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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 TPPN. Today is December. 12/16/2025. Merry Christmas. Oh.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. We are live from the TVP and Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, the North Pole. The North Pole of net income.
Speaker 1:Ramp, Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. Know what to get for that loved one in your life this Christmas. Get them on ramp.
Speaker 1:Introduce them to a ramp SDR. They will appreciate it. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Speaker 2:It really is.
Speaker 1:Anyway, you know what else is the gift that keeps on giving? Hiring a storyteller, which apparently is the is the hottest topic in Silicon Valley. Thanks to our friend Katie Dayton over at The Wall Street Journal, who made this go mega viral by posting an article in The Wall Street Journal all about how startups are hiring storytellers. Companies are desperately seeking storytellers is the headline, of course. We are going to dive into it.
Speaker 1:Jordy wrote a take. If you have a storyteller, you wanna tell a story, why don't you tell it on all of the streaming platforms simultaneously with Restream? One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. Storytelling is the only way to impose meaning on abundance, says Signal.
Speaker 1:Coherence on noise, legitimacy on power, strategy ops, capital are all downstream without narrative control. None of it will ever stick. This has been one of the core premise of my account in a world of infinite output. Story is the scarce primitive. He's a very good writer signal.
Speaker 1:Whoever can compress chaos into something people can feel, remember, forgive, and rally around actually runs the system. This skill is worth more than the entire c suite combined. Okay. Woah. So lay off the CEO, the CFO, the CTO.
Speaker 1:You just need a storyteller. You're good to go. Is that the pitch? No. People are having fun with this one.
Speaker 1:What was your take, Jordy? Break it down for me.
Speaker 2:So I How do you
Speaker 1:frame this? How do you process this?
Speaker 2:I mean, should we should we read through the article briefly or at least summarize it? Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So Katie writes, companies are desperately seeking storytellers, brands trying to wrest great greater control from their narratives or seeking storytelling skill sets
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Without a camp campfire in sight. Maybe some of them have a have a warm hearth like we do. Anyways, What corporate is the latest thing? What is Normally, you'd be telling a story
Speaker 1:Oh, around a campfire. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That makes fire. Sense. Can be telling a story that way.
Speaker 1:I usually think of smoking cigars around campfires. That's what I associate. Mostly focused on the cigar.
Speaker 2:But you like to yap between puffs. I do. I do. Corporate America's latest hot job is also one of the oldest in history, storytellers. Some companies want a media relations manager by a flashier name.
Speaker 2:Others need people to produce blogs, podcasts, case studies, and more types of branded content to attract customers, investors, and potential recruits. All seem to use the word differently than in its usual application to novelists, playwrights. As storytellers, a Google job ad said last month, we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long term growth. Mhmm. The listings had a customer storytelling manager to join the company's Google Cloud storytelling team.
Speaker 2:That sounds like a fantastic opportunity in another life personally. I'd be on the Google Cloud storytelling team.
Speaker 1:For
Speaker 2:sure. In some ways in some ways, we are. One article the unit published this year was titled Lowe's Innovation, How Vertex AI Helps Create Interactive Shopping Experiences. Microsoft Security Organization, meanwhile, is recruiting a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator, and part marketer. Sure.
Speaker 2:Vanta is also hiring a storyteller. Notion recently
Speaker 1:Head of storytelling
Speaker 2:in Vanta. Productivity apps, Notion recently merged its com, social media, and influencer functions into one ten person team, a so called storytelling team. And so anyways, they go Katie goes on and on. She talks about how more and more of these listings are popping up.
Speaker 1:They're Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're growing year over year. They're showing up in earnings calls. Yeah. And I went to try find
Speaker 1:have a different take on this. I think as soon as as soon as there's a Wall Street mean, we love Katie. But as soon as there's a Wall Street Journal piece about a trend, the trend is effectively dead. And so there is no more alpha in hiring storytellers. You need to hire a yarn spinner.
Speaker 1:You need to hire a fabulist. Someone who will go around to group chats and tell wild lies about your product, your company, how successful you are. You recruit this person, and then they go around seeding little little anecdotes, little tall tales, and they spin yarns.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's called securities fraud.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It certainly depends. Maybe if there's no securities changing hands. Anyway, so I would But telling tall tales,
Speaker 2:I to find a storyteller from a long time ago.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And I found none other than the legend Steve Clayton. He's currently vice president of Microsoft's communication strategy. But back in 2010, what was he hired for? The chief storyteller
Speaker 1:No way. Of Microsoft. They were using that term fifteen years ago.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:That title? Feels like a very modern title.
Speaker 2:Title from 2010 to June 2021. And he says, in this role, I led a team of 40 who engage in a wide variety of storytelling inside and outside Microsoft. Anyways, goes goes on and on. I was trying to also kind of understand the from like the early nineteen hundreds to the nineteen fifties, you had copywriters. Like that it was it was like pretty elite to be a copywriter.
Speaker 2:Yep. This was like a high status job. You were using
Speaker 1:Don Draper. Isn't Don Draper a smartwatch? Director
Speaker 2:but also a writer Yeah. And the people that he worked with were copywriters. Because at that time, print media, you could being able to use your words to get people to take action
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That you want, that you benefit from is a very elite skill set. Yeah. At some point,
Speaker 1:marketing One more example that I mentioned earlier, early storytellers in Silicon Valley. Guy Kawasaki. He was he was one of Apple's employees originally responsible for marketing their Macintosh computer line in 1984. He actually popularized the word evangelist in marketing the Macintosh as an Apple evangelist and the concepts of evangelism marketing and technology evangelism slash platforming evangelism in general. And and and he became, you know, this idea of word-of-mouth marketing.
Speaker 1:Not quite storytelling, different keyword around it, but he was also one of the early turning points in tech marketing.
Speaker 2:Anyway, continue. Yeah. Around that time, you started to get content strategists. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And if you look back to the '80s and '90s, it was about that was kind of like the boom of brand strategy, brand identity. Think like the Nike kind of era of marketing.
Speaker 1:Anthropologie recently went viral because there was a clip from an older podcast that was reposted on Axe, went viral. And it was his take a few years ago during the creator economy boom, arguing that companies need a founding creator or like a or like a Creator
Speaker 2:in residence.
Speaker 1:Create you know, it was it was higher than creator in residence. It was like it was like, on the co founding team, should have a CTO and then you should have a creator. And it was like, you know, it's an interesting thought experiment. Probably good for some companies, maybe not good for every company. You know, like any piece of tech advice or or wisdom, you know, there's gonna be a variety of of cases where it makes sense.
Speaker 1:But it went viral, and everyone was saying like, this is so it's he's so behind. And I was and I had to correct someone. Was like, no. No. No.
Speaker 1:Like, that clip is actually a couple years old. He when he was saying it, it wasn't. So it's it's sort of interesting that way.
Speaker 2:Any Early insight. Yeah. Anyways, I wrote a piece for the newsletter today at tbpn.com, and of course, I titled it, You Don't Need a Storyteller. I said according to a friend of the show, Katie
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At The Wall Street Journal, companies are desperate to hire storytellers. Hiring a storyteller is not a new phenomenon, but it makes sense that companies feel the need to hire them right now. Why? Because it's never been more obvious that the best storytellers in the world create billions of dollars of value for their companies and create massive advantages using only their words. Their words are so powerful that no matter where they appear on the Internet, they draw millions of views and create a vortex of talent, capital, and customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But yeah. There's this thing where like, if you have a hot take, you don't actually need to own the platform. You can just go do a circuit of appearances.
Speaker 2:A podcast tour. I'll continue. So the reality distortion field that emergence emerges often results in a 100 x PE ratios. Of course, every company in the world wants this. The problem is that it's impossible to hire the most elite storytellers because they are founders.
Speaker 2:Think Elon, Karp, and Palmer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I new coinage alert. I call these types Joe Rogan CEOs. I love it. Right? You know if you have a Joe Rogan CEO.
Speaker 2:It's fine if you don't. There's great CEOs that are not Joe Rogan CEOs. Yep. But there's a certain type of CEO that's a Joe Rogan And
Speaker 1:to to be clear, you're not saying that the that the CEO has to have the same aesthetics as Joe Rogan or the same style Well, even Carr
Speaker 2:has not been on Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:But you know that if he went on You
Speaker 1:would crush.
Speaker 2:It it would be a it would be a Electric. Grand slam. It'd electric.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. No.
Speaker 1:So so it's more about being able to put on a performance in that particular environment in terms of you can
Speaker 2:capture people's attention for three hours. Yes. Just like rambling,
Speaker 1:Whereas there there have been CEOs that have gone on Joe Rogan successfully, but they just haven't delivered a Joe Rogan experience.
Speaker 2:And I think if you think about I think if you think about, like, early stage founders Yeah. Who who would who would go on and just crush Joe Rogan Gus is doing good. Just, like, immediately comes to mind. You know who these people are, and there's there's CEOs, founder CEOs
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of his generation
Speaker 1:He's a JRC.
Speaker 2:That are amazing even though they wouldn't necessarily they're not necessarily a JRC.
Speaker 1:He's a JRC.
Speaker 2:So I continue the Internet is noisier than ever with thousands of startups competing for mindshare. When every startup has a great launch video, no one does. And yet these storytellers consistently break through and dominate the timeline. Even though Gen AI allows marketing teams big and small to massively increase their output, it is often not even 1% as effective as one of these elite storyteller founders going on a podcast or just posting stream of consciousness on x. The white pill for savvy marketing teams is that even as we're seeing an exponential increase in content production, I'm not sure we're seeing an exponential increase in great ideas.
Speaker 2:That means that companies large and small that don't have the luxury of having an Elon or Palmer on the payroll still have a chance to break through the noise and be remembered. As I was personally reflecting on 2025, there were only a handful of, like, truly corporate storytelling moments that I remember. And each of them worked for different reasons. One, don't work at Andoril. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Iconic campaign. Palmer makes, like, a cameo in it, but he's not the star. He's just like a he's he's like kind of he's just like a character in it, but it's you could remove Palmer, and the and the ad would, like, still Yep. Carry weight. I thought that was one of the best campaigns of the year.
Speaker 2:The other one was Astronomer. Their reaction to the to the crisis and the viral moment they had, the the campaign is titled, thank you for your interest in Astronomer. It obviously featured Gwyneth Paltrow. I think this one will be studied in ten years. It was, like, really a perfect reaction to that moment, and I did not know astronomer before then.
Speaker 2:I do now. I will never forget them. I thought ramps, expenses should do themselves with Saquon. That one was this combination of, like, luck, incredible execution and timing. And and ultimately, it it just, like, having the Eagles got it done Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that, like, was just the cherry on top. It was a great campaign. It was a great, you know, first Super Bowl commercial for them. Next is keep thinking from Anthropic. It's felt like very Apple inspired.
Speaker 2:They even had the piano crashing and then sort of like reversing up. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. Which I felt was a reference to that iPad Yeah. Yeah. Ad in in some way. And then finally, Avi Schiffman's campaign, which I call buy every billboard.
Speaker 2:He literally bought every billboard. We've talked about this before, but near our office, there was a billboard that you could only see like a third of it. You could only see it say n.com because it was just facing it was like 10 feet away from a apartment building. And so I said, Friend did something absurd, which we can call the buy every billboard strategy. Many people criticize the campaign and the product, but the results from an awareness standpoint are undeniable.
Speaker 2:Avi spent 1 to 2,000,000 was my estimate and became a household name, at least on the coast. And a lot of other brands have spent like 10 times that amount. Yeah. And you don't even know who they are. Right?
Speaker 2:You you wouldn't somebody could rattle off a handful of them. You'd be like, what? Like, I'm actually not familiar. So that that campaign was notable to me because I think if you utilize that for the right product, it could be super impactful. Right?
Speaker 2:It could have a you know, I don't know if that campaign transformed Friend for as a business, but it certainly put them on the map. And I think, like, it's very possible that billboards can have increasing returns to scale. So you might buy Yep. Two billboards, not really see any noticeable, like, lift in awareness and attention and and traffic. But if you buy, like, 200 Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's sort of undeniable. You can't miss it. I kept I
Speaker 1:and Well, we had a great result with literally two billboards. Could have just been one, basically, Just one billboard. But we were able to get a lot of photos taken of it, and so it broke through in a very Yeah. Interesting way. And so we we probably got way more value out of that just because it was such a small, just one billboard.
Speaker 1:And then Avi went the opposite direction and bought every billboard. When he came on the show and was like, it's the biggest billboard campaign in history. I was like, there's no way. And then I saw it everywhere, and I was like, okay. Maybe it is.
Speaker 1:But I thought it would take it cost more than a million dollars to get that big of a billboard buy. I thought a billboard buy of that scale would be like 10,000,000 or 20,000,000, but I guess not. I guess
Speaker 2:I I know he didn't spend that much because he hasn't raised that much.
Speaker 1:He hasn't raised that much, but I I don't know. He also he was, like, financing his hishis.com. So is there possible is it possible that he has, financing agreement to, like, pay these billboards down over time or something? Like
Speaker 2:I don't know about that. I don't I don't the you can finance a domain Yeah. Because the domain gets hold held in, like, a third party, like Yeah. Yeah. Custody.
Speaker 2:And so if somebody stops making payments, you just claw back the domain. Yeah. Whereas billboards is like, you ran the ads. You you took the spot of another advertiser that could have been cashed today. So I don't really know about that.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't be surprised if Avi's levered up in more than one that Who knows? Anyways, I said hiring a storyteller to craft narratives and tell your story internally and externally is fine. But if the goal is to be remembered and you lack a Joe Rogan CEO, remember that one great campaign is worth 10,000 posts. And yeah, I would just like to see people, companies, instead of, you know, frantically just trying to make a a lot of noise in a bunch of random ways as you go into 2026. How do you have one breakout moment campaign and truly be remembered?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's interesting. I I have more to say about that. But first, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, developing fine tuned models of serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I I'm trying to I'm trying to square, like, the problem that these job posts are trying to solve. So in the Wall Street Journal article, says the percentage of LinkedIn job postings in The US that include the term storyteller doubled in the year ending November 26, I guess, to include some 50,000 listings under marketing and more than 20,000 job listings under media and communications that mentioned the term storyteller storytelling. Executives on earnings calls and Investor Days mentioned it 469 times, is like three times as much as ten years ago. So clearly clearly, people are you know, business leaders are interested in storytelling both as a, you know, a a narrative for investors, but also as an actual physical job. But I'm wondering, like, you get in the seat.
Speaker 1:It does feel like a little bit of what this what this story is what what this journal article is saying is like is like, you're going to be storytelling every single day. It's kind of counter to what which I guess is what your whole point was, but it's very much counter to your point of, like, one big campaign, one breakthrough idea. And I'm wondering just like I don't know. Is there is there a world where you need both, where you need inspiration, but you still need, like, you know, at a certain at a certain point, you know, there there was an example here. It's like, you know, they did a Lowe's case study on how Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences.
Speaker 1:Like, is that going
Speaker 2:to be the the standout moment Yeah. For me this year from Microsoft was Satya saying Yeah. I'm happy to be a leaser. Yeah. And I'm good for my I'm good for my 80,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when you think about when I know, I I think what
Speaker 1:I'm do for Lowe's partnership, you know? Like, if you're like like, this was actually Google's cloud storytelling team. They published an article. And so if they just have to get out a blog post, maybe there is some benefit to just, like, shifting their mindset to at least being like, hey. Instead of just doing, like, a list of facts, like, why don't you try and, like, tell it like a story?
Speaker 1:Meaning, like, the React structure, conflict, resolution, characters, antagonists. Like, you know, like like, because, like, a lot of like, you it sounds like a low bar.
Speaker 2:They didn't want Lowe's to have efficient cloud infrastructure.
Speaker 1:They didn't want the the shopping experiences to be interactive. But then Google came in and changed it up and changed up the game.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, that feels a
Speaker 1:little bit of You
Speaker 2:know, if I'm at a big company, if I'm employee at a big company, it would be cool to have a re like, a centralized resource that's like, here's how we talk about this product. Here's how we talk about our mission. Here's how we talked about talk about our road map in the near term and the medium term and the long term. Right? But ultimately, that when you think of the companies that are great at storytelling, it is because a CEO is a great storyteller.
Speaker 1:Yes. I mean, the yeah. There's two
Speaker 2:there's Like,
Speaker 4:I would
Speaker 2:I would argue that Apple, who's historically been an amazing storyteller, not is not currently an incredible storyteller because Tim Cook is, like, 11 out of 10 operationally. Mhmm. And he's not the guy to go on Joe. He's not like I I I don't see Tim Cook popping up on a bunch of
Speaker 1:They're all so annoying. Him enough to go do extra stuff. Like, if, you know, if I if you if you're making that type of money, like, you're not gonna be like, yeah, I'm gonna go work on the weekends.
Speaker 2:You're gonna 05:00 rolls around. Exactly. You're bailing.
Speaker 1:You're bailing.
Speaker 2:But No. So so again, in in that, that's not it hasn't matter. Yeah. Like, he's told the story through the company's performance Yeah. Which is that he is one of the most elite operators Yeah.
Speaker 1:Last business night history. Night, I feel like we had dinner with a great storyteller. And he told us his entire life story. And what was interesting and why I thought it was a really great story was two things. Like, one, the facts of the story, just the truth, was a lot of up and down, a lot of conflict.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was riveting.
Speaker 1:It was riveting.
Speaker 2:Failure. Wins.
Speaker 1:He's the protagonist, but there were antagonists. And there were and there were mentors and trials and tribulations. Like, it really did fit the hero's journey. So so the facts were there, and you could go fact check them and be like, oh, yeah. Maybe there were.
Speaker 1:There were these story points. But then also, the way he told the story didn't hide those. There was an there's another version of that story where he only tells you the good moments in the story, and he doesn't tell you about any of the trial and tribulations. And we're like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We get it. You're successful. You know? It's boring. Yep.
Speaker 1:Instead, we were like, woah. Like, another another downturn, another up, another swing. It was emotional. It was a roller coaster. It was a great story.
Speaker 1:And I feel like if if there if there's anything that comes out of, like, the storyteller era of corporate marketing, it should be giving marketers, writers, storytellers permission to actually inject conflict into their marketing materials.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look at the way that Palmer responded to that journal piece about how Anderol had a fire at one of their test sites.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? He was like, yes. We had a I I I'm I'm paraphrasing, but it was effectively, yes. We had a fire at the at the missile test site or whatever it was, at the explosives test site. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, yes.
Speaker 5:We and he
Speaker 2:he was trying to do that. He was he was he was trying to do that in the journal article when he clearly when he was talking to them, but they they pulled out moments where it was like, we fail a lot. Yeah. Whereas Palmer was trying to tell a good story, which is like, yeah, we fail a lot because we test a lot. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we're trying to iterate faster than our Yeah. And through that, we'll succeed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. I wonder I wonder what the net impact of that journal article will be. Yeah. Ultimately ultimately I think he's I a think
Speaker 2:tech needs to fall, like, fall in love with advertising again. Advertising is amazing. Like, I wanna see companies hiring advertising specialists. Somebody that
Speaker 1:That's funny.
Speaker 2:Somebody that is just focused on doing really great advertising. Yeah. Right? Not just like I think I think this gets lost because we're in this era of rapid testing, iterating through a bunch of assets, volume. Right?
Speaker 2:You see this with companies that say, like, yeah, we just need to create 100 new ads for Meta every single week forever. And we're trying to get to 200. But in that, it can oftentimes get lost of what story are we telling. What is the through line between all of this noise that we're creating and all this attention that we're getting?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Numeral. Compliance, handle. Numeral worries about sales tax and BAT compliance, so you can focus on growth. The reindeer inbound.
Speaker 1:Do you think companies we have some
Speaker 2:Ben made some new sound effects.
Speaker 1:Let let let let's have a company.
Speaker 6:Naughty list just got a bit longer.
Speaker 1:What was that one?
Speaker 6:Santos naughty list just got a bit longer.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of the good ones.
Speaker 6:You're surrounded by enemy snowmen. Walk it down.
Speaker 1:You're surrounded by enemy snowmen?
Speaker 6:Hostile drummer boy.
Speaker 7:On your six.
Speaker 1:Take the shot. Hostile drummer boy. Very funny.
Speaker 5:Friendly reindeer inbound.
Speaker 1:Friendly reindeer inbound. I like it. Really fun. Anyways So so so do you think do you think it's gonna be hard for companies to hire great storytellers? Ties here, Bronco says, the Venn diagram of people who get tech, get people, can explain complex things simply, and can make people care is tiny.
Speaker 1:So will these folks be
Speaker 2:I think a lot of these people actually are at advertising agencies. And if you're Coca Cola, you've been working with hundreds of advertising agencies for decades and decades and decades. Right? This has worked well for them. You're bringing in
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:New ideas, new perspectives. You're hiring. It it can be great to say, hey. We're gonna give this agency, like, a $100,000. But in exchange, we're gonna get a great campaign out of it.
Speaker 2:Right? So I just think people need to know what they actually want. I think what they want is to be remembered and to be thought about and to be, you know, have certain ideas associated with their company. Right? And I think just people that are like, oh, we want we wanna be remembered.
Speaker 2:We should hire a storyteller. I don't think that's gonna work really that well. Right? Because I mean, for for again, just because, like, in order to it's about, like, cutting cutting through the noise. Like, you need an idea that is so good.
