Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the fastest growing podcast in the world and also the most profitable podcast in the world. We got some exciting news today on the show. We are awarding our 2nd reply guy of the month. Jordy, who's
Jordi:this guy. This is gonna be obvious to some if you've been in the comment section of our post today. None other than Baldo Granados is our reply guy. Let's do. Absolute dog.
Jordi:I mean, this guy has been putting in the work. I'll Read me
John:some of his best posts.
Jordi:Relief through this quickly. He's got some low 10 bangers in here. I mean, the guy's been an absolute animal. I mean, I hit around the clock Yep. Replying first reply Yep.
Jordi:Every single time, hundreds and hundreds of replies. He not only replies to our stuff, but he, replies, you know, and even post about our partners. He says, after here seeing Andrew's merch success, I wanted to throw out an underrated merch item for try for ramp, ramp earmuffs because no one wants frostbite while reviewing expense reports.
John:I like it. A lot
Jordi:of potential in that post.
John:It's good.
Jordi:Another one, we got to inspire the next generation of capital allocators.
John:That's just a banger by itself.
Jordi:Just by itself. We're investing in this post at 2 likes, quality stuff. He commented on an ad we did for another one of our partners, Celsius. He he actually recommended that we explore other varietals from Celsius, including, wild berry, a refreshing choice no matter the occasion. The guy's got a gift for the written word.
Jordi:And he's even out, you know, replying to to our partners over at Ramp saying, building the Ramp network. Market dominance is only a matter of time. So, anyways, this guy could be a writer for the show.
John:It's fantastic.
Jordi:Thank you for your service. Emerging poster. And remember, Baldo, you can get reply guy of the month more than once, so don't stop don't stop now that you just got some recognition. But this guy's at Cornell. He's got a start up.
Jordi:Awesome. And I'm excited to see what he does. No doubt. This is just the start.
John:That's fantastic. Well, thank you
Jordi:to Baldwin. Baldo.
John:Let's move on to the Facebook Red Book, one of their foundational documents for the organization, hidden
Jordi:Well, I would actually push back and say in in in the way that, in many ways, the Bible was the foundation of Western, you know, just general society and thought. So Facebook Red Book has been the same for the startup economy in many ways. So it is not just a little book. There's been 1,000,000,000 and potentially 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of value created from this source of of, of wise, wisdom.
John:So we're breaking it down today. It was formerly a document that you had to find on eBay. It was pretty rare passed around, but our good friend, Matt Parkhurst over at Antimetal, got a copy, sent it over to a very high quality, archival scanner, had it scanned, and uploaded the PDF for everyone to read.
Jordi:PDF is available, I think, on antimetal.com or just go to Matt's, We'll quote the post. Yeah. We'll quote the post.
John:Be able
John:to find it below. You can print it out or you can try and go find a hard copy. But let's go through it. First thing, I mean, amazing visuals. Like, every single it it it feels like a brand book even though it
Jordi:it it's More than that. No. It feels like a coffee it it feels like a coffee table book. Yeah. Like, really, really, really but but not over the top.
Jordi:Like, it's not trying too hard. It was clearly Yeah. Very intentionally made, but also Yep. Very efficiently made. What aesthetics of
John:a brand
John:book, but you can already tell that the brand for the company is extremely broad and wide. Like, there's there's a picture of Kevin Bacon in here. There's pictures of ancient, you know, ancient art, the Berlin Wall falling, graffiti and protesters. It it it really is not saying that Facebook is for any one specific type of person. Totally.
John:But the message is very clear. Like, the brand is for humanity.
Jordi:It's the world. It's
John:the world. And that's amazing.
Jordi:And the other thing right away that stands out, it's it's over a 100 individual pages, but 250. The, the actual text is fairly sparse. Yeah. And they're they're only yeah. Really only trying to communicate, like, a a handful of of specific, learnings, which I think is cool.
John:So it kicks off with, Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission to make the world more open and connected. Changing how people communicate will always change the world. Changing how ideas spread changes how societies function. It changes how people speak, live, and tell stories.
John:It's it's kind of the Marshall McLuhan thing. Like, the medium is the message. The tech company defines how humans communicate, and that will actually change the world. And it's crazy because, I mean, obviously, the narrative in the very early days around Facebook was, like, oh, it's this, like, you know, poke. It's this dating app.
John:It's this hot or not. And it's clear that very early on, they realized, like, the impact it would have at scale.
Jordi:Bigger. And
John:they were able to really capture all of that. It's fantastic.
Jordi:Yeah. And I think this was key at a time where I don't know if you look back, like, it it was not in the same way now that Anduril has been able to get really, really talented mission oriented people to come work on defense Yep. For the first time in in decades, you now at when when Facebook was really getting off the ground, there were would have been a lot of engineers that say, I'm not gonna go work on, like, a your little app. Right? Like, I I wanna work on something important.
Jordi:And so part of the way that they've positioned this is, like, no. The work that we're doing is extremely important. We're, like, creating entirely new mediums similar to the to the printing press, which they, which they pull out.
John:So, connection is the fundamental unit of society. Increasing the number of ways people can connect and the number of people they can connect to is a powerful tool for good. It's it's fascinating because Google, in the same way, is like an ad company, and that can be kind of boring to go work at an ad company. But Google was very amazing in the early days saying, like, our mission is to organize the world's information. Yeah.
John:And that's just, like, awesome when you think about all the different things that can come from that.
John:It's interesting that this was not promoted externally more. Yeah. Like, if you
John:go back and you interview someone about, you know, externally more.
Jordi:Yeah. Like, if you
John:go back and you interview someone about, you know, what what was your perception of Facebook in 2,008 or 2,010? They wouldn't necessarily have gotten that in the same way that the Yep. That Google went public with their message. But clearly, it worked in the recruiting and, like, talent and retention realms. So yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. And and right away, you know, one of the sections democratization of influences is called. It says, in the past, controlling the media meant controlling the message. If you if you owned the only printing press, you controlled what people read. The same was true with radio and TV.
Jordi:But what happens when everyone has a printing press, when the playing field is level? Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned. The best ideas win. So this to me stands out pretty dramatically because this last election cycle was a perfect evidence of that.
Jordi:Like, it did not matter how much CNBC and CNN and The New York Times and all these different sort of traditional media, sort of trashed, the the president-elect. It it really didn't matter because he had earned his own platform and influence that was just had had had an order of magnitude more engagement. And the the funny thing is, like, the way that social networks have evolved now, and everybody and people love to complain, oh, you don't actually own your audience
John:Yep. Yep.
Jordi:On on on Facebook or MetaX, Instagram, etcetera. But what what they're saying right here is it must be earned. And in many ways today with the algorithms. You need to come on the platforms and earn that influence and audience every single day. Yeah.
Jordi:It's not like a, you know, basically, like, oh, we're giving this audience and you can, you know, say whatever you want to it over and over and over. You now need to earn it, which is why, I don't know, some of these sort of legacy media accounts will post on x and get, like, 2 likes. Right? Even though they supposedly have 20,000,000 people in their audience. Right?
John:Because it's not they're creating good content anymore. They're not winning in the algorithm. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that, like, the best ideas win, creating, like, this town square, this very open communication standard.
John:Zuck's obviously had, like, a ton of criticism around deplatforming and bias and the algorithm and what gets promoted and what doesn't. But if you go back and look, like, it just feels like that was never driven by him. There was always external pressure, just tons of, you know, congressional inquiries and whistleblower and hit pieces. And it it feels like he's he for a long time, he was doing his best given all the pressure. And now he's kind of created something that's really, really balanced.
John:I feel like it's pretty good. We haven't heard about a lot of deplatformings. And then and then at least when he when he kind of dipped his toe into the short form of threads, they they wasn't saying, like, this is gonna be a left wing space. It was just like, we're not gonna do news or politics at all. And some people love that, some people don't, but it's like, at least it's not hyperpartisan.
John:So the idea is, like, maybe maybe threads isn't isn't a place for for ideas about everything, and some people don't like that. But, it's still meritocratic in its own little niche. In the same way that Instagram is meritocratic around things that are aesthetic and things that are, you know, images and tech and, and videos. But I love that, there's a section here called Zuckerberg's law. Yeah.
John:Huge, huge embracer of the Coin it. Law.
Jordi:Coining it.
John:He coined he coined his own law, which I love.
Jordi:Smart.
John:And Zuckerberg's law is written here as
Jordi:the man Basically, the man who created the timeline
John:Yes.
Jordi:Created was the original
John:Yeah. User of Coogan's law. Understood the importance of of compressing his overall thesis into something that, that could be repeated. And so he boils down Zuckerberg's law as the amount of each content each, the amount of content each person shares doubles every year. Very, very concise, and that makes a ton of sense.
John:People are sharing all sorts of stuff now, and not just in the amount of text, but then as people went to images, images, you know, an image is worth a 1,000 words, pictures worth a 1,000 words, video tells a much bigger story. And Zuckerberg's conclusion is this means the amount of information shared by humanity is increasing at an exponential rate. However, the amount of time people spend consuming content has not changed. There are no more hours in the day. And so what that means is that, like, the algorithm is inevitable.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:That there has to be some sort of filtering for all of this. And that's why these, these content recommendation platforms are so powerful because you're seeing the the cream of the crop across the entire network. And and, obviously, Facebook has had to go through major upheaval, especially on Instagram, as they moved away from the the following feed to the algorithmic feed, like, what TikTok does. But
Jordi:Well, and that was that was one of those, yeah, it was one of those things, like, yeah, it's interesting to see what your friends are doing, but it's more actually more interesting to see what your coolest, most interesting friends that aren't really your friends, but you feel like they're your friends.
John:They will take it all over the world.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the next the next one after Zuckerberg's law, they talk about 2 massive opportunities which, again, this is all, like, this is this is being this was written at a time where
John:They didn't have a video product.
Jordi:They didn't have a video product. Like, everything was very nascent.
John:This is
John:pre Instagram.
Jordi:Yeah. Obviously, pre Instagram. But there are 2 opportunities they identified was creating better ways to share as people share more of the demand for new and improved tools for sharing will continue to grow. So the Instagram acquisition makes total sense in that capacity of like, hey. This tool is catching on.
Jordi:People are sharing in this sort of medium that's adjacent to what we're doing. We should overpay. We should pay $1,000,000,000 for this tiny app, and snap it up. And then delivering information more effectively with so much content is essential to deliver it in ways that are relevant, understandable, and quick to consume. And so I think this just ties into what you're saying about algorithmic feeds always being inevitable because, again, if people are doubling the amount of content that they're sharing every year and we only have so much time in the day, when you open Facebook, Instagram, x, etcetera, you want the most interesting, most relevant content to be there in the form factor that's most easy to consume, which is why I love algorithmic feeds.
Jordi:It serves me up Yep. Stuff every single day. Yep. It's a great ad format
John:Yep.
Jordi:As well, which we love.
John:It's curation at scale.
Jordi:It's just like like who was it was it Teal that talked about this or, it's a good sign that, if you don't know who had said a quote, you just attribute it to Teal. But it's like the the true and test of intelligence is like being able to predict the future. And in many ways, like, the red book just predicted the future Yep. 15 years out, like, almost to a t.
John:Yep.
Jordi:The next one, you wanna you wanna get it?
John:Yeah. Build products around people. Data doesn't care about you. It won't bring you soup when you're sick or take you out when you've been dumped, but people will. People are surprising.
John:Give them something exciting and they'll build on it. 1 out of 7 people in the world are on Facebook. That's amazing. But 6 out of 7 aren't. That's a lot more people to connect.
John:Just really, really, like, world domination. Yeah.
Jordi:And it's interesting everybody, like, the big, when when people would attack Facebook over the last 10 years after this was written, it it was always about, oh, they're just harvesting your data, and they're using your data against you, and they're using it to manipulate helping people manipulate elections and all this stuff. And it's just cool to see that internally, they're not, like, data rules all, you know, you know, and and who knows? Like, maybe their actions were were different at different points. But ultimately, it comes down to the fact that even after all that controversy, I have very positive feelings towards Instagram and and just meta broadly as a company, and I actually don't mind that they're harvesting my data. It's gonna mean, like, after this 3 hour podcast, they're gonna serve me up a super relevant ad.
Jordi:It's a conversation. Yeah. They're gonna serve me up the tech ad.
John:There you go. I did get some tech ads. It's so funny. The next one's the hacker way. The hacker way is about pushing boundaries and testing limits.
John:It's doing more with less, finding creative solutions, and making things work sometimes with nothing. It's effectiveness over elegance. There is always a way. I love that. And they've always had that hacker culture.
John:And they they'd talk later about hackathons, innovation through action. Hackathons are the place where ideas become reality. They've led to major failures like timeline or major features like timeline born from an idea called memories. The process wasn't smooth and involved a lot of failure, but it worked because people were determined to make it happen. And, yeah, I mean, the original pushback on the timeline launch was insane.
John:People were had, like, all these groups about, like, boycotting Facebook. It was a total, like, stated preference versus revealed preference. I think there were even protesters at Facebook HQ. They were bringing back the old, like, you know, UI. And, the UI changes people always get upset.
John:What was it before?
Jordi:I I can't even imagine.
John:I know. I can't even imagine.
Jordi:My, like, early memories of Facebook are just, like, people having very almost private conversations Yep. Like, posting, I guess, on each other's walls.
John:Yeah. Yeah. So so you could post on your own wall. Yeah.
John:You
John:could say, update. I'm recording a podcast today. And then I could go to your wall and say, hey, Jordy. It was great recording that podcast with you today. But in order to get information about Jordy, I had to go to Jordy's page.
John:There was no timeline to synthesize all the changes that were happening on everyone's page. So you would literally just scroll around to people's pages and be like, I wonder what this person's up to. I wonder what that person's up to. It was very aimless. It made no sense.
John:Like, it's it's very primitive by comparison.
Jordi:Like And I'd be like, yeah. If if I look back on my feed now, it's like, you know, my best friend, from growing up being like, hi, Geordie. I'm really excited for our ski trip in 2 months. Yeah.
John:Yeah. See see
Jordi:you then.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:And then, like, another post from him the next
John:Yeah. So he closes with what makes us better. Three points. 1, focus on impact, solve the problems that matter most. 2, ruthless prioritization, pick the right problems to solve.
John:And 3, keep shipping, stay focused, and keep moving forward.
Jordi:Yeah. There's another part of the book too that that I think was, relevant, which is, like, in our industry, there's only sort of two timelines that matters. There's 6 months 30 years. Yeah. And it's wild that he has what, you know, that that the organization was able to execute on clearly many, many 6 month timelines in a row very well, while at the same time, their little red book, like, perfectly illustrated the reality 15 plus.
Jordi:I mean, it underscores everything
John:that he's doing with meta and and VR. Like, everyone agrees that that's that that bet is very early. Yeah. But it just doesn't matter if you have a 30 year timeline. Yeah.
John:So fantastic, piece. I recommend you go read the full piece. Yeah. There's We'll post it below.
Jordi:Yeah. It's really great.
John:It's pretty There's some
Jordi:there's some pretty great pictures in here. There's there's one
John:of,
Jordi:of, Sam Lesson from Slow Yep. Hanging out just, like, with an entire real technology brother right here. Look, he has his entire timeline, like, printed printed out. Okay. It's like a bunch of posts printed out.
Jordi:So There you go. So anyways, lots of cool piece of history and cool of Matt to make it available for everybody.
John:I love it. Well, we'll wrap up there. We highly recommend you go check it out, and we'll move on to some personnel news.
Jordi:Our favorite segment.
John:We got some we got some major personnel news. We're doing 3 different huge moves in Silicon Valley today. Let's kick it off.
Jordi:Gonna sit up straight for this.
John:Get get locked in. Get ready because these are gonna rock the tech world. Jordy, you wanna kick it off with yc?
Jordi:Alright, everybody. We got some breaking news in the startup world. Y Combinator just made a high profile off season pickup bringing in Ankit Gupta as a visiting partner for their winter 2025 batch. This kind of player acquisition this is the kind of player acquisition that sends shock waves to the incubator landscape. This pick screams Gary Tan to me, and while a stint at head coach has been brief, he's certainly making a statement with this move.
Jordi:What do you got for us, John?
John:Yeah. Let's break down the stats on Gupta. He's a Harvard double degree holder in computer science rocking both a BA and a master's, graduating magna cum laude with phi beta kappa honors. This guy has deep playoff experience as the cofounder of and CTO of Reverie Labs, where he built AI enabled solutions for drug discovery, raising $31,000,000 and partnering with RocheGen Tech to drive multimillion dollar deals. His skill set spans cutting edge AIML, full stack engineering, and a track record of scaling startups more than 15 x by headcount.
John:Think of him as the Patrick Mahomes of AI.
Jordi:Look, Gupta also has experience as a research engineer at Vicarious AI and stints at Google and Palantir.
John:Gary went to Palantir.
Jordi:I know. There you go. Where he flexed his technical chops, and now he's set to bring his strategic vision to y Combinator, working across sectors, but keeping a close eye on startups pushing the boundaries of AI, biology, and health care.
John:With his pedigree, leadership, and ability to scout and develop talent, Gupta's addition to Y Combinator solidifies their status as the premier incubator for the next generation of startups. For the tech ecosystem, this is nothing short of a blockbuster signing. With 6% of YC startups already becoming unicorns, if Gupta can add the value that we think he can, there's no reason he can't add 1,000,000,000 to YC's future returns. Stay tuned. YC winner 2025 is gonna be legendary.
Jordi:Legendary.
John:Stay locked in, folks. We got more breaking news.
