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The most profitable podcast in the world.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Have I told you about Coogan's Law?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:You have? Of course. I've told you about this? It's
Speaker 2:I mean, you see it everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Once you once you know of it Yeah. You can't help but notice
Speaker 1:it. I mean, there's a number of these laws that people, you know, repeat in tech. Metcalfe's law or, you know, what's that one? Anything that can go wrong will.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:You know, those or, Moore's Law, the rate of computing is doubled. They're not true scientific laws in the sense that they came out of scientific papers, but they're axioms that define
Speaker 2:a way.
Speaker 1:What's that one?
Speaker 2:Anything's backed by social capital will drop 90%.
Speaker 1:So Coogan's law is the value of a coined phrase is proportional to the square of the amount of algorithmically consumed content. Basically, my prediction here is that coining phrases like laws is going to increase in value as feeds and just the overall consumption of content becomes more algorithm, algorithmically compressed. So as we move to tweets and TikToks and short form, you need to be coining phrases at, like, an increasing rate. And if you look at who's really popular in tech, they've almost all coined phrases, you know, like, it's time to build American dynamism. Software is eating the world.
Speaker 1:There's so many of these. Balaji has the network state. Lulu has going direct. I don't even know. I talked to Lulu and she said that going direct was not her phrase, but she, like, took it to a whole another level.
Speaker 1:Lindy man, same thing. He didn't come up with that concept, but he, like He's a Lindy man. Yeah. But he, like, dominates it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so finding a a really key pithy phrase that you can build your whole brand around, super key and going to be increasingly valuable. If you look back to,
Speaker 3:like, the great books, like,
Speaker 1:you know, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, like, those guys didn't need to compress their ideas down into pithy phrases. No one talks about, you know, like, Shakespeare's law. You know, you just read all of Shakespeare because you that was the only thing that was they weren't competing with tweets. But now you're competing with tweets. And so you need to really, you know, compress everything down.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, Coogan's logic is a reference to that.
Speaker 2:Right. There's a guy, Zach. I think I'm gonna butcher his last name, Pogrob, who his whole his word is obsession.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so he's just constantly every, you know, 50% of anything he ever talks about ties back to obsession somehow. Yeah. Yeah. And part of his cult of obsession is pick a word or a phrase Yep. That you just become one with Yep.
Speaker 2:And Then you just repeat it over and over and over and over.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it works because I don't even know the guy. I have some mutual friends. Yep. But I'm bringing it up right now in the context of all these other phrases that are, you know, have become popularized in different ways. And it's just because every again, almost every single time he's saying anything, it comes back to obsession.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Which is just his, like, rallying cry. So
Speaker 1:I have a group of buddies who are, like, in the content world, and they all have these they call them razors, you know, like, Occam's razor. Right. This guy, George Mac, has Mac's content razor, which is only create content that you would consume yourself, which is good. But it's also kind of silly that he even needs to coin a phrase. Right?
Speaker 1:But it works really well because it sticks in your mind and it's this whole, like, just compressing a big idea down. Paul Graham, founder mode.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a lot that was said about that, but it sticks in your mind. It's like, okay. Well, whatever that is, whatever makes successful founders, we're calling that founder mode now. Yeah. And there's a phrase for that.
Speaker 1:And that was that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Clearly there was a gap in the vernacular, in text vernacular where we needed a word for, like, what is the Steve Jobs, Elon, Brian Chesky mentality? Yeah. The founder mode just slotted in there. So it's kind of
Speaker 2:Founder mode for us is listening to our own podcast Yes. Because you've already had the conversation.
Speaker 1:Ideally on vinyl, which will be coming soon. So Soon. If you're not subscribed, subscribe, and then you'll be the first to know when the vinyl The
Speaker 2:vinyl hits. Drops. Yeah. Yeah. It's good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a different experience. The tonality, the analog nature of it, it almost it's the closest thing for us to feel like we're back closest thing for us to feel like we're back in the room where the recording happened. Right. Sitting at this wooden wooden desk Yeah.
Speaker 2:Feeling the energy from the the crystal ball.
Speaker 1:What did our what did our one fan describe it as? A rustic feel?
Speaker 2:A rustic analog.
Speaker 1:Because you hear the you hear the people shuffling.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We That's a rustic audio.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's organic. Organic. It's all natural.
Speaker 1:It's a Yeah. It's a return to tradition. Right. It's good. Should we go into the top story of
Speaker 2:today? It's hard to hard to follow Coogan's law, but
Speaker 1:Well well, next time we need Jordy's law. Right. So we're gonna come up with that. And then we're gonna be coining a lot more phrases and you're gonna hear them. We're gonna try them on here and you'll hear them here
Speaker 2:first. Yeah. Yeah. That that's a whole new segment of the show is is new Just
Speaker 1:coining phrases.
Speaker 2:We're tracking phrases and laws. We could have we could have a chart that was just, like, you know, going long and short on these different phrases.
Speaker 1:I mean, in in some ways, it's extremely silly to just think that, like, oh, okay. You've you have some idea. You've written it out. Like, maybe you've actually put a lot of thought into something and realized something Taste
Speaker 2:was the other one. Yeah. Somebody came out and wrote a piece on taste Yeah. In terms of startups, and it's, like, okay. Does that really need to be said?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's But it's it's controversial. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:In some ways it does. Yeah. And and, yeah, I I think a lot of people do forget about, like, the importance of, like, compressing it down in something that can be viral.
Speaker 2:It's it's, like, it's it's a meet. There are always memes. Exactly. Right? It's time to build.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Solana is really good at that.
Speaker 2:Founder mode.
Speaker 1:Moon should be a state.
Speaker 2:Moon should be a state.
Speaker 1:That phrase is is so much bigger than that. It's talking about
Speaker 2:Solana's law would be how many times people call you a billionaire in a
Speaker 3:there. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's something there.
Speaker 2:It's like if people are if people are getting angry at you and calling you a billionaire
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You probably are just a capitalist.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:It really is clear that, like, he's he's particularly good at just these these pithy phrases because every, when he writes a piece, the titles are always really good.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, I mean, he had one that was, like, moral inversion. Just this idea that
Speaker 2:In another life, he was a journalist. Yeah. If he wasn't a billionaire, he would have been a journalist.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And then, but now he's doing with the daily. The I don't know if you're subscribed to that, but
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sends 3 takes, 3 morning takes. And each one of them has, like, some sort of clever, you know, pun or, you know, headline. And I'm, like, how do you come up with these? Because it's really hard. But I guess, you know, they can
Speaker 3:be muscle.
Speaker 1:You can be really good.
Speaker 2:There could be some real alpha and us just ripping all the takes from him.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Just, like,
Speaker 2:just going back through the daily and repeating them as original thoughts. Yeah. And just and focusing more more on the algo.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just trying
Speaker 2:to grow faster and
Speaker 3:bigger. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then he'll be trying to plan his takes out to be, like, okay. Well, I can't do the daily anymore. I've got to drop it the the morning that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:After they record.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I mean, as long as that's as long as that's more profitable, then I'm I'm down.
Speaker 2:I, there's a topic that we have to cover. I'll I'll actually wait. It's we can put it in the reaction section.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But I just got an email, that was from this guy, Eric Newcomer, who's a journalist. And he says the the subject of the email is new is reflections on newcomer 4 years in.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the preview line is new newcomer is on track to generate more than 1,000,000 in profit on more than 2,000,000 in revenue this year. Pretty good. Which is fantastic. Yeah. And, it just shows that that, he's living every every journalist's dream, which is to be rich.
Speaker 2:Yes. But but, instead of being, you know, just rich and successful, they choose to, attack and try to tear down the sort of, like, crabs in a bucket phenomena. Yeah. Yeah. Crabs in a bucket for
Speaker 1:Well, he's a Harvard guy. He's he's buddies with, Max Child. You know this guy who runs this, AI startup. He's he's a little more in tech than most people think.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and he knows who he knows who bread it who butters his bread because he's got the events business, a lot of sponsors at Cerebral Valley.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:He's bringing in the big bucks. He's not gonna be right in hit pieces for very much long.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think yeah. Yeah. Eventually eventually, you just gotta
Speaker 1:turn pieces aren't gonna get you
Speaker 2:Going to profiles.
Speaker 1:To to, Lake Como.
Speaker 2:There you go. No one no one You need to be a peer. You need to be a peer. Exactly. You don't become a peer by writing hit pieces.
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 2:You become a peer by generating
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, huge, you know No one's no one's inviting Taylor Lorenz to Saint Tropez. Right? Right. Like, she's not going
Speaker 2:to Saint Moritz. She's climbing in through the through the
Speaker 3:HVAC system.
Speaker 2:She's, like, she's in the she's in, Hotel Du Cap Ducat or whatever, in the HVAC system because it's it's 82 degrees
Speaker 3:in there. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyways, we need to get into the story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The top story we we gotta talk about Stripe acquiring bridge for over $1,000,000,000. Are you big in crypto? I'm, like, generally a believer. I like Bitcoin, but I'm not really deep in any of
Speaker 2:And we like bubbles and speculation.
Speaker 1:I do. I do.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:I was thinking about, like, why do we need to talk about this? And I think the real reason is just that, you know, whenever one of these Here's $1,000,000,000 acquisitions happens, like,
Speaker 3:the
Speaker 1:there's a new class of wealthy individuals who are on the scene. And, like, these founders, they're gonna be the ones you're bidding bidding against at Christie's. They're gonna be the ones, like, if you're fighting for a new allocation in the Ferrari f 80, like, you're gonna be going up against this guy, so you gotta know who he is. So we should do a little a little overview of of Zac Abrahams and and Bridge just to kinda set the set the story because it's a pretty it's a pretty fascinating journey to get to this $1,000,000,000 outcome. So Zac grew up in North Carolina, attends Duke, and he he's only done one podcast.
Speaker 1:I I I searched all over the place. I could only find 1, like, 20 minute podcast that he did, but it was really great. And he talks about when he was a duke, his dream. It might
Speaker 2:be Abrams law.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Number of podcasts
Speaker 2:you do is in inversely correlated with enterprise value.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The dude is clearly actually working and building stuff, not just stroking his own ego. But, he he said that while he was at Duke, his his life's goal and his dream was to become operating partner in private equity.
Speaker 2:Amazing. I love it.
Speaker 1:And he and he achieved it immediately. He goes to this private equity firm, and he focuses on, like, opening and closing factories for this auto parts business that they bought.
Speaker 2:A real PE guy is closing stuff.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So he's, like, 24, and he's, like, shutting down manufacturing plants, opening up new manufacturing plants. And it's, like, a beast of a time because it's post recession.
Speaker 1:I think it's, like, 2,009. And, it's the auto parts business. Like, no one's buying new cars and stuff. It's just, like, really rough. But then 2010, he realizes that, like, okay.
Speaker 1:I want something different. There's a startup scene out in Silicon Valley. He moves out there. He starts a Fintech company called Evenly, and he sells to Square pretty quickly after a year and a half. And so this is he gets into Square pre IPO, pre Cash App, pre a lot of the crypto stuff and kinda sees that start growing.
Speaker 1:So he's a product manager at Square, works there for a few years, goes to Coinbase where he leads the consumer business. And what's funny is that I I didn't fully fact check this, but he's his cofounder at Bridge is Sean Yu, who I believe was also his cofounder at Evenly Yeah. And also worked with him at Coinbase and also worked with him at Brax.
Speaker 2:So I think we would one of those this is, like this is this the story is fantastic because it completely justifies VC's pattern matching.
