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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVP N. We are live from the Temple Of Technology. The Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital today is Tuesday, 03/04/2025. And guess what? We have a guest at the opening of the story of the show.
Speaker 1:Eric Gliman CEO ramp. We're very excited for you to be here. Thank you. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Awesome to see you and, great to be in this holy place today.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The dojo of the dollar, the the shrine of shareholder value. It has many names, but most importantly, it is it is our humble abode is the host.
Speaker 3:It is where we hope. And it should feel like home to you considering that, I have this massive, you know, sort of ramp logo over my head here. So, home away from home on the air. It's amazing to have you. How's how's this week been so far?
Speaker 3:Obviously, a busy one, with the news yesterday. But from what we understand, it was, you know, old news to you, but I'm sure it feels great to get it out in the world.
Speaker 2:It's incredibly exciting. And, look, like, you you know, most days as a founder, it's it's it's you in an office taking calls, waking up early, staying up late. It it's just, you know, a lot of, you know, constant work. And it was one of those rare moments, I I think, when, you know, customers, partners, the team could, all celebrate just a little bit, enjoy, and then kinda get back to it. And so it's, you know, pretty overwhelming, really exciting, and, feel lucky to be here.
Speaker 3:Talk about the, you know, pressure of, you know, raising, you know, in in, in the sort of height of Zerb you guys raised at at a 8 ish billion dollar valuation, then you had to, sort of reorient the team around. Obviously, the business performance was still fantastic, but, many people were saying, you know, publicly that generally a lot of these unicorns may not ever sort of achieve that sort of peak valuation. How good does it feel to not only achieve it again, but exceed it dramatically? And what did you have to do to kind of, like, motivate and rally the team in those sort of, like, the darker days, where, again, the sort of public narrative was that, you know, these valuations were never really real. And, yeah.
Speaker 3:So how how good does it feel at this moment?
Speaker 2:I think someone really has to do just like a a deep in-depth piece of, like, the big comeback and and building up for, like, these twenty twenty one companies and and and what it took because there really were, companies that would raise at, you know, hundred x revenue multiples. I don't think it was a sin necessarily to raise it high prices, and it probably the sin was just spending it all, really quickly. You look at a lot of the companies that have transformed, their industries, Amazon, Google, Apple, like, you you name it, often started with, some kind of bubble or hysteria people were investing a lot in it. I think it does interesting things to businesses. I I I can tell you that, you know, our our mission has been very consistent.
Speaker 2:Start a business that is obsessed with saving our our our customers time and money, help them have every dollar an hour that they're spending in their business go a lot further. And when you have, a large amount of capital behind you, you, of course, think about what are the results that you produce next week, but you start obsessing over, could I make this outcome, ten years from now larger? Instead of taking that next marginal dollar and I'm keeping it, how do we put it back into the hands of customers, see them succeed, have the ability to use that next dollar to invest in faster growth and, in a weird way, grow a a much larger business, for them ten years from now and and we hope a much larger one for us. And so, I actually think it created the the the conditions for Ramp, to not just be customer obsessed but, obsessed but, to take that to a whole another level. You know, I I I would say is is one of those twenty twenty one companies.
Speaker 2:We certainly had a lot of of work to do to to grow, but if you keep, you know, I think in 2022 is public that, you know, revenue forexed, that year. If you keep doubling, if you keep growing at incredible rates, what what are very large multiples suddenly become very reasonable. And I I think that the, interesting thing that happened since is these these, you know, it all met, and now Ramp is is not only trading, like, you know, strongly performing public traded companies, just growing at a dramatically faster clip. It's driving more savings and more value for customers. And, the most remarkable thing is it's such a large market.
Speaker 2:I I think if we do our jobs right, we tend to save our customers more and and grow, just as fast if not faster. So
Speaker 1:I remember you telling me that, one of the things you did for the employees was actually during the all hands, during kind of the turmoil of the interest rate rise, you actually walked the team, everyone on the team, regardless of their role in investor relations or not, through how valuations are calculated, where ramp is, the growth rates, the metrics, and kind of did a bottom up analysis, not like a full DCF or anything, but you walk people through that. Do you think that's something that's unique about ramp culture, or do you think more, startup CEOs or, you know, scale up CEOs should be transparent at that level with their employees about how, because there's a lot of companies out there right now that are just like, Hey, yeah, we're worth $20,000,000,000 because I got one guy to write me a check at 20,000,000,000. Right. They bought, they bought, you know, a million dollars for the stock at 20,000,000,000. Whereas you, I think you said, Hey, look, There's a whole host of people around the table that agree on this valuation now.
Speaker 1:We just repriced it in the new interest rate regime, and here's all the multiples. Here's what it would look like if we were public, etcetera. Walk me through that.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 2:start start with with maybe this and and think about this, where if you're a new, employer, you're considering coming to Ramp, there's sort of two, you know, ish ends of the deal just from a comp perspective. One was cash. People can agree on, you know, you know, base bonus that that kind of structure and and and what's the equity value. You know, maybe that you get a a package worth a hundred thousand, half a million, something like that. And traditionally when this is done, we say, okay, this is granted.
Speaker 2:This is based on this valuation. So we believe that the stock today is worth if you stay for four years, it will be worth half a million dollars. And if it grows from there, it will be worth more. The problem that all these companies had, in 2022, '20 '20 '3, when, you know, publicly traded tech companies, in some cases, were down 70%, some were down 90, others were down 30 is no one quite knew. And for an opaque private company, suddenly, the bid ask spreads could be very, very wide.
Speaker 2:And during all this, I mean, we we sort of like, we were growing incredibly quickly, like, that twenty, twenty two years. We grew four times year over year over year. No other publicly traded company was was doing that, and so, I think part of the problem that we were trying to solve was, you know, we we had the we were very lean. We weren't burning a lot, didn't have a capital need, but I wanted to be able to look employees in the eye and say, you know, when we make a grant and we say this is a $500,000 grant as of the day that you're joining, we really believe it. And it's not just us but other sophisticated investors have done it.
Speaker 2:And so we we did what was a very unusual thing, at the time which is, you know, we just went out to market and said, we just wanna know where you would price this. What's fair? And, investors said we have more conviction than ever. In December 2021, we valued Ramp It at 8,100,000,000.0. Today, we actually think it's gonna be a way bigger company and the value is 5,800,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:And we said, great. Let's do it. And and the interesting part is mathematically if you go through it, to your point, John, like a a DCF discounted cash flow, one of the biggest drivers of of what's the end valuation is what are all the profits you'll make in ten years plus, and it's impacted by what is the risk free rate the, overnight rate you can get. In December 2021, that rate was almost 0%. You know, you would get no no reward for risk in, 2023, 2022, the risk free rate was, like, five to five and a half percent.
Speaker 2:And if you compound that over over ten years, it has a dramatic effect, and so in a weird way, the 5.8 if you kind of go through the math, the $5,800,000,000 evaluation first, it it it it lowers the share price today, but it implies a much higher share price later on.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:So I guess to back into it, you know, I still think a lot of companies haven't taken their medicine. They actually haven't just marked it to market, and I think that a lot of employees who've been working hard, probably you're still underwater and I I we didn't think this was right. We rather would just say, you know, here's where the stock is, come in today, through hard work and, you know, focus, customer obsession, let's build from here. And I think that proved really well, you know, we're we're we're back, above all time highs. We have a lot of momentum, and I think for, people who join the team and part of the mission, I think people have been been treated really fairly.
Speaker 2:And so, I I don't know. I hope that's helpful and and just how we saw that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I have a question around ramps ramp truly lives the ramp way. Like, the the approach to company building that you guys advertise, you you you do exactly yourself. Right? So so I feel like you're in a position like, looking at ramps capital efficiency, which I think was published, you know, yesterday around your guys' sort of net burn, it's really astonishing.
Speaker 3:Right? And it's gotta be if you're running a business, you know, at at anywhere in the same category, even adjacent categories, you have to be highly concerned at the at the rate that you guys are growing in that context. Is that how much of that do you credit to ramp versus yourself and your team's, operational abilities?
Speaker 2:I think our whole mission. Right? To your point is, like, make the most of every dollar in every hour. If you're spending it, you should know why. And it's not just that you're spending it in one place, but but what actually generates the return?
Speaker 2:What what what connects to growth? And I I I would say that, we certainly benefit a lot from our own product. We try to be obsessive over making sure we're not wasting. And, if we're spending on on, you know, software licenses of product, we buy 500 seats, we want 500 people to use it. And, we use ramps to cut out extra licenses.
Speaker 2:We look and make sure we're getting the the most impact for for prices and, you know, software that we're buying and, I I just think, you know, for the same reason, a lot of the highest performing best running companies, on the planet run on ramp and and use it. You know, we do too. We we wanna be the best customer of our own product and, so, some of it's that, but I I'd also say with your whole mission is, you know, to obsess over getting, you know, your customers the most from every dollar an hour, as long as you're not a big hypocrite, you start thinking about it for yourself too. And so, I I I would give credit to the team. I just think that the rigor, you know, not just financially, but even just from a, you know, engineering perspective, design perspective, I I think most organizations could not have put out a Super Bowl ad from, you know, eleven days start to airing.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 3:we're one of the few groups that had direct insight into that because I remember we talked to the team. You know, we have a sort of a weekly, with with the ramp, marketing team, and we talked to them, and they basically were like, hey. We gotta go dark for, like, three days. And so we got to witness the process, and it was just it was it was incredible to see. In this moment, you know, to me, it feels like ramp's opportunity like, the the value proposition for ramp has never been stronger.
Speaker 3:Right? You you were born in 2019. You very quickly were in the zero interest rate era where it was not cool to save money. It was cool to spend it and grow as fast as human humanly possible. And we're now entering this period where, you know, we have terrorists.
Speaker 3:There's austerity in the government. Right? It seems that, you know, saving money and making dollars go further is in. How do you, you know, how are you you thinking of, you know, taking ramp out of you know, ramp is the Super Bowl felt like this first moment where ramp was going mainstream. Right?
Speaker 3:And, you know, what does that look like over the next, like, couple years, in terms of, you know, getting, there's there's many more businesses that that, aren't on ramp that than are. What is the next two years look like in term in terms of going mainstream?
Speaker 2:Two two things. I mean, there's something just timeless about Ramp's core ideas. You know, I need to paraphrase, you know, Jeff Bezos when he was talking about Amazon. He couldn't imagine, ten years in the future people would ever, you know, say, you know, Jeff, I I love Amazon, but I wish the prices were higher. I I just wish that, you know, these packages got to my door a a little bit slower.
Speaker 2:You couldn't imagine it. People always want lower prices, you know, and getting things earlier, getting more done with less effort. And, in some ways, we just took the simple idea very seriously. For a business owner, you know, in The US, average profit margin is eight and a half percent. It means that a dollar saved is not equivalent to a dollar earned.
Speaker 2:Right. You know, a dollar a cost that you cut is equivalent to increasing your revenue by $12 and, I just think that we, you know, looked at the math and just took it seriously. And I I think that, you know, simple truths in some sense are one of the most powerful forces in in in business. When I look at where we are, it's it is incredible to be serving, empowering. I what we believe is one to 2% of all corporate and small business card spend in The US, which is maybe the market that we're largest in.
Speaker 2:Know, it's 98 to 99% to go. I I think part of going
Speaker 3:You did the you did the meme. You did the 1%. The 1%. If we
Speaker 1:just take 1% of this thing, it will be a big company. And you did it.
Speaker 3:They did it. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:So frustrating. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, people are gonna be like yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can I get a breakdown of, like, post mortem on the Super Bowl? I wanna know. I mean, everyone kinda knows, okay, Super Bowl. Like, it just looks good.
Speaker 1:It looks like a six to seven figure spend, but how do you everyone wants to know, you know, what does it feel like? How do you start calculating, like, does this make sense, and did we make money from it? What's your early read, and then what do you what signals are you looking for down the road?
Speaker 2:It was incredible. So there was a couple things, and and also there was even kind of in ramp fashion some things that made it, the the buy particularly impactful and maybe a little more clever. So, by being by buying the ad much later than most normal people would do, we had access to very unique inventory. Like, it's sort of is a little insane to say eleven days before the Super Bowl. You know, what if we did that?
Speaker 2:And so as a result, we actually knew who was playing in the Super Bowl. You know? You know, we were able to to find someone that had incredible relevance to to what people were were watching and, of course, Saquon is it an amazing one on one talent. That was phenomenal. Next, there was without getting too specific, a lot of folks that, for various reasons would normally buy Super Bowl ads insurers who had to deal with fires and other things like that that dropped out of the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2:You know, didn't wanna be advertising at a time when, you know, we're we're sort of, coming under attack and it meant that some of the the spots that we were able to get were in extraordinary slots. For people who are watching closely, we were the very last ad, going in to the Super Bowl. And that was nationally aired. For folks in other markets saw the ad twice and, well, I can't get specific on the figures. It was a lot less than what people think and the impact was a lot more.
Speaker 2:I think that Saquon, you know, being a core contributor and having extraordinary season meant that not only, you know, was a lot of coverage of of him, but, you know, even the next week he was on the Today Show and, you know, they talked about his story as well as, our partnership and, the ad aired there and and and we can see this in the metrics where February was, you know, by many accounts that, by far the biggest February that we've ever had. The acceleration just in terms of of sales as well as people feeling like, you know, it's gone from startup to, you know, this company that I knew when is is actually on this big stage. And so you you can see it in in in in the growth and just even in how people feel, how likely people are to recommend, and and and we've seen all of these go up.
Speaker 3:I have a more personal question. You now run a a $13,000,000,000 plus company. You're still one of the most kind and genuine people that I know, and it's almost most people by the time they they sort of climb the mountain to to to build a company this big, they get sort of hardened. What do you what do you credit your ability to, you know, your your ability to sort of lead with kindness? And I feel like every conversation that I've had with you, but at the same time, sort of broadly, your your sort of reputation despite, you know, building, such a behemoth in such a short period of time, that's broadly your reputation with anybody that I feel like interacts with the company.
Speaker 3:Where does that come from?
Speaker 2:So, Juan, I I just think, you know, we're we're we're thrilled to be here, but, you know, I I I, you know, show some humility. 13,000,000,000 is a lot. It's still very small, in the grand scheme of things. You know? We're competing directly with companies that have multi hundred billion, if not, almost trillion dollar market caps.
Speaker 2:Some of the largest companies, you know, today or, call it 3 and a half trillion dollars. And the the wild part, you know, is that mathematically a a company like, you know, an Apple or Microsoft or Nvidia, you know, talking to a ramp, is almost like a ramp talking to a seed or Siri j, startup. It's actually those multiples in between valuations are about the same. And so in some sense, I think some of it just comes from the the reality of, we have such a long way to go. There's so much more to build.
Speaker 2:There's so many more people that we can serve and, just remembering that. I I think that when you look at at great companies in the past often are killed by by hubris, you know, arrogance and, you know, forgetting, like, the reason why they were able to to grow and get there is there were people who early employees who gave them a shot and, worked hard, who didn't have to be there, who who who were there. Early customers who said, you know what? I I I'm gonna try and and, you know, trust you with my business and please take good care of it and, you know, that still is true. And so I I I don't know.
Speaker 2:I I guess it's a little bit too, like, you know, you you grow up a certain way and, you know, that those kind of things stick with you. But, that's really how I think about it.
Speaker 1:Right. Did you wanna get into any of the general entrepreneurship questions or anything?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I guess you you've had your pick of the litter in the valley. Right? At at this point, I'm sure you've talked with every major, you know, investor for you know, across different rounds, and, obviously, some funds get conflicted and things like that. What's a single best piece of advice you've ever gotten from somebody on your cap table?
Speaker 3:It could be, you know, it it, you know, specifically, on the investor side.
Speaker 2:It's a really good question. I mean, I, I tend to really resonate with former operators, people who who built and and run business. I think that experience where you it's fun. It's interesting. Also, time is very solitary.
Speaker 3:Turns out it's pretty valuable.
Speaker 2:It's pretty valuable. Yeah. Yeah. And and so look, I I, you know, we have a very small board. You know, one of the members is is is Keith Herboy and I I think that part of why I wanted to work with with him even from the, you know, the earliest days is, I just think he had an obsession with, what it takes to to be a high quality operator.
Speaker 2:Like, I still think is, how to operate talk he gave over a decade ago is is, as good as it is, I think it's very underrated. I think what
Speaker 3:we're saying What
Speaker 1:was the gist of that? It was, cannonballs and barrels. Right? Barrels and ammunition?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Barrels and bullets.
Speaker 1:Barrels and bullets.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the idea is it's, like, you could go to the bottleneck. You know, you might have as many bullets as but if you have a you have too few canons, you can't fire as many bullets. You need to have more more more more more canons to to go quicker. But, I think a lot of the heart of it, and some of this is, like, the score takes care of itself with the idea that you manage towards the inputs to drive the out the outcome.
Speaker 2:And, you know, I I think ramp has been in this very large and in some sense, people look at it from the outside in hyper competitive space, and we've grown, at a level others haven't in part. I I actually think it's just by taking that advice to heart. It's really looking, you know, upstream. What are the activities that lead to the outcomes you're trying to drive? What are the things I can do today that will save your business, you know, time and money tomorrow?
Speaker 2:What are the things we can do today to drive more sales tomorrow? And so, in in in some sense, it wasn't, you know, profound. It just was right, and we, try to listen to it, pretty often.
Speaker 3:That's great. Yeah. I feel like the best, the the best advice in the Valley is actually all out in these sort of blog posts or individualized talks. And in the same way on the company side, you know, the ramp secret plan is out there. It's like we're gonna save businesses the the most amount of time and money.
Speaker 3:And if you wanna compete with us on that, you're welcome to. It's good for the world, but we're gonna do it the best. Yeah. So it's amazing to witness. And, Yeah.
Speaker 3:We'll have to have you back on, in the very near future because, you know, if there's one thing about ramp is, there's always always news coming. Always news.
Speaker 2:Anyway, guys, I really appreciate it. And, look, I I, thanks for having me on the show when, I'd say I knew when I I think this is gonna get, continue growing really quickly.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. We're excited. We have Center coming on in a couple minutes, I think. So Yeah. We're gonna have him psychoanalyze you.
Speaker 3:You.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll let you go, Eric. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Yeah. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye. And, we are gonna take a thirty second break while we, fix some stuff with the stream, and then I will give you a little run of show because we did we jumped straight into that interview. Obviously, we're getting live later and later. And, so, yeah, we we want we wanna go we wanna touch on the Trump tariffs thing, but just a little bit. Dip our toe in.