Speaker 2:Like, don't work at Andoril
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That it will just break out and people will remember it. Right? And people will will watch a two minute ad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There there's a little bit of, like, the just like you did, you know, the story still has to be we're we're talking about we're not talking about yarn spinners. We're talking about actual real stories that potentially could be fact checked. And so you do have to do a little bit of the hard work to actually deliver some facts and some story points, which is probably why it's extremely hard to tell a compelling story as, like, a seed stage company because you're a young company. It's why usually your story leans on, like, your backstory, like how you grew up or what you were doing before, why you quit that big cushy job to go out into cross into the unknown and become the the intrepid entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:I was I was reflecting on Keller at Zipline as having a great story this year in particular that sort of manifested itself in Zipline's solar punk style launch video and Keller going around on different shows, coming on our show multiple times and talking about the progress of the business. But a lot of that story is just the fact that he's been running the business for a decade, and it's now finally working. And it's this thing that the story of drone delivery Yeah. Was told a decade ago. Like, I remember in San Francisco, people were saying there there was somebody who was, like, building a drone delivery company as, a small startup, and it would basically just be, a DJI drone that he would just, like, clip it to and, like, fly it to you.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. But it was, like
Speaker 2:Well, an example also in the drone space of good storytelling is the Niros guys. So like Soren for example, when he comes on, he's like, yeah, I was competitive drone racer. Yeah. It immediately doesn't matter that he's like young and doesn't have the most experience in the category. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But you're like, okay. The guy that is making Yeah. Killer drones, you probably want him to be one of the best in the world at actually flying
Speaker 1:Yeah. I completely agree with that. The hard part is that, like, if you're if you don't have that background, if you don't have the the the plot points, if you don't have plot, then no amount of storyteller hiring can fix
Speaker 2:that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you have a boring plot. So you gotta go do things.
Speaker 2:It's easier to be a great storyteller if you have motion than if you have aura.
Speaker 1:It is. But also yeah. I don't know. Plot points. Plot points are are things happen.
Speaker 1:Things they like, facts occur. Like, you know, things the the you know, Soren actually competed as a drone racer. Like, aura motion that that ties to it, but it's really You're
Speaker 2:saying that adds to the aura. Right? If you think about,
Speaker 1:like,
Speaker 2:if Soren rewind a little bit Yeah. He starts fundraising for his company
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, that that kind of just by that that gives him a huge advantage if that's just circulating of, there's a new startup raising Yeah. And the founders were competitive drone racers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? I mean, even even just, like, being on your second company, having sold your first company, that's just a plot point. No no storyteller can come in and say like, hey. Why don't we go tell everyone that you sold your last company for a billion dollars?
Speaker 1:It's like, yeah. That would make your story better. Yeah. But it's not a fact, so you can't use it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so Yeah. There's always, you know, there's always something to latch on to. I I think about with the the Ridge Wallet guys. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They never raised money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There was never any hype surrounding the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, like, as a storyteller everyone's a storyteller. When I introduce them to people, I'd be like, you should talk to Sean and Connor. Yeah. They've bootstrapped this business to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and profit by being truly elite marketers. And that, like, creates, like, a catalyst for people to be like, wow.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm paying attention now. So
Speaker 1:Yep. Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Ali is chiming in.
Speaker 1:She says, wow, 23 k likes. She says, tech bro obsessed with storytelling but hasn't read a book in the last five years. Probably not a good sign. A lot of the classic stories have been told again and again and again. Go back to the classics.
Speaker 2:Instead of a launch video, somebody should just write an announcement in the full hero's journey.
Speaker 1:That actually sort of works. I mean, would I would would use the story circle when I would write YouTube videos. Dan Harmon's story circle is it's basically like a three act structure, but in eight parts. And so there's like the crossing into the void. I would try and map out, like, you know, all the different story beats pretty deliberately and try and map them on there.
Speaker 1:It's it's hard, though.
Speaker 7:I would like to see a a launch post written in verse. Oh. Almost like a
Speaker 1:Getting back into Homeric. Poetry. Yeah. I mean, Homeric, should maybe drop an epic poem, like a true true like thousand page book of poetry. That's the way.
Speaker 2:Where you could drop 20 haikus on your startup.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. This really did become the current thing. There's a clue.
Speaker 1:Eric Zaworski says, there's a big clue in the middle of the viral Wall Street Journal article by Dolly Dighton that explains why the people who would otherwise crush the role of storyteller, the hot new job at hot startups rarely get the gig in the end. As designer Stefan Sagmeister observed back in 2014, it's all the people who are not storytellers who now suddenly want to be storytellers. Interesting. He says, every so often an article like this drops, remember brand brand's the new mote or taste can't be taught that lays bare the repackaging of an oft taken for granted concept in communication human to human relation just enough that it entices reaction discourse today. It's the idea that stories are is telling stories is an important function of extending the lifespan of companies.
Speaker 1:A familiar debate on the timeline many are correctly pointing out that this is nothing new. Marketing one zero one always has been dot j p g. It's tier stuff. So how did storytelling and an idea fundamental to our existence get Rubik's cubed into a novel optimization strategy? That is is funny.
Speaker 1:Rubik's cubed is good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just I just think a a title like this Yes. Would I I think a good a good test if you're trying to hire for a role like this is would the person be do they want the title storyteller? Yeah. Or would they be okay with the title copywriter?
Speaker 2:Right? Because in my view, if you're hiring somebody to be a storyteller, their job is to, like, write down words Mhmm. In a structured Mhmm. Impactful way and help the entire organization, like, share those words in a in a in a consistent manner. And I would say a lot of the people a lot of people, like, want the title creative director, but do they wanna be a project manager?
Speaker 2:Like, no. They wanna be a creative director. Right? Yeah. There's just like a status associated with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's maybe a status associated with storyteller. Yeah. But at the end of the day, if you're trying to hire for this, do you want somebody that is obsessed with Yeah. Writing?
Speaker 1:You should be willing to take the job of storyteller. If I come to you and you say you wanna work for me as a storyteller, I say, I'm gonna start you off with the title Fabolist. And if you're cool with that, then maybe we'll upgrade you to storyteller. If you're if you're okay coming to this organization with your with your title being yarn spinner. Just tall tall talesmith.
Speaker 2:First project. You just hand them a bunch of yarn. Yeah. Just just
Speaker 1:tell me a lie. Tell me a lie about my company. Be like, you're you're you're actually a generational founder. You sold your last company for $10,000,000,000. Be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Write the blog post and post it. Anyway, what is this Andreess Norwoods has a laws of new media coming from Marshall McLuhan, the laws of media, the new science. There are four of these, the laws of media. One is it enhances awareness of inclusive structural process, obsolesces dominance of the logical method, reverses into technology hardware becomes software, retrieves metaphor logos. That is I like some McLuhan.
Speaker 1:Where where else is this? Xerox enhances the speed of the printing press, obsolesces the assembly line book, reverses into everyone becomes a publisher, retrieves the oral tradition. That's a cool framework. I like this. Dig through, you know, different value props, essentially.
Speaker 1:The iPhone one, it enhanced bringing the world into your yourself into the world, the world into yourself into the world. Woah. Obsolesces the house's home, flips the end of the individual, retrieves the nomadic hunter. What? That's weird for the Here's here's one of his tetrads on the computer.
Speaker 1:The computer enhances instant replay of information. It obsolesces hardware. It retrieves hunter. It flips pattern recognition. What a what a fascinating framework.
Speaker 1:ChatGPT has a new image model. They just launched this. Sam Altman teased it with a photo that Woah. At this point, you know, him and a bunch of him and a bunch of polos looks great. He says, most likely to launch a new image model.
Speaker 1:And Sam Altman says launching something really fun today. What is the actual announcement? How is this how is this framed? I know I know the model got better
Speaker 2:Alf.
Speaker 1:But what if Alf. But what is
Speaker 7:It's a good model. It's a good model, sir.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Okay. So so so
Speaker 7:Image 1.5.
Speaker 1:Image 1.5. What were they on before?
Speaker 2:G p
Speaker 7:t image. Now there's g p t image 1.5.
Speaker 1:Were they on one point o before? Yeah. Okay. Today, we're releasing a new version of ChatGPT images powered by our new flagship image generation model. Now whether you're creating something from scratch or editing a photo, you'll get the output you're picturing.
Speaker 1:It makes precise edits while keeping details intact, And it's four times faster. You know that's a big deal.
Speaker 2:That's a You
Speaker 1:know that that, like, like, that is the real thing where Nano Banana has been very, very fast. They got to speed this thing up, and they clearly figured out a way to do it. Alongside, we're introducing the new images feature within ChatGPT designed to make image generation delightful to spark imagine inspiration. And it is cool. It's has its own little corner of the app, its own little surface area.
Speaker 1:Before I tell you more about this, let me tell you about Fin dot ai, the number one agent for the number one AI agent for customer service, automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Why is Jordy going over to Gong? It's Gong. Just Finn is Gong worthy. Oh, Finn.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So around here, we have a benchmark for images, for image generation. You come to us you come to us with
Speaker 2:With a model?
Speaker 1:New model. You know we're gonna try and generate a Where's Waldo, and we have some Where's Waldos pulled up. And, we're we're getting better. We're getting closer. They're not ready for prime time, though.
Speaker 2:We're not ready for print.
Speaker 1:We didn't pass our personal internal benchmarks.
Speaker 2:Can we pull
Speaker 5:it up?
Speaker 1:Let's pull up, this this first image of this Where's Waldo. It's gonna be very small. So I don't know if you'll actually be able to see that. Can you zoom in a little bit? Yes.
Speaker 1:So so this is the Where's Waldo.
Speaker 2:The important thing is that from far away, this looks this looks
Speaker 1:It looks like a Where's Waldo. It looks ready to rock. Now part of where what makes Where's Waldo special is it has this unique perspective, like the it has it's like infinite depth of field. It's it's this 40 it's this 45 degree angle, isomorphic. It's an isomorphic image.
Speaker 1:This is not perfectly isomorphic, but it's not bad. And there's a lot of interesting detail and texture. But as you zoom in, you start noticing It's
Speaker 7:actually isometric.
Speaker 1:Oh, isometric. Isometric. Thank you. And so as as you zoom in, you start to notice that, like, some of the people are not quite to scale. And the telltale sign of a Where's Waldo is that there is story.
Speaker 1:Back to storytellers. The creators of Where's Waldo are storytellers. Because as you move around the image in the Where's Waldo, you see little scenes playing out. It will be a dog that is hungry for a ham, a Christmas ham. And that's part of what goes for the ham.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As he goes for the ham, he knocks over a ladder where someone is painting and the paint bucket falls, and and and it tells you, like, there's these little vignettes that are playing out
Speaker 2:for it enjoyable to look around for Waldo.
Speaker 1:100%. Because you notice and in fact, if you go to the back of the book in Where's Waldo? Oftentimes, there will be bonus things to search for. So you will so you will get a list of prompts for what to hunt for outside of just the main Waldo. You will also be prompted to is this a real Waldo?
Speaker 1:Or is this an AI one?
Speaker 7:No. This is you made this.
Speaker 1:I made this one. This is the By hand? It looks great from this direction, but as you zoom in, you'll see that you're not quite getting the the the level of storytelling. And also, the the final the final check is like, there must be one and only one Waldo. And I'm not I'm not actually sure that this one included a Waldo of
Speaker 2:Put it back in ChatGPT and say, where's Waldo?
Speaker 1:Where's Waldo? Can it find it? So I'm not I'm not seeing a Waldo on this one. On the beach, there are a number of people that look sort of like Waldo, but they none of them have the precise, like, walking stick backpack.
Speaker 2:Gold Rock in the chat says, could you just generate that picture and then drop in a Waldo with an edit feature, which is true. You could just say generate a where's Waldo This might be bullfish. Include Waldo and then add him afterwards.
Speaker 1:No. I think I think you're a 100%.
Speaker 2:Where's Waldo was created by Martin Hanford, a British illustrator.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:He gained worldwide fame in 1987 with the release of the first book. He, prior to that, specialized in drawing massive detailed crowd scenes for commercial clients
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Which ended up becoming the foundation of the Where's Waldo series. A single illustration would take him up to eight weeks to complete. Wow. And
Speaker 7:also imagine kind of like a a generator verifier setup Mhmm. Where like the the generator gets better and better at generating them Yes. The verifier can find them. Yeah. So soon you'll have kind of where's Waldo superintelligence.
Speaker 1:Do you think that'd be it'd be adversarial?
Speaker 7:One one could say that.
Speaker 1:It it could be generative adversarial network potentially. They could network these two together. You could in fact create a proper Where's Waldo? But you probably need to generate the images tile by tile, one tile at a time, and kind of work piece by piece, and then combined it all, blended all together. And then, yes, you probably want to add one Waldo at the very end in some random spot, but you would not wanna just just one shot the full image because it's still a little bit too complex.
Speaker 1:But it's remarkable. I mean, these images are are are remarkable, and yet and yet there's still room for improvement. It's crazy. It's like we're we're we're every time we see one of these, I'm like, okay. This is the final thing.
Speaker 1:We're done. It's good enough. It's great. And then, another year goes by and there's more
Speaker 7:Pull up
Speaker 2:pull up this post that says also very fun way to use it to easily get fun images and then scroll down. I thought this was somebody messing with Sam as a reply, but it is Sam himself Oh. As a firefighter with a with a calendar. And then there's a there's a sore video from Ramp Capital. Let's pull it up.
Speaker 1:That's funny.
Speaker 2:I'm the product manager. It's showing up in my replies, but not your replies. I'll put it at.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Going back to the OpenAI announces ChatGPT images. Creative transformations, the model's creativity shines through transformations that change and add elements. Here, let's play this one. Well, this is not what does it say?
Speaker 5:Impressive. Oh. Very
Speaker 1:nice. That's pretty funny. I like it.
Speaker 5:Now let's see more slop.
Speaker 1:Oh my god. The the the ability to use Sora to make jokes at Sam's expense is truly new territory for I mean, I guess there were probably people that were in MS Paint making fun of Bill Gates back in, like, the nineties.
Speaker 2:Mocking him?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mocking him. And and he's just like, you you wrote this takedown of me in Word. Like, you wouldn't have been able to do this without me. But but the but the feedback loop, the the iteration cycle is like way way faster there.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin. Crush your backlog with a personal AI engineering team. So these transformations work on both simple and more intricate concepts and are easy to try using preset styles and ideas in the new ChatGPT images feature. No written prompt required.
Speaker 1:That's very interesting. So in an effort to make it easier to prompt, are now instantiating more UI. So as that image shows you, it's like
Speaker 2:As the models get better, we need more SaaS.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's something like that. It it it's just that, like, it is I mean, this was, David Holes' insight during the mid journey boom was that, if you gave someone a blank text box and said, this is a magical text box. It's artificial intelligence. It can generate an image of anything.
Speaker 1:They would just type like dog, and they would just get a picture of a dog. And the picture of the dog was so photorealistic. It was just like, okay. Cool. You could go to Google Images and get that.
Speaker 1:Like, what is special about this? There's nothing special about it because, like, we have images of dogs. Like, yes, it's amazing that a computer can generate it from nothing. Like, that's remarkable.
Speaker 2:Can always have more.
Speaker 1:But that paves away. And so and and he was like, then you ask them again, oh, you can do anything. Be like, dog dog, happy dog. You know? And and the people just weren't fully inspired.
Speaker 1:And so the beauty of mid journey was putting everything in this big chat room on Discord so that Letting
Speaker 2:people inspire that each other.
Speaker 1:Each other. And it became this collaborative thing. And so with this, it feels like feels like OpenAI and and the ChatGPT app are definitely sort of embracing this idea that you will need to bring a little bit of of idea generation. I mean, on on when Images and ChatGPT launched for the real for the first time, I wasn't the person that came up with the idea of Studio Ghibli. I needed to see that.
Speaker 1:And then once someone told me this is a great prompt, I was like, okay. I'm in. I'm I'm gonna go create a few more. I needed a jumping off point. And they're bringing that jumping off point to their users in the images tab, and you know there's gonna be Disney in there pretty soon, and that's gonna be very cool, as you wrote in the newsletter last week.
Speaker 2:Ty in the x chat says, no beards. I've never seen beards. Beards are coming. Beards are coming.
Speaker 1:Well, you for supporting the coziest podcast in all of in the entire world right now. We really complete victory on the on the cozy maxing. We've been going back and forth on, well, does it look ridiculous? Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:And that's why we do it.
Speaker 1:But Merry Christmas to everyone, and only a few more days. Only a few more days. One really good Christmas gift, Turbo Puffer. For Serverless vector and full full text search for grandma. For your grandma.
Speaker 5:This is
Speaker 1:a Built on fantastic. I know. Your grandma's saying, you get me a sweater every every year. Well, this year, what about The black and black box. Exactly.
Speaker 2:She's gonna be linear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. She's gonna she's gonna ask. She's gonna she's gonna unbox Turbo Puffer, and she's gonna say, well, is it built from first principles on object storage? You're gonna be able to say yes. And she's gonna
Speaker 2:say, does Notion use this? Does Notion use this? Yes. You're gonna be able say yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. She's gonna say, well, is it is it extremely scalable? Absolutely. That's what most grandparents care about when it comes to Christmas Scalability.
Speaker 1:Scalability. They want something scalable. They want something fast. And they definitely want it to be 10 x cheaper. And so get your grandmother Turbo Puffer this this Christmas.
Speaker 1:Get them
Speaker 2:Bobby Bobby already got his grandma Turbo Puffer. She says she's gonna be so happy.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:OpenAI hires an executive from Google to lead m and a Oh. According to Walter Bloomberg, according to the information. More notably, OpenAI hire, comms chief Hannah Wong is departing the company.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:This came out yesterday. She's stepping down. She's gonna depart the company at the January. Axia says why it matters. Wong was the AI giant's first chief comms officer and guided the company through the launch of ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Heightened regulatory scrutiny controversies and a slew of deals and lawsuits. The bigger picture, her departure comes as the company is pushing on a variety of fronts. Trump 1,400,000,000,000.0
Speaker 1:that you she asked for the storyteller title and she didn't get it so she quit in protest?
Speaker 2:Very very possibly. It's possible. It's very possible. Yeah. I feel like she deserves she deserves, like, a a little bit of a of a vacation at this point.
Speaker 2:I can't I can't think I can't think of a more stressful job since 2021
Speaker 1:some gray hair
Speaker 2:as as the openaiopcom's role. She joined OpenAI from Apple
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In 2021. And, anyways, so vesting vesting cliff reached.
Speaker 1:Well, first off, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, and they're trusted by millions. Speaking of Merry Christmas, there is a fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal. We gotta go through it in the business and finance section. It says, advertisers start Christmas season early.
Speaker 1:This was written for us. This is fantastic news. Brands chase inflation weary shoppers with plentiful TV spots. There's a whole bunch of interesting article interesting stats in here. And so it starts with a very controversial question.
Speaker 1:It says, are you tired of Santas and relentlessly cheerful snowmen filling every screen? No. Blame the advertisers. This is so funny. Advertisers kicked off the holiday season even earlier this year, and they are inundating televisions with commercials.
Speaker 1:The activity comes despite continuing efforts by many businesses to rein in costs to contend with tariffs. Holiday TV ads started in earnest in early October, and companies have spent a combined $1,470,000,000 over the past nine weeks, a 13% jump compared with the year ago period according to ad tracker, iSpot. So keep this in mind. 1,470,000,000.00 on holiday TV ads. Guess how much holiday retail sales are expected to be this year?
Speaker 2:Counting counting Black Friday?
Speaker 1:Everything. Everything.
Speaker 2:What do mean? It's big. All retail spend On holiday. Are you asking for all retail spend in q four? Or do I have to, like, pull out grocery and
Speaker 1:Sales from November and December each year.
Speaker 2:Does it include grocery spending, food spending?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think it might include everything.
Speaker 2:Is it?
Speaker 1:I'll give you a hint. In 2020, it was it was 700,000,000,000.0, 700,000,000,000. Then it went to 850,000,000,000, then 900, then $9.50. Last year came in around 99 something really close. What was it?
Speaker 1:It was 980,000,000,000.00, $980,000,000,000 this year. It's expected to be over 1,000,000,000,000. We gotta hit the gong for that. That is that is a that is some fantastic news for this holiday season. The first the truly the first holiday season in history that will be over $1,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of interesting facts in here. So there are massive investments in digital promotions, flooding social media, email inboxes, text messages. So, of course, the 1,470,000,000.00 that's happening on TV is just a small slice of the overall advertising that's happening this holiday season. Retailers spent 5,800,000,000.0 on digital ads in The US from November 1 to November 7, a 4% increase from last year. Holiday shopping season remains a critical moment for retailers with inflation still weighing on household budgets, but brands aren't taking any chances of losing out on the action.
Speaker 1:The National Retail Federation is is projecting
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for the
Speaker 1:National Retail will surpass 1,000,000,000,000. A handful of retailers are proving particularly busy on the TV ad front so far. Walmart's ads feature a Doctor. Seuss inspired world starring Walter Goggins as the Grinch. Target, meanwhile, brings brass brings back Kris k, a jolly bearded Christmas enthusiast introduced in a 2024 campaign.
Speaker 1:In Target's spot, a woman who with whom he is on a coffee date gets a peek at his gift list, and it leaves him confused by referencing his his naughty list. Interesting. Amazon.com. This is the most interesting stat. So so total minutes of US advertising by retailer.
Speaker 1:So Amazon last year was in 2023, they were around seven thousand minutes of US TV advertising. And to be clear, that's right in line with Walmart. Target was around six, seven thousand minutes. Macy's was around six, seven thousand minutes.
Speaker 2:The joke's old.
Speaker 1:Even Verizon.
Speaker 2:It's an old joke now, John. Which I'm making.
Speaker 1:What what what joke?
Speaker 2:You said six seven.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:That's actually where it is. But they doubled in 2025. They went to they went to fourteen thousand minutes. Woah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They they they went up to so Amazon has doubled the amount that they're spending on on TV advertising.
Speaker 2:AB in the chat said Coca Cola invented the red and white Santa. I was trying to I was trying to fact check it a little bit. Apparently, it's an urban legend that Coca Cola invented the red and white Santa. And in reality, Santa Claus was already appearing in red suits long before he appeared in soda advertisements. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But apparently, they did standardize the Santa look. Mhmm. Right? They're spending probably more on advertising than most most other companies in the world for, like, many decades. Right?
Speaker 2:They had an opportunity to really define the look define the look that we are delivering.
Speaker 1:Delivering today. Let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows the company to the next level. Friendly reindeer? I'm glad.
Speaker 1:It's good to hear that it's it's a friendly reindeer.
Speaker 2:Did you see the journal going after Core Weave?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes. We should get to that. Well, there's one last stat that we need to share. So so I mean, basically, it's like there's a lot of jitters in the economy as AI overheated.