Speaker 3:Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's like, okay. Finance background. So has, like, extreme work ethic, understands how business works.
Speaker 2:Yep. Starts a company, sells to Square, probably wasn't like an amazing outcome, but, you know, stays on with his cofounder, learns the game, is at a hyperscaler Yep. Goes goes and works at Coinbase. Another hyperscaler goes and is at Brex early, another hyperscaler with his with his original cofounder the whole time and then starts a new company and raises it 40 pre Yep. Which probably felt, like, really expensive for a lot of people, but they're, like, hey, he was sold his last company to Square.
Speaker 2:He's with his original cofounder. And so the pattern matching is extreme all the way through.
Speaker 1:Not technically hyperscalers, by the the way. That term's reserved for, the big tech companies that are building, like, massive
Speaker 2:Right. Right. Sorry. Sorry. Growth.
Speaker 2:Scale ups.
Speaker 1:Scale ups. Scale ups.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:and in the financial world. Yeah. It's he never, like, went off and did something Yeah.
Speaker 2:Random. Yeah. So when he and and and, you
Speaker 3:know, he's now he's not, like,
Speaker 2:he wasn't he wasn't FOMO ing
Speaker 1:into Fintech.
Speaker 2:Exactly. He started in Fintech in 2010. Yeah. Right? So he's, like, a decade and a half into his career when he's really building bridge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think here's the reason that this story is important
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is this is the only major liquidity event that I can think of in crypto that wasn't token oriented.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, can you think of another have a token. And no. They definitely didn't have a token.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because they didn't need it.
Speaker 1:It's all just infrastructure.
Speaker 2:And but I cannot think of another major outside of Coinbase IPO, can you think of another crypto company that was a 8, you know, sorry, 10 figure, acquisition? It's just you can't think of one. They're all
Speaker 1:A similar business would be like Chainalysis. Right? But I don't know if they've sold or Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, like,
Speaker 1:that's a company that doesn't have a token. They just do the research. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 1:think they're doing very well. Right. But again No. But to your point, not not a liquidity.
Speaker 2:This is like the Instagram moment. Yep. Yep. Yep. Of and and and the funny thing is this will inspire in an entire massive wave of new crypto infrastructure investing.
Speaker 2:It's good timing. I have a a company that's similar to bridge, for Latin America.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That does stable coin infrastructure. They're called Minteo. They're gonna be raising this quarter if you're, if you're listening.
Speaker 1:This is, yeah. Dylan Field posted this about, he's the CEO of Figma. And he said, in 2006, I asked Joey Krug, Joey, what are gonna be the biggest use cases for crypto? He quickly and succinctly answered, speculation, stable coins, and prediction markets. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Meme coins, Stripe's acquisition of bridge and poly market. The world is starting to catch up to Joey. And that's, like, exactly what's happening right now.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:You have pumped up fund, tons of meme coins. Also, just speculation on Bitcoin and ETH is, like, underlying assets. Yeah. But then now we're seeing a lot of infrastructure and stable coins, which makes a lot of sense. It is really hard to refute if you're a crypto skeptic.
Speaker 1:And, and then Poly Market, which is obviously taking over the world right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's it's interesting. So I met Zach in 2022. It was must have been post his initial fundraise Mhmm. Which I think was at 40.
Speaker 1:I think he did 2 2 rounds, like, a series a. Yeah. And I think they raised 53 total, probably 10 on 40 in that first thing. And then I think they probably did, like, 40 mil on a 100 or
Speaker 2:So 200 or something. I met him in the context of we were doing a lot of work with stable coins at party round. Sure. We supported stable coin investing on chain, which was funny at the time because the reason that that what he was doing was important is because we even had deeply crypto native companies that were using our product that didn't want to raise using the stable coin functionality because it was too much of a hassle once you had the stable coins to convert them and all that stuff. So he was solving an important problem.
Speaker 2:I I had already backed a company called Layer 2 that, is doing sort of similar stuff to to bridge, more focused on, like, sort of, like, banking applications. But, they were I thought layer 2 was a good bet at the time. They were powering all of AngelList stable coin infrastructure. Bridge took it in another direction. And when jumped on with Zach, I wasn't, Zach's obviously super smart.
Speaker 2:I should have probably tried to invest at the time, but he wasn't raising. And he basically just mined me for information for, like, the entire 30 minutes. Like, he was just, like, not really to share anything because I think he wasn't didn't know exactly what he was doing yet. So he just used the entire meeting to just, like, you know, just mine, information of how we were thinking about stable coins. And we had a bunch of crypto sort of companies, as customers.
Speaker 2:So, anyway, should have should have, bet big on Zach, at that time, but, didn't really I I don't know. I don't kick myself that much because it wasn't like a fundraising specific meeting.
Speaker 1:It's interesting though.
Speaker 2:But, but, yeah, I think it's I think it's fantastic for crypto at a time when speculation and prediction markets, like you're saying, are getting all the attention to say, like, hey, here's a here's a major liquidity event by the most storied relatively recent Silicon Valley company being Stripe.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Putting it on the map and, like, legitimizing it Yeah. Which is just good because I have a lot of, I personally heavily invested in early stage, crypto and and ultimately, I think that it was always very clear that stable like, nothing has product market fit in crypto like stable coins. Like, if you actually look at like, I think the most it's, USDT is has more revenue on a per employee basis by, like, 10 x than BlackRock
Speaker 1:Woah.
Speaker 2:Which is sounds insane, but I think they have, like, a 100 person team and they're doing 1,000,000,000 of dollars Yeah. Something that makes sense. So I think that, it's very, like, legitimizing and it's just very positive. The only the only thing that was unfortunate about the way the whole announcement went down is that Sequoia didn't really get the credit that they were wanting. And so Sean had to really come out.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The information really snubbed him.
Speaker 2:Snubbed him, felt very personal. Yep. He had to come out and say, hey, we love the series a.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It wasn't Ribbit or Han or, you know, Sean was, like, I don't even know who those funds are. Anyway, so They did issue they they issued a correction.
Speaker 1:Thank God.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Journalism is saved. But it was a dark day for journalism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was rough. It was rough. I've actually used stable coins. I paid a video editor in Argentina.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And because the currency was fluctuating like crazy. Yeah. It was really, really hard. And the fees to get dollars there were crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We Yeah. As Americans, we want USDC, USDT adoption. Yeah. It's good for the dollar.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It just allows us dollar dominance. I had a I was on a I was on a Yeah. I was on a surf trip with 4 Argentinians when I was 18 traveling from Ecuador to Panama, and I was on, like, a 6 month trip at the time. And my Argentinian friends had to cut their trip short by, like, 8 weeks because their currency just got demolished mid trip, and they were sitting obviously in Argentinian pesos.
Speaker 2:And so they're imagine getting their budget, like, slashed, like, by 60%. Wow. You know? So they just literally had to go home. And so yeah.
Speaker 2:Just think it it, I, you know, I pray for the continued dominance of the US dollar as long as we both shall love live, for the sake of our children and their children.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, stable coins are good. You know, stable coins are are are a big catalyst for the dollar.
Speaker 1:It's kind of fascinating. I mean, I I it doesn't seem like anyone's announced, like, bridges revenue or how big they were.
Speaker 2:No. But it, they did it. It was, like, 15,000,000 Yeah. Dollar run rate. So it was, like,
Speaker 1:huge multiple 100. But it seems like they have a massive regulatory moat or or have done a lot
Speaker 2:of work on the Yeah. Yeah. That's what I actually don't, as, you know Yeah. Idea guys, nontechnical folk. I don't know what they built that was so valuable that Stripe couldn't build it themselves and felt like they had to what you don't know is, like, how much of this this is almost like Stripe hedging.
Speaker 2:Like, Stripe's been had a lot of stable coin initiatives internally. They've been trying
Speaker 1:to build. Access. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. They've been trying they've been working on this space for a really long time. So I'm I'm excited for it to come out more of, like, what did they build that was so Yep. Critical that they had to pay a 100 times revenue or whatever they paid.
Speaker 1:Well, this, a non signal wrote on conviction finance. Zach has managed to do the near impossible obtaining solid licenses with the 2 major jurisdictions, the United States and Europe, where they are both permitted to transmit large sums of money and exchange currencies on behalf of users, essentially a ramp. 1 for the Eurozone is located in Poland, the other US Delaware C Corp is located in Berkeley. US C Corp has money transmitter licenses approved in 22 states, and they got more, and they're close to 48 states now. If not, they already have them.
Speaker 1:And so it feels like bridge went out and did all this, like, heavy lifting on the regulatory side to actually get approved. And then they also have very high transfer limits. I guess there are tiers to the money transfer, like like Yeah. You know, approval, levels. And so they did all this hard work.
Speaker 1:And I wonder if that's if that's difficult for Stripe because they're such a big company. Maybe they're like you know, it becomes more of a political issue. The politicians wanna extract more of a pound of flesh or something. Because you would assume that, like, okay, a bigger company would actually have an easier time getting transferred
Speaker 2:like this. It's it's sort of interesting. Stripe knows how important stable coins are to their business long term.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Did they only spend, like, $50,000,000 trying to make this happen? Did they spend a $100,000,000 internally? Did they spend $500,000,000 internally and, like, fail?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? I just don't know why they didn't have the lobbying power. They have the technical prowess and the, like, war chest to have made this happen. And so maybe Zach is, who knows? Maybe maybe Zach, you know, plays, like, oh, I'm a nice guy.
Speaker 2:I don't do podcasts.
Speaker 3:I'm just, you
Speaker 2:know, I just I'm just interested in money. But then behind the scenes, he just was he's just an absolute animal. Right?
Speaker 1:It seems like it.
Speaker 2:Just doing deals with the mafia, Poland. Yeah. He did what
Speaker 1:Getting any of the things in Europe.
Speaker 2:He was on he was in Yeah. He was in Poland on founder mode meeting with the mafia to get this done.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One one thing I was listening to that podcast with him and he he pointed out this very interesting thing that I couldn't quite get to the bottom of was is that there's some sort of, like, legacy ruling in the American banking system where dollars in a bank account need to be demarcated between checking and savings. And I and I'm not exactly sure why. I think it might actually just be to for the measurement of the money supply. I couldn't really get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 1:But, he said that, like, one of the things that the stable coin infrastructure unlocks is the ability to have a yield bearing account that then you can also transact with. So basically, just merging a checking and savings account. And now, like, a crypto skeptic would say, like, well, that's like a stupid technical feature. Like, why can't you just make a, a combined checking and savings account or a a yield bearing checking account? But it's, like, well, there's so much cruft in the legal system around the American Financial System.
Speaker 3:So But
Speaker 1:it's, like, maybe, yeah, you do just need to, like, have some sort of greenfield fresh start and that's enough. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So our capital, we had, we had a high yield checking account,
Speaker 3:so
Speaker 2:it's not that. Mhmm. It is a good I mean, I I think the there's so much, platform and infrastructure risk and all this stuff. Right? Like, one of the reasons that they maybe had to buy bridge, I'm just speculating, is that Stripe's existing bank partners had no interest in taking on that level of risk.
Speaker 2:Right? We, at Capital, we were rolling out a stable coin custody product when we were informed by our bank partner that we we were gonna have to jettison a lot of our digital asset oriented customers.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so our entire product strategy, like, fell apart because we couldn't do the thing that our customers wanted. And in fact, had to be like, hey, you guys should, like, leave, basically. Yeah. So there's so much, that that is I feel like the whole bridge story is such a good example of risk taking. Right?
