.
Speaker 5:Like, I I in the beginning was definitely somebody who thought that I would move to a different platform. I wanted more customization, whatever. Like, you'd have to give me a lot of money to move to a different platform now just because it works really, really well, the core product that they've they've built.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you ever experimented with a, like, a paid offshoot? Because I know you've done other offshoots like, what what what was the Thursday white pill one?
Speaker 5:Oh, we did the Friday. Yeah. The weeklies optimism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Weekly doses of optimism, which is kinda like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Offshoot.
Speaker 1:But but that's still free.
Speaker 5:Right? It's all still all still free. We could I don't wanna write more. If anything, I wanna write less this year. Sure.
Speaker 3:And so,
Speaker 5:I think I don't wanna
Speaker 1:Bangers only.
Speaker 5:Bangers only. I don't wanna limit what I send.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 4:I actually don't know.
Speaker 5:I I like, at this point, I'm in too deep, and I don't know what the conversion rate would be, and maybe it would be incredibly embarrassing. And so I'm just gonna stick with stick with what I got.
Speaker 1:There you go. Love it.
Speaker 2:Love it. Where you mentioned earlier you've been finding, companies you feel are undervalued. You obviously have an insane top of funnel. Right? You've you're broken through the the mainstream if I ask somebody that, you know, is on x, they know who you are.
Speaker 2:If I ask somebody that's kind of even LinkedIn mode, like, they usually know who you are. Right? So the top of funnel must be Yeah. The top of funnel must be crazy. I love that.
Speaker 2:But, what, like, where where are you excited to be investing right now? I'm sure you're flooded and and doing a bunch of AI, but at the same time, it feels like an interesting time right now where you you maybe wouldn't wanna invest in the next humanoid robotic, you know, company. You probably don't wanna be investing in more defense, like, net new defense tech companies that are just incorporating today. What what's got you know, space feels, like, in many ways, there's more opportunity than ever because the cost to get up there is dropped. But where where is exciting to you?
Speaker 2:What's the weird stuff you're looking at?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Really, like, the way that I've I've been thinking, like, my catchphrase on this is Andro and SpaceX for everything. So as opposed to, like, you see it Andro and SpaceX, the move is not, like, go do the second best version of that. It's go find that in the other industry. So Yep.
Speaker 5:You know, like a base power company or some most Internet doing telco
Speaker 1:or Yep.
Speaker 5:Primer doing education, like, find the thing that is gonna go win that category is really what I'm looking looking for, and those end up looking weird. So I I was kidding about the stuff that I'm investing in being undervalued, but, I do think that because it doesn't really fit a thesis that a fund would have on defense or whatever, it is a little more affordable than a humanoid company or a foundation model company for sure.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. I mean, stuff in, like, power, energy, deeper in the supply chain, way far away from the core hot AI consumer stuff, there's gonna be more reasonable prices there. Also, are are you looking at bio stuff yet or bio adjacent stuff? We've been
Speaker 5:doing a lot of bio stuff.
Speaker 1:I imagine that's
Speaker 5:Yeah. Hot take would be cancer is probably gone in ten years. I think it's it's one of my favorite hot takes.
Speaker 3:There's just
Speaker 5:so many different attacks on it, and CAR T cell therapies are doing well, and it's a matter of kinda scaling scaling those out. Yeah. I'm sure you guys should now I was really
Speaker 1:excited about that. The the power law. I'm sure you've read Sebastian Malabai's The Power Law. Yep. And before that, he wrote, that book on, More Money Than God about hedge funds.
Speaker 1:And so his whole thing is, like, go and find the the group of people that are making trillions of dollars effectively or, like, really moving capitalist markets, like, the biggest power players, and then write the definitive history and profile of them. And so, yeah, I went to a speaker series with him. And afterwards, you know, somebody comes up to me and he's like, what's the next book you're writing? Because that's where I wanna be investing today. Right?
Speaker 1:And he said bio. He he was like, I think that the the next book I write will be about, like, the flagship pioneering, like but also the biotech public companies and and then the biotech funds. And so it's something that I've I've certainly been meaning to get more up to speed on. I have a lot of friends and cofounders who have done, like,
Speaker 5:these stuff. It is hard. Bio is hard.
Speaker 4:Like, I I compare like, of all
Speaker 5:the other things, you know, my colleague, I've been working with on the bio side who's who's, you know, Stanford PhD in genomics. And he like, without him, I wouldn't invest in bio. You see other generalist investors investing in bio, and he'll be like, that is the dumbest fucking deal I've ever seen in my life. Are we allowed to curse on x? Dumbest deal I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1:You are allowed to curse on x, but you will what would your mother say? And we will shame you for cursing generally because this is a, this is a friend,
Speaker 2:a Our kids watch this show.
Speaker 1:Friendly show. Our kids watch this show.
Speaker 5:Goodness. I'm I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1:We don't we don't curse personally, but do whatever whatever's right for your brand.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They're they're,
Speaker 1:you know, if you wanna have, like, a low a low tier, like, I I I know you're an Irish guy. You're you're you're you're you're up in Boston getting drunk, getting hammered all
Speaker 2:Put pottery.
Speaker 1:Packing. Packing. Packing. Packing. Packing.
Speaker 1:Packing. Packing. Packing. Packing. Packing.
Speaker 1:Packing. Packing. Packing. Packing. Packing.
Speaker 1:Packing. Packing. Packing. Picking. Picking.
Speaker 1:Picking. Picking. Picking. P
Speaker 4:No. I I all all to say,
Speaker 5:bio is incredibly exciting, and bio is, like, a really funny one where I I think, like, people get really excited and really, like,
Speaker 1:oh
Speaker 5:my god. Like, they told me that they're gonna make people live till 250 years old. They're definitely investing in that, and people are gonna lose their share.
Speaker 4:But we're I
Speaker 1:mean, at the same time, it's like it's like every category is hard until some power law company comes along and makes it look easy. Like, Anduril Not even that. Hardware was hard.
Speaker 3:Now there's, like, now there's
Speaker 1:a new hardware company, like, every two days, and then they, like, yeah, they can't, like, beat Anduril necessarily overnight, but they can, like, sell and get deals and then sell to Anduril or, like, create value or, like, there can be good deals done in hardware now even though, like, hardware is hard.
Speaker 5:Totally. I I mean, more just, like and may this might just be me calling myself out, on it. What do you have, like, millions of of people watching this right now calling myself out for being, stupid, but, like, just the vocabulary of biology and, like, understanding how that whole thing fits together. It's just like a totally different beast, even I think compared to hardware and and other things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One of the one of the things I've been sort of realizing around everything deep tech, hard tech, biotech fits this is, within software, we went through a twenty year period in Silicon Valley where software entrepreneurs could go out and make these sort of outlandish claims around the products that they would build, but then just go and do it. Right? Because the software is hard, but you can kinda make the pixels, like, you know, work and whatever. It's code.
Speaker 2:Right? We we know how to do it. And then in hard tech, it's very different. You know, Elizabeth Holmes, like, I do believe she genuinely believed that she could build the blood testing device that only drop, but then, like, physics got involved. And it was, like, I gotta I gotta tell you to pump the brakes there.
Speaker 2:So it's been interesting to see that play out where for you as somebody who's a a definite optimist, somebody that wants to believe in human potential and the ability to great bit, build great things, you you probably have to dial it back at points and say, like, I want to believe this is real, but I'm not gonna invest because I can't kind of reach that conviction threshold.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I have said, and I think this is fair for for me, not for people who are better at science, but, like, I I do I'm I'm trying to actually move in click closer to the series a now and, like, not doing deep tech because, like, I'm not the guy to underwrite the science. And if I'm, like, the investor that you're calling to to to have something that has a bunch of science risk in it, like, I shouldn't actually be, it's more like Yep. The, you know, the the furthest out proven thing and putting a bunch of those together and and into a company. Gentlemen, I have to, I have to leave you.
Speaker 5:Last can
Speaker 2:can we can I get a minute?
Speaker 5:Yeah. You can get a minute.
Speaker 2:Okay. As the godfather of Solana, the guy who kicked off Solana summer, you did. You gotta you gotta give credit. You gotta you deserve some credit for that. Give us your thirty second take on the strategic reserve.
Speaker 2:It would have been an unimaginable to think that's the US government would be buying Solana, but, you probably maybe I wouldn't be surprised if you alluded to it. What's your thirty second take?
Speaker 5:Oh, man. My thirty second take is that it's also dumb right now. Like, I think Solana is great. I think it's, like, fast tech, and I think it's, like, some point in five years, a lot of finance is gonna run on Solana, on ETH, maybe on SWI or, you know, like, a lot of I think it's inevitable that that more and more finance will move over to crypto stablecoins and having Stripe behind it is, like, a real thing. Any strategic reserve that has Cardano in it is just it's a joke.
Speaker 5:Right? Like, it's, like Not to get political. Bunch of, like and I'm guilty of this too. There's a bunch of a bunch of dog that caught the car stuff going on. I think in crypto.
Speaker 5:Right now, it's, like, no regulation, strategic reserve. We're like, this is actually kinda stupid, like, but not this way. Like Yeah. This is not what we've been Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin's down 8% today and basically round tripped back to where the announcement happened, which is so bearish. Like, that's the US government is buying crypto and everybody's bearish. But I know you have an in person meeting in, like, four minutes, so sorry for making you late for that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This is great. Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:This is great. You're welcome. I'll look forward to the next show. Have a good one.
Speaker 5:See you later, guys.
Speaker 1:See you. Let's move on to Garage Mahal. So this is this is important stuff.
Speaker 2:This is Really If you're building a
Speaker 1:garage, how big should it be? Yeah. You're bigger. Square feet? No.
Speaker 1:Couple thousand square feet? No. Let's we're talking to people that are making 6,000 square foot garages bigger than most people's houses
Speaker 2:out in Minnesota. Minnesota. So I have spent time in Minnesota. The CEO, my cofounder, Aurora Yeah. Brian lives in Minnesota.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you can play everything's bigger in Minnesota. Right?
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:The the houses are bigger. The basements are bigger. You can play basketball in his basement. He's got a half court, and Yeah. When it's below freezing for half the year, you gotta go big.
Speaker 2:You gotta build man caves, and we're talking about man caves today. So I'm excited to get
Speaker 1:this car garage in the Minneapolis suburb already full. He had a three car garage. Brett Bailey, talk about struggle. I mean, we need a moment of silence for this guy, because he had to keep his racing portion of trailer outside through brutal Minnesota winters. Then one March, as he prepared for a race, he discovered the wheels of the trailer had frozen to the ground.
Speaker 1:Unacceptable. But he didn't just take it lying down. He figured out a solution. For two weeks, he was throwing salt out there, but now he is part of a man cave meets storage wars revolution spreading across the country. I love it.