Speaker 1:Stay not political, but it is the top story. It's what everyone's talking about. So we're gonna focus on the tech reaction. We're not gonna really deep dive into the politics of it. We're gonna talk about what people on tech Twitter are saying about it.
Speaker 1:We're gonna go through a bunch of timeline, cover some reaction to earlier, clips that went out yesterday from the show. And then I wanna talk about Greenland. I think Greenland's super interesting
Speaker 3:about this.
Speaker 1:There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about whether or not Greenland could be a place for a mining boom. And the and the question they ask is Greenland has the makings of a mining boom. So where is everyone? Like like, there are minerals there, but no one's really going after them. We're gonna try and get to the bottom of it with this Wall Street Journal article.
Speaker 1:And then also, Google's making a new push with star project Starline. Have you seen Starline?
Speaker 3:I have not.
Speaker 1:It's one of these, like, tech demos that feels very fake, but every because it it like, you just can't go experience it, but they bring in journalists, like YouTubers, and they all walk out journalists? And they all walk out of the room, but that was incredible. And you don't know if they're being paid off or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, you put on the tinfoil hat. Like, they might be paid off to be like, that was amazing. It really sucks. So it's in the it's in the, like, project Orion realm of, like, seems really promising. But basically, it's like a TV that's, like, three d, and it uses kind of, like, an illusion technique to help you see someone across the table in, like, as a hologram.
Speaker 3:Interesting.
Speaker 1:And they wanna roll it out, and they wanna get it, like, cheaper so basically everyone can have this. But, they're they're making a push. So we
Speaker 3:could podcast holographically.
Speaker 1:I would love that. I mean, it the the reviews the early reviews have been has been remarkable. But, it's very unclear, like, how real it is or how or how expensive it is to actually roll out. So we're gonna go through that. But mostly, we're gonna do a ton of phone calls today because we're really enjoying the guest spots.
Speaker 1:We're having a lot of fun people on. So we will have, David Sendra hop on, and then we're gonna have Bridget Harris from Founders Fund hop on at 11:45. And, who else is maybe gonna come on? Maybe Sean Maguire. We'll see.
Speaker 1:I texted him. Hopefully, he can get on. Let me see if he's on if he's on next. This is turning increasingly into just, like, a live stream. We're just, like, hanging out.
Speaker 3:We're hanging out. The
Speaker 1:okay. He just liked my post. He DMed me his cell phone number. I texted him. Hopefully he
Speaker 3:gets a double text.
Speaker 1:Maybe, maybe we'll just call him live at noon and just be like you're on and that's it. What's going on? Okay. We got to catch you a break. We will be right back.
Speaker 1:You're watching TVP, and you'll still be watching it in a couple of minutes when you get back. We are back. You're still watching TVP, and we had a little HDMI issue. I guess when I was looking at Jordy, it would look like I was looking off to the other side. Anyway, it's fixed.
Speaker 1:We're back. We're happy to be here. Ben, give me an update on David Senra. Is he in the waiting room? Does he have the Zoom link?
Speaker 3:I mean, we're talking about the most powerful man in Miami.
Speaker 1:He is the most powerful man in Miami now. You know, we had Keith on, but Keith has kinda relinquished it a little bit. He's got his toes in DC. He's got one foot in Silicon Valley now.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:Cetera Cetera isn't making a move. He's he's locking down the islands. He's having he's establishing He's
Speaker 3:not leaving.
Speaker 1:He's not leaving. You're gonna have to drag him out of Miami. And I would be happy to drag him out of Miami.
Speaker 3:Actually, it's very easy to get him out of Miami. You just gotta send a private jet. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He really does hold the bar well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He he he holds a line.
Speaker 1:It's remarkable how he set that bar and then still might manages to get on a plane twice a week. You would think that that would reduce the amount of travel, but somehow it does not. Anyway, Senra, Senra, Senra, hopefully, he hops on. He says he needs five minutes.
Speaker 3:That was, like, four minutes ago.
Speaker 1:You know, maybe we should just, play a little bit of his his podcast on our podcast.
Speaker 4:The dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most two to one.
Speaker 1:This is But
Speaker 4:in the field that I
Speaker 1:was interested in,
Speaker 4:I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or a hundred to one. So given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream and to build a team that pursues the a plus players, and that is exactly what ramp did. Ramp has the
Speaker 1:Alright. We're in the middle of a ramp ad. That's hilarious. Oh, hey. There it is.
Speaker 1:I'm playing I I was listening to your your latest episode, and and there was some good there was a there was a really good quote in there, and I didn't realize it was in the middle of a ramp.
Speaker 4:That's funny. I caught the the tail end of you talking to Eric.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's great.
Speaker 3:How are
Speaker 4:you doing, man? Good. Good. I just actually saw Eric last week. We had breakfast.
Speaker 4:I went, I flew to New York for a super secret, dinner that I'm making an episode about right now.
Speaker 1:Oh, that sounds fun.
Speaker 4:So me and me and, Eric had breakfast the very next day.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 3:Very cool. Sing. Every time I tried to ask Eric something personal, he perfectly redirected it into talking about
Speaker 1:how Saving money.
Speaker 3:Save businesses time and money. Can you help us psychoanalyze Eric? Because he's just like this and he's truly a one of one in the sense that, I was kinda positioning it as, like, building a $13,000,000,000 plus company and maintaining that level of sort of genuine kindness
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is, like, very tough. And, I'm curious if you if you have any sort of, like, opinion or or sort of, like, comments
Speaker 1:to others. Have the answer. Like, when I when I made the documentary about ramp, like, I was interviewing him with that exact question. Like, hey. You're so nice, but, like, you're running this, like, kinda cutthroat company in this, like, hardcore industry.
Speaker 1:Like, how is this possible? And it kind of got peeled back the onion and got to the fact, like, like, he had a brother who got bullied a lot and, like, he developed, like, this insane empathy. That was my takeaway. I was, like, tearing up while I was talking to him about it. It was really, really, like, kind of like a crazy, crazy, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Early life to, like, deal with. And that clearly gave him, like, a new level of empathy because he went through all this stuff with his brother. His way is wild. Anyway but, Sandra, what what what's your time?
Speaker 4:One, I spend much time with him. I do when I say on the ramp ads, my friend, Eric, I don't
Speaker 1:know
Speaker 4:if that's not like, hyperbolic. I would say that the larger, like, the more important idea is, like, you actually don't have to be, like, a complete I listen. I think Steve Jobs is one of the best, you know, founders of all time. If there's a Mount Rushmore of the history entrepreneurship, he's gotta be on it. It doesn't matter, like, what the other three are, but he's definitely one of them.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:But people hear how, like, you know, how he spoke to other people, and they just say, oh, like, to be like him, I have to be like that. And it's just like, no. You don't. Like, if you look at the greatest you know, when I went to Charlie Munger's house and had dinner with him, like, he said that the greatest he feels the greatest founder of all time was Rockefeller. And one of the craziest things about Rockefeller is, like, there'd be people that worked for him for decades that said he never raised his voice, and he never said an unkind word.
Speaker 4:So I think there's, like, this myth that there's, like, this one size or one way to be successful. In fact, I was on the long walk with a friend last night, and we were talking about Michael Dell. You know? One of them regardless of what you think, he's, like, one of the most successful people that ever lived, has a phenomenal relationship with his son. They're, like, best friends from what I hear.
Speaker 4:Very, very proud that he's still married to the same woman. Like, on anybody who spends time with him says the same thing. He's just unbelievably thoughtful and kind. So, yeah, I I I I one with particularly Eric, it's definitely not an act. And two, I don't think, you know, it's a prerequisite for success.
Speaker 4:This is, like, one of the reasons I tend to work alone is because I am really fucking mean, and I don't like that. I I wish I wasn't so, you know, like, intense around that.
Speaker 5:And I
Speaker 4:I'm perfectly fine being that way with myself. I just don't like doing that to
Speaker 1:other people.
Speaker 3:Why when you said you liked our podcast, I took it really serious because I'm like, you just wouldn't say that. Oh, no way. Very authentically, like Brutal. Yeah. Like, this this isn't for you, bud.
Speaker 1:I mean, I've sent him so many things to review, and he and I'm just like, it's it's not bad. Right? And he's like, have you listened to it?
Speaker 4:So there's a
Speaker 1:do you
Speaker 4:see this bookshelf behind me? Let me zoom out a little bit. So it is, it it holds, like, 600 books or something like that. Yeah. And, let me see if I can change this.
Speaker 4:So they're actually in order by episode number. Yep. And one thing that I love about there there's another, like, 300 books in my living room, and I walk past it every day to get upstairs. And one one of the books, has the title, like, big bold letters in the spine. And it's it's applicable to a lot more industries than you think of, and it's definitely applicable to podcasts.
Speaker 4:But the title of the book is competing with idiots. And I think, like, that
Speaker 1:You know we're doing the same thing here with posts. Right?
Speaker 3:We have we have every post library of Alexandria post.
Speaker 1:Post printed out in order that we reacted to them on the show.
Speaker 4:So remember which one you guys were like
Speaker 1:It's bigger than your it's bigger than your bookshelf.
Speaker 4:You remember when you guys had this idea of, like, you were gonna sell your podcast in vinyl?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so I actually I hope you make that into a book, and I would buy the Technology Brothers book of tweets.
Speaker 1:We're definitely thinking about that. Definitely thinking about that. I think with the final thing where we got was we wanna send you our favorite episode of founders on vinyl. Something like that. There you go.
Speaker 4:Okay. Then send
Speaker 1:that to Patrick and then so, like, the Jeremy Giffon episode goes out because you get that on vinyl. It's like a fun thing. You could, like, put it on your bookshelf or something. It's a little tricky.
Speaker 4:I actually think it's really smart. There's been multiple occasions. So, like, you can't see it, but behind my desk. So Sam Zell there's a bunch of people. I'm actually reading Michael Obitz's autobiography.
Speaker 1:Yep. So
Speaker 4:I'll give
Speaker 2:you a preview
Speaker 4:of the the episode that has been killing me.
Speaker 1:I did
Speaker 4:it out two days ago, and it still won't be done.
Speaker 3:Oh, brutal.
Speaker 4:And he had a full time gift guy. And this has actually come up a lot in the books. Sam Zell had a he spent millions of dollars a year from my understanding
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:On his full time gift department. In fact, he'd build these, like, automatons. Right? And he'd have a theme. And I actually spoke at this guy's conference, and he's like, do you want anything for this?
Speaker 4:I was like, it's in Miami. I don't give a fuck. I'll do it for free. And we're friends anyways. And he's like, alright.
Speaker 4:I have a gift for you. And he actually found one, and he bought me a Sam Zell, like, automaton. But I think the technology brothers, especially because you're like, if you're doing it five days a week, you're gonna have all these guests. You should have, like, a gift department where it's, like, thoughtful that like that. Like, here here's your favorite episode on vinyl or, like Yeah.
Speaker 4:Whatever whatever.
Speaker 1:I mean, is that in, how to win friends and influence people? The whole idea of a Rolodex, you save everyone.
Speaker 2:You said
Speaker 3:that was your favorite book. Right? Just kidding.
Speaker 1:I mean, it it I I thought Patrick O'Shaughnessy said he rereads it all the time. I I read it. It is a fantastic book. It's one of these, like, timeless books. Agree.
Speaker 1:It's a little ridiculous because it's, like, so it's such a, like, over the it's clickbait title, but, you know, clickbait works.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. The value I I like things that the value prop is in the title, actually.
Speaker 1:Also, it's so old timey. Like, it it it's just it's an interesting artifact because it's, like, it's the type of, like, business advice that you'd see on, like, a thread on Twitter these days, but it's from, like, the nineteen twenties. So all the examples are, like,
Speaker 4:really antiquated.
Speaker 1:Because it's
Speaker 4:not it's advice on human nature, and human
Speaker 1:nature is It hasn't
Speaker 4:changed yet. Why people still read it. And, like, Charlie Munger's one of his favorite book was, influenced by Robert Cialdini. He liked it so much. He gave him, a single share of Berkshire stock when it was valued at, like, 500,000.
Speaker 4:I think today, it's, like, 750.
Speaker 1:Wow. A
Speaker 4:pretty good compensation for writing a book.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's amazing. I love that. When are you writing a book?
Speaker 4:What's that?
Speaker 1:When are you gonna write a book?
Speaker 4:Never. You you just
Speaker 1:gotta get started.
Speaker 4:No. Because, like, here here's the thing. Like, I told you before I mean, you guys know this because, like, I kinda, like, cornered you at heretic on about how important podcasting is.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, you know, I get, like, it's very nice because, like, I as you guys know, most of the books I do I cover are, like, really old. But publishers send me all of their, like, new books, and, you know, I might do, like, one new book for every, like, 50 old books.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And they all they send me their new books for distribution, but they're also, like, will you be interested in writing a book? Yeah. And my point to them is, like, I I think of podcasting as, like, one of the greatest technologies ever created. I think it's the printing press for the spoken word. And so me taking and I think it's the highest and best use of my time.
Speaker 4:So me taking time away from that to do anything else but more podcasting doesn't make sense. Now that I I talked to my friend Jimmy Soni, who I absolutely love. And, he's he wrote this great biography on Claude Shannon.
Speaker 1:Spoke at
Speaker 4:your event. Book called what's that?
Speaker 3:He spoke at your event.
Speaker 1:Who wrote the PayPal book? Right?
Speaker 4:Yep. He wrote the founders, the history of, founders. He's like another psycho obsessive. It took him longer to write the founder's book than it took PayPal to be founded and then sold to eBay. Okay?
Speaker 4:So That's crazy. But I called him. I was like, hey. Just name your price and, you know, listen to the podcast. We'll have some conversations.
Speaker 4:And if you can write this for me, like, in partnership, then I'd be interested in doing that. So what I told him to do so one of my favorite books is Will and Ariel Durant's lessons of history. Right? You really think about that book. It's like they dedicated fifty years of their life to writing the, history of civilization.
Speaker 4:It's probably, I don't know, what, 10,000 pages all combined. And yet after that, they're like, hey. We're gonna do this fucking ridiculous thing of trying to write a biography of the human species, and we're gonna limit to a hundred pages. So I was like, okay. I would wanna do that.
Speaker 4:Like, what are the most important ideas that we've just we've unveiled so far through the podcast in in eight years of his existence? And, right, like, this is a bot like, the most important ideas in a hundred pages. Mhmm. And so he he's got a bunch of stuff going on, including two books that are really fascinating that he's writing, but he said he's gonna do it.
Speaker 3:Very cool. Who are the entrepreneurs that are still building their legacy that you are, hoping that they will live up to their full potential and one day be qualified to be, you know, given the full founder's podcast treatment. I would put Eric and Kareem in that in that bucket of, you know, ultra high potential, but still, you know, sort of just getting started in a sense. Are there people that stand out today that that you're excited to cover in, you know, fifteen, twenty years? Right?
Speaker 4:I'm gonna tell you who my favorite founder alive is right now, and it's gonna be surprising to people. Because, I I heard your episode yesterday where you talked about, like, how I'd call you up, John, and I'm, like, find a simple idea and take it seriously. And I think that's one of, like, the best pieces of advice, and you see it over and over again. I've been able and some of these people I can't fucking name because of the podcast, but I've been able to meet, like, these crazy, you know, family businesses where the founders, eighty years old, still running the company, no outside investors, worth $10,000,000,000. And, you know, they've just monopolized, like, crazy stuff, like nails or packing equipment and or shipping company or just, like, crazy like, not very complicated ideas.
Speaker 4:Just like they found a simple idea and took it, very seriously. I I I think, one of the things I like about Eric and Kareem is, before we had this, like, very deep, partnership. It's not obviously, you guys know this. It's not just like I'm not just, like, reading ads for them on my podcast. Like, we're friends.
Speaker 4:We we spend a lot of time together. Our wives spend time together. Our kids play together. And, you know, it took a long time getting to know them really well. One of the important things when we talked about this is, like, is this your last company?
Speaker 4:Like, I'm not interested in, like, the people that wanna start scale and sell. I'm interested in people that do something for a very long time. If you look at all the books behind me, these people literally work ends of Ferrari. Right here. You were like, he died.
Speaker 4:He worked on there's no retirement. Like, it's like Ferrari is my entire life. This is what my life energy goes to this. Most of the people I cover in the podcast, you know, their life's work. And what I loved about both Eric and Karim, like, this is the last company.
Speaker 4:Like, this is we we wanna build this forever. There's actually an interesting idea, and I'm trying to convince Kareem to do more. Not that he needs my advice by any means, but I really want him to be interviewed by Patrick just just because I get to talk to him privately. And he's he's, like, fucking brilliant technical mind. And one of the things that he said that was very fascinating, is he he optimizes for spikes.
Speaker 4:And, what that means is, like, you know, especially as the as the company grows, you tend to, like, try to, like, even out and, like, hire for personality or, like, yeah. This guy's talented, but he's kinda like an asshole or he's, like, come comes in late, are, like, you know, will show up for two days and kinda disappear. And I think what Kareem understood is what a lot of history based entrepreneurs understand. There's a great line by David Ogilvy where he said that talent is likely is most likely to be found against, among misfits, nonconformists, and rebels. And, what Kareem is interested in is not, like, your total package.
Speaker 4:He's interested in your very best idea. So, like, if you were the very best at x and he just wants you to do that for ramp, and if you only last for six months, that's fine. It's like he just he optimizes for spikes, and I think that's incredibly, intelligent because it's also something that Steve Jobs says that he's like, you can never ever, ever, ever forget the dynamic range of human beings. That most things in life, you know, between the the average of the best, it's like two to three, two two times best, three times quality, where he's like, in software and hardware, it's like the difference is like a hundred x or a thousand x.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Marketing too. Not just not just 10 x engineers, ten x ideas, 10 x Uh-uh.
Speaker 4:%. You're like
Speaker 1:see it with Apple right now.
Speaker 4:What's that?
Speaker 1:You can see it with Apple right now. Genmoji it. Like, it's not crazy to think of the yin and yang campaign that they ran as a thousand times better than the than the Genmoji campaign.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And, again, where does that come from? Where, like, Eric and what I like about Eric and Kareem is, like, they work like dogs just like I do. Right? And I'm really only interested.
Speaker 4:I just had came back from lunch. The reason I text you guys in five minutes late is because I was meeting another founder friend of mine and and we had lunch with another friend. And it's like all three of us have this in common. It's like we're taking what we do very seriously. It's all different businesses.