Speaker 1:We're gonna go into the Core Web story. But overall, the health of the consumer seems to be good. Holiday retail sales are higher than ever in history and over $1,000,000,000,000 now. Everyone's advertising. There's one interesting stat in here, which is at the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article.
Speaker 1:They they polled consumers, how do you feel about the timing of holiday ads? And so when holiday ads start. So Amazon, one of the largest advertisers in the country, aired its first holiday TV ad on October 13.
Speaker 2:Okay. But you gotta you gotta give me more. Was Santa in the ad? Because I I'm I'm kind of a purist. I like I like to go full speed ahead on on on the the Christmas spirit the day after Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1:Day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday.
Speaker 2:I got I got our tree.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:We went and got our tree
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:On Black Friday.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I that that just feels like the right moment.
Speaker 1:Right? I like to have enough. So you don't wanna see Santa until
Speaker 2:I don't wanna see
Speaker 1:day after Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2:But then I wanna see him everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, of course. I I I agree. It should be zero to a 100. I so so I'm with you.
Speaker 1:I I generally agree with that. Tyler, how do you feel? When when is it
Speaker 7:appropriate to After see Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1:After Thanksgiving. Anytime before,
Speaker 7:I can't even listen to them.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I will describe the ad, and we we could potentially pull it up here. But Amazon Home for the Holidays was the name of the ad. So let me oh, damn it.
Speaker 2:We got more Christmas lore in the chat. Redding white Santa is because of Amanita muscaria mushrooms. Reindeer eat them.
Speaker 1:What? What is that? Okay. Anyway No.
Speaker 2:I can see you know the the red and white mushrooms?
Speaker 1:I know candy canes. Sugar plum player plum fairies. So October 13, they write they they they run an ad. It shows a college student arriving home to see that her child her their childhood bedroom now contains a treadmill with her father running on it awkwardly wearing short shorts. The young woman checks the Amazon app for more appropriate workout gear, and it's called Home for the Holidays.
Speaker 1:So no Santa, at least that I can tell from this ad. We can we can actually pull this up here. The the Amazon TV spot home for the holidays. Maybe maybe maybe it's not playing. Oh, it is.
Speaker 1:It is here. I have it here. If we can pull it up. You have to this week. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so I we we we we need to determine whether or not Jordi why are we zooming out like this? We need to determine whether or not Jordy Jordy decides that this ad is is Too too early. Early. Too early. And so let's pull up the the Amazon TV spot
Speaker 2:On our side, we have been drinking this podcast in a can all year. Yes. It's very Christmas themed.
Speaker 1:Okay. I think we have it here. So Jordy, based on this is what is the what is the earliest
Speaker 2:I'm getting red flags already.
Speaker 1:Red flags already. Okay. Play it. Play it.
Speaker 4:You're home for the holidays. You've dreamt of this moment. Back in your old What? Room.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 3:Hey, kiddo. I'll be right there.
Speaker 4:At least you can get a deal on new shorts for dad. Something with a little more coverage.
Speaker 1:There's no Santa. Early.
Speaker 2:Way too early. You
Speaker 1:think that's too early? What's the what's the earliest day? You still you you wouldn't even run that before Thanksgiving?
Speaker 2:And that's like two it's like almost two months before winter.
Speaker 1:It's before. I mean, they ran it before Halloween.
Speaker 7:Well, so yeah. I mean, this is October. There are some places in The US where it snows in October. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You go
Speaker 7:up to Alaska. This could be like this could be their the college students fall break.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This could be They they could be targeting Anchorage
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or Juno.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We don't know where it ran. So I did I did find an article from the Fungi Foundation Okay. Called The Influence of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms on Christmas. The story of Santa Claus is not the creation of Coca Cola nor Saint Nick or a children's story.
Speaker 2:It exists because of a small living being with great powers, the Amanita Muscaria mushroom.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So I'm gonna I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, like, the the fungi foundation might have a little bias built.
Speaker 1:Are you doing this research on Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet? State of the art reasoning with next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. Why don't you vibe code something for your family for Christmas? So would you say that the Christmas ads are a, much too early, b, slightly too early, c, about the right time, slightly too late, or much too late in terms of the the timing of holiday ads this year?
Speaker 2:I think you can start doing holiday advertising without putting snow on the ground and without How
Speaker 1:would you do that? How wait. Describe a holiday ad that doesn't at least have a little bit of snow.
Speaker 2:I would like to see Amazon do a star a plain text ad that's Star Wars style where the text is just scrolling and it's like Scrolls. Get ready to buy stuff. This is about to be the Super Bowl of just buying stuff. Yeah. Do it on amazon.com.
Speaker 2:Okay. It's time to buy.
Speaker 1:It's time to buy. It's time to buy. But but but do do do so do you it sounds like you think that the holiday ads are are, you know, at least slightly too early, maybe much too early?
Speaker 2:Much too early.
Speaker 3:Or do
Speaker 1:you think it's about the right time?
Speaker 2:I think Amazon should start dropping a billion dollars on ads just on Black Friday. I mean, they probably already do.
Speaker 1:Because the so so this is this is the interesting stat from here. They they pulled a bunch of consumers in, and boomers complained the most about the ads being too early. We're all we're all the boomers.
Speaker 2:Because they're locked in. They're paying they're paying
Speaker 1:For Gen Z, over 50% said, yeah. Christmas in October is great. Sits perfectly with me. Only 20 something percent of boomers said, yeah, the holiday ads are about the right time. Whereas to over 25%, 30% of boomers said the ads are much too early.
Speaker 1:Only 10 of Gen z said
Speaker 7:How many said that they were too late? Did any say that?
Speaker 1:Yes. Millennials. Millennials actually led the whole pack by saying 4.3 per 4% of millennials said that the holiday ads started too late this year, which is funny. Gen z, only 2% were in the were in the too late camp, basically.
Speaker 2:A b a b
Speaker 1:said boomers the boomers actually, less than one less than 2% of them said slightly too late. They were all saying too early, too early.
Speaker 7:Did they hate Christmas?
Speaker 1:The boomers? Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the chat says Santa discovered ChatGPT and now Christmas is 30% faster and the elves are unemployed. Trey says every time Jordy pitches back on Christmas when Christmas starts, I'm gonna move it up one month. It starts September 1 now.
Speaker 1:September 1 is great. September 1. Well, let let let's Here's
Speaker 2:here's a Yeah. I would like to see Coca Cola
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Get a blimp. You know, I'm a blimp maxi. I see more companies leveraging blimps for marketing. They get a blimp
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But they hang a sleigh and a bunch of reindeers. And so they fly the blimps in the crowd, and they have sort of like clear Yeah. You know Yeah. Yeah. Wiring so that it just looks like Santa's flying over The United States.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Somebody's got to do it.
Speaker 1:I like it. I like it.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk about Core
Speaker 1:Weave's But staggering first, let's talk about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds.
Speaker 2:Very aggressive title. Core Weave staggering fall from market grace highlights AI bubble fears.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The data center providers terrible six week slides picked up speed when a famous short seller piled concerns on top of delays. CoreWeave's value dropped by 33,000,000,000 due to AI bubble concerns, a failed merger and short seller criticism. CoreWeave, largest of a new breed of companies driving AI boom, has watched $33,000,000,000 of value vaporize in six weeks. The share price plunge of 46% comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble, fallout from a failed merger, and public criticism from high profile seller Jim Chanos, known for predicting the collapse of Enron. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But some of the high-tech companies biggest problems began with a very low tech nuisance, unexpected turbulent rainstorms in North Texas. Uh-oh. Over the summer, heavy rains and winds caused a roughly sixty day delay construction site in Denton, a small city north of Dallas preventing contractors from pouring concrete for a major complex. As a result, the completion date for the huge data center cluster consisting of about 260 megawatts of computing power that CoreWeave plans to lease to OpenAI has been pushed back several months. There were additional delays caused by revisions to design plans for some of the data centers a partner is building for CoreWeave in Texas and elsewhere, according to filings.
Speaker 2:The slowdown was compounded by mixed messaging from CoreWeave's chief executive officer, Michael, which spooked investors and accelerated the company's share price decline at a particularly vulnerable moment for the AI trade. CoreWeave's business model involves using high interest debt to pay thousands to buy thousands of advanced chips from NVIDIA, installing them in server racks inside data centers that it leases from third party landlords, then renting access to the chips. As capital spending on infra has intensified, CoreWeave, is 7% owned by NVIDIA and backed by hedge funds such as Magnetar Capital and Co2 Management, has become the standard bearer for both the promise and the risk of the AI boom. Some critics point to the high levels of debt it has taken on to finance its data center build out, while others worry that the company depends on just a handful of large customers, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta for the bulk of its revenue. Coraweave saw sales more than double in the most recent quarter to nearly $1,400,000,000 from $05,000,000,000 a year earlier, but the company is unprofitable and lost $110,000,000 in its most recent quarter.
Speaker 2:In early November, before the construction delays were widely discussed, Intratore played down fears of an AI bubble at a Wall Street Journal event in Northern California. If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business, he said, adding that the number of buyers of data center computing services had convinced him that there is not a bubble inflating.
Speaker 1:I think this was the same Wall Street Journal event where Sarah Fryer made the back stock comment that sort of went super viral. I think he I this quote is actually pretty reasonable. This is something that I agree with. The the the question is always just like the dance of, like, how much is it accelerating the economy? Is it showing up in the economic statistics yet?
Speaker 1:How much how much value is there being created? And then how are you financing that? Because naturally, the capital markets will push everything to the edge. And if you're underwriting it against 10% GDP growth and that doesn't show up, you could have a bad time. But if it's more like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, a new SaaS boom, bunch of great companies building on top of us, like
Speaker 2:I think it's super important to put it into context too. Their last private valuation in November 2024 was $650,000,000 secondary. Jane Street was in that magnetar. So again, the the company today is at a $34,000,000,000 valuation. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Meaningful premium in the last private round.
Speaker 1:Private round? Like, it was in the tens of billions.
Speaker 2:$2,323,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:So it's still up 50% since the last private round, but it's round trips.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was seven in December 7 in December 2023.
Speaker 1:And I mean, even just today, the 23
Speaker 2:in November 2024.
Speaker 1:Rough. Rough. Rough.
Speaker 2:Anyways, it's a lot of debt, but it's a lot of demand. Yeah. It was interesting. Yesterday, there was a a pretty viral post from an account called Hunter Brook.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:They said Bethany McClean broke the Enron scandal. Tomorrow, she publishes her first investigation for Hunterbrook on a company that may epitomize the AI bubble. Sign up.
Speaker 1:And Did they say what it is? There's
Speaker 2:And then they shared it this morning. So I'm expecting, like, she broke the Enron scandal. She is her new investigation is on the company that epitomizes the AI bubble. Uh-huh. And the company is saw something RadNet.
Speaker 1:Woah. Okay.
Speaker 2:Do you know the com No. I I wasn't familiar.
Speaker 1:I'm not familiar.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm somewhat of a bubble enthusiast. I used to pray for a And
Speaker 1:I I did see a clip of her talking about how it's not by hyperscalers. So it's kinda like we're on the hunt for the for the Yeah.
Speaker 2:So RadNet RadNet is a as of today, it traded down on this report. It's a $5,370,000,000 company. I was expecting something in the 100 to trillion dollar range. Right? I wanted I wanted some I wanted some real meat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Didn't get that. Hunter Brooks says, RadNet, the AI story that doesn't add up.
Speaker 1:It's a radiology firm? Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. But but again, like, this company I like, we'll dig into it. But again, this company, like, collapsing wouldn't make a dent in the broader kind of, like, AI trade.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's, like, 25 different funds that could just write this off and be like, yeah. Zeros are part of the game. You know? Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway, so Hunter Brooks says RadNet's much hyped AI business is a sideshow. Less than 5% of the medical imaging company's revenue, about $65,000,000 out of $1,500,000,000 in the first nine months of twenty twenty five come comes from its newfangled digital health division. Much of that division's revenue and two thirds of its reported revenue growth, excluding recent acquisitions, come from selling software to RadNet's own imaging center. RadNet also charges mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. Okay.
Speaker 2:I'm The not seeing anything
Speaker 1:pre the pre AI stock price of this company was around $20 a share. Now it's $70 a share, something like that. And so you you you see you have seen like a three x pump. Like like, the the the stock has definitely benefited from the the AI narrative, if that's what they they they're alleging. But it's it's yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, you're you're gonna have to do better if you're gonna try and bring down the entire global economy. You you you gotta service up something that's worth at least a 100,000,000,000. I agree with you
Speaker 2:on that. Yeah. Somewhat of a clickbait. And yet the company's stock has soared in value since its AI rebrand trading at a much higher multiple than historic norms and competitors.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so again, I didn't I I think
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, let's tell everyone about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Now the the there is interesting like, everyone's been hunting for the Enron of this cycle because there was one in the past. There must be another one.
Speaker 1:We, of course, were joking around doing the, you know, the letters lining up from OpenAI or Nvidia or whatever. When those are obviously very real businesses and no one is alleging that they are doing anything inappropriate, it's more just like how fast will they grow? Will they be complete winners forever? Will there be will they face competition? Those are the questions that people are asking.
Speaker 1:But Buco Buco Capital Bloke had a good rebuttal to this question of is it possible to argue that AI is not a bubble right now? Someone in the chat was was putting AI bubble in quotes kind of sarcastically. Well, Vuku Capital is arguing that AI is not a bubble. He says real businesses are seeing real impact from AI. Coding and tech support help are the two clear immediate role beneficiaries.
Speaker 1:Advertising is another clear beneficiary. Meta has talked about it in detail. We, of course, are sponsored by ProFound. You can get your brand mentioned in Chateapiti, reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Traditional boring companies like C.
Speaker 1:H. Robinson are pointing to AI and agentic workflows as making them more efficient. The market is responding quite rationally and scrutinizing these AI input companies diligently. See Broadcom and Oracle this past week. So that is the sign of yeah.
Speaker 1:I I agree with him. Like, the fact people are taking a victory lap dunking on Oracle. It's like, this is how the market should be working. Like, it it it it should it should sort of be like, okay. We're regarding this future RPO five years out with some skepticism.
Speaker 1:We're not gonna give you that much credit for it upfront. You've got to actually deliver some real value. You've to get some cash flow into the business. You've got to actually deliver on those on the build out that you're promising. We're not just gonna, you know, moon your stock because you said the biggest number.
Speaker 1:Right? Mag seven minus Tesla have reasonable valuations, and the hyperscalers have more demand than they can handle. He says, I've been vocal that indiscriminately gunning all AI input companies is a dumb thing to do, again, as Oracle Broadcom, Neo Clouds have shown this last week, but it doesn't mean AI is a bubble. I like it. I think it's a good take.
Speaker 1:But Dushant
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just interesting going back to this RadNet analysis Sure. Saying that they also charge mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. It's like how is that like they're they're positioning that as a bad thing Yeah. When this company clearly has distribution, and they're just gonna like vend in technology into that.
Speaker 2:And it doesn't like, I don't I don't that's like it's basically making the argument that, like, rap a rapper can never have value when clearly, like, they have a captive audience here. Yeah. And they can put in commodity technology and charge premium for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there's a huge incentive once everyone is giving me stuff's overvalued take to then move into the like, it's fraud, it's crime take. But the bar for that is so much higher because it's legal. Like, obviously, like, can be overvalued or undervalued at any moment in time, but fraud is very much like binary. Like, the company's either cooking the books or they aren't.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. You gotta stay compliant, automate compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring close. To security reviews and vendor risk. Let's move on to the EV debate. Tomorrow, I wanna get into how Rivian beat Ford in trucks, in electric trucks.
Speaker 1:That seems crazy to me. I wanna get to the bottom of it, but there's a little bit of a of an op ed in The Wall Street Journal, and I thought it might be useful to go through some extra context. They say Ford learns a brutal this one. You're taking the gloves off?
Speaker 2:No. I'm putting the gloves on.
Speaker 1:Putting the gloves on. What what wouldn't you be taking the gloves off to to fight it out?
Speaker 2:I don't know if we're gonna be fighting yet.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Maybe we'll be agreeing. Ford learns a brutal EV lesson. The carmaker takes a $19,500,000,000 write down on its electric vehicle business.
Speaker 2:And in this
Speaker 1:op ed, they say not long ago, automakers were touting electric cars as a future. Well, now they are slamming the brakes hard on that future as market reality has hit them like a 16 wheeler. See Ford Motor's stunning announcement Monday that it will take $19,500,000,000 charge on its electric vehicle business instead of plowing, quote, instead of plowing billions into future into the future knowing these large EVs will never make money. We are pivoting, Ford CEO Jim Farley said, as he explained the company's plan to boost its lineup of gas powered cars and hybrids. Ford will also scrap its all electric f one fifty lightning pickup
Speaker 2:Full scrap.
Speaker 1:Which has been full scrap. Not gonna sell them anymore, which has been a favorite of the EV loving press. So it got very good reviews, and, obviously, it was positioned in this interesting way. It has the aesthetics of the f one fifty. It doesn't have the baggage of the Elon brand.
Speaker 1:Although, does that really matter to the f one fifty buyer? It's so it's so complicated. I just hope they make a Raptor. They you know, the Raptor Raptor R, the high performance version of the f one fifty?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:They need to do the Raptor R plus with a v 12.
Speaker 2:That's what's You wouldn't want it to be the R Max?
Speaker 1:R max would be good too. So Ford has lost 13,000,000,000 on its EV business since 2023 with bigger losses expected in years to come. Last year, Ford lost about $50,000 for each EV sold. Wow. That's so much money to lose
Speaker 2:Don't do that.
Speaker 1:Truth is that the business case for EVs has always let rested largely on government subsidies and mandates. Now that is now that this combination of government favoritism and coercion is mostly going away, most carmakers have much less reason to make EVs. I was listening to an interview with the CEO of Ford yesterday, and he was talking about some of the challenges of the supply chain. Like, I think that they're doing it sort of like almost a JV with a Chinese company that has IP around battery manufacturing, but they're going to make them in The United States. And so they're very much negotiating, like, how do we get this new technology that we haven't been really developing?
Speaker 1:We this hasn't been in our our DNA for, you know, twenty years. We gotta get up to speed, but it's been very costly because they have to pay everyone all Yeah. Down the supply chain and then deal with tariffs and deal with, you know, geopolitical considerations and all this other stuff. So the Biden administration sought to force feed that EV transition with ramped up fuel economy and green greenhouse gas emission rules. Car makers were required to produce increasing number of EVs, which they had to sell at a loss because consumer demand was weak.
Speaker 1:The inflation reduction acts $7,500 EV tax credit boosted demand, but not enough to make the cars profitable. This year's GOP tax bill eliminated the tax credit in October, causing demand to fall off a cliff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was talking to a buddy on Saturday who manages a a group of dealerships around LA, and he was saying that that the I mean, the market generally has been brutal for cars this year. You've had just, like, chaos and uncertainty around tariffs. And then also, there was a huge boom right before the tax credit ended, and then everything fell off a cliff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The this so the deregulation has enabled Ford to cut its losses, sizable as they are. A $19,500,000,000 charge will hurt, but it's better than spending tens of billions of more dollars on making cars that are not enough that not enough Americans wanna buy. Ford can focus its investments on gas powered trucks and SUVs that are popular with customers and earn, dare we say the forbidden word, profits. If Ford makes more money, workers also make more in profit sharing.
Speaker 1:General Motors this fall also rolled back its EV plans and took a $1,600,000,000 charge way less. The American car industry would be stronger today had its CEOs not embarked on the EV joyride with politicians promising subsidies. So, yeah, always dangerous to over rotate on a government mandate or government action because we change governments every couple of years. That's the nature of America, democracy. You know, what what might be So you don't think Ford's
Speaker 2:to over rotate and and get, like, like, maybe four v twelves into a single Raptor, like, put them
Speaker 3:I was
Speaker 1:I was thinking
Speaker 2:angle like the no. The Bugatti, but just do it, like, copy and paste Yes. A few more times.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Definitely. Definitely.
Speaker 2:Something there.
Speaker 1:Something eight eight liter.
Speaker 2:It looked the front of the car looks like a train. Exactly. And it's just it's just engine.
Speaker 1:This is the goal. This is what they should go for. No. To to more seriously investigate it, like, do you can you think of a way that that the Ford f one Lightning would have been successful? Like, it doesn't seem like it was, like, wildly mispriced.
Speaker 1:It doesn't seem like it was I mean, it had a classic silhouette. So it wasn't like, you could a Cybertruck hasn't been selling fantastically well, but it's, like, so bold that you could easily say, well, okay. It's not doing that well because it's such an edgy choice. It's such a it's such a bold design decision. Like, you have to really wanna yell to everyone, like, I own a I own a Cybertruck.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can get an f one fifty Lightning, and unless someone's really checking out the badge, they're just gonna be like, oh, truck. You know?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I disagree. Okay. I think real real ball knowers can clock that from a quarter mile away.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I I it's it's nuanced. Yeah. But I can I can clock a a lightning over
Speaker 1:This normal is the little blue trim?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just you can just
Speaker 1:I know I know you can, but is that but it has to be so would you have gone crazier in the design and put more distance between the Lightning and the classic f one fifty?
Speaker 2:I think I think maybe. I I also think, like, truck buyers, it's very possible that they're they're making purchasing decisions not for how the average person views it, but how other truck buyers are gonna view it. Right? They're so much like, oh, you have a
Speaker 1:I think that's true for almost every category. Yeah. Like, even even in, like, the midsize Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or look at look at hand look at handbags.
Speaker 1:What does it say about
Speaker 2:a handbag Yeah. Your wife might see, like, oh, that's
Speaker 1:Every car goes the speed limit. Like, there is no real argument for, oh, I need this car because it's, like, more efficient or something like that. Yeah. Like, they all go the speed limit. They all basically get you from point a to b in the right time.
Speaker 1:So it becomes very quickly about some differentiation in amenities, but really the brand and what it says about you.
Speaker 2:The silhouette, the trim.