Jordi:More breaking news.
John:Another personnel update. Some personnel news.
Jordi:Look. We got some breaking news out of the Flatiron District. Ramp has locked down one of its absolute stars, Andre Kovalov with a big contract extension after he hit his 4 year cliff. Andre has been a key player at ramp leading the charge on massive launches like ramp travel and their partner program. This guy's been an absolute dog when it comes to building and scaling innovation at one of the hottest companies in Fintech.
John:Oh, he's an absolute dog. Now now we don't have all the details on the contract yet, but we're guessing it's likely a high 6 or maybe even 7 figure package. Likely another 4 year extension, probably no cliff this time. For a top performer like this, Ramp's move shows that they're not just in the game. They're building a dynasty under Eric Gleiman's leadership.
Jordi:Absolutely, John. What does this mean for Ramp? Well, they're doubling down on retaining elite talent, and Andre's decision to stay with the franchise is proof of the powerhouse culture that they built. Ramp is clearly taking advantage of the lack of the salary caps in tech. They are playing to win and moves like this prove it.
Jordi:This guy is an absolute beast. Congratulations to both parties.
John:Congratulations. And, lastly, we got some we got some personnel news. Breaking news from Sand Hill Road. Andreessen Horowitz, the juggernaut of venture capital, has just made a massive sign. Massive.
John:Christian Kyle is joining the team as a scout investor. This is a huge play for Andreessen Horowitz as they continue stacking talent to dominate the startup landscape.
Jordi:So who's Christian Kyle, John? Well, let's break it down. This guy is a vice president at Astronos Space Technologies where he's leading the charge on government relations, international relations, PR, and marketing. He's got experience as a chief of staff and director of biz ops at at biz ops at Astronis as well where he helped guide one of the most exciting companies in space tech. Before that, he founded Direct, a roaming decentralized tech startup, and cut his teeth at Deloitte.
Jordi:Love that for him as a consultant.
John:He also worked with, Jason Carman at Astronis.
Jordi:Animal. Who who
John:we love on the show. But don't sleep on his academic game. He's got an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BS from the University of Michigan where he crushed in economics, psychology, and applied statistics. Now Andreessen has brought him into power up their growing scout program. While the exact contract terms haven't been disclosed, you can bet there's a cut of carry on every deal he does.
John:This is incredibly bullish for the hard tech community. Kyle's deep connections and experience in space and hard tech make him the perfect fit to bring cutting edge startups into the a 16 z portfolio.
Jordi:Look, John, we gotta call this what it is. This is a dynasty move by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Christian's already built a fantastic podcast interviewing hard tech founders. And with 2025 on the horizon, the industry is watching closely to see what plays he makes next. Absolute dog of a signing.
Jordi:Stay tuned here.
John:Stay tuned. Stay locked in. Thank you. Let's move on to some q and a. We got some DMs from wonderful folks in the audience.
John:We'll start with a, public post from Counter Pressure. They say, hey, guys. I met this LA model from Columbia. She asked me to cosign on a car lease for her. She has a 258 credit score.
John:She's hot, but not quite hot enough. I'm not sure if she has a job. Should I help her get a Civic? What do you think, Jordy?
Jordi:I like it, John. I like the play. It sounds risky, but we like to go we like to go risk on on this podcast. And look, you know, if you're looking for love in this competitive market, you gotta be willing to take some risk here and there. You know, I I don't know what kind of I don't know what the retail price is of the kind of car you're looking at, but if if, finding the love of your life is worth 20 or 30 grand to you, I think this is an easy bet.
John:Yeah. I say take the risk. Let's go on to the next one. We got a DM. Hey, John and Jordy.
John:I recently sold some secondary, and after taxes, I netted about $30,000,000. I'd like to rotate about 10% of that into a new daily. I want something sporty that can still fit 2 car seats as I have 2 sons under 5. What car would you recommend? By the way, my sons love the pod and take turns screaming, risk on and lever up, when they're in the back of my current car, a Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT.
John:What do you think, Jordy? $3,000,000 for a family vehicle. I think you gotta go Mercedes G Wagon 6 by 6.
Jordi:The 6 by 6 is great. The 4 by 4 is a good option. Although, my personal experience with the G63 variance is that it is certainly tough to fit car seats in them. They're not, they're not very long. Not very long.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:You could get one of those off road beasts, one of the, you know, van life, something really decked out.
Jordi:Just Yeah.
John:Just fit a ton of family members in there. You could you could have 7 kids in the back.
Jordi:Van life van life is certainly certainly tough. I mean, at this point, I think if you're going for something that is, trying to spend $3,000,000 on a family friendly car is not, is certainly not easy.
John:Mhmm.
Jordi:There's not a lot of 4 seaters, but I'm gonna have to go with I'm gonna have to go with a Koenigsegg, Gemara on this one. That's
John:a great one.
Jordi:Phenomenal car. Yep. I mean, this thing is an absolute dog of a car. Fantastic. I don't think you're gonna find something faster or more expensive Yeah.
Jordi:With 4 seats.
John:Yep.
Jordi:So to really optimize around that price target, I don't wanna come back to him with something that's under under 7 figures just because he clearly is trying to, he he wants to lock into a more stable asset. Yeah. The markets fluctuate every single day. With cars, even if they're depreciating, they're usually pretty fixed
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Rate. Right? You might be losing 5, 6, 7 percent a year, but you're not gonna lose a 100% in a year, like, if you're trading options.
John:Wildcard pick would be get 2 SUVs, the pure Songway, the latest Ferrari SUV. Not gonna blow your whole budget on that. So then also pick up a mint in fresh condition, Lamborghini, not the Urus though. You get the l m o o 2.
Jordi:I will tell you
John:the Rambo Lambo.
Jordi:The Rambo Lambo. I actually got a
John:3 way. In the shop 50% of the time. Yeah. But the Purosangue is the
Jordi:modern technology, so if you're
John:not feeling to fire up the Rambo Lambo, you get in the Purosangue. But if you're feeling adventurous, you fire up the Rambo Lambo.
Jordi:The Rambo Lambo Lambo is I'm surprised Massive. Have it. Super underrated. It's it's a beautiful silhouette. And driving a Lamborghini SUV just feels so right.
John:And you can just tell people, oh, yeah. I just have a Lambo SUV. And people will just assume it's an arrest. They'll know. Okay.
John:It's just
Jordi:a nurse. Yeah. Whatever.
John:But Yeah. Then when they see it, they know. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. It's a really if you know you know a car. Exactly. Funny thing about the, poor poor sangue, pure blood. The the pure blood.
Jordi:Those things are getting into, like, the 700 if you wanna pick it up right now.
John:You can also get, a Mansouri kit on it if you wanna Yeah. Yeah. Pump it up a little bit.
Jordi:Pump those numbers
John:up a little bit.
Jordi:Lower it a little bit
John:for kids. Yeah. You get in.
Jordi:So it. Arrow kit on it.
John:Yep.
Jordi:Yeah. People don't think about lowering their family SUVs enough. You can get you can get like you've seen those Honda Odyssey. Yep. It'd be lowered, which is you don't realize this until you have kids.
Jordi:But once you have kids and you got 1 or multiple car seats, like you want a car that's actually low to the ground. That's why some of these SUVs kind of suck. And so having something that's lowered, it's like, you know, having a kid sort of a chess level is is really ideal.
John:So, I mean, you know, an LMO too, you're not even gonna be pushing a $1,000,000 with that. So even a mint one. So, you know, you could take the Purosangue, take it to West Coast Customs, get the sliding minivan doors put on
Jordi:There we go.
John:And then also add hydraulics like it's a Lolo so you can boost it up, but then you can also lower it
John:all the
John:way to the ground, get the kids in really easily.
Jordi:That's I
John:think we solved it.
Jordi:I think we
John:solved it. Well, good luck out there. We're on to the next day.
Jordi:On the, liquidity event.
John:Hey, John and Jordy. I recently got a promotion at work. I'm a PM at Meta, and I'm looking to get a new car and watch to commemorate the moment. I previously made about a 100 k a month, and now I'm clearing a 150 k a month including bonus. I currently drive a Kith BMW M4 comp and wear a day date.
John:Can you give me some ideas for potential upgrades? I love questions like this. It's important.
Jordi:I love questions like this. And I and congratulations on the promotion. Congrats. I'm surprised we didn't pick it up in,
John:some personnel news.
Jordi:Personnel news already. Anyways, you know, the the the Kith m 4 comp is is a beautiful looking car. I'm not I'm not a BMW guy myself, but I but I can appreciate, I can appreciate that car. At this point, you're making it pulling in a 150 k a month. Where where would you go with this?
John:It's a car. Strato. Great option.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, especially, you know, if you wanna be able to if if you're in the Bay Area, you wanna be able to take it skiing, snowboarding, whatever. Exactly. Strato is a great option.
John:296, if you're not going off road.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Yeah. 296. It's it's kind
Jordi:of underrated, but it's a fun It's beautiful car.
John:It's a beautiful car.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. And then and then and then I just I I feel like the trap, that I always find, you know, myself getting in and and friends getting in is wanting a car to do too much.
John:Mhmm.
Jordi:And so the right answer here is actually probably, like, get a daily, you know, something something, you know, maybe like a Ferrari Roma, something that's a little bit more under under the radar. It's not gonna blow anyone away at a car meter or anything like that. And then get a get a get a weekender, like, Yeah. You know, more of a collectible car. A Countach.
Jordi:A Countach. Something that
John:Cougar GT.
Jordi:Something yeah. It's a car meet or anything like that. And, you know, it can still be a little subtle, but, you know, it doesn't you don't have to go for a Huracan SEO or anything like that. But, but, anyways, don't try to get a car to do too much at once. It's a trap.
John:I think
Jordi:that's what I tried to do that with.
John:What about watches? What are you thinking?
Jordi:Oh, I think it's, it's obviously, holy trinity time.
John:Yep. Holy
Jordi:trinity time. I don't I don't know that you can, you know, he he he's working at he said meta.
John:Yeah. He's a PM. So so Patek, AP, Vacheron, like, which speaks to the role of the PM at meta best?
Jordi:Look. I think meta is a is a culture that's not super flashy.
John:So And yet the boss is rocking an FP Jorn.
John:Right?
John:That's true. Because the
Jordi:user hitter collection is Kubernetes. So so if you wanna if you wanna stand out, if you care more about standing out to to Zuck than your than your direct peers Yep. I would go for for, you know, like overseas complications, something like that. Like, something that's that's a true hitter. Some of their ultra thin models are fantastic.
Jordi:Yep. Something like that. That's gonna be low profile. You're not gonna get questions about
John:like you're trying, but Zuck will notice.
Jordi:Zuck will notice. It's gonna blend in in the lunch line, and you're not gonna be sort of bashed in in Slack or or Teams or whatever they use.
John:I mean, you could also go the other direction and just try and take it to the max, Richard Mille.
Jordi:That's true.
John:And just be the only one in the office with something
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Yeah. So in your face.
Jordi:Yeah. And it's funny because it looks kind of like a cartoon watch.
John:Exactly. And
Jordi:so, again, it's like one of those, they're not usually like an if you know you know watch. It's a racing machine on the wrist, but at the same time, you you know, you're you're gonna get the right attention wearing wearing an RM.
John:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, the other the other option is, just pick up a Cubitus Patek. It's a controversial pick, but Zuck has 1.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so I think he's thinking about the Cubitus in kind of a contrarian way.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
John:It's this Patek that everyone's hating on in the community, but maybe there's something there.
Jordi:But it's still a Patek.
John:It's still a Patek, and and I will fight you on the cubitist. I think it's underrated. Let's go to erroneous input. Just a fantastic meme produced, on our behalf. Just says certified banger, and it has Jordy raising the roof somehow, which I don't know how he got this image.
John:He must have scrubbed through 10 hours of content to get that perfect shot.
Jordi:I mean, we have a lot of content to pull to pull, screenshots down. He also he also made one of you too. The certified certified platinum banger. Pointing or something.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
John:It's great. Well, thank you, erroneous input. He's been on a roll. Potential future reply guy of the month here with this. I mean, it's quality over quantity in this case, but Totally.
John:I I see a bright future ahead. So Well done. Thank you. And then, we got one more from Sy Sack. Says, Tech Rose pod needs to slow down.
John:I can't possibly keep up with this much content.
Jordi:And I I unfortunately, we're speeding up.
John:Yeah. We're speeding up, man. Gotta we
Jordi:might get a 5 minutes. More.
John:We might go to 5 days. You might be getting 15 hours a week. We've done 10 hours a week. We're gonna push it even farther. It's go kind of Yeah.
Jordi:We've heard it. We've heard from a few listeners. They they put us on, you know, when they're hitting the gym at 4:30, and they're they end up being frustrated because by 7:30 AM, they're they're out of content. Yep. And so we kinda need to lean into some of our our our bigger, you know, fans and and really deliver what they Not not try to provide always for sort of the median.
John:Yeah. Exactly. Listen on 2 x. Listen on 3 x. Listen on 4 x.
Jordi:4, 5 x.
John:5 x. Just get it in your brain.
Jordi:The,
John:don't skip any minutes.
Jordi:You know that, like, it it really got, when when Mark went on JRE
John:Yeah.
Jordi:It really got memes of people being like, oh, you gotta listen on God.
John:He he talks that fast?
Jordi:He yeah. He talks quite quickly.
John:Okay. I didn't really notice that before, but I love to see it.
Jordi:Yeah. Because because yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:2 x for you is just like one x for that. Beautiful. For immortal.
John:Let's go to the timeline. Will Menitis, happy birthday to Will. He's been on the show before. Says Amtrak on Thanksgiving. Entire aisle is blocked by a VC's bag.
John:Dozens piled up. He's standing there yelling into a cell phone about some deal getting marked down. Someone offers to help with his bag. He snaps, can't you see I'm on a call? And Will says, we are so back.
John:You
John:love it. You love to see an aggressive capital allocator.
Jordi:No. I I wanna bring for some reason in tech, yelling has been a big no no for the last 10 years,
John:and
Jordi:I think we need to bring it back. Yeah. Yelling is a great way to get your point across if used highly strategically.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:You cannot yell all the time. You cannot yell on every call. You cannot yell once a week. You probably shouldn't yell once a month. But once a quarter, keep that as a tool in your toolkit and really let loose.
Jordi:There's a way to do it respectfully. Right?
John:Sure. You can yell respectfully. Yeah.
Jordi:I this is serious
John:alpha for the listeners, but one of the first lawyers I had
John:in Silicon Valley was
John:like, look. Like, yeah. Some VCs
John:love to yell.
John:Here's a tip. When you're getting yelled at on the phone, just turn down the volume and put the phone farther away. And I was like and I let him do it, and it was phenomenal because it just takes the edge off so much. Because if you're up in the air zone.
Jordi:Yeah. Because if you're if you're on a call, you control.
John:You control the amount of yelling. And then all of
Jordi:a sudden, it just sounds like someone's yelling at the curb. Sorry. I can't hear you. Hear you now.
Speaker 4:Speak loud. Mogged. Mogged.
John:Mogged. Yeah. We gotta we
Jordi:gotta flip it on him.
John:Let's go to Zach. He says most of the, many of the most successful writers and entrepreneurs I know built their entire empire on Apple Notes. I love it. Anti second brain guy.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. I don't think,
John:I mean, the simplest thing is just it it's a canvas, and Apple Notes has, like, so many features. You can draw. You can do bullet points. Like, everything everything you need to do, you can share stuff. You can create shared things.
John:I mean, Google Docs is the same thing.
Jordi:Yeah. My my thing is structured, it's like you're
John:spending more time organizing than you are actually thinking.
Jordi:My my thing, I don't know if you do this, I just text myself, like, stream of consciousness. That's the only, like, note taking app I really use.
John:More basic. Yeah.
Jordi:Like, I just, my wife's always just like like you text yourself more than anyone. You talk to yourself more than anyone. I'm just like constantly just like typing away, but it's great because I just have this like timeline infinite timeline of
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:Stuff I'm thinking about and what I need to get done.
John:Yeah. It's great. Use Apple notes. Make sure you're leaving, mental mental notes everywhere. Lucy Guo says, I don't have an addictive personality outside of working out.
John:So, of course, when the opportunity presents itself, I do 3 berries in a row. Thankful to the universe for giving me so much energy. Fantastic.
Jordi:I think she has an addictive personality to creating shareholder value. Yeah. Decacorn. Yep. Probably potentially a future Decacorn.
Jordi:Financials are fantastic. Animal.
John:Animal. Absolute animal.
Jordi:Absolute dog.
John:And and I think I think she's been profiled in the in the information, and there's a little bit of a thing where, people kind of clock her as, like, not having the default tech personality because she's, like, talking about working out and working with the, these, like, content creators, and she's, like, almost, like, cool in a way that's unheard of in tech. Like, she's cool with, like,
Jordi:actual early to loud opulence. Right? She she was driving A Ferrari. Ferrari. Yes.
Jordi:I think Roma.
John:Yes.
Jordi:She'll correct us, I'm sure, in the comments if if we're wrong, but I think she was driving a Roma in,
John:like, 2020. F 40.
Jordi:Yeah. No. No. No. No.
John:Fantastic. And and but but I think the real takeaway here is that, like, I think that there is a world where Lucy designs her personal brand all around Scale AI and being this, like, very serious business processing BPO and and doing b to b SaaS, essentially, which is like that business. But she knows the the business that she's building now needs to speak to the type of content creator that talks about
Jordi:Well, in many ways, she's now she's now much more well known for being Lucy than being one of the cofounders of Scale, which is
John:And so and so there's a lot of there's a lot of founders that are in tech, and they they fear being seen as some like, a member of the industry that they're actually part of. And so if you're part of the influencer economy or, like, the creator economy, like, you need to feel authentic in that. Yeah. If you're just there talking about, like, what software you're using or whatever, like, that's not gonna appeal.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so I No. What I what I love is underrated.