Speaker 1:I'm a huge fan of man man caves and storage wars. And so he now keeps his two Porsches, a Ferrari, a custom Harley, a dune buggy, and a racing trailer in a nearly 2,700 square foot space outfitted like a sleek European car dealership. It sports a tequila bar, heated floors, bathroom with a shower, giant TV, leather sofa, stack of racing tires, and a car lift so you can lift up the car, work work on it, wrench on it with a couple of cold ones on the weekend. It's great.
Speaker 2:Nothing like getting under your car after you've had a couple of beers Yeah. Just going to work on it.
Speaker 1:Going to work on it. It's a
Speaker 2:little dangerous, but sometimes you hit that Balmer peak. Right? Yeah. Working on your car.
Speaker 1:Call them car barns, barns, barn dominiums, toy sheds, garage mahals, or shouses for shop houses. They're a big hit in the land of 10,000 lakes.
Speaker 2:Alright. So what's the controversy here, John?
Speaker 1:The controversy is that, they're too big and they make the town look stupid. Everyone hates how they look. They called it what was it? What what did they call it? They call it the the the the tin tin city
Speaker 2:or something like that. I don't you you know this, but Ben Yeah. Our vice president, producer of the show, is actually from Minnesota. Yeah. So we might have to send him out there to and and just have him zoom into the show on the site because this is just such an important story.
Speaker 1:It is. It is.
Speaker 2:We gotta get original reporting. We we don't like to do original reporting here. We like to just, you know, spread misinformation from the timeline.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:But, we gotta get Ben on the ground there because friends with one. We can go Yeah. There we go. Ben Ben says he's got friends with garage mahals.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Yeah. In Cross Lake, a forested vacation mecca two and a half hours north of the Twin Cities. Space is limited on lakefront lots, making storage space elsewhere often in simple metal buildings highly valuable. The city council has twice put a moratorium on new storage, combating an image that has led some to dub this the community, Tin City, because there's so much tin, going up as, as as storage.
Speaker 1:But if you look at some of these photos, they look fantastic. It looks like a lot of fun. If you're in one, Nelson and others tout the expansion of the tax base from the storage boom, which includes his new 4,200 square foot building, which is that's a massive house.
Speaker 2:And he's got a taxidermied Kodiak bear in there.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's jammed with boats, an RV, sports cars, motorcycles, a taxidermy Kodiak bear, and his father's model a. One section designed with input from his wife includes a full kitchen, flat screen TV, bathroom, and stone fireplace.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The biggest here biggest thing here, John, is I can't go in my backyard and throw up a I can't do one of these because California, they don't they don't want you to build.
Speaker 1:You can do ADUs every once. I know, but I want
Speaker 2:I want 5,000 square feet of podcasting, you know.
Speaker 1:I gotta run the restroom. Can you keep it going?
Speaker 2:I'll keep it going. Let's jump through to, the next post. We're gonna jump into the timeline. We got a post from Reggie James. Somebody posted, do you think that Steve Jobs did a market survey?
Speaker 2:You know, did, consumer survey to build the iPhone and Reggie jumps in here with a fantastic point. He says, they literally did. They got all the phones on the market. They saw it was all junk by Apple standards, and they knew this for a while, but had to get a few technical things in order first. They had to get really good at miniaturization.
Speaker 2:IPod helped them learn that. Then they had a cross learning moment where the company they acquired for their touchscreen technology, which was working on computer displays, they took that and brought it over to Project Purple, and that is how the multi touch was born. So now they have multi touch and know how to make things small, and they're still looking at these junk phones on the market. Once they see what's wrong with them, they ask themselves what's the phone we'd make for ourselves? They vibed after they knew the market.
Speaker 2:They had technical pieces in place and this is where all the software love that made the iPhone and, the iPhone finally comes together pulling from springboard and all the macro assess work. That's what made the iPhone feel so good with directional multi, manipulation and multitouch. The iPhone wasn't some isolated do what you want event. It was built off of decades of HCI learnings, a key acquisition and the success and learning to the iPod. Learn the real stories and don't just take a cliche like users don't know what they want as an excuse to build nonsense.
Speaker 2:So Shots fired. Yeah. Aggressive but completely fair, analysis of the situation.
Speaker 1:Posted this though was like was like, hey. I'm actually I actually don't know the history. I'm just curious. Like, can you just, like, educate me? But Reggie's a good poster, so he kinda amps it up.
Speaker 1:And it's like, let's let's go. Let's let's talk about this.
Speaker 2:But have Reggie you know, Reggie's had some amazing analysis of Apple over the years and their different trends. It'd be it'd be great to have him on the show sometime soon.
Speaker 1:We should have him on the show. It's interesting. I I remember this old core post by, Joe Lonsdale talking about the Hegelian Dialectic. Are you familiar with this? No.
Speaker 1:It's this idea of, like, the dialectic is basically, like, there's a, thesis, antithesis, and then the synthesis. And so you take, like, the like, an idea, you think about the opposite of that idea, the counterargument, and then you synthesize and then it takes them to the best art the the best pieces of both, essentially. Yep. And it's a very popular, like, mental model. And the example that he used in this Quora post to explain the Hegelian dialectic was literally Steve Jobs, both being, like, the vibes guy, but also the spreadsheet guy.
Speaker 1:And it's so easy in thought leadership and, like, posting for people to be, like, oh, like, vibes are the only thing that matter. Like, you should never think about the market matter.
Speaker 2:Don't ask. Don't talk to customers.
Speaker 1:Don't exactly. Exactly. People want axioms, when in fact, like like, the best leaders are often, like, you know,
Speaker 2:competition of generalized advice is to, like, don't do traditional market research. Yeah. Just talk to as many customers as you can. Yep. The thing about consumer is consumer is a category where you can have no preexisting business experience experience for the category and just build the product that you want.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can do this in b to b as well, but I think it's more common
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To just kind of ignore the market and just build what you want in consumer.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But even then, it's it's cool to see the history of how the iPhone came together and not just being, oh, here's a good idea. We should just do this.
Speaker 1:Yep. Anyway, anything else on Apple?
Speaker 2:I got a lot of hot takes on Apple.
Speaker 1:You gotta be more positive about Apple, I think.
Speaker 2:I just I've just been positive on Apple for twenty plus years of my life. Yeah. That's right. Fair to be negative in the short term, but I'm positive in the long run.
Speaker 1:It's more just like like I feel like at the end of your after you go massively viral for talking trash, there needs to be like, hey. Like, we can
Speaker 2:I gave Apple an app? I said if you're just giving up on innovation, buy an f one team.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Then we'll we'll all shut up.
Speaker 1:There's something about, like, I still love this company, and I want it to be great. And there is a sliver of greatness here. Let's just There's
Speaker 2:more than a sliver.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's way more than a sliver. Totally. But, if Tag Heuer will sponsor f one Why not why not Apple?
Speaker 1:Would be very cool. An Apple car.
Speaker 2:And no other sponsors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like like Red Bull. Like, I mean, Red Bull has a few others.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They've got a bunch, but They got a bunch.
Speaker 1:Imagine just the Apple car running around. But I'm sure they can't do it because it's, like, some emissions thing or something. Like, they've they've made so many like, they've pandered so to so many, like, special interest groups, essentially. Like, they're, like, completely bought in at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:don't know. It'd be very cool. I'd like a I'd like an f one team.
Speaker 2:Do we wanna talk about the GC?
Speaker 1:Yeah. General catalyst is going public. You'll be able to, invest in a venture capital firm soon on public.com. So get ready. Move your assets over to public.com.
Speaker 1:But no. This is a real story. General catalyst is considering an IPO. Dan Primack has the scoop. We've been hearing rumors about this for, a couple months.
Speaker 1:And as these asset managers get bigger and bigger, it makes more sense to trade them publicly. There's a few reasons, behind that. The main reason in my I mean, we can list out a few, but, when you're a public company, you are, subject to much more aggressive audits. And this is why people don't wanna go public because it's a hassle. They will put they will put up with that hassle.
Speaker 1:And as a result, they will have access to more capital. Yeah. And it will be a, there will be potentially more of like a power law consolidation in the actual fundraising of these funds. General catalyst has, you know, billions and billions under management at this point, tens of billions. And, if they wanna go for even bigger funds saying, hey.
Speaker 1:We are publicly traded. All of our financials are are public. You can go see them. Yep. You know, you don't have to rely on, newcomer scooping some random things Scoop.
Speaker 1:To, to to count on it. But there was some debate over this. Dan Primack, you know, posts that General Catalyst is considering an IPO. Jason Calacanis says, what is going public exactly, the returns or the LP interest? Dan Premack says, what do you mean?
Speaker 1:In this case, it would be the management slash holding company like Carlyle, Blackstone, etcetera. And a lot of people don't necessarily understand this, I guess, but, you know, asset managers are themselves businesses that make money from fees and all sorts of different pieces of that.
Speaker 2:GC, I think didn't they roll out a private wealth
Speaker 1:Yeah. Commission? Yeah. And and and they have private equity investments. They have they have growth stage investments, seed stage investments.
Speaker 1:And so every time they make a deal with someone else's money and so it it will be valued similarly to a bank, although it's a very, like, high performing bank in the sense. But how do you Yep. How when you invest in a bank, when you buy when you buy shares in Citi or Chase, JPMorgan, or or, I don't know, Goldman Sachs, What is happening? Well, Goldman takes money from some people, put my money in the bank, and then they lend that money out, and then they return it. And over time, they make money, and it's just like any other business.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:I don't know why Jason isn't thinking about this.
Speaker 2:Jeremy Gaffon has a good bid on this, which is, you know, basically that at the end of the day, private equity is the greatest business model on Earth.
Speaker 1:He he always says, like, merchant banks, the merchant banks Yeah.
Speaker 2:He talks about merchant banks, but specifically, it makes sense that the the the people that invest in private in public in private markets Yeah. Who study businesses all day long created a business model for themselves that's just absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. I mean, they certainly have, like, an advantage playing in
Speaker 2:the market. The question is is, it will be very interesting to see a venture capital firm going out and doing, you know, a roadshow and putting together materials and saying, look how much EBITDA we're gonna put up in this year. Yes.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:it's based entire you know, presumably entirely based on the fee Yeah. Accumulation Yeah. From their various funds that are all kind of funneling into this one vehicle. So
Speaker 1:also be very interesting to see what comp looks like post IPO at these firms. Right. Because instead of carry points, you're looking at stock options potentially. There's a whole variety.
Speaker 2:That's what's unclear is is, the the fund performance, the carry, where do those returns flow through? Because some of them will flow to the partners still, but you would imagine that investors in GC and the public markets would want upside in the returns as well.