Speaker 1:The silhouette. And so maybe they needed to go more like it's even more obvious that you made the eco friendly choice. But again, I think that the truck buyer just doesn't is not interested in signaling I made the eco friendly choice at all. And that seems very intuitive to me. Am I crazy?
Speaker 1:But, like, I I I know that, like, the reason everyone went after trucks was because it's just such a big market. Americans buy so many trucks. You had to go after that market, and Rivian wound up winning it, essentially, it seems like. But but it's it is weird that that Ford wasn't able to break through. I guess it's just like their core their core customers weren't able to to to get over the the hurdle to actually get into the into the brand.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna try to figure out how many Rivian trucks actually sold.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We'll have to pull up all the all all the data and run through it, maybe tomorrow. But
Speaker 2:I'm pulling it up if you wanna.
Speaker 1:So in in in other news, mean, we can move on from this. We have our guests joining in just a few minutes. In other news, SpaceX is now initiating a bake off to select which investment banks will advise on its planned 2026 IPO. They are very much moving forward with the IPO. It feels very real.
Speaker 1:It does feel like there's a bit of a race between SpaceX and OpenAI to some degree, but SpaceX has to be set up for this. Like, they have to be you know, there there there's a whole whenever you talk to somebody about going public, they're always talking about, well, the the financial requirements are much much more onerous. Like, you need to be really, you know, like, reconciling your books, like, understanding the business. Like, you need to be, you know, really mature CFO operation, office of the CFO who needs to be really dialed in. You probably need, you know, clarity about whether or not you're a for profit or a nonprofit.
Speaker 1:Right? And and you have to imagine that SpaceX has been effectively ready to go IPO at any moment in time for a decade because it's just been such a real business. And they've been working with the government. And so the government comes in and says, right, we wanna know that you are actually generating real revenue or you're knocking the books if we're gonna be working with you, all that other stuff. So we'll see.
Speaker 2:I just wanna take a second to give it up for everyone out there that's currently in a bake off no matter what side you're on. I just want you to know we are we are rooting for you.
Speaker 1:Like a Christmas cookie bake off?
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of people this time of year, they're winding down. Some people are just getting started on some of these bake offs. Right? There's gonna be intense, you know, it's gonna be intense all the way through the end of the year.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. I just wanted to give a give a shout out to to the bankers
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 2:who are not getting enough not getting enough love.
Speaker 1:If you're a banker, get yourself a nice luxury watch on getbezel.com. Shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Bilal asks Bill Gurley, shouldn't SpaceX just do a direct listing? And Bill Gurley says, 100%. I would love to know how that will actually play out if if, like, what what the decision making will be because it has to be I mean, you imagine an Elon stock, like, the chance that it moons on day one is like it feels guaranteed.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the question is the I don't know. So looking at Figma's IPO. Right? They did not raise very much money in the actual IPO.
Speaker 2:Right? So they priced it around Mhmm. It was around like forget. It was something around $20 Sure. $20,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It immediately popped like crazy. Good. But and and people were like, oh, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. Mhmm. But, they they never had an intention of they wanted to price the business fairly.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So, of course, people had invested pre IPO in that pre IPO round, right, or or as part of the IPO benefit a lot. But, again, I I would there is very real possibility that they like, Elon wants to sell the incremental 30. They could raise the $30,000,000,000 at 1,500,000,000.0 And I could see there being that much demand.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I wonder if you're an investor who's supposed to potentially come in as permanent capital, stay as an investor for a very long time, even in the public markets. If you come in at a lower cost basis, even if the stock moons and then round trips, you're like, okay. Well, like, I'm still kind of where I was. I'm not day trading it.
Speaker 1:I'm my my point is to, like, hold this company, not trade it, own it, not trade it. And so I could imagine a situation where we're we're going out at a logical price even if you miss the pop and then and then round trip could be good for keeping those types of investors on board
Speaker 2:for all are the prepared for it to price at 1 and a half trillion and go to three on the day of the IPO.
Speaker 1:That would be very, very crazy. But it could happen. I mean, anything can happen with Elon. It's you know, he's a he's a Joe Rogan CEO. He's a JRZ.
Speaker 2:That's right. This was a funny post from Andrew Benson. Yep. He says, Peter Thiel will personally make 42,000,000,000 from the SpaceX IPO at a 1 and a half trillion dollar valuation. What a recovery from the mistake of exiting Facebook early
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That he never held
Speaker 7:that he never down to his last like 20, I
Speaker 1:think. Maybe. I think so.
Speaker 2:I think so. I've never seen
Speaker 1:He was actually I've
Speaker 2:never seen Pete do a money spread.
Speaker 1:I've never
Speaker 2:seen him wearing Rick Owens. No. I've never seen an RM on the wrist. Never. Never spotted in chrome hearts.
Speaker 1:Never.
Speaker 2:So how do we know that he's not down to his last $20?
Speaker 1:He doesn't have spinners on his car. True. He doesn't have his his wheels stop when he stops. They don't keep rolling. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:So it's really hard to clock.
Speaker 1:He doesn't have hydraulics on his car. Hydraulics would be a good one. You gotta get hydraulics on your car. That's a lead. And and two twelves in the back.
Speaker 1:You gotta get subwoofers. Mod your car. That's the that's what real power is. Should we talk about future? FF two holds 10% of SpaceX.
Speaker 1:PT funded 10% of that. Carry of 20%, assuming that in the early days, he was entitled to all of it. I I have no idea if this math is accurate, but it is it's it's gonna be a remarkable result. Probably one of the greatest one of the greatest investments of all time, certainly in the venture world. It also will be interesting because this will be the second this will be the second trillion dollar early stage investment for PT, and there aren't that many funds that have done any like, if you remember the holy trinity calculation was, have you done the first institutional round into a mag seven company?
Speaker 1:And it was just Kleiner, Founders Fund, and Sequoia that fit that criteria. If you take it to you need to do
Speaker 2:companies are just going so much they were going public so much earlier.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:It's not like they just stayed private and let I I'm just saying if you actually
Speaker 1:I don't knock.
Speaker 2:For the same amount of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I I don't knock that at all because, like, a lot of the Sequoia guys did hold the NVIDIA shares, right, even though they were distributed. I still count it as one of the big wins. But this yeah.
Speaker 1:The
Speaker 2:says never seen him with a grill either.
Speaker 1:There we go. That's a great point. No grill is crazy. When you have that amount of money, you gotta get a grill and get it iced out. Did you see this venture capital compensation in The United States?
Speaker 1:DD DOS? DD DOS has been in some hot water lately because he's taking shots at OpenAI. Lot of lot of OpenAI folks.
Speaker 2:Well, he was right in the center of the whole Klein
Speaker 1:Oh, that was also dramatic, but, you know, we're back we're back on the time when it was
Speaker 2:viral stuff. He he likes being in
Speaker 1:hot water. I mean, he did not stop posting. So VC compensation by fund size. So this is the chart that shows what level are you at and how big is your fund. And so if you have a sub $50,000,000 fund, even if you're the GP, you're probably only making 200 k.
Speaker 1:But if you're at a $3,000,000,000 fund, you might be making $1,200,000 in salary. And so I had some car This
Speaker 2:is why these these smaller solar GP funds, you're really in it for the glory. Yep. It's a carry game.
Speaker 1:And so one of It's those base
Speaker 2:really it's one of the hardest ways to make 200 k a year.
Speaker 1:Indeed. Indeed. I mean, some of the associates here, if you're an associate at a small fund, you might be making 150 k, 170 k. Even at even at the big funds, the associates are making $2.38. The principal VP at a big fund might be making $4.50.
Speaker 1:So I had some recommendations for cars. If you're making a $153,000 a year as an associate in a small fund, you're gonna take that's about $12,000 a month, $13,000 a month. You can put that into a a leased Ferrari s f 90 street alloy.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great. You have no money left over, you have to sleep in it.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it's gonna make a statement. You're gonna get that promotion.
Speaker 2:You can sleep in an s f 90, you can't drive a house to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you get that promotion and now you're making $2.50, well, that's 20 k a month for your lease. You're gonna upgrade to a used Bugatti Veyron.
Speaker 2:What about taxes? We're not
Speaker 1:paying taxes in this model. We're deferring the taxes. But but but I think if you pull up, if you're if you're making two fifty so so what role do you have to do to make to make two fifty? To make two fifty, you have to be where where are you? You you have to get promoted to partner at a small fund or principal at a $250,000,000 fund.
Speaker 1:So you're making $2.50. That's that's 200 k 20 k a month. That's enough for the used Bugatti Veyron lease. That'll get you the bump up to $3.50 a year. That's 30 k a month.
Speaker 1:At this point, you're in Ferrari f 40 territory.
Speaker 2:There you go. You're showing I was gonna say is you could go to the to the managing partner and say, instead of a bonus this year, will you guarantee the loan on a on a Porsche ST? Yes. Right? Go go for something really timeless.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the benefit of that, assuming you live close to work, right, you're not gonna be losing a lot. There's not a lot of depreciation there. Mean, that's a that's a special car. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you gotta get creative here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The really the really crazy thing okay. So obviously, so so so once you once you get promoted, you'll be making $600,000 a year. That's 50 k a month. That's enough for a multi car garage.
Speaker 1:You're gonna get the Ferrari f 40 plus plus a daily driver per Asangore, which you'll be sleeping
Speaker 2:Of course, sleeping in it. But Of course, sleeping
Speaker 1:in But point
Speaker 2:But at that point, have some diversity.
Speaker 1:You you can finally upgrade. You're making 1.2 a year. You're making 100,000 a month. That's enough for the Bugatti Chiron or the Pagani Roadster. But the interesting question is that the current market value of a McLaren f one is $20,000,000, and so the carrying cost to lease that is probably around $2,000,000 a year.
Speaker 1:And so if you see someone dailying an f one, you know that they are post exit. They're it's truly the most
Speaker 2:They're in carry. They're the carry.
Speaker 1:You gotta do it. Yeah. They're into the carry. They're into the carry.
Speaker 2:Carry mode.
Speaker 1:Our speaking of Kari from Linear, he's our next guest. Let's bring in Kari from Linear. Welcome to the stream. He's in the Houston living room. How are you doing, Kari?
Speaker 1:Good to see
Speaker 2:you. What's happening?
Speaker 6:I'm doing well. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're doing fantastic. We're in the Christmas spirit, obviously. We're dressed up like Santa Claus, both Santa
Speaker 7:Claus.
Speaker 2:If you didn't notice.
Speaker 1:If you didn't notice.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, it's it's kinda looks similar to what you usually look like. So Yeah. I noticed it.
Speaker 2:When do you think is the right time for companies to start getting into the Christmas spirit? Because Amazon was running kind of Christmas themed ads back in October. That felt a little early for us.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, like, I I don't really have, like, an opinion on this on the company level. Like, we don't do anything about it.
Speaker 2:You're locked in.
Speaker 6:I think personally, like, I I believe in the in the, like, after Thanksgiving, it's okay to start it. Mhmm. So you can get a Christmas tree after Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1:After Thanksgiving. Let's hear it for another respecter of after Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2:Said the exact same thing earlier.
Speaker 1:Everyone says this, but there's clearly been a sort of erosion in every day, every year, one day earlier. And now they're running Christmas ads in October. It's an outrage. But anyway, we're not here to talk about Christmas anymore. We're here to talk about design.
Speaker 1:We're here to talk about your essay. Design is search. I would love for you to just kick us off with, like, the inspiration behind the essay, why you felt the need to set the record straight on this particular topic. And then we can go into some of the actual the actual thesis and hopefully bat around some different ideas around it.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. I think this whole, like, debate on Twitter or on X started, like, on on Friday. I was just sitting on the couch in in in the midnight and thinking about this that this is probably, like, I don't know, the tenth time I've seen a company launch this like design to code tools or coding design or like designing code Yep. Kind of tools.
Speaker 6:I I think it's like people always kind of see that that's kind of like the final form of design. Like, now we can finally design an actual medium, actually in the code. And I think it's there's definitely like some benefits to that and like it it is a great tool, but I I always think like design is not just the tools. It's it's like broader than the tools. And in a designer's toolkit, you always have many tools.
Speaker 6:And then depending what you're designing and, like, what does like, what is the environment, like, who designing for, what's the domain, what's the product, you you use different tools. So I think, like, it's not like that clear cut that, like, like, designing in code is the best way to do design. So I kinda, like, wanted to, like, highlight that there's some, like, challenges with this. And what I started with was that the I think that what also happened to me in the past, like, when I was designing and building front ends for apps, I what I what I often, like, start feeling happening to me is that, like, I I become less idealistic or I become more conservative because, like, I know that, like, whatever I design, I also have to build. So there's, like, already, like, you start hesitate yourself or, like, you don't believe you can actually build certain things because, like, you you start to kinda collapse the design and build more too much.
Speaker 6:But I think, like, also, like, if you are designing against an existing code base, I think it also introduces, like, additional bias where it's, the code base is, like, is this kind of collection of decisions and architecture and layers and and and product features that have been built over the years or over the months. And you are now kinda, like, trying to fit something new into that. So, like, the natural tendency there is to, like, fit something that fits. And, like, kinda like any kind of new or alien idea can kinda kinda, like, feel like it doesn't fit and doesn't feel like a good idea. So, like, you are too much reflecting the design against the state of the world versus, like, thinking about design more in abstract, like, what the world could
Speaker 4:be.
Speaker 2:It's like an art artificial constraint.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, it's it's all yeah. I don't know if it's an artificial constraint, but it's a constraints what arrives too early. So, like, eventually, any design has to be, like, manufactured or coded or something, like, made it real. Like, design is not real.
Speaker 6:It's, like, it's an idea or, a concept or, like, it's it's something, but it's it's not something people use. So I think it's eventually, you have to deal with the constraints. Similarly, like, architects has to deal with their constraints, like, how does the building like, how can we build this building? How can we stay under budget? Or how do we make sure the materials How much land yeah.
Speaker 2:How much usable land do we have? That kind
Speaker 6:of thing. But it's like I think, like, a lot of science architects still don't start from the constraints. Like, they might acknowledge the constraints, but then they go to start sketching something what they wanna see.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:So I just want wanted to highlight that, like, every tool has certain certain kind of strengths and weaknesses weaknesses. And, like, if you're not mindful, you kinda, like they can influence you your thinking a lot. So what I worry about is that, like, if we start thinking design is about coding, then I think we lose something. Like, we lose that, like, space to think more broadly or kind of without those constraints, and we jump into, like, let's build this solution. And that was kinda like the I think, like, some people were pushing back on this essay or these ideas I was I was talking about that, well, now the design can be better because we can build it better, and the quality can be better.
Speaker 6:But, again, this kinda proves my point. It's like, don't think that I think construction and execution is different from designing. And I actually think that while it can help to construct the design better, like, does it really make the design better? So I'm, like, still, like, looking for that. Like, how do these tools actually make the design process better?
Speaker 6:Like, how do we make better things with these tools versus like we just execute them faster?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is is your is your view that, like, doing design within code is something that should effectively happen at a refinement stage, where maybe you have a process of planning how you want to build a product or a feature, and then you think really deeply about how you want to do it. You make a bunch of decisions based on your intuition and what you know about the customers and how the thing should work. And then you build it, and then at a certain point, you're able to make, like, more kind of, like, micro level changes to it when you've already you've already done all the work of the kind of, like, heavy planning and and being really thoughtful about something versus I don't know. I I I would be I'd be worried if if, you know, somebody was like building me a house and they just came to the land and they threw up like a box, like a frame, and then they started just kind of like, okay.
Speaker 2:We're gonna add a door over here and, oh, we actually have to add like some pipes under here, so let's like dig under there. And like you you want when you're trying to build things that are high quality and great, I think like that that, like, preplanning process and doing things in the right order matters a lot. So I feel like with these new tools, you have to be thinking about where do you actually, like, slot in that where do you slot into the tool to the overall process?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. I think, like, I think these new tools can can help to blend this. Like, so I think in the past, I think there's more like this like, I don't know. The way things operate is much more much more that there's a design, and then there's a handoff, then there's engineering, and then nothing crosses this border.
Speaker 6:And I think that's a bad way to do as well, and I think it there should be this blended mode where I like to think that design is kinda essentially, like, two phases. Like, you have a conceptual design, so you're kinda, like, trying to understand the problem and then you're trying to explore multiple directions how to solve that problem. And, like, I always tell my designers to do that. Like, even if you know the solution, you should still explore something else because, like, maybe you find something better. Or, like, sometimes you should even explore bad ideas because sometimes the bad ideas show sometimes bad ideas actually turn out to be good ideas, and then sometimes bad ideas can show why that that other ideas are good.
Speaker 6:So I think, like, there's this stage where what what my essay was about was, like, design is a search. So you you are searching for the direction, and, like, you're searching for the concept. You're kinda, like, removed from the execution stage of actually making it work. So the conceptual design is, like, it's kinda like cars Mhmm. Car industry has a concept cars.
Speaker 6:Like, those cars are not in production yet and, like, they never will be, but it's an idea what the car could be. And, like, car industry never, like it seems like they never really take anything from those concept cars, but
Speaker 1:they did.
Speaker 2:We took the handle. We took the handle from the passenger door. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We made this crazy gullwing super fast crazy car and it's like, yeah, the lights.
Speaker 6:So that that's kinda like the idea. It's like, there's a concept that is cool and we should try try to execute it. But, like, I don't know what happens in the car industry. They just kinda like can't do it. But I think, like, in a software, you can do it.
Speaker 6:And then there's the execution design where you're like, how do we actually make this work well in this context of the application or fix the we fix the problems we we didn't think about in the concept, like the edge cases or performance or just like we get user feedback. We make some fixes. So at that stage, I think the coding tools can be really useful because, like, you are iterating on the you're refining the the the kinda, like, the design, but you had first this other stage where you kinda, like, thought about it, like, more, like I don't know. Not exactly first principles way, but, like, you started from, like, kinda, like, a pure problem or an idea, and then you, like, created some concept that you think is worth, like, executing on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about like, it feels like so much of what AI is great is maybe I mean, AI is pretty good at, like, search, but I still feel like we probably agree that there's elements that are lacking around inspiration, and and and design is certainly not a solved problem from an AI perspective. But a lot of times, translation is more or less solved. So what stuck out to me was in your essay, you you noted that a lot of architects will start by sketching with, like, pencil and paper. And we are in the area the era of, like, you could sketch it, and maybe you have to come up with the brilliant idea or the brilliant, beautiful design.
Speaker 1:But then you can just take a picture of that sometimes and get a floor plan out of it, potentially. But do you think that something's lost there? Or do you think that, like, text like, are these all going to be lossy and so you want to avoid, like, text to image to code and you want to be able to, like, dip in at every single level? Like, how do you think about the different translation modes? Because some of them are really helpful.
Speaker 1:Like, at the end the day, some of them are just autocomplete, and that's amazing.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Yeah. I feel like there could be always something lost. Like, I think, like, when you actually if you draw something and then you try to like draw it again, for example, you you kinda like even if you just took the sketch and then draw it again on a paper, you probably like start noticing different things. Like, you start thinking about the problem like slightly like different way.
Speaker 6:So I think, like, what the AI is kinda, like, always doing is kinda, like, it's shortcutting you to the output without actually you yourself going through the process. So I think, like, something always gets lost there. I think, again, and I don't think it's, like, necessarily a bad thing. You can just, like, take a sketch and generate an idea and, like, you see it in a different way, and that can be good too. But I think there's that that problem.
Speaker 6:And, yeah, like, some of the comments I got that's like, well, now the AI is so good, so you don't even have to code. So it's like you just describe what you want and the AI kinda, like, creates it for you. But then now you're kinda, like, adding an another another layer of influence there. It's like the AI is, like, kinda influencing the output, Like Mhmm. And the LLMs are kinda, like, statistic models, whereas they're, like, always, like, looking for the correct like, kinda, like, statistically correct answer.
Speaker 6:They're not looking for the, like, necessarily unique answer or your best best answer for you personally or for this, like, context or something. So, like, you there there can be this danger. It was, like, everyone starts to average towards the means or the the the the kinda, like, the the common standard patterns or standard practices. Again, like, I I think it's fine to use AI, but it's just, like, kinda, like, you have to understand, like, what are you giving out or what is the trade off. And, like, if we Yeah.
Speaker 2:We should take it
Speaker 1:as something that's in our yard. So the MDash of code.
Speaker 2:Well, one one interesting example earlier in the show, were talking about Where's Waldo? We we use, like, Waldo bench. So we'll test, a new image model by just making, like, a Where's Waldo illustration. And like none of the models can do it yet. It's like really complicated.
Speaker 2:They can make it visually look like it's perfect, at least from far away. And then you zoom in and it's like chaotic and there's no story happening around the page. And maybe Waldo is just not even on the page. Like, it's the ultimate Where's Waldo? He just bounced.
Speaker 2:But we looked back at the history and the the original illustrators, this guy Martin, and he would spend like eight weeks on to make like a full spread. Right? And you could imagine, I mean, part of that was just like hand illustrating everything, but it's also like planning out like what is the storyline and what is the experience of like being in this page and like what is the experience of finding Waldo. Right? And I feel like that is the that is still the thing that is ultimately gonna give products edge and make products have that craft is when you know that a team that's building software could have one shotted, like, a dashboard and got it, like, to to to the point where it's like it's functionally a dashboard.
Speaker 2:Like, we can functionally make a Where's Waldo illustration that you can go on the page and search for Where's Waldo. But is it like an enjoyable is it an enjoyable experience? Like, now, we're not seeing AI that, like, maybe that you could find the right prompts. But right now, you're not doing you're not one shotting an illustration like this, and and it is still something you have to put an immense amount of, like, thought and planning into and and try things and and revert them, things like that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And I think there's different modes. Like, I think you can use AI, like, creative ways of, like, generating a lot of output or different ideas. But I think it's it's like, yeah, there's always, like you now have this influence of the AI model. Like, what is it what how it does how it creates those outputs and, like, decides things, and then you have the tool that is doing, like, the code base versus, like, you're kinda directly working on a sketch or a screen where there's, like, very little, like, influence, like, what can be do how the design can be.