Speaker 2:There's so much that Bridge was trying to do that when they started was unclear if it was even gonna be possible. And so, oftentimes, opportunities like that attract unsophisticated founders that
Speaker 3:don't know what they're getting themselves into.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And then, unsophisticated founders that don't know what they're getting themselves into.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then founders that are sophisticated and already successful and comfortable with the risk. Right? Yeah. Because a lot of people would have said, like, oh, what you're trying to do is you're gonna get destroyed by Stripe, or you're gonna get destroyed by Block and Square, or or, oh, what you're trying to do, like, no banks gonna allow that, or you're never gonna get money transmitter licenses, or whatever the things that there there would have been a lot of ways to to if you're writing an investment memo on the business, be like, what could go wrong here? And Zach, I'm sure was totally aware of all of those risks and still comfortable with it.
Speaker 2:And it shows that it shows that there's so much alpha and just being okay with the fact that you're taking on a regular you're taking on a lot of regulatory risk. You're taking on a lot of platform risk, and you need to just that's part of what creates these sort of exponential opportunities.
Speaker 1:Do you think they'll ever be a stable coin depegging? In the sense that, like, normally when a stable coin depegs, it's like a disaster because it means that, like, it's been discovered that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That they don't actually hold the assets. But I wonder if in the future, stable coins become so popular that they be they essentially become global
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Super valuable. And then the the US the the Fed is, like, printing too many dollars, and the dollars become inflationary. And Yep. The and just like the dollar went off the gold standard, imagine if, like, the imagine if USDC or USDT DT become so big that they say, you know what? We're we're no longer backed by the dollar because we are more stable than the dollar.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right now, they're using Yeah. I mean, that's it. That's that's been the stability.
Speaker 2:So that's been a huge critique of of, so Coinbase has always taken the approach
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That, that everything like, they they've taken a very transparent approach.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tether, I don't think has ever come close to the same level of transparency. Yeah. There's Yeah. There's always And there's there's a huge amount of, you know, saying Tether USDT can say, oh, yeah. We're a stable coin.
Speaker 2:But what if but it's a private company and what if they've just been they could have been giving themselves for every dollar, you know, dollar that they take in and and sort of minting a new stable coin. What if 30% of the time they were, like, we're just gonna take, you know, I I don't know. Right? Like, you just don't really know what's going on, and that's why their their USDT depegged during the whole FTX saga. There was, like, a lot of people Very minor It was depegging.
Speaker 2:Which was, like, off by Yeah.
Speaker 1:30% one day. Everyone's, like,
Speaker 2:okay, this is the end. Yeah. And so I think that, there will undoubtedly be a time in the future where a major stable coin, like, blows up. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Because part of part of crypto by saying, hey, decentralized finance, which is another way of saying unregulated finance or, like, digital, you know, crypto based finance. The whole thing has just been speed running why we have all these financial regulations in the first place. Right? So if you allow anybody if you allow a global team of anons to start creating financial products, yeah, you're gonna similar things are gonna happen to the Wild West of America when, like, 10 dudes were, like, yeah. Let's create a bank.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, and this is, like, the cattle bank and Yeah. You know, whatever. And they just are they're just freestyling, you know, finance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the bull case here is that is that it's, like, yes, they are speed running, Like, let's regulate financial products for the first time. But just by virtue of the fact that they are not immediately slotted into the existing regulatory scheme
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:You're able to take a second crack at creating more effective regulations that make more sense and allow for speed and transparency or whatever. And you're just it's just like, you know, it's the same thing as the people that wanna, like, go and build a new country just because there's, like, so much legal because every year in America, we're adding, like, 10 times the amount of laws that we're deleting. Right? Yeah. So the amount of laws is just growing, growing, growing.
Speaker 1:That slows down innovation. That slows down the the financial sector. And so it's, like, yeah. It is the Wild West. It is really bad while it's completely unregulated.
Speaker 1:But there's a really bullish case for whatever regulation comes, it's just gonna be a little bit more fresh and a little bit more from first principles and hopefully a little more permissive and and just informed by the the the wins and losses of the last, you know, few decades in the traditional finance system.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. The other thing that's interesting about the whole thing is that Stripe was willing to pay 20% of what people believe Circle's eventual IPO will be. So people are projecting Circle IPO at at something like a $5,000,000,000 valuation. Circle what let's look at what their market cap is right now. But I've You
Speaker 1:mean for the stable coin market cap? Because that's just the value of all the stable coins?
Speaker 2:Yeah. But they generate
Speaker 1:really high and then they get a percentage on that as their market cap.
Speaker 2:You can you can buy USDC for 99¢ right
Speaker 1:now. Deep pegged.
Speaker 2:It's the end. Pegging.
Speaker 1:It's game over.
Speaker 2:What is the so the market cap is 34,000,000,000 dollars right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's for all the stable coins.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the reason that that's substantial is it means that Circle is has taken on $34,000,000,000 and is earning interest yield on that, which right now is somewhere around 5%. And they're giving a lot of that back as incentives, but it's still very, very profitable business. Yeah. So anyways, something that Zach and the Bridge team did resulted in it being their $15,000,000 company being worth a $1,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:And we'll find it out over time, I imagine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's certainly
Speaker 2:Stripped, they needed a win.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That wasn't speculation. Yeah. It's not enough to be it's not even though pump dot fund, who knows what the enterprise value of a business like that is. Right? Because it feels like very like, it's on the most shaky regulatory ground possible.
Speaker 2:But they're doing, I think, like, 100,000,000 a year in fees. Right? So that's a massive win from a revenues generation standpoint. But what is that company worth? So I think standpoint.
Speaker 2:But what is that company worth? So I think crypto needed a win, and it certainly, got one.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's it feels like this year, there's been 3 major wins across all three of those. Speculation wise, Bitcoin is near all time highs, like, in terms of the digital gold thesis. Like, it's very, very solid. And so this whole, you know, fear that was being sowed by the crypto skeptics was correct around some of the bubbly NFTs. But clearly it was wrong about Bitcoin because it's had much more staying power than those folks predicted.
Speaker 1:Right? They like, everyone was predicting that Bitcoin, once it's sold off from 65 at the height or I think it was, like, 70 for a little bit during the peak down to, like, it was in the thirties and maybe even high twenties at one point. Well, it's back up. And if it keeps if it keeps going up and down, like, yeah, it's it's volatile, but it's here to stay in one way or another. And then you have poly market, like, absolutely dominating, like, the new cycle and providing some sort of insight and and, you know, some some value that's, like, much more.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there's the there's the gambler aspect to it, but there's also just, like, the, like, the normie value of, like, of, like, people want to look at a percentage of who's gonna win the presidential election. That has value. People will pay for that. People and that that seems like something that's more fundamental and more easy to value than, like, what is an art piece worth.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Like, if you're a business or a hedge fund or something and you think that the the the there's gonna be some economic impact to, a Trump election versus a versus a Harris. I wonder Like, having that data is valuable.
Speaker 2:I wonder if this is available to see on chain, but what percentage of poly markets bets are on the election versus anything else? Like, it must be, like, 98%.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's 98%, but it's it's certainly high. There's, like a $1,000,000,000 of liquidity in the in the election right now. I I asked Shane, like, what does he think the next, the next biggest market will be after the election? And, I I think they have some pretty exciting things planned. They they I don't believe they use, bridge, but they do use stable coins on the background on in in the back end.
Speaker 1:But they're a very crypto native company, so they were able to implement that. And Zach's been in or or, Shane's been in crypto for years in the Ethereum community.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But for so many other companies, using stable coins is a huge hassle. I mean, you don't wanna roll your own infrastructure there. Like Yeah. With my first business, we took we we accepted bitcoin payments through Coinbase in 2013. And it was a mess.
Speaker 1:It was a disaster. I I think I mean, we lost, like, $10,000,000 because we sold it too early. We should have held it.
Speaker 3:Damn.
Speaker 1:And then, also, it was just like a nightmare from from an accounting perspective because you basically are operating in foreign currencies and you have to reconcile those. Your balance sheet's, like, fluctuating left and right. And so you wind up accepting them. And then for anyone who has a product with any sort of return policy, you wind up acting as as a hedge. Right?
Speaker 1:Because, like, let's say that you're selling
Speaker 2:I'll take that bitcoin back.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Let's say you're selling some microphones for $500. You buy 10 microphones for bitcoin. You have $5,000 in mics. If the price goes down, you just sell those microphones,
Speaker 3:for
Speaker 1:and get your cash back at dollars. But if the price goes up, you return the microphones and you get and you get the bitcoin back.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin back.
Speaker 1:And so you wind up in this weird scenario where, like, if the price is going up, you you tell the customers, well, okay, we will refund you in the currency that you gave us or if it's going down. So you're always, like, playing this weird game of, like, what do I give back to the customer? Because you act as a hedge. So, it it's just really, really difficult. But, obviously, if you can just plug stable coins in, it makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:And that's what's happening. That's actually the big win.
Speaker 2:What if it comes out that Stripe paid a 1,000,000,000 because Zach had taken his entire 50,000,000 dollar round from Sequoia. It's gone super long on Bitcoin, and then he's sitting on, like,
Speaker 1:so the company actually got bought
Speaker 2:for a $100,000,000, but then there's a $1,000,000,000. And it's like Sequoia is, like, you know what? We made this bet once with SPF. It didn't work, and you fucking did.
Speaker 1:You know, I I was wait you you know the famous story about the FedEx founder?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the the FedEx founder is down to his last dollar. The company is about to go out of business. Famously, he to Vegas, puts all the company's assets on black. He comes up black. He doubles his money.
Speaker 1:He's able to make payroll. The business keeps growing. Now, the the conspiracy theory is that it wasn't he didn't go to a casino. He went to, like, a loan shark in Vegas or, like, the mafia.
Speaker 2:Right. No. The real Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ben, where's my tinfoil hat?
Speaker 1:Is that is the water in the shot for him? Can you just keep it on the side or
Speaker 2:something?
Speaker 3:It'd
Speaker 2:be on brand for me to have water in the shot. Yeah. The whole time. No. So I think the real conspiracy theory is that he was narcotraffic you know, doing, like, trafficking drugs, getting a lot of cash Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he needed a story in terms to say Yeah. Like, all he have would have to do to make a $100 in cash Yeah. Is do, like, one run for the cartel
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then all of a sudden he's got
Speaker 1:Oh, because he's in FedEx. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Because he's in the trucking business.
Speaker 1:Exactly. So you could be, like, okay. I'm just gonna do one
Speaker 2:So if you wanna if you wanna create a
Speaker 1:a Hypothetically. Hypothetically.
Speaker 2:Legendary hypothetically legendary story of how you bet your company on the at in Vegas. Vegas
Speaker 1:like Casino. And you
Speaker 2:suddenly came up with all this cash. Yeah. That's a pretty good way to
Speaker 1:That's that's super fascinating. Yeah. You'd have all the infrastructure to do.
Speaker 2:But it's but, anyways, so Yeah. My tinfoil hat off. But I I I I think that,
Speaker 1:yeah. I was always thinking that during the last crypto boom when everything was just ripping, there was we were gonna hear the story of a company that raised some money, didn't find product market fit, but put their whole treasury in some altcoin and wound up with, like, just a huge treasury. And then maybe they would maybe they would keep building, use that, and then actually make
Speaker 3:a make
Speaker 1:a win and it'd be like, wait a minute. That company came out of, like, stealth. They raised a $1,000,000 seed round, but they have a 1,000 employees or something and they're just launching this product. Like, what happened? It's like, oh, well, yeah, because they turned that million into a 100,000,000 Yeah.