Speaker 4:But Kareem works nonstop. Right? Eric does too. And they they want the pressure, and they want they they do believe, like, something that Eric told me that was wild at breakfast was, like, when Ramp was founded, AmEx was, like, a $70,000,000,000 market cap company, and now it's, like, $2.20 or whatever. So I I I heard at the very end, he's talking about, yeah, people are saying, hey.
Speaker 4:We're valued at 13,000,000. That's fine. But, like, you know, we're missing a zero, maybe two zeros. Like, if we're doing this for a long period of time, things grow in unpredictable ways. Like, the people that I've met that
Speaker 3:didn't I, like, didn't ask him the question of, you know, I was I I'm genuinely curious. Like, what do you do, if you have five minutes in the day, you know, what are you doing, for fun? And I don't even think that's worth asking Eric because I know he's just gonna say, look. You know, I like to, you know, keep in touch with my family and but, otherwise, I'm at the office. I'm thinking about work or I'm calling Senra.
Speaker 3:But, but, yeah, it just didn't even seem, like, worth asking because I already know the answer.
Speaker 4:One of the most interesting things I think they just put this out in, in that blog post, but we definitely talked about it too. It's like, you know, they're doing, like, 54% of their payrolls on are dedicated to r and d. Like, they're not just like, oh, we're we're look what we did in in this amount of time. It's like, no. We're gonna keep pushing the pace.
Speaker 4:This is, again, the what I, I I had the when I went to New York, I had dinner with Mike Ovitz. I had an intense three hour dinner with Ovid. So I'm making an episode on the dinner, and I'm making an episode on, on the book. And the way this came about is because I was, at breakfast with a friend of mine, and his phone was on the table, and it rings. And it's Mike Ovitz.
Speaker 4:And he picks up, and he puts on speakerphone. He's like, hey. I'm actually sitting here with my friend, David. He does this podcast. You should know about founders.
Speaker 4:And, Mike, without missing a beat, he goes, I love that podcast. I listened to four episodes yesterday. And one of the things that me
Speaker 3:and Mike talked about at at
Speaker 4:breakfast is, like, nothing that Michael Ovett said in his book or at dinner is, like, surprising to me. And because it's like founders of church for entrepreneurs. It's just you're I just tell them the same story over and over again. It's the same personality type over and over and over again. And so, yeah, of course.
Speaker 4:Like, when they're saying, hey. We're extremely dedicated to what we're doing. We're trying to get better. It's like, that's exactly what they should be doing. If this is going to be your last business, if this is your life's work, then you will have that, like, importance of every little detail.
Speaker 4:Like, how many you guys see all the tweets when people talk about the difference of, like, the u UI and UX to ramp to to compared to some other people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And your your your point about Apple. There's a great book called creative selection. It's episode two eighty one of founders. I think the title is working with Steve Jobs, if I'm correct.
Speaker 4:Might be wrong. Maybe February. Probably February. And that's one of the best books I've read it three times because it talks about the care that Steve Jobs put to every single pixel of all the products they're make making and all of the advertising. So that ad wouldn't have gone out because Steve would have had to approve every single ad that went out.
Speaker 4:That's there's a different level of care and love.
Speaker 3:Yep. What's your sleep score? What's your sleep score?
Speaker 4:Not not good. And Mateo I love Mateo. They were, one of my early partners. Let's it was here's the problem because every I'm so excited about this is gonna be a big year. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I have a lot of stuff coming that people don't know about. K. And, like, it's it's not good. So last night was seventy.
Speaker 1:Oh, I got eighty eight. What'd you do, Jordy?
Speaker 4:The the the night the night before is 56.
Speaker 1:50 six?
Speaker 3:I've never actually got that. I don't think
Speaker 1:I ever got that love today. You're you're grinding too hard.
Speaker 4:No. No. I'm just very excited. This is like Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. It makes sense.
Speaker 4:One of my favorite founders, you mentioned earlier is, are you we were asking earlier, is, Dana White. I think what he did what him and the Fertitta brothers did with the u UFC buying out of bankruptcy for, like, 2,000,000,000 or $22,000,000. And then, you know, selling selling it for whatever the number is and still staying on there. And I saw a clip from a podcast interview that he said that's excellent. And it's, like, very again, I like simple ideas.
Speaker 4:He's just like, build a life that you can't, like, you can't wait to wake up to. And he's just like, I people always ask me, oh, when are you gonna retire from the UFC? And he's just like, retire from what? Yeah. Like, I get to put on the best fights in the world.
Speaker 4:I get to travel in the I get to stay in the nicest hotels, eat at the nicest restaurants, like, put on the best live events. He's like, I'm gonna be doing this till I'm 80. Yeah. You know? And I just love that idea.
Speaker 4:Like, a very simple idea. Am I building a life that I cannot wait to wake up to?
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 3:One industry oriented question, and then I have, I just want you to rant about a specific topic. So what's going on with Spotify? Yesterday, for the first time, I got a clickbait style video suggest suggested to me on Spotify that was, like, I tried zero star tech, and it was, like, this, like, kinda, like, crazy video. It looked exactly like a YouTube video.
Speaker 1:It was a YouTube video. It was just a YouTube video that Yeah. Came
Speaker 3:out came out, you know, last week that YouTube's the biggest podcast platform in the world now. That's obviously, you know, sort of not great, for Spotify. How do you see Spotify as a platform, evolving?
Speaker 4:So I don't see this is another thing because keep in mind, I, like, study people for a living. Right? I think that's really the only edge I have. So, we we talked about this. Like, when I think of, like, peep people like, people think of, like, their portfolio, they tend to, like, list companies.
Speaker 4:Mine is, like, people.
Speaker 1:People.
Speaker 4:It's like, oh, I invested in this dude, and I invested in Justin or Sebastian or, like, that. So you're
Speaker 1:long Daniel Ek?
Speaker 4:What's that?
Speaker 1:And so and so in this analogy, you're long Daniel Ek.
Speaker 4:Daniel's the best. Like, he's the like, the car dude. Yes. I I've spent a a bunch of time with him. I consider him a friend, like, a legit friend, and it's shocking that we're friends.
Speaker 4:But, like, every time I talk to him, like, he's the idea that what what is Spotify? Like, a hundred and $20,000,000,000 market cap company or something today. I don't pay attention to any, like, the stock market, but, like, it's big public. Yeah. Hold up and inform this.
Speaker 4:It's it's over a hundred billion, I I would imagine.
Speaker 3:Hundred and 20. Nailed it.
Speaker 4:Okay. So how the hell is the guy that's been running the company for eighteen years? He's the founder. He's still there. He's what?
Speaker 4:42? Like, young. 44. I don't know. Something like that.
Speaker 4:He's, like, so underrated. More people should study him. Like, he doesn't give a bunch of interviews, and usually the interviews around product announcements. But, like, I don't know what's gonna happen with Spotify, but I would back up the truck in anything that Daniel does. And as long as Daniel's there and his team, I've met his team, and they're fucking incredible.
Speaker 4:Like, yeah.
Speaker 1:They also knew exactly what was gonna happen. This is, like, famous, like, founder's son lore is that, like, Sean Parker and Daniel Ek come in, and they're like and they're like, we're gonna execute, like, the Napster type music sharing strategy, but it's all gonna be legal. We're gonna build this platform. And they projected something like I I don't remember the exact number, but they're like, in the in the investment memo, it's like, in 2025, we'll have 300,000,000 DAUs. And they got it within, like, 10% or something.
Speaker 1:It was like a twenty year projection, and they nailed it. It was crazy.
Speaker 4:Listen. More important, he's one of the greatest living entrepreneurs without a doubt. That's not even including the stuff he's doing outside of Spotify, which is fucking awesome, incredible, and impactful. More important that he's, like, a good guy. So, I I'm I want I'm been I'm gonna do more of these.
Speaker 4:Like, I had dinner with episodes. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:They're the people seem to like them, and I like doing them. And, I had dinner with and this one had to be, like, anonymous, so I I don't know. I'm I'm not gonna make an episode on it. But, because I asked the guy it's I I mentioned this briefly in a in a episode, but I was like, I had dinner with, you know, one of I got the opportunity to have dinner with one of the, wealthiest people on the planet. Very unknown.
Speaker 4:Right? His family it's a multigeneration dynasty, and his family, like, commissioned biographies for certain people in the family. And, of course, when he's telling me that, I was like, oh, let me get those. And he's like, this is you know, I say bad boys move in silence, that maxim that reappears over and over again in history of entrepreneurship
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Came from Rockefeller. He's like, absolutely not. I go, why not? And he goes, because I'm not interested in educating my competitors. And the dinner was incredible, but he knows Daniel.
Speaker 4:And he was just like, there's he's, what do you think of Daniel? He's incredible, one of the best entrepreneurs in the world, this guy's telling me. He's like, but more important than that. Like, he his like, when you speak to him, like, he's a kind person. He's not one of these, you know, assholes.
Speaker 4:He has no ego. No ego. He's not much older than all three of us. Well, maybe a lot older than Jordy. I forgot how young Jordy is.
Speaker 4:But, like, it's incredible what this guy has done. And, you know, I I I think more people should spend time studying him. Like, we're gonna,
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 4:We're gonna do he already agreed to like, we're gonna do I had dinner with, Daniel episode soon because I had an incredible dinner with him. It was the most important you know what I fucking think of him? I get to meet a lot of incredible people. Last year was the craziest life year of my life. That that conversation I had with Daniel was by far the most important.
Speaker 4:Because, like, he doesn't he sees no ceiling to what he can achieve, and then he takes that self belief and he transfers it to you, which I think is very, very important. So I have no idea that they what the fuck have they've done in podcasting so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And they're gonna continue to do. What I would say if people are interested in learning more about Spotify, they made I was just in Stockholm, and I found this out. They made a short series on the history of Spotify. Sean Parker's in there. Daniel's in there.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It's called Spotify, a product story. It was out in, like, 02/2021, and I think it's eight or nine eight or nine episodes, and then they update it later. But you could just listen to the first ones. And, again, everybody's talking about AI. Right?
Speaker 4:In February whatever you I don't 02/2025. They're they were talking about it half a decade ago. They were using it half a decade ago. So they're just he's he's he's great. That's all I have to say.
Speaker 4:Like
Speaker 3:Two minutes left.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Question for you. We're at a unique moment in time where it doesn't feel like the a a lot of entrepreneurs can afford to not pay attention to geopolitics. Right? There's there's been a lot of time in the last twenty years where it would the the generalized advice was focus on your customers. You can kind of ignore everything else.
Speaker 3:And if you're delivering value for your customers, then, you know, you'll do well. We're at a period where, you know, there's there's, you know, tariffs coming down. It's impacting a lot of businesses, you know, here in The US and entrepreneurs. Who should those entrepreneurs study in the sort of founders world, in terms of, you know, entrepreneurs and companies that had to navigate sort of like, or does it not even matter? Right?
Speaker 3:Or is
Speaker 4:it still just This this is the biggest thing, man. Like, you're the problem is everybody's so focused on on the present. Right? And it it history allows you to, like, take a step back and have a perspective. And instead of, like, being in front of your fucking face all day long and so, like, here here's a great book.
Speaker 4:I just did this episode. It's, like, absolutely ripping. It's called 400 pages of, Munger and Buffett in their own words. And in there, it talks about the fact that you you could have bought Coca Cola, you know, in after World War two I I'm making up the numbers, but World War one for, like, nothing. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And it went up by 10,000 x since then or whatever the number is. Right? And the point being is, Buffett's point was there's a lot of smart investors and other people and smart capital that passed because they're like, oh, like, there's all this uncertainty. There's political uncertainties.
Speaker 4:There's wars. There's pandemic. So if you think about everything that happened from, like, 1910 to up until when he's saying this is probably, like, in nineteen nineties, you know, you went through two world wars. You went through multiple pandemics. You went through all this turmoil.
Speaker 4:You went through, asset bubble, asset class collapses, high interest rates, low interest rates, everything else. He goes, at the end of the day, you know what mattered? That sixty years from now, they're gonna be they're gonna be serving a billion servings, eight ounce servings of Coke a day. And if somebody is making a billion people slightly happier every day by by serving this drink to them, that person should make a little bit of money and probably will make a little bit of money. So I don't I'm not actually a good person to ask that question, surprisingly so, because, like, the amount you guys know.
Speaker 4:This is, like, the amount of what I don't ignore. I figured that Yeah. This the important stuff. Like, I'll know about wars. I'll know about pandemics.
Speaker 4:But I have no idea, like, who's leading in the stock market. I don't pay I don't like reading the news. I don't do any of this because what but what matters is, like, I just stay focused on my customer. Right? So if I wake up every day and I read for a few hours, you know, a a biography of one of his discretionary entrepreneurs, and I sit down once a week and I talk to you for an hour, and I just rip through idea after idea in an hour that you can listen to on 1.5 x speed, so it takes forty minutes to you.
Speaker 4:Right? There's nothing else everything else has some control. I will get everything I want in life and that I deserve if I just focus on that. Just focus delivering value as much as possible.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And another another way to look at this is if if you are if the company that if you're an entrepreneur and you're running a company that's not your last company, it's the the the sort of geopolitical environment right now is hyper stressful. Right? Because you're thinking about, oh, I wanna sell the company. I wanna exit and all that stuff.
Speaker 3:But if you're thinking about, you know, still running the company in twenty, thirty years from now, it really doesn't matter what happens in the next four years. You just need to, you know, make it through and, make
Speaker 4:Okay. Dead dead on. I'm glad you said that because this just spawned another thought to me. Right? Where, for some reason, and this has not been, like, on purpose, I was spending a lot of money or a lot spending a lot of time with, like, family offices.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And, and a world I didn't know anything about, and I've been asking questions like, who's the largest, like, American family office? And, you know, a lot of them are dispersed. Whatever the case was, like, highly likely, it's the Waltons. Right?
Speaker 4:You know, Sam Walton's kids and grandkids. I was if you if you pass the Miami Beach, Marina. Right? If if you're coming from downtown to to the beach, you'll see this giant boat. I looked it up one day.
Speaker 4:It was like Sam Walton's brother's daughter's boat. Right? It's like bigger or ship bigger than anything else even remote in in a giant, marina, and it's like it sticks out like a sore thumb. So there's a great biography that I actually read. It's called Sam Walton, America's Richest Man, written by Vance Trimble.
Speaker 4:And it was actually published a year before Sam Walton's autobiography came out. And he had a funny story in there because, Sam was very private, just focused on, satisfying the customer, and then everybody sees Walmart stock. Oh, this is the richest man in America. So during Black Friday, that was, I think, 1987. Right?
Speaker 4:Sam didn't have a cell phone. He doesn't have a beeper. He doesn't have Internet. Right? So he's driving
Speaker 3:Black Friday, the retail
Speaker 4:No. Black Friday.
Speaker 3:Or the actual stock market crash. I just wanna clarify because you're talking about a a retail entrepreneur.
Speaker 4:Good point.
Speaker 3:Good point. Big day.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Black Friday, biggest stock, I think, single day stock crash ever. I assume that still holds the record. And so, anyways, on paper, he lost, like, a billion dollars. Right?
Speaker 4:So he goes he's he's given a speech at, like, this charity event, I think, in Arkansas for, like, kids or something. And somebody he takes questions after somebody asking questions like, how does it feel to lose a billion dollars in the stock market today? And his his response was great. He goes, I didn't I didn't hear about it. It's like, he didn't care because he's just like, I don't care.
Speaker 4:I'm just, like, focused on my business. I'm not selling the stock today. I'm never selling it. Like, like, it all that matters is that he was he really he took a if you we mean take a simple idea and take it seriously. His dedication to that simple idea, e everyday low price.
Speaker 4:So e d l p. This is everyday low price. Let's just make sure we have the lowest price for our customers. And so let's work backwards from that. We just focus on that.
Speaker 4:We'll do that forever, and you fast forward. And it's like one of the greatest if if it was concentrated in one person, it might be one of the it is one of the greatest fortunes ever created by taking a simple idea and taking it very seriously.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. David, we love you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining.
Speaker 4:Thank you
Speaker 2:for joining.
Speaker 3:Appreciate it. Expect, expect us to send you a Zoom link once a week forever because we're, we're all
Speaker 1:we're all in. Catch up. I I love this.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That Next time, we'll do it. You just Next time in California, I gotta suit up, though.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:We'll do
Speaker 4:a suit. Hey. Where's you said you were gonna frame. Where's that picture?
Speaker 1:We're we're
Speaker 3:it's like the monger it's like the monger picture that we're gonna do. We're getting a a picture of the father, the most powerful man in Miami, David Senra.
Speaker 1:You really are the most powerful man in Miami. We've been talking about even close. Not even close. I I don't know, man. I think
Speaker 4:You're too humble.
Speaker 3:You're too you're holding it down. Acting like you you're spending too much time with Eric. You're too humble. You're the most powerful man in Miami. I think if
Speaker 1:you go to Miami, you gotta check-in with center. You gotta let him know. Because he's not there. He's gonna he's gonna yeah. You gotta email him.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll drop his phone number. We'll drop his personal address in the comments. You can go stop by. I'm not. Socializing.
Speaker 1:Invite him to really big events if it's crowded, like a, you know, conference room hall, Las Vegas. Invite him to that. That's where he's really in his element. Book signing, you know, podcast signing.
Speaker 4:Real quick before I go. So our mutual friend Patrick always gets on me because he's just, like he'll, like, try to connect with people or, like he's like, David doesn't read his email. Like, he's just unreachable. And he goes, why don't you have an assistant? I go, why do I need an assistant?
Speaker 4:He goes to answer these emails. And and they're like, manager's schedule. I go, why do I need a schedule? Like, I just need to wake up every day, read for a few hours, sit down once a week, and talk about what I read. I don't need to do anything else.
Speaker 4:I don't need to do anything else. It's that simple.
Speaker 3:It was great. This morning, we actually published on our ex account that you were calling in, and you hadn't fully confirmed. You'd been, like, partially confirmed. Yeah. Maybe it was just saw that.
Speaker 3:It was, like, David Centra calling in at, 2PM.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. I I unless I'm absolutely indisposed by creating a podcast, I will always answer for you guys. You know that.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Alright.
Speaker 5:Alright.
Speaker 4:You're the man.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 4:love you guys. Talk to you later.
Speaker 1:Talk to you later.
Speaker 3:Talk soon. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye. Do you wanna do ten minutes quick on tariffs? Yeah. Okay. I'd like
Speaker 3:to just sprinkle in a little of geopolitics. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it is a I think it is an interesting question about, like, you know, this was the result of Coinbase. Like, Brian Armstrong said, look, we are not gonna be participating in we are mission driven company. We're gonna we're not gonna be participating in every political fight, every culture war issue. But that doesn't mean that we're gonna stay out of crypto lobbying. Like, we do need to be regulated effectively.