Jordi:What I love is I I I feel like there's an entire cottage industry of of Lucy, like, haters to people that don't want her to win Totally. And and she's just a winner. Like, she just keeps winning every single year. I gotta go really I'm very short Lucy haters because, you know, they've taken
John:They should have losses.
Jordi:Huge losses. I mean, honestly, props to her for just just I think she gets she's like, oh, you think I'm annoying? I'm gonna go do 3 berries and add, like, a $1,000,000 of GMV today to my platform.
John:No. She was talking about how, like, she, like, maxes out the wood way. I had berries like it. Yeah. She broke the machine.
John:It can't go any faster.
Jordi:It's broken.
John:It's fantastic. Critter says, I can't wait until we have slurs for moon people. And, dirt man, a good friend of the show says, the 51st state, and he's talking about building on the moon. Very funny. Did you read, Moon Should Be
John:a State shirt?
Jordi:Slurs, I mean
John:Pirate Wires? Fantastic essay. And I I ordered my newest Moon Should Be A State shirt. Highly recommend you go pick them up. Pirate Warriors Might
Jordi:be sold out might be sold out by now. Probably. There's only 500 there's only 500. Half of these. They're
John:rare. Rare. They're drops. Yeah.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:But if you see somebody out in one of those but yeah. It's funny. Every everything can be a slur. Tech bro is a slur. That's why we're the technology brothers.
Jordi:Yep. Canadian is a slur in some circles.
John:Yep. Jeremy's gotta work on that.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. He's gotta make it cool again. But Yeah. We're probably Jeremy and Sam, do your best to make Canadian cool again.
John:I actually had, like, a crazy, almost, like, emotional moment with the moon I was putting on the moon should be a state shirt, and my son's, like, obsessed with the American flag. Anywhere he sees an American flag, the American flag American flag, he just gets pumped up. I see the American flag on the back. And I'm like, oh, yeah. This is like a moon should be a state shirt.
John:And and he was like, what's that? And I was trying to explain it to this 3 year old. And I was like, well, I have some friends. You know the moon. Right?
John:And he's like, yeah. I love the moon. He's like, well, like, I have some friends that are trying to make it so we could just go visit it whenever we want. And he was like
Jordi:Won't even need a passport.
John:And yeah. Yeah. And he was like, that's amazing. And then he was like, I, will need a rocket. And I was like, well, it's funny you say that because I have some I also have some friends that are working on that.
John:It's like f f is like moon and and SpaceX and, like
Jordi:I mean, the create the lesson the lesson the lesson that your your son is gonna grow up with is that, dad, my dad's got a guy for everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My dad's got a moon guy.
Jordi:My dad's got a rocket guy.
John:Yeah.
John:Basically. Basically. But it's like I mean, it's not like these basic people are like my guys. It's more just like like I'm clearly aligned with them. Like, this is the
Jordi:vision that Spiritually. Loosely working towards.
John:Yeah. And he was just like, that's amazing. Like, that's exactly what we should doing, dad. Like, I couldn't agree more with your plan.
Jordi:My kids are based.
John:It's it was so good. Every time he sees a Cybertruck, he's like, I need that.
Jordi:I need that.
John:Okay. I asked him what color. He was like, red.
Jordi:I was like, I don't know.
John:My hands are tied here. I have to drive a red Cybertruck.
John:It's fantastic.
Jordi:School drop offline. It's gonna be crazy.
John:Let's go to Signal. Signal writes, LMAO, if you're an employee of a startup started by 4 XVPs of Google and alike who are already insanely wealthy, why would you work hard for them? What skin do they have in the game? Literally nothing. Perhaps they're all great people, but it strikes me as an awful way of creating mission and a culture that someone gets super inspired by.
John:Well, maybe they just wanna go bigger. You know? Maybe they're maybe they're deco decobillionaires decomillionaires, and they wanna become senties or beanairs.
Jordi:It's such a it's it's so, one signal has been dropping some absolute bangers every every every every time I I see their their
John:name How wealthy was was, was Elon when he started
Jordi:Yeah. So this is I mean, you could argue that Elon invest he claims he invested every dollar he had into everything.
John:Sam was back to wealthy?
Jordi:And he Yeah. When when he said No. But I that's what I'm saying. It's it's very person to person. I'll I'll meet founders that have better, you know, sort of post economic, and they're trying to do their new thing, and you can just tell they don't have that dog in them.
Jordi:And then you meet
John:Yeah.
John:I think the most important thing there is not necessarily the money, but the VP at Google. Because VP at Google is not necessarily a super entrepreneurial person by default if they went there early. So if they joined a a 10,000 person org, that's a lot different than founding a company, exiting, having some money, and then being like, I gotta
Jordi:take Yeah. Just because speed is so important. I feel like Google has been in this position where they can plan things across decades and multiple years. And if you apply that style of leadership to a startup, like, you probably will never get off the ground.
John:Yep. Let's go to Isaiah Taylor, founder of, let's go to Isaiah Taylor. He says, if you're a VC reading this and want to make a large bag and, b, save American manufacturing, stop what you're doing and invest in Atomic Industries, Rangeview, and Hadrian. Then ask Aaron, Cam, and Chris who else you should write checks to. We win this through innovation.
John:I love this. Shouting out the boys. Yeah.
Jordi:Absolute boys. It's great.
John:We are losing and it's a quote tweet of Zane saying, we are losing SMB manufacturing shops, kind of identifying the problem. But Isaiah just writing the playbook for the VCs, it's good. He's doing their homework for them.
Jordi:Yeah. I mean, this is how a lot of VCs actually invest as they invest in one good founder and they'd say, who else should I invest in? And then they go try to invest in those people, and
John:it's
Jordi:a pretty good strategy.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:That's how I've approached angel investing where sometimes I'm I'm sort of evaluating a company early on, and I'm like, well, I don't think this person is as good as this team. But even if it they're in the same orbit at all, it means they're, like, probably pretty good
John:Mhmm.
Jordi:Compared to the average person that's attacking that space.
John:Yeah. It it it just speaks to, like, the beauty of the gundo. Like, they've kinda bootstrapped their own, like, YCS community where they're syndicating deals together, sending employees around. Like, there are now employees that fly in from, like, the East Coast and just tour all the companies and just wind up at 1,
Jordi:which is just really, really cool.
John:Yeah. And, it was fun making, like, that little video about,
Jordi:the window and kind of, like, the green energy. Like, the the bonfires and stuff, which I think they still do. Do.
John:Yeah. And it's important when they're small because they can kind of share resources and syndicate stuff. It's great.
Jordi:Yep.
John:Let's go to Lisa Su, CEO of AMD and Jensen Wong's cousin, I believe. She says, we're saying everyone a happy Thanksgiving. I'm very thankful for to our amazing AMD extended family, friends, and fans. And I wanted to call this out because wrist check, she's wearing a beautiful Rolex Oyster Perpetual.
Jordi:No way. Lisa, happy thanksgiving to you.
John:True technology brothers.
Jordi:From the technology brothers.
John:Yes. And it's important because this being our show with Jensen. Jensen Wong, founder and CEO of NVIDIA famously doesn't wear a watch and but his cousin does. And so
Jordi:Clearly Clearly
John:clearly Good. You know, Christmas comes along, Maybe she gets him something. He wears it, and the world has changed.
Jordi:It's up to you, Lisa. The power's in your hands.
John:I'm very optimistic about it. Sam McAllister says, poetry camera in action last night at Tate powered by Claude. This is so cool. I was so stoked by this. So it's a camera that you take a picture of, and then that picture is sent to Claude, and then it writes a poem based on what it sees in the image.
John:Gadgets.
Jordi:Gadgets. I love gadgets. Yeah. The the the this this reminds me of that app that we heard about being built at a hackathon where you would just speak a sentence into a microphone, and then it would generate this, like, 30 second visual of whatever you said.
John:Yeah. So
Jordi:it was almost like you were hallucinating, basically. Yeah. But all of these things were, like, you take some organic input, like a picture or voice, and then it just generates something absurd.
John:Yep.
Jordi:It's just such a fun, it's such a fun form factor.
John:Has a receipt printer in there, probably very unhealthy. We got we have to Do not touch the receipt. But, just an amazing gadget, and I really hope this is for sale on Instagram and just blows up during holiday season. Yeah.
John:That
John:that's my fears that this is like a hackathon project, and it doesn't actually get productized.
Jordi:Gotta get commercial.
John:We we we we need more kind of, like, bootstrap founders, making little, like,
Jordi:AI projects. Little gadget like this, you guys sell a 100,000 of them. Yeah. You know?
John:And and and it's it's it's fascinating because the the person that designed this is clearly now thinking, like, okay. I need to disrupt the iPhone. And so Yeah. Because the the the whole problem with, like, the humane stuff was, like, they they they they they understood Apple's moat, and they were going after Apple as ex Apple. By the way,
Jordi:this is not good, but I have not seen a single thing from Humane in months. Like, what's going on over there?
John:Yeah. Well, I mean, part of it was that when you got the PIN, you had to set up a new phone number because they didn't want it tied to your phone at all. They wanted to keep it completely off of it because, obviously, if you integrate it all Avi
Jordi:Avi is gonna end up buying you,
John:man.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Maybe.
John:But, this is something where
John:it's it's
John:just like a fun little gadget, and maybe they could build more gadgets off of it. Maybe it does turn into obviously rooting for them. But Yeah. I just love that it's something unique, something that leverages, like, what's like, the tech that's available. You couldn't build this years ago.
John:And, like, people would love to buy this.
John:It's
John:great. Let's go to Sarah Hess. She says, me at Thanksgiving telling my family that defense tech investment is about to explode, and America will bring a new era of global peace that will last for 1000 of years. And it's a picture of, what's that movie? Basic Instinct.
John:Yeah. Great.
Jordi:Sarah Sarah understands aesthetics.
John:Great aesthetic. And it's it's good because, we did a Thanksgiving post, and, you know, it was like it was like me at Thanksgiving waiting to tell my family that I was featured on some, you know, tech niche tech podcast. But, great way to kind of, like, reframe it towards what you do, like defense investing.
Jordi:Sarah at Hereticon Yeah. Founders kept kind of pitching her these sort of like half baked defense ideas and she would be like, so who's your customer going to be for that? And they would, like, kind of stumble over it and they're she's like, well, so how is that going to work? And then they'd, like, stumble over it. She was just mogging every single time.
Jordi:Every single time I heard somebody try to pitch her, it was just, like, very it was, like, very simple questions, but just completely mock them. So if you have an idea in defense tech and you wanna stress test it, go talk to Sarah. She will either validate what you're doing or mock you
John:Yeah.
Jordi:In a gentle kind way.
John:It's great. This one's, controversial. Paula writes, I'm never leaving this app, and it's a screenshot of some drama between True Ventures that hired Helen Min and Charlie Cheever who's calling her out because he claims that, she and her husband were blackmailing her him, but then Sunil Pai chimes in and says, conveniently left out that you were previously in a relationship with Helen. And I think all of these were deleted, but, 5 not before 5,000 people like this post.
Jordi:I don't even think we should I we should probably cut this out. Yeah. It's not really worth talking about, relationship drama among among VCs that we can leave that to the information. Politics are
John:on the table now. The All in podcast has made politics completely acceptable for VCs to talk about, but, the personal life is tough. Yeah. Let's leave that. You gotta keep that.
John:You gotta keep that. On Blue Sky. Please Blue
Jordi:Sky.
John:Exactly. Ken says, people keep saying we're so back, but it's quite obvious we're at a place we've never been in the history of the country.
Jordi:I love this.
John:It's a quote from Unusual Whale saying billionaires Bill Ackman, Marc Andreessen, and Travis Kalanick are reportedly getting involved in Doge. You know, I read this and I was wondering, like, is this really that new? I feel like the robber barons and the, the the the oil billionaires and the railroad barons.
John:It's it's
John:These guys were deeply involved in politics.
Jordi:It's Lindy to exert your will by leveraging the government.
John:Yeah. But also just I don't know. I I think the the story, you know, how Henry Flagler started Miami. No. Like, he was Rockefeller's business partner on Standard Oil, made a ton of money.
John:His wife got sick. The doctor said, you gotta go to somewhere warm, a warmer climate to keep her healthy. And so he was like, I'm just gonna start building railroad south. Kept building until he hit Florida. Starts the starts the city of Miami.
John:They wanted to call it Flagler because he was, like, developing everything. He was like, no. No. No. That's too too much.
Jordi:We'll call it Miami.
John:Yeah. And then and then he kept building, and he wind up building, like, the causeway that's now, like, really iconic in a bunch of movies.
Jordi:The one that connects Yeah. All the keys. Miami Beach.
John:Yeah. No. No. No. Not the keys.
John:You guys go further south. Yeah. And so he was just, like, this maniacal builder. And and when I go back and think about, like, the power broker, Robert Moses, like, he was deeply involved in the government, driving efficiency through, like, kind of interesting ways. Yeah.
John:This doesn't feel this doesn't feel entirely new to me. But but I do get it.
Jordi:It doesn't It's new for us because it's the first time the tech elite have become deeply immersed.
John:But at
John:the same time, like, the railroads were the technology of the day. Oil drilling was the technology of the day. Gold mining was the
Jordi:People that made their money in software.
John:Yeah. Exactly. It's not like you you go back and you're like, oh, like, they didn't have technology. They did. It was called, like, the first industrial revolution.
John:It's like the steam steam technology. Like and the It's certainly
Jordi:not the first time capital allocators have become involved in government. Sure. Because you have Nancy Pelosi, absolute size lord, who's been running it in in DC for a while.
John:Yeah. This is great. Elon says, I was telling Sylvester Stallone that I watched Demolition Man again and how well it predicted the crazy woke future 30 years ago. Fascinating movie. Have you seen the demolition man?
John:No. It is a fantastic movie. Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes both get they're they're, like, a a super grizzled cop and a criminal who get, frozen in cryosleep, and then they get thawed out, like, 30 years later. And it's, like, 2025 or something, and the technology predictions are insane.
Jordi:No way.
John:Self driving cars are exactly like they are where it's like, it's not full self driving. Like, there's still steering wheels, but when you put it in self driving mode, the the steering wheel kind of compacts, which isn't exactly what happens, but it's, like, pretty close, but
Jordi:it's, like, level 3, level 4. Tesla wheels
John:compacting. Yeah. Smaller. They have this crazy VR stuff where, Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock have this, like, intense romantic experience in VR, like, very reminiscent of what's going on. There's a whole bunch of other, a a lot of, like, fearmongering around different dietary restrictions.
John:They they go to Taco Bell, and it's, like, a 5 star restaurant that's like Michelin starred. And he's like, can I get some salt? And they're like, salt was banned. Can I get the
Jordi:state oils?
John:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Can I get some ketchup?
John:And they're like, no. Sugar's also been banned and stuff. It's very funny. And they have all these, like like, anytime he cusses, there's just a there's just a an AI that's listening and finds him. It's funny though, I mean fined a $100 for saying a bad word, and he has to rip off the receipt.
John:It's very funny. It's a great movie.
Jordi:It's funny the things that they got get wrong are diet related because diet cycles so hard. It's like, yeah, salt and sugar were very bad for 2 decades and now everybody's like, oh, actually, you should have supplement salt and and, like, sugar is actually good in certain cases or whatever.
John:Yeah. But fantastic movie, highly recommend you watch demolition man. Levels I o says 30 year loyalty to one brand, and it's Marc Andreessen wearing Ralph Lauren 30 years ago and then just a few days ago on the Joe Rogan experience, and I love that. Pick a brand, grow with it.
Jordi:Make it your whole personality.
John:Make it your whole personality. It's great. He's done the same thing with watches. You know, we've seen we we we posted that, you know, a lot of people were asking us about what watch he was wearing on the g on Joe Rogan. It was, Omega.
Jordi:Yep. Seamaster 300.
John:Yeah. The James Bond watch.
Jordi:Yep.
John:But,
Jordi:not a fit for an allocator of his size.
John:We we recommended a Graff Diamond hallucination or or 8 of them really, but, it's one of my favorite watches now. I get a kick out of it every time I look at it. I I watch an interview with the founder of Graff Diamonds. It's fantastic. But but this is great.
John:Like, he's
Jordi:just curious. Things. Well, a lot of people in tech have struggled with personal style because it does take a lot of mental overhead to to develop and curate it and make sure your outfits your outfits are working and all that stuff unless you just put on a suit. But one of the ways to kind of speed run it is just to find a brand you really like and that's that's stylistically consistent like Ralph Lauren is and then just only buy from that brand and everything's going to work together pretty well. Yep.
Jordi:You don't have to think about it as much, and it's much cooler than being, like, well, I'm just gonna wear jeans and a white t shirt every day.
John:Exactly. Yeah. Let's go to Anna Musterak. She says, Australia has officially become the 1st country in the world to ban social media use for individuals under the age of 16. The legislation was passed quickly and without any real opposition on the final day of the parliamentary year.
John:The law will be enforced through digital identification and other unspecified age verification technologies.
Jordi:So this is this is
John:from Reuters.
Jordi:This is wild. I saw a really funny post from somebody who is like, this is what all the Australian kid all the Australian kids are gonna be on LinkedIn now. Like, I just loaded I just cleared another, 2 figure day at my lemonade stand. Like
John:We just linked it not banned?