Speaker 1:Essentially gambling. It would be like a FedEx style story. But, everyone I talked to encrypted was like, yeah. There's been people that do that, but then they just ride off in the sunset. They just leave and they don't.
Speaker 1:And they just stop building. They just drop out, which sucks. But, yeah, with this, with with Bridge, the the one really interesting example that I that I did see of, like, a a company using this, and it was a perfect example of of of this was, scale. So they have a bunch of contractors internationally. They wanna pay them quickly in dollars because there's no fluctuation.
Speaker 1:And so they use I think they use a product that's built on top of bridge.
Speaker 2:I love how we say there's no fluctuation of the dollar. Yeah. I mean, it's devalued. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, like,
Speaker 1:relative to a lot of these places, like like, people will be so happy to to get paid in dollars on the day that they work, and that's something that stable coins can can Yeah. Bring. So it it's interesting to watch crypto, like, rack up these, like, very real wins whether it's, like, bitcoin becoming essentially Haters
Speaker 2:will say it's photoshop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Well, haters will focus on the bored apes.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's, like, yeah, that was one thing that didn't work out.
Speaker 2:It was so it was Yuga Labs Yeah. That was our customer that
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:That, didn't use ours when they when they raised with us. They didn't use the stable coin functionality.
Speaker 1:Well, should we move on to brother of the week?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This was a tough one.
Speaker 1:But first, I need to tell you about NetJets. If you're looking for the ultimate in flexibility and convenience when it comes to private travel, NetJets offers an unparalleled experience. With access to the world's largest fleet of private jets, NetJets allows you to enjoy the benefits of private aviation without the hassle of ownership. NetJets operates the largest, most diverse private aircraft fleet in the world and offers a full range of personalized private aviation solutions to meet and exceed the high standards of the world's most discerning travels travelers. Tell a personal story about flying on private jet.
Speaker 1:Do you have a lot of experience in the private jet world?
Speaker 2:Not as much as I'd like, John. I think that, private aviation is the last true luxury. It is. Something that, David Senra set One of his mentors
Speaker 1:told him.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:One of his mentors told him. One of one of David's mentors. The life goal is to get a private jet.
Speaker 3:That's the
Speaker 2:only thing that matters.
Speaker 1:The only thing that matters.
Speaker 2:That's the only thing that matters. Here's the thing. You can sleep in a private jet.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You can't fly a house. Right? So what does that tell you?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Optimize for the jet. Don't optimize for the house. That's true.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm surprised that's not more of a thing. If you think about it, RVs are big. Yep. And and why are people not just saying, you know, I'm gonna get I'm gonna buy this jet or money I'm gonna leverage net jets Yeah. Primarily as a, you know, sort of like this sort of RV in the skies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? There is this interesting thing where people always complain, like, oh,
Speaker 3:we don't have flying cars yet. We don't have flying cars yet.
Speaker 2:We do.
Speaker 1:We do. It's just not evenly distributed yet. We have we have private jets which you can take anywhere, like, it's a flying car, and then we also have helicopters.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you put those 2 together
Speaker 2:I'm surprised that Kind of flying anyway. Yeah. I'm surprised that it hasn't become more popular to develop, you know, something, you know, maybe this is a partnership with NetJets. Right? But developing, you know, a city in Arizona that's way off the beaten path that has consistent air, you know, private air travel between LA or somewhere that's that's a comparable distance to New York.
Speaker 2:Anyways, there's you know, we're we're thrilled, to partner with NetJets as consumers and as a show. And, you know, we we, look forward to many, you know, more trips with them in the future. And,
Speaker 1:yeah. So thanks to them. Should we move on to brother of the week? We gotta give it to Daniel Francis getting doxxed. You might know him as Daniel Johnson.
Speaker 2:DJ.
Speaker 1:Or growing Daniel?
Speaker 2:Growing Daniel.
Speaker 1:Growing Daniel. One of the greatest posters. He, he announced his startup, Abel, this week, And it is an an AI startup for police. And he's based in San Francisco. And he, he launched it in an interesting way.
Speaker 1:I mean, he has over a 100000 followers. Basically, everything he posts goes viral. Like, he's fantastic as shitpostmates. But he chose to launch this in kind of the most normie way possible, just like a TechCrunch article.
Speaker 2:TechCrunch article. But his world was so powerful
Speaker 3:that Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, did he did he do an interview with Gary or something?
Speaker 2:Gary, I think, was just a big investor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So, like like, you know, he could have he could have gone on a podcast. He could have done a launch video. He knows people.
Speaker 1:He could have done all sorts of stuff, but he went with just the TechCrunch article, which is kind hilarious and counter I
Speaker 2:think he might still be having a little, like, bit of an identity crisis. He's, like, I'm the number one shit poster on Tech Twitter
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And I'm building AI for cops.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it is a little hard because, like, yeah, maybe you know his account is shitposting. Like, there's a couple shitposters that I follow. Like, there's this one guy, Chris Bakke. Do you know him?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He worked at he ran Lasky. He sold it to Twitter and he worked at x and then he left. And when he left, he was, like, big news. Like, I'm leaving the company.
Speaker 1:Like, thanks everyone. And he's always shit posting. So my reply was just, like, oh, this is, like, your best joke yet. This is hilarious. Like, I can't believe you even, like, you even got rid of your official badge.
Speaker 3:Like, you
Speaker 1:know, this is, like, searing comedy, great satire on, like, what what cringe people do when they leave companies. Yeah. And so you could see this, like, backfiring if he's, like, hey, I'm launching this, like, police AI startup. Everyone would just be, like, oh, like, this is the best shit post ever. He's, like, no, guys.
Speaker 1:It actually is real. I'm actually, like, a real person.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny to think about him in some Milwaukee police station, you know, doing a customer, like, meeting or conversation or a sales thing. And they're like, so, you know, we have a few minutes before the chief arrives.
Speaker 3:What tell me about yourself, you know, what do you have any family and law enforcement
Speaker 2:and how
Speaker 3:You know, what do you
Speaker 2:have any family and law enforcement? And, he goes, well, I'm somewhat of a sheriff myself on tech Twitter, actually. Yeah. A little town called technology Twitter. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you've ever been there, but,
Speaker 1:I actually met Elon Musk. So yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think that, this is not here's the thing. People aren't gonna wanna say there's there's always anytime somebody posts a lot and is building a company, all the VCs that suck at posting try to signal them, you know, and sort of, like, shit on them and be, like, oh, this is not a serious founder or whatever. Why he's posting it. But but whether you like it or not, if somebody can figure out how to post really well
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They can figure out how to build a company and get attention and communicate in the right ways to raise money, to hire great people, to get customers. So for some reason or another, the skill set of posting translates well to doing
Speaker 1:Well, it's it's a compression of ideas. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, like, posting a banger tweet is just taking some sort of, like, concept that's bouncing around in the ether and boiling it down into something that's funny or fits into a meme format.
Speaker 2:That gets attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And it relays a complex concept in a very short amount of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and that is just a valuable skill as long as you don't get addicted to it and you're not just making posting your entire life or, like, getting sucked into it and having some weird Well,
Speaker 2:for but
Speaker 1:I don't think for
Speaker 2:Daniel, it's an edge because his ex income allows him to take a lower salary from
Speaker 1:He probably makes a decent amount. Right? Yeah. Yeah. He's probably making, like, $10 a month or something.
Speaker 1:Couple of a month from that. Oh, yes. Cyan is in here.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, he got long journey. That's great. Justin's over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. N y c. I I love it. Do you did you see the his his
Speaker 2:It's it I will say it is the most hilarious business that he could build straight up. As a as a poster to go build AI for cops. I'm totally for it. I want I want the police to have more funding.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that they have gone through a decade of being ostracized and put down and told that they were bad people. Yeah. When these are people that get paid way less money than they should probably to do a job that is very challenging. And, you you know, half the country seemingly hates you, whether they're people that are breaking laws or people that are just, police haters. So, I think it's I think it's totally a smart move because he can go make building AI for cops cool and attract other smart posters.
Speaker 2:But it's it's funny from the lens that I would say that, you know, somebody like Ayush, who's building Warp is like a, you know, talented poster. There was a lot more overlap in terms of the customer. The buyer The buyer's already on Twitter. Yeah. I just don't think, you know, maybe 2 cops follow Growing Daniel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There's a 100,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The only value is maybe hiring engineers.
Speaker 2:Which is who might be following. Deeply valuable. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But And and investors.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, every major VC use on tech
Speaker 2:is aware. The real yeah. The real the real edge is ability to raise capital and hire talented people that otherwise wouldn't be going and applying for a job at at a AI for cops Yeah.
Speaker 1:Startup. Yeah. Do you remember his stunt at Twitter when
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:It was iconic.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:I was actually I got dinner with Raul the night before that happened.
Speaker 2:No way. And we
Speaker 1:were just, like, hanging out, and then I went into, like, a meeting at Founders Fund the next day, and we all open up our phones and we're seeing, like, he the guy that I had dinner with the night before and and Daniel just out front of, out front of Twitter HQ, like, talking to Deirdre Bosa at CNBC about how they got laid off and, like, causing this, like, viral, like, fake news cycle. And, it's just iconic.
Speaker 2:That was amazing. And it and it's no
Speaker 1:That was really, like, the moment.
Speaker 2:No fluke that that both those guys have gone on to build interesting companies. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They have. Right?
Speaker 2:Because they're interesting people.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. And I think I I think both of them, like, have the ability to not get lost in the sauce on Twitter.
Speaker 2:You could raise a whole the you could raise a whole fund dedicated to funding posters.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? It's just the poster index.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think it would outperform.
Speaker 1:Perhaps.
Speaker 2:There's only one way to find
Speaker 3:out.
Speaker 1:Only one way to find out. Gotta fund the posters.
Speaker 2:Fun But the posters.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting it's an interesting category to be in. Like, I'm pretty sure the company that makes the body cams has is doing pretty well. I think it's, I think it's the same company that owns the tasers. I forget what company that is, but, but they're they're, like, a multibillion dollar public company.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It's just it's just hard because, like, selling into police departments is, the it's a real it's not like a real stream where there's one
Speaker 2:buyer. The real the real play is building Twitch meets police body cams meets poly market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can see poly market. You can bet on it.
Speaker 2:Bet on arrests. And what's gonna happen? Chases.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, yeah.
Speaker 1:Just in pursuit of this person. Will they pull over? Will they make a run for it?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. I see a Hellcat engine. He's he's breaking for it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The other company that's done really well here is, are you familiar Flock Safety? Yeah. Yeah. They are crushing it and Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Is that a founders fund company? And They made that another big acquisition.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. They did. Aerodrome. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And and and everyone thought it was really really hard to build, like, the the Andorro for, like, the local government because it's just so fragmented and you have to go, like, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. But some people have cracked it and so, you know, if he can figure that out, it's gonna be good. It's gonna be good.
Speaker 1:I'm excited. So congratulations to Daniel, the brother of the week.
Speaker 2:Brother of the week.
Speaker 1:Should we do some, tweet reactions? I like this one. So Elon Musk has been playing Diablo relentlessly. I mean, the guy is one of the top 30 Diablo players in the world right now. Something like that.
Speaker 1:And so Alex Lieberman, over at Morning Brew says, how does this man have time to play video games? I would absolutely love to see a screenshot of Elon Musk's calendar. Would be a fascinating window into elite time management prioritization and delegation. And so yeah. I mean, he's running SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring Company, all pretty serious efforts.