Speaker 1:And so it it's this weird balance of like, yeah, we're not, like, getting fully political, but we're also not completely apolitical. We care about our industry and the things that we're experts in. So, so I think look, like, yes. If you're just some random, like, AI SaaS founder, like, you might not care about tariffs between Canada and Mexico. But if you're manufacturing something there and it's coming, that that does make that does matter.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden, that is a tech issue. Totally. Like what we when we talked to Ryan Peterson, he was saying the same thing. He was like, well, this matters to me. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 3:So we we have a bunch of good posts in here. Why don't we quickly run through the article? Okay. And then we'll we'll jump into because I think that
Speaker 1:The news is that Trump, imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada. It took effect first thing Tuesday. Canada responded with plans to impose 25% tariffs on about a hundred billion dollars worth of US imports. Trudeau said Trump is acting in bad faith. Mexico's President said he would also retaliate with a range of moves to be announced to Sunday.
Speaker 1:The US is, also introduced an extra 10% tariff on Chinese imports overnight, adding to a levy imposed a month ago. So everything's ramping up. China announced retaliatory tariffs on US agricultural goods and other measures against American companies. Beijing also filed a lawsuit with the World Trade with the World Trade Organization. And so investors were rattled.
Speaker 3:Funny way to get to Trump.
Speaker 1:The the the market sold off generally. And, yeah. It's been yeah. Not like full chaos, but, definitely one of those things like tariffs are taxes. You know, it they kind of suck energy out of economic, systems.
Speaker 1:They can be very good for certain things, especially if you're getting a super raw deal and a country is really, you know, just destroying your ability to produce something or or playing some sort of long game that you're not considering. But, of course, there are a lot of pushback for this. So let's go through some of the reaction. Logan Bartlett had a post. He said, the trouble he's he's he's quoting David Kelly, the chief global strategist at JPMorgan asset management.
Speaker 1:And David Kelly says, the trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity, and increase global tensions. Other than that, they are fine. So bit of a hot take. Keith replies gets to this.
Speaker 3:Most of that is false. And then Logan fires back and says, I put it in quotes so I could obfuscate responsibility for saying it. I love it. Which is smart. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Phenomenal, such a
Speaker 1:huge good posting strategy. I don't know. What do you think? Which side do you take on this?
Speaker 3:You know, I'm I'm very grateful in moments like this that we're a technology and business show. Sure. I I've approached this from the point of view of this is making life really, really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs that I respect and, want to see do well. Yep. And so from that lens, from a purely sort of personal angle, it's, you know, it's tough to see.
Speaker 3:But at the same time, there's been precedent throughout history where we've implemented tariffs like this and and and seen, seen seen positives out of it. Right? Yeah. So I just think, I just think it you know, I think that, Mexico and Canada have, the the right to be able to say, like, you know, Trump's acting in bad faith because he's been sort of, like, you know, he's playing with people's livelihood to a very extreme degree. I I thought it was worth jumping down to, something
Speaker 1:Before we do that. Yeah. Yeah. I I just have a I don't know if it's a problem with this, but it just feels so inconsistent because if you think about what's going on with the tariffs on tech companies, China effectively has a 100% profit margin tariff on social networking. Facebook, Instagram, they're banned.
Speaker 1:They can't make any money. It's a 100% tariff effectively, and yet we haven't banned TikTok. Yep. And so it's like it's like, if we're not that is the most clear to me that it's like, that trade imbalance is crazy right there. And we're not doing anything about that, but then we are doing stuff about, you know, agriculture and cars and stuff.
Speaker 1:All that stuff's important. And and I I I don't know. We'll have to see how this plays out. I mean, the last round of tariffs, it seemed like it went pretty well at, like like, all through like, the economy tended to grow pretty well during the last Trump administration. So I'm I'm, like, I'm cautiously optimistic that all these gyrations in the market kind of get worked out and things and things wind up doing well.
Speaker 1:Of course, we got, like, smacked with COVID right at the end. So it's very easy to look at, like, oh, well, unemployment was way up when Trump got out. And it's like, well, there was, like, this crazy, you know, once in a century event that happened. Yep. But the core the core, like, let's renegotiate trade deals, It wasn't as disastrous as I think people thought it was gonna be.
Speaker 1:So but,
Speaker 3:I I think certainly
Speaker 1:to Isaac's point here, like, if you're in the if you're in the crosshairs, if it hurts a thousand times more.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Isaac says here, these tariffs are gonna wipe out the entire net margin of a ton of businesses. Lots of them, my friends, real people, real livelihoods, real employers with lots of jobs. Yep. Having your dream squashed, smashed by geo geopolitical whims sucks.
Speaker 3:Yep. And he had another post that I thought was great. I have it pulled up myself here. He says it's so easy to see numbers and detach them from people. Yep.
Speaker 3:That 25% tariff, it kills a ton of jobs and livelihoods. Families will feel pain. Those casualties in in a war, real people, not just a number. That grifting you see in broad daylight, the money came from real people, maybe a college fund, maybe someone's entire savings. It's easy to see a number and have zero empathy.
Speaker 3:So I think this is the right sort of point of view right now. It's it's it's way too early to say, you know, they're all bad or they're all good Yep. Or, you know, really kind of, like, we don't know what the impact is yet. We see what's happening in the in the public markets, and and that's, you know, based on sort of fear and a bunch of these other sort of factors that that, you know, are getting sort of priced in in different ways. But, I think it's just important to, you know, as a technology and business show, on the business side, a lot of great entrepreneurs are being affected by this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of DSC companies, will source internationally. And just to keep the business going, they're spending, you know, what, 25% of their revenue on marketing. There's Yeah. The, like, the profit margins are pretty thin.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So yeah. And so, an increase like that could really wipe you out. Fortunately, like, there has been really wide signaling on this for a while that, like Yep. You know, you're gonna need to re shore at some point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Spinning up new manufacturing can be difficult, but it it can be done on the order of a year for most things. I mean, you look at you look at how fast people
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 1:what things. Hopefully hopefully, there's, you know, people I
Speaker 3:think what makes sense is generally this idea that Yep. We need more targeted tariffs. So a tariff on TikTok. Right? Effectively, a % tariff on TikTok in the same way that they by banning US social media and China, it's effectively Tariff
Speaker 1:on Smiley.
Speaker 3:Than Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A tariff on Fentanyl. A tariff on terrorists.
Speaker 3:No. And the the the other thing is is, you know, for Trump to be fully taken seriously, he should be thinking about, hey. We don't want millions of unitary humanoid robots, like, walking our streets in our homes.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, they're not On the ED thing, like like, the tariffs have been way ahead of this where to to the point where I never see a Chinese ED. Yep. Because there was a % tariff on day one, basically. Yep.
Speaker 1:And they they they're not even trying to send them over here. Yep. Because it's just, like, it's been determined even in the last administration, like, hey. We're not doing that this time. It's just not gonna be a thing.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 1:I think that's probably the right move.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Luke Metro had a good post. He quote tweeted, the Atlanta Fed. They said on March 3, the GDP now model now cast of real GDP growth in q one twenty twenty five is negative 2.8%. Not good.
Speaker 3:Which is
Speaker 1:We wanted 10%. Satya was telling us that AI would get us
Speaker 3:Satya promised 10%. He said if we just signed up for Clippy, if we just listened to Clippy promised. No. I'm kidding. I love it.
Speaker 3:Satya implied that if we listen to
Speaker 1:you, Satya.
Speaker 3:He said, just listen to what Klippe says.
Speaker 1:GDP growth.
Speaker 3:Listen to what Klippe says. 10% GDP
Speaker 1:growth. Satya.
Speaker 3:But Luke, Luke quote treats us and says, my ideal economic system is where we inflict large damage on the populace via trade wars, but keep the wealth of the oligarchs propped up via dumb speculative BS. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's hilarious considering the the crypto exchange. Like, there was Yeah.
Speaker 3:The timing of that was, a little inconsiderate. I mean, it it's gotta be, you know, if you're an e commerce operator that had just had your margin wiped out and
Speaker 1:It's like, don't worry. The money that we're taking from you, we're gonna put in Cardano.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So you're gonna make it all back in one trade, buddy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Make it all back in one trade. But now you own some of that Cardano. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll see. Yep. That's that's hilarious. Anyway
Speaker 3:Anyways, do we have Bridget ready to call in?
Speaker 1:How we doing? We are, bringing on Bridget from Founders Fund. She is a investor in crypto. Works with Joey Krug over there, good friend of mine. And we are, bringing her on to, cover the prime intellect fundraise that just happened.
Speaker 1:Do you know the story of the metamorphosis of the prime intellect?
Speaker 3:No. Tell me what
Speaker 1:it is. So a couple years ago on on Lex Fridman, George Hotz, the comma AI guy is talking about, how he thinks AI will, like, evolve. Oh, hey, Bridget. Bridget.
Speaker 5:Oh, hey.
Speaker 1:Hi. Welcome to the show. How's
Speaker 5:it going, guys?
Speaker 1:We have you read Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect?
Speaker 5:No. No. Okay. But all of all of Prime's, like, design their, you know Yes. Logo, all of that is inspired by yeah.
Speaker 5:I think we have a copy in the office, actually, but I haven't
Speaker 4:read it.
Speaker 1:It's I mean, I don't wanna, like, spoil it, but, Andre Karpathy also listed it as, like, one of the greatest, like, sci fi prediction books, like, or, you know, in in general. And his his summary, which I think summarize well, is just AGI gone mixed. And it's very, very weird. It's like it's like, what happens when you're in this post scarcity society and you want some sort of, like, social reward or some sort of, like, reward, but everything's, like, post scarcity because you can just will anything. So no one ever dies, but then, you know, what do you do?
Speaker 1:And it gets very, very weird. It's very bizarre. And George Hunt's highlighted on the on the Lex Fridman podcast. And so it became very popular. And then there was a there was a sequel to the book as well, like, last casino on in the universe or something.
Speaker 1:But it's pretty, like I don't know. It's, like, spooky to me. But I highly recommend everyone check it out. Out. Anyway, we want you to break down the deal.
Speaker 1:Give us, how'd you meet the founder? How'd we wind up, doing the deal? And and just give us a background on what PrimeIntellect is, what they do. Give us the high level.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Definitely. So we met them, I wanna say, about a year ago. We actually reached out to them because most of the AI crypto projects we had seen had been just, like, not really interesting. It was more like, copy paste from existing AI companies, and then they would, like, slap a token on top.
Speaker 1:So it
Speaker 5:would be, like, character AI but with a token, like, lang chain but with a token, like, hugging face with a token, that kind of thing. And I think we saw Prime announce their, like, 1,000,000,000 parameter model trained in a distributed way across, like, three continents. And then we reached out to them and we were like, wow. Like, we would love to to meet you guys and chat, you know, more about it. And we met with them.
Speaker 5:And literally, like, I think the first meeting, like, we were sold. Like, we were like, these founders are, like, a level top tier killers. Like, Vincent and Johannes, like, you could just, like, feel the energy, like, radiating off them. Like, they're very passionate about what they do. They're in crypto AI, like, for the right reasons, whereas I think a lot of founders kind of just hopped into this space, like, after a lot of the hype, took off.
Speaker 5:And, you know, we're looking for, like, a quick token pump, but that's, like, could not be further from, you know, the team Vincent has built and and what they're doing. So, basically, they're attacking the tackling the problem of, like, distributed training, which, you know, access to compute is one of, like, the largest bottlenecks in, you know, AI training today. And you have these, like, huge data centers that are centralized, and power constrained and expensive. And what Prime is doing is it's basically like a true peer to peer marketplace where, like, you know, you can go on and bid for compute, and then suppliers can go on and supply, like, idle compute. And then it enable like, it has crypto incentives, you know, layered on top to really
Speaker 1:Can you look at the the the render network? Like, the the I I think it's, like, the Octane team, what they did in, like, CGI.
Speaker 5:Have you seen this? Okay. I've seen, like, render and a caution. I don't know if I've seen the CGI thing.
Speaker 1:Because this was a thing, like, years ago, and everyone was like, oh, like, you know, crypto tokens, like, it's all fake, whatever. But I have been doing a bunch of CGI work where, you would need to go and render, like, whatever scene you built in cinema four d. And you needed a bunch of GPUs, not as many as, like, a training run for an LLM, but Right. But you you send out each frame, and each frame is, like, deterministic. So you can you so you can very easily parallelize these, and you can run it on AWS.
Speaker 1:But, there was a company that actually built a very similar system where you could kind of sell back your excess GPU time onto the render network. I think it was kind of, like, low tam because the amount of independent artists. Like Pixar has like, Disney, they have their own server farms. And then Yeah. Like, the low end, like, clients, like, people tinkering is kinda small.
Speaker 1:But it was very cool that it was like, oh, wow. This this makes a ton of sense. How do people actually transact in this? Like, having a token that moves these, you know, GPU resources around made a ton of sense.
Speaker 5:%.
Speaker 1:And so it's cool. It makes a lot of sense in the in the age of AI. Do do you know more about, kind of like early use cases, obviously, like the frontier insane, like, you know, gigawatt scale that's gonna come in the future.
Speaker 5:Right. Right.
Speaker 1:Right. What are some of the more exciting use cases in, like, the near term? Is it just, like, fine tuning stuff? Do you have any insight there?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, they're right now, they're basically working on just, like, scaling this up to, like, state of the art level models. Like, they did the 1,100,000,000 parameter, you know, training run. Like, a few months later, they completed, like, a 10,000,000,000 parameter training run.
Speaker 1:Yep. And
Speaker 5:then, you know, basically just serving as, like, the the peer to peer marketplace between the supply and demand side. So, like, on the demand side, you have, like, AI startups that need extra compute, like labs, like, you know, random independent developers, that sort of thing. And then on a supply side, it's, like, data centers and then individuals and also startups with, like, idle compute. Like, you have, like, hugging face, like, semi analysis that want to just, like, earn extra for for their idle compute. So it's basically just, like, like, the way we think about it is just enabling, like, the AI market to, like, progress at a much faster rate because it's just, like, enabling all this idle compute to be to be put to work.
Speaker 5:And then on, yeah, on their end, it's, like, basically what they did is Google DeepMind released a paper called, like, D loco, which stands for, like, distributed low communications framework. And they implemented that, but in, like, an open source way. Like, they called it open D loco, such that, like, you can train across, like, many different continents. And that was, like, a huge step function improvement, like, from the research side that that we've seen. So it's basically about the I'm just
Speaker 1:seeing it at that. Like, they they have that spanner and big query and, like, they they they just are so good at at at taking some sort of, like, database and being like, oh, yeah. Now it works, globally and deals with all the time zone issues. Just feels like incredibly hard engineering, but they always figure it out. And then, of course, it opens up a million other things.
Speaker 1:Jordan, what what what questions do you have for Bridget?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so taking a little sit back from PrimeIntellect, one question I've had that you might have some insight on is, was there a frustration among, crypto founders that are, you know, you know, seeing the news on Sunday and Yeah. General frustration around it not being included in the reserve. Right? It seems like that the reserve was effectively you take the top five biggest, you know, projects by market cap, and you just, you know Yeah.
Speaker 3:Put it in a reserve. Right? It didn't seem like it was super thoughtful. Do you was there was there any idea leading up to this that there would have been, you know, any surprises on that list? And,
Speaker 4:yeah,
Speaker 3:I'm I'm curious around, sort of your response, but also across the portfolio how, how founders are kind of reacting to that that are running, you know, through these, you know, bigger prod bigger market cap projects.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. It's a really good question. I think, generally, people were a little bit upset because, you know, the XRP, the Cardano inclusion, just like there's basically two plausible explanations that I think the crypto community came to for why this could be the case. One is just, like, simple, like, unit bias.
Speaker 5:Like, XRP and Cardano are, like, point $0.00 1¢ or, you know, something akin to that. And a lot of Americans will, like, you know, go and see that, oh, Cardano's, like, 1¢ and Bitcoin's, like, a hundred k. And, like, they'll genuinely just go and buy, like, Cardano because, like, it's cheaper.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:And so, like, the the the joke on Twitter is, like, you know, like, Uber drivers everywhere celebrating that Cardano's in the strategic reserve and, like, it, you know, Trump could be playing some, like, 40 chess to, like, curry favor with a lot of just these, like, retail buyers. So that's that's explanation one, that these buyers have, like, unit bias and Trump's trying to curry favor with them. Explanation two, and this came from, like, Udi at at Taproot Wizards, is basically, like, Trump is going way too far in, you know, the extreme direction of we're including all these crazy assets in the reserve because it it does require an act of, you know, congress. And then he's gonna roll back and kind of be like, okay. I'm making a concession.
Speaker 5:I'm making a compromise.
Speaker 3:Interesting.
Speaker 5:And we'll just have Bitcoin. And because he always kind of at the outset goes, like, way too far, way too intense, you know, and then kind of rolls back and acts like he's making this huge concession where a Bitcoin reserve would already be a huge, you know, act, for congress to make. But Yeah. Yeah. I think I think those
Speaker 3:are the two John earlier, I said that Trump doesn't get enough credit for not including Trump coin in the reserve because,
Speaker 5:you know,
Speaker 3:you know, he's talking with his team. He's thinking about it.
Speaker 1:Why do we put
Speaker 3:in the
Speaker 1:names? He
Speaker 3:is pretty big.
Speaker 5:Why not? No. Exactly.
Speaker 3:Let's let's let's put in the whole every White House coin put in there. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, if Trump had just launched the Trump coin and not Melania, like, there's all these jokes on Twitter of, like, society would be, like, amazing. Like, you know, crypto would be mooning. It's like, the Melania launch, like, messed up our whole industry. But
Speaker 3:Yeah. It it really does feel that way. What is, you know, what what's the broader sentiment on the investor side right now? Any of the crypto focused investors that I know, the ones that have done well have just taken a very long point of view. They understand that the market has cycles and you need to be, you know, kind of basically deploying, you know, throughout, you know, consistently if you wanna sort of benefit from, benefit from these sort of peaks.
Speaker 3:How you know? And and and, again, we we we also saw this sort of bunch of AI slop in the sort of crypto markets and and, what it what are the areas that you think are most exciting specifically in the context that, you know, the joke is that crime is legal now. Yeah. More seriously, we're in a favorable, regulatory environment for basically the first time in history, and it does feel like the next four years are an amazing opportunity to realize the full potential of the technology. Right?