Speaker 1:Yep. So the partners have the partners own the general partnership. Right?
Speaker 2:So then they would just own shares in the in the company.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And so when you buy them, you're buying a a a slice of the general partner stake. And if you buy enough, it's like you're a general partner. Right. But you just partner stake.
Speaker 1:And if you buy enough, it's like you're a general partner. Right. But you just paid for that instead of worked on it. And yeah. And and and this this type of thing has happened before where firms have sold GP stakes and said, hey.
Speaker 1:I'm cashing out of my fund. It doesn't have a lot.
Speaker 2:Did this.
Speaker 1:But I'm selling I I don't know if that's actually I I I haven't heard that. But, but, basically, I'm very I'm I'm I'm selling part of my GP stake. You will you will be the one to earn the returns from that upfront.
Speaker 2:But, Yeah. So this happened in 2023, January '20 fourth '20 '20 '3. Thrive Capital sells minority stake to Bob Iger and other moguls. So this was kind of like a party round. This sold 3.3% of the company, including CEO Bob Iger.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. So they they were able to raise a hundred and $75,000,000 to the balance sheet
Speaker 1:That's so fascinating too. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Management company.
Speaker 1:And and because you think about 3%, like, that could be just like hiring another GP and giving them a a slice of the GP. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you hire another partner, you say, oh, you're gonna be the one who does the AI deals or the deep tech deals or the defense deals or whatever. And you wind up giving them the effectively the same share, but they didn't pay for it. Or unless they, you know, bought in for some reason. Or they Yep. And and and they don't get the same alignment.
Speaker 1:Like, at this point, it's kind of like, Iger's like a partner almost in the sense, like, if he he owns a stake in this one firm. So if he has a deal that he wants to bring or a partnership, or he wants to do a deal with a portfolio company, like, he is linked to Thryv in this, like, very important way that's more tangible and more economic than, just like, oh, I'm an advisor to your fund. It's like, no. Like, I actually invested in your fund. I I not just as an LP, but also on the GP side, which is fascinating.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so Scheele sums it up. He says, GC would be the first major USVC fund to IPO. They own a health system, a wealth business, a fund of funds, a debt business, etcetera. They all started from a $73,000,000 fund one that had 0.7 IRR. Wow.
Speaker 1:Not
Speaker 2:good. Legends.
Speaker 1:But they kept going.
Speaker 2:I mean, you just gotta give them credit for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:That's incredible.
Speaker 1:Their first five five Warrior, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:If you look
Speaker 1:at the details with stripes when Hemant led stripes series b. And, of course, Hemant Tanaja is, the CEO now. Yeah. But he refers to himself as CEO. He has never he he he's Never said I'm sure he said GP.
Speaker 1:And and but, more recently, he's been saying, hey. I'm the CEO of this firm. I'm not just the I'm not just the GP or, like, the the the named GP or the most important GP because all of that's kind of, like, you know, fake, essentially.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should ask Shiel. He's gonna be on in twenty minutes. We should ask him, yeah, for kind of a deeper analysis here and how he thinks, all the fees and everything.
Speaker 1:Percent of GC's returns, 5,850,000,000 came from Livongo, a chronic care company sold for 18,500,000,000.0 in 2020 written down two years later. I wonder what it was written down to, and I wonder and I wonder exactly what, what happened with that. Like, what like, why was that asset so mispriced? But this happens all the time. I mean, plenty of times, companies get, get sold early and then wind up not doing the thing.
Speaker 1:But then on the other side, you have the Instagrams.
Speaker 2:Right? So Teladoc was the acquirer. They took a $13,700,000,000 loss in 2022 tied to the Livongo acquisition. That's a lot.
Speaker 1:That's a lot. I wonder what happened. I wonder how they mispriced it so bad.
Speaker 2:This is, maybe on par with with Square Square's acquisition of Affirm or not Affirm. Who did Square acquire?
Speaker 1:Wasn't it Tidal or something?
Speaker 2:Well, that was
Speaker 1:That was the, the wasn't that, like, the the music streaming thing? Didn't they wasn't Jack Dorsey?
Speaker 2:Afterpay. Afterpay.
Speaker 1:Was that not a good deal? I don't know.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 1:mean, all that stuff blew up on the interest rates. They
Speaker 2:acquired Afterpay for 29,000,000,000. Yep. And then, like, two years later, they were worth, like, maybe 40,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Public company. Okay. Well, should we zoom in on much smaller deals? A company making 30 k in twenty four hours, selling through Google Meet after one viral tweet.
Speaker 1:Interesting rhyme scheme here. I wonder if that's intentional. Eddie Zhu. Right.
Speaker 2:So just just to clarify in the last bit, then we'll restart that. So Square buys Affirm Yeah. In, the Zirp era for 29,000,000,000, and two years later, they're worth 26,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Afterpay. Right? Not not Sorry. Afterpay. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Block or Square
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Buys Afterpay for 29,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:That's a lot.
Speaker 2:And, like, less than two years later, they're worth $25,000,000,000 collectively themselves.
Speaker 1:Block is worth 25 collectively?
Speaker 2:I mean, they're worth $40,000,000,000 now. So
Speaker 1:So they'll build it all back.
Speaker 2:It's one it's just one, figure, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're just they're just one really good parlay away from Yeah. Getting back to nine digit territory.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We don't see public companies, like, ripping parlays.
Speaker 1:It's a hundred billion. I don't even know.
Speaker 2:I think that public companies should start ripping parlays Friday after the market closes.
Speaker 1:What what is your job as CEO if not a parlay? Yeah. It's like I want If you're I want I want my CFO to work out. I want this financing to go well. I want that distribution deal to pop.
Speaker 1:And I wanna
Speaker 2:rip parlays.
Speaker 1:It is a parlay.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And and and even you would You are constructing the ultimate parlays. CFO is job is automated away by ramp, and they have all this free time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They could be ripping parlays, and it would be fun for the market to be able to sort of anticipate, alright. How's the comp you know, the company's putting up a hundred million dollars on DraftKings this weekend. Like, how's it gonna go? Right?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:Don't don't bet on sports. Bet on yourself.
Speaker 2:Bet on yourself.
Speaker 1:But but view your but view your organization as if it is a parlay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because get this right, and we're gonna get this right, and we're gonna get this right. You only have to do that a few times.
Speaker 1:Exactly. One t. Jensen Wong. He's like, I want China to not invade Taiwan. I want I
Speaker 2:want America to work
Speaker 1:America to work. I want, I want Microsoft over 80,000,000,000 in CapEx. I want Zuck to develop $20,000,000,000
Speaker 2:secures the 500,000,000,000,
Speaker 1:5 hundred billion. And if he gets that boom, 10,000,000,000,000 stock.
Speaker 2:You gotta post that.
Speaker 1:10,000,000,000,000 stock.
Speaker 2:He's like, here's my $10,000,000,000,000 parlay for Nvidia.
Speaker 1:It's like it's like the Tesla secret plan, you know? Yeah. It's like, here here here if all these things go right, my stock should be worth a 10,000,000,000,000. And so, you know, this is my plan. Just express it in a parlay.
Speaker 1:I I think it's a viral format. I I think it's good. I I like I like thinking about things in parlays, even though I don't participate them in the sports betting realm because it's low class and vulgar. Anyway, moving on. Eddie says he made $30,000 in twenty four hours selling through Google Meet after one viral tweet, and I like the rhyme scheme there.
Speaker 1:He says he was inspired by PMF or die.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. This is amazing. So he made a post Yes. On Saturday.
Speaker 2:And he said, I built an algorithm that simulates how thousands of users react to your tweet, so you'll know if it will go viral before you post. It's a really cool concept. Everybody's experiences if you post it on x, you think you've got something great. You post it 300 impressions later. You got one, like, from from, you know, your your absolute boy, and you realize, like, alright.
Speaker 2:This wasn't a good post. Sometimes the opposite happens in in something that you weren't super confident in, rips. But, anyways, very cool. He ended up launching this, and starting to sell it kind of immediately and and did $30,000 in volume in a day, which, annualized is pretty good business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He basically would have gotten out of the cage in an hour.
Speaker 1:Insane. Oh, I didn't even annualize it. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You gotta annualize everything. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:Don't talk about, you know, you had a good day. Say, well, annualized were, you know, $200,000,000 revenue business.
Speaker 1:It's great. It's great. Yeah. I saw some big, big people quote tweeting this. It seemed really fun.
Speaker 1:We should give it a try. And congrats to Eddie. I love that, people have been inspired to go build stuff and and take a crack.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw Emmett Shearer from Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what it was. Tick, tick, tick.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Saying, you know, dramatic, which basically alluding to if we're letting truly right now, there's a lot of human input. You know, your brain's basically an algorithm. It sort of creates a, concept, releases it to the algo, and then and then humanity sort of reacts. And then in a world where algorithms are dictating the sort of entry
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Into the algorithm, it's just an entirely new level.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so Emmett Shears says, tick, tick, tick. And essentially, you know, he says, we're gonna start he he he's going down, like, the wire heading path. We're gonna, you know, be optimizing for the algorithms too much. That's gonna lead to, you know, some some sort of AI doom scenario, essentially.
Speaker 1:Not not not full doom. I I don't wanna, like, mischaracterize what he's saying, but he's just saying, like, it's clearly just, like, things are getting weird, which I agree with. And so Yaxin chimes in and says, would work better to replace this app with something that just has a blank screen with the text, everyone likes you. Because, you know, the goal is to get lots of dopamine from the like people, basically. But that's not really what it is.
Speaker 1:The goal of a social media, everyone thinks it's the goal to get, like, you know, a pat on the back and, oh, people like me. I'm popular. No. The goal is to make money. The goal is to make money.
Speaker 1:And and and and that's what a proxy for, you know, getting a banger post is, is that it will get you a job. It will sell your product. Like, this kid is making money. And so, it's not about that everyone likes you. It's it's, you know, you you cannot replace the app with with with shareholder value, with Yep.
Speaker 1:Cat with with with actual capital trans, like, changing. So Emmett says, do you truly not see the oncoming train of consequences for building optimizers that can predict the discourse generated from a post both volume and tenor? Do you truly not see the oncoming train of consequences for building optimizers that can predict the discourse generated from a post, both volume and tenor? And so I can't. I mean, break it down.
Speaker 1:I I I gotta dig into it. I mean, I can imagine some consequences from that. I don't know about all of the all of the consequences on this oncoming train.
Speaker 2:I think that, you know, the reality is right now Yeah. Every active creator online
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is already hyperfixated on how to, how to what does the algorithm want? Totally.
Speaker 1:It's like Mister beef.
Speaker 2:TikTok does this where they're like, if you do this song, we're gonna surf, you know, surface it. If you talk about positively about if you, are against the TikTok ban, we're gonna surface it. Right? So people know that, and they start to lean into it.