Speaker 1:Then also serious. Campaigning Yeah. Constantly and doing tons of interviews. He's also running Twitter x
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Constantly. And apparently, becoming one of the greatest Diablo players ever in the world.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I love.
Speaker 2:And then and then, aren't there people that are saying that he's not actually playing and maybe he has a whole team of people that are playing, so they're warming up the account for him. So he just
Speaker 1:gets to come on and So one of one of the other great Diablo players did kind of a breakdown and said that so Diablo basically has new season content every quarter where there's, like, a new final boss and new levels and stuff. So even if you're maxing out your account when the new season drops, like, you have several 100 hours of content in front of you just to get to the right level to beat the final boss. And so in order to be where he is, which is beating because he I mean, in this tweet, he says, like, 5 minute t 150 clear, which is, like, the hardest thing you can possibly do right now. Hope there's some mid season content because he basically, like, finished the expansion pack, like, in, like, a month and a half, and it's supposed to take you, like, 3 months or maybe longer. And so, so one one of the Diablo, like, you know, fans says, like, in order to do this, like, you literally have to be playing, like, 40 hours a week or something like that, maybe more.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:so now there's, like, this this theory that maybe Elon has a team of interns or something, like, playing on his account, doing a lot of, like, the grinding and leveling, and then he can just log on for the best, which is which is, like, amazing delegation, if that's true.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's giving it's giving
Speaker 1:the animators. He's maybe just playing.
Speaker 2:It's giving ammo to I mean, the guy spends a lot of time on jets. Right? Sure. Starlink. Starlink.
Speaker 2:I'm sure Starlink. Yeah. Testing Starlink, making sure it's working. What better way to test the product
Speaker 3:than play,
Speaker 2:you know, Diablo? I think that this is potentially giving some ammunition to the folks out there that say, Elon's not a real he didn't build SpaceX. He didn't do this or that. He hires team that's, like, the that's the number one gotcha that people, like, try to get Elon for. That's
Speaker 1:a big take.
Speaker 2:That yeah. It's, like, you didn't do that. Yeah. Other. You hired people that did that, which is, like, okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. You should you
Speaker 1:should hire people. You should
Speaker 2:hire people and build Neuralink too.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think everybody would benefit if you could do that. But, yeah, this is giving some real, you know, ammo to those people who are gonna do a takedown piece, which I'm sure journalists will find a way to paint this in a Elon's deceptive video game practices apply to much more than just, you know, online games. Elon's treating the entire world like an online game. Yeah. He thinks leveling up is all that matters when yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I think it's here. I think it's human humanizing. It's good. Like, the idea of, you know, this very powerful and wealthy person, like, not having fun or, like, letting off steam at any point is, like, very black peeling to me.
Speaker 2:Do you think that he is over having kids and now it's just, like, I'm gonna be a kid.
Speaker 1:He was joking about it recently. Right? He was saying he was gonna have Taylor Swift's baby.
Speaker 2:That would be that would be Or he was, like, offering I can't wait. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That part of the simulation,
Speaker 1:I cannot
Speaker 3:wait for.
Speaker 1:Down and I think he's hit such economies of scale with the with the children that, like, I would be surprised if it ever stops. I have this theory that, like, there's a lot of there's a lot of, like, old dudes who
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 3:There's a
Speaker 1:lot of, like, old billionaires who are, like, constantly getting divorced and remarried. And I think at a certain point, it's, like, they just like having weddings because weddings are just, like, big parties and, like, an excuse to
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To to because you because you look at you look at I forget it was, like, maybe the founder of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, like, he had, like, 3 weddings in the course of, like, 9 years or something. He's getting remarried every couple years. And it's, like, okay, why doesn't he just, like, date or, like, not get married? But at a certain point, it's, like, he probably has some legal team that can, like, structure the perfect, like, prenup and then he just gets to throw a wedding and Yeah. His girlfriend likes that.
Speaker 1:And so he's just, like, yeah. Okay. Run it back. We'll do another one. It's not not a big deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then when they break up, it's, like, yeah, they get divorced. But to him, it's just, like, breaking up with someone. It's, like, very, like, low stakes, I think.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's, like, an excuse.
Speaker 2:That would be that would be
Speaker 1:I don't see it. So
Speaker 2:yeah. If Elon Elon should should open source his entire, you know, family building playbook including even if he's not getting married to these women, I'm sure they're signing documentation Yeah. That basically says, if we have a child
Speaker 1:You get taken care of. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. These are the terms.
Speaker 1:Well, he gets
Speaker 2:he sends a term sheet.
Speaker 1:Well, he got destroyed by Pavel Durov recently because Pavel has, like, 50 kids because he was not only.
Speaker 2:He got mogged.
Speaker 1:Oh, he got totally mogged. Because Pavel, it came out that he has, like, 50 kids because he's been, like, donating sperm and sperm banks and stuff and just doing, like, all this crazy stuff.
Speaker 2:That's that's
Speaker 1:It feels a little
Speaker 2:inaccurate.
Speaker 3:It's not
Speaker 1:a It's not linear.
Speaker 2:That's not a that's not a cool way to have 50 kids.
Speaker 1:No. For Pawel? Yeah. That makes sense. Over a 100
Speaker 2:That's just to me reckless and weird. Just like Yeah. You know.
Speaker 1:He is a dripped out technology brother though. So
Speaker 2:No. I support I support I I guess I support I just think that why not just have 50 children with 50 women if you're gonna
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I guess he does. He just doesn't he doesn't fuck. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to this one. So, Will, who I think was at OpenAI for a while. I follow this guy. He says, I don't understand the recent trend of college dropouts specifically raising some insane 10, 20, a $100,000,000 at a 100, 250, $500,000,000 valuations pre product or pre revenue often for idiotic shit. Are people unable to see how they're fucking themselves?
Speaker 1:It's not just free money, my brother. And he kinda went on to say, like, yeah, that he knows a lot of people that were young and they raised too much money and now they're buried under a pref stack and it's kind of a war
Speaker 2:in this generation. This is the dark side of pattern matching
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where pattern matching Zach, who had been in Fintech for over a decade
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Building at Square, his own company, then Square, then Coinbase Yep. And then, Brex to to go then build another Fintech company. Yeah. But pattern matching, oh, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out to build the social media app and then go on to make a a plethora of devastating, you know, mistakes and mishaps with people and the, you know, the government and all these different things. And then when I saw this tweet, the number one that the company I was thinking about is thinking about is company
Speaker 3:called
Speaker 2:Mach, which is making, I let's Oh, wait.
Speaker 1:Mach Industries? Mach Industries, which
Speaker 2:is like an MIT Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Drop out and, you know, they're building, I think they're building hypersonics.
Speaker 1:It's like hydrogen weapons.
Speaker 2:Hydrogen powered Big can weapons.
Speaker 1:He was gonna shoot down weather balloons and Yeah. Drones and just defense type issue.
Speaker 2:Is is
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I got a lot of money
Speaker 2:very quickly. Speed running in in some of these industries that where the stakes are a lot higher, like, defense, tech Yep. You're seeing some of those issues with mock where one of their employees, like, was hospitalized with, like, devastating injuries because something blew up. And, there's a real I I I don't think, I'm all for giving smart young people lots of money to to do ambitious things, but it's almost like, they're find the balance of it. Right?
Speaker 2:So but so bet on bet on the kid, bet on the dropout, but go get them somebody from Lockheed Martin
Speaker 1:Well, that's the under
Speaker 2:to be their chaperone.
Speaker 1:That's the under discussed thing about Facebook. They had some, like, VP of engineering who was, like, 45, who was there very early. I forget what this guy's name is, but he was, like, allegedly, like, very important in, like, stabilizing the company early on
Speaker 3:when it was
Speaker 1:a bunch of crazy kids running around. And and he had, like, just the right level of respect to be, like, okay. When he speaks up, we should listen. But he's not trying to, like, be, like, oh, we gotta bring in NetSuite. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He wasn't, like, he wasn't slowing anything down, but he was providing, like, just enough, like, you know, basic rules. Because at one point, like, Facebook was all just, like, one file on, on a web server. And, like, when you wanted to make a code change, you would just be, like, hey, everybody. I'm pushing the code. Like, nobody make any changes.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna update the file or whatever. Like, the file is on the web server. It's like, it was getting crazy. And he, like, brought in, like, cool stuff that like, cool process that everyone's like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This process actually makes
Speaker 2:us better. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is cool. It's, it's interesting because I think there's there's 2 things that are kind of on a collision course with these, like, crazy high valuations and high early checks. And it's one that the funds are bigger than ever. And even though we went through the ZURP era and and VC fundraising went down, there's still so many more $1,000,000,000 funds out there than there were 10 years ago. So there's just more money to deploy, and you gotta deploy it to get the fees.
Speaker 1:So there's all these incentives aligned with, like, we gotta deploy big money. So let's push out the IPO window, do more growth stuff. Let's put more money into earlier stage companies, like, write bigger checks. That's fine. And and then, simultaneously, the 2 hot industries are immensely capital intensive.
Speaker 1:AI. So I'm gonna come in and say, yeah. I'm gonna do a training run. I need to hire I need to hire a bunch of engineers that are gonna want a $1,000,000 a year. And I'm gonna also need to buy a bunch of NVIDIA GPUs and do a bunch of capex and build out a training center.
Speaker 1:And even if I'm not capital intensive, even if I'm capital light, a training run might still cost $10,000,000 for my first thing. So Yep. Like, there's just higher computing costs and we're not in the zero marginal cost era of AI. And then defense is the same thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna need to buy a bunch of CNC machines, a bunch of, like, a bunch of aluminum. Like, all this stuff has cost. It's not just this, oh, yeah. You're y c. You get a 100 k, and you're gonna go spin up a web server, and your cost is gonna be perfectly matched with your revenue.
Speaker 1:Like, when your website blows up and starts getting a ton of traffic, well, yeah, you're gonna have paying customers then. So all of a sudden, we have the 2 hottest categories are highly capital intensive, at least in theory. And then you have funds that are perfectly set up to fund those capital intensive businesses. So it's just like, anyone with an idea, let's get a big check-in there. But the problem is is that if you if you wind up pivoting to something that isn't as capital intensive or doesn't find, like, the immediate product market fit, you wind up buried under this huge capital stack.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. That's what I think that's the pain people are feeling right now. But yeah. Yeah. I'll probably get,
Speaker 2:I'll probably
Speaker 3:get a
Speaker 1:call from Jeremy Giffon soon. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jeremy, mock industries is Jeremy is like,
Speaker 3:who knows?
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:No. I think that the challenge is, so this happens with with, let's say, the I think the the the rule is maybe it's DePuy's law, which is the faster you get a lot of money, like, the dumber you will be with it. Yep. Right? And so if you win the lottery
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You're gonna just spend that money Yeah. Horrendously. Yeah. And that's almost always what happens because you didn't have to learn how money works. You didn't have to learn how hard it is to make it.
Speaker 2:And so you're just doing, like, crazy
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Crazy stuff. And this happens even with angel investing. People, like, oh, I'm gonna do angel investing in their worst five investments. Sometimes you get these people that are, like, oh, yeah. My first two angel investments are unicorns, and that's because of the networks they were in.
Speaker 2:But more often, it's somebody search angel investing and makes, like, a they're the worst investments that they'll make in the first five deals that they do. Yeah. And so I think the challenge here is once money comes really fast Yeah. And easy, like, you're
Speaker 3:an MIT
Speaker 2:dropout that raises $50,000,000 in the 1st year, you're just gonna make a bunch of really bad decisions. It's everything from you're gonna spend $400,000 on a brand identity because your VC connected you to a to a to a
Speaker 1:term that seems good. Right?