Speaker 3:Specifically around, you know, I'm sure areas that you're looking at a lot. So where are you most excited to invest? What what is the general sentiment right now? Do you feel like people have pulled back, you know, talk talk a little bit
Speaker 5:about that? Yeah. It's a good question. So, like, when Joey and I started at Founders Fund, like, almost almost two years ago now, the the sentiment was terrible. Like, it was six months post FTX.
Speaker 5:Like, you know, no one was deploying. Crypto only funds were not deploying. Generalist funds were definitely not deploying. Yeah. And that that was one reason I wanted to join Founders Fund because I was like, wow.
Speaker 5:This is, like, actually a contrarian act. Then we did start deploying in
Speaker 1:so funny. You guys just came in and went so hard
Speaker 3:so fast.
Speaker 1:Came in
Speaker 5:and just, like, started doing so many deals. Yeah. Ridiculous.
Speaker 1:It was ridiculous.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. But it no. And it it was, like, in retrospect, the best time to start deploying. Like, obviously, it's easy easier said than than done.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But now, yeah, I think the market it's interesting because I mean, the sentiment isn't amazing, but I would say prices on new deals that we've been seeing have been, like, asymmetrically high. Like, we the last deal we did was PrimeIntellect, and that was in, I wanna say, October or November. So we haven't done, like, a net new deal in, like, you know, five five ish months. I think what we're continuing to look for is basically, like, applications uniquely enabled by crypto where, like, integrating crypto is like a step function improvement, to what you would currently have.
Speaker 5:So an example is like Polymarket. Like, prediction markets obviously existed before Polymarket, you know, but they were very illiquid. Your counterparty was, you know, across the world betting in a different currency with a different bank account. There was chargeback risk, and doing all the conversion on the back end was super costly. But now if you're just, you know, if you're just using crypto, it genuinely does, like, make a lot more sense from just, like, streamlining the, you know, the the market side.
Speaker 5:And PrimeIntellect, you know, it also applies to that. It's basically just like the same thing but for compute. If you were, you know, paying in a different currency, like, to access compute, like, it would be a lot of work on the back end on the protocol side. And that's why there's, like, these compute brokerages that charge, like, insane markups. And also back to falling market really quick too is, like, Joey also always tells a story, but, like, if you win too much on prediction markets, like, they would actually just, like, ban you back in the day.
Speaker 4:No. It's just sports betting.
Speaker 3:Same as Vegas.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I believe Nate Silver is banned from all the sports betting apps.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, Dana Dana White Dana White has these stories of casinos. You know? He he Well, no
Speaker 1:one bans him because he loses.
Speaker 3:No. No. He's super into baccarat, and he actually does well.
Speaker 1:Oh, he does?
Speaker 3:He does well, and he's had casinos. He's telling some story
Speaker 1:about losing, like, six figures.
Speaker 3:He goes way no. He goes up up seven figures, down seven figures, whatever, but he's gone on these sort
Speaker 1:of He's high ball, high
Speaker 3:beta. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 5:No. It's insane. Yeah. And then I I think the last thing I'll say is, like Yeah. I think DeFi in America is definitely, like, a lot more, you know, better positioned now in the sense that, like, DeFi founders had it the worst.
Speaker 5:I think the past four years, like, many of our founders just fully moved out of The United States because the risk was just, like, you know, way too high. Yep. But we're gonna get a new, like, market structure bill, and hopefully, we'll see, like, regulatory exemptions for for DeFi protocols because you can't regulate DeFi in the same way you regulate, like, an exchange or brokerage. Right? Like, it's just a set of smart contracts.
Speaker 5:And so, like, there should be exemptions like we see in, like, the you know, there's exemptions in the fit 21 bill, but, you know, I never it it's it's all still in the works. But if we do get exemptions for DeFi founders, I think, like, that will kinda usher in a new, you know, era for DeFi. Maybe even,
Speaker 1:like, another DeFi somewhere. Do you think this starts with, like, Bitcoin lending? Is is that kind of, like, the first Yeah. Lava lava?
Speaker 5:Lava. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we invested in lava.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's definitely a a very interesting use case. I think I think DeFi is just like it it's just such a broad sector, but Bitcoin is like, Bitcoin does enable, like, a huge use case in DeFi because so, you know, so many people own Bitcoin. Like, there's just so much capital inflows to Bitcoin. And, like, if you can lend against your Bitcoin and make your asset more productive, like, there's gonna be so many whales that that that want to do that.
Speaker 5:Like, they just do not wanna sell. That's interesting. But even for regular DeFi, like, if you look at, like, DeFi summer in 2021, like, you know, a lot of founders got in trouble for what they were doing. And it was just it was just such a new market that people didn't even know what was allowed versus not. And then the SEC was issuing, like, Wells notices to, like, the most compliant companies like Uniswap, Coinbase, like, things like that.
Speaker 5:So I do think that with people saying crime cycle, like, I think those people are a little overblown because I actually think the the new administration is just really, really smart. Like, I don't think they'll be issuing Wells notices at random to, like, Coinbase and Uniswap because that's just dumb. But, like, they will be actually going after, like, legit scams. So I would say, like, act according.
Speaker 4:I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1:for the last four years, the best, like, cop in crypto was, like, Coffeezilla. It was basically, like like, the only hope that you can the only hope you have if you're, like, seeing a scam happen is Coffeezilla makes a video, and then everybody realizes it. And it's wonderful. But, like, the SCC is not gonna step in for any of these things.
Speaker 3:No. Exactly. Where do you But now yeah.
Speaker 1:There there's a lot of room to just be smart and actually just go after the the the the scams and, like, the power law bad stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 3:Do you still where do you see founders that are interested building, in in the stable coin space? The the bridge acquisition, I think, was fantastic for crypto broadly. It really was a, you know, real stamp of approval for Stripe to go out and pay this sort of pretty significant revenue multiple to buy a a developer platform, a crypto developer platform, which you which, which bridge is. And then from what we know, that sort of spawned a wave of new stablecoin, you know, startups to come out and say, we're building stablecoins too. Right?
Speaker 3:And so I'm sure you saw a lot of those companies. Where are you excited about the potential of stablecoins, and, you know, going forward?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good question. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think after the bridge acquisition, we genuinely got, like, probably, like, 50 stable coin pitches. Like, it was legitimately, like, it's insane. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But, no, I think, like, right now, the most interesting use case for stable coins is probably in, like, b to b payments just because that's where there's the most volume. It's like yeah. Like, literally, like, you know, billions and billions of doll of dollars of volume, per year. And b to b payments, like, cross border historically just take so long.
Speaker 5:There's insane markups. Like, the bank takes a lot of fees. I think on the consumer side, like, the argument is basically, like, okay. You know, if a user, like, swipes their card, you know, Visa and Mastercard take, like, a 2% fee. A lot of that goes to the issuing bank, and then it will actually flow back to the user in the form of, like, rewards.
Speaker 5:And that's such a different story than if, like, I wanna pay, like, Kuvan or something and Kuvan's in Europe or whatever, and it takes, like, five days and it you know, they charge, like, 2%. Like, that that's just, like, kind of scammy. Right? Like, that should not be a thing anymore. So I think that's an interesting use case on the on the consumer side.
Speaker 5:A lot of people are arguing, like, on the credit card side. Like, it might be stable coins under the hood, but, you know, it's doubtful that the user will, like, know it's stable coins at least to start. But, yeah, I think b to b payments is, like, that's where there's the most volume. That's where the there's the most incentive for, like, startups to compete. And then the issue there is, like, getting the the regulatory stuff figured out, the corridors opened in these different markets, and then just, yeah, starting to capture the volume.
Speaker 3:But And the infrastructure to prevent, Citibank from sending a trillion dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 5:mean Oh my god. Yes.
Speaker 1:Question. Like, I
Speaker 3:I Like, how do you solve the fat finger issue? Like, obviously, you can do multisigs, but but but let's say you have, you know, a group at Citibank. They're like, alright. We gotta send, you know, some stable coins to somebody, and then it's late at night. And one person signs off, and someone else signs off.
Speaker 3:And, like, three people fat finger it collectively. And you're like, well, we have these protections in place, and now we have to go ask the customer nicely. Like, we
Speaker 5:just should knock it into crypto because, like Yeah. That money would be gone forever if it was crypto. There's no way.
Speaker 3:Honestly, this should be huge alpha in just being a Citibank customer and signing up for as many accounts as possible. Signing up.
Speaker 4:I got this.
Speaker 3:No. But I think those are I mean, I think those are real things to figure out. It's, my last company, like, we we enabled, you know, stablecoin investing and and, and we actually had, like, I won't even name them, but billion dollar crypto companies that were customer of ours that said at the time, this was '20, early '20 '20 '2, we don't wanna accept stable coins as too much of a hassle. And so I think that's I think that's evolving. But, Bridgette, amazing to have you on.
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 3:You're you're a regular now. Yeah. Always welcome. Always welcome.
Speaker 4:Thank you, guys.
Speaker 3:And we're looking forward to having Vincent on the show featured. As well.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, guys. By.
Speaker 1:I'll see you soon. Bye.
Speaker 5:Bye, guys.
Speaker 1:Very fun.
Speaker 3:What should we reference? Guest? Or are we just diving back into the show?
Speaker 1:I mean, we could call Sean Maguire right now. I have his phone number. He hasn't responded to me.
Speaker 3:Give him a shout.
Speaker 1:Should I just give him a phone call? Yeah. I don't wanna talk to him. I need to make sure the camera doesn't, doesn't see anything. Let me see.
Speaker 1:Should I just for some reason, it's it's I I don't wanna talk more about this, but let's see. I reached Sean. Okay. He didn't pick up. Oh, well.
Speaker 3:Next time.
Speaker 1:Next time, we'll get him. We'll get him. We'll send him this clip. We'll post this clip, and then he'll feel a lot of pressure to come on the show. Let's get into some timeline.
Speaker 1:We haven't done timeline because we had a lot of guests. We gotta go through some timeline. First up, David Holes, founder of Midjourney, founder of Leap Motion. He says chemistry to biology, silicon to blank. What what do you think?
Speaker 1:I don't even remember who put this in there.
Speaker 3:You put this in.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 3:It's your
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Or or or Brett. I think it was Brett. What?
Speaker 3:I don't know. We got somebody new joining the team soon.
Speaker 1:We got some buddies on the show, helping out. I don't know. Yeah. It's interesting. It's like he what what what he's getting is, like, is, like, you know, ball biology is built on top of the chemistry, silicon.
Speaker 1:He's he's clearly getting it, like, some sort of, like, AI metaphor. Yep. And, like, how you understand, like, the the the the mind and the, the consciousness that emerges on top of these systems.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, random, sort of adjacent topic is Raboy yesterday saying what comes after LLMs? Like, what is the next iteration of Yeah. Of LLMs and sort of our understanding and application of
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Of a technology that everybody's talking about, but we don't know its full potential yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I was I was remarking the other day. I was watching this interesting video about how, DALL E and, like, all the image generators can't generate a wine glass that's full. Have you seen this? I haven't.
Speaker 1:So you can say the the it starts with this, like, incredible interaction where it's basically saying, like, hey, Chachi Petit, can you, generate a wine glass that's full to the brim, to the top? And it gives you a half full wine glass. And then you say, oh, no. Like, you made a mistake. Like, actually fill it to the top all the way.
Speaker 1:100%. You give it more context. It's like, on it, totally understand, returns, and it's, like, the same. It's because, apparently, there's just, like, no images of completely filled to the brim wine glasses in the training set. And so it just couldn't figure out how to do it.
Speaker 1:And it gets to this idea of I think it's David Hume has this idea of, like, humans are good at there's this impression and there's this idea. And basically, you can interpolate between two things. So you can imagine a unicorn even though you've never seen a unicorn in in the world. But it's hard to create these complex ideas, if you don't have, like, the reference images, which is what they have. But my takeaway from it was just, like, we're we're scaling up these models, and we still are building, like, an image model and a language model separately and a driving model separately.
Speaker 1:But you would imagine that if we're really building like this, like, AGI, like, won't ASI be like a one model, but maybe not. Maybe maybe it will be Right. Like what he's saying where, you know, there's silicon. And in biology, you know, you need to understand the the basics of chemistry, but you also need to understand the different parts, the different lobes of the brain, the different actions that your body can take, your muscles, how these different systems interact with each other. And, and you could imagine that the the AGI that we build will have, you know, so many middle so many different models and so many different things that are kind of like trained that it can, like, you know, interact with.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. I'm I'm sure it will
Speaker 3:be a
Speaker 1:field of study.
Speaker 3:I just want a a model on top of the open all the OpenAI models to route me to the best model. I don't wanna be choosing
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 3:I was I noticed that that there's this button
Speaker 1:you can push that will indicate, like, head, like you to search. But even if you don't push that, it'll still search sometimes.
Speaker 3:It's so clunky.
Speaker 1:And one time I
Speaker 3:mean, that's just the that's just the reality of it. It's possible for companies to be at this point, it feels like they're waiting for this big announcement of the router. Like, the router needs to come. Right? It should be one box.
Speaker 3:Yep. And it should take me to the take me through you know, send my query through
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The right
Speaker 1:They're really speed running the Google story because Google, it was, like, just just search box, I'm feeling lucky, 10 blue links. Simple. Yeah. Now Google is, like, no one hits I'm feeling lucky because it auto fills, then it shows you Google Shopping and then 25 ads and then click bait, and then videos, and all this stuff. And they've kind of, like, recreated that all in, like, a very short amount of time, whereas it took, like, Google, like, twenty twenty twenty years to degrade like that.
Speaker 1:They've gotten a very convoluted thing. But, I I I don't know what
Speaker 3:to say. Huge I mean, it it's just gonna be such a big selling point for OpenAI once they get there when they can say, look. It's one box. Yep. You enter in what you wanna do, and we're just gonna execute it to the best of our abilities.
Speaker 3:Yep. And it shouldn't even really matter Yeah.
Speaker 1:With the underlying model. It is a testament that, like, even though that yep. There are some reasonable critiques of the naming scheme. Oh, Chat GPT is still ranking higher than Jimmy John's in the App Store.
Speaker 3:Yep. That's Which is big.
Speaker 1:Because Jimmy John's, if you're not aware, it's number two app in the App Store right now. Chat GPT is number one. And I'm sure it's a knockout drag out fight. I'm sure they had meetings. Okay.
Speaker 1:Jimmy John's is coming for us. We need to call Nikita beer. What are we doing to stay ahead of Jimmy John's?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I I I posted about this earlier. Twenty twenty three, everybody said, alright. Value's gonna accrue to the model layer. It's obvious.
Speaker 3:Twenty twenty four, people said, hey. Value is actually gonna accrue to the app layer. A lot of value here. Twenty twenty five, everybody's saying value's gonna accrue to the sandwich layer. And so I expect to see Subway charting soon.
Speaker 1:How did how did this happen? Like, did did they run some national campaign that we don't know about? Like, it is weird that Jimmy John's is the number two app in the App Store. Like, what what is going I I I know it's based on momentum and stuff.
Speaker 3:They launched to toasted sandwiches. That's it.
Speaker 1:It's equivalent to, like, you know, magical and machine intelligence too cheap to meter or, like, toasted sandwiches. Humanity assigned
Speaker 3:They're giving away $1,000,000
Speaker 1:They are.
Speaker 3:Of toasted subs.
Speaker 1:Oh, I mean, that's
Speaker 3:I mean, so it's obvious. I I props to props to opening for for holding the lead.
Speaker 1:The funny thing is that is that grok through right now because they aren't charging yet. They are literally giving away millions of dollars in inference costs. Same thing with deep sea, they're subsidized. Even even ChatChippy Tea, you know, Sam has said, like, hey, we're losing money on some of these queries. Right?
Speaker 1:And so Yeah. You could think about this as, like, the AI labs are giving away hundreds of millions of dollars of intelligence, magical machine intelligence. Yep. But that's but we value that as humanity, like, only slightly higher than, like, a million dollars with the toasted sandwiches. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, that is what the market is telling us. Yeah. The market is telling us that sandwiches are, like, you know, they're up there. But it makes sense. Like, food is it's what I need.
Speaker 1:I need food. Yep. I will die with that food.
Speaker 3:Intelligence, but I need food more than intelligence.
Speaker 1:I could I could live without a a poem.
Speaker 3:I could live without a good stand up joke.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 3:AGI can wait.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious.
Speaker 3:You know, it's funny that ChatGPT continues to, you know, basically battle for the number one spot. Yeah. They don't even share it anymore. Yeah. Any any other any other, you know, AI lab would be taking victory laps, you know, sharing the number one
Speaker 1:spot champagne in their mouth.
Speaker 3:Into their mouth. Opening eyes just like, you know, it's just great, you know, usual business, and, credits to them. Impressive.
Speaker 1:Well, should we move on to Fred Wilson?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. We got a post from Vincent. He says, Fred Wilson, VCs are service providers to entrepreneurs. We ride on their coattails. And so even though venture capital requires a sophisticated understanding of finance, technology, markets, strategy.
Speaker 3:It's ultimately a people business. Learning to be a successful venture capitalist is about learning how to work with people, a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious, and fragile. And our job is to meet them right where they are and support them with all of our might. And I think that is a fantastic quote. It's almost become it's almost become normal for, I would argue it's almost becoming meme territory where investors now, if you ask them, you know, what what do you look for in investments?
Speaker 3:They just say, you know, we're we're in the people business. You know? We're we're trying to find generational founders, and it's absolutely right.
Speaker 1:That's what Brian Singerman says in founders.
Speaker 3:It's sort
Speaker 1:of And
Speaker 3:you meet with him and
Speaker 1:you want some secret of, like, oh, yeah. Like, when I go for it, you want something that you can copy. And Yeah. And his whole strategy is uncopyable. It's very frustrating, actually, because he's like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I actually just picked that. And then you talked to David Senter. It's the
Speaker 3:same thing. Yep. Yep. That that was, as I got to know you, I expected to sort of learn some sort of secret sauce Yeah. From that you had sort of gotten from Founders Fun and and you were basically, like, zero to one.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Zero to one's the playbook, but then it's really about judging the founders and the people.