Speaker 1:So how is this an oncoming train? I I I see this as like the train has been whizzing past us and continues to whiz past us and is is accelerating and, you know, I don't see this as some binary moment that Emmett is is kind of I don't know. We'll have to have him on and and and discuss this with him because, I I think that's the main thing that I that I disagree with the characterization here is, like, I mister Beast literally built this for YouTube, like, two years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, it's, like, it predicts how well your thumbnails and titles are gonna do. And so, like, we're here. Like, people people have these tools. Maybe maybe it's not good enough yet. And when it gets better, then it really becomes, you know, give the people what they want.
Speaker 1:But I don't know. I mean, yeah. It becomes all AI generated. It becomes all all very addictive. And it becomes wire heading and no one ever goes outside and, they get the juice reward and they get the the the nutrients directly delivered into them and and, that's the end of humanity.
Speaker 2:Beautiful.
Speaker 1:Except for us because we'll be lifting.
Speaker 2:Speaking of the art of humanity, we got a post from Patrick, Patty Collison. He says, Grok's voice mode remains active when the app is closed. This behavior is made very clear with a live activity. It ends up being an awesome experience. Plop it beside you while reading a book and bat occasional questions its way without interrupting your flow.
Speaker 1:I read this post and I read the first sentence. Grok voice modes remains active when the app is closed. And I just thought like, oh, this is gonna be bad. This is this is gonna be like, it's spying on you. You need to be aware of this.
Speaker 1:Like, if I thought because I didn't even see it was him. And I love that it's just like, this is exactly what I want, actually. This is great. And I completely agree. What was I
Speaker 2:It's funny because because Yeah. Patrick has the perfect index on AI Yeah. Which is every AI company pays him, you know, 2.7% Yep. Right of every dollar. So he can be sort of Switzerland.
Speaker 2:He's like Switzerland of AI. The true Switzerland of AI. You know, everybody can can run on Stripe. But this was cool. I mean, it it does seem like, you know, voice has been this sort of lingering trend that everybody's been predicting, but it hasn't quite played out.
Speaker 2:Right? It it seems that voice has been predominantly used by people that aren't good at using their thumbs, and it hasn't been the preferred sort of method of communication communicating with your device. That seems to be changing. Right? Sesame Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sesame came out last week and and had a pretty incredible response. It's a wild experience to use and, and now Grok is, you know, I I I flagged this post from Patrick because I think we should try to, I think we should try to leave Grok running for a show and just start interacting with it and saying, you know, when we have a question that I would otherwise Google, we can just ask Grok. Yeah. And it'll have the context from the conversation to be able to sort of surface, relevant data. So
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 2:But we're having trouble with x servers today. Our livestream on x, the the entire
Speaker 1:livestream servers to Grok. Yeah. What happened? Yeah. Clearly, they're not they they're not deploying AI.
Speaker 1:They're not deploying the servers to, to the humans. We're the second class citizens now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well said.
Speaker 1:It's a disaster.
Speaker 2:Oh, well. But, sweet. Well, let's, jump in. We got a promoted post from AdQuik, our favorite way to advertise out of the home.
Speaker 1:Out of home. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuik combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And Glad to see it.
Speaker 2:What I think is amazing in the same way that, you know, any any company in the world can go on meta and and just sort of sign up and start running ads alongside the biggest companies in the world. Same thing happens on AdQuik. Biggest companies in the world, there's, like, a ton of the Fortune 500 that runs on AdQuick, Wall Street Journal, Warby Parker, Ramp, Discount Tire
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Instacart, Credit Karma, H and R Block Lift. All these massive companies use it, but you as a start up can go and start testing out of home Yeah. You know, even on a smaller scale. So
Speaker 1:You know, another way to advertise out of home, make a t shirt like Jason Carman did.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:On to the next post. He says, we made a movie about space for free on x, then we made some t shirts. All of the designs are love at story.inc/apparel. Go check it out. We love to support Jason Carmen here.
Speaker 1:He has made some
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, he's building a whole media company right now, and it's fantastic. And, yeah. I mean, really cool designs. Like, very, very iconic. I think these will age very well.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. Good to get it out in the world. And I'm sure it'll start a lot a lot of conversations about the content. If you see somebody in rockin' a Jason Carmen original,
Speaker 2:you're like, you know, they're you know, they're an absolute killer.
Speaker 1:Techno optimist. Should we go to Carpathi on, four point five again?
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:So this is a, reply to someone, Zivi Moshevitz saying, g p t 4.5 reaction time go. Anything you want to make sure I don't miss or your own reactions. And Karpathy says, my reaction is that there is an evaluation crisis. I don't really know what metrics to look at right now. MMLU was very good and useful for a few years, but that's long over.
Speaker 1:SweeBench verified real practical verified problems, I really like and is great, but itself too narrow. Chatbot arena received too much focus. Partly my fault, that LLM labs have started to really overfit for it via a combination of prompt mining, private eval bombardment, and worse, explicit use of rankings as training supervision. I still think it's okay, but there's lack of better. It feels like on like it's on the decline in signal.
Speaker 1:There's been a number of private evals popping up, an ensemble of which might be one promising path forward. And in absence of great comprehensive evals, I tried to turn to vibe checks instead, but now I feel they are misleading and there's too much opportunity for confirmation bias, too low sample size, etcetera. It's just not great. TLDR, my reaction is I don't really know how good these models are right now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You gotta get the models to write, to write little stand up sets, feed them to stand up comics that get bucket pulled at kill Tony or go on
Speaker 2:Put them in the stands. Me.
Speaker 1:Put them put them in this put them on the stand. No. It's gotta be humans that step on stage with At the comedy store. At the comedy store on an open mic. Don't get that boot off.
Speaker 1:And then you measure the boos to the laughs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Boos to the laugh. No. I think I think the real the real bent like, the the only thing that really matters right now if you're you're a foundation model company is being Money. Significant noticeably better
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not to benchmarks, noticeably better than than chat g p t Yeah. For specific use cases. Yeah. Right? So Claude is noticeably better at coding.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. And so people use Claude. Grok is notably more entertaining for some specific use cases for consumers than ChatGPT. Right?
Speaker 2:So that that's, like, something that, you know, potentially but but you have the situation right now where a hundred million plus consumers love chat g p t. They think it's awesome. So if you're competing with them Yeah. You don't just need to be 10% better on some random math benchmark. You need to be 50% better so that somebody will try you and switch to you for their day to day use.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 2:that's what actually matters in terms of winning and, you know, you can see what in my view, you can see what companies are actually consumer AI companies are actually doing well by looking at the App Store rankings. Right? It's not it's a snapshot insert and it's obviously momentum driven.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But if you're a consumer AI company and you're not on the App Store chart while OpenAI has continued to have a pretty dominant position, you're not in a good spot.
Speaker 1:Yep. And that
Speaker 2:like, the App Store chart is the final benchmark
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Real benchmark that matters.
Speaker 1:I see. It's gotta be so hard to try and be competing in LLMs right now because it's like, you have people who are everyone there is like an open AI cofounder or adjacent to the president or a state actor. It's like, if you're not on the highest, highest level, like, how are you how are you competing there? It's gotta be tough. Anyway
Speaker 2:We got Shield in the waiting room. I'm excited to have him on.
Speaker 1:Let's talk fintech. Let's talk Financial technology. Hey.
Speaker 2:Ram. We're not gonna call it fintech today. We're gonna call it finance technology.
Speaker 1:Finance. Finance. Finance tech. Finance technology. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's bring him in. Let's chat. Let's chop it up with Shield. How we doing? Should we do one more related post?
Speaker 1:Will Brown says it's interesting that 1,500,000,000 parameters is all you need to crush math competitions, but you need, like, 15,000,000,000,000 to make the model funny. Maybe humor is the right measure of true intelligence, and I agree. I agree.
Speaker 2:It it is very difficult. Is can you see him in the waiting room? Yeah. I I just see his photo here. It says shield.
Speaker 1:Well, 15,000,000,000,000 parameters
Speaker 2:really quickly.
Speaker 1:To be funny. The the whole be me thing is funny because, it feels like it's going to really benefit from personalization. Like, the people that are like, oh, it's so funny. It's like, well, yeah, Tyler Cowen. Like, you did laugh at it because, like, it's funny that the LLM knows so much about you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you give that to just some random person off the street and it's like, be me. Like, I don't know. The LLM doesn't know anything about you or, like, you just have a normal job. Hey.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Hey, guys. Welcome.
Speaker 1:What's up? Oh, looking good in the suit.
Speaker 2:Let's go. He was prepared.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, when
Speaker 4:you come on on this show, you gotta you gotta dress up. You gotta do the part.
Speaker 1:So I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:I mean, we had Appreciate it. We had, quite the lineup today. Packy, reporter
Speaker 1:boy was on.
Speaker 2:Nobody showed up in a suit, but you did, which is why
Speaker 1:I think you win the day.
Speaker 2:You win the day.
Speaker 5:Hey. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's go. I love it. Super excited to have you here. I mean, we we've had you on the show informally
Speaker 1:Dozens of times.
Speaker 2:Dozens of times, constantly surfacing, the stories that matter. But, I don't know. We've had a big week. I think why don't we start I wanna kinda start with, maybe kind of extrapolating on your Stripe ad gen point of view. You you covered this last week.
Speaker 2:Let's start there, and then I wanna kinda broaden it and talk about FinTech more broadly. There's been some big news, but maybe we start there. What, What's your takeaway? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What what's, like, the main takeaway from you know, I I think you've tried to generally stay somewhat impartial. Right? And just sort of, like, put the the numbers out and let readers take away their their own opinion. But, but, yeah, what what what's your what's your expansion there?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so the overall headline is the Stripe Stripe puts out an annual report now, and Adyen's a public company. So they do, they process a similar amount of volume. Stripe is slightly ahead, growing slightly more. It's, like, 1,400,000,000,000 processed by Stripe.
Speaker 4:And I think, you know, a lot of people look at that and say, okay. Well, these are equivalent companies. So it's crazy that Stripe trades at 91 and a half billion when Adyen's a public company trades at 56,000,000,000. So a lot of people said, okay. That's a sign that the private markets are overvaluing Stripe.
Speaker 4:I don't think that's exactly true. Like, although they have similar process volumes, their margin profile is different. So, like, when you make a transaction on Stripe, Stripe actually charges more than Adyen does Mhmm. In part because of the types of businesses that Stripe serves. Adyen has a lot of enterprise businesses.
Speaker 4:Stripe has some smaller businesses. So Stripe most likely actually has greater net revenue than Adyen does. We don't know it because Stripe hasn't posted that publicly. But, overall, I think both are amazing companies. I think Stripe you know, people fault them for having more employees, but I actually think it's interesting.