Speaker 2:To the top agency and you're not thinking about the real cost of that, you're gonna make a hire that's not a good culture fit because they just care about cash comp and you're gonna just overpay for them and then now you're dealing with this person that
Speaker 1:Not holding the bar on hiring. Yeah. You're not. I just need
Speaker 2:to hit my hiring quota. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So you're you're
Speaker 2:telling you, you know, these people get excited about being, like, oh, yeah. We're we're a 20 person team. Yeah. And it's, like, well, you don't even know what you're building yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You don't even need to be, like, fully starving, but just, like, a year or 2 of, like, being somewhat cash constrained is gonna set the culture up for years where you're gonna go back and, like, the CEO is just gonna be when some VP comes to them and is like, I wanna spend $500,000 on the branding package. They're gonna be like, what? Like, I did our first brand myself. Like Yeah. Like, like, why do we need to jump there?
Speaker 1:Let's just do a half step. And then and then all of those are gonna add up to, like, saving money and being a little bit more judicious
Speaker 3:and a
Speaker 1:little bit less, like, frivolous. And then you won't have a culture of frivolousness, which I think is, like, the real danger with, like, the
Speaker 2:Yeah. Over overall, when people are I don't think I don't think it's bad for the world that this stuff happens, to be honest. And in fact in fact, the entire model is predicated on if you back 20 MIT dropouts and one of them builds a generational firm
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Then it worked. Yep. That's the entire model of venture capital. So, Will, I I think it's a funny tweet and and I I respect that point of view, but he's not really realizing what the real game of venture is, which is if one of these companies becomes 10% as big as SpaceX, then the entire investment strategy worked.
Speaker 1:That's true. But he's not talking entrepreneurs. His brothers. Yeah. He's talking to
Speaker 3:the brothers. And so what
Speaker 2:what he's saying is not that,
Speaker 1:like, yes, all of these deals could add up to plenty of funds doing well. And even the bad funds, they're gonna return capital. They're gonna be 1 x funds, maybe 2 x funds. They'll be okay. It's not like the cash will really get totally incinerated.
Speaker 1:The the problem is is that I think he's trying to just raise a flag to college dropout young people that it's like, yes. You can go and do the the fake work of twisting your idea into something that fits a VC narrative and say, oh, well, like, we could be asset light, but we can raise more money if we say we're gonna train our own model. Or we could we could do this, but if we say that we need to buy this huge manufacturing plant and put up a big American flag, we'll be able to raise more money. So let's go with that path even if it's not the right path for our business. Even that's even if that's not what the capital structure of our industry demands.
Speaker 1:And so you wind up building for the VCs instead of for the market, for the customer, and for yourself. And so I think that's kind of the the meta take here Yeah. To some degree.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But yeah. Gotta kiss a lot of frogs. Game. Should do this one? I love this one.
Speaker 1:Evan Armstrong writes, obviously, I am excited for my child, but also really wish I had, like, 2 more months to write. Just today, pre 1, pre pre product pre product robotics company raising a 2,000,000,000 valuation. 2, bridge getting bought at 90 x revenue. 3 rumors about new models coming. Can't help but want to publish on this.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:I know. This is a man who prioritizes work over everything else. Skip paternity leave, brother. Yeah. It is it is the most important thing that keeps the keeps the society, keeps capitalism grinding.
Speaker 1:The relentless march on techno capital is nothing without those who are willing to put their family to the side.
Speaker 2:I took off 36 hours when my son was born. Not necessarily proud of that. But I've, he was born Saturday, like, you know, in the early early hours of the morning. 12 hour Monday. 12 hour.
Speaker 1:On call with you.
Speaker 2:I legitimately had a 12:12 hour meeting back of back to backs on Monday. But we had to feel like that. That was the only way we had to do that. I didn't do that with the second one. But, but, yeah, I mean, I think that, that's just a sign that Evan loves his work.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:And he there's a lot of stuff stuff. We wouldn't have this podcast if there wasn't stuff to talk about.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean, underrated about this tweet, work life balance always goes viral. So I don't know if this got dunked on, but, like, if if you're if you're rage baiting, like, this is the best possible rage bait if you're just trying to go to your account, like, because people will fight about this forever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because he could have tweeted, well, I'm a big fan of organic intelligence Yeah. Being my new child.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm really a fan of artificial intelligence. Exactly. And the child that I'm having today, I could have had the same child 400 years ago, but AI and large language models
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Didn't exist 400 years ago.
Speaker 1:Exactly. So if you just dial this out, if he just rewrites this, it's like, I haven't seen my child in months, but I've been writing. Boom.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're actually so every is chugging along. I've subscribed to their stuff forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that they are too nice of guys to be in the media business. They now they they spun out a word processing
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Product, which which seems cool. But they're not like Eric Newcomer, who's putting up 7 figures of EBITDA Yeah. Because, you know, maybe they are now. I don't I don't know. I have no idea.
Speaker 2:But I think that Evan is too nice to rage bait, you know. Like, he he only went 50% of the way there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what what is the actual it's every? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a media company.
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 2:they're focused on on AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've never seen them get, absolutely raked over the coals by tech or the communists. And you gotta have an enemy.
Speaker 3:If you
Speaker 1:don't have an enemy, you don't have an ally.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The only reason people rally together
Speaker 2:the enemy of my yeah.
Speaker 1:No. Seriously, you have to have an enemy. If you don't have an enemy, there's no reason for someone to be your ally.
Speaker 2:We should who we need to pick an enemy. The working class, obviously. There you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we all know that the working class gets too much credit And it's long and it's and and respect for the for the financial professional. Yeah. Blue collar. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're they're they're clearly the enemy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we haven't done our jobs until people are used calling us billionaires in a sort of negative
Speaker 1:Exactly. A pejorative. Yeah. Pejorative. I mean, unironically, the the the the enemy that I always focus on in the tech stuff is is China, essentially.
Speaker 1:And and the foreign That's
Speaker 2:an easy and so authentic to to my lived experience Yeah. Because I I studied abroad in Shanghai. Yeah. I studied while I was there, basically, the Harvard of China. I worked at a tech tech accelerator, like, while I was there.
Speaker 2:And within 48 hours of setting foot in that country, I knew that I wanted to do everything. I wanted to spend my life making sure that we contained China. Yeah. And that and that they didn't export the their sort of way of life to the world. So I don't have any issues with the people of China.
Speaker 2:Of course. But their way of life
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sir. Yeah. And and and I feel like that's I always try and remind people in tech when there's these little feuds, like, oh, Miami versus San Francisco, like, which is cooler or, like, the Gundo versus SF, like, AI versus hard tech or even, like, the intro fights between, like, the VC firms, like, Andreessen, Sequoia, Founders Fund, like, they're all beefing or whatever. And I'm and I'm like, okay.
Speaker 1:Like, there might be good reasons for these beefs, but, like, let's refocus on, like, the real battle here.
Speaker 2:They're all gonna they're all gonna in terms of conversation and milking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone everyone's on the same team here. And and I try and I try and refocus, especially, like, when the Gundobra start going hard on SF. I'm like, do you think China is having these fights over over Wuhan versus Shanghai? No.
Speaker 1:They say,
Speaker 3:what is Wuhan good at?
Speaker 1:Biotechnology, bioweapons development? What what what is what is Shenzhen good at? Copying American consumer electronics. Like, they're both excellent in their own ways in the same way that the Gundo is great at hard tech and San Francisco is great at AI. They're not fighting.
Speaker 2:Couldn't have said it better myself.
Speaker 1:They're working together as one team. We need to be one team over here in America.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Who's the l who we need to find the l p in Sequoia, Andreessen, and Founders Fund. This is probably Saudi.
Speaker 1:Oh, there's tons. Not even Saudi.
Speaker 2:That's gonna be, like, put who's the who's the one person that can put all the GPS on one group chat and be, like, stop it. Squash this. Squash this right now in front of me.
Speaker 1:You you know who it is? I I think it's Zuck's family office. You know that from Yeah. Yeah. I forget what they're what they're called, but I I'm pretty sure they're LP and everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But there's a bunch of others,
Speaker 2:endowments and whatnot. Dad, the GPs are fighting again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I do think that I I I love the idea of, like, you know, being a founder became high status. So it was, like, oh, I gotta I gotta graduate from college and get on the track and, you know, start a
Speaker 2:company. Drop out. I gotta get into a good school.
Speaker 1:Then it was a drop out and, oh, like, I'm gonna just gonna go straight to angel investing or, like, start a VC firm, and it's like, okay. Like, kinda odd. And then we talked about that one guy who is, like, he's starting, like, fund management software. It's like one layer of abstraction.
Speaker 2:Pretty soon,
Speaker 1:it's gonna be, like, I'm just gonna go be an LP. I'm just gonna go
Speaker 2:straight to be an LP.
Speaker 1:Straight to be an LP.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The investing is something that I feel like I grew up in the so immersed in the Silicon Valley ethos and you can just do things. You can do anything. Yeah. That the the number one way in which I've felt that experience really matters is in angel investing.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Because I just started angel investing, and I didn't know, you know, there was no I didn't go to Jason Calacan at school. I was just asking
Speaker 1:if you had done that.
Speaker 2:Like, I didn't didn't do that. I just started investing in cool ideas with smart people, and it's overall been very, you know, fruitful, that strategy. But there's been a number of it's like, okay. I talked with Zach
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Within 6 months of him incorporating Bridge to invest.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I met Shane from Poly Market. Like, we would DM back in, like, 2021, and I didn't go back up the Brink's truck.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, and now having had those experiences, I'm like, next time when I meet people like that now, I just figure out a way to give them money as fast as possible. Yep. And experience matters. Like, my returns from this era of my investing life will be better than the prior era because of that learning.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, are you gonna invest in any fentanyl vaccines? You see this article?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. This is the I I think I texted this to the group being being,
Speaker 1:Hughes is in Bloomberg. Says a fentanyl vaccine is a long shot that just might work. What did you find interesting about this?
Speaker 2:So I just think it's funny because it's the private markets doing what they do best, which is finding solutions to problems that the government is not capable of solving. I just think that the government is probably a lot more able to tackle the fentanyl issue than, than than Well,
Speaker 1:they have a monopoly on violence, and they should import enforce that at the ports. Right?
Speaker 2:Right. Right.
Speaker 1:And and But at the same time, yeah. I mean, if you if you sell this through medical clinics, potentially people come in when they're not at or where they're
Speaker 2:It's just a funny it's just hilarious. Yeah. They're at rock bottom.
Speaker 1:And they say, like, well, I'm done
Speaker 2:getting Literally going to buy some sketchy cocaine right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Please, can I get this vaccine? So I can Will it will it kick in in the next 2 hours? Yeah.
Speaker 3:You
Speaker 2:know? Because I just I don't I don't know. But I but I I think it's, I really don't know who the customer is for this. I mean, I can imagine, but it seems like sort of a very I don't know. Like, people that think like, I'm very happy to report that I don't ever expect to encounter Fentanyl True.
Speaker 2:In my life. Yeah. And so this vaccine, I'm
Speaker 1:You know what I need? I need an Ayahuasca vaccine. So then I can go into the jungle with all the 10 billionaires and be, like, yeah, let's go on this Ayahuasca retreat. Totally. Like and they're all getting one shotted.