Jordi:I guess I would have liked it. Maybe LinkedIn. Maybe LinkedIn. Yeah. But it's funny how they're you can't you can't stop the Internet.
Jordi:Right? So if if if it what what's exciting to me about this is it will just create a bunch of other emergent apps that get created with Yep. With hacks of, like, no. This isn't a social media app. It's an art app.
Jordi:Yeah. And you can draw, and then people are, like, texting and, like, drawing.
John:It's like it's like the Gen z founder who does his meetings in cod. Yeah.
Jordi:You
John:know? Exactly. He's turned cod into Zoom.
Jordi:Yep.
John:And so someone will turn Fortnite into social media
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Or Roblox, which is already kind
Jordi:of a platform. Yeah. It's just it's so funny because I, I've probably talked about this on the podcast before, but I studied abroad in in, in China.
John:Yeah. We get it, bro.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Never been back since. Never will go back again unless unless, gee drags me there himself for for, dissenting on this podcast. But, what's so so all Western social media and major technology platforms are banned in China, but every single person still uses them.
Jordi:Right? They all use Instagram. Yeah. Like they all use YouTube. You just get a VPN and like there's there's always gonna be a workaround.
Jordi:So trying to ban software products, even networks, is just never gonna work. So good luck Australia. I would like to, they're really making I have quite a few friends in Australia from surf trips over the years, and I think they would all be stoked if we made them a a state. So, put it on that put it on the pipeline.
John:Yeah. The 5 i's. Just make it 5 new territories. Let's stay in the east and go to Russia. Right wing Cope says the Russian ruble is officially worth worth less than a fortnight v buck.
Speaker 4:Mogged. Oh my god.
John:Really rough year for Russia. I mean, it's interesting. It doesn't correlate perfectly with the, the war, but you imagine that some sort of sanction caught up
Jordi:now and
John:now they're devaluing.
Jordi:No. I think it I I would imagine that it's more people predicting that the war is gonna end. Mhmm. We don't talk about geopolitics, politics, or social issues on this podcast, but Russia's entire economy is predicated on the war right now. And so if the war stops Yeah.
Jordi:The value like, their economy is just gonna go. That's, like, why Putin doesn't have an incentive to actually end the war is because it's a war based economy.
John:Should we be long v bucks?
Jordi:War in the digital world? Yeah. Yeah. Go long v bucks.
John:Short the ruble. It's great. Howard Cushlin, shares a photo of a Lamborghini Urus and says, we park our Lambos in the front yard here in Palo Alto. Also, inconspicuous color choice, and I believe it was, green. Beautiful car.
John:Fantastic. You know, people call it an RS QA rip off. It's, you know, just an Audi with, nicer clothes on. But we love the Urus here. We've promoted them in the past, and we're happy to see someone.
John:Yeah. We won't.
Jordi:San Francisco San Francisco won't truly be back until every other car is a supercar. Yes. And so that is the only metric that
John:the Urus is. Entryway into Yeah.
Jordi:It's not it's it's arguably not a supercar, but it's in a supercar price range.
John:But whoever owns this is getting a call for the next batch of Lambos when they drop. Yep. And, and and it's interesting because, driving an Urus in Miami is very different than driving an Urus in Palo Alto.
Jordi:Totally. You're not making a statement in Miami. Contact. Oh, here's another course, bro.
John:Exactly. Exactly. Crypto person, NFT guy. Yeah. In Palo Alto, you know that this person is standing out.
Jordi:Totally.
John:And, enough free to get, you know, laughed at.
Jordi:Speaking of standing out, we have a promoted post from Ralph Lauren. Fantastic. Ralph Lauren is a, is is a fantastic way to stand out. Yeah. So so there's a
John:recent favorite brand.
Jordi:One of our, favorite capital allocators, Marc Andreessen, has been wearing Ralph Lauren for over 3 decades. And Ralph Lauren says today a night of giving back at our Milan via Della Spiga flagship store. Visitors to Ralph Lauren's flagship will have the opportunity to make a donation to, an Italian foundation called the a IRC and dedicate a personalized star ornament that will be featured on Ralph Lauren's giving tree hashtag rlholiday. So anyways, this store looks fantastic. Any technology brothers out there, hopefully, you can go get a chance to visit.
Jordi:What what a celebration of the season. And thank you to RL for keeping, capital allocators looking sharp for 3 decades, in a row and no signs of slowing down there.
John:Alright. I have to interrupt the show for a real quick announcement. I have a, a fraud account that's impersonating me on x, goes by just Coogan. If you are contacted by this account, please report and block. It's very annoying.
John:This this impersonator is messaging basically everyone, with the cringiest copy ever, and I'll read it. I'm Coogan from Founders Fund. Our firm specializes in investing in and advising groundbreaking initiatives, facilitating strategic connections with key opinion leaders, KOLs, to fuel growth. Our current portfolio includes Polymarket, OpenAI, Gecko Robotics, and Emerald Cloud Lab, all seeking collaborative opportunities with influential experts. We believe your expertise would be a valuable asset.
John:So if you get this DM, please, troll them as my best as you can. Send them something funny.
Jordi:Honestly Screenshot it.
John:Send it to me. Here's a challenge. Block and report them.
Jordi:No. Here's a challenge for all the listeners. Get the scammer to invest in your venture fund.
John:Yes.
Jordi:Get them to invest in your rolling fund. Yes. That is the challenge.
John:Scam them. Scam
Jordi:them. No. Don't scam them. Try to drive some returns. Oh, yeah.
Jordi:They see
John:Turn them turn their life around. Turn them. Turn their life around. Probably down their luck. That's why they've they've turned to a life of crime.
John:Yep. Make them some money.
Jordi:Make them some money.
John:Do they got $10? If you can get $10 out of them, turn it into a 1,000.
Jordi:There you go. Get a 100 x. There you go. Good challenge.
John:Faraz, been on the show before, from Giant Step says, don't just buy someone else's used jet or yacht or supercar. Commission your own build. Have to agree with this one. I don't want someone else's old boat. Hard agree.
John:Quoting Tristan Tate. Let's go.
Jordi:Yeah. So love to see, Faraz, you know, quoting quote quote tweeting, in many ways g one owner. He's an AMG one owner. He doesn't wanna drive you know, he doesn't wanna live in your old boat or or fly your old plane.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Talk about, you know, fantastic capital allocator. Multiple we had a post recently. He replied that with with a list of all his biggest liquidity events, quite the track record. He even put a picture of a bunch of cash, which presumably was was from one of those deals. So anyways, this is the right attitude.
Jordi:Commission your own boat. You know, talk to talk to your Goldstream rep. Get your get something bespoke made. You won't regret it.
John:Fantastic. Nathan's been on the show before. He says 12 hours and counting. Oh, we actually already covered this one, the GDP to grow here. We can skip this.
John:Very, very silly. Let's move on to something else. Let's move through. Oh, this is an interesting conspiracy theory. Bone GPT says Greg Brockman's sabbatical lines up with how long it takes to get a top secret clearance.
John:Similar timing as the Nokasone hire and several defections. Been a hell of a year for OpenAI. Sam's been asking for regulatory capture. These are the moves to engineer it. And I think this is it got a 1,000 likes.
John:Everyone likes this theory. But it's very silly because, like, people don't take sabbaticals to get top secret clearances. Like Yeah. Elon is building rockets that go all over. I need to take the the
Jordi:Take that off.
Speaker 4:Take that off.
John:Buy it. Take it off. It's like we we would be hearing about, oh, yeah. This defense tech founder got a program of record, and then the founder had to take 6 months off. Like, you've never heard that before.
John:Yeah.
John:Yeah.
John:What is this 6 month?
Jordi:Nothing.
John:It's like it's like maybe it takes 6 months. Like and how much of a black pill would it be on our on our on our intelligence agency? And if you
Jordi:had to stop where you
John:were. Community.
John:If it was like, oh, yeah. Anytime someone needs to get security clearance, they have to take 6 months off for their job. Like, that would be so stupid.
Jordi:All I will say is bone, keep posting, but add one of these to your profile picture, please. Because as long as you're ripping these
John:Nice try, but I don't buy it.
Jordi:Add some add some tinfoil.
John:It's not that he couldn't get top secret clearance. I I think a lot of tech people should have clearance. Like, I'm I'm I'm all in favor of that, but this is, very silly to to assume that it it lines up and plays some, like, date. It's a numerology in this case, and I I'm not buying it. Will Yi over at Ramp says, the truth is that Claude's branding is horrendously mogged by chat gbt's branding.
John:Claude is a name is an obvious and failed attempt at making AI sound human like. It is virtue signaling friendliness and approachability, the serif font, brown, low contrast color screen, the scribble logo, fake and dishonest, and everyone subconsciously knows it. By contrast, Chat GPT is no nonsense. It's clearly a tool, and OpenAI leans into it. Black and white, simple sans serif font.
John:Everyone is using Chat GPT Claw to cheat on their homework or generate some SQL. No one is here to chill or vibe and whatever. I need to drill a hole. I'm reaching for a drill called DEWALT 20 volt max cordless. I'm not reaching for a drill named named named Charles that looks like a mid century modern living room.
Jordi:I don't even think we need to respond to that. That's just the first one. Yeah. He didn't say this directly, but Claude is a French name.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And being French is inherently un American. Yep. So chat g p t though sounds very s is very s f coded. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:Which is which is bullish.
John:Yeah. I mean, it's a
Jordi:But we like both we like both.
John:Great great product goes
John:goes back
John:and forth. Sometimes they're winning, sometimes Yeah.
Jordi:But a lot of their a lot of their out of home camp Claude's out of home campaigns, like, they've clearly been trying to spend a lot of money to break through into Yeah.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Detect Twitter. Because, like, the developers respect them for sure. Totally.
John:Like, technically get it.
Jordi:Arguably, I think a lot of people are using it more than OpenAI.
John:The average person is not eval driven. They're not like, oh, this one scored 2 points higher on MMLU. I need to switch. But but but
Jordi:Claude's strategy has been, hey, let's buy, like, these huge, you know, billboards and all these things, and a lot of their ads have just been falling very, very flat for me.
John:Yep. Yep. Yep. It's not it's just not breaking through.
John:I don't know.
John:We'll solve it on the next podcast. Let's go to Arab. He says, selling a course is the male version of OnlyFans, 11 k likes.
Jordi:It's funny. I somebody else posted today what is the male equivalent of OnlyFans.
John:Is it
Jordi:an investment newsletter? Yeah.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. And and that's, like, per pretty, accurate as well. But I don't know. I think we need to go and get the data. I bet you there's a lot of male I bet a lot of the people on OnlyFans are men.
Jordi:Yeah. Right? It's not a gendered platform, even though
John:The real question is what is our course gonna be?
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Selling secondary.
John:Selling secondary. Yeah. That's right. And, and style guides, a watch buyer's guide. Do we have a promoted post?
Jordi:Promoted post from our friends at DuPont Registry. Today, we have a beautifully spec'd Ford GT carbon series presented in night mist blue. They even added a little emoji. Very cool, very Internet native of DuPont registry to to add that. But anyways, if you want a true American supercar, the Ford GT is the obvious car to get.
Jordi:I think this is in your personal pipeline.
John:Yep. Yep.
Jordi:At some point next year. And and and honestly, like, this this to me is this is by far this is the only American supercar that I truly cannot wait to own.
John:Sure.
Jordi:Sure. And this is a fantastic example. We should probably dial in to TJ Parker at some point and get his opinion on the on the Ford GT. But
John:Yeah. We need to narrow him down. He's too much into these Porsches. We gotta get him okay. For the American dynamist investor, what's the best?
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:You gotta narrow it down, TJ. He's gonna squirm.
John:He's gonna squirm.
John:There's nothing that
Jordi:He absolutely dunked on he dunked on Miata's. Yeah.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing like 19 forties Porsche that goes 2 miles an hour. Sorry, TJ.
Jordi:No restomods. No restomods. TJ, we we kinda need to issue a correction. We highlighted,
John:the Amy Leon Dore collab. He said it was mid. He gave us a 0 out of 10.
Jordi:He gave it a 0 out of 10.
John:He rested us.
Jordi:No points on the scoreboard
Speaker 4:at all.
John:But, yeah. Stick to the classics. I I he made some great recommendations in that thread. You can go look them up and pick something up. Let's go to Emily is in s f.
John:She says, we need to make space for exited founders to call out the VCs who wronged them. There are so many repeat offenders that new founders don't know about. But once founders get liquid, they act like it's water under the bridge and the cycle continues. Well, it is water under the bridge if you're rich. Who cares if somebody wronged you if you came out on top?
Jordi:If you can mock them.
John:And, you know, it's a it's an iterative game. It's a repeat game. You know? The the the VC who who screwed you over, if you did have a great liquidity event, probably got fired. And that firm is probably still chugging along with a new partner there in the Lot of turnover.
John:Lot
Jordi:of turnover recently.
John:Yeah. So I don't know. Do we need do we need exited founders to call out VCs more?
Jordi:I think back channels do the work in many ways.
John:They do.
Jordi:I don't think it's there's so much nuance in, like, different situations and stuff like that. Like Yeah. I don't think it's worth it it always reflects poorly on the person saying it to go out Yep. And publicly For sure. And the only example of this is, like, is is Palmer, you know, repeatedly, ratioing Jason.
John:Not an investor, though?
Jordi:Not not an investor, but, again, it's like, I it doesn't reflect to me, it doesn't reflect poorly on Palmer when he does that because Jason's, like, continues to instigate it. Yeah.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:But, but, yeah, I just Homer never starts it. I just think this is why, like, founders just just do go to go to a VC's portfolio page message all if you're if you're exploring signing a term sheet with somebody and and it didn't come from a quality, necessarily like a quality intro, do 5, 6, 7, 10 follow the Graham Duncan method. Take 10 messages. Calls for you. And the main the main thing is only do this if you actually are really exploring partnership because I've had this weird thing where, probably like 10 times founders have reached out to me and been like, hey, what do you think about this fund?
Jordi:Oh, yeah. And I'm like, Meaningless. But but and they want an intro to the fund.
John:Oh, okay.
Jordi:And I'm like, what are you doing, dude? Like, I'm not like, go have a conversation with them Yeah. If you're gonna explore.
John:Sure.
Jordi:Like, don't use that as a way to start a conversation so that I intro you.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Like, I'll intro you if it makes sense, but don't try to reference check. Don't try to reference check a VC before you're in active conversation with that look.
John:Yeah. I I was more reflecting on the fact that, like, the, like, the the distribution of personalities within every fund is, like, crazy. Totally. So reference checking an entire fund is, like, impossible. Totally.
John:And, yeah. I mean, the other thing is that I I I just think, like like, the water under the bridge thing, like, a lot of these, if you had a bad experience, it can just become a formative experience that you learned from. Like, oh, you got yelled at, but you learned how to turn down the volume on the phone so that it didn't matter. And now you're stronger and it's like, yeah, I got kinda I I got kinda beat up at the gym that day, but now I'm a be I'm a beast, and I'm ready for the next
Jordi:one.
John:Yep. I'm
John:gonna yell back even louder. I've been working on my voice voice going to a vocal trainer, voice coach. Boom. Boom.
John:I'm the
John:one who yells, you now. Josh Kaplan says, every moment in business happens only once. The next great podcast won't be like all in. And he attributes it to Peter Thiel, which I don't think is very funny. This is the thing.
John:No.
Jordi:He's just I think he was replying to you with that.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:It's just it's just funny.
John:Oh, great reply.
Jordi:We're gonna we're gonna we we might put this in our in our partnership deck. So I should give that to
John:you. Let's pass that.
Jordi:This is great. Thank you, Josh. It it might not look like all in, but it will certainly look like Technology Brothers.
John:Yeah. I I mean, I think that there is something something real there about, like, don't just copy the format that you see that works. Like, it's just not it's like like Yeah. Like, copying, like,
Jordi:doing a right now, doing a biographies focus one when there's Senra
John:Yep.
Jordi:And acquired stuff. It's just not gonna work.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:You're not gonna get better at them.
John:Yeah. You just have to find the white space. Find some
Jordi:other topic. Copying and, you know, invest like the best is gonna be really challenging too. You need to find your own lane and focus to and copies
John:of the McAfee show for tech. Oh. Personal news. Now that that's a winning strategy. So figure out how to remix stuff.
John:I mean, there's so many innovative media formats out there. If you look at what's happening in, like, gaming and, like, streaming kids and streaming and stuff. Yeah. There's still not a single tech streamer. No one's figured that out.
John:Yeah. Massive white space if you can do it. Praying for Xets, been on the show before. It says, wait till this guy finds out about Jane Street and Citadel, and it's a screenshot of a CS major asking, I want money. All I want is money.
John:I love it. Yeah. Probably will wind up at, Jane Street or Citadel. That's the that's the place.
Jordi:There's a UFC fighter whose nickname now is Money Moy Cano.
John:Okay.
Jordi:And he was relatively unknown, and he started winning fights. And after he would win, he would just get on the mic and be like, Dana, I want money. Give me money. And so now this is the same guy that was quoting the front the French revolution.
John:Oh, yeah. That's right. Wow.
Jordi:That guy's a total legend.
John:That's me.
Jordi:So, anyways, if you want money, go and ask for it. Close mouse. Don't get fed. Go interview at Citadel or Jane Street. Tell him you're here because you wanna make as much money as possible.
John:Tell them the technology brothers sent you.
Speaker 4:Tell them
Jordi:the technology brothers sent you.