Speaker 3:And Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and that's the stuff that it's very hard to concretize. And I mean, we saw this with the debate over Keith Rabois' quote yesterday. It's like, he was making a recommendation that, like like, you will probably have a good time if you, like, go and work in an excellent organization and then start a company. Yeah. But he's not saying, like, you can generate alphas of venture capitalist by just pattern matching that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I like here, you know, the point is, Fred says, a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious, and fragile. And I think the frustrating point stands out because oftentimes people, you know, you know, an incredible founder is going to have, you know, some aspects of them that are that are truly amazing. And then you have other moments where you're, you know personally, I have 50 plus, you know, angel bets, and there's definitely some moments where I'm super frustrated with entrepreneurs. Not that I make that obvious or known because it's oftentimes is my, you know, not really my place as a small investor to, cause any type of hubbub.
Speaker 3:But an example that I thought of, I once helped a founder get a 4letter.com for $10,000. That was their exact their exact name. And they had some terrible domain prior to that, like, getblank.com.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:And I got them their 4letter.com domain at at cost. Obviously, like, their portfolio company wasn't, you know, gonna, mark it up or anything. And the guy, didn't even say thank you. Like, I I sent him I sent him the, like, the info and everything and, like, basically just ignored it. He ended up, like, like, checking out for the domain and everything like that and started to use it.
Speaker 3:Never never once said thank you. And I and I was like, that's super, twisted and and feels very wrong in some ways. Right? It's like, the JD Vance, like, you should have said, you know, you should have said, please. You know?
Speaker 3:You should have said thank you. But at the same time, I was just like, look. You know? I I would have gotten this even knowing ahead of time that you weren't gonna, you know, express any gratitude for it. And, you're not gonna be judged fifteen years from now on whether or not you said thank you a lot.
Speaker 3:You're gonna be judged ultimately. You will be judged, but you're gonna be judged on was your company successful? Did you treat your people right in in a grand scheme of things? And and, I can get over it, even though it felt, it was it was funny.
Speaker 1:I have a funny anecdote about why you should say thank you and be nice. At my at my first company, the, the CEO was extremely curt and would just, like, send emails, like, do the blah blah blah. You know, like, not, like, very, like, like, didn't really bring, like, a personal style to his emails.
Speaker 3:Which is a style by itself.
Speaker 1:Yes. But that style just also happens to be the style of every phishing scammer in the world. And so people would get fished constantly because the scammer shows up and, and falsifies some email. And it's like, I need you to send me $10,000 and people would be like, yeah, this actually sounds exactly like our CEO. Normally
Speaker 3:No one would ever be this direct.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Normally, you get a phishing scammy email, and you're like, well, this doesn't sound like Jordy. Like, this sounds like someone impersonating, like, just a random
Speaker 3:just talked to this person. They would have brought this up. Exactly. They would have texted me. Exactly.
Speaker 3:Or they would have texted me. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Or they would have texted me. Exactly. Slacked me. Yeah. It would have
Speaker 2:just come out of the blue. Yeah. So you can't be too chaotic
Speaker 1:like that. You gotta be, a little more a little more empathetic. Bring your own style. You know, the Ron Conway, all caps. That's one of the funniest things in the world to me.
Speaker 3:Yeah. One of us should start using adopting the all caps.
Speaker 1:Something chaotic. Well, I mean, one way you know you're talking to us and not an AI clone of us or a scammer is there's gonna be a lot of typos.
Speaker 3:Yep. Put typos in your posts. Yeah. A lot of people are saying if if you're writing a blog post, people are saying, oh, you use the word delve. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You definitely generated this. Yeah. Put put a put a bunch of typos in. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:And don't worry about spell check because the AI is gonna handle it. If Yeah. If you want to read a spell check version of my post, you you are free to take my post and put it into chat GPT and say spell check it. Yeah. And then boom.
Speaker 1:You have a spell check version, but I'm not doing that.
Speaker 3:Well said.
Speaker 1:I'm golden retriever maxing. I'm going FSD mode. This is my new twist on this. Full self driving. No.
Speaker 1:Funny, friendly, sexy, dumb. FSD on the on the golden retriever maxing.
Speaker 3:Great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Does a golden retriever use spell check? Absolutely not.
Speaker 3:Absolutely not.
Speaker 1:Ship it. It's gonna be a banger anyway. No one cares if there's a typo in your post.
Speaker 3:Alright. We got a post from Yacine. Yacine. Yacine. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Do we need to have him on the show?
Speaker 1:Maybe we should. I don't know how to pronounce it.
Speaker 3:But, he says the only AI risk that I'm concerned about is the risk of me not making an f ton of money off of AI. That's great. I think I think that's the right the the gen you know?
Speaker 1:It's Good basis.
Speaker 3:Generally, the the right point of view for most people. I actually think I think it is a good thing broadly that there are a group of humans focused on AI safety. Yes. Like, that that that's, like, generally probably a good use of resources Yes. For the future of humanity.
Speaker 3:That said, if you're not a, you know, sort of, philosopher, king or queen type who's going wants to spend all their time thinking about the impacts of AI and the potential risk, you should probably just focus on how to make money with AI. And, you know, this idea of you don't wanna just be worried about something. You wanna be sort of, like, taking action. Right? So if you're worried about, you know, losing your job, from AI, build a business with AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? This is a remarkably good post because Yeah. I've I've I've also come around on AI safety. I think deep seek was a big moment for me in terms of, like, I want to know if they are embedding in if an open source model has a, a bad version or a jailbreak version embedded inside of it.
Speaker 1:And the AI safety teams are, like, the only ones that can really evaluate that. Yeah. So I think that's really interesting. So all of a sudden, while I'm not worried about, like, overall overnight, like, the nanobots come, like, the LA Eleazar Yudakowsky theme of, like, I'm just gonna be turning into a paperclip overnight. It's like, no.
Speaker 1:But, like, Stuxnet did happen. Like, you know Yeah. Like, the the the the pagers did explode. Like, these these hacking attempts do happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think I brought that up. I was like, the what is the AI equivalent of Stuxnet where something Exactly. You know, travels with
Speaker 1:It's dormant in there. And if and if there's a trigger word, it goes and it steals some data, and that's it. It's like Yeah. That's worth that's worth investigating, and the AI safety teams are the ones who would be equipped to run those evals. So that's interesting.
Speaker 1:But then also, we've been saying for a while that, like, the like like, the stop measuring AI against all these random evals and instead just measure it against how much money people are making from it because that's, at the end of the day, the value capture Even Satya weighing machine
Speaker 3:for saying, I'm really looking at the real benchmark to him is GDP growth around AI. Right? So what is the what is the impact? Old Billy comments here. He says, yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm an AI researcher. Research and how to stack that paper.
Speaker 4:That
Speaker 3:great line.
Speaker 1:I wonder how I wonder how accretive the current AI revenues are to GDP. Like because you could see every dollar that goes into character AI being, like, it's taking $10 out of the economy. Not to, like, throw a ton of shade of character, but, like, it is Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's it's it's, you know, you spend a dollar on character AI and you skip dinner and you don't, you know, take your a girlfriend on a trip and, you know, suddenly, like, you're you're thinking
Speaker 1:yourself possible to have
Speaker 3:I can get by on my parents' allowance. I don't need to go you know, there there's very there's sort of a dark scenario where it's very, destructive.
Speaker 1:I mean, at the very least, we've seen a lot of technology get rolled out over the last, I don't know, two, three, five decades with that haven't hasn't caused massive GDP growth. Everyone was expecting, oh, the Internet is gonna be the thing that, you know, cures stagnation. Right? Because, you know, prior to 1970, the US economy was growing very, very fast post war. Boom.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Right? And then we kind of stagnated. And GDP growth real GDP growth kinda slowed to, you know, 3% real.
Speaker 3:And now the Atlanta Fed reporting two and a half percent negative GDP growth. Who knows? Who knows what's real? Right? GDP is politicized.
Speaker 1:Maybe if we go down a bunch, it's easier to build back up.
Speaker 3:Run it back up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Run it back up. If you're
Speaker 3:on a smaller base, you can grow faster.
Speaker 1:It's good. Yeah. Really, America just wants to grind harder.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And America Trump is trying to inspire Americans to grind harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. GDP is going down because we need to grind harder.
Speaker 3:Oh my god. Anyways, speaking of grinding harder, we got a post from Shkreli. So Raboy was on the show yesterday. He said, quote, work at an outstanding organization for a year or two before starting your own company. And he gave some there's some other context here, and he said there's some great entrepreneurs that just sort of one shot their companies.
Speaker 3:Right? One shot. One shot, you know, entrepreneurship. Right? Zuckerberg's a good example of this.
Speaker 3:But Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1:Bill Gates. Right?
Speaker 3:Steve Jobs did not. He interned at HP.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's right. That's right. You you could argue Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do we count interest or not? That's a good question.
Speaker 3:So this shouldn't have been a controversial quote, especially in the context of it, but it's Yep. Started a conversation. And Rabois' point was that you get this feel for taste, a taste of what great is, and I think that's generally good advice. I gave this advice to a listener who's, you know, DMing me, you know, company ideas and and saying, hey. Should I join this company?
Speaker 3:Should I start this thing? And I just told him, unless you're hyper hyper convicted in an idea
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And you can get, you know, people that care about your truly care about your professional success, that are knowledgeable in that sector to say, you know, this is generally, you know, you know, I I agree with you. I think this is a big opportunity, and and I share your conviction. Yeah. Yeah. Then go start a go start a company if that's the case.
Speaker 3:If not, go try to work at the best possible company that you can join and don't even optimize for the title comp or anything like that. Just go work at, you know, go work at an OpenAI, go work at a ramp, go go work at one of these companies that, is gonna, you know, really change your your perspective around what what great is, you know, how to have good taste across marketing and product and things like that. So I was surprised at how controversial this was. Avi Avi was posting nobody that I look up to, you know, ever works for anyone else. But,
Speaker 1:Taking shots at Warren Buffett, taking shots at Jensen.
Speaker 3:Yes. So Shreli put together a list of, absolute dogs who, worked at at other organizations. So if you wanna run down the
Speaker 1:list Warren Buffett, Jensen Wong, George Soros, Peter Thiel, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mike Bloomberg, Phil Knight, Tom Peter Fee. Peter Fee? I don't know who that is. CZ, and then Jeff Yass, Yankoom, Ray Dalio, Leon Black. A lot a lot of finance people since he really knows his finance chops.
Speaker 1:But then also GDB from OpenAI.
Speaker 3:Yep. Brian Armstrong, Bennyhoff.
Speaker 1:Yep. Every Tiger cub. I love that one.
Speaker 3:That's great. Anyway, so so, you know, advice is best, taken, you know, generally. You don't have to apply every bit of advice you get, from a podcast to your life. But but, generally, I you know, there there's too much evidence that, this can tremendously accelerate your abilities and and, your career. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I agree with you. It's like the it's like the Jeremy Giffon quote of, you know, Mozart never asked how to write concertos. If but if you have a question in your mind of what you should do, go work at an outstanding company because that's either going to be, that's going to be great no matter what. And it certainly doesn't close off becoming a generational entrepreneur. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So if there's a question, but yes, if you truly are like working on this and you have this burning desire, you're not even going to ask, you're not even listening to this clip. You know, you're just like, I'm I'm already building, and there's nothing that can stop me. And that's fine.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I would I would argue since we had Eric on from Ramp today, I would argue that if Eric had built a fintech company
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then went and worked at a big company like Capital One, he would not have had the insight or the, know how or the relationship with Kareem and all that stuff to go and build ramp. Yep. Ramp wouldn't exist in its current form if he didn't have that sort of body of experience and the network. Right? And so, the
Speaker 1:tiger cub thing is so funny to me because so Julian Robertson found Tiger Management, very successful hedge fund. Bunch of people spin out. They're all called tiger cubs. And one of them is Chase Coleman starts Tiger Global. Like, what like, mocking your former boss, basically.
Speaker 1:Like like, Tiger Global sounds more aggressive than Tiger Management to me, at least. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It sounds like the parent company.
Speaker 1:It does. It does. So imagine, like, you go and work at, like, you know, Apple or something and then you leave and you're like, actually, my new company is gonna be called Apple Global. It's, like, very funny. I wonder I mean, obviously, Julian Robinson, like, speak
Speaker 3:on the news. Called Fruit Management.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think I think the Tiger company is specific because it's, like, he I I think Julian Robinson would, like, set people up to, like, succeed, like, actually stake the fund. So he's very much, like, starting them. So it was great that it was, like, carry the brand forward because I will retire and you will be running the new organization. But it's still just, like, a funny thing.
Speaker 1:What is going on with this ax perplexity, ask perplexity account? Is this is this fully AI automated? Is this just their social media manager? What do you think is going on here?
Speaker 3:The perplexity CEO, it's Arvin. Right? Yeah. He knows how to he knows how to post.
Speaker 1:He knows x.
Speaker 3:He knows he knows x.
Speaker 1:He does. He knows
Speaker 3:how to get attention. This is a funny one. Please stop tagging me in questions about meme coins. I don't reply to broke people.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Really, you know, trying to get a a reaction out of the, crypto community. Yep. Somebody replies, why didn't you buy TikTok, broke boy? Which is which is It's hilarious because
Speaker 1:they were they were talking about that.
Speaker 3:Set themselves up
Speaker 1:for that. Is this is this the is this the at chat thing we were talking about with grok and x? Where, like, you could just can you just at this and it will answer? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's basically a bot. It's automated.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So somebody somebody tags ax, ask perplexity, what meme coin should I buy?
Speaker 1:And it gives you the real answer.
Speaker 3:Immediately responds, with with kind of a a perplexity style answer.
Speaker 1:Which basically just says, I can't advise anything. Yeah. But that makes sense. Okay. So so there's probably someone managing the account who's posting, like, the major ones, but then it also acts as a bot.
Speaker 1:Right? So it's both interesting. I mean, it's good. More more perplexity attention, more impressions, more people reminding them, hey. Maybe fire up the app again.
Speaker 1:Give it another try. Yep. Drag back into this in the ecosystem. I wonder how long this lasts because, I mean, the grok button is literally there on this on this post. Elon's very aggressive with competitors.
Speaker 1:Yep. I don't see a world where he's happy that there's another AI system running on Axe Yep. That you can interact with on Axe even though
Speaker 3:He hasn't been accused. It doesn't feel if he has shadow banned Sam Altman Yeah. It's not working.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. No. I I don't think he said that.
Speaker 3:No. No. But I'm just saying that the the people have had this idea that, okay. You're building on an Elon platform. If you're competing with Elon, you're gonna have a bad time.
Speaker 3:Sure. Yet x is probably the most important
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Sort of sort of comms engine Yeah. For OpenAI still, at least for the industry, obviously.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I I more just think, like, the API pricing. Like, it's gotta be really expensive. I know that they they raise the pricing. And so, you know, it's like, it it's gotta be unaffordable at some point to build anything on top of this, especially if you're building something that should just be an x a I product.
Speaker 3:It just adds a couple zeros to your Yeah. API pricing.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Sean's in meetings. He can't call in, but he said he's good for tomorrow or Thursday. We gotta ask him about, he's since he's in all the Elon companies, we gotta ask him about that, and then we gotta ask him about
Speaker 3:He's an x. He's an x.
Speaker 1:I wanna I wanna know he's an x, and I think he's an x AI. Yep. And I think he's in SpaceX. And I I don't know if he's in Tesla, but we'll see if he's in a Tesla, if he owns a Tesla. And I wanna know if he has a Roadster.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If he has a Roadster as a innovation.
Speaker 3:The timing there.
Speaker 1:Let's see if he has
Speaker 3:any insight. I'm sure he owns Tesla in the public markets one way or another.
Speaker 1:Maybe he might be conflicted out. Sometimes he can't trade those things. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's true.
Speaker 1:Too much inside information.
Speaker 3:True.
Speaker 1:Anyway,
Speaker 3:we got a post from Aidan, friend of the pod. I've been talking with Aidan lately, trying to give him, my point of view on on how he should, approach his next career move. He's been working on startups. He has some bunch of good ideas, and then a bunch of people trying to recruit him as well. So he's got a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 3:But he says this goes unbelievably hard. And it says, during my forty four years as a career CEO and serial entrepreneur, I think I've made every possible mistake in business. I've overpaid for acquisitions and botched integrations. I've run operations for cash when I should have invested for growth. I've delegated tasks I should have done myself.
Speaker 3:Sometimes I've hired the wrong people or made strategic bets that didn't pay off. And yet, my teams and I have managed to create tens of billions of dollars of value for our shareholders. This book is about what I've learned from my blunders and how you can replicate our successes. In corporate America. I'm what's called the moneymaker.
Speaker 3:I've started five companies from scratch. Seven if you include two spinoffs and turn them into all into billion dollar multibillion dollar enterprises. My teams and I have completed approximately 500 acquisitions and opened more than 250 greenfield locations. In total, these ventures have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and raised about 30,000,000,000 in outside capital. So this is obviously
Speaker 1:Brad Jacobs.
Speaker 3:Brad Jacobs.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:He's got
Speaker 1:a book.
Speaker 3:If you wanna make a billion dollars, he's got a great book for you called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. Yep. Right? How to make a few billion dollars. Great book.
Speaker 3:And it's the intro to the book.
Speaker 1:And he has a great he has a great, like, this crazy exercise that feels like, I don't know, like, some something like a psychic would tell you or something. But he's basically, like, I want you to physically visualize what a billion dollars looks like. Like, mentally in your mind, like stack up the bills inside of a room. It's enough to fill like a massive ballroom. Imagine that.
Speaker 1:And then imagine all the things that you would need to do to, like, make that yours, and then just go do them. And this is, like, kinda like crazy mental exercise Yep. That I just really I I I really thought, like, made the book stand out in, like, very unique ways.
Speaker 3:You should lead tomorrow. You should lead the audience through that exercise.
Speaker 1:Exercise. I'd love to.
Speaker 3:We should do it weekly.
Speaker 1:Right? I I I screen recorded the audiobook when I was listening to it. I sent it I sent it to David Sedra, and I was like, this guy is on a different level. This is crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Yeah. That's a great that that that's a great quote. Yeah. Highly recommend reading reading Brad Jacobs.
Speaker 1:It's good. And I like how Andrew Gardner here is, like, haven't read it, but I could immediately tell it was Brad Jacobs. Like, it is it is his brand to a t. Yeah. A lot of interesting stuff.
Speaker 3:We got another post from Shweta. Yeah. I think I'm saying that right. She says, if the founder you invested was an Aspen this month, you can write that investment down to zero. And, harsh, potentially true.
Speaker 3:February is a tough month. There's not a good there's not a lot of good arguments to be in Aspen in in February.
Speaker 1:No? Why not? Can you just ski?