Speaker 1:And I'm just sitting there
Speaker 2:Like a demigod.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Getting stronger.
Speaker 2:You're having to fake you're having to fake things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so crazy. Like, the world's open. Like Oh my god. This brilliant idea.
Speaker 1:Like, it's a nicotine company. You should invest. You're like, wow. Yeah. What that's what the demon told you.
Speaker 1:I was like, yeah, it told me that. Yeah. Told me that nicotine pouches are a big, big category.
Speaker 2:20 on 20 on 200.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just think getting like, if you're gonna do that vaccine, just start doing start start creating vaccines for everything. I mean, the vaccines are a great business model. So
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:I want a vaccine for,
Speaker 1:Low testosterone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's 1. Another one would be, like, inbox 0. You know, it's like a vaccine that
Speaker 1:What if there's a microplastics vaccine? Take that. Just your body just deflects the plastics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Force field.
Speaker 1:Force field. Anyway, I don't know how we're gonna cover this, but the cover of The Economist this week is fantastic. It's the SpaceX rocket taking off the the Starship. But instead of the the core tube, it's just the dollar. And it says America's economy is the envy of the world.
Speaker 1:And it's a deep dive on the resilience of the American economy. Often hated on but extremely resilient. And Robert Sterling posts this, like, mega thread of all the things that he loves about America, and it's just amazing. I'll read some of this. Culture that celebrates risk taking, ingrained ingrained hatred of bureaucracy, robust capital markets, Starbucks nitro cold brew, cheap and abundant oil.
Speaker 1:You can just do stuff. Investment bankers that work till 2 AM, low barriers to entry for entrepreneurship, manifest destiny, private equity, dot Delaware c corporations, m and a markets, meritocracy, low capital gain stacks, McDonald's, New York City, University Greek Life System, Walmart, GPU clusters, Sand Hill Road, Michael Jordan, 50 states competing for business, the Homestead Act, the old school DARPA, no union reps on on corporate boards. Like, the the entire state of Texas, like, you just rift for so long and just sent this massive list of cool things and How
Speaker 2:are you not bullish?
Speaker 1:Pumped up.
Speaker 2:How are you not bullish after reading that?
Speaker 1:You really you really have to be. But I love that, it's it's 2 it's 2 lenses on the same idea. Like, you know that The Economist wasn't writing like this. Right? The Economist is gonna have this very thoughtful article that explains basically the same
Speaker 2:thing Inclusion. In a much more complicated way.
Speaker 1:In a much more complicated way, much more nuanced way.
Speaker 2:And I like how it almost every single thing listed off was, like like, intense American consumerism Yeah. And then and then and then Finance. Finance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ability to get filthy rich even if you're born poor. State school engineering programs, pickup trucks. Yeah.
Speaker 3:State school.
Speaker 1:It's just amazing. It really it really is such a wonderful country. I always like that that that teal line. They're like, oh, are you gonna leave? He's like, to where?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the least bad option. Like, you might complain about America, but it is the best. We're just number 1
Speaker 2:of everything. I never I I think we grew up in the in the period where young people thought that America was bad. Very good. I don't know what was the cause of it, but it's almost like things were so good here that people were trying to find reasons to not like it for some reason. But in I've been to I've been to 40 plus countries, many of which I've spent, you know, a week plus in.
Speaker 2:And the the closest thing I got to wanting to live there was I I would buy a vacation home in Switzerland Just because Switzerland is outside of the United like, I would say Switzerland is my favorite country. That's not the United States. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just love being there. I could see spending a lot of time there. But I never once in my life was thinking I wanna spend
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:3 quarters of the year.
Speaker 1:Every time I traveled, I would always just come back to, like, oh, like, I went to Thailand. And I was, like, oh, this is Russia's Mexico. Like, I went to Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa. It's just LA. Like, there's beach and there's mountains.
Speaker 1:It's beautiful. It's amazing. People drive around on freeways. It's very similar to LA. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you go to all these
Speaker 2:I think the
Speaker 1:countries and it's like there's a like, America is so unique in that we have we have Manhattan. So that's like your Tokyo or your high finance, like, really dense city. You have LA, SF, unrivaled, Miami. But then you also have Hawaii, like, a chain of islands. So it's, like, all of a sudden, like
Speaker 2:Underrated. Underrated.
Speaker 1:Fiji's Fiji's great, but it's a lot farther, and it's not 10 x better than Hawaii.
Speaker 2:What's the next one?
Speaker 1:Alaska. Like, okay. I never need to go to Russia.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. And America really just did a good job of capturing, like, every single biome. So there are there are there are tropical areas. There are desert areas. There are mountainous areas, forest areas, tundra.
Speaker 1:Like, we have it all. Whereas very few countries have every single biome covered. Russia doesn't have tropical areas. They got to go to Thailand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the thing that you need to do if you're American and I think a lot of our listeners right now Yep. Are American, is as you go about your day to day life or you go on a work trip or you go on a vacation within the United States, view it from the eyes of some Italian kid who grew up in a small village and is visiting, like, Los Angeles. Right? Like, we're sitting here recording with a straight shot view of skyscrapers of that are home to some of America's greatest companies.
Speaker 2:Right? If you're from a small fishing village and you get to look out and see KPMG, I mean, that is that's like a core memory. Yeah. Right? If you're and so it's our duty to view our world through their eyes.
Speaker 2:And when I drive back and I'm passing, you know, the other Jonathan Club
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The,
Speaker 1:The beach club.
Speaker 2:The beach club and seeing, you know, this this Ferris wheel, like, on a pier or I'm driving on PCH, or I'm I see the I'm on the 405 and I see the Hollywood sign, you know, really in Chateau Maement. Chateau Maement. You know, these iconic places, it's
Speaker 1:I, I have this rift with, you know, how Josh Steinman
Speaker 2:tweets good morning, we're gonna win
Speaker 1:every day? And I was thinking about, like, what is a mantra that, you know, you could tweet every single day and mine was just listing out every single country that's not America and calling them un American?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Canada is un American. France is un American. Greece is un American.
Speaker 2:Un American is a good
Speaker 1:It's literally
Speaker 2:true. That's a potentially a a phrase that we could that we could coin.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That we could own.
Speaker 1:It is literally true. Canada is un American.
Speaker 2:Almost everything that I don't like is un American.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Should we talk about Tim Ferris?
Speaker 2:Tim Ferris is un American. I like Tim Ferris.
Speaker 1:Tim Ferris is the most American.
Speaker 2:No. No. I'm just saying I like Tim, but Yeah. This specific video up a
Speaker 1:a clip from his podcast where he did a 30 day dopamine detox. No caffeine, alcohol, sex, or sweetness. He didn't which sounds like it sounds like I'm not going to hug my wife or something. But he was saying that he would not consume any sugar, anything that was sweetened.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the funny thing with this is I could do all
Speaker 3:I could do yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:1, I could do all those things. But whatever dopamine release that I negated from skipping coffee or nicotine or any of these other or a nice piece of chocolate cake in the evening Yeah. Would immediately be undone by picking up my daughter Yeah.
Speaker 3:Giving her a
Speaker 2:hug, you know, like the same whatever.
Speaker 3:I I mean, I think that
Speaker 1:they'd like to, you know, steel man him, like, that is the point of the dopamine detox is that you will put you'll proportionally get more dopamine from picking up your dog.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. Right. You're you're you're not like, okay. This is like, you know, like, a 110% of Tik Tok.
Speaker 1:It's, like, TikTok isn't even in the equation.
Speaker 2:So it's
Speaker 1:just, like, the purest of the purest.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For you, it would just be waking up in the morning and being, like, I have 3 sons.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. I do wonder if he stopped posting during this detox.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because that's the real
Speaker 2:tip for
Speaker 1:a content creator.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did he stop capital allocating? Did he stop investing? Because the
Speaker 2:I do think I do think Tim I think Tim stopped Angel Investing.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Like, it was too much.
Speaker 1:Too much dopamine?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the angel investing is deeply addictive. It is. It makes no sense to do Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Financially. Yeah. I just I always wonder where these dopamine detoxes if if, like, when you cut something out, like, usually you find yourself finding a crutch. Like, I noticed, like, if I if I stop using 1, like, I I stopped using a lot of this the endless feeds, but then I find myself just opening up, like, the Wall Street Journal more and that's probably better, but I'm still, like, using that There's
Speaker 2:still a rat
Speaker 3:on the treadmill Exactly.
Speaker 2:Going to hit the
Speaker 1:So I wonder what his what his, like, cheat meal was during this dopamine detox. Like, what was he doing to get Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't the only Probably
Speaker 3:post it.
Speaker 2:The only video that I would watch it's funny. I don't think either of us watched the video.
Speaker 1:I I I did. It was him talking to, Kevin Rose, the guy who did a dig.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, I would watch I would watch a 30 day long video of Tim doing a dopamine detox. Yeah. That's the real dopamine detox. It's just to watch Tim's extremely boring life in monk mode.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:It takes 30 days and you can sleep when he sleeps.
Speaker 1:When he sleeps.
Speaker 2:But you have to let you have to be woken up by his alarm.
Speaker 1:That's pretty sick.
Speaker 2:So That's probably the That's a whole that's a whole category of content where you just live someone else's life.
Speaker 1:I feel like that's something like Jocko premium subscribers would, like, pay for some sort of live stream, like, come live my life with me. Like, tap tap into this live stream, and you're just gonna, like, come along for this whole thing. Like, when I wake up, you wake up. When I go to the gym, you go to the gym. It's kinda
Speaker 2:people pay for the person. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They
Speaker 1:do that virtually. It's
Speaker 2:pretty scalable. Scale it. Yeah. That's definitely a high
Speaker 1:There's definitely, like, a, like, a a lot of his on his, like, off-site events, obviously, very bounded by, like, the number of people that can attend. But if you just put out the 30 day video,
Speaker 2:like Imagine Anyone can do it. Falling falling asleep, listening to Jocko effectively tell you a bedtime story. Today was a great day. Tomorrow is gonna be a better one. And then and then he just, like, is sort of rambling and you sort of fall asleep, and then he says, morning, sweetheart.
Speaker 2:It's 4 AM.
Speaker 1:It's 4 AM.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna be up right now. You don't wanna be up right now.
Speaker 1:I gotta start posting the Jocko wake ups with the Patek at 4 AM because he has, like, the really athletic, like, Navy Seal watch.
Speaker 2:G shock
Speaker 1:or not? G shock. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's just
Speaker 1:the Patek at 4 AM. Be like, time to go to work. It's the best. I love Jocko.
Speaker 2:He's incredible. Jocko. Sure. Jocko, as soon as he's a billionaire, he can call in and be on the show.
Speaker 1:For sure. He's gonna be close. He has
Speaker 2:Only a matter of time.
Speaker 1:Multiple products that are, like, the top on Amazon. His his business is insane. He has so many different monetization methods. Did did Sendra ever send you that, like, breakdown? Oh, that's great.
Speaker 1:It's like yeah. It's looking, like, in a single in a single long Jocko episode, like, all of the ad reads and all of the monetization that's going on, there were, like, 10 or 15 different products and calls to action. So it's like an athletic greens competitor, an LMNT competitor, a protein powder. But then it's also, like, a subscription to the premium service. And then I
Speaker 2:bought his book.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The books. And then it's like
Speaker 3:and then
Speaker 1:it's like there's a $100 tier for, like, a course that you buy and you watch. There's, like, a $1,000 tier for, like, going to a big conference. There's a $10,000 tier for going to, like, the VIP conference. Getting kicked
Speaker 2:in the nuts. People. By Jockey.