Speaker 4:I think, like, Stripe is investing more in r and d, and they're growing faster, and they have a lot more business lines. So I think both are outstanding companies. I actually have exposure to both, which I'm quite happy about.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Awesome. You gotta be the best case scenario is you're conflicted, but the even better scenario is you're double conflicted. Double conflicted.
Speaker 4:And they're both ripping.
Speaker 2:So it's great. Yeah. They're both ripping. I'm happy to I'm happy to hear that. Where do you think, you know, one, Stripe Stripes had this amazing ability to, you know, build a behemoth by betting on basically betting on these super early stage companies.
Speaker 2:Right? Many of their biggest customers today were startups when they were all going through YC together, and and that's turned out to be a fantastic strategy, is part of the reason that Stripe could be worth significantly more than Adyen, right now is that the sort of general investor belays base believes that they'll be able to take customers away from Adyen, these sort of bigger enterprise players because all the marketing you know, Stripe has been able to take these two lines. Right? They've got Stripe Atlas, so they're gonna get the next generation of companies. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then simultaneously, when you see their out of home ads today, it's all oriented around, hey, we we signed Hertz Rent a Car. Right? Like, clearly marketing. And so do you see Stripe's you know, what what are Stripe's biggest, you know, future opportunities, you know, enterprise and and sort of beyond?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So you're absolutely right. So Stripe does a phenomenal job of getting all early stage startups or a huge percentage of early stage startups. And, actually, like, this business, it start it started, like, almost fifteen years ago now. And at that time, your CTO was not making the decision on who you chose for payment processing.
Speaker 4:That was not a CTO's decision. That decision was made by if you had a CFO as a CFO or it was, like, the CEO. Because it was it was a money decision. And then what Stripe did is they said, it we're gonna save you so much time and energy in getting a payment processor up and running that it's gonna be the the CTO's decision. And the CTO is a little less price sensitive, and it's gonna go with the best option that saves them time and engineering resources.
Speaker 4:So Stripe charged a little bit more money than you would pay if you went somewhere else, but it was transparent and you knew what you were paying. And, and then along the way, a lot of those early companies that they signed ended up growing into massive behemoths doing many billions of of revenue. And so that was awesome for Stripe. But now Stripe is also saying, okay, like, we got those customers that started with us when they were small and grew grew up. But to your point, the on the out of home and and, like, when they're at conferences and stuff, they are trying to attract these other behemoths as well.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, I think they have part of Amazon's business. They have, Shopify is large in the I think if you look at in aggregate All
Speaker 2:the sellers.
Speaker 5:Get
Speaker 4:or Shopify one, then Shopify is probably the largest, single opportunity for Stripe. But it's made up of, you know, thousands or many more than that of of smaller, individual retailers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. What other what you know, they've they've obviously they're making a push into stable coins. Yeah. What do you think they're you know, I I think it was very smart to identify that, hey.
Speaker 2:What is the Stablecoin developer tool that has the most traction that's that's really working and just pay kind of any price to get that and then bolt that on. Right? That's basically what happened. What do you think, you know, what's your thesis around Stripe and stablecoins? They obviously wanted to own that sort of asset and have exposure to it, but it's not like they're exactly rolling it across out across the entire portfolio today.
Speaker 2:But what do you think that rollout actually looks like?
Speaker 4:So, yeah, one thing that's kind of interesting is, like, how this came to be. So one kind of funny thing is I think the bridge Stripe acquisition was announced, I don't know, three or four months ago. Yep. And literally, in the next month, I was getting five to 10 stable coin pitches per week. It's amazing how how quickly that happens.
Speaker 4:Like, as soon as some some large acquisition happens, you're instantly VCs are getting pitched all sorts of companies around that space. And everybody thinks, you know, because Stripe made this acquisition, now the space is super hot. I think what actually happened here is pretty interesting. I think, like, Bridge is a very a a great company. I I think what happened is they so SpaceX, had this problem with Starlink.
Speaker 4:So Starlink, you know, is, an international ISP accepting payments in developing markets. Developing markets are really hard to accept payments in. Traditional banking infrastructure, like, totally sucks. It's slow. It was, like, blocking transactions, like, traditional infrastructure in some of these markets was blocking blocking transactions.
Speaker 4:So strike or so so SpaceX said, okay. We're looking for a solution. I don't know if Sean Maguire wasn't involved at all, but, like, Sean is is close with with SpaceX, is close with with, was an investor in Bridge. And so You
Speaker 2:can imagine between, you know, raging, you know, fighting the culture war on x, he was also doing the side deal to get the bridge SpaceX thing to happen. I'm just saying there's a world anything else. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The man contains multitudes. Yeah. He is a man of many talents for sure. Continue. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you wanna finish? And I have a default.
Speaker 4:I have a follow-up question. I I think, like, I think SpaceX using stable coins was a big moment. Totally. And I think a lot of other people said, oh, like, we're having this issue too. SpaceX is using a stablecoins with their bridge.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:I think that was actually super instrumental for them.
Speaker 1:Even the scale AI example, like, really concretized it for me where it was like, oh, it's very clear that you're paying a bunch of people in an international. I I I paid I've I've paid, video editors internationally, using stable coins. And just because, like, it's it's so much easier for them to get the money. And so I think as soon as you have that, it's very hard to be a skeptic about it because you're like, okay. I I actually used it.
Speaker 1:It worked. It was, it was it was what everyone's been talking about for a very long time about easier, faster, lower fees, etcetera. But I wanted to flip it around for you and ask, you know, you know, you in consumer tech, you always have like, oh, Zuck's gonna kill you. Do you feel like, you know, you get these bridge pitches post bridge acquisition? Is there is there any fear like, oh, Stripe is gonna build that?
Speaker 1:Is that a vibe that you see among early stage fintech companies? Because there's been a lot of successful fintech startups. Also, Stripe is a founder led Decacorn that is very able to move quickly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I do think I do think there's some of that, but I think that there are other there are areas in which people have been able to build great businesses that Stripe was competing. Actually, you know, kind of crazy, maybe blasphemous to talk about, but one of your sponsors here and friends of ours, Ramp, you know, Stripe ended up investing in Ramp. Stripe, as as you may recall, had a competing product
Speaker 2:to that.
Speaker 1:Totally. So Yep.
Speaker 4:So it's not like you can't beat Stripe at anything they do. There are a lot of businesses that are going after
Speaker 2:Well, Stripe also had a stablecoin internal stablecoin team That's right. That that had been working for a while. So
Speaker 4:So so while Stripe, you know, those guys are super sharp. And as you said, founder led, my brother works there. I'm I'm, you know, I'm I'm I'm I'm all about Stripe. Love it. But I think there are plenty of opportunities to build businesses that that go after businesses that Stripe has been.
Speaker 4:And Stripe has a core focus area that they need to that they're doing phenomenally well at, and they're doing a bunch of other stuff that I think there are opportunities to compete with them on.
Speaker 1:Just don't start a high end publishing company because they will kill you.
Speaker 2:Like, Zach is one
Speaker 1:right where Stripe for Yeah. I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole that industry. I think that's the one that they just have completely locked up, monopolized. Yeah. And they will actually break your legs if you
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Irish mafia.
Speaker 1:The Irish mafia will come out for to defend
Speaker 4:that monopoly. Stripe does not launch a podcast because
Speaker 1:Game over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll hang
Speaker 4:up with the clique. Brothers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very true.
Speaker 1:That's okay.
Speaker 2:What, you posted a day or two ago about the general catalyst IPO and and sort of rumors around that. How do you talk about you know, I don't know if you, you know, speak generally. You don't need to give us any sort of inside, baseball on it. But how do you think the sort of, fee structures work when a venture fund goes public? And and and do you think that's gonna impact GC's a bill you know, is it gonna be good for GC's ability to recruit top investors?
Speaker 2:Is because there's more liquidity? Is it gonna be bad in the sense that, you know, people that really wanna bet on themselves are like, oh, I could go work for BTV and get a bunch of carry, and I and I trust my picking ability, and I can make them a lot more, you know, getting actual carry. What it how how does that unfold?
Speaker 4:I think on the latter part, I think, like, these mega funds, we'll call them the, like, you know, double digit billion AUM going out to raise five to 10 each time. They're already huge behemoths, and, like, somebody who is considering working at them should not be considering working for us. Like, we're we're we're playing a different game.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's like, you know, you're you're a seed or series a startup, and you interview somebody who's like and you're like, who are they who are you considering? And they're like, well, I'm considering Meta, Stripe, and you guys. I I'm like, get out of the room, dude. Don't waste my time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We just had this. It makes so much sense.
Speaker 4:So I think, you know, I think we play a different game. Like, they're in the asset accumulation game, and going public only furthers that.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:We're, like, they're gonna make a lot of their money off of management fees from these billions of dollars they collect. And, you know, returns like, they've had some great returns along the way. You know, they led stripes series b and I think a $500,000,000 valuation. It's now worth 91,000,000,000. So, obviously, they've done phenomenally well there.
Speaker 4:They have a few other bangers that they've had through the years, Livongo among amongst others. So I I think in the past, they've had some pretty good returns. I think in the future, it becomes more of an asset accumulation game. And if I think about how we as BTV, like, if we're if we're pitching or if we're we're trying to sell, a a startup to take our money, it's like, look. Like, we're returns motivated.
Speaker 4:We're driven by you being successful. They're just and and, like, you're really meaningful to us versus if if it's a multistage firm, it's like, take their money later. Like, they're not they're not as driven by
Speaker 2:They'll always be there. Yeah. They'll always be there. We we won't be. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. But I I think it's interesting. I think you're gonna see more funds IPO, frankly. I don't think this is the last one.
Speaker 4:I think, you know, it's certainly possible that Andreessen could IPO and and any of the mega funds could.
Speaker 2:Yep. No. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Especially if they're already set up as parades. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. You have to be feeling pretty good, lately given that fintech is is back. I'm sure you had I'm sure you had a now I remember this in in in late, early twenty twenty three, FTX had collapsed. I was running a a fintech at the time that that had digital asset features and traditional fiat features, and it just was like, where where do we really go from here?
Speaker 2:Brex at the time was burning spending, like, 800,000,000 a year to make, you know, like, what what it was totally inverted. Right? It was, like, 500,000,000 in revenue on, like, 800,000,000 of expenses. I was, like, is this category, like, you know, where do we go from here? Right?
Speaker 2:It was it was sort of a dark time. You guys rode through it. You know, crypto is really good at this. Right? Like, crypto VC is, like, the market's down.