Speaker 6:The the other reason, like, I like, why I even, like, talked about this, like, like, I didn't I don't I don't have any tool to sell here. Like, I don't don't have a design tool to sell, but it's it's more like I worry about the if we start to, like, kinda see design as coding then or, like, start to see design as construction, that we like, already, like, there's, like the incentives to ship things fast is so strong Mhmm. That we start to see that, oh, like, now we don't need to design because we can just build it, and we can designers are gonna, like, design and build it. And then I think we start losing the the other phases where can we just think about the problem? Like, can we think about the concepts?
Speaker 6:Like, how could this be work really nicely? And then, like, I think we it's, like, very, like, ink like, it's very exciting idea for companies or founders or someone who's like, I don't have to think about design anymore. It just, like, happens with the when we build it. And I think it's it's it's maybe, like, good for the business, but I I think it's just, like, not good for the world or, like, good to get, like my my kinda, like, motivation with Linear and, like, talking about some of this stuff is always that, like, can we just have nicer things in the world? Can we, like, spend more time on the craft and quality and and, like, value it again even if it's not, like, something that can be measured?
Speaker 6:And I think the Silicon Valley and, like, technology companies always have trouble with this. It's, like, it's hard to, like, value something that is not quite quantum fail well, like, easily. It's it's like
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:It's if there's no data for it, then it doesn't exist. And, like, good design is something sometimes, like, it's it's cannot be measured. So so I think, like, this again, like, shipping speed and and, like, how many things you ship can be measured. But, like, if someone makes a design really good, it's, like, it's hard to, like, it's hard to measure that. And and then designing things or, like, sketching things can be seen as unproductive because it's not directly contributing to that shipping speed or shipping more things.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:What's your philosophy on story storytelling? Is is Matt your storyteller? Do you like that word?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I I like it because, like, I think I don't know what happened to marketing, but I think marketing kinda, like, lost lost his story or lost the plot there at some point. It's it's
Speaker 1:kind quantitative. Big. It, like, it became more mathematical, like, just buy the ads and run all the AB tests and all. It became more of a science, and so the art needed a new brand, maybe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 6:And, like, I I would kinda, like, think, like, storytelling is kinda, like, I think it the same way as I think the brand. I think the brand and storytelling is maybe, like, the same thing. It's, like so I and, like, to me, brand is something just that you have a belief or, like, some kind of worldview and you, like, and you have some values or things you stand for. Like, we always have that on linear, and, like, that's kinda, like, from the place I always articulate my things. It's like, I try to, like, keep true to that brand.
Speaker 6:It's like, can we have nicer things or quality things or or something? And so the brand or the storytelling is not never about the, like again, about the output. It's actually, like, it's like a deeper thing. It's like, do you believe in something? And then I think the storytelling or the brand is just like, how do you express that belief so anyone like, people can't read your mind, so you have to, like, either tell stories or you have to show visuals or videos or something.
Speaker 6:So how do you express your beliefs? So the problem when people are looking for storytellers is that, like, again, like, do you have the story to tell? Like, do you believe in anything? Like, is that
Speaker 2:Needs to be a plot.
Speaker 6:If you believe in something, is it, like, engaging? Like, do we people do people wanna hear that story? So hiring a storyteller doesn't help if you don't have this, like, a good story or an engaging story to sell.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And someone in the chat noticed you guys are hiring a writer, which is something I was pushing for. Like, if I wanted to hire a storyteller, I would wanna personally, I'd wanna hire somebody that is very good at writing and wants to come in and write a lot and, like, enjoys the craft of writing and not somebody that wants, like, a, a pretty title that like sounds cool, but then ultimately just wants to collaborate cross functionally across the org or whatever it is. Last question I have, what are your thoughts on holiday gimmicks in products? I got into my car this morning and on my profile, it had a Santa hat?
Speaker 2:A Santa hat on it. Cool. And I I got I got some enjoyment out of it. It had some cobwebs for for Halloween too.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:But is that cheapen a product? It feels like something that I don't I don't know which way you're gonna go.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I would think about it, like, again, like, from the point of brand. It's like, does it, like, fit the brand? Like, I think we we haven't done those things because we kinda, like, linear kinda the brand is more that it's, like, a serious tool for work, and it's it's a so I think some of those kind of things can can kinda feel, like, off and, like I don't know. Like, for example, it's always like these situations where, I don't know, like, a company is using linear and then something goes down.
Speaker 6:Like, their service goes down. Like, their the whole company is, like, scrambling. And then suddenly, some Santa hat appears, and everyone's like, what is this thing? It's like, we we have, like like, our product or, like, customer base is on fire and, like, there's some Santa hats flying around. So it's it's like, it can be distracting.
Speaker 6:And so I think it's kinda depends on your brand and, like, how critical, like, infrastructure you are and where do you put these things. I think it's it can be fun thing for the team to do Easter eggs. Like, we do Easter eggs that are hidden. So they are not there's, like, you can there's games you can there's an arcade you can enter in Linear, and then then there's, like, old arcade games you can play. But, you know, that you don't find them.
Speaker 6:Like, you have to really find them to like, you need to find the Easter egg to access it.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 6:So there's, like, these kind of things that you make secrets, but but, yeah, I don't personally like the, like, putting the decorations on your face and and, like, professional tools.
Speaker 2:Yep. Makes total sense. Well, great having you on, and, yeah, we'll save the Santa hats for the podcasters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Great catching up. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:We went yeah. Thank you. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Merry Christmas. We went way over, so we are going to skip Pranav Mayana and get him on the show tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Great. Instead, we will be joined by Mike at Liquid Death at 1PM. And we will catch up with the space data center debate. Pranav, of course, built a first principles model on the economics of data centers on Earth and data centers in space. I'm really enjoying the way the space data center debate has evolved.
Speaker 1:We are now vibe coding full applications to get to the bottom of the economics of these the the the decisions. And Well, people are still split
Speaker 2:on it. Santa came early for Lightspeed this year.
Speaker 1:Yes. That's right.
Speaker 4:They have
Speaker 2:9,000,000,000 in new capital for a new family of funds. Their largest raise in twenty five years. AI is rewriting the rules. We're backing the founders building Building what
Speaker 1:comes next.
Speaker 2:Comes next. Congratulations to Lightspeed, guys, Aaron, Michael Yeah. And all of the folks over there.
Speaker 1:Hanging out with you guys. Interesting. We I mean, we saw that chart of, like, the new venture funds raised really falling off a cliff.
Speaker 2:There's something like 50,000,000,000 to date.
Speaker 1:This feels like a huge chunk of it potentially.
Speaker 2:That chart was already getting debated Okay. Or Yeah. Potentially
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe stuff had been reclassified. Like, it's possible that this 9,000,000,000 well, some of it's in the growth funds They weren't reclassified it or something like that. Wait. Do do you have more context there on that one? No?
Speaker 1:Okay. Let me tell you about wander.com. 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 by Better folks.
Speaker 2:Pavel
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Pratta says, look at Haystack Ventures Fund three.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It was an $8,200,000 fund.
Speaker 1:Semel Shah. Semel. Former guest on the show.
Speaker 2:Bought three Deckacorns. Wow. Invested early in DoorDash. Senticorn. Senticorn alert.
Speaker 2:Figma Yeah. Figma. Public company. Instacart, 12,000,000,000. Carta
Speaker 1:Well, he did Instacart and DoorDash. That's that that's interesting. You'd think that that would be a little bit of, hey. What are you what are you doing investing in a competitor?
Speaker 2:But it was restaurant delivery versus grocery.
Speaker 1:Grocery, which is different. Yeah. Yeah. Guess it's different.
Speaker 2:Yeah. HashiCorp Encarta, Open Door, 6,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Best solo GP fund in history. Oh, was fund through Solo, though?
Speaker 2:I think says Applied Intuition was also in this fund. Woah. Currently at a 15,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Wow. That's very, very impressive. Well, congrats to Semel. Legend.
Speaker 2:We gotta have him back on the show.
Speaker 1:Wow. I'm liking the gong today. Not warmed up, still has a nice little ring to it.
Speaker 2:Kind of a wild ring to it. Harry Steving says venture investors are going through an existential crisis. If you are not in OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Merkor, etcetera, etcetera, you you do not freaking matter. And we were with somebody yesterday for dinner, and they were in OpenAI and Anthropic in
Speaker 1:They were doing fine.
Speaker 2:Back in back in '20 early twenty twenty three. He was feeling pretty good.
Speaker 1:I I I do I do know some VCs that have been early to the category but missed all of those. And it is a hard story to tell, you know, to bring it back to storytelling if you're if you're a VC right now and you're and you haven't done anything like that. At the same time, I I I if you're if you're early, early stage if you're early stage, it it it doesn't seem that crazy. There are only so many people that could be in these firms really, really early. But if you're if you're a growth investor, I mean, we've we've we've seen many growth funds that are in both Anthropic and OpenAI, which is, like, typically a no no, but they they Yeah.
Speaker 1:Figured out how to do it.
Speaker 2:Well, why don't you and Tyler read this post from Dee? I will. And I'll be right back.
Speaker 1:So Dee Dee Doss says a few software engineers at some of the best tech companies told me this week, my entire job these days is prompting cursor or clawed code with Opus 4.5 to do what I need and then sanity checking it. Tyler, do you agree? Is that this is the new life of a software engineer?
Speaker 7:I mean, yeah, kind of. Like, Cloud Code is, like, really good. Yeah. And and, I mean, also Codecs, the the Gemini CLI, basically, all they're all, like, very similar.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But that form factor is, like, really, really good.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 7:I find it to be yep.
Speaker 1:It says we've crossed some intangible threshold of AI generalizing to most software. OPUS 4.5 is the is my is the first model that makes me actually fear for my job. All models so far were okay ish at best. OPUS 4.5 really is something else. People who haven't tried it yet do not know what's coming for us in the next two to three years.
Speaker 1:Hell, even next year might be the final turning point already. I don't know how to adapt from here on. Sure, I can watch Opus do my work all day long and make sure I to intervene if it f's up here or there. But how long will it be until it's not even until I'm not even needed anymore? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I is the do do you think there's any sort of, like, overweight here on the type of, like, you know, vibe coding, small apps, new features? Like in are you hearing about big like big hairy code bases, things that need to be very you know, fault tolerant where it's not just throwaway software still
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I think That's something you know, he says, you know, he still has to intervene if it messes up Yeah. Which I think is, like, that's extremely valuable. Like you need someone to do that. It's like it's like the law firm thing where people talk about you can't just place everyone with AI because Yeah.
Speaker 7:So much of like a law firm is like you need to have them be accountable.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Where I think it's very similar with engineers. Yeah. I also think like a lot of the stuff I do is like kind of fairly like low risk, like it's not super important if it messes up a little bit. Yep. So there I can like models.
Speaker 7:Well, it's it's not gonna bring down like a nation state or it's not like important government data or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So if it if it's like not super efficient or stuff like this, it's like not that big of a deal. Yeah. Where I I think it's still it's much harder. Like I I often find that if I'd if I'm trying to like completely one shot a project and then I keep iterating on it, a lot of times I have to do some sort of like architecture Yep. Rework because it just like doesn't make sense if you really wanna keep scaling it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Where the tech debt
Speaker 5:and then you can use
Speaker 7:the model to do the to fix the tech debt Yep. But it's still it's kind of like not as smooth as you would really like ideally want it to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, eight sleep. Maybe you just hit clog code and then you go to sleep. Overnight sleep.
Speaker 1:Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized.
Speaker 2:Eight Sleep should really make overnight success into a campaign.
Speaker 1:Oh. That would be good. That's a great tagline for them. Overnight success. I like it.
Speaker 1:What most discussions of AGI feel like nowadays says Rota. Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah. That's a good point. It's not the car. It's not the windows that make the car go.
Speaker 1:It's something else entirely. What a great post.
Speaker 2:DJ cooked.
Speaker 1:DJ cooked with this one. It's fantastic. What is what is this long
Speaker 2:Crazy image.
Speaker 1:That is a crazy image. Martin Shkreli shared some like, clearly a screenshot of a of a spreadsheet. I don't know how accurate this data is, but he's he's pulling minutes spent on AI sites last month alone. 64% were on ChatGPT, 15% on Gemini. DeepSeek and Grok are the only two on a trajectory to come even close.
Speaker 1:Grok grok.com is only at 3% of the total of these users that
Speaker 2:were Growing.
Speaker 1:On web.
Speaker 2:Growing. It's
Speaker 1:growing very fast. Deepseek.com is the same thing, 3%, but growing very fast, whereas some of the other ones are shrinking. Interesting to see, yeah, Perplexity is at 2%. Claude AI is at 2%. Some of these have they bend themselves into other systems.
Speaker 1:And also, these are, of course, websites. So app based LLMs are not going to be quite captured here, but continues to tell the story that ChatGPT is still the dominant consumer platform for just hopping on an LLM and answering some questions. Anyway, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable, plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest, Mike from Liquid Death, is in the restroom waiting room.
Speaker 1:Let's bring him into the TVPN UltraDome. What's happening? Mike, how you doing? Hey. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:What's new in your world?
Speaker 2:You didn't get the memo.
Speaker 1:What memo? Oh, yeah. He's not wearing a Santa.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're the only ones wearing Santa suits today.
Speaker 1:Feeling the holiday spirit. Merry Christmas.
Speaker 3:Merry Christmas.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Welcome to the show. First time on the show. There's a ton of stuff I want to talk about, about marketing and launching this business and how comedy scales. But maybe can you just take us back and really quickly give us the intro on the actual launch?
Speaker 1:I feel like is it fair to say that Liquid Death had, like, a viral launch video strategy? Was that the cornerstone of the launch, or were there other pieces that were at play in the early days?
Speaker 3:Well, the way we launched Liquid Death was actually a bit different. So when I had the idea, it it was a little bit too crazy to most people to find investment to make it. So I basically created a Facebook page, and we made it seem like a real brand just to see, like, what kind of traction did it get in the world if people thought this was a real thing. Mhmm. Then we shot a cheap commercial for the product that didn't exist yet, and we probably spent $1,500 to to shoot the commercial.
Speaker 3:And, you know, we put a little bit of paid media behind the video, maybe, like, a few thousand dollars. And then after five months, the video had 3,000,000 views. The Facebook page had, you know, sixty, seventy thousand followers, which was more than Pina had on Facebook at the time. So then I used all that kinda market traffic to then go raise, like, a a small
Speaker 2:I'm so surprised that that more CPG brands don't do that. Like, it takes so long to make even a like like if somebody's making a drink like this, right, if they actually start working hard on it today, they might have something close to a product that they can sell in six six to twelve months, something in that range, to, like, really go through rapid iteration and getting it made and scaling up production and testing and all that stuff, when you could just actually make an image of something like this and just start running ads against it and see, do people care at all? Do they click through at a good rate, even with ads that aren't super refined? I did that once on a project in, in college. I had the I was shooting a lot of film photos, and I was super frustrated.
Speaker 2:It was like a thirty minute drive to the place you drop off film. And so I wanted to make, like, basically, like, kind of Netflix model for film so you could just, like, get sent a roll of film, send it back once you shot it. And I was shocked. I just ran ads against it, and, I had, like, immediately, like, a $10, like, customer acquisition cost. Of course, I didn't actually have the service set up, so I just refunded everyone immediately.
Speaker 2:But it it's so much easier to validate stuff, and I think people waste so much time. And when you're in that sort of, like, pre prod pre product in CPG is just, the death zone. Like, it's just so hard to get people to care and, like, actually risk capital when it's like, you don't even have a product that I can, like, sample, and you want me to give you, like, a $100,000 or 250 k. It's just it's a big ask.
Speaker 3:Completely. And it's something I hear from people, you know, who are aspiring entrepreneurs or or have an idea. I think there's just like a general sense that, oh, I have this great idea for something. How do I now go raise money? Well, the reality is investors like to invest in businesses, not ideas.
Speaker 3:So how can you start in some way to prove out that there might be some traction, however you might be able to do that? And that's gonna get you a lot further than just saying, hey. I have this great idea. You know, give me some money.
Speaker 1:Okay. The first, so so that video that you described, was that the animated video?
Speaker 2:Or That was before this.
Speaker 1:That animated video happened later. Can you take me through, like, how, like, the the I mean, I I imagine that cost more than $1,500 to produce that. What was the story behind picking animation? I feel like a lot of brands were doing sort of like the founder testimonial direct to camera. You tell the vision of the business or, you know, you go on a podcast tour and and Liquid Death came out with that really aggressive animated style.
Speaker 1:What was the story behind that particular video?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, with most most businesses, I think you need to look at where are your strengths, what is your network, what are your connections, and utilizing what you have near you to the best of your advantage. So, you know, another way put is play the hand of cards that you have Yeah. That's unique to you. So for me, you know, I was a big fan of this animated TV show on Adult Swim called Mister Pickles.
Speaker 3:It's this bizarre acid trip of a violently funny cartoon, and I ended up reaching out to the guy who was the creator of it. There was two creators. He was one of the two. And in the early days of Liquid Death, saying, hey. I'm a huge fan of your show.
Speaker 3:I feel like we have similar creative sensibilities. Maybe you'd wanna be involved in this Liquid Death thing I'm trying to get going. And sure enough, he responded. We met. We got along really well, and he's actually the one who drew the skull that is the logo on all of our cans to this date.
Speaker 3:And then once the we actually got the brand off the ground and we had real product that we were selling and we were making, you know, real revenue, we had slightly bigger marketing budgets, You know, we were able to use the the animation firm that he was working on his TV show with.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 3:And they said, hey. We'll do this for super cheap because Will's already here. He could just do this on the side and, you know, we could we can make it happen. So animation is very expensive. Like Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, thirty seconds or forty seconds of animation is very expensive, but we were able to get I think we spent all in, like, 30 k on that. But that should have costed probably a quarter million dollars if you Yeah. Were just trying to go do that normally
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:Minimum. Yeah. But, yeah, it was kinda like that that was something that was in our in our quiver, and we were a big fan of it. And, we had some great resources there to make a really funny and that was all we were thinking. How do we make something that's the funniest thing someone's gonna see
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:In their feed and spread it for us for free?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I mean, obviously, we love comedy here. You're being interviewed by two Santa Clauses. I I'm interested to know, take me a couple years into my future. Do I regret this, or or or or do I lose this?
Speaker 1:Like, how does how do you maintain a level of humor while still, you know, coming to the customer and the business partners with, hey, yeah, we're not joking around about quality assurance or something? Like, we think there's a serious side of the business now. There's still some humor that's still there. At the same time, the marketing is probably not last minute anymore. Have you thought about, like, scaling comedy?
Speaker 3:No. It's it's a really great question. It's something that I've had to push through multiple departments of the company, which, yes, we're a funny brand in the way we market, but if you think about a brand like a person Mhmm. Like, think about someone you know that's funny. Like, they're not funny in every scenario.
Speaker 3:You don't tell them that, Hey, my dad died, and they crack a joke.
Speaker 1:Like, people,
Speaker 3:a lot of really funny people, they just know people really well. Like, they know how to make people laugh. Mhmm. They know when to tone it down. Like, the number one rule of comedy is, like, know your audience.
Speaker 3:So I think it's important that it's always like, hey. When someone sends in an email saying, hey. My case of liquid death from Amazon got all screwed up in the mail Yeah. You don't crack a joke. Like, act very earnest.
Speaker 3:Hey.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:I am so sorry about that. Like, that sucks. Like, we will completely figure it out. So it's all about knowing where it's important to be, you know, real and authentic and caring and then where it's important to be funny and irreverent and that you always got to be cognizant.
Speaker 1:How much did you predict the death of the alcohol culture? It feels like this is perfectly timed. We've talked to so many folks on the show about the next generation just drinking way less, and it feels like you've been a beneficiary of this. But was that something where you had seen a chart and you'd actually seen a trend line? Or you just had a vibe?
Speaker 1:Or it just kinda came to you naturally? Or you just got lucky? Like, how do you frame the fact that you're selling an alternative to alcohol in a ton of bars, I see it all the time, at a time when people are looking for an alternative?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was a little bit luck. I think the bigger conceptual drive behind Liquid Death's inception was that how do we make a truly healthy beverage company that markets more like a fun alcohol or junk food company? Because you think about all the funny, irreverent marketing over time, it's all like stickers, Cheetos, Dos Equis. Like, it's beer, it's candy, it's fast food.
Speaker 2:My biggest criticism of of, like, healthy brands historically is they it's so hard to build a brand if you're not making people feel any, like, real emotions. Right? Like, how many healthy brands are funny at all? Like, almost almost zero. Right?
Speaker 2:It's like toned down colors, like, just kind of like simple straightforward copy. There's not a lot of there's no energy coming through the brand. So how are you gonna make somebody feel something? And if you wanna be remembered, you have to make somebody feel something.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I completely agree. And I think it's also just strategically unhealthy brands, like, their marketing boardrooms, they're like, we want people to associate our products with fun. So everything we do is gonna be centered around fun and, like, we want this to be fun. Or they think about their audience, like, hey.
Speaker 3:We are selling to teenagers. Like, this is how we wanna make teenagers love us. We're healthy products. We're not ever marketing to teenagers. They were marketing to 35, you know, females, and they would market a certain way there.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, part of what I love about Liquid Death and why I wanted to do it is so many healthy companies just preach to the choir, people who already make healthy decisions. How can I use a brand to get people who don't typically make healthy decisions to now, every once in a while, pick up a low calorie water just because they identify with the brand and they think it's cool?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then you still get the healthy people because they're already buying in those categories. But how do you start bringing new people into the healthy categories who weren't there before?
Speaker 2:What's your what's your philosophy on storytelling on on x the last twenty four hours? Everyone has just been debating. Everyone's been debating, like, do you need to hire a chief storyteller? Yeah. I took the point of view of of like truly the most elite storytellers are founders, CEOs Yeah.