Speaker 1:There's a 50,000. So so, like, no matter what you're willing to spend, he does really, really good at, like, price laddering and price discrimination. Because that's one of the hardest things with with podcasting and why it works with ads is that you you have some billionaires in your audience. With us, it's like mostly billionaires. But, but then you also have some people that are like, they're not billionaires yet.
Speaker 1:And so they don't have the ability just to drop, you know, a $100,000 on, you know, a private, private event with the Technology Brothers. But Yeah. How do you get money out of both of those audience cohorts?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, you gotta have a a more affordable
Speaker 3:product.
Speaker 2:Netjets is a really good example, right, where you might not be able to afford a private jet. And we certainly have friends who are billionaires who own their own jets.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They they'll still use NetJets. Yep. Right? It's not a one or the other. Yep.
Speaker 1:But it's also a reason why you might hear some ads on this show for things that that have lower ticket prices because
Speaker 2:we wanna Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We wanna monetize every single listener here. That's that's the goal of the show, to be the most profitable podcast in history. And that means that no matter who you are, no matter how much what what your w two says, no matter what your Roth IRA says, we wanna get the most money out of you. Should we move on to Corey Levy?
Speaker 2:Oh, I tried to I tried to I tried to keep it together.
Speaker 1:So Corey Levy I I mean, it's funny because he's got dunked on, but, I mean, I love everyone involved in this. And is this is this Ben from Vesto here? I don't know. It looks like
Speaker 3:some of
Speaker 2:my friends.
Speaker 1:I don't know. But Ramp held a an event with Khosla with Keith called the art of hiring, and it featured Brian Chesky, Mike Shebet, and Keith, talking about how to hire and founder mode. And, and Corey Levy, who runs Z Fellows, prolific early stage angel investor, essentially. I don't know, incubators accelerator. I don't know what term he likes, but, he wrote kind of a breakdown.
Speaker 1:Some notes from the art of hiring event earlier today. And he starts with, Keith, and then so he adds Keith. And and the first line that gets cut off when you see the tweet is just don't hire anyone over the age of 30. And then there's, like, there's, like, 25 other things that are all, like, super reasonable, but he led with the most controversial thing. And so there's a there's a note now that says age discrimination in in hiring is illegal in the US.
Speaker 1:Anyone who follows the advice from the first point is potentially committing a crime, which I just love. Yeah. Well, I think I think saying that literally, like Yeah. He's saying he's
Speaker 2:saying that I could see Keith saying that literally. But he's also he he understands the art of rage bait.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Right? Yes. And using saying controversial things to generate attention, which does other things.
Speaker 1:He's compressing the idea of, like, you need young energy in your organization. You need people that are hungry, who aren't who aren't resting, investing, who aren't already millionaires, who wanna make their equity work. And so you need people that
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Are show up and are hungry. And so how do you compress that down into something that will stick in someone's mind? Oh, well, don't hire anyone over the age of 30. Now Yeah. It's probably a lot more nuanced than that.
Speaker 1:And and I think, Keith, if you talk to him for an hour, he would get into that. And there's a million reasons why. And if you look at his companies and all the other companies, I'm sure there's people over the age of 30 of these companies. But, it's a great way to get that to stick in someone's mind.
Speaker 2:So it's funny because there's a, here, just turn the mic towards you. I was I was talking with a a founder that used to work for Keith and raise money from Keith and, on the way over here today. And running a business for the first time, it's absolutely crushing. It's about to raise, like, a very hot series a.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:And he has taken every almost all of Keith's advice. I don't know about this advice, but he certainly has learned so much from Keith. Yeah. And the only thing that he didn't follow was the Miami thing. He Really?
Speaker 2:He originally started the company in Miami. And at one point, it was probably the scariest day of his life telling Keith that he was gonna go back to s f. But almost everything else he's followed to a t. And it's just working for
Speaker 1:this company.
Speaker 2:It's worked so well. It's worked so well. This is Dara. Yeah. At Delphi.
Speaker 2:I've invested in. Yeah. So it's worked so well for Dara, like Yeah. Ignored the hype. Yep.
Speaker 2:Building in a very, like, hot space, which is, like, consumer AI Yep. Has ignored the hype, stayed focused, focused on customers, like, all these things that that, that that Keith has parroted and reiterates and things like that. And it's just worked extremely well.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, it it it, and so the funny thing with, I will say that Dara hired one of my old, engineers who is over 30, who does have children, but that guy's a fucking grinder. So so, yeah. I mean, I think overall, I do think about this sometimes where as a 28 year old that has the life style of some something that's more found from somebody in their mid thirties at least in tech or mid forties, depending on how late to children. Like in
Speaker 1:the fifties.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mid fifties. I do that is almost like a recurring nightmare of, like, if I was competing against myself without children, what how much more would I be getting done and things like that? I do think that the counter side to that is when people are in their thirties, they're they can't afford to lose in the same way. Right?
Speaker 2:So it's, like, there is this whole other side of it, and they have the benefit of and so when you when you look at this tweet saying, don't hire anyone over the age of 30, combined with young college dropouts raising 30 to $50,000,000 pre product.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The combination of those two things is terrible. Right? And you brought this up with Facebook earlier being, like, Facebook having a really veteran engineer who brought structure and experience and all these different things. So anyways, I I would say that overall, Keith's advice, I'm I'm, like, very bullish on any founder that takes, like, 90% of Keith's advice Yep. To heart
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And follows it. I think it's a really good framework. But, but, again, the don't don't take anything too literally. Yeah. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:Even Miami is giving I mean, Miami is a state of mind in many ways.
Speaker 1:And, also, I mean, Miami is still, like I think we've talked about this before, but, I mean, it still is just, like, a phenomenal place to go meet a lot of Phenomenal people. People.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like like, it it it I I think everyone agrees that it is behind on on hiring engineering talent. But in terms of just, like, lots of
Speaker 2:Capital markets.
Speaker 1:Powerful people having money there, like, if you're if you're, if you're a founder and you're doing a fundraising trip, like, stopping in Miami and a bunch of people is, like, very doable and very beneficial. Yeah. It's also just, like, an awesome place to live or awesome place to visit when you're a founder and you've been grinding in some, like, you know, tenderloin complex in in San Francisco and get to, like, you don't just have to go down to Sand Hill Road, which is, like, even more boring. You just go to Miami and hang out at all these house.
Speaker 2:I know that I will absolutely own property in Miami at some point in my life. I'm not in a huge rush to do it, but I really enjoy there, and we're going next week. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. But, yeah, I I'm excited for this video to drop. I'm sure that they're gonna record it and put it out. I think it'll be good. I I think I think they're all
Speaker 2:really great. It's funny. We're giving we're giving him the benefit of the doubt, and Keith is, like, literally telling all these young kids, I swear to god, do not like, I I cannot be I cannot be more explicit about this. If somebody is 30 years old and one day Yeah. Disqualify.
Speaker 1:Disqualify. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Write it into your HR HR. Like, write it into your hiring policies. Put put it on your wall.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't even know where this is from, but you dropped this in the in the group chat, and I just wanted to read it because I thought it was a funny quote from maybe, like, a substack or something. This guy says, I look for the type of guy in London who gets up at 7 o'clock on Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed and logs on to a poker site so that he can pick off the US drunks coming home on a sun Saturday night. I hired a guy like that. He usually clears 5 or $10 every Sunday morning before taking out the drunks playing poker because they're not very good at it, but their confidence has gone up a lot. Someone who understands an edge.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:I don't even think we have to add commentary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just it's just Cheers.
Speaker 2:It's just cheers to that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's great. Yeah. Find an edge.
Speaker 2:The hard thing the hard thing with people like that is they they usually end up making so much money. They're really hard to hire.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. If you're making $10 a week, that's 500 k a year. Like, what job are you offering them? I mean, I guess this is probably for like, a hedge fund position or something, or somebody who understands that, like, yeah, this is maybe not, not gonna stick around forever, maybe.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Should we close with the the new king of podcasting? Harry Stebbings?
Speaker 2:Harry $400,000,000 I I I will say I think that that that picture could come back to bite.
Speaker 1:So the story is, podcaster Harry Stebbings raises one of Europe's biggest venture funds. The British firm firm 20 BC pulls in $400,000,000 to invest in early stage tech startups, and he claims it's to make Europe great again. Is he a Trump guy? Or is he just, like, riffing on that?
Speaker 2:I bet he's a Trump guy. He appreciates great entrepreneurs. Yeah. Right? Trump is
Speaker 1:I feel like he's pretty, like, like, non like, apolitical. So Yeah. Because, like, if you if you go super
Speaker 2:hard There's nothing there's nothing less cool than being not living in the US, but being obsessed with US politics. It's, like, get a life, you
Speaker 1:know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, get a life. Yeah. So yeah. No.
Speaker 2:I think it's amazing for podcasting. It's amazing for Harry. He's now we kinda have him if we're if we wanna build the most profitable podcast in the world Yeah. He's pulling down 80,000,000 of management fees Yeah. On that fund.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's in our
Speaker 1:Big shoes to fill.
Speaker 2:Big shoes to fill. Target on his back. Right?
Speaker 1:Target on
Speaker 3:his back.
Speaker 2:It's not that but it but we're positive sum. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:We'll do a $500,000,000 fund.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. And shout
Speaker 3:out to Harry. Congrats
Speaker 2:to Harry. So Yeah. Anyways, congrats to Harry.
Speaker 1:It is interesting. I feel like do do you think his audience is primarily entrepreneurs or VCs? Because he he really focuses he does get some entrepreneurs on the show, but it's mostly VCs that go on the show. So he probably has an incredible set of work. So he can get into he can get small checks into deals.
Speaker 1:But, like, what happens when, you know yeah. He's interviewing, like, the Sequoia guys, but then they're not gonna let him, like, steal a hot round from them. Yeah. So how does that work in terms of deal flow?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The reason that I'm bullish overall on I'm not bullish on the European focus.
Speaker 1:Sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, I guess that If
Speaker 2:he's gonna invest the full if he's gonna invest the full 400,000,000 in Europe, that's concerning.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seemed like the real alpha here was just he is probably one of the greatest bridges between European LPs and US investments because he's he's a name brand in America. And if you are wealthy in Europe, you can't necessarily just call up an American VC firm and LP and do it. Yeah. So so I I hear this happen a couple times.
Speaker 2:So what people
Speaker 1:have raised really big funds because it's like, oh, they they happen to be super connectors in, like, Brazil. And so they can go around and just pull all Brazilian capital together, and then they come in and they invested in America. But they're providing that service to Yeah. The Brazilian high net worth individuals and and institutions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the reason to be bullish on Harry is that what David Senra has done for founders
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Harry has done for contemporary VCs. So in the same way that David will be talking about founder and then tie in, oh, here's how these other 3 founders also thought similarly and applied this way of thinking to their business. He's doing the same thing with VCs, you know, where where he will be talking with 1 VC and be like, well, that's similar to how, you know, Peter thought about the initial investment in SpaceX or whatever.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:So I think that being a student, he's now a student and a player. Right? And he's drawing on I think it's a very real thing that he could text probably 50 of the best GPs and get a response within, you know, a day Yeah. Of, like, hey. And they can be, like, well, here are the traps in aerospace.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here's why this won't work. Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is actually really interesting. Let's look at it together.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, like, that's real alpha.
Speaker 1:Yep. That's great. Well, cheers to Harry and we'll see you
Speaker 2:next time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for watching. We're listening.