John:Yeah. I mean, you can also go to an early stage startup or something. There's a bunch of different ways. You know, if you're in college, just raise, like, a $400,000,000 fund.
Jordi:Yeah. You'll
John:be good off that.
Jordi:Start a podcast. Raise a $400,000,000 fund. There you go.
John:Let's go back to Sarah Hess. She says, wow. Really all the girls that talk to you are CCP spies? You must be building something really important. And it's a picture of Anne Hathaway being like, oh, yeah.
John:Funny. Did you see the CCP spies meme?
Jordi:Yeah. Which is which has been going on
John:For a
John:while, but it but
Jordi:it hit like a real fever pitch.
John:Yeah. We need
Jordi:to we need to create a we need to create a leaderboard of memes and just constant, like, the power ranking.
John:I think Jason Levin has that. Like, he put this in there and was and other people were using this image as, like, a meme
Jordi:to But I I just mean more, like, high level, like, not the meme itself, but the CCP is
John:like thing.
Jordi:Do, like, kinda, like, a UFC style, like, pound for pound list.
John:But it is it is, like, so cringe how how it became very trendy to be, like, I'm building something so important that, like, when I go to a startup happy hour for my seed stage company, like, China wants to spy on me and Xi Jinping, it has to know what I'm doing. And it's, like, probably not, bro.
Jordi:Probably not. Yeah. Your your your GPT rapper is not that important. Yeah.
John:Also, like yeah. Also, you really shouldn't be worried about CCP spies. It's cringe to accuse every Chinese woman you meet being a CCP spy. You should be worried about your Canadian bro friends.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:From a communist country, they blend in.
Jordi:They're right at the border.
John:These are the guys you gotta worry about. Yep. So cut off all your Canadian friends. All your male Canadian friends, they gotta go.
Jordi:Except if they're capital allocators living in New York.
John:Yeah. That's okay. We'll give them a pass.
Jordi:Jeremy Gaffan.
John:But the rest of them, risky.
Jordi:Risky. But, no. I I do think though that it was like so so AI and defense tech probably the 2 hottest spaces right now outside of, like, energy and
John:some some
Jordi:other few other categories, but those were the first two times in a while where I felt like there was this real sense of, oh, you do have to Totally. Rethink this
John:higher or For sure.
Jordi:Yeah. You should should talk about what you're doing a lot less. You certainly shouldn't be building in public Yeah. With your defense tech company or yeah, or or even, like, there there is an argument of, like, if you're working on some super frontier technology and AI, yeah, maybe you shouldn't open source at all right away. Totally.
Jordi:But that doesn't mean we need full regulatory capture.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. And there's, like, nuance there's Yeah.
John:Balance. Yeah. There there there's just such a difference. If you just look at, like, the priority stack for the CCP spy, like, agenda, like, it's gotta be just, like, get into Oracle and just get all the data. All the different.
John:Yeah. At every 4 to 500 company or whatever. Or, like, get into like, they they they they hacked, like, the, the depart the OCP. You hear about the OCP hack?
Jordi:Yeah.
John:They got, like, you know, personally identifiable information on, like, every single government employee. A dream for Doge, really. Yeah. Yeah. Doing Doge's work ahead of schedule.
John:Work. Just ask Xi Jinping, who should we fire? But, yeah. I
Jordi:I Yeah. There was also there was also a bunch of their
John:is the target. There was
Jordi:a bunch of, like, blustering on x about potential investors that that could be foreign agents. And you push back on that hard, and you were, like, all this anything that's in a deck now is publicly available usually within a year.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And it's not even any and and again, the thing about startups is the reason that it's so bearish when a founder says to you, oh, can you sign my NDA Yep. Before you look at my deck is because as a founder for 99.9% of businesses, you should be able to tell somebody your exact plan
John:Yep.
Jordi:Step by step Yep. Every single thing you're gonna do, how you're gonna acquire customers, all this stuff. And you should still be better at doing that. And you deserve to win only only almost only if you can tell the whole world what
John:you're doing.
Jordi:So don't like, at the same time, I think it's very bad to go build in public and and post screen like, you are if you're building in public, you're inviting you're you're casting a really wide net for potential competitors. But in private, you should be able to tell people what you're doing without this risk of, oh, if I tell somebody they're gonna, you know, go home that night and and launch my company on Stripe Atlas and be competing with me.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:You know, it just takes so much to actually make something happen.
John:Yeah. It was also just this idea of, like, the CCP spies going to cocktail parties specifically because the conversation at cocktail parties isn't anywhere near as valuable as just hacking into a company and stealing the IP, which is something that China's clearly doing. It just takes the form of cybersecurity and you'd never see this person around. Or if you do, it's like somebody who's working at your company and, like Yeah. Putting everything on a flash drive.
John:So you just need better IT. It's not really Totally. That if you tell someone like, oh, yeah. I'm building a, you know Yeah.
John:The launch
John:group 3 ISR drone with, you know, industrial capability.
Jordi:Codes are on my nightstand.
John:Yeah. I saw that one. That's good. Gauthier has been on the show before, says the 2 horsemen of the American dream, and it's the, Herman Miller chair and the Ames recliner. Right?
Jordi:Well, it it her Herman Miller Herman Miller? Owns the
John:Oh, they own both?
Jordi:I think they own both. Okay.
John:Yeah. It's like the work chair and then the relaxing chair. I I the the horsemen of the apocalypse thing. I don't really get the analogy here. It's just like this is this is what people No.
Jordi:I so so my my, my office setup is, like, right now, one Herman Miller chair, and I'm adding the recliners as well because I want those are my two states of work, basically, reading information and at in front of my monitor, you know, doing, you know, Zooms or whatever. So I think it's very accurate. Those are the only 2 chairs you need to create a $1,000,000,000 of enterprise value.
John:Love it. Eliana Eunice says, in today's New York Times, Palantir Tech is partnering with Selkirk Sport for, the these, pickleball paddles. He actually gave me
John:2 pickleball paddles which we'll
John:put on the set that are Palantir branded. Perfect. And says, Selkirk is leveraging Palantir's self-service AI technology to
Jordi:outperform the competition.
John:I mean, huge commercial business. Like, everyone still thinks that Palantir is, like, just purely government contracting, but they have a huge commercial side.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. We should ask for Palantir tennis rackets too. I don't I don't necessarily support or endorse pickleball, but I support Palantir, and I support American innovation.
John:Yeah. Eliano is a great I worked out with him on Monday.
Jordi:We'll put it in the set until they can get the tennis racket sent out.
John:Yeah. But, yeah, he's been crushing it. He has a whole Palantir merch store. You can go buy shirts and hats.
Jordi:And he's got an army of retail traders Oh, yeah. United behind him.
John:Huge huge huge Reddit. Huge there's a whole YouTube channels about the Palantir stock, and they're having a good year.
Jordi:They're having a good year. It's gonna be a happy holiday.
John:Yep. Palantir is now the biggest defense company in the world. They they flipped Raytheon finally. Crazy. $150,000,000,000 company.
Jordi:Live, laugh, Palantir.
John:Do we have a promoted post?
Jordi:Promoted post, from our friends at Tiffany and Co, and it couldn't be more timely. Technology brothers out there, men and women, Tiffany is a fantastic place to go shopping for your loved ones this holiday season. Today, they are saying making hearts beat faster since 18/37. The iconic Tiffany blue box is reimagined by 24 talented illustrators through the month of December, and they have some great illustrations here. One of the most some of the most iconic packaging of all time, Tiffany box.
Jordi:Can't can't say enough good things about it.
John:Speaks to the value of just doubling down on a color.
Jordi:Doubling down on a color, owning a color.
John:Owning it.
Jordi:Yeah. The the the Tiffany, blue nautilus is is fantastic and, anyways, you know, whatever you're thinking of getting your loved ones for the, you know, this holiday season, they'd probably rather have something from Tiffany than whatever you're
John:thinking of. Store.
Jordi:Pop by the store and tell your sales associate the technology brother sent you.
John:And, speaking of, the holidays, we have a gift guide, the 2024 gift guide for the tech right from the Foundation For American Innovation, FAI. I spoke at their conference recently. They gave out Lucy Breakers to everyone that attended.
Jordi:There we go.
John:And, we are included in this as well. They they are promoting our product as as a a potential gift product. Giftable product for, someone in tech, which I love. And, so we highly encourage you to go check out. It's
Jordi:it's one of the only ways that you can gift locking in.
John:Oh, yeah.
Jordi:You know, because most gifts are distraction. It's like, oh, I got this new sweater.
John:Yeah. What am I
Jordi:gonna do with this? Oh, I got this new, you know, pan, something like that.
John:Yeah. No. It's great. I I appreciate them. Let's go back to signal.
John:Signal says most people wish they had more and more time away from work, but in reality, they'd waste it or do something stupid like train for a marathon or worse, play pickleball.
Jordi:There we go. There's the ball. Pickleball, slander. We support pickleball slander. We do not play pickleball on this show.
John:Well, I'll take the other side of this. I so I don't play a lot of pickleball. I played once, but incredible, incredible story of asset utilization.
Jordi:Totally.
John:Because if you are a country club and you have 4 tennis courts, you can subdivide a single tennis court into 4 pickleball courts.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so you're just getting 4 times the amount of people in, 4 times the revenue, higher margins, same capex. It's genius.
Jordi:So my favorite one of my favorite stories of capital incineration from the last 2 years is people like, 2 years ago, you started getting pitched pickleball teams. It's like, oh, we got this crazy opportunity. We got the Austin, the Austin Dolphins pickleball team. They got one of these new slots in the pro pickleball league and it's like, I kept asking the people that would pitch me this, have you ever watched a single minute of pickleball? And they're like, no.
Jordi:And I said, why is this gonna be
John:be, like, a high performing asset?
Jordi:They're, like, well, pickleball is, like, the fastest growing sport in the United States. And I'm, like, yeah, but but where's the TV and and a team? Like, nobody watches. You see it on ESPN. You're, like, this is a joke.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:It's hard to see that highlights even. I I feel like I don't even see that many viral highlights.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:I see more viral highlights from, like, the fighting sports. Like Totally. Karjitsu where they're fighting the karjitsu or the bear, the the the the jiujitsu in suits, that's viral and amazing.
John:Yeah.
John:There's all these different slap boxing stuff. There's so many
Jordi:I'd rather see any combat sport even
John:Well, combat sports are much more viral in your in in order to really break out, you have to have some sort of viral mechanism for growth. So the question is, like, how do they solve that with pickleball?
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Make it full contact.
Jordi:Even badminton is is exponentially more fun to watch because it's so high speed.
John:They should make it like hockey where you can drop the pickleball paddle and just Yes. Squeak it
Jordi:out. Fight. Yeah. I think that'd be good. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. If if if pickleball players had UFC style Yeah. Gloves on where they're, like,
John:4 Should have, like, a quick release net, and if something triggers, it just drops the net, everyone drops, and they just start
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. Four ounce gloves
John:just Yeah.
Jordi:Cracking people. Great. Anyways, signal, acquire pickleball, professional pickleball, and turn it into a fight sport.
John:There you go.
Jordi:That is your task.
John:Jeremy Giffen says, a material part of compensation for a lot of people is just being given something as opposed to nothing to do with their time.
Jordi:Yeah. I think this is real. I think you can if you if you've ever taken a vacation and usually so you arrive there, check into the hotel, you have a nice night, the next day is great, and the day after you're, like, alright, what are we really doing here? I've got this book that I could have been reading at home Yep. And we're just eating and just consuming stuff and not and and then you realize, okay, a huge part of well-being as a human is just doing things and being productive.
Jordi:And the more you produce, generally, the better you feel and the more you consume, generally, the worse you feel.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And so creating an environment where people are only consuming, everybody's going to be really unhappy. So that is why and and maybe that's, like, American. That's just very part of American culture, but I think it's probably pretty broadly applicable across
John:That's why it's so important to vacation at places like a month.
John:Yep.
John:Because you strike up a conversation on day 2, someone else's capital allocator, you start having to do dinner deals
Jordi:on day 3.
John:XL comes out, you're building models, and you're back in the grind.
Jordi:Yep.
John:The week's gonna fly by.
Jordi:Fly.
John:Cycle says Technology Brothers will happily leak production secrets to a secrets to a petite Chinese spy just for a chance to say orthogonal to the woman at the s f party. And we thought this was slander, but then we realized we are Technology Brothers. We are the Technology Brothers podcast. But when you post about us, please use capital t, capital b, and put the t m after it. Please.
John:Class.
John:Please.
John:And so he's talking about Tech Bros generally, and we've already discussed this. We kinda disagree with, this, with this idea, but, it's good to get the message out. Just let everyone know. Be careful out there. What you're building is important, and, don't leak any production secrets.
Jordi:Yep. Do
John:not. Go Sean Maguire. He says, the incoming Trump admin is working 16 hour days, 6 days per week, and Elon chimes in saying, it's actually 7 days a week. I love this.
John:I mean
Jordi:He's taken the Frank Slootman approach from snow snowflake where you're just always always setting the pace. Yep. You know, if your team thinks they're working hard, show them they can work harder.
John:Yep. What was, Frank Slootman's book called? Oh, it's so good. I forget it. But we should review that at some point.
John:What was it called? I can't I'm blanking on it. But, yeah, I mean, whether you like Trump or not, like, it's good to have people in the government working hard better than not working at all. Time in a while. Better than not, if if you have fake jobs.
John:But, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what comes out of the the the the admin. I mean, we're still so early. Like, they're I guess, they're working mostly on, like, nominations and just picking people. I think they have to hire, like, thousands of people in, like, a very short amount of time. So more
Jordi:Yeah. That that's that's that's what I think people is kind of under discussed is you have this new administration, and then you're sprinting. And, of course, you're gonna hire then you're sprinting and of course you're gonna hire a bunch of make a bunch of bad hires. If the startup had to hire a 1000 people in 3 months, you would make I would imagine, you know, I don't actually know what, like, great sort of, like, hiring success rate looks like. I would imagine if 9 out of 10 people you hire turn out to be great, that's pretty good.
John:Yep.
Jordi:But if you're trying to hire a 1000 people in 3 months, the failure rate is probably gonna be 20, 30, 40 percent even of just, like, people that you didn't have you know, Trump admin's been getting to know a lot of those people. They obviously have the experience from 2016
John:Yep.
Jordi:To 2020, but it's still, you know, you're having to kind of date really quickly and
John:It's really hard to recruit people too. I mean,
Jordi:a lot of
John:people have been in the admin and they now they wanna make money in private in the private sector. And so you gotta do a whole new pitch to convince them to come over.
Jordi:Totally. A lot of momentum.
John:Follow-up from a deep dive we did on previous episode. Antonio Brown is following up about Pirate Wire's reporting and Shane Copeland, founder of Poly Market. He says, I posted something sent by the Kalshi team about the Poly Market creator. I didn't do research on it and honestly didn't even know what I was posting when I posted it. I was doing other business with Kalshi and just tweeted it.
John:I wanna say sorry to Shane Copeland as I know he's been getting a lot of shit. Some things you're sent, you don't understand them or the wait, didn't even look into it, just did it. Never a wrong time to do the right thing. Shane's a good guy. I love it.
Jordi:I love seeing a a b do the right thing and just own up to it. Yeah. Clearly, when you looked at the original text thread, he clearly wasn't putting a ton of thought into it. He was just like, okay. So that's cool.
Jordi:Yeah. I mean, it was a funny his thing was a funny post. Yeah. It's him with Tim Walls. Yeah.
Jordi:Tim Walls Yeah. Does look daunting of something. I don't know what it is. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:So anyways, I
John:I love
Jordi:seeing Yeah.
John:It's funny.
Jordi:A a a b is having the most beautiful post athlete arc of of pretty much any anyone outside of Pat Mac feed.
John:Yeah. Also just like a master class and, like, apologizing from, like, a really, really bad scandal. Like
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Really, really bad. Like, the Pirate Wires article we read was let me make
Jordi:him look
John:really, really bad skating. And, and he just
Jordi:Well, I would I would argue it made call she look a lot
John:worse. True. True. True. But still, it's like, you know, just quickly owning up.
John:Clearly, this didn't go through some committee. There's no crisis PR firm behind this. He's just reading the room
John:Yeah.
John:And just understands the vibe and understands, you know, what's going on and can just address it.
Jordi:Potential brother of the week. It's okay to mess up. Put him over there. You gotta say sorry.
John:Master master communicator there. Simp for Satoshi says the first production truffle 1 unit has been produced. It's exciting. Do do you know about this company?
Jordi:Yeah. So I I think we talked about this, on Saturday, but, I got a chance to meet, simp for Satoshi last week in, here in LA. He moved down from the bay. He felt like it was too much of an echo chamber up there and and they're building basically these like personal GPU's that you can put on your your, right on your desk and run, run their model like locally and nothing cloud nothing touching the cloud. So they're gonna be selling into some of the, like, Reddit, like, Llama community and and let's say you're, you know, an investor or an allocator and you wanna be able to, like, not feed, OpenAI all of your proprietary data, this is gonna be an awesome solution for you.
John:We're not actually just
Jordi:having a look at it. I like they're pushing the form factor form factor forward. It feels like
John:there's something out of, like, a psychedelic jungle, like, it's
Jordi:just, like, sitting there, like, glowing. Like, it's just it's psychedelic jungle. Like, it's just, like, sitting there, like, glowing.
John:Like, it's just it's cool. Their aesthetics and visuals are awesome.
Jordi:And, and, world class poster. Love them or hate them. Yeah. You can't ignore them. That's true.