Speaker 2:They're, like, I'm gonna get paid if I just hang on. VCs typically are like, you know, you probably had a lot of fair weather fintech investors that were like, we're gonna go and do other categories. How, where do you think the biggest opportunities are in fintech today? And, yeah. I'd even be curious, you know, without naming names out of the last few deals that you've done, can you kind of kind of talk about the the investment areas?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. So I'd say, like, fintech overall, look, it's been it's been a crazy time.
Speaker 4:We started this fund five and a half years ago. It's been a roller coaster. Yeah. And I've been investing in fintech full time since 2016. Nobody gave a shit about us then.
Speaker 4:Then, you know, fast forward to 2021, we were the belt of the ball. Everybody Yep. Everybody wanted to invest in fintech. People were, like, begging us to give them advance notice on deals we did and then investing, like, months after us at, in some cases, like, 15 times evaluation. It was absolutely bonkers.
Speaker 4:And and stupid, frankly
Speaker 2:Good for fundraising, I'm I'm sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, good for fundraising, actually not actually not actually good for those companies that took too much money.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And so and then what happened was an overcorrection in 2022 and 2023. And in in part because those companies had so much money, they didn't have to find PMF. Like Yeah. It what it wasn't PMF or die. It was PMF or survive because you raise a hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And for coast for five years.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, fortunately, most of the companies in our portfolio, like, they had enough money to survive, and then they didn't burn too much. And they're now, like, now they're having killer years. Like, a lot of our companies actually kinda struggled in '22 and '23, but then '24 was a banger year and, like, especially the second half. I think it was just coming out of that whiplash. And and you saw it in the public markets too.
Speaker 4:Like, if you look at fintech companies, '22 and '23, they were totally in the in the doldrums. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was just explaining I was just explaining to John that Square bought Afterpay for 29,000,000,000 and then was worth less than $20.20 like, 25,000,000,000 combined, like, less than a year later. I mean, one of the one of the most one of the most devastating, acquisitions So rough. Ever in recent memory.
Speaker 4:By the way, that's a fun topic. So Afterpay. So the the cool thing about that one is, our friends at Matrix, Dana over there, when they invested in Afterpay, I believe it was a $80,000,000 public company.
Speaker 2:What? Way.
Speaker 4:Matrix led the a. It it was Australian
Speaker 1:Oh, they were already They were already public. Money, and raising money on Australia just meant you go public. There's a lot of Canadian companies like that. I I see them all the time where it's like, oh, it's a hundred million dollar company, and they had just happened to be public because, like, that's how you get a deal done if you're raising $5,000,000. Like, you have to go public because I want all of the oversight, and I want all the accounting, and I want all the audits.
Speaker 1:And so you better just be public if you want me to underwrite this. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So so what a banger of a deal. Like, they invested
Speaker 1:in a
Speaker 4:company any of us could have invested in.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then, like, I don't know I don't know how many years later. It's four or five years later, sells for $30,000,000,000. Bang.
Speaker 1:I I
Speaker 4:think when all is said and done, what what happened was it got announced at 30,000,000,000, but by the time it closed, Square stock had already dropped a lot. So it was it was, like, half as much. Still Sure. Quite a banger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. How
Speaker 1:That's why they brought in TJ to to find the next one. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So, there was a bunch of, you know, bunch of businesses started, super low rate environment that that worked in that in that sort of setting and then sort of started to not work, in in 2023 and beyond. How are you advising your founders around you just are are you telling them, like, plan, like, this is the new normal?
Speaker 2:You know, it's been easy to imagine a situation where Trump just lays on the pressure to to drop rates, but, and then and this reminds me you have a portfolio company Mercury that that generates, you know, basically, like, really obscene levels of of EBITDA, but it's predicated on, you know, this sort of, fed funds rate that they don't control. Right? So they they've been a fantastic product. But, so yeah. How how are you advising your portfolio companies around the sort of rate environment, given that that so much of the returns in fintech are driven by, you know, finding that perfect balance.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's true. And I would say, overall, lower rates are great for us. We have Mercury and one other portfolio company, Relay, that are benefited by having higher interest rates. It's because they're sitting on deposits.
Speaker 4:So, you know, they they that's how they make a lot of their money. It's tricky for both those companies. Like, if you think about to your point, they're printing money. But, investors have to think about, okay. Like, what is the rate that we can make we can assume is gonna be the case going forward?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's really hard to predict these things. I don't think it's gonna be back to where it was in 2021 anytime soon if ever. So
Speaker 1:But at the same time, you could totally imagine, like, you know, like, a period in the next decade where we have effectively zero interest rates for, like, five years plus. Like, post some sort of recession, like, inflation
Speaker 2:And that was why when the when the Mercury news came out and, you know, they were getting a $3,000,000,000 valuation and everybody's like, oh, this is great because it's two x Yeah. Whatever they got priced in 2021. I was looking at that and saying, they're not really getting credit for that Oh, totally. Profit at all. They they may as well, like, there there's, you know, other companies that are losing $200,000,000 a year, much less making $200,000,000 a year that are getting priced like that.
Speaker 1:So Fundamentally, America just has a lot of debt, and keeping a high interest rate is not fun when you have a lot
Speaker 4:of debt. Totally.
Speaker 2:I think you're gonna
Speaker 1:see a
Speaker 4:lot of pressure from Trump.
Speaker 1:I think there will. And at some point in the future of American history, we will see low interest rates.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The next the next there's been one grift every two weeks, but the next might be dropping dropping rates just long enough to refinance the whole Trump Yeah. Yeah. You know? No.
Speaker 2:But, anyway, so your your general position is, like, assume they're gonna be somewhere between here and 2%, and you gotta make your business model work kind of anywhere in that range. Sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Totally. And and one thing that's interesting is, like, Mercury started before. Like, Mercury was making a large portion of their revenue off of the rate. And then in 2020, rates dropped.
Speaker 4:They lost a huge portion of their revenue and then actually, like, built up a pretty substantial interchange revenue business.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And, like, kind of I don't remember the exact amount, but, like, in March 2020, rates dropped. Mercury lost a shitload of the revenue, and I I believe that, like, two or three months later, they were back up to where they were
Speaker 1:from before. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. So it feels
Speaker 1:all gross to your soul.
Speaker 2:Since it's the the topic of the last 24, I would love your I would love your take on the strategic scam and gambling.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The strategic crypto reserve? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I
Speaker 4:think I think it's total bullshit. I it's like a it's a classic big government idea that masquerades as some sort of, like, forward thinking policy. You can say we're innovative or whatever, but it's actually quite the opposite. Yeah. We're literally handling handing public funds over to, like, you know, private cronies and wealthy people like myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You said you said your single biggest position personal position is is Bitcoin. So you're you're actually and and the the craziest thing is, you know, we started the show today, and we realized that that the Bitcoin price had almost round trip back to which is is the biggest bear signal that we the government announces, hey. We're gonna be investing in in crypto now.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't move the market materially or in any permanent way. Yeah. It's crazy. Really priced in fully. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4:I I think, like, my my point of view is on this and and a bunch of the other stuff that that has Trump has done this administration. I feel like, you know, it seems like a short term political win, but long term, it's bad. And in this case, I think this crypto reserve undermines the dollar's position, which is, like, fucking awesome. Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 4:Is the global reserve currency.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And this sends some sort of confusing signal about our own confidence in USD.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, like, so other countries hold hold dollars because they're stable, consistent, and predictable.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, you know, I I think you could make the case for Bitcoin. I wouldn't personally.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:But you could make the case that Bitcoin is the new gold
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's some sort of hedge against inflation or currency instability. I don't think you can make the case for fucking Cardano or, you know, XRP. Like, what what is this shit? It it's it's bullshit. It's, it's basically a taxpayer funded backstop.
Speaker 4:Now David Sachs came out today against Joe Lonsdale and said it's not taxpayer funded. I think that's bullshit. Let's say there's confiscating coins and and holding them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's the same thing. Like, if you like, previously, when they confiscated, they sold.
Speaker 1:Yep. At when not selling.
Speaker 4:It's the same thing. Like, it makes no difference.
Speaker 1:What what about the argument of, like, you you know, during the, bank bailouts in 02/2008? Obviously, like, it looked very bad because it's, like, taxpayer money is going into the the the balance sheet of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, save those companies. But if you look back historically now and you read the Tim Geithner book, it's like, well, the banks paid them back with interest in the in the and the taxpayer actually made money on that. What about that argument?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so what's the but what's the argument for the crypto reserve? Because The
Speaker 1:argument is that it is that is that it it could be net positive to the taxpayer. Like, the taxpayer, yes, the taxpayer does does put money into this thing, essentially. But if it goes up, then they wind up paying less taxes down the road
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:When the government wants to fund something because, alright, we don't need to tax you as much because we went 10 x long on x, y, or z.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's it's just a question of, do you trust the government to allocate our dollars Yep. Or do we trust individuals? And so I I think it's like a personal freedoms issue, so it it's kinda strange to have it come from the Republican party, frankly.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally. It was odd.
Speaker 2:Anyway what, talk to us about you've got an accelerator, which Yeah. Vertical specific accelerator makes a ton of sense. It you know, if you're you know, YC is an amazing product and platform and
Speaker 1:Why are you locking them in cages, though?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. No.
Speaker 2:That's a real question. Why aren't you locking them and putting a live stream on it? Yeah. No. I don't think that I I think people are are sick at this point of the PMF or die approach applied to financial products.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know? We we very clearly did not want that because there's been some bad, bad things that happened when you just try to but, what kind of companies are you looking for? I imagine that it would be insane if somebody had the opportunity to go through the your guys' accelerator and they're building in fintech to to choose YC. Not because YC is not great, but just because you guys can connect them to this hyper hyper specific network and Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I totally agree. YC is great. Look, I I ran an accelerator 2016 to 2018. YC's I think Gary said that they had four and a half percent of their companies became unicorns.
Speaker 4:Actually, in mine, 7% became unicorns. So we have we have a good success
Speaker 2:rate. Congratulations.
Speaker 4:So we have a good success rate. I I think the idea is, like, look, if you're building in an area that we have expertise, yes, ring the gong. With expertise, we could be helpful.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Now you you asked what areas I'm interested in. I I'd say, look. We're we're sort of founder driven first and foremost, but there are some areas we've invested in a lot. One is this, you know, very unsurprisingly, we're investing in AI companies. We we've done a bunch recently in the services as software space
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 4:Including one actually we did with a previous guest on here, Keith. We have a company called Basis, that's a AI for accounting company that is able to do a lot of the work that a low level account does. We led the seed, last year. Keith led the a recently. We've done a bunch others in that space.