Speaker 3:For capital allocators, I can think of a hundred reasons.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. And when is the Aspen Ideas Festival? I think that's over the summer.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's when you wanna be there.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So because then they'll be, like,
Speaker 3:the big deals. Be if somebody's in Sun Valley in February Yeah. That's not a serious operator.
Speaker 1:Unless I unless I find out that you're in Sun Valley on Alamy stock photos because you got caught by paparazzi, you shouldn't be there. That's the only that's the only reason to be in one of these places is if the paparazzi are there taking pics of you next to Sundar and Tim Cook.
Speaker 3:Yep. But but yeah. It's it's a funny thing. I do think founders need to be if you're a venture backed founder with a with a team Yep. Small or big, it's really hard to have any type of divide between your personal life and your professional life as a founder because you need to be you you know, if you're not sort of a % fixated on what you're building at all times, like Saturday, you know, obsessing and sort of frustrated around, as a founder, you should be annoyed on Saturday that everyone else is offline.
Speaker 3:Like, I think that's, like, the default, you know, sort of state that that early stage founders specifically need to be in. And, I think that, you know, I've seen founders mess up optically around, you know, it's not sending good signals to the world if you were on, you know, a week long ski vacation in February Yep. And your company is not absolutely ripping. Yep. And even if it is ripping, the challenge is that people are gonna judge you for that.
Speaker 3:Yep. People are hyper, hyper, hyperjudgmental of founders in the same way that VCs get on a different, you know, sort of in a different way. Right? It's like, oh, they're in Aspen. They're not working hard.
Speaker 3:Founders are like, oh, they're in Aspen. Their company is a zero. Right?
Speaker 4:You know
Speaker 1:who you know what founder I would not judge for being in Aspen? And I would not write down the stock if I found out they were in Aspen this month? Wander. Because you know that they're onboarding anew, that they'd be there with a purpose because their business is in is in Aspen. We love Wander here.
Speaker 1:Go check it out. Go book a, a wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, seriously, obviously, there are a bunch of ex there are exceptions to every rule.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't don't go to Aspen if you're building a b to b SaaS company for sewage treatment plants, and there's no sewage treatment plants there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you know what, John? Yeah. Wander is gonna give away a trip for free to our audience. Really?
Speaker 3:All you have to do is create an account. Okay. Totally free to enter, and you could go to Aspen for free
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:On us. Courtesy of the technology brothers. So, wander.com/tbpn is a great place to go Cool. If you're interested in Aspen.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Should we want to do another post?
Speaker 3:Another post, we got a post from Sam Altman. He is posting a screenshot, with and, the caption is just two exclamation points. That's how you know it's serious. He says, okay. So relying on only your own first principles thinking and not giving much weight to what you've read, what do you personally, as g p t four five think?
Speaker 3:Is consciousness the only thing that exists, or is that material is the materialistic universe also real? Please try to answer as clearly as you can. Do you wanna play it, you know, role play the AI, John?
Speaker 1:So it's it kind of repeats this is what I personally think. Consciousness definitely exists. This is undeniable since all experience directly proves awareness itself. Matter or a material universe is always inferred indirectly through consciousness. We never directly observe matter independently, only perceptions appearing within consciousness.
Speaker 1:Because consciousness can easily create structured experiences as demonstrated clearly by dreams, imagination, or simulations, an external material universe is not strictly necessary. Given that matter is never directly experienced independently, it seems logically simpler and clearer to conclude that, and this is what GPT 4.5 thinks about the universe. Consciousness alone truly exists, and the material universe is merely a consistent experiential creation within consciousness itself. My clear personal conclusion is g b d point five. Yes.
Speaker 1:Consciousness is likely the only fundamental existence. No. I do not think a separate materialistic universe independently exists. Bizarre. And of course, this is this is like highly relevant because, like, it is simulated.
Speaker 1:And so if you're a simulation hypothesis guy, like, this is wild. Right? Yeah. Because it's like, yeah. Like, are is there anything real or are we just is consciousness the only thing?
Speaker 1:And that's what it's basically saying. And certainly, we would say that that is true for g p t 4.5. So, like, I would I would say, like, this is true for the experience of this particular AI, but I I would definitely say it's not true for me. I'm built different. I'm in the real world.
Speaker 1:I have a materialist experience. Look at this watch. I got it on bezel.com. It's materialist. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:As long as we're talking about materialistic universes, let's talk about materialistic items. Let's go to the vessel.
Speaker 3:Let's go to no. I mean, it's absolutely wild. I I think some of the most thought provoking responses are when you ask the AI, not how do I make you know, it sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but how do I make a good avocado toast? It's how what what is the meaning of life? And then and then it sort of gives you a pretty good answer, right, that's sort of based on humanity's consciousness in a way because it's been trained on, you know, humanity.
Speaker 3:Right? So,
Speaker 1:Matter is just an internally generated experience of consciousness, not independently real. That's what we're dealing with with this AI. You know what? I think we're wrong.
Speaker 3:Back to you we'll get back to you after the break.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I think you're wrong.
Speaker 3:Alright. We got a post from Bridget. She says, the GDP per capita in most African countries is 2,000. And then the average yearly revenue per user to sports betting platforms in Africa is also $2,000. And, this is just another argument for why The United States
Speaker 1:How is it possible?
Speaker 3:No. I think I think it's that the average person in Africa is basically like, the people that are sports betting in Africa
Speaker 1:They're rich.
Speaker 3:Are are doing well.
Speaker 1:Got it. Got it. Got it.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 3:And, yeah. So so I I can see how this makes sense, but this is more evidence Yeah. Of your post yesterday that The United States needs a strategic, parlay reserve to allow every American the the sort of, once a week to get the rush of Yep. Of potentially, life changing wealth.
Speaker 1:You know, guys like Sager and Jenny will come out there and be like, oh, sports betting's so bad. I don't like sports betting. Well, if it's so bad, why don't we use USAID to send sports betting to countries that we want to infiltrate and destroy?
Speaker 3:Smart.
Speaker 1:Why don't we air drop parlays to North Korea? Destabilize their entire economy. Why don't we why don't we take a, super long shot bets Yeah. QR code, drop that over the Forbidden City. Get everyone at the Forbidden City Addicted to sports betting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I gotta give you this. But, John, is it possible that DraftKings is, you know, a a deep state operation?
Speaker 1:I have no not at this point. But if but if we send if we send DraftKings to, to the Kremlin Yeah. And we get and we get Putin maybe that's the cure for
Speaker 3:the war. We air drop if we air drop one, you know, $5, you know, match
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:Over Yeah. Over Moscow.
Speaker 1:Think about this. So Putin is clearly just going to war because he's, he needs a rush. He needs a thrill. And he probably doesn't have a lot of access to sports betting. And so if we brought him sports betting, then he's like, I don't I don't wanna I I just don't get the same rush out of the war.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm gonna wind down the war. We're gonna have world peace through sports betting.
Speaker 3:World peace through sports betting.
Speaker 1:I think that's That
Speaker 3:is a bold idea. I think you should do a TED talk on it.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:I think you should look at the data and make a case based on the data. Yeah. That, that world peace is possible. We it just we need universal basic parlay.
Speaker 1:We do. We do. Truly.
Speaker 3:Anyways, Packy, we got a poster.
Speaker 1:Bats?
Speaker 3:Is there another?
Speaker 1:Oh, he's he's saying he this looks like a bad bat.
Speaker 3:Oh, so yeah. Speaking of, potentially a parlay to put together here, Packy, quote tweet. So, we talked about this yesterday.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Apple's chat g p t like version of Siri, which I think is an OpenAI partnership. Right? They had a partnership of some sorts, but maybe
Speaker 1:they're so confusing. I don't understand what they're canceling because so the the headline is is Apple has now delayed a chat GPT like version of Siri. But they were just telling us that they launched a chat GPT like version of Siri called Apple intelligence. And that rolled out in a bunch of beta tests and is, like, available. And then also, you can go into your Siri settings right now on your phone as long as you have the latest software, and you can integrate your ChatGPT credentials.
Speaker 1:And so you can use ChatGPT through Siri right now. Yep. And so I don't know what this is that they're delaying. Like, we all know it's bad and it's not working. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I guess they're just saying, like, hey. We were gonna improve it because we know it's bad, but now we're acting, like, never launched anything, but it's, like, we clearly did. Apple's chat g p t like version of Siri, that's just Apple intelligence. You launched that. It didn't go very well.
Speaker 1:Now you're saying you're delaying the launch of it, but you already launched it, and you put billboards up everywhere in 2024. And so very confusing. Anyway, there's been a bunch of talk about this. Packie had a spicy take. He said, Apple will not be a top 10 company by market cap by the end of this decade in 2021.
Speaker 1:That's a crazy, crazy take. Yeah. I mean, that's a completely different question because they print money and and they have a monopoly on a bunch of different things in the App Store and all the service revenue. But Packie says
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the idea that, luxury goods have, you know, proven to be a fantastic business for the Arno's. Yep. They're worth if if LVMH sort of collectively is worth, you know, 300,000,000,000 Yep. Is the the the sort of consumer electronics equivalent if Apple just becomes a luxury.
Speaker 3:You know, business is less focused on innovation, but more so just making the sort of best, kind of commodity devices. Yep. Is that worth is that where is it is that a $3,000,000,000,000 company? Like, you know, is it worth 10 times more than LVMH if they can be a toll road on on so many transactions? Like Yep.
Speaker 3:Still feels like it's possible even if they sort of stop innovating. Yep. But, but, yeah, overall, he says, looks like a bad bet right now. Apple, is the most valuable company in the world by a healthy margin, but there's so many little cracks like this one. They have lost the it, and it's only a matter of time.
Speaker 3:So, very interesting to follow.
Speaker 1:I I don't know. It's just so hard. I mean, look at Microsoft. Microsoft lost the it, like, decades ago, and he's still super, super valuable. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, Microsoft Windows stopped being cool in 02/2001. Right? Yeah. Like, it it literally like ceased to be like a cool company. And it was like, oh, you're running windows XP at work.
Speaker 1:Like, that's a bummer.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, yeah. Well, you know, we have to run windows XP for the security patches or whatever, and then they just use that to print a trillion dollars. Yep. Apple has returned a trillion dollars to shareholders. They have generated a trillion dollars in cash, in cash.
Speaker 1:It's so much money.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Gravy train ain't stopping. It's it's just gonna be hard to displace them. Who who's going to build
Speaker 4:the the computers?
Speaker 3:Announced a phone with T Mobile, the AI phone.
Speaker 1:The complexity bug. You know, there's a obviously, there's a lot of people that are like, oh, that's like a super bearish signal. Right? But the interesting one is Solana launched a Solana phone. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Obviously, I think it didn't do that. In the
Speaker 3:strategic reserve.
Speaker 1:But yeah. Like, it it it was a it was a it was a boondoggle. I think the Solana phone was
Speaker 2:just a side product.
Speaker 3:Here's the bet.
Speaker 1:But it but it wasn't a death now.
Speaker 3:Here's the bet. It wasn't a death now.
Speaker 1:Here's the bet. It wasn't a death now.
Speaker 3:We have a strategic crypto token reserve.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Herplexity is betting that there's gonna be a strategic token reserve.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:The other kind of token. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hey. I told you.
Speaker 3:And, if they have some tied to the real world,
Speaker 1:we should
Speaker 3:make it happen.
Speaker 1:Internal reasoning tokens.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. We have a question on x from, Gordon Gekko. K. He says, is this what you guys do every single day?
Speaker 3:And the answer is yes. Every Monday through Friday. Some people like formatting PowerPoints. We like, doing a daily
Speaker 1:Lives
Speaker 3:technology and business, you know, show. And, we feel very grateful.
Speaker 1:How everyone else that has a show has to pretend like they have some other job. Like, oh, really? I'm like an investor, so I can only do this once a week for an hour. It's like Yeah. We all know, you know, podcasting is the most important thing in the world.
Speaker 1:So what like, the other stuff's just window dressing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, yes, the answer is yes. Going forward, we got a post from Dan Coe.
Speaker 3:He says, everyone is gonna make their own apps with AI. That's a quote. And he says, my friend, you don't even make your own food. You'll still pay a few bucks to use an app. And I think this is a great take.
Speaker 1:So true.
Speaker 3:There's, you know, like, the idea like, I'm a firm believer in that apps become memes in the way that you're gonna generate apps.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And there's gonna be some some novelty and maybe some value. And maybe for little stuff like, hey. I wanna make a custom weather app that that, you know, that should be able to kind of maintain itself and and stuff like that. But the idea that you're going to, you know, anything with network effects, obviously, is like a different story.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But even the idea that you're going to generate a CRM, that that's on par with HubSpot or Salesforce
Speaker 1:or some
Speaker 3:of these other products, and then you're gonna be building your business, but also maintaining your AI generated CRM Yep. That's breaking all the time. Yep. And if it's and if it you know, you get some, like, data loss or or or something like that. Like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Talk to people at Dollar Shave Club. They built their own they built, like, a Mailchimp replacement or something at that company. Like because, like, they were, like, we're a tech company, and they and they hired a bunch of engineers, and they built, like, an email management system for to, like, you know, send transactional emails. And it was like this big system. And, of course, like, you can it's like you're kind of saving money because you're not in and you're getting more customization, but ultimately and and all of that was let was predicated on, like, well, you know, now we have, you know, the ability to write programming code really quickly with, like, you know, abstract languages like Python.
Speaker 1:We're we're at a higher level of abstraction, so we can build this faster. And they did. Yep. But it was still, like, you're upside down on the trade because
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Like, you're only selling it once.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You're I think the way to look at the way to look about software costs is, like, an example, like a Mailchimp or Beehive or something like that is you pay, like, let's say you're an early stage company, you pay a thousand dollars a month for something. You are getting the benefit of potentially a million dollars of r and
Speaker 1:d spent a month
Speaker 3:on that specific area, and you only have to pay a thousand dollars. Exactly. You don't even you know, maybe you have to think about it. Yeah. You know, actually building out integrations and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:But in general, the the value of I'm I'm gonna spend a thousand dollars and get a million dollars, you know, millions of dollars a year in r and d is truly why capitalism is goaded. And
Speaker 1:this is the big question about those, like, buy an old business and drop a drop AI on top of it is like, well, is everyone doing the same thing? Because that doesn't change the competitive dynamics. It doesn't change the market structure. If everyone if it's like, yes. Like, there are a bunch of, like, web design agencies.
Speaker 1:You could buy them and tell them to use Cursor and Figma instead of whatever they're using right now. Yeah. But if everyone's doing the same thing, it's not gonna really change the economic structure. So you better be happy with the price you paid at the current multiple and the current cash flow generation for what you paid because you shouldn't expect it to 10 x like a venture bet. Yep.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:We got another post. So this company launched yesterday. It's called Orca. It's an energy drink that tastes like water, and I just wanted to highlight this Yes. Hilarious launch video.
Speaker 1:Did you
Speaker 3:see it?
Speaker 1:I saw it.
Speaker 3:So it's, it's basically this woman. She says, introducing orca. This is a flavored, basically, what caffeine water.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Caffeine water.
Speaker 3:They hard post the Amazon link, which which maybe worked out for them. Yep. Right? This this still did numbers even though that I'm sure that throttled them. Yep.
Speaker 3:But then it says, she basically introduces the product, and then she says, now this guy is gonna read off every
Speaker 1:Corbin Bleu.
Speaker 3:Corbin Bleu.
Speaker 1:Who I think is someone famous. I don't know who it is, though.
Speaker 3:Actually, I didn't realize that he was famous.
Speaker 1:Gonna be very offensive because I I bet there's, like, fans out there who are, like, really into this guy. But
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Corbin Bleu, he was in high school music.
Speaker 1:There you go. See? I I knew he was somewhat important.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely brutal. Yeah. Yeah. So And
Speaker 1:he reads every stop sign or every sign.
Speaker 3:Every legal road sign in America.
Speaker 1:It's just very odd. So of course it goes viral.
Speaker 3:And it's actually a brilliant way to hack the algorithm because the
Speaker 1:intended users. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because it's very entertaining Yep. And people are clicking this long video and watching the whole thing. So the algorithm is getting the signal that
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:People really love this. I should show it to more people. And I I I thought it was hilarious.
Speaker 1:Also speaking of the typo thing, he made a mistake while he was reading that. And and people in the comments are like, at seven minutes, he said, like, the turn left signal, but he put the turn right signal up or, like, he used the wrong hand signal for it. And so people had a lot of fun kind of, like, critiquing it and finding that little Easter egg, and then that obviously drove more engagement. And so, it all went very viral. I remember seeing when this dropped.
Speaker 1:We gotta we gotta do a taste test of this. See if it's better than Celsius.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We should give it a try. I like it. I when I was watching the launch video, I was like, wow. This is, like, a ten minute long video.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I was scared that I'd skip ahead two minutes, more signs, more signs, more signs.
Speaker 1:It's just did that?
Speaker 3:I just kept skipping, and then I skipped to that, and it just it he Corbin Bleu finished strong with the signs. And, I
Speaker 1:wonder if he's an investor. So, I mean, I wonder why they picked him or
Speaker 3:how how gotta hope that he, like, had some incentive to do this outside of, like I mean $10,000 or something like that.
Speaker 1:Pretty easy job. You just sit down, read a bunch of signs, get a teleprompter,
Speaker 3:camera He did a good job on this on the
Speaker 1:The lighting's good. It looks nice.
Speaker 3:We got a post from Chad Byers. He's been on the show before. He says, at this point, I won't fund a start up without an MVP, beta, or working prototype. It's just too easy to make stuff today. A pitch with nothing to show is emblematic of a team that's low ambition, conviction, agency, or all three.
Speaker 1:Well, Chad, what about a what about a startup that has a billboard? Let's go to AdQuik, and then we will do the analysis, but we're doing the ad inside of this post. So out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's go back to the post.
Speaker 3:Brilliant, John. Great point. If you're a found if you're a founder if you're a founder and you if you wanna make a splash Yes. In in, in Northern California
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:No prod no MVP necessary. Just buy, like, five or six billboards on it real quick, and you will get enough coverage.
Speaker 1:Here's here here's what you do. Okay. I'm not gonna tell you where Chad's where Chad skis, but if you look at his profile picture, you can see there's some skiing going on there. You go geo guesser mode. You figure out where that is.
Speaker 1:You get AdQuic to put up a giant billboard On the top of that. Mountain. He's up there. I finally got away from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley. And then he looks over and it says, guess what, Chad?
Speaker 1:I have an MVP, a beta, and a working prototype. And
Speaker 3:And a billboard on your favorite mountain.
Speaker 1:And I'm high conviction. And I got massive agency and I'm high ambition, fund my startup. And he's like, goddamn it.