Speaker 2:Who are the ones communicating to customers and, you know, vendors and the media and and all that kind of thing. And if you're if you're feeling like you need to hire a storyteller, it's very possible that you just don't know what story to tell. But I don't know that hiring somebody off the street to to tell your story is gonna actually get you what you want, which is like a plot and, you know, meaning and and all these other things that great great stories and brands have.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's like storytelling is such a broad thing. It's like storytelling isn't everything. And as a founder specifically or if you work in sales, it's like just being able to tell a story is not just important to a consumer. How do you get employees to wanna follow you?
Speaker 3:If you can't articulate a vision, a story that gets people excited and believing in the mission, like, you're not gonna be a very good leader either because it it's it's so important. So I don't know if hiring a a chief storyteller is, like, the equivalent of having, like, you know, a language translator.
Speaker 6:Hey,
Speaker 3:storyteller. Tell everybody in the company why what I say, you know, matters.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 3:So but I think that, know, great CEOs have been have been successful because they're great storytellers naturally, and that goes far beyond just knowing how to tell a consumer story, but how to get investors excited, how to get employees excited. You gotta be able to speak in a way that makes people believe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have an you have an advertising background. How do you work with ad agencies today? My another thing I was, you know, kind of sharing with the audience, my point of view is that more tech companies should work with traditional ad agencies to actually just, like, come up with, like, novel campaigns to try to cut through the noise. I think people get too focused on, oh, we just need a pretty website.
Speaker 2:Like, that will solve our problem, or we need a nice logo. And it's, like, spending not enough time thinking about, like, really clear messaging and actually thinking in campaigns. Like, I know companies that will spend $50,000,000 next year on marketing, and they're not thinking about they're not even thinking about, like, what campaign what campaigns are we gonna do. They're just thinking about, like, what channels are we doing? How are we spending?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Who are our segments? And they're not thinking of this, like, kind of, like, through line messaging. And so I think that that's an area that traditional ad agencies, not necessarily the biggest ones in the world, but the the sort of classic ad agency, can actually really be really helpful on.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I think another way to think about it is thinking about all different kinds of companies, tech or what have you, thinking about more of the full funnel. Because when you talk about campaign, you're kinda talking about top of the funnel, like, general awareness around the brand, and then you've got other marketing assets further down the funnel that are focused more on converting somebody into a customer. I think you have so much focus, especially in the tech world, on the lower funnel where, you know, hey. I put this money in, and then this much money comes out because of conversion.
Speaker 3:But what happens is if you're not bringing in enough people at the top of funnel at the brand level, you don't have enough people to convert. Then it starts getting really expensive to convert low level performance people because you start running out of people, and it just starts getting more expensive. And I think, like, a great example is, like, AI. All the LLMs now are fairly comparable in what they can do, but still ChatGPT is by far the biggest because it's the most notable brand. It's just the thing that people oh, ChatGPT.
Speaker 3:It's easy to say. It's fun to say. I know that. I'm just gonna use that one. Look at Google.
Speaker 3:How many other search engines tried to come about? And just because of Google's brand Mhmm. And something that's emotional just made that the go to place where nobody else could really come and and and take it away? And to your point, a lot of that has to come from more brand marketing and not just, like, nuanced performance functional marketing.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the new sparkling energy drink? I feel like there's there's a sort of, like, positive positioning. Hey. We're the only ones that have this particular benefit, or there's the free of strategy where everyone else has this bad thing and we don't. Is that the framework you think about when you go to launch a new product?
Speaker 1:What was your thesis behind getting into energy?
Speaker 3:I mean, we've been asked about when we were going into energy since probably, like, year one of Liquid Death because people just think the brand is so much more like Totally.
Speaker 2:It's got a lot of energy. It does.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's got a lot of energy. Yeah. And even it's still funny to this day, you know, in consumer research that we have. You know, we make flavored sparkling water.
Speaker 3:We make plain water. We make iced tea. Like, 60% of the country has heard of liquid death. 20% know
Speaker 1:that
Speaker 3:we make flavored sparkling water, which is our biggest, actually, category now. But 19% of the country thinks we make an energy drink. So, literally, our biggest category has as much awareness as a category we don't even make yet.
Speaker 1:Right? That's crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because the brand just sounds more like an energy drink than it sounds like a flavor of sparkling water.
Speaker 1:So Totally.
Speaker 3:The reason we got into energy was because I think we finally found a way to stay to our brand ethos, which is to truly be a better for you brand, and we were able to find a way to do what we feel is a truly better for you energy drink product. Mhmm. And now that the better for you segment of energy is the fastest growing within energy, the Celsius of the world, ALAANI, C4, these other brands that are low zero sugar, low calorie, etcetera, it just became the right window for us to kind of offer something that really felt better for you within the category. And that's a combination of things with just we thought the category was getting a little in stain with the caffeine. Like, Celsius, Elani, all these brands are, two hundred milligrams of caffeine.
Speaker 3:I think they have
Speaker 2:We started this show, by the way. John would have three Celsius in a single show.
Speaker 1:It was insane. Was so bad. Now I do three Diet Cokes, which is, like, I think around a hundred or two hundred milligrams of caffeine. It's not too bad.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, most people don't think of Red Bull as a weak energy drink. It's the number one selling energy drink. Red Bull is a 114 in a 12 ounce can. So Celsius is like pounding two Red Bulls at one time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's crazy.
Speaker 3:You know? So and I don't think a lot of people realize that. And, you know, the more we've talked to people, they kinda feel like, oh, yeah. I don't I stopped drinking, you know, Celsius or Lani because I don't know. I I started feeling a little, like, cracked out.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. It's crazy. Know, I just thought there was, like you know, we we thought there was, like, a good opportunity to come in with something that was not weak, but this just what we're calling a sane level of energy in a category that I think is starting to go a little insane.
Speaker 1:You have a tagline for it? Murder your sleep or something?
Speaker 4:Well, we actually have on
Speaker 3:the can, it's like it's not really the tagline, but it's a small one that says death the drowsy.
Speaker 1:There we go. I knew it was gonna be something good.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What, what's the what's the go to market with energy? I I can imagine, I I buddy of mine is, like, a pro skateboarder. And, like, in skating, there's, like, some fatigue around the the big energy drink brands, and it feels like there's room. Like, energy drinks have had a big place in the industry for a long time. So I can imagine there's, like, an athlete angle to this.
Speaker 2:There's kind of campaign, a broader campaign, but how are all the different ways you're planning to really bring it to market?
Speaker 3:It's funny. It's actually not that at all because, you know, Monster and Red Bull, both companies valued, like, upwards of 60,000,000,000 apiece. Mhmm. They've got endless checkbooks to buy athlete. And that's the thing.
Speaker 3:When you do sports marketing, anybody with a big enough checkbook can buy any athlete. That's how they make their money. Right? So if Liquid Death tries to go in and buy athletes competing with the checkbooks of Monster and Red Bull, we're never gonna make enough of a dent to have it move the needle for us. So for us, like, what makes Liquid Death unique is we're arguably the funniest beverage brand in the world, and we're better at being funny than anybody else.
Speaker 3:And big companies have a really hard time producing comedy because you go through that bureaucracy of focus groups and layers, it's hard to make something legit funny the way we can, and no amount of money can fix that. So we wanna focus on being the only funny energy drink brand in a sea of
Speaker 2:extreme Extreme. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Forks. Right?
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that. Yeah. That's great. That's great different positioning.
Speaker 1:This is, what a great guest for today. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. We gotta jump to our next guest. But Yeah. This fun.
Speaker 1:Way deeper.
Speaker 2:This is No one loves advertising more than me. Maybe you do. You're you're very elated. So thank
Speaker 1:you. It's always great.
Speaker 2:Super fun conversation. Let let's do it. Let's do it again soon.
Speaker 1:Let's do something again soon, please.
Speaker 2:Congrats to the whole team on the launch.
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 3:Appreciate it. Thanks.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon. Bye. You heard from Kari, Linear. Let me actually tell you about Linear. Linear meet the system for modern software development.
Speaker 1:Linear streams like work across the entire development cycle from road map to release. We have Elliot Cohen from General Medicine in the restream waiting room next. He's coming in. Previously, cofounded PillPack Merry Christmas. Friend of the show.
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 1:Merry Christmas. How are you doing? Happy holidays.
Speaker 4:Merry Christmas.
Speaker 5:Thank you
Speaker 1:for having us. Holidays. Exactly. Please, since this is your first time on the show, I mean, we've talked about general medicine before, but introduce yourself. I'd love to get a little bit of your journey, your story, and then I'm sure we can go into a ton of different aspects of the health care industry and general medicine generally.
Speaker 2:Also, hello, TJ. Yes. Hope you're watching.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I hope so too.
Speaker 2:We love you. Anyways, Elliot.
Speaker 4:For having me on. He was joking that maybe he would have actually been better for this because he got the nice Santa beard. You know? Yeah. Does have
Speaker 1:the Santa beard sometimes. Anyway, but it's great to
Speaker 2:meet you. Know? It's
Speaker 4:great to meet you guys. Yeah. My name's Elliot Cohen. I was one of the other founders of TiltPac along with TJ Parker. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And we started that business in 2013. We sold it to Amazon in 2018 and then both of us stayed at Amazon.
Speaker 2:Success.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It was like, a month or two and it all just worked out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yep. What's the latest of general medicine I hear? You guys are ripping. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But would love for you to share kind of the state of the business.
Speaker 4:Business is doing great. We launched in May and since then, we've just been expanding. It's available nationwide. I think it's got the most insurance coverage of any provider group in the country. And even if we don't take your insurance at our provider group, we can always route to the right care locally or anywhere else.
Speaker 4:And really, started with this sort of first touch experience. We wanted to make sure it was as easy as possible to get access to immediate care. And the ambition has always been to build an entry point to healthcare, where you should be able to come to us for absolutely anything. And what we're launching today is a new way to do that with a chat that has all of your health history in it. You know, we've been watching, I think probably like you guys, people have been chatting with ChatGPT and Gemini and others about their healthcare.
Speaker 4:And, you know, it's something like sixty or 70%, probably any all adult out there. And what we've noticed though is that those chats don't go anywhere. They aren't connected back into the rest of your care. And so, at General Medicine, what we've been building is the ability to go from that chat straight into actual care and all of it is health history aware. So we import all of your records, make it really easy for you to have a conversation with them.
Speaker 1:How are you importing records? I feel like my records are all over the place. Sometimes the doctor just hands me a piece of paper. I lose it. Sometimes it's an email.
Speaker 1:Sometimes there's a web form or a web portal that I have access to. Sometimes I went and used some one off, like, you know, Internet product that I signed up for, did some labs, have some data over there. It feels very messy. I understand that AI could do cool stuff with it, but I feel like I will be very lazy about actually centralizing all the data in my life since it's not organized.
Speaker 2:Agent that goes and and finds everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. But but how do you see actually the the the the most important pieces of health information pulling those in? What's the workflow like?
Speaker 1:How does the how does the user actually experience this?
Speaker 4:We we have a bunch of elves, and you tell us. Yeah. They just play right out
Speaker 1:there. That's okay. He's gonna be gone for the elves. We completely lost him on the camera too. You you dodged him completely.
Speaker 2:Where am I? Here
Speaker 1:I am. There we go. Okay.
Speaker 4:You know, that that's the I think we've been willing to wrestle with the complexity of healthcare. You know, that that that's the difference of being willing to Sure. Take people's insurance Yep. Being willing to embed yourself in the entire healthcare system. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so, yeah, you look at what traditional healthcare or sorry, tech companies have been doing, they've given you these ways to import your records one off. And the problem with that is exactly what you said. Mhmm. You get one record from one care event. You know, when I imported my records into general medicine, I had stuff going back to 2005.
Speaker 4:You know, more than twenty years of records that got automatically imported. And the difference is we're an actual provider group and we're providing real treatment and that gives us the ability to go collect a lot more information because it's critical to the way that we provide care. Ultimately, this is the contact that we're using that lets us provide this much richer care to folks when they come through the front door.
Speaker 2:So is the goal for this to be like effectively, like, passive where even if I'm not immediately seeking, like, a treatment and I'm just trying to understand my health, maybe I have, like, shoulder pain and I want to understand that. This is some I'm coming to general medicine to just, like, have a conversation with an LLM, and maybe later I come back and I'm like, oh, okay. I actually wanna pursue treatment now, whatever whatever I learned. It's not going away or whatever. And then and then you guys can help route it.
Speaker 2:Is that is that the goal?
Speaker 4:I think, you know, honestly, whenever anybody comes in, if you're experiencing shoulder pain, there's always, advice that we can help support you with that's gonna help you figure out when's the right time to seek imaging or when's the right time to go to PT, when's the right time to talk to a clinician about it. And that's the that's the whole point of trying to have the care deeply embedded into the experience is you shouldn't have to just wait to see if it magically gets better or doesn't before deciding to really engage with the health care system. If it was easy to engage with, you'd do it right away. And that's what we wanna enable. Actually, I've had foot pain for the last two years and the connection I had never made in my head, I've been wrestling this with this, I've been talking to doctors about it, I've been exploring it.
Speaker 4:And when I loaded all this into general medicine, was it the first time I made this connection back to an injury I had in 2005 on my on my left foot. And it was the the LM that helped me appreciate that there might be a connection between these two. And it started helping me explore, you know, what are the different options to figure this out. We decided, you know, one one of the options that came out of that was imaging. I ultimately booked a visit so I could debate whether the imaging was really the right thing or whether PT was the right thing.
Speaker 4:Since this has been going on for so long, we decided my clinician and I decided that really jumping straight to imaging was probably the right next step. And the imaging ended up finding these cysts in my ankle.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm a
Speaker 4:I'm a relatively educated consumer and I read the report and I didn't really understand it. You know, you get like that MRI, you log into your portal, you download all this stuff. It's like this really technical language And I started reading. I just didn't really get it. And I dumped it all into our into General AI.
Speaker 4:And it started explaining it to me perfectly. In fact, it was so different though than my understanding of it. I had to give it to one of my buddies who's a radiologist cause I thought it meant that this thing was wrong. And he was like, no, no, it's given you a perfect interpretation. That's exactly what the radiologist said in the read.
Speaker 4:And so that, I was then able to start exploring with it all of these different pathways. You know, is surgery the right next step? Is there a different, you know, left invasive approach? And ultimately, you know, this thing is not going to diagnose me. It's not going to tell me what the right next step in the care is.
Speaker 4:But being able to have that very exploratory in-depth dialogue by the time I get to the actual visit to talk about the different options with a doctor, now I've got this clear idea in my head of, Man, there's these three or four different options. I actually don't know which one's right for me, but here are kind of the puts and takes. And it just makes it way easier to then have this super rich dialogue with the doctor about which of those pathways is best for me.
Speaker 2:What what is it like being a a doctor post LLM in general? Like, are are do you think patients in general are coming in more informed or more freaked out for no reason? Everyone's been told by a doctor, you know, don't Google it, you know, don't don't don't search and then add Reddit to the end. You just go down a rabbit hole. But everything everybody's experienced at this point of, like, actually, it can be very empowering to, like, do research, and maybe it has some negative side effects.
Speaker 2:But in general, I think this is people want information. They wanna understand their health, and you're never gonna stop them from exploring.
Speaker 4:I we're we're pretty clearly on the side of, like, you wanna give people these tools. More more data and information is helpful. You want consumers to be empowered. You know, if their bodies, if their health, they're the ones who get to make the decision, The clinician should not be a gatekeeper. The clinician should be a guide, a quarterback helping them get to the best care for them.
Speaker 4:And we think AI is a really critical tool in that process. It helps the consumer understand more upfront so they come to the visit way better prepared to have a really rich dialogue. We also then have a bunch of tools that let us share that conversation in a nicely summarized way with the doctors. The doctor, when you show up, they know a conversation you've been having. They have a sense of that history and what you're interested in exploring in a visit.
Speaker 4:And so in a fifteen, twenty minute visit, you can just dive right into the meat of the conversation. You know, you don't have to spend the entire time just ramping up on the history.
Speaker 1:How do clinicians see you? Is is do they see you as just like a funnel for business broadly? Like they all want to be on general medicine having you funnel customers to them? Is there any sort of negotiation that happens? Is all of this just happening sort of by default?
Speaker 1:Is there opt in, opt out? Like, what is the relationship between you and the, you know, the radiologist, for example, in that example you gave?
Speaker 4:We've got two ways that you could work with us.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:One is you can join the platform and see patients directly through the platform. And in that scenario, you're getting paid just like you would as part of any health system. You're getting paid for providing care. Separately from that, we have these really rich tools that help us understand the quality and the different services that each physician across the country provides. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And so when a customer needs follow-up care, we can help them search very precisely for the exact right care. So to come back to my ankle example, you know, I can go hunting in that database for the doctor that is gonna be the perfect one to remove this cyst from my ankle. Not just a general orthopedist, but someone who has experience in that exact surgery and that exact repair. And I think this is actually where physicians and consumers are perfectly aligned. Consumers wanna get to the exact right doctor for their need as quickly as possible.
Speaker 4:It's just really hard to know what that is because you didn't go to med school. You didn't go to residency. Like, you don't have the same expertise. Same thing on the other side. The doctor wants to practice.
Speaker 4:You know, they wanna focus on the patients they're gonna be the absolute best at seeing. And today, there's just no good way for the consumer to know that they're going to the right doctor for them, and there's no good way for that doctor to say, Hey, These are exactly the type of patients that I'm going to be really good at. I'm really good at these ankle repairs, but I don't want the knees. There's no way to filter for that today.
Speaker 1:One more question from me, and then you can close it out. In terms of, like, AI and health, we're still it feels like we're very much in, the abstract era of, like, maybe it'll cure cancer. And it feels like a couple of years ago when in broadly in AI, were like, maybe there'll be, an economic explosion. We'll be growing at 10% GDP. And, like, the economic data, at least this year, has been, like, pretty fine.
Speaker 1:Like, same as it's, like, not bad, but also not great. And, like, the unemployment rate just came back and, like, sort of mixed. And, like, the stock market's doing well, but it's not, like, oh, 10% GDP growth. And I'm interested in if, you know you know, Satya Nadella said, like, I'll believe the AI, like, fast takeoff narrative when I see GDP growing really, really fast. Like what are some of the health metrics that you would look to judge in five years, ten years?
Speaker 1:Is AI having a really dramatic impact on health? We've I think everyone has expectations about what's happening with the peptides and GLP-1s, right? And we would expect that if the GLP-one mission works, you'll see obesity rates fall. But is there a broader health metric that you could imagine tracking to understand the impact of what you're doing, but also just broadly, like AI in medicine having an impact?
Speaker 4:You want us to get a metric that's not like Chinese peptide shipments into the country.
Speaker 1:I mean, that one would be probably worth tracking as well. But yeah. I'm just wondering, like, like, what are the high level KPIs for, like we we look at a lot of, like, the health of the American consumer. How much do they spend on Black Friday? What about the the health of the just the health of the American?
Speaker 1:Like, how are we tracking that?
Speaker 4:I think we look at this stuff all wrong, honestly. Like, we spent the last twenty years optimizing for the financial relationship between the doctor and the system. And so all of our health metrics, the way we talk about nfl.com. Mhmm. I personally, I don't think that's what we should be optimizing for.
Speaker 4:I think we should be optimizing for the consumer and their enjoyment and their fulfillment that they get out of that experience. So to me, it's you know, if you wanna boil that down as a metric, it's something like Net Promoter Score. Like, how much do you love interacting with the system health care system? And today, that's a silly question because the answer is nobody. Nobody loves interact that's the craziest thing.
Speaker 4:Like, it's the most it's it's the definition of wealth. Right? The most important thing that any of us have in our life is probably our own health. We should love interacting with it. We should love engaging with it.
Speaker 4:And to me, that'll be that's the metric I would look for, particularly around AI. You know, it has this opportunity to completely shift the way consumers engage with their health and how empowered they are in it and really make them the customer. You know, at the end of the day, I think so much of our health care system today, the consumer is not actually the customer. And our ambition of general medicine is to build a completely new health system where the consumer gets to be the actual customer of their own care. And my personal belief is if we do that, we will solve most of the problems in healthcare.
Speaker 4:Most of the stuff we complain about, it's because the customer's the employer, the customer's the doctor, it's the insurance company, it's the government, it's not the consumer. And I think healthcare, I think AI has a real chance to shift that back around and make the consumer the center of that.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I love it. All comes back to NPS.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The final final NPS. Final metric. The final boss.
Speaker 2:If you think about it, like, in in times that I've rate, like, my NPS score for a company would be like one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was like a health care related experience, you know?
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, if you get misdiagnosed or just get bad advice or you get prescribed Yeah. A drug that you shouldn't be on or whatever Sure. It's like you're gonna Would not have that time. And a lot of that I think is avoidable with just, yeah, better better understanding, better more personalization, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Makes no sense.
Speaker 2:Anyways, congratulations to the to the whole team. Very, very exciting. And
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Great to have you on.
Speaker 4:Well Hey. Thanks for having me. This was great. I love that. Have
Speaker 1:a nice rest your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Great news. Has weighed in on the word of the year situation.
Speaker 1:He says the word of the everyone's word of the year is slop, thus making the word of the year as an article category slop. What do you think? Word of the year, still underrated, still room to run? Does the word of the year as an article category have motion?
Speaker 2:We were trying to yeah. We were trying to figure out our word It would have aura. The word that we landed on was motion. I love motion. It's it's hard to perfectly define.
Speaker 2:Yes. Define you know it when you see it. Sure. You know when someone has it. Yes.
Speaker 2:You know when someone doesn't have it. And I just felt like this year
Speaker 1:When they're sleeping. You know when they're awake. Know that who's been bad and good. Good. Are you on the motion list?
Speaker 2:Are you on the motion list?
Speaker 1:You on the motion list? Yeah. It does it does it it does feel like everyone everyone's sort of laying on the slop thing. Anyway, you had you had another story you wanna
Speaker 2:run through. Warner is preparing to tell shareholders Uh-huh. To reject Paramount offer. Wow. To recommend existing Netflix deal as soon as Wednesday, so we'll be looking out for that tomorrow.