Jordi:That's true.
John:Yeah. George has a similar project with the, the tiny box. Have you seen this? It's it's it's a it's a custom made computer. It's like 10 grand, maybe 20 grand.
John:Yeah. And it can run, like, the bigger models locally, but it's the same thesis.
Jordi:Like Yeah.
John:You wanna you you wanna have an AI in your home that you can interact with in any scenario.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And I I That's the real second brand.
John:Yeah. I love that even for, like, doomsday prepping. Like, if you have this thing in your bunker and all you need is just power somehow. So you could have solar panels. You could have just a bunch of batteries.
Jordi:Small nuclear.
John:Small nuclear reactor, even just a gas generator and you have access to the entire memory of humanity.
Jordi:Totally. So
John:you can just ask it any question, tell me a story, and it's gonna have everything. Like, the LLM's incredible compression engines.
Jordi:Yeah. They just I compared it. I compared it. The the truffle one is gonna be I forget. I think it's gonna be, like, a few grand roughly.
Jordi:But I compared it to almost, like, the the whole, like, Arduino movement. Do you remember? Like, I I remember growing up, my dad was is is, like, would use Arduinos, like, in some of his, high school classes that he would teach. So he'd always have them at home just kind of, like, running and they'd have their little lights and whatever. So I think it's kind of like the evolution of that in in many ways.
John:For the promoted post?
Jordi:You know I love, promoting, the world's greatest car manufacturers and we actually have a promoted post today from Bentley Motors at Bentley Motors. They say artistry that commands the road, start something powerful, hashtag Bentley, hashtag continental d g t, hashtag mulliner. This is, the Continental GT Speed is the if I didn't drive a turbo s, I would drive a Continental GT Speed. It's they're showing one of the GT's here, but, the most beautiful, timeless car.
John:Silent performance,
Jordi:silent. It's it's low it's lower key, much lower key than a Rolls, but gives you similar levels of of comfort. And, yeah, this one, this one's just beautiful. It is a hybrid, so that might piss off some of our audience, but, they do it right. And, thank you thank you to Bentley for, making the world a more beautiful place.
John:Yeah. It's a step up from an s class. Something a little bit different.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. We wanna see more of these street parks in SF.
John:Absolutely. That'll
Jordi:be a sign that that things are really turning.
John:Absolutely. Thank you. So head to your local Bentley dealership and tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Josh Browder. He says, I witnessed Bill Browder receive his knighthood from Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace yesterday.
John:The royal family work on Thanksgiving, and I'm so proud and thankful. That's amazing. Do you know
Jordi:this story? This is brother behavior right here to the max. You know, I I what what is it called? What's the book called? Red?
John:Red Notice.
Jordi:Red Notice. Yeah. Such a great book.
John:I think
Jordi:I read it maybe in in high school and and figuring out the connection between Josh and his dad was, like, crazy because, like, they're both clearly just, like, geniuses and, like, their own in their own ways and and, not afraid to in in many ways, Josh doing do not pay and using it to saying, like, power back to the people, like, let's let anybody just, like, fight back against the system using technology
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Is just, like, totally different. Like, he's carved out a totally different lane than his dad, which was, like, trying to take down the oligarchs.
John:Well, that's
John:the crazy thing about the Red Notice book is that you open it up and you're like, oh, this would be a cool story about, like, a hedge fund guy who's, like, going to Russia, doing deals, and that's what the first part of the book is. And then his business partner, Magnitsky, gets thrown in jail and dies. And spoiler alert, I guess. But it's a fantastic book. You should still read it.
John:And and then he spends the last half of the book, like, campaigning to basically get revenge and, like, you know, you know, like, retribution for what happened. And then he passes the Magnitsky act, which, like, literally changed the order and the relationship between the US and Russia. It's crazy.
Jordi:Yeah. He kind of mogged the oligarchs. Totally.
John:Yeah. Yeah. They all had terrible time after that. It was rough. There were all these asset seizures.
John:It's crazy. He really, really
Jordi:went to it.
John:It went to battle. Let's do Kevin Kwok. Kevin Kwok says, how did Stripe and Shopify get into this red queen race over making the most hardware looking digital tracker for Black Friday sales? Someone someone will one day write a nature paper on something something bird mating plumage and engineer hiring one day UIs. Did you see the, the over the top digital tracker for Black Friday sales from either of these companies?
Jordi:I did see both of them, and I saw, I think, Connor, Connor McDonald,
John:we
Jordi:were having dinner with tonight.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Technology brother and CMO of
John:Ridge.
Jordi:Ridge. He was joking, and he was like, all I want Shopify made this, like, extravagant device.
John:They put it on the, the the sphere. The sphere. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Stripe made the device. They put it on the sphere.
Jordi:Sure. Connor's like, all I want is something that compares this this year's Black Friday Cyber Monday to last year's in a single dashboard. That's all I want.
Speaker 4:And it's just like you put it on this you put it
Jordi:on the sphere. Just give me this, like, simple update to the dashboard. And, I
John:mean trenches.
Jordi:Yeah. I think this is I mean, I think
John:top of funnel marketing.
Jordi:This is this is marketing.
John:Is it it's marketing because you see the Black Friday tracker and you're, like, I should have a Shopify store or a Stripe store or something because clearly, there's a lot of people making money today. Yeah. And and it and it's it's cool. It's a good flex. It's a good, like, exploration territory for UI and development.
John:I think it's fun. Probably acts as a it's kinda like that Chesky thing about how, you know, Steve Jobs has, like, the annual keynote speeches and then Chesky adopted that. Like, if you're in deeply entrenched in ecommerce, like, having Black Friday as a drumbeat. Every year, we gotta step it up in Black Friday. It's kinda
Jordi:push for the It really is it really is poorly timed with the holidays, though, because I don't know. We we experience you know, we launched Aurora, like, about 2 weeks ago at this point. And so, like, we launched because we were trying to launch as fast as was reasonably possible. But at the same time, going right into every if you've ever been close with somebody with it
John:that's deeply entrenched in ecommerce for like,
Jordi:Thanksgiving is not an enjoyable, e commerce for like, Thanksgiving is not an
John:enjoyable holiday
Jordi:because it's the most intense to, like, potentially sick, you know, 3 months of prep up until that point. Yep. Thanksgiving happens and then you have, like, 2 hours until the big star Yeah.
John:The
Jordi:biggest where you're gonna hit the year's records for the next 4 days potentially. And so it's the most critical time.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:It's it's a it's it's a super high stress time because if an ad goes haywire or a button is broken on the site or a code stops working, you can literally lose a $100 in an hour. Yep. And it's not uncommon for one employee to lose their their company, like, their entire annual salary in an hour just because they fucked something up. So the stakes are so high, and it's very American that we go from a day of family and gratitude straight into the into 4 days of the most ex excessive commerce and spending.
John:That's great.
Jordi:And then okay. Now we're gonna go back to at least at least Christmas time is usually as soon I think it's, like, December 17th. There's a lot of brands stop telling people that they can fill fulfill Christmas orders. And so at least they get Christmas and the New Year to kind of, like, relax, but then if you're a brand in in health, at all, then it's back, like, day 1 in January, New Year, New Year, like, full full tilt. So
John:It's because I've I've been doing Shopify stores and ecommerce for almost 15 years now and never really had a Black Friday push because it's always been CPG.
Jordi:Yeah. And so
John:it's not a gifted product. We've done gift stuff, but it's never like a driver.
John:But I
John:talked to the guy who ran Pebble, the smartwatch company, and he was, like, 90% of our revenue comes in q 4 because it's a gifted product.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so they have to do all their inventory forecast based on that. It's it's a It's so intense. Business because if you get the projection wrong, you have too much inventory, then you have to liquidate it. It's, like, really, really hard as opposed to just thinking, like, okay. Like, every month will be kind of like the last month when you're selling, like, a food product or whatever.
Jordi:Totally.
John:Let's go to the Peel pod, Turner Novak's podcast. He said no pod no new podcast this week. Listen to Tech Bros pod instead. Instead. Thank you, Turner, for giving a shout out.
John:And we would recommend this to anyone who has a podcast where they maybe don't have the dedication to put up the the numbers. Just send them our way.
Jordi:Yeah. If you if you, if you are gonna miss a recording 1 week, let us, know. We will produce a dedicated episode for your listeners
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Where we will impersonate you for an hour and a half That's actually in your format.
John:That's actually a great way to grow. You know, about feed drops on podcasts?
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:So so it's like you'll you'll do a swap. I think, founders podcast did this with Invest Like the Best where they where where you Feed swap? Where you you literally just drop one episode into the other RSS feed to just let everyone know, hey. Today, you know, you're gonna be hearing from another podcast. Check it out.
John:Hope you like it.
Jordi:Yeah. But here's here's the strategy, though. In in in venture, there's a lot of dead podcasts. Right? There's a lot of podcasts that hit you know, maybe they record 10 episodes, and then the 11th takes a while to come out, and the and 12th just never comes at all.
Jordi:So we should go acquire all all those old RSS feeds and just roll them up.
John:Yeah. If you have an old RSS feed, reach out to us.
Jordi:DM us. We will acquire we will acquire it.
John:Yeah. You mean, actually
Jordi:We're like
John:we're like the tiny GIFFond.
Jordi:We're like the tiny of of RSS feeds. Yeah. Send us your list. Special situations though. Yeah.
Jordi:Send We'll make you an offer in 24 hours. It's gonna be a fair offer. Yeah. It's not gonna be the the the highest price that you might get if you ran a full process. We'll get you an offer in 24 hours, which will make it easy, and, you can get a nice little liquidity event on our behalf.
John:Yeah. Let's go to Eric Gleiman, the founder of Ramp, CEO. He says, get rich, young man, for money is power and power ought to be in the hands of good people. I say, you have no right to be poor. This was very popular in 1915, but it's best kept to yourself in 2015.
John:Interesting.
Jordi:And I think he almost posted this because it feels like that's actually no longer the case.
John:He's coming
Jordi:back. Yeah. I mean yeah. I think this is this is being proud of your success is is becoming a little bit more normalized now.
John:Yeah. But it's not just that. It's the good people specifically.
Jordi:Totally.
John:It's like it's like if the capital goes into hands of people with bad morals or bad Yeah. Ideals, like, you will see bad outcomes.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:But if it's in the hands of
Jordi:people that have this sort of nihilistic view, and they're like, oh, the world's such a fucked up place. I'm not even gonna try or or I don't wanna participate in the system that's that's so bad. But if that's the case if if you really believe that's the case, 1, if you wanna change the world, one way to do that is accumulate some amount of power Yep. Influence and money, certainly helps with those things. So Yep.
Jordi:Succeed young men and women.
John:Yeah. I mean, I also say that there's a moral obligation because so many rich people spend their money so poorly. You gotta get if you have good taste, you gotta get rich so you can class it up.
Jordi:Class it up. Yeah. More closing dinners on yachts.
John:Let's go to this, post that has one one like. I think it's probably a reply to us. It says, Sailor has pre.combubblebrotherbehavior, a champion. And it's a quote from an article in 1996. Michael is an intense guy on weekends, friends say.
John:Washington's 1996 high-tech entrepreneur of the year has taken a date to the office, handed her a book, and asked her to read all day while he works. A couple of years ago, Sailor flipped his red Toyota sports car several times in an icy highway, escaped with cuts and bruises
Speaker 4:Several several. Several times and headed back
John:to his job, DuPont company executives recall. For fun, Sailor himself says he reads 2 inch thick tomes on the history of western civilization after he gets home from work at midnight. Wow.
Jordi:True bubble brother right here.
John:True bubble brother. Wow.
Jordi:Bubble brother.
John:Thanks for sharing that. I would never have found this. I love this. I I love archival.
Jordi:I respect. It's great. There's two kinds of behavior that I respect. Somebody that hit, a local top for their company in the dotcom bubble and runs it back up 20 years later and achieves a new all time high
John:Yeah.
Jordi:In the in whatever the 2020 bubble that we're in is, and then somebody that can flip their car car multiple times on a single drive and still make it home is also fantastic. So shout out to all the bubble brothers out there.
John:It's great.
Jordi:Are we even into the the latest?
John:Yeah. We are. We are. Paula, who I I believe we covered earlier in the show says, I subscribed to the information just so I could read this specific article. And, and it's a quote by Mark Andreessen's, wife who says, she calls her husband's giant bald head my egg.
John:Amazing. Wild that she went on the record with.
John:That
Jordi:is great. My Dune. My Arrakis.
John:In in in the the 1952 presidential election, Richard Nixon's opponent, Adlai Stevenson the second, whose bald head was similarly shaped, was dubbed an egghead by Republicans for being a nerd. Interesting.
Jordi:I just don't think it's a I don't think it's a diss anymore. No. Like, I don't think you can say, hey. You you look like Humpty Dumpty. It's more like you look like your brain is bigger than mine, and I'm threatened by it.
John:Well, the the the the famous image has been photoshopped so many times that no one knows the story. Yeah. Exactly. It's been so deep fried.
Jordi:So yeah.
John:No. And this is the fact that
Jordi:you're, like, now we're we're we're looking at an archive version of the the the Facebook Red Book. Yeah. In 10 years, it'll be, like, the archive,
John:like, print
Jordi:copy of Mark Andreessen. Yeah. The iconic Eggman image.
John:And he's wearing a an Omega. I love it. Jesse Powell says, POV, you are staying in a $1,000 a night Airbnb, and it's a picture of, Amazon basics, polyester sheets, I guess. Yeah. I mean, the the there's a lot of Airbnb hustlers who have figured out that the profit maximization happens when you reduce your cogs and reduce your CapEx.
Jordi:I I I love Airbnb as a business Yeah. And I have some good experiences in Airbnb. I do not use Airbnb under any circumstances anymore. Like, I I just don't. Yeah.
Jordi:I, I mean, it was great when
John:I was starting my first company, and we needed, like, a big place for a bunch of people who are coming into town. Yeah. It's affordable. Yeah.
Jordi:But that's
John:way cheaper than buying a bunch of hotel rooms.
Jordi:Totally. Totally. I think it's actually best suited for startup off sites
John:Totally.
Jordi:Basically at this point because it's like, yeah, you don't expect your but if but for me, taking a holiday with friends or family, I don't wanna stay in I don't wanna stay in an Airbnb where the quality is just so variable and the average host is running it as a business. And that's why that that created space for Wander, though, to come out. Wander really standardizes the, like, the experience.
John:There there are a few options. I I I know some people that do longer term Airbnbs. And at that point, it's like, okay. On day 1, just order the sheets that you wanna use. Like, if you're gonna be there for 2 months because you're, you know, some sort of nomad.
John:Like, just just make it your own and, yeah, 2 months in a hotel is gonna maybe gonna be a little bit crazy compared to some
Jordi:long term maybe. If you're gonna be there for a couple months, Egyptian cotton.
John:Yes.
Jordi:Maybe go on, italic.com. Yeah. You can get some off brand. Yeah.
John:Yeah. That's good. Let's go to Nasdaq. Says the current state of futurism and, post an image from futurism, the blog, and says Elon Musk's plan for a city on Mars will likely end in horrifying mass death. Wow.
John:One good life.
Jordi:So so I also saw another screenshot from futurism, and there's, like, 4 deeply negative articles on what is the inevitable future.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And it and it and this is just, like, another example of the collapse of mainstream media is, hey, I guess, we just have to be negative on anything to get any type of attention.
John:Yeah. Well, what it is is that they're going for lowest common denominator.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:They're going for broad clicks because they don't have particularly well targeted ads. They're not doing ads for protect. Let's be honest.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so they they they need to be negative because what will spread. If it bleeds, it leads. Like, negative news travels faster, gets more clicks.
Jordi:It's so funny to catastrophize
John:Something that is, like, years away
Jordi:A 100 years out.
John:It's like,
Jordi:oh, something bad could happen in the future. I guess I guess that's, like, how humans have always thought. Right? Yeah. But, have a little have a little positivity.
John:Yeah. It's great. Let's go to Nir. Says, in a world of AI agents, the age of the engineer is over. The time of the idea guy has come.
John:It's a picture of the orcs from, Lord of the Rings. It's very derogatory towards, idea guys. Yeah.
Jordi:I resonate with that. That's kinda sometimes I wake up in the morning and I feel like that.
John:It's true. I can look
John:at the mirror
Jordi:and I'm like,
John:I look at I was looking through my my chat gpt, logs and I was like, other people just wouldn't think to search this stuff. Like, anyone can get these results.
Jordi:The best part.
John:Only I could think to ask them.
Jordi:Yeah. It's true. So the best part is if you I think I think Near probably replied with this, but, somebody actually animated it using some model to to to be, like, a whole, like, scene, and replied with it. So That's great.
John:Yeah. I mean, ideas are underrated. Personal connections are underrated in the age of AI. Like, rote memorization is clearly
Jordi:over. On the way out.
John:Yeah. Let's go to Rohit remembering the best product launch of all time, and it's Sam Altman announcing the launch of Chat GPT.
Jordi:So this He just tweeted it out.
John:Today, we launched Chat GPT. Try talking with it here. Chat.openai.com on the 30th November 2022. So over it's been 2 days.
Jordi:But my favorite part of this, he had a typo. Oh, he did? I don't it's somewhere in the thread. I think he, like, made a mistake.
John:Yeah. He
Jordi:was like, oops. Maybe maybe it didn't get printed out.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's slow.
Jordi:But he was like, oops. Sorry. Meant this. And and and that's the greatest product launch of all time. They get to a 100,000,000 users in 2 months.