Speaker 4:We did, one in the SMB loan underwriting space called CODGE. We did one in the mortgage space, did one in insurance. And all these companies basically are using AI, but embedding themselves deeply into workflow and solving a problem for somebody who probably could not build it themselves, which is exciting. I I think you know, my worry with a lot of these AI companies, you've seen all the charts, zero to a hundred million revenue. I think a lot of them that aren't as deeply embedding into a workflow, I think are in danger of going from zero to a hundred down
Speaker 2:Easy come, easy go.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so we're trying to invest in companies that we think have some durable lasting value, some data distribution, and embedded workflow, value. And and those kind of things are easy to find in fintech.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have you touched any of, these broader sort of more PE style roll ups? You know, there's some opportunities in in payments, obviously, for that. Have have you gone into that space at all yet, and and what's your general point of view there?
Speaker 4:We haven't we haven't done a whole lot of these PE roll up style things. We've done a couple things that that are similar. We did one in the, in the health care space, that's doing that's works in private practices called Meroca. I I think, honestly, jury's out on those kind of businesses and and raising venture dollars to do so.
Speaker 2:Probably works better for the asset accumulator harvester model where, you know, you can deploy a lot of capital with with no you know, lower risk unless you're saying, you know, we're gonna replace every employee with AI. You know, it's easier to say, we're we're gonna buy a bunch of companies at fair prices and and get some efficiency, but that's basically just private equity, which is not the business that you're in.
Speaker 4:Not the business that we're in. That's exactly right. And so I I completely agree. I I was gonna bring up, like, general catalyst is buying a hospital system in Akron, Ohio. That's they're in a different business than we're in.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I can see why it makes sense for them.
Speaker 1:Really quickly, you you say is buying. Can you break down, like I heard about that deal, like, last year. Why is it taking so long? Like, what's going on with that? What is is this, like, a regulatory approval type of situation?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'd imagine. I don't know. I don't know any
Speaker 1:personal information,
Speaker 4:but, I'd imagine when you're buying a health system, there's a ton of shit that you have to do. There's, like, there's pushback from the community I noticed, like, immediately. Like, when when we heard about it, I also saw articles like, hey. This is fucked up. Like, a venture capital firm is buying something that should be for the public good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's been a lot of pushback on, like, oh, private equity bought this, you know, local clinic and, like, made it worse or, like, reduced the quality of care to, like, maximize profits. So it's always been controversial. It'll be very interesting to see how General Catalyst positioned themselves in the IPO. I mean, Citadel was thinking about going IPO back, like, I don't know, ten years ago.
Speaker 1:And they they like, hedge funds were seen as, like, villains of the Yeah. Of the crash. So they bought an investment bank to try and make themselves look better, which is hilarious to me because it's like, like, oh, yeah. We're we're not the bad hedge fund guys. We're the good investment bankers.
Speaker 1:It's like both of those are, like, kind of villainized already. It's
Speaker 4:bad if you go banker to make yourself look better. That's bad.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:And so they yeah. I think they paid McKinsey, like, a fortune to, like, you know, advise them on how to position their brand going into the IPO. And then they just kept it private, and then they created Citadel Securities and printed. It was great.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 2:You're probably, gotta jump Yeah. Because I know I know we had thirty minutes. Is there any IPOs that you're you're pretty convicted are happening in in 2025 in fintech specifically? I mean, there have been rumors around Chime and Klarna and, you know,
Speaker 4:Chime and Klarna are the biggest. I think where Chime prices is gonna be, you know, very important to the fintech world. I think, like, I think in the private markets, it's currently trading at 10, but people think, you know, people think it's gonna go out stronger. It it's gonna have a huge impact on on me and our portfolio. Actually, we have we have some other companies that are in a similar space.
Speaker 4:So I'm I'm really looking forward to that one. Klarna, I think, you know, I I actually don't know where it's gonna price. Klarna has something interesting. You know, they raised at a crazy valuation and then did a massive down round, which is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for them. Klarna actually does not have liquidation preferences crazy enough.
Speaker 4:So Interesting. It actually was just like They
Speaker 1:also replaced 100% of their employees with AI. Right?
Speaker 5:Supposedly. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's just the CEO and and Claude three, Sonic cursor, actually. No.
Speaker 2:Somebody should go buy a Peloton and then see if see if a human bangs on their door or it's just it's just a chatbot being like, hey. Please pay this back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fine.
Speaker 2:What but but Chime, what was their what was their 2021 or 2022 valuation? It must wasn't it or, like, you know, '4 x yeah. 25,000,000,000 in 2021. So Nice.
Speaker 4:And I remember it trading privately at, like, 30.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Cool. Very cool. Well, we will have to definitely have you back on with us.
Speaker 1:I'd be back off.
Speaker 4:This is super fun,
Speaker 2:guys. Enjoy this. You're welcome any week, and, thanks for jumping on.
Speaker 4:Appreciate it. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Cheers. See you later. Bye.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Should we
Speaker 1:close out with we we were going so long, the lights are turning off because we're running out of battery, you know. We're really pushing to the limit today. It's great. Should we close out with some timeline? What do you wanna do with this?
Speaker 2:A little bit of timeline.
Speaker 1:PM. We got we got to drive around in a Ferrari later. You know, it's a hard life out here. More to come there soon. Also not kidding.
Speaker 1:Did you see the the the mister beast backlash? I thought this is kinda interesting.
Speaker 2:I didn't. I didn't.
Speaker 1:So, mister beast did a podcast on Diary of a CEO. Have you ever listened to this podcast? Diary of a CEO?
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's like the biggest
Speaker 1:It's the biggest business podcast, and no one in Silicon Valley listens to it. It's very odd. I mean, it's like, it's popular, but it's popular just with, like, a very I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's not an American show. Yeah. The guy's British.
Speaker 1:And so even though he has he has great gas, like, I mean, Brian Chesney
Speaker 2:He also has, like, a Web three startup.
Speaker 1:He does?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I had no idea. The the the host. Really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. He should've stuck to simple supplements, I guess. But anyway,
Speaker 2:I'm gonna let you read through this summary
Speaker 1:of the restroom. Yeah. Sure. So, mister Beast goes on Diary of a CEO, and then Kotaku writes an article about mr beast going on the show and says, mr beast, life is quote so much easier when you're broke. And of course, this is very controversial.
Speaker 1:People get very upset. There's a viral post saying, f you. It gets like a hundred million likes. Everyone sees it as very, you know, negative and flippant that this rich guy would come on and say, it's, life's so much easier when you're broke, but that's not actually what he said. And it's very interesting.
Speaker 1:So Jack Appleby breaks it down. He says, this might be an all time PR team screw up. Mister beast went on diary of a CEO podcast. The podcast PR team pitched Jack Appleby and other writers to cover it, which is something most, most podcast but most people don't know about podcast. But when you go on a podcast, there's a PR team for, you know, trying to amplify the attention that this guest gets.
Speaker 1:It's all very, very planned out, very insider plant, industry plant. And so when Kotaku wrote about it, they used a pretty harsh quote. He said, I'd I'd have done the same, except it's not a real quote. The podcast publicity team somehow confused mister beast saying bro as broke. So maybe they use, like, AI dictation or something.
Speaker 1:But in a moment where he's just saying life is harder when you travel, they misquote him and made him sound like a jerk when it's not the case at all. And it's all not naturally gone viral with the misinformation side of it, all because the publicity team tried to get coverage and they screwed up. So now mister beast is taking heat. Kotaku is taking heat when neither of them deserve it. And so the the real quote was, this is killing me to be honest.
Speaker 1:It was like so much easier when you're broke if you don't travel constantly. And that's not what he was saying. He was saying, it's so much easier when bro, like, you're not traveling and it's fascinating. And of course, his original point is correct, but the, but, but, but the Stroud seed reading of all this is of course that life is so much easier when you're broke and that, and that with wealth comes a responsibility.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that, and that, and that when he's, when he's getting canceled for, he should have said the quiet part loud and that everyone else is wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's true. He's also built up a brand where he's sort of almost promised his audience that he's reinvesting, like, a 1% of whatever he makes. Like, he's
Speaker 1:gone out very powerfully. But, I mean, Elon has said this, and not backed down from it where he said, like, look. I have all this money and the world's richest man. I'm miserable. You don't wanna be me.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm not having fun. Yeah. Like, I'm I'm like like, I'm having I'm doing there's forward motion. There's energy, but I wouldn't call what I'm doing fun. And that's fine.
Speaker 1:That's good. That's also a true story. He could retire for fun.
Speaker 2:He could retire, buy the biggest yacht, and not ever talk to them.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He totally didn't have to buy
Speaker 1:And plenty of people have.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the Google founders did for a long time. Bill Gates, you could say, has kind of been on that tip for a long time. Even Ellison is kinda chilling from time to time. Like, there are people that choose to be much less aggressive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jason Calacanis was the first investor in Uber. Yeah. One of the first. And now he's deciding to be in this you know, go to war with, defense tech founder.
Speaker 1:She does not need to do that. You know? He he could he could pass on that, and yet he doesn't. He keeps he keeps kicking the beast, and everyone involved in that seems to love fighting. Love fighting.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. It's very annoying for me. Makes sense.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm totally over it.
Speaker 2:Anyway. Over it.
Speaker 1:Should we stay on the topic of VC? Liz Wessel, ramp investor. Congratulations to Liz. She was an angel. She says, has anyone written about the trend over the last six to twelve months of founders eighteen to 26 years old raising VC to buy old school businesses and inject AI into them.
Speaker 1:I've seen so many pitches in every vertical on this in 2024, and it looks like still in 2025. I'm curious to learn how VCs who have done these seed and a rounds often priced pretty high are thinking about this approach. Blog posts or podcast recs appreciate it. Well, let's just do a podcast about it right now.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. Here
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:So, Liz, we got the answer for you. We're gonna go to Jordy, an expert in this exact topic. Jordy, break it down for us. Would you invest in a 18 year old founder buying a, old school business, injecting AI into it? And, the seed round is that, you know, you're gonna get
Speaker 2:one at AI, John.
Speaker 1:Ninety nine pre.
Speaker 2:I'm in. Send me the wire instructions. No. So there's two things that hap there's two things that happened. The the the concept of the search fund Yep.
Speaker 2:Exploded because the idea of these sort of old school IRL real world businesses
Speaker 1:It wasn't a Silicon Valley thing. It wasn't Silicon Valley. HBS.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was an HBS prospect saying, hey. You could have gone to Goldman.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Instead, you're gonna take $5,000,000 Yep. And try to turn it into $15,000,000, in, you know, five years. Yep. Something like that. So that became popular.
Speaker 2:And then the the AI sort of enabled roll up, you know, started blowing up. And and Liz is right. There's just tons and tons and tons of these companies. My concern you know, generally, I think we're gonna see we're gonna see returns in the category. It's not gonna be one where, you know, every everything that gets basically zeroed out.