Speaker 2:If you wanna participate, I'm I'm kind of tempted to at least I'm not a I'm not a Warner shareholder. I'm tempted to buy a share. I'm tempted participate.
Speaker 1:Just to vote yes or vote no?
Speaker 2:No. No. I haven't decided yet.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay. You could be swung. Yeah. You could be swung.
Speaker 1:You're you're swing.
Speaker 2:I wanna put the word out there.
Speaker 1:I'm a single I'm a hey. I'm gonna buy some, and I'm gonna be a single issue voter, foghorn leghorn.
Speaker 2:I need a new I
Speaker 1:need a trilogy.
Speaker 2:A trilogy.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna need a trilogy. I'm gonna need a foghorn leghorn trilogy with a lot of porky pig on there. I'm gonna need a a a massive cinematic universe all around
Speaker 2:hold up the process until you can get clarity on how they're gonna treat that
Speaker 1:Exactly. That IP.
Speaker 2:Yes. Right? That's really
Speaker 1:Foghorn Leghorn is very, very important. Anyway, our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room. We have Ali from Databricks. Welcome to the show. How are you?
Speaker 2:So sharp. So sharp.
Speaker 1:You look very sharp.
Speaker 2:We Feels like you're wearing a suit, but
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Not. It's your own
Speaker 1:But good to see you again. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Likewise. Good. Good. Good. I didn't get the memo.
Speaker 5:I'm not dressed up the right way.
Speaker 1:We should have no. You you look fantastic. Don't worry about that.
Speaker 2:Come back on tomorrow. We'll Yes. We'll ship you a suit outfit. Can raise the next round. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We still have a few letters left.
Speaker 1:But congratulations. Give us the news. What what what happened?
Speaker 5:Yeah. What happened is that, you know, we're just seeing an acceleration in the business, especially with respect to AI. And, actually, we slice and dice we're data companies. We slice and dice that data in many, many different ways. Is it a particular customer concentration?
Speaker 5:Is it a particular cloud? Is it particular product? No. It's like, you know, broad based acceleration throughout the business. You know, we passed $4,800,000,000
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 5:Run rate revenue. Awesome. Oh, wow. Yeah. Was asking in, Ben, so I get a gong.
Speaker 5:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yes, of course. Of course.
Speaker 2:Of Maybe multiple. Maybe multiple.
Speaker 5:Perfect. Yeah. So over 55% growth and but, you know, more interestingly, we we're now passing $1,000,000,000 on our data warehousing product which we announced four years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And we also passed $1,000,000,000 run rate in AI revenue which, you know, makes it, you know, over 25% of our revenue. Wow. You know, not that many companies. And there's a lot of talk about AI, what's going on with AI. Is there a bubble or not?
Speaker 5:Not many companies have over 25% of their business in AI and, you know, over a billion dollars. So we're excited about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about classifying that? Because I imagine that in some ways, a lot of the data warehouse revenue is from AI companies that wanna warehouse data because there's more and more need for data because everyone's doing more things with it. We're in this era where everything is becoming AI, and yet it can feel a little disingenuous when companies slap AI on the back of their name and
Speaker 2:maybe It's they're hard to classify too because we were looking at some data earlier this week from Ramp that basically said, like, 50% of businesses aren't spending any money on AI directly Yeah. Yet they're clearly buying things from companies that are using AI.
Speaker 1:It's Where like in the supply chain is it? But how do you think about, what is the main driver of that data warehouse growth?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, that's kind of interesting. So, you know, we we started the company in 2013
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And one of the reasons we started was because we wanted to do AI. Sure. And the problem is, since 2013, up until November 2022, no one wanted to hear AI. Mhmm. K?
Speaker 5:No one was interested in it. And then come November 2022, ChatGPT gets released and now everyone wants to just talk about AI. Yep. You know? And so now it's like, you know, well, you know, are you an AI company?
Speaker 5:Are you doing AI? What's AI? But, yeah, no, when when we we split our revenue up, right, you can think of it, like, you know, roughly 2,000,000,000 of data munging and securing that data. Mhmm. 1,000,000,000 of data warehousing and then 1,000,000,000 of AI.
Speaker 5:So you can, like, separate these out. So it's not like overlapping triple quadruple counting or anything like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So what are they doing with AI? I mean, there's just lots of use cases, so let me give you an example. So we have this product called AgentBricks, you know, one of the favorite use cases I have is that Merck actually created a model, these are called transformer models, these AI models, they created something called TEDDY, which stands for transformer enabled drug discovery. Okay. And this is an AI model.
Speaker 5:Instead of predicting the next word in English sentence, it can predict cells and cell expressions. So it's called gen gene regulatory network. Sure. This is super important for drug discovery because then the drug companies can target those genes that are responsible for diseases. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So that's like a game changer. Yeah. And then there's lots of use cases like this. Seven Eleven was able to automate most of their marketing stack. So before, you would have to do your own segmentation, like, who should I show this material to, who this will be interesting to, and then you would have to create the material for that segment manually.
Speaker 5:Now the agents can actually prepare a lot of that material themselves. They can generate images, they can rewrite the text to target a specific group. You can do that much faster now. You know, I could keep going. RBC, Royal Bank of Canada.
Speaker 5:Basically, when an earnings call comes out, you guys will like this. Earning calls come comes out, it fetches the earnings call, looks it at all the previous earnings calls Mhmm. Looks at earnings calls of competitors, looks at what's going on in the market, looks on, you know, the sentiment, and then writes up the equity research report Sure. Using the tone of the equity research analyst, and they can get this out in fifteen minutes Yep. Which is, you know, usually in the industry, it's at least two hours or several hours.
Speaker 5:Sure. So And every
Speaker 2:every minute every minute matters. Yeah. Every second.
Speaker 5:Exactly. Exactly. So those are some of the use cases that you're seeing out there. So it it is taking off, you know. We're kind of focused on this, like, you know, I call it, sort of, you know, get stuff done or GSD AI rather than Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, superintelligence AI.
Speaker 1:How much of those examples that you I mean, there's a great case study. It's very very tangible in a world where there's, you know, not many tangible AI narratives. Or or how many of those how many of those case studies came from companies that were already using Lakehouse or data warehousing product, and then you came to them and they were comfortable working with you or they felt like they would be sped up on working with you, on the AI side because they were already comfortable with you housing the data for probably years.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Almost all of them. Let me explain why, though. Yeah. There's a reason why.
Speaker 5:It's not just, hey. We know each other and I'm comfortable with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's the fact that AI today, like, large language models Mhmm. Are actually a commodity. I mean, they're the coolest thing that ever happened but they're already a commodity. What I mean by commodity is just like oil, you know, you could get your gas from this gas station or you can get it from that gas station, slightly different in price, but doesn't really matter for your car, right? Same thing with LLMs.
Speaker 5:You can get this LLM or that LLM, you don't even know the difference. This week, this one is better, that week, that one is better at
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:You know, coding. This week, this one can do reasoning, this one can do images, so it's a commodity. So, actually, it's now a commodity to have a generative AI model that can answer any question about the world and the history and it's super smart.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:What is super elusive and you can't get your hands on is an AI that can actually reason on proprietary private enterprise data. Mhmm. Okay? That's that actually doesn't exist Yeah. Because the techniques used to generate these AI models work on huge amounts of data.
Speaker 5:Like, when when I mean huge, I mean, like, the whole Internet. Like, take all the data and crunch it. It doesn't work on a smaller data that enterprises have. So you how do you then make the AI work on that data that you already have inside the enterprise? Right?
Speaker 5:This could be electronic medical records that are sensitive. It could be financial models that are super secretive. It's your recipe for your alpha generation. So what you need to do is you need to get a good data foundation there, and that's the lakehouse that you're talking about. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And then the governance and the secure on top of that with Unity Capitaloc. Those are the kind of things you have to get in place first before you can unleash the AI on it, so that's why. It's not that they just know us, it's that they've been at it for a long time, and actually, if you haven't gotten that foundation right, if your data is a mess, it doesn't help. If your data is sitting in on premise, in some old database, you know, some Oracle database and it's locked away, what help is this commodity AI that you have on the top?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What advice do you have for founders that are building their business around in and around open source technologies? We've we we talked to a lot of young founders that, you know, are are are open sourcing something really cool. They have a bunch of GitHub stars. There's energy.
Speaker 1:They don't really have a business model yet, but you can see that they're delivering value, and at some point, they're gonna capture it. What are the dos and don'ts of growing up and being a good steward of an open source project or being a good partner to the open source ecosystem? What would you counsel a founder in that situation? Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's a billion dollar question. It's very hard to get that right. Yeah. You know, what I would say is, number one, that there's actually kinda two requirements, and there's, like, an analogy I have that you kinda have to get right. Yeah.
Speaker 5:First of all, realize it's a very difficult sport, the sport that you're about to get into open source and to monetize and create. This is, like, not an easy sport. So, you know, preferably don't get into it because you might, you know, get hurt. Yeah. But if you decided, if you're hell bent on doing this
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Then, you know, you can think of it as, you know, your strategy basically is to hit two home runs after each other consecutively. The first home run Okay. And you're banking on hitting that home run is for your open source project to take over the world. Everybody wants to download it. It's like the greatest thing ever.
Speaker 5:If you don't hit that first home run, you just shot yourself in the foot because you just gave away all of your intellectual property and you got nothing back for it, and now you have nothing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So you better have a first home run and the open source project takes over the world. So that's, like, step number one. Now you've achieved that. Congrats to you. Everybody's paying attention.
Speaker 5:They're downloading your open source project. The GitHub stars are just, you know, going vertical. It's awesome. You don't have any monetizable business. You cannot make any money.
Speaker 5:So then comes home run number two. Home run number two is now you have a 10 x, just as good as the first one, innovation on top of the open source, and that's the proprietary value that you're gonna provide to these companies. That's why they come to you. Yeah. Otherwise, you know, they can get open source anywhere, and that's how you monetize, and now you have the sort of secret sauce to a really successful company.
Speaker 5:If you don't hit the second one, the problem is now the big guys, you know, the hyperscalers and others, just pick up your open source model and they offer it up for almost free. How do you compete with that? How do you compete with that free? That's where you need your second home run. So it's very difficult.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I wanna double click on that part particularly. How do you compete that we have? Because we have other founders that have a open source project, and it's growing, and they're doing well. And then, we see the press release from one of the hyperscalers that their product is now a feature.
Speaker 1:Their child has been abducted into the cloud. And it's always a you can just tell no matter how they respond. It's a scary moment. It's an existential moment. We know that there's a board meeting happening happening.
Speaker 1:If, if you're in, you know, a board meeting, a fly on the wall, an adviser or something, and there's a founder who says, oh, one of the hyperscalers just launched a clone of our product. They're really gonna come for us this quarter, maybe next quarter. What do you advise them to stay in the game while the capital canon of the Mag seven is pointed directly at them?
Speaker 5:Well formulated. So I actually get that call from the founder day before the board meeting and they're like, oh my god, you know, what do I do? My life is over. Yeah. And I tell them, congratulations, you just proved that you hit your first home run.
Speaker 5:They're paying attention to you so now they're coming after you. So now you need to do another home run, okay? But your first home run, you just actually succeeded.
Speaker 2:-Is that a home
Speaker 5:run business?
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 2:home run business.
Speaker 5:They would not yeah, they would not direct all those cannons towards you if you didn't have anything. So you have something, now they're direct, now they're coming after you. So now you need to innovate and you need to actually monetize that and that portion, you cannot open source. Yeah. If you do, they'll just keep, you know, milking that with their cannons, right?
Speaker 5:So that's the way to go about it and it's normal part of life, and by the we all went through it, I went through it, I remember, like, you know, waking up, you know, cold sweats in the middle of the night and, you know, freaking out about, like, my god, this thing will kill us. But, know, the good news is if you continue innovating, you can stay ahead Because, you know, the people that wanna copy you, they're always gonna be a few years behind. So if you continue executing, you can stay ahead. And if you did a home run once, you can probably do it again, if you set my your mind to it. So just the trick is to stay behind stay ahead, right?
Speaker 5:Because the way it works is that startups, the main the main thing going on is that they don't have time on their side, right? Like, if you could freeze all startups for twelve months, the all max seven would catch up immediately and there would be no startups. Right? So your whole thing is outrun the big guys very, very fast. So that's another thing I tell them.
Speaker 5:Don't slow down. Move very, very fast. Continue innovating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love that.
Speaker 2:I love that. Do you categorize everything that's happening in AI? Like, what what is your personal framework? Because, like, what you're doing is very different than, let's say, a Foundation Model Lab, which is different than, you know, maybe maybe an end, rapper company.
Speaker 1:Is picks and shovels a pejorative? Is is is is that a pejorative?
Speaker 5:No. I mean, look, Levi's still around.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 5:know how many of those gold diggers are around.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's a great point. I never thought about that. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Still here kicking, you know, here in San Francisco. Yeah. But, yeah, I would say there's there's kinda like three paradigms going on at the same time. Paradigm number one is the quest for superintelligence.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And the quest for superintelligence, you know, requires bigger and bigger data centers, more and more gigawatts and it's very resource intensive and the idea is to come up with such a smart model that can improve itself to the point that we don't like, you know, it's just curing cancer and coming up with new AI models, and of course, we should be really afraid of the, you know, safety aspects of that. So that's like, know, what the frontier labs are doing. I would say, you know, category two is the researchers that created these models in the first place, like Jan Lecun or Rich Sutton who created reinforcement learning, that technique, they'll actually tell you, like, hey, that's not gonna actually work, you're not gonna get to superintelligence that way because that's not how humans learn or animals learn and so on, so they're like, hey, we're you know, leave us alone and we'll get get to something in twenty years. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Which to me sounds like a little bit like, we don't really know, leave us alone. Then there's the third camp. The third camp is, hey, we already have our all the AGI we already need. We might not have super intelligence but we have artificial general intelligence. I'm in that camp.
Speaker 5:I believe we already have artificial general intelligence. It's generally intelligent. Just use it and you'll be convinced within, like, five minutes. Pretty smart. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Okay? So now, start applying it and get stuff done inside of an enterprise or inside of an organization. Just GST, deliver AI value on basic tasks. And if you're unsure, start with the simplest mundane tasks that, you know, are, you know, really low cost right now. See if you can start augmenting and automating them.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:How did you how did you process the Talent Wars Mhmm. This year? I think the question on my mind is, will we see, you know, a $1,000,000,000 pay package into in two years from now or even in in next year. Right? But I'm curious how you processed it as somebody
Speaker 1:Was it a one time thing or is
Speaker 5:it normal? That was last year, guys. You know? I think no one at character got, like, a billion, right? I mean, they paid billions for character.ai.
Speaker 1:-Yeah.
Speaker 5:-And that was literally a billion dollars for one guy, at least 1,000,000,000. So that's already done that. So, I mean, 10,000,000,000 is the next, I guess, package to go for. Maybe that was Alex at Meta but, no, but, you know, joking aside, I think that it's also in everybody's interest to exaggerate these numbers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, the joke among CEOs is, let's exaggerate that number, right? It's like, oh, you know, companies are making, like, $100,000,000,000 offers for my employees. Because when you say that, what happens is that, first of they
Speaker 7:approach have a great team.
Speaker 5:First of all, it's like a compliment to your team. Second, if someone comes after someone in your team now, they're gonna expect at least that amount. If they don't, they feel insulted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Exactly. You're you're not even offering me a billion dollars? What's going on here?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So that's the that's
Speaker 2:the They don't value they don't value my skill set, clearly.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Right? So if it it dissuades everyone so I think there's also a little bit, like, self reported numbers here going on.
Speaker 5:The market is not as crazy as, you know, people say, but it has been pretty nutty and especially on the research side in AI, but actually, think it's coming. Like, it used to be the case that if you're a big shot professor in AI, you could, you know, get funding, huge amounts of funding for crazy evaluations. And if you you could just say, wanna just do research and get to superintelligence. Those days are over, actually, already. It's no longer the case that you could that pitch doesn't work anymore.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And there's no capital. Like, you're not gonna get a billion or $2,000,000,000 to go just do research on AI. You need to have something more than that. So I do think, actually, the market is coming to its senses.
Speaker 2:The timeline, the last twenty four hours, has been fixated on the role of storytelling within companies. You're a fantastic storyteller, like very just fun to listen to and animated. I'm curious, were always goaded or did you have humble beginnings?
Speaker 5:There's no way to answer that question right away. It's like a trick No.
Speaker 2:It's not a no. No. I genuinely believe there are founders that come out and they're seed stage, and they're hyper engaging, and they're incredible to listen to, and they get you excited and motivated. And then there are other founders that, like, have to really learn and but I but I think it's, in some ways, it's, you either have it or you don't.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Look, think that there are many things that go into, like, running companies. Like, one of them, ingredient number one is to be engaging and excite people and get people excited about your vision. Right? Right?
Speaker 5:But number two, you also need a good strategy. If you're not if you don't have a good strategy, events are just gonna catch up to you.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Number three, you need to put together amazing, stellar, world class team. Right? That's all that matters. Because if you're amazing but your team is not, then you're not gonna go anywhere. Even if you have all of these, it's not enough.
Speaker 5:You need to also execute. Like, you need to actually get the team to execute again and again and again and get to the results, and that kinda matters more than anything else. I mean, look at AWS. Like, they're phenomenal at executing. Right?
Speaker 5:And then, finally, five, you need to do it with good culture. If the culture is not good, it will eat you up from inside, the key people will leave, you know, we've seen, you know, companies that went under because the culture was bad or the CEO got fired and, you know, they went through tough times and, you know, the, you know, authorities were after them for fraud and these kind of things, you so kinda have to nail all these five, you know, it's the unfortunate truth.
Speaker 1:Well, is it series l now? You're quickly running out of letters of the alphabet. We have to ask, are you gonna be hanging out with us at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon, or are there are there no plans to go public? Because we'd love We to
Speaker 5:can hang out interview. We can hang out there we hang can out there anytime at the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq Yeah. You know, but but whether we're gonna go public look, we're I mean, I wouldn't be I wouldn't rule it out Okay. That we would be public by end of next year.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But, you know, it's also not like, hey, it's guaranteed. Sure. Because the thing I wanna avoid is what happened in 2022. Yeah. In 2021, I had a lot of peers that were so excited, they took their companies public, they're ex by the way, great storytellers
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Great execution machines, they were awesome. Yeah. But then interest rates went up, inflation went up and in 2022, they said, hey, man, you gotta, like, get EBITDA. You gotta produce, you know, margins. So what did they do?
Speaker 5:They all did layoffs
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And they all produced EBITDA. And what did they cut down on? All the futuristic stuff, all the innovation, all the new products. And also, morale kind of tanked. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Because, you
Speaker 5:know, employees are like, I don't trust you anymore. You said this company is gonna do well but now, you know, you're firing my friend here. So, you know and, you know, as you can see, we're now growing twice the growth rate of many of those companies. And I think staying private in 2022 had something to do with it as well. So, you know, you know, we're we're not trying to exactly time the rock market.
Speaker 5:We're trying to win it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think that the the narrative around open source LLMs is, like, is over? Do you think it's understood? Because, you know, the deep seek moment was a moment when everyone was saying, oh, maybe open source will win or it'll have a serious, shaping of the market structure in AI. It feels like folks have a much more concrete thesis around the shape of the AI market with, you know, like a you know, an aggregator winning in consumer and then maybe more of an oligopoly in in enterprise code gen and API businesses.
Speaker 1:And and certainly, the the open source models fit into that. But how are you thinking about open source AI models developing maybe in next next year or the year after?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I would just say that open source has always been a commoditizer in business.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 5:You know, like, when Linux showed up Mhmm. Like, is the greatest thing that's happening right now in the world Linux? No. But what did it do? It kinda commoditized Windows.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Right? And significantly so. Mhmm. And we've seen that again and again and again.
Speaker 5:So what it does, it really it's it sets the price of the IP of the open source project down to zero. So that price of that intellectual property shrinks to zero overnight.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And that's great because that basically puts pressure on the LLM foundation model layer to have lower and lower prices. And the lower those prices go, the complementary markets, the, you know, market on top, which is us with AgentBricks and, you know, Lakebase, you know, our our database for agents. Yeah. It helps that market because, you know, it makes our COGS, our cost of goods sold, which is we would pay for those LLMs lower. So I think that's gonna continue happening.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And in particular, one interesting trend is that China is putting the pressure on just open sourcing everything. They're not just open sourcing the large language models and the weights, they're open sourcing the whole stack. Everything they did. This is the way we open source it, this is the data we use, here's a research paper, they're having really fast diffusion of innovation happening in China, and that also puts pressure on the West over here.
Speaker 5:We're like, okay. We can't fall behind, so we're doing the same thing over here. So I think that's just gonna continue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's I mean, I I I completely understand that narrative, and, it does seem like it feels like China's commoditizing American Foundation Labs, and it and you easily, like, fall into this, like, geopolitical narrative. But is there a world where in China, it's it's really just, like, the the classic open source technology with a for profit corporation wrapped around it, and they're trying to build, like, the red hat of LLMs over there. And, like, that's the real, motivation more than just some, like, crazy wrench in the system?
Speaker 5:Well, I think that the I I I don't exactly know how the company's party thinks and what they are doing, but I think that over here, we will have companies that are already doing that. Like, you talk to start already, many, many of the startups in The United States are actually using the open source models and the Chinese models. By the way, what's already happened, which people don't talk about openly, it's really hush-hush, is that they're taking these Chinese models Yep. And kinda distilling them and you get an American model, right, with an American name. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And you don't know that it actually tracks back to Quinn from Alibaba or something like that. That's already happening in this market. But, like, look at the vast majority of startups. A huge amount of open source Chinese models that are being used by American open source models. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I think you'll have actually Red Hat like companies here even here in The United States that will say, hey. You know, we'll help you get up to speed, use the right ones, make sure it has the right safety and guardrails, and you're not taking any risk, and we do it at low cost. That's already happening in some sense. And then there are people who do that in the cloud. We actually help you do that.