Jordi:Yep. And now it's the fastest product that went fully into the mainstream, and I don't know Yep. How long. So and I Do
John:you remember the buzz around this beforehand? Like, what specifically? So so before he publicly launched chat gpt, Sam was doing these, like, monstrous fundraising, like, pitches where it'd be like him and every investor in the valley on the same call.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Not doing, like, individual it's just like join this webinar, basically, if you wanna be in.
Jordi:So amazing.
John:And, and we're just like there was an information article where, I think one of the funds asked, like, what companies should we invest in? And they were, like, really impressed with the results because it it, like, analyzed the portfolio and came up with some ideas. And it was just, like, blowing everyone's mind because no one had ever interacted with an LLM like this. And and then and then as soon as it launched, it was, like, sensational.
Jordi:And and can you believe that it was only was it a year ago that the Microsoft round happened and Microsoft bought like No.
John:The Microsoft round happened before ChatCappetee, like, well before.
Jordi:Microsoft came in, like When no. But no. No. I know they invested early, but there was the one where it was, like, 10 on 20.
John:Yeah. 27,000,000,000 was, right after this. Like, this, like Yeah. This this product was the pitch that did the round at 27, and now the the the like, I think it's been leaked that there's, like, a new round going on at, like, a much higher valuation.
Jordi:Yeah. It's, like, 1 50 or so.
John:Yeah. Exactly.
Jordi:So if you any any of the investors that were on the webinar are being, like, I'm not gonna invest in this. That was like the potentially the biggest miss of their career. Yeah.
John:Basically. I I I know some people that
Jordi:like missing out.
John:And it was it was always because of the, like, oh, they'll never figure out the the the, like, the structure and let
Jordi:Or this isn't a consumer company would have been the other criticism. It's like you're launching your research. Why are you guys gonna create the next dominant consumer?
John:Yeah. No one really pegged the consumer flip
Jordi:At all. At all.
John:It took a long time for that.
Jordi:And it's a huge and it's and it's now it's a this this is the most, like, dumbed down example possible, but I've got to experience with with Rora for the first time building something in in silence for a really long time and then launching it and and going, like, 0 to a 100 with with sales. Mhmm. And it's given me, like, a lot more confidence in, like, now investing in companies where I'm like, I'm gonna invest in you. I'm barely gonna hear from you for, like, the next year and a half, and then you're gonna launch. It's either gonna work really, really well or it's not.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And OpenAI was a company that had to work in relative silence. I could add hype, but it was silence Yeah. For years years years. And then when they launched, it was literally 0 to a 100,000,000 in 2 months.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And so it it's honestly a good case study out there. It's totally counter to the y c approach of just, like, launch early and often and just, like, get feedback and it's and just, like, ship something to get that market feedback because if you are an experienced group of entrepreneurs, you can you can, you know, basically just toil away, like, building the thing for years and launch it and get with the way the Internet distribution works now, you can sell a ton of something really quickly.
John:Yep.
Jordi:Get a ton of users really quickly. And and so it's just a There's no way to do it.
John:Because they they launched it with 3.5, which now if you use it, you're like, woah. This is way worse than 4. But it was still magical. And then they followed it up with 4 in, like, 3 months.
Jordi:Such a good
John:People were, like, afraid. Like, people were really, really, like, this is going to destroy every job ever. This is, like Yeah. The fear mongering was insane. But Yeah.
John:It was you you could you could you could obviously see that at other companies, there would be an a big impetus to, hey. Let's wait for 4. Like, we know 4 is gonna be better. Let's let's wait and just launch this chat g p product when we have the new model that's gonna blow everyone's mind. And they didn't.
John:They launched it quick, more quickly than that. And it was actually better because it it it it showed this like pace of execution that was like uncanny when in fact that 35 model had been out for a while and people were talking about DaVinci and that particular model. It was, 3.5 dash 2, I believe.
John:Mhmm.
John:And that one was already getting great results because it was the same model that was eventually in the first version of Chat gpt. You just had to use it through a different UI. So people in the AI community were like, okay, it's getting really good. Like,
Jordi:yeah, yeah. There was that company copy AI that got one from 0 to 20,000,000 annualized revenue in a year and then had to completely pivot because people just use chat. Yeah. The lot the last thing I'd say on that point so somebody I saw somebody post something I think it might even signal actually credit to signal for just you know having some of the best takes of the week but, the whoever it was who's saying college students are at such a rough point in time right now where they're able to use AI products that are just doing all their work for them in school so they're gonna just learn way less And then they're entering a workforce where all of the jobs that would have been done by early entry level employees are being done by Julius or just chap gbt itself. Right?
Jordi:Like, we use chat gbt so much to prep for the show just to to to, you know, we used it for the red book. Right? You used it to to summarize the book and and that that easily could have been done by, like, an entry level sort of, like, you know, editor type person. Yeah.
John:But, I mean, I think about the work that we did with that Red Book. I didn't even have it summarize it. I just had it take the messy extracted text from the people Yeah.
Jordi:I know. That's still that's
John:still something. Someone's job, but it's great if that's someone's job who's just prompting now.
John:Yeah. I
John:think that's actually better.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Let's
John:go to Palmer Lucky. He says, I'm going to be shilling for what?
Jordi:We should hire a prompt secretary.
John:Basically. Yeah. So it's great. Let's go to Palmer Lucky. He says, I'm going to be shilling for mod retro all weekend.
John:If you aren't interested in the fruits of my Internet forum side project that took nearly 17 years to reach fruition, you might want to smash that mute button. I love it. Even Palmer gets it. Black Friday is important. This is the holiday season.
John:Go get a mod retro. This isn't a promoted post, but we are happy to support Palmer here.
Jordi:Great game. This guy is not afraid of the algo. He's not afraid. He he he he says mute me if you want. Yeah.
John:It's great. He knows. And also, I mean, what a what a fantastic gift for kids. Like, it's, you know, you forget how the Game Boy you can lose yourself in it for hours and hours and hours, but it's not gonna be some, you know, Internet connected Skinner box that's,
Jordi:oh, you know, one of the It's it's very fun. It's not nearly as addictive as the as the average iPhone game.
John:Totally. Totally. And you're not gonna wind up playing yourself.
Jordi:I found my I found my game boy, color recently, which was a Pikachu edition, and those things are going if you have the original box and papers and everything, it's it's like $4,000. And then if you don't have the box, it's like
John:Yeah. $200. 200. Jackson Oswald says, there's so much money in the world. It's actually embarrassing.
John:I don't have at least a 100,000,000 of it by now. I think about this every time I fly, and I'm coming in over Los Angeles, and I'm just looking at all the different buildings. And I'm like, every one of those houses is worth $1,000,000 on average. Every one of those office buildings is worth, like, 10,000,000. Someone owns all of them.
John:Someone owns a piece of all this stuff, whether it's through a fund or something like that. The wealth is there. You can physically see it.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And, yeah, you gotta go out and get it. It's stuck in your laptop.
Jordi:Stuck in your laptop. Yeah. Your job is to find it. I think Jackson is is on the path to finding the 100,000,000 hidden in his laptop.
John:I agree.
Jordi:We'll check back in with Jackson in, 5 years.
John:We will. Let's do another promoted post.
Jordi:Promoted post from our friends at McKinsey and Company. Thank you, McKinsey, for all that you guys do to help companies get more efficient and drive, profits. McKinsey says from climate risk to cyber threats and a growing talent gap, insurers face a critical moment to rethink risk management. The key, empowering CROs to move beyond control roles and lead with strategy. Listeners, you guys can explore the trends driving change in risk leadership.
Jordi:Go to mckdot co, slash 3ctonevwh. You can read this piece all about climate risk. And, we highly recommend even if you're, you know, running the 2000 chat, gpt derivative app in the app store, you should be thinking about climate risk. It's a threat to all of us. So get after it.
John:Pavel Asparuhov says, if you're building, don't get lost in the AGI sauce. VCs can afford to do it. They've got the 2 in the 2 and 20. You as a founder, don't get a management fee. Stay tethered to reality.
John:I like this. It's a good it's a it's a good post. There are a lot of people that just wind up getting obsessed with, the AI futurism and forget that, like, they need to actually build Need
Jordi:to lock in.
John:Lock in. Yeah. Pop Pop was a master of lock in culture.
Jordi:Yeah. I I I don't actually think it can be overstated enough how how a founder is a bet in a VC portfolio and a founder, you are betting your life on the idea that you choose to work on. Yep. And the nature and because Silicon Valley is so supportive of of giving, you know, investing lots of money in young people. Young people, when I started my last company, my prefrontal cortex was not finished developing.
Jordi:Right? And I wouldn't have chosen the same idea today as when we first started. Yep. And, and so it's really on the investor to make to to under you know, yes, you're looking at a an investment as a part of your broader portfolio and a specific bet, but it's it's it's always helpful when the when the when the investors are truly orient care a ton about the company winning, every single company winning just because, you know, not not everyone surprisingly some some are very much just like it is what it is. You know?
John:I mean, it's also just been, like, the 2 in 20 the 2 in the 2 in 20 used to be a lot smaller. Like, you think about the first, like, Kleiner Perkins Fund and, Eugene Kleiner going inside Genentech, I believe, or maybe it's Tom Perkins, like, working at the company
John:Yeah.
Jordi:One day
John:a week, like, doing their finances and closing their books and just making sure that things were the trains were running on time.
Jordi:Yeah. Chris Chris Sacca, the greatest, like, the the the fund that arguably set off the solo GP wave was an $8,000,000 fund. So the management fees on that is, like, you could barely live in SF at the time. Yeah.
John:So he has to make it work.
Speaker 4:So he
Jordi:had to make it work. But now what did what did he do? Stripe, Uber, Twitter Love it. Docker. Yeah.
Jordi:I'm missing one big one.
John:Fantastic.
Jordi:But, back against the wall, cowboy boots on the feet. The guy did it.
John:Made it happen.
Jordi:Imagine what he would have done if he had a suit on.
John:Yeah. Well, speaking of suits, Kevin says, love that jacket, Geordie. You look like Colonel Sanders if he had a liquidity event.
Jordi:And and and Let's go. Kevin. Kevin gets it. That is exactly What
John:you were going for.
John:What I
Jordi:was going for. Colonel Sanders with the liquidity event. So if you wanna look like, colonel Sanders had a liquidity event, go find, Fiorentino label, John Fiorentino. Oh, my. Get yourself a fine white linen suit.
John:It's great. Eric Lyman, CEO of Ramp says, the need for AI and finance has never been more clear. Manually inputted accounting data creates openings for bad actors and human error. Automation prevents those openings. We have the technology.
John:Let's make financial waste a thing of the past. And he's showing a few different, screenshots. Macy's says accounting employee hid up to a $154,000,000 in delivery expenses, and the Pentagon fails its 7th audit in a row. But CFO says progress is being made rough. Yeah.
John:We gotta get these firms on ramp for sure. Yep.
Jordi:Yeah. And I honestly, this is one of those things, every single new company coming out of YC that's doing some AI meets finance for corporations, you are competing directly with a a very fast moving gorilla, which is right. A very, very, very, very aggressive gorilla.
John:It's like you think they haven't thought of this? Like Yeah. There
Jordi:No. And there's a bunch of, there's a there's still, like, so much white space. It's such a large sector of the economy. It's so critical to every business and and individuals, like, ability to operate in the world. So there's plenty of white space, but
John:You're not just gonna build a ramp with AI because that is just ramp.
John:Yeah.
John:I mean, early on, I remember they they were, they they were one of the huge beneficiary of GPT 4 for the receipt scanning because they could just just do exactly what we did with the red book where they, would OCR it Yeah. With Google, take all the text in this Yeah. In the picture, and then throw that through chat gpt Yeah. Gpt4 just to clean it up, and it just sped everything up so much for them. Yeah.
John:And so it's like, they're not asleep at the wheel. Like, they're gonna build this stuff, and we're excited to see where else, AI pops up in the ranks.
Jordi:Yeah. I I met a company, I wanna say, like, 2 weeks ago that's that's using that sort of same method to just do much, much much much faster, basically diligence on small businesses, like super small businesses Yep. You know, under 7 figures a year in annual revenue to be able to offer them credit more efficiently. Mhmm. So, like, there's still tons of ways to apply the tech that isn't necessarily squarely in in ramps, wheelhouse.
Jordi:So, hey. And and if you build a great team and you're doing something interesting with AI and finance, shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you might land back at ramp.
John:It's fantastic. Druva says GM announcing a licensing deal with Tesla for FSD will be this era's 1997 Macworld. And if you're not familiar with the 1997 Mac world, Bill Gates called in to the Apple conference pledging a $150,000,000 investment in his struggling competitor while the crowd jeers and boos. This was an iconic piece of tech history. Bill Gates is, like, looming in this massive Huge.
John:Street. It it was so crazy this happened. I stream. It it was so crazy
Jordi:this happened. I cannot wait for Elon to Yeah. I feel like Elon would would show up in person to that event though, the GM, like, keynote. And he'd be like, you know how he does this, like, awkward thing? Right.
Jordi:Hey. Hey, everybody.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:You know, and he does his little, like, spiel, and he's like, should we hit the bar? Yeah.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it'd be great. I mean, I I the Tesla FSD.
John:I mean, I don't know if they'll ever actually license it. This is a firm prediction. We'll see if this actually happens. But
Jordi:I like I like Druva I like Druva going bold because it'll be an iconic quote to me if it happens.
John:Yeah. Exactly. He's not saying, oh, this might happen. He's predicting it.
Jordi:It will happen.
John:It will happen.
Jordi:Check back in 5 years, Technology Brothers.
John:What what what's the top GM product? Probably the the do do they own Corvette? Right? Oh, okay. They do.
John:So the z r one.
Jordi:Give
John:me give me FSD in there. Give me a naturally aspirated turbocharged v eight that goes 230 miles an hour. No. It also drives itself.
Jordi:You know, this would actually be a cool product that you could build, request for startup. Go create create something that runs, that just fact checks podcast historical catalogs because you could go back and, like, what was this week in startups predicting in 2015?
John:You know, Gary Vaynerchuk actually has, like, a guy on his team that does that and goes and pulls his old his old predictions and then post them when they come true, and they always go viral.
Jordi:See, that could be that could be an app.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Jordi:So Gary's guy could be an app.
John:Yeah.
John:Yeah. Zach says speed. That's everything. Never lose it. And it's Cal AI ranking higher than Strava and MyFitnessPal.
John:I assume
Jordi:it's just the number
John:of Cal AI?
Jordi:I think we've I think we've featured this guy before Yeah. And he was like We
John:followed him.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. He's saying, like, I'm not, something like I'm not sleeping till 10 till not 10 figure 8 figures in ARR or something like that. So I didn't realize this kid is, I can actually call him a kid because he's 17. Okay.
Jordi:He's not even officially an adult yet. Yeah. And he's built Cal AI into something that is charting.
John:That's amazing.
Jordi:You know, charting is we've talked about this before is based on momentum. Yep. Not, not overall, downloads or anything, but still very impressive to be beating out my fitness, pal, and Strava given their scale. Yeah. And I and the the app's super cool.
Jordi:You basically can, like, scan your food using your camera and, like, get an idea of how many calories it is. Yeah. Makes total sense and Yeah. And something that can be probably a lot more accurate.
John:Yeah. I was getting lunch with a guy who, like, took a picture of his Chipotle order to then enter it into MyFitnessPal later. And I was like, dude, you run an AI company. Like, you gotta cut out the middle man here. Like, yeah, I should just be able to look at the image and just guess, like, pretty accurately, especially if you've ordered that before.
John:And he was like, yeah, I always get the same thing. So I just go into my fitness pal and copy it. And I was like, that still feels like, you know, the stone age.
Jordi:Yeah. And this is I mean, this is such a good example of so many of the best applications or AI are super obvious, and that doesn't mean you shouldn't go and do it.
John:Yeah. Oh, this is great. Ben Little says, if this guy is across the negotiating table from you, you're in trouble. The tells he wears a 3 XL, but should probably wear a 2 XL. He wears an old school Rolex, jeans with worn in loafers, took 4 calls before takeoff at 6:30 AM, and he's been talking about racing for an hour.
Jordi:Animal. An absolute dog. An absolute dog. I would love to figure out who this guy is and do a news segment on him because when he moves companies, he's gonna move the market.
John:Is he moving companies?
Jordi:Maybe he's just an entrepreneur.
John:Some small business. Maybe he's been rolling up h facts for a couple of years. Who knows?
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's the guy. If you're if you are running a search fund and you're bidding for an HVAC company, just remember you're bidding against this guy, and good luck.
John:Yeah. That's great. This is an interesting one from Rune. Been on the show before. He says, shape rotator was a 100 x less useful and more tasteless than word cell.
John:I expect people will say word cell for a long time. Yeah. That shape rotator and word cell tweet was, like, shook Silicon Valley To its core. It really brought Roone to the forefront of, like, tech culture.
Jordi:All it takes is one
John:one banger
Jordi:True banger. Basically. I mean,
John:it's Kuggins law, coining a phrase to describe a phenomenon. What is a word cell? Someone who's high verbal. What's a shape rotator? Someone who's high math.
John:Those words don't stick out in your mind the same way.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:I don't understand that shape rotator was tasteless. It doesn't it it doesn't seem like it's that tasteless. There's that whole shape rotation test. Have you seen that?
John:Yeah.
John:It's like a test to see if you're, if you're can rotate shapes in your mind. You just give some of this test and they either get it or they don't. But, yeah, there's a big there's a big question about, you know, who's the beneficiary in the age of AI? The shape rotator or the word cell? And maybe it's the word cell.