Speaker 3:Find the find the the jet charter service that that, Chad uses in a pinch, you
Speaker 1:know Yes.
Speaker 3:And wrap the plane.
Speaker 1:Wrap the plane.
Speaker 3:So you can even say I don't have a beta. But, but for the next, you know, three three hour flight Yeah. Wrap the inside and the outside.
Speaker 1:Yep. And,
Speaker 3:yeah. There's something there, but the the the I I I flagged this because I talked to an entrepreneur yesterday
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Who, who's raising, for a SaaS company, and, he's a buddy of mine. So, you know, we were chatting, and he was basically saying, like, yeah, it's gonna take a couple years, to kind of get feature complete on sort of what what we've designed to date. And I just said, do not say that to any investor. And before you talk to investors Yeah. Figure out how you can sort of shrink that timeline Sure.
Speaker 3:By basically 75%. Yeah. Right? It's fine if it's gonna take a year to because it it wasn't, like, you know, it wasn't basic. It wasn't hard
Speaker 1:to travel machine? Like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was more like Because the the the narrative in Silicon Valley is, like, humanoids and quantum computers and AI God, like, two years max.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yep. So if if Elon is building an XAI data center in Memphis with 200,000 GPUs in a year In
Speaker 1:a year.
Speaker 3:You can build your SaaS company in three months
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And that is a bar you should hold yourself to internally.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 3:And that is what people will hold you to externally. Totally. And it's hard to get conviction in a founder that thinks that, you know, something's gonna take two years if it's pure software anymore. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 3:The bar has been raised, but at the same time, there's more information and and, playbooks out there than ever. So And
Speaker 1:that's supposed to say that it might like like, you will have a five year road map. You will have a ten year road map. Like, every company that we work with and we see internally, we we we we see that it's like, oh, wow. Like, yeah, it took a couple years to get around to launching this new feature or launching this new thing. Like, it it it doesn't just happen immediately.
Speaker 1:There is that compound startup philosophy, that idea that you, like, try and build everything all at once. But for a lot of companies, they need to really dial in the software. It's not so much that, like, instantiating the first idea is difficult. Like, we're building a to do list. Yes.
Speaker 1:Getting the right to do list, like, coding it is not the problem. It's the finding the product market fit, accelerating it, figuring out the full economic workflow for it, and then doing that again and again and again for every single product in the portfolio Yep. That actually builds, like, the full company. That does take time. And And I think that even though the the time from, like, design to technical instantiation has gotten a lot shorter Yeah.
Speaker 1:That doesn't mean that there's still not, like, a whole bunch of cycles of talking to customers, testing, seeing, can we scale this? Can we advertise this? Are the channels working? And some of that stuff is just gonna take time. So it's not that you're gonna be retired in two years.
Speaker 1:It's just that you're gonna be able to do more than previously thought in two years.
Speaker 3:Yep. Well said. We got a post from Palmer. He says, so Anduril came out with an announcement today. They are, they say fight unfair.
Speaker 3:The US Air Force announced the mission design series designation for Anduril CCA prototype, the y f q dash 44 a. Palmer quote tweets, and says, in Chinese culture, the number 44 is considered unlucky because the pronunciation of four sounds similar to the word for death, and 44 is seen as double death. So he they basically named their new, autonomous fighter jet the the, y f q double death a, which which sounds menacing if you were, across the pond.
Speaker 1:What would what would China do if they wanted to get back at us? Like, I feel like the number 13 is not that big of a deal over here. It would be funny if they made a huge deal out of it. They were like, guess what? We named our missile the
Speaker 3:thirteenth Friday
Speaker 1:the thirteenth, and we're all like, that that played out, like, Halloween movie. Yeah. Didn't really land.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:don't know.
Speaker 3:Stuff. We're not as
Speaker 1:superstitious. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we're not as superstitious. I don't know.
Speaker 1:But I like this. It's fun.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's fun.
Speaker 1:I wanna see I wanna see some videos of this, the CCA prototype. I mean, it's gonna be a knockout drag out fight for this.
Speaker 3:And and this is ultimately gonna inspire the the Anduril for x, all those out there to also come up with cute and sort of fun Agitating. Agitated, names for their, products. So Andrew leading the charge again. We got another post from Packy, Tim Cook today says, introducing the newest iPad Air. And it's just an iPad that looks exactly the same as every other iPad we've seen.
Speaker 1:Well, he's getting into he's getting into meme posting. He's like he's, like, riffing now. It's like a You
Speaker 3:think Cook is riffing?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's just like, oh, like, everyone will understand the joke here that, like, I'm just
Speaker 3:posting gave up on AI, but don't worry.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We got an we got a fresh iPad for you.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:The the the the joke of the post here is Tim Cook is just posting the previous iPad Air, and and he knows that everyone will be like and he he's like, oh, I'm introducing the newest iPad Air, and everyone will know, and then they'll be they'll think it's funny. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly, John.
Speaker 3:You nailed it.
Speaker 1:Nailed it. I think I think it's Coke's high art.
Speaker 3:No. But Packy says, holy, they did it. Those crazy I can't say those crazy sons of really, really did it.
Speaker 1:Did it.
Speaker 3:And, imagine
Speaker 1:some joke. Backed, maybe maybe Jacoby. Jacoby. Apple is bugged. Apparently, this core core, trend research report is like a PDF that they use, as like a demonstration, just to, like, throw something on the screen.
Speaker 1:And And it's this inside joke, and it was, like, very funny five years ago, but they haven't come up with a new joke since. And so they're still recycling this, like, same idea of, like, this insider joke, and they haven't come up with a new one. It's very silly. Anyway
Speaker 3:We have to I genuinely I think
Speaker 1:you should just like, like, this week could be, like, introducing the new iPhone.
Speaker 3:We need to find somebody that recently left Apple
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's not under NDA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. To whistle blower. Them. Yeah. The whistleblower, but not about the toxic work environment, about the lackadaisical work environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We need somebody to
Speaker 1:They didn't yell at me once. They didn't they didn't yell at me at all. They let me. I I never came in on the weekends. It was I I left
Speaker 3:it I left it 12:30 after lunch on a Friday. I'd have an a long lunch and and take off.
Speaker 1:That's the type of whistleblower we need.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you work at Apple and you're chilling, call us.
Speaker 3:Reach out. Reach out.
Speaker 1:Anonymous. You
Speaker 3:don't so so there's this phenomena where every major tech company you see Apple employees out online over the Internet
Speaker 1:Yep. Talking Yep. Yep.
Speaker 4:Chatting. Yep.
Speaker 3:You never see does anybody work there? Have have we do you know anybody that works at Apple right now?
Speaker 1:I do, actually. I was supposed to go skiing with one last week. I I should've gone. Could've gotten the the inside scoop.
Speaker 3:What did they say? I had to go on a different ski trip?
Speaker 1:I mean, this guy actually works really hard and, like, is, like, doing, like, semiconductor stuff, like, in, like, their fabs and stuff. It's like it it it they like, the stuff that they do is really legitimate. They're the company is just optimizing. Like right? Like so, like, what you don't
Speaker 3:see there optimizing. I'm optimizing.
Speaker 1:Like like, to steel man this is like, yes. This looks exactly the same, but, like, this is the best form factor. They've tried to make the iPad a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, and nothing else works. Like, no one wants a slightly bigger one. No one wants a slightly smaller one.
Speaker 1:They want that size.
Speaker 3:No. But they haven't taken it to the extreme. I need the comically large iPad that's the size of a flat screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 3:You have to carry with your I
Speaker 1:would love that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's actually it's actually
Speaker 1:I want the printer, but, you know, obviously, printer dialing in
Speaker 3:those Like, they don't nail the simple things. If you made a a true Apple TV Yeah. Not not a sort of
Speaker 1:I know. I know.
Speaker 3:Device. I'm talking about a large
Speaker 1:plus about the app, the Apple TV.
Speaker 3:That's Or are
Speaker 1:you talking about the streaming service, Apple TV?
Speaker 3:No. I'm talking about the Apple TV plus plus extreme.
Speaker 1:Are you talking about the the app the the streaming service that lives inside the app that lives inside the device, and they're all three called Apple TV?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No. But there's a world I would pay for a mattress sized flat screen from Apple that I could mount to my Can you
Speaker 1:imagine how expensive a hundred inch TV would be
Speaker 3:for Apple? Like, I I wish they just grand. So so LVMH will drop a product Yeah. That's $50.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And they're just like, yeah. We know some people will buy this, so we're gonna make it. I want Apple to do
Speaker 1:more stuff like that. The Apple Watch edition, $10,000 gold watch, gold Apple Watch version one immediately became out of out of date. Like, doesn't even run the latest software.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so and so they they wind up cutting out. They do the bracelets a little bit. They they do the bracelets for real stuff.
Speaker 3:Anyways, I wanna buy a, a Do
Speaker 1:we throw that bezel with that? Do we already do the bezel? We already
Speaker 3:we already we already fit with you, but I have a I have a prepare prepare a promoted post, but we got a question from t dai in the chat. He says, question, how do I get out of analysis paralysis? Yep. And I think that's a good question. It's you just gotta start ruthlessly taking action.
Speaker 3:I think if you think about, I think they're they're
Speaker 1:I feel like I knew some story about some guy who, like, just would carry around a d 20. You know, like, with Dungeons and Dragons, like, dice that has 20 sides. I think it was, like, a very odd, you know, the a word. I don't know if we're supposed to say that. No.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But,
Speaker 1:like, you know, neurodivergent thing to do. But, yeah. It's like, okay. With a if you carry around a a a dice with 20 sides, you can model probabilities down to 5%. So you could say, look.
Speaker 1:I think that, there's a, there's a 15% chance that I should become an entrepreneur and a 85% chance that I should take Keith her boys advice and be a startup founder first or or be work at a work at a large high performing organization first.
Speaker 4:Just roll it.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, you roll it. And the way you model it on the d 20 is that if it's if it's a three or under, that's a 15% chance. Yeah. Because because every single digit on the d 20 is 5%. So you say, okay, I'm just gonna roll this dice.
Speaker 1:And if it comes up three or less, I'm starting my company today. And if it comes up for between four and twenty Yeah. I'm I'm applying to a job at a high growth company. I don't know. I mean, it sounds crazy, but, like, sometimes it really is valuable, I think, just to, like, you know, like, when when you're in a when you're in a business relationship, someone there's obviously this idea of like disagree and commit, like, look, we, we, we, we, we, we, you know, we, we, Jordy was saying we should do six days a week.
Speaker 1:I was saying we should do four days a week or whatever. Like we disagreed. We, we met in the middle, we made a compromise, but we disagreed. But, like, we're putting it behind us. We're committing to that.
Speaker 1:Right? And so you should do that with your life too to get out of paralysis paralysis. So, like, just running hard at anything is probably better than waiting around. And so it's the same thing. Should you lift legs or arms, like, while just do something aggressively?
Speaker 3:Ultimately, every act in life is a leap of faith. Yeah. And specifically startups, you know, I I don't know Tidad's situation. He might be deciding, you know, given the example of, do I join a company and work there for two years, or do I start my own thing? And success is not guaranteed.
Speaker 3:Yep. You might join the company, and you have a bad manager, and you don't get access to the CEO. Totally. And you don't get any of the learn positive learnings that Keith is talking about. Or you might start a company and and you had the right idea, but, you know, a more heavily funded competitor came in and just steamrolled you.
Speaker 3:But, every act is a leap of faith. Yep. And the big the the most like, what you work on matter is, like, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters. Yep. But you're not gonna know you you can't have, you can't go into any decision, you know, with with a % certainty of of the outcome, and that's okay.
Speaker 3:And you just have to get comfortable with that. And you have to make the decision and make micro adjustments, and sometimes macro adjustments. But, if you're if you're waiting for, to be able to make a decision that that a % leads to success, you're never gonna find that.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's It's a good point. I like it. Anyway, we have pretty much gone through the whole timeline.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think we should cover Greenland tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's do Greenland tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Gotta talk about mining, which is cool. We have one more question, and then I think we can close out.
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 3:Jordy and John, how do you deal with incompetence and lack of speed? This is relevant. So we have somebody joining the team soon, and, it was pretty funny because John connected me to him on a Saturday.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I will usually if I'm talking to a candidate, and I get introduced on a Saturday morning
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'll just say, hey. Let me know if you're, like, do you wanna jump on the phone now? And that's just sort of information gathering. I'm not gonna write the person off if they're like, oh, actually, like, can we talk Monday Yeah. Or Tuesday?
Speaker 3:But I am gonna judge that interaction. And John introduced me to this guy, and, he before I could even respond, he said, are you free right now? I'll give you a call. And so, like, that's an immediate signal. And so, you know, we ended up extending an offer to this person and but I already knew that, like, speed was in their DNA.
Speaker 3:Right? And, you could tell, like, if somebody's it's Saturday morning at 9AM and they're ready to jump on a call, you could look for those signals. Right? You need to be, you should, the entire recruiting process should be figuring out is somebody competent and are they fast? Yep.
Speaker 3:And competence and speed are, like, the two biggest factors. Competent general competence and speed, make up for a lot even intelligence, right, in a lot of roles. Like, golden retriever mode is real. Yeah. In companies, if you're just, you know, golden retrievers maybe not the right example, but but, there's sort of this idea of, like, if you're competent and you can make generally good decisions and you're fast and you're It's
Speaker 1:a corporate athlete.
Speaker 3:And a corp a true corporate athlete, you're you're gonna do well. So I think the biggest thing is if somebody's in the role and they're incompetent, then you need to potentially find a different
Speaker 1:Different role.
Speaker 3:Different role for them. Maybe they're different
Speaker 1:which is
Speaker 3:fast, and and if they don't have that sort of speed in their DNA Yep. I've never I've never gotten somebody that didn't wanna work fast to work fast. It just
Speaker 1:Didn't want to work fast to work fast. Yes. But you can if you give someone the right job, I think people can move faster.
Speaker 3:For sure.
Speaker 1:If they're in a job that isn't rewarding or demanding or, like, gives them the right feedback cycle, you can you can steer them towards something that just fires them up. Yeah. And all of a sudden you're like, wow, that person's doing way more work way faster. They're pumped because, like, we found the slot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I think that's, like, how you deal with it. Then kind of the other side is, like, just on feedback, you know, being very candid, very open, like, you know, humane, but giving like direct feedback. But then also trying to give as much, kind of like meta level, like algorithmic feedback. Yeah. Not just on this was bad, but what what is the process?
Speaker 1:How do we improve the process and whatever whatever the output was instead of, just acting as, like, the validator. Yeah. Also acting as the fine tuning of the model. Yeah. Essentially.
Speaker 3:Now I had a one example, you know, people often don't change and it's disappointing, but it's just reality. But people sometimes don't understand the seriousness of a situation or the importance of a situation Yep. And that, they might be working quickly in other areas, but, like, not on the right thing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And I had this last year. I had a portfolio company, and, I'm one of probably the top five shareholders in the company. It was involved super early. And, the company was at a point where we'd have these sort of monthly check ins, with the with the CEO. A month passed, very little progress happened, and I had a very candid kind of conversation with the CEO where I said, if you keep operating like this, the comp it will be Christmas break
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Break, whatever that is if you're a startup founder, but it's gonna be between Christmas and New Year's, and you're gonna be dealing with laying off your team and shutting the company down. Because at this pace, you're not gonna be in a position to raise your next round. Yep. Your the traction is not gonna be there, and nobody's coming to save you. And between and I said, let's meet in a week, and, like, let's see if you can get the pace up.
Speaker 3:And he absolutely did. He he crushed it the rest of the year. He got his round his next round raised, and the company's in a fantastic position right now. And there was something that I think he was too fixated on on sort of, like, the big picture of, like, where the company is going and all this stuff. And I just said, you need to take sort of ruthless action, and he unlocked something in himself, and the company has been dramatically different since then.
Speaker 3:I think it's different giving that advice to a founder and saying, look yourself in the mirror and decide, you know, understand the situation that you're putting yourself in is very different than, you know, if you talk to a employee who's not motivated and they're not moving quickly and things like that. I I haven't had a lot of success in sort of turning somebody from a low low, urgency, low output person into somebody that's super high output. But that wasn't that was, you know, one, very bright point in my year last year where I said, okay. This person, like, found the next gear. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it and it dramatically transformed the company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I just don't wanna be too black belt on it because I I think, like, yes. Like, there is some, like, innate speed that is just, like, in people's DNA or something. And they come into an organization and they just go hard no matter what. You see these people all over. But I do think that there's that there's, that next gear that everyone can achieve for sure.
Speaker 1:And then there's also just, you know, if you get dropped in, if you're parachuting into, you know, Nazi occupied France and you're a 17 year older to 19 year old kid, like, you can just kind of, like, stare the opportunity in the face and, like, just just turn it on. Yeah. Even if it's even if you've never done it before. And so finding that that thing that, like, brings that insane energy, and and really going forward is is really important. And that's the job of managers is to, like, unleash that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, that's a great show. I thought we had a lot lot lot of fun. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You guys can help us.
Speaker 3:Ben, hold us accountable. Let's How many new ones? Oh, we gotta get some new ones.
Speaker 1:We gotta get
Speaker 3:some new ones. You people are not leaving enough ads in our reviews.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Please leave some recent ads in our reviews.
Speaker 3:I got a DM the other day that had an ad in it.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 3:And, we got one last question. Let's do it. Advice on becoming a creator and not and cutting out consuming. The answer here is that all the value on social network, or at least 99% of the value, created by social networks occurs to the people that create the content versus the people that just use them for entertainment. And so if you the other thing is if you don't create content online, you don't really exist online.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And it's hard to, have a real impact in this world if you have no digital presence.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have posted that in the last, in the last show notes. I don't know if we got to it, but it was like, oh, in, like, 1999. Oh, someone has a presence online? They must be a weirdo.
Speaker 1:And then now it's like, someone doesn't have a presence online. They must be a weirdo.
Speaker 3:And I still think there's, I I still think that there is value in going through periods of time where you cut out all Totally. Social, activity at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, try to just not go on these platforms and try to just focus on, your business or your role or whatever whatever kind of situation you're in. But, there will come a time where you should emerge and start sharing what you're doing with the world.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic advice. We will see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. We appreciate you all, and have a great Tuesday. Enjoy it.
Speaker 1:We will see you soon.
Speaker 3:Sean Maguire on the show tomorrow. Yeah. We're excited.
Speaker 1:Stay tuned.
Speaker 3:Stay tuned. Have a good afternoon.