Speaker 2:But that being said, you're going into you're you're taking venture dollars and you're going into this sort of private equity world, which is like one of the most efficient markets in the world. Right? Private equity has spent decades honing the ability to buy assets, make them better, and then sell them for a higher price.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so by going in there and saying, it's a huge bet to say we're gonna we're gonna be able to replace 80 to 90% of the employees with AI. Right? When when the models are good, but, you know, they're not agentic yet, right, for the most part. And so, my my concern is that you're gonna have the it seems like the most likely outcome is, like, some of the big winners end up being the big winners still end up not being venture winners. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And that they they they get a nice three to five x and Yep. On invested capital, but it's not enough to to to sort of return any any type of fund.
Speaker 1:Yep. I I think that's a good point. I'm I'm trying to think of, like, the private equity deals that I've seen, like, kind of up close and personal. And I'm going back to, like, Bain Capital When I was there, they the the the the the historical, like, banger for them was Staples. Yep.
Speaker 1:You know, Staples stores. And that was not a digital transformation story. Yep. Like, that was very much a nuts and bolts. Like, what should the capital structure be?
Speaker 1:How do we lever this thing up properly? How do we close underperforming stores, ramp up overperforming stores? It was not it was not, hey. The Internet's here. I mean, this would this happened in, like, the nineties.
Speaker 1:Like like, this is the main capital story. So they I mean, they they they think it owned I think they own Staples from, like, the eighties, nineties to the early two thousands.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Like, the Internet was a thing. They they there there is a world where you could be, like, buy Staples and turn it into Amazon.com.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But I'm sure they launched an e commerce site at that point, but it didn't, like, materially change the business. Same thing they bought, who'd they buy? Toys R Us? And that one, I think they got out, but eventually, it went bankrupt, and it was not a digital transformation story. And so, yeah, the private equity thing, it's like the the the even though there's been a trend of, like, the Internet for a long time, there like, that hasn't been the story of private equity in my Yep.
Speaker 1:In my in everything I've read over the past, like, few decades. It hasn't been, oh, let's, like, let's go and buy the hospital network, and we're gonna improve the user experience flows of the payments plan or whatever. Like, it hasn't been let's use the The
Speaker 2:challenge is when you're buying a legacy sort of SMB Yeah. Typically, the founder's retiring. Yeah. And the reason that that company you know, outsiders will look at the business and say, oh, they run on pen and paper.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're not factoring in the fact that that founder was a staple of their local community, would work twelve hours a day for decades and put their blood, sweat, and tears into the business. And so you would get this effect of you're ripping out the sort of owner operator who's Yeah. Who's made their life's work, this company, and then you're slapping some AI on it. Yeah. And I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think you almost are better off with the owner operator. Right? And so the value and so in this business, when you're buying businesses that are being valued on cash flows
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You need to make them grow faster, and you need to increase earnings. Otherwise, the value is less. Yes. And so it's it's you can rip out cost to increase earnings, but the the sort of replacement, the sort of what you're ripping out is human
Speaker 1:capital and ejecting, you
Speaker 2:know, artificial intelligence. Yep. Unclear what that trade is gonna look like in the short term. The other thing
Speaker 1:is the value capture lies because so so so, hold on to that second point. But the the interesting thing is, like, like, oh, they're doing stuff on on pen and paper. Well, if they're paying somebody, you know, $10 an hour and they're only spending one hour a month on it, well, that's $10 a month. DocuSign's gonna hit you up for a hundred bucks a month. You're gonna 10 x your bill by going not paper.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so there there's a question of, like, how efficiently priced are the digital tools? Yeah. Because if they're really efficiently
Speaker 2:priced with these
Speaker 1:they're gonna take their pound of flash.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're supposed to pay that. Small businesses are, like, you have the the, niece and nephew Yeah. Of the founder who, like, kind of work for, like, below minimum wage, and they're getting ripped out too. Right?
Speaker 2:They're not sticking around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We have a we're we're the grandchildren coming in on the weekend and, like, you know, racking servers.
Speaker 2:I've got a I've got a buddy in Malibu who's, like, has a multi hundred million dollar, like, health care software focused Yep. PE fund. And he, he has like, people don't realize, like, how, how precise these, managers are, and that he does not care to try to get a 10 x. He's like, I just wanna get, you know, two x. I want a two x, and that's really all that I care about, but I'm never gonna miss.
Speaker 2:And I'm just, like, only and so you're coming in and you're competing with an operator where you you're gonna have to pay, you know, people that are selling their businesses. Usually, they have some type of long term incentive to make sure that the the the acquisition is successful. Do they wanna sell to the guy that's a proven operator that's, like, like, literally, like, I'm gonna go out of business if this doesn't, you know, my fund is gonna be, damaged if this doesn't work, or do you want the 22 year old that's, like, you know, I'm rolling up, you know, pools. Like, I saw, like, a, like, a pool roll up. That was, like and I think it's awesome.
Speaker 2:Like, it's a cool, like, it's a cool shot. The pool? But, you know, I I I'm it's unclear if Public pools? No. No.
Speaker 2:Like, residential pools. So, like, if you can all
Speaker 1:those are. If no.
Speaker 2:So you can go on, biz buy sell or some of these other sites right now, and you can buy a pool route, and it'll be, like, basically the client the clients. And so these things trade over time where you can go and say Yeah. I'm gonna buy, you know, thousands of pool clients in outside of Austin. Right? Roll this up.
Speaker 2:The challenge is, like, the the the competitive pressure on a pool route is so intense that anybody with, you know, a hundred dollars worth of equipment can clean pools. Totally. Right? And so it's not it's certainly not a monopoly type environment.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I can see a lot of VCs getting burnt here, mostly because, like, yeah, like, even if you wind up shifting from, look, we have 100 x in our in our fund to everything's a three x. And the math and you work out the math and the IRR should be the same. That's not the entire purpose of a single fund because there's plenty of there's plenty of situations where, yeah, you wanna get a seed you wanna get a seed into some company, and then you wanna pile it into pile into it with your growth fund. Yep. And and if you're just getting a two x, you're not gonna pile into it and and scale it.
Speaker 1:And so it's kind of just this this hope that AI true will transform private equity, and maybe it will, but we don't know. We haven't seen it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the risk for venture funds is that you're running a traditional venture model, and then you say, oh, we're gonna put 20% of our fund
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Into a bunch of, you know, roll ups, and then you get a banger Yeah. And it's a four x. And they're like, great. Like, we still are, like, are under gonna underperform. Right?
Speaker 2:So, anyways, I think, that venture people need to understand that, you know, we like to go into other industries and and, you know, sort of say, like, oh, like, you guys have been doing this all wrong.
Speaker 1:Expeditionary or boondoggles. I mean, they're basically boondoggles. Yeah. You know? Maybe.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, it works out. I I hope they figure it out. Let's go to Molly O'Shea. It's a fun one. I think I think we should take this into account.
Speaker 1:We've been we've been podcasting pretty hard. I think we should announce that we're taking a break. We're gonna take maybe eighteen hours off.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you won't hear from us for a
Speaker 2:while. Yeah. We're gonna end this stream eventually, and it's gonna be about eighteen hours till we start up again. Yeah. So We're gonna spend time with our family.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Really re recharge the batteries. Yep. Deep breaths and stuff.
Speaker 1:But then we'll be right back at it. But let's let's close out with this, post from Molly O'Shea. She says, after further analysis, I've come to the difficult decision to go into hermit mode. I will be refraining from any generalized social interaction or networking like events, travel conferences, and coffee chats for the foreseeable future. If you wanna hang out, sign up link in my bio.
Speaker 1:My team will get back to you.
Speaker 2:Brave, Molly. Brave. You're brave.
Speaker 1:I wonder who inspired that.
Speaker 2:I wonder who inspired that.
Speaker 1:I wonder who inspired that. No. No. We love Molly on this show and, yeah.
Speaker 2:She's Our default answer when we get invited to events now is,
Speaker 1:we did it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We did cover it on the show. Did you
Speaker 1:invite us to have an event? We're gonna say no. But if you tweet about it, we'll cover it on the show.
Speaker 2:If you
Speaker 1:wanna call in, we'll call in too.
Speaker 2:Everybody wins.
Speaker 1:But, you're probably not gonna get us out of this chair because it's so much fun.
Speaker 2:It's just too much fun.
Speaker 1:It's too much fun. You never wanna turn off the stream. Are there any other bangers you wanna do?
Speaker 2:What was your sleep score last night? Because I
Speaker 1:I had I had a rough one. I had a good one. I got a ton of sleep.
Speaker 2:It takes me having the worst night of the last thirty days for you to for you to do better. I got a 72.
Speaker 1:I got a 94. I slept eight hours and seven minutes. Let's go.
Speaker 2:You you put up you consistently do eight hours. Yeah. This is great.
Speaker 1:You got the laugh joke. That's great. Yeah. Put up huge numbers. Built like a bear, sleep like a bear, just hibernate every once in a while.
Speaker 1:I have I've been a bit under the weather, so I had to go to bed early. Still got up at six, got in,
Speaker 2:pumped some funny. So so I didn't set an alarm. Yeah. I used the the the Eight Sleep alarm. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 2:I didn't set it yesterday. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You shouldn't have told me about that because if you're competing with me, now I got
Speaker 2:an edge. Yeah. You
Speaker 1:gotta keep these features to to to Well,
Speaker 2:I got some other secret features Okay. That I'll share with the audience,
Speaker 1:but you're not asking. I'll have to do cover my
Speaker 2:ears. No. But I I didn't turn on the the warming feature at
Speaker 1:the end
Speaker 2:of the night. Yeah. And so it was, like, impossible to get out of bed yesterday even though I was sleeping in, like, two hours past, like, whenever we normally get up. So, anyways, go to, instant.com.
Speaker 1:I forgot my transition. My original transition was when we go to the moon with Firefly, we'll we'll sleep on an eight sleep on the moon or something. But somehow I missed that.
Speaker 2:I don't know what happened. We are interested in competing with the audience. So, go to 8sleep.com/tvpn
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And get a discount on eight sleep, and then DM us. We'll get in a group, and we'll all sort of motivate, each other to put up crazy numbers. Yeah. Anyways, we got some more timeline.
Speaker 1:I think I I think let's do more timeline tomorrow. I think we're I think we're good at this point.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 1:Getting late.
Speaker 2:Good. Good.
Speaker 1:Good. Good. We we got a promotion to film.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We are, gonna go drive a Ferrari around, which you'll hear more about soon.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thanks for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave us We gotta do, in your review.
Speaker 2:We gotta do a review of the reviews tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should do a review of the reviews. We'll get them up on the show, and, thanks for watching. We appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, brothers.
Speaker 1:We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.