Speaker 5:We at Databricks, we are multi LLM.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So we have OEM. So OpenAI is available natively to all of our customers. Mhmm. Anthropic is natively available to all of our customers, and Gemini is natively available. So it's, like, Fuse and Databricks, those three are actually under the hood, and then we have all the open source models to let you so since we are the next layer on top, right, that's the complementary market that I was talking about.
Speaker 5:So I think this will continue, and I think, actually, that's good for innovation that that's happening. There's so much pressure on that middle layer, because it it is a very lucrative layer. Right? I mean, you know, as judging from the evaluations of Anthropic and OpenAI that are very well deserved, you know, that's a important market. So I think this will just continue.
Speaker 5:You'll see more and more open source. That's not gonna stop, and it's gonna be from China. My prediction is that you're gonna also see that now from Europe and United States. Oh. Because, you know, do we want Chinese models to take over the whole planet in open source?
Speaker 5:I think that some nations will say, hey, why don't we just get together and fund a supercomputer and then build one here? By the way, we used to do that back in the day, was called supercomputers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:National labs that had supercomputers. The largest computers on the planet used to be supercomputers, state funded. That's gonna start happening, you know, in either this country or that country and once that starts, you know, everyone wants to get in, like, you know, United States is gonna have the biggest one. Right? Of course.
Speaker 5:So that's prediction.
Speaker 2:What does your sales process look like at this stage? Like, where where are you investing time specifically with with, customers that are that are in the pipeline? Like, what's the what's the highest leverage, and what is even what is even the workflow look look like?
Speaker 5:I mean, we have many different segments at Databricks. There is a self serve segment. Yeah. You can actually sign up. There's a free edition of Databricks that's a really important funnel for us.
Speaker 5:The free edition, anyone can just sign up with their Gmail and use Databricks forever, but you don't get, you know, lots of compute. You don't get lots of AI. Get a little sliver. Mhmm. So you get a taste of Databricks forever.
Speaker 5:Then, you know, we have Good.
Speaker 2:This is your sales process. You're selling selling right now. Always.
Speaker 5:You should try it out. You guys have a Gmail address. If you have a Gmail address, you know Love it. Go to databricks.com/try. And so once you've done that, so then comes the yeah.
Speaker 5:Then comes the trial. The trial is like, okay. But that was just a sliver of compute. I mean, you know, I wanna I wanna process a lot of LLMs. I wanna use the bigger models.
Speaker 5:I wanna do more interesting things with agent breaks. I wanna have my database with LickBase, then I would say get the free trial.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So free trial, we'll give you, I think, $200 or something like that, and you get to spend $200 for free with us. And so that's sort of the funnel. And then from there, people convert. Mhmm. This is really how most SMBs, mid market companies, that's how they get started on Databricks.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about I'm gonna I'm talking about the big dogs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how different is the organization? Do these people like, the the the person who maybe is responsible at some level for the biggest deal you've ever done and the person who's responsible for the smallest deal, are these, like have these people ever met in the organization? Are they completely separate? Is there some cross functional opportunity?
Speaker 1:Because they're very different functions, I imagine. One is steak dinner. The other is, like, UI UX, I would imagine. But I don't know.
Speaker 5:Well, believe it believe it or not, the steak dinner days are kind of over.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:You know? I mean, like, it's it's not like, hey, we'll just take you out and Sure. We have like the best golf players and we have the best drinkers that, you know
Speaker 1:To be clear, if you take us out to a steak dinner, I mean, we'll go to databricks.com/
Speaker 3:try. I I would. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And and you pay me $0. Exactly. Right? But
Speaker 1:I was hoping I would sneak that by you and, you know, gonna Exactly. No. But I
Speaker 5:would say
Speaker 2:Steak futures are selling off massively right now.
Speaker 5:Stake prices are just going down. Yeah. Exactly. I'm sorry, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But what I would say is that, you know, we actually have a funnel. So, you know, you start
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Maybe as a sales development leader. Actually, have one at Databricks. You know, a guy called Matt started just, you know, hitting the phone, just getting these SMBs Sure. And then grew with the business, then got into the sort of more mid market accounts, and then now, like, on the enterprise side. So, you know, we have people who grew up with Databricks, they can you know, you learn to do the whole all the way to the know, it's a lot of it is just getting comfortable, right?
Speaker 5:Because it's like it's one thing if I'm negotiating with you a $30,000 deal. Yeah. It's another thing if I'm negotiating with you a, you know, $250,000,000 deal. And, you know, a lot of folks will just get nervous and they'll start shaking. Right?
Speaker 5:So Yeah. But how do you do that? How do you get that, you know, $200,200,000,000 deal? You know, I'll it actually goes back to those free additions and those things. Yeah.
Speaker 5:In that conversation, with an exec high up, we will say, did you know that you're already leveraging open source Spark throughout the organization Did you know that you're already having people using the free edition with their Gmail accounts? Mhmm. You know, you have all these trials. By the way, these things I'm telling you about today, if you don't trust me, you can go yourself try it out in the free edition. So actually, that kind of motion, bottom up motion helps a lot even in the top down big enterprise sales.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then but there, the goal is what are the transformational projects
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That you want us to help you with, and how do we really drive business value for your organization? Like, what's a big strategic board level initiative? Yeah. Let us help you make you successful with that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're trying to get to we're trying to get to twenty four hours a day, and so we're really trying to use AI twenty four hours a day live. Yeah. Use AI to optimize when John sleeps, when I sleep, all that stuff. Anyways, this this has been super fun. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Congratulations for the whole team on the milestone.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll save it for next
Speaker 2:looking forward to the next letter.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thanks rest of your day. Thanks so much for coming on show.
Speaker 6:Thank you.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:What a legend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What a legend. He's he's he's such a great such a great CEO. Such a great conversation.
Speaker 2:More breaking news. Kushner's affinity withdraws from Warner Bros.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Takeover
Speaker 1:battle. This is breaking news right now.
Speaker 2:Jared Kushner is exiting from the takeover battle. Affinity was helping to finance Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers, but now believes the dynamics of an investment have changed since it became involved in the process. The battle for Warner Brothers stands to reshape the entertainment industry regardless of which bidder emerges victorious with I I
Speaker 1:read between the lines, I think we know what happened. Jared Kushner, clearly a Foghorn Leghorn fan
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:With not enough Looney Tunes in the deal. Not enough
Speaker 4:I'm
Speaker 2:out. Pig. I'm out.
Speaker 1:Not enough Foghorn Leghorn. On that I said I'm out.
Speaker 2:I'm
Speaker 1:out. I'm out. I can't I can't support this. If if David Allison is gonna pull the plug on the Looney Tunes cinematic universe reboot and three trilogies of Foghorn Leghorn live action, I'm out. I'm not doing it.
Speaker 1:This is very exciting. It feels like is it gonna land with Netflix? We're back and forth on this now. But it feels like Netflix has certainly the upper hand, a lot of support, and barring some wild card in Washington, wild card with the with the shareholders, they're set up. I mean, the board has accepted the offers.
Speaker 1:Aslov is is moving his thumbs up on it.
Speaker 2:Right? Ellison's haven't given their best and final offer, though. We know that. They said that themselves. So
Speaker 1:And I mean, to be clear, there are other sources of capital beyond Affinity Partners. So they they like, they could clearly marshal the capital. I mean, Larry Ellison himself has it. He's worth 250,000,000,000. We're talking 80.
Speaker 1:We're talking 90. We're talking a 100. It's a lot, but there is a lot of money there to, you know, pool around if you need to. Anyway, I wouldn't
Speaker 2:be I wouldn't be surprised if in the next twenty four hours we see a new a new offer. Mhmm. Right? There you have current one likely, you know, Zaslav pushing to reject the offer. Sure.
Speaker 2:This is the moment where they kinda need to up the ante a little bit.
Speaker 1:Well, we gotta get one of our our media correspondents back on the show because that's been the highlight of last week was talking to Dylan Byers and Ben Smith about media and getting up to speed on the the the story behind the Warner Brothers Netflix, you know, Paramount deal. Anyway, in other big company news, the Unilever CEO disclosed Nutrafol and Liquid IV revenues. Have you ever been a Liquid IV guy?
Speaker 2:No. You ever Element guy.
Speaker 1:You're an element guy. That's right. You like salt, not whatever's in liquid IV. Sugar?
Speaker 2:Is it true? Sugar. It is based though. Sugar is very good
Speaker 1:for hydration. You like you like it. I've I've I've really enjoyed liquid IV. Actually, I gotta say, I just turned from liquid IV because I'm on the new Chris Williamson creatine in the in the stick pack. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That one, the new tonic that the elf is putting under the tree this week.
Speaker 2:The Nutonic
Speaker 1:creatine stick stick pack. You can open it up and show what they actually look like. Just pull the whole thing off. Oh, yeah. That's fine.
Speaker 1:So it's this little stick pack like like liquid IV, like the one that you were having, Elementi, but it has creatine in there, five grams of creatine in there. And and normally, I'm used to drinking the sand, the creatine sand, and this is fantastic. It's so it's so delicious. Yes. You can just shoot it back if you want to be the boldest elf in the in in Santa's workshop.
Speaker 2:And just texted wrist check the elf. Wrist check the elf.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious. Anyway, back to Liquid IV world. In a fireside chat with JPMorgan, the Unilever CEO revealed that both Nutrafol and Liquid IV have entered the billion dollar brand club. I don't know if you wanna ring the bell.
Speaker 2:Go for it. I'll take the next one. Enter the billion dollar brand club. Great execution from Unilever. Sometimes when they announce these acquisitions, it sounds a little crazy.
Speaker 2:They pay a lot, but Yeah. They know how to scale. They have the distribution. Yeah. They are soft circling 1 and a half billion euros per year for m and a.
Speaker 2:I was thrilled to see this. I have a lot of friends with CPG businesses that are starting to get to a scale where Yeah. They are prime targets. And I am I'm just very excited for them.
Speaker 1:So LiquidIV, they bought it when it was doing a 120, and now it's doing over 1,000,000,000. What a good run. Do we know what they paid for LiquidIV back in the day? How much actually how much did that deal cost them? That would be interesting.
Speaker 1:Because but but I mean, it just it is it is a it is a testament to the CPG founders
Speaker 2:500,000,000.
Speaker 1:500,000,000, and now they're making 1,000,000,000 a year in revenue. I mean, I don't know that they're 50% net margins. High margin. I would think it's high margin. And so imagine, you sell for 500.
Speaker 1:You're you're the founder of this of this company. You're doing $1.20. You sell for 500, and you're like, this is amazing. I have a $120,000,000 business. But then five years later, they're making 500.
Speaker 1:What they paid for you in that one year, they're making that every year for as long as the brand's around. So don't underestimate just compounding at scale with these businesses. Get what you deserve. Don't don't take No.
Speaker 2:I think I think liquid death will be a good case study there because they certainly would have had opportunities to sell. Totally. They raised a huge amount of money. Yeah. And they've kinda probably took them out.
Speaker 1:And there were a lot people saying, oh, it's overvalued now. But, you know, if you just keep compounding
Speaker 2:Let Mike
Speaker 1:cut. More, I I completely agree. Just like like, there's no one else that's really going after that particular brand positioning. You let it compound, it becomes this unique thing. It becomes Lindy, basically.
Speaker 1:And whenever we talk about CBD
Speaker 2:Speaking of compounding What's compounding? Anne over at Forbes says, beloved productivity app Notion told employees today is doing a $300,000,000 tender Let's go. At an $11,000,000,000 valuation. The company crossed 600,000,000 ARR, half of which comes from AI. That is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Watch out for more Notion rounds slash an IPO. Expect that they will get out in in, god willing, in the year 2026. Yeah. But we'll see. We'll see.
Speaker 2:They are on on a tear. Notion was a $2,000,000 seed according to Jason to 11,000,000,000 in twelve years.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Great case study of growing into your valuation. Jason says Amazing. 2013, $2,000,000 seed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you scroll down on this on this this chart, you can see a huge jump in valuation, and it takes them a while to catch
Speaker 2:up on the journey. So they 2013, they had a $2,000,000 seed. 2019, they had 3,000,000 of ARR, and they got to an $800,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:2020, they're at 13,000,000 of ARR to a $2,000,000,000 valuation. 2021, 31,000,000 of ARR to a $2,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:Crazy because, I mean, if this number's right, they they they basically triple revenue, not even triple revenue, and they and they see their multiple double. Their multiple doubles from a 150 next to 300
Speaker 2:But then from 2021, they grew they grew revenue from 31,000,000 to 600,000,000, and the valuation went up 10%.
Speaker 1:And it was the correct. Yeah. It was the correct yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Eventually caught caught up. Wow. What what
Speaker 2:what what execution. Obviously, the the leases in 2021 Congrats. Are not getting an insane
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:IRR on that. But But job's not job's not finished. Finish. And snoring is
Speaker 1:not over.
Speaker 2:You're in the green.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What yeah. What a what a remarkable revenue ramp.
Speaker 2:So yeah. I think of
Speaker 1:those paying for it, there's
Speaker 2:Says ahead. Of the brick going up. We've we've missed saying that.
Speaker 1:Should've we should've hit him with the bricks. But it was good chatting with him. So, yeah, as we know, Databricks raised us
Speaker 2:Brandon serious Balos says this is crazy. The Lululemon leggings to oil ratio just hit a new high. You can now buy two barrels of oil for every one pair of Lululemon.
Speaker 1:What are we talking about?
Speaker 2:Like, this is one of the most important economic metrics in the world, John, obviously.
Speaker 1:What? This
Speaker 2:says so much about the state of of of markets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hilarious. Also, it it is making me feel like Lululemon leggings are made from oil.
Speaker 2:Well, I
Speaker 1:think they are. Right?
Speaker 2:Isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like petroleum based polyester or something. I
Speaker 7:don't know.
Speaker 2:Yes. There's some My understanding, yes. DJ Parker Maybe
Speaker 1:this is fake news.
Speaker 2:Posted this
Speaker 1:This is so good.
Speaker 2:Before there was TBPN.
Speaker 1:Look at him on Fox Business.
Speaker 2:It's funny because this headline is crazy. The CVS killer, he looks kinda like the guy that would kill someone in a CVS. Is this
Speaker 1:CVS killer? Did they ever find the real one? Or did did did he ever got brought did he ever get brought in for questioning?
Speaker 2:He does. I'm gonna say I'm gonna say he he looks more like a young Santa Claus.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Kind of That's a much nicer thing to say.
Speaker 2:I take it I take it back.
Speaker 1:But wow. Countdown to the closing bell. In three minutes, he hops on CBS killer. And I don't know. He didn't quite kill CBS, but what a fantastic run with PillPack.
Speaker 1:Absolutely legendary business. And he's already on to the next one at general medicine. So it's it's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Singer Vehicles just put up a minute 22
Speaker 1:is huge news. This is the biggest news in technology these days, I think. So Laguna Seca, the legendary racetrack in California. This is an American hypercar.
Speaker 2:So the Production car lap record.
Speaker 1:The story here is that the the story here is that Koenigsegg set the lap record just a few weeks ago, and Lucas Singer took it personally. And he said, I'm gonna go and put up a better time, and he did. But this car is insane. So it it has it's a two seater, but they're both centered. So it's like a fighter jet.
Speaker 1:I don't know I don't know why everyone's lying.
Speaker 2:Like That's a very cool that's a very cool setup.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so you sit you sit like this one after the other, and the doors we need to pull up a picture of
Speaker 2:Why are you guys
Speaker 7:laughing? Doors on this? Fire. I've never heard
Speaker 1:of anything like that. I've never heard that before. If you go to four seconds on this on this main video, the Laguna Seca video here on x, you can see the door. So the door yeah. The doors are two two doors long because you need to let two people in.
Speaker 1:So when you open the gold bar
Speaker 2:And I'm sure they're planning to let it fly at
Speaker 3:some point.
Speaker 1:It's yeah. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Part of that, it's ready they they they have a secret feature Yeah. Trying to beat Elon to the flying car like he was alluding on on Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1:So there so there has been a recent hypercar war at Laguna. This is specifically for the production car record. Zinger, Zinger just took it by two seconds. So on in August 2024, Koenigsegg strikes. Koenigsegg brought the Jesko attack to Laguna Seca for the first time.
Speaker 1:They got a one twenty four eighty six, beating the previous long standing benchmark held by the Singer 12, 21 c and the McLaren Senna at one twenty five, one twenty, and one twenty seven. So Singer had it at one twenty five. Then Koenigsegg shows up with a Jesko attack, gets it at one twenty four. Then, then they come back, lowered the speed record. There was this new there was this new, you there's a new noise limit at Laguna Seco.
Speaker 1:Your car cannot make more than 90 decibels of noise from the exhaust. I assume Brian Johnson had something to do with this. But you have to bolt on a special exhaust so you're not too loud while you're going on going on the track, and, of course, that affects track performance. And so, they reset the record, and Koenigsegg comes back. They have a specific Jesko attack for this new Laguna restriction.
Speaker 1:They get a one twenty four, and then Singer comes back on December 9, just weeks after their Koenigseggs November run. Singer returns with their three d printed hybrid 21 c. Driver, Joel Miller, runs a blistering one twenty two. And so
Speaker 2:And put into context, the nine nine two, g t three RS is doing it at one twenty eight six five.
Speaker 1:So It's basically slug. Basically walking. Basically walking speed.
Speaker 2:Walking speed. Well Congrats to Lucas Singer. Is almost unbelievable. I for me to believe that it's real, he's gonna have to drive it into the
Speaker 1:I I think he is. He wants us to believe that this was built by humans. I I don't it seems like alien technology probably.
Speaker 2:Make it make sense. Make it make sense.
Speaker 1:No. It's a beautiful beautiful vehicle.
Speaker 2:Anyway Anyways, final final
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Host of the show.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:We posted this yesterday as well, but future was named friend of the house by Louis Vuitton for embodying its values. And Louis Pisano says, and what values would those be?
Speaker 1:I don't I don't I don't know enough about Louis Vuitton to understand what this means.
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny. Do you know about Future's values? No. Have you ever you haven't listened to a Future song?
Speaker 1:I I just know no. I I really don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think his primary value is is getting getting the bag.
Speaker 1:Getting the bag.
Speaker 2:And so that's kind of how I
Speaker 1:Well, they make bags.
Speaker 2:Other you know, he he has, I think Yeah. A lot of a lot of children with a lot of different women.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, think
Speaker 1:Getting the bag.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's I don't know if that's one of Louis Vuitton's We values. But
Speaker 1:were talking about a friend, he was saying, like, the whole goal, we're in the getting the bag business. Everyone wants to get their bag, get the bag, secure the bag. And I thought that, you know, that that is a good goal. But there is an alternative, which is to secure a series of smaller bags every two weeks
Speaker 2:Every two weeks.
Speaker 1:Paid directly to
Speaker 2:Like a bag that you
Speaker 1:have on your bank account. Yes. Exactly. So you're getting a series of small bags that then compound over time. You throw them in a large sack like your Santa Claus in the no one talks about getting the sack.
Speaker 1:No one talks about getting the bag. No one talks about getting the Santa Claus sack. But you have to get the bag. You get a small you get a series of small bags and over a life over a lifetime, you accumulate a bag that gets larger and larger until you have the real
Speaker 4:bag.
Speaker 2:Well, here's another post about life from Kulte Bra. I know I said it was the last one, but I I take it back. Kulte Bra says a fantastic poster over the years. He says, you can just do things. Go from Olympic snowboarder to head of cartel, $50,000,000 reward from FBI on your head.
Speaker 2:Life is short. Let it rip.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Do not let it rip. I do not recommend becoming the head of a cartel. That is is insane. But of course, this is a Maybe very wild
Speaker 2:become, you know, maybe become the the head of a $50,000,000 annual revenue business in a in a sort of legal domain.
Speaker 1:Maybe an enterprise software.
Speaker 2:Enterprise software, SaaS.
Speaker 1:Maybe a database.
Speaker 2:Let Life is short. Go from an Olympic snowboarder to a SaaS icon. Let it rip. Yep. Life is short.
Speaker 2:And we'll leave it at that. We'll leave it at We we are actually going
Speaker 1:Breaking news from Tyler.
Speaker 2:What what we got?
Speaker 7:News if you want. Opening, I got rid of their, model router for for free users. I thought that was pretty Woah.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? Wait. They got rid of it for free users?
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you like getting rid of in e o.
Speaker 1:It is always there for is it the model picker or the model router?
Speaker 6:Is it
Speaker 1:always on auto, or or can you still or do you have to pick thinking pro legacy models? Like, how do you pick the model?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I think it's the the routers. That means the picker is still there, but it doesn't automatically do it for you.
Speaker 1:It just defaults to fast or the basic model?
Speaker 7:I don't know which one. Mean, I'm
Speaker 1:not Unless you
Speaker 7:But I I would imagine that, like, if I was thinking through it, like, I I would I would think it would be the opposite. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 7:Because as a pro user, I want to
Speaker 1:Do pro all the time. Yeah. I wanna You wanna get what you paid for. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You wanna get what you paid for, but the free user Yeah. Who you
Speaker 7:think is like the unsophisticated person that you know which one to to use.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Well, we'll have to dig in. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Merry Christmas to everyone.
Speaker 2:Tracy says cartels only get a bad rep because they don't have a head storyteller. I feel like somebody I feel like Escobar was low key an incredible storyteller.
Speaker 1:I don't think so. I think people told stories about him. I don't think he was doing
Speaker 2:anything
Speaker 1:He
Speaker 2:was in politics.
Speaker 1:Oh, maybe. Okay. Well, we'll get to the bottom of that.
Speaker 2:He was a politician.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day. Merry Christmas.
Speaker 4:Thanks for
Speaker 2:hanging out with us today. We will see
Speaker 1:you tomorrow feels like a Friday. It does. When you put on the Santa suit.
Speaker 2:It does feel like a Friday. We are going go karting. We are we're doing a little end of year team outing. We're going go karting as a as a team. As a
Speaker 1:team, which should be fun.
Speaker 2:Very excited for that. Well We will see you guys
Speaker 1:tomorrow. Tomorrow. Thank you. Goodbye.