John:That's the that's the hot
Jordi:take. The ideas guy.
John:But we'll see we'll see.
Jordi:The work ideas guy.
John:The the the the bull case for word cell over shape rotator is that it's just shorter. We're like, word cell, 22, 2 syllables instead of shape rotator 4. And, and the more compression that goes into an idea, the easier it is to use. The shorter it is to type, the the more useful it is as a shorthand.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:So I kind of agree with him there.
Jordi:Totally.
John:Crypto. Boring. Let's do this one. This is interesting. Raptor is my favorite new niche brand, says Andrea.
John:Products are made by an architecture student, and it's a it's a very elegant egg holder for a dozen eggs and something that's a juice squeezer that looks like something out of Blade Runner. Very very cool.
Jordi:Yeah. I I just wanted to put this up to encourage people to, look, you know, there's this the the when you if you're early in your sort of entrepreneurship journey, it's easy to be like, oh, all the good ideas are taken.
John:Mhmm.
Jordi:Ramp is a great idea. It's already ramp. Right? I don't you know, nobody needs to go rebuild ramp or anything. But when you look around your everyday life, right, like, rebuild the Polycom.
Jordi:Right? Like, I want I want that that some of the printers. Yeah. Printers. I want somebody to make just a beautiful, stunning, super easy to use printer.
John:Right? I camera. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. So is doing interesting. Yeah. You can just look around everything everything in your life, everything that you touch and interact with is a potential business.
Jordi:You can make it more analog. You can make it more futuristic. You can make it easier to use. You know, there's just any number of of, Yeah. I
John:also like this just because the design language is uniquely not Apple, which really dominated the tech industry for so long. It's just like you gotta copy Apple on everything. And then we saw this with the landing pages, like, linear, I believe it was like
Jordi:the Yeah. Yeah.
John:People were LARPing. And, yeah, it was, very, very exciting to see someone break out and do something different. Gabby Goldberg says, imagine how powerful it feels to crop Jeff Bezos out of your Instagram carousel. And, she says, fall photo dump. Grateful for all the memories this season brought, and Jeff Bezos in full Batman costume has been cropped out.
John:Although, I
Jordi:So but this is like the this is like the eith this is like it looks like one of the Yeah. One of many images.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. Exactly. Need to go fact check. Like, we
John:She clearly wanted to show the whip that
Jordi:she's carrying.
John:Yeah. It's at lauren w sanchez on Instagram. And and I I thought I saw a, a community note on this later that said, that said, that he's actually just in the previous photo. So if you swipe, you can actually
Jordi:see both
John:of them. So a little bit of fake news, Gabby. You might wind up with a community note. I don't know. We're fact checking you right now.
John:But,
Jordi:I can't even find the original post,
John:but
Jordi:3 3 days ago, she's
John:posting this. Posting him.
Jordi:She posts she posts her her technology brother
John:Why not?
Jordi:All the time.
John:Jeff Bezos looks great. He's jacked. He's living his best life, having fun. Why not post him?
Jordi:My Chad Life by Jeff Bezos.
John:We we, Tuna says, we owe a lot to these gentlemen. Eastern European developer makes 15 k a year. Will accept any GitLab ticket, doesn't argue. I haven't really worked that with that many Eastern European European developers, but I know that there are a lot of companies that have really, really sick,
Jordi:Estonian No. It's an amazing it's an amazing approach to work, which probably comes out of spending decades under a communist regime. And then you're in the capitalist system and you're like, I can be productive and contribute to an enterprise that supports me back is, is is probably an awesome feeling. So
John:Yeah. Long people, a a lot of it's driven by the speed of the Internet. That was a big thing for Estonia. Their their their government just went super long on Internet for infrastructure, and so they built out high speed Internet. And so everyone, no matter kind of how wealthy you are in the country, you just get access to really fast Internet.
John:Same thing with, Poland has really amazing Internet. There's a few other countries, and it's a high correlation between the speed of the Internet and the and the quality of the software developers, which makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Let's go to Will O'Brien. This is a long post, so I'll I'll read through it.
John:He says, there's so much opportunity in ocean technology right now that literally nobody is talking about. It's probably the most underrated startup vertical. The ocean economy is massive, over 2,000,000,000,000, covers 70% of the planet. 3,000,000,000 rely on it as the primary source of food. 1,000,000,000 as their primary source of income.
John:And while we have robots on Mars, low cost, high performance drones, supersonic VTOL planes taking over our skies, the technology in our ocean pales in comparison to these domains. The main player in nearly every ocean value driver transport fisheries, defense, energy, oil and gas biodiversity are the large scale incumbents offering solutions that run on ancient Fascinating. It's cool that he's, like, found a different angle in, like, hard tech and, and American Yeah. There's there's, there are some companies that are interested in
Jordi:I invested in Shinkai Oh, yeah. Probably, like, 8 18 ish months ago at this point. Yeah. And safe the found safe the founder. Yeah.
Jordi:So Shinkai is creates robots for basically fishermen for for fish processing. Yeah. Using they basically yeah. They created a robot that allows you to kill a fish. You basically using a needle to the back of the brain, which makes the fish, die, gracefully and not, like, die really stressfully because if you just if you catch fish, throw it on ice, it just flaps and releases a bunch of, gets really stressed, releases a bunch of cortisol, I'm I'm sure, and and other stress hormones.
Jordi:And so, so, yeah, they're doing that. Will's doing that, And I and I think the oceans have always been forgotten. Right? Like, humans naturally have always been focused on the stars and and we and there's always this, like, fact that's, like, you know, 80% of the world's oceans are completely undiscovered, you know. It's like so there's a lot to explore down there.
Jordi:I would love to see a future where I really wanna see a startup. This is gonna is a crazy idea, but but I wanna start up where you and your absolute boys can crowdfund a a really capable autonomous, semi autonomous drone that you can just either fly or send out to sea. Like, imagine if you had a little mini, like, drone submarine that was self sufficient. Yeah. You can just send it out into the ocean and be, like, it'd be you just have a live stream of it.
Jordi:You could just, like, like, I I would pay a lot of money.
John:I think the comms are really, really hard.
Jordi:The comms are hard. Coms are really hard. Yeah. So let let's
John:say it's
John:a surface surface zone. Truly fully autonomous.
Jordi:Little mini little mini reactors, Starlink.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:I just wanna be a live stream of being, like, we're pulling up to this deserted island. Like, let's go. Let's Let's go check it out.
John:And stuff. Visibility is not good down there.
Jordi:It's very hard.
John:But, I mean, maybe the right, the the right, equipment, you've figured something out. It is cool. I mean, there are some companies that are doing, like, I guess, ocean economy stuff. Flexport is probably counted in the ocean.
Jordi:Very good example. Yeah. That's an example. Like, there's been no investment in this. Yeah.
Jordi:Saildrones and others. Kind of like, I guess, what what Saildrone needs to sort of offer, like, live streaming services where you and your boys can can get your own Saildrone and
John:Yeah. I wonder what else. I don't know. It's it's fascinating. It's just cool to see someone highlight, like, a different angle, different different niche in the in the hard tech community.
John:Let's go to JJ. He says Don Valentine was 40 years old when he founded Sequoia in 1972. Wow. What a boss. But it makes sense.
John:I mean, he'd he'd built, you know, he's wasn't he one of the traders 8, or he was involved in, like, the intel story early on? I I might be getting that wrong. But
Jordi:Yeah. It's not like he just was a HVAC technician and decided to, get into venture capital.
John:I wonder I wonder how what his track record was before founding Sequoia in terms of investors.
Jordi:Angel Bets.
John:Yeah. I wonder if he was, like Couple. Yeah. We talked about him on Mount Mount Rushmore, like, potentially one of the Mount Rushmore Angel Investors.
Jordi:Yeah. My my favorite, there's a great founders. I mean, there's so many examples if you look at if you just go back and listen to founders podcast, it's like every other purse person that he covers started their company, like, in their forties or sometimes even fifties.
John:It really does debunk the man.
Jordi:Enzo Ferrari Enzo Ferrari was, like, 45, and he had been in racing in the automotive world for that kind of his whole career, but he didn't start the the actual what became Ferrari until he was 45. Red Bull, CEO is the same way. I think early Monster.
John:The Monster CEO is really old.
Jordi:Estee Lauder too. So there's a bunch of examples and, honestly, like yeah. That that's why it feels like there's there's this common trend in Silicon Valley where somebody hits 35 and they're kind of maybe post economic and they just kind of start floundering around. It's like, no, that's when you should go do your life's work. 40 do it at 45.
Jordi:Yep. 50. Whatever. It doesn't matter. But,
John:then pick up some don't die from Brian Johnson and build your business for 200 years.
Jordi:For 200 years. Why not? Yeah. Yeah. That's gonna be great.
Jordi:The first the first, CEO with a 100 year tenure.
John:General has on his track.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Zuck. Zuck. Zuck is looking healthy.
Speaker 4:Zuck is and he's looking good.
John:CEO for, you know, 20 years already here.
Jordi:Wow. That's wild. That's actually that's wild to think
John:about. 2005. Yeah. 2004. So, yeah, must be 20.
John:You gotta
Jordi:do something for for 20 Yeah. For Zuck.
John:Founders funds during 20 next year.
Jordi:That's big.
John:It's big.
Jordi:I gotta go to a promoted post. We've had
John:Let's do it.
Jordi:We've had too to little break to to little, ads. So this one is from Sotheby's. Sotheby's says a masterpiece of sound, a treasure that transcends time. The Joaquin Moss Stradivarius, an instrument of extraordinary historical significance, is is coming to Sotheby's New York in a one of a kind auction during Masters Week in February 2025. This is a singular opportunity to acquire one of the world's finest instruments while directly supporting the next generation of musicians through NEC Music.
Jordi:So anyways, this looks like absolutely incredible violin. They have a great video here, and, this is a a instrument that I hope ends up in the hands of the community.
John:I I hope so.
Jordi:And I would we would appreciate the honor of having it placed somewhere on the set, you know, even for a few weeks to kind of put it on display display, and get it, you know, in front of the audience.
John:We're not making Stradivarius anymore.
Jordi:They're just not.
John:It's it is one of the craziest things that Stradivarius is a violin maker. He made a ton of them. They're still regarded as the greatest violins, and they still trade and are used and played.
Jordi:Yep.
John:Like, it's something that violinists actually use. Yeah. I can't even think of another product that's
Jordi:Yep.
John:You you would
Jordi:want Yeah. In the auto in, like, the automotive world, it's not like you're gonna use the 1965 Le Mans winner in, like, the 20
John:I mean, people people drive model t's that have been restored.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Yeah. For sure. But that's not 400 years.
Jordi:And they're not at the highest level. They're not, like, racing.
John:Maybe castles in some degree. Like, people live in in 400 Castle is still hit. Sometimes.
Jordi:Yeah. Castle is still hit.
John:But, I mean, I I I know, I I think Ascenty who's, restoring a old Viking ship right
Jordi:now.
John:And so that might be up there, but it's rare. It's rare.
Jordi:So yeah. Let's Great great option. Send it, past, you know, could test it out in the Middle East to see if it's if that Viking ship still has it, you know.
John:On the Red Sea. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. You have
John:to mount to 50 cal to the front.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. A few few drones. Yeah.
John:Let's go to Gabriel. He says, regular reminder, we're toward the end of the brief period of time, which you can pay 20 to $30 for a bag of very good coffee that's roasted pretty well. By the end of this decade, the industry will have separated into gigaslop and and Veblen goods like wine. 6 k likes. Gigaslop.
John:Banger. Gigaslop is a great term. Veblen good, also great, but we love Veblen goods here. Yep. We we love all all sorts of Veblen goods.
John:We we don't have a
Jordi:problem with the Veblen goods. Yep. There's no other option.
John:More consumer surplus to go around. There's more economic profit to
Jordi:go Celebrate wealth creation.
John:Into the organization that created the Veblen good. I actually don't know that much about the world of, fine coffee roasting, and, I wasn't aware of this trend.
Jordi:It is interesting. So so, you know, Ben and I yesterday morning.
John:We like Volta here. We like Celsius.
Jordi:Ben Ben and I were getting some some b roll for our upcoming launch video, yesterday. And Ben and his roommate who is helping film were complaining about, like, groundwork coffee. They were like, this sucks. And I feel like, I feel like, we're at a point where this sort of Gen Z millennial crowd has such high expectations for coffee partly because of the price point. Like, if you're paying $6 for this, like, black, brownish liquid, you want something that's good.
Jordi:Our parents grew up at a time where it was just, like, brown liquid. Good. I I like coffee. Like, I'm just gonna have it.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:But the bar has been risen so much. I feel like it was probably used to all be Gigaslop, and now there's this sort of certain bar where they're they're like, oh, bloop.
John:Starbucks was, like, revolutionary. And now people call it Charbucks, and they don't like it, and they think it is Gigaslop. Gigaslop. You're gonna love this one. Marty.com says go.com or go home.
John:And then, somebody says the dotcom is taken. What's the next best one? And Paul Graham chimes in with some other name dotcom.
Jordi:So good. It's It's great. So good.
John:Dotcom's valuable.
Jordi:It's so it's it's we are not joking. It's so important.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:There is an and and yeah. The, no. This so this wasn't even, so the cal so I think the cal.com founder, quote tweeted this and responded to it too. And it's cal.ai. No.
Jordi:No. Cal.com. Okay. Cal.com is the is the calendar is the open source calendar scheduling
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Tool that's like an alternative to Calendly. And, yeah, cal.com, you're right away. Super memorable. Yep. It's great.
Jordi:You can do cal.com/ Yep. Coogan or whatever. It's easy to remember. That dotcom almost made the business. It's so good.
Jordi:Totally. Yeah. Obviously, you gotta execute really well, but Yeah. It makes a big difference.
John:What does Nikkita beer think about dotcom? Because, like, if you're in the App Store, he's very
Jordi:Well, so name
John:and the
Jordi:Actually, he posted something earlier. I don't think we're gonna cover it, but it was interesting. He he posted a screenshot of the downloads chart of an app that he's advising, and he was, like, one of the key changes that they made to get it to go viral was naming it something better.
John:Mhmm.
Jordi:So he might I I bet he's much less oriented around domains and and much more but still very oriented around names mattering a lot.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Finding, like, the white space that shows up in the search results, a little bit of SEO in the name, but not too much.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:It makes a ton of sense. Let's go to this next one, zvi. I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, but, economists, I love you. Never stop. This is from Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg.
John:And Tyler writes, a bigger change that is that the average walking speed rose by 15%. So the pace of American life has accelerated at least in public spaces in the northeast. Most economists would predict such a result, since growth in wages has increased the opportunity cost of just walking around. Better to have a quick stroll and get back to your work desk. I love it.
Jordi:I mean, you gotta be strolling and working
John:Yeah.
Jordi:At the same time.
John:Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, you know, the the long walk can be valuable and can be important for both your health and also
Jordi:Some of our best, people ask us how we post how we post.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And some of our best content comes on a stroll.
John:Yeah. But if you're if you're doing the type of job where value can only be created at the desk, pick up the pace.
Jordi:Pick up the pace.
John:Start walking faster.
Jordi:Sprint. Run. Yeah. Maybe run. Don't do marathon, so
John:No.
Jordi:Do not. We are strongly against marathons.
John:Yes. Oh, this is great. From a good friend, John Fiorentino. He says, I'm a method founder. When I start a new business, I simply become the brand.
John:I eat, sleep, and breathe the brand ethos engulfing myself with its energy. Even my car becomes a vehicle for the brand, driving our mission forward every single day, and he shows a series of cars that he's owned, a lifted G Wagon 4 by 4, new pals, the Volta Ferrari, and the jeans, old school car. I'm not exactly sure what model that is, but, it's fantastic. And it and it speaks to the different types of brands that he's building. And I always think that, like, if you are building a company and someone asks you about your brand and what car your brand would be, if it was a car and
Jordi:you can't
John:say, you don't have a strong enough brand.
Jordi:Yep.
John:You really don't. And and, you know, with Red Bull, they owned the Mini Cooper. With with, you know, even Anduril, you see Palmer driving a a Humvee, and you're like, that makes sense. That tracks. Right?
Jordi:But it's interesting. In the case of Red Bull, they owned the Mini Cooper from but they made it their own. Yep. I would argue that if you asked, the founder of Red Bull what car represented the brand, he might say, like, a GT 3 or some type of Porsche RS. Right?
John:Maybe. But, I mean, so much of the Red Bull brand is very stunty and jokey. Like, they do the fluke coffin, you know, that thing where they drive stuff off of
John:Yeah.
Jordi:But it's it's
John:like almost it it has a little bit of tongue and cheek element to it even though it is the highest performance. And and then maybe they'd also the the the real answer would be the the the Max Verstappen f one car. Yeah. Because that is the that's that's the modern avatar.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Yeah. But, you know, monster has the monster truck. And, and I think I think it's a it's a it's a it's a, like, an easy out as a founder to just say, oh, well, we're a tech company, so we have a Tesla. And Tesla's great. Love them.
John:But that's not necessarily an expression of your brand. That's an expression of Tesla's brand, which is already like like the Elon's car is the Tesla. Right? So what is yours? And, you know, it goes back to that that quote about, you know, if Nike made a hotel, you could immediately imagine what that would look like.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:There
John:would be a really cool gym. It would have, you know, lots of, like, you know, athletic there'd be posters about great athletes. It'd be very clear. But if Hilton, if Hilton made a shoe, you don't know what that would mean. And so it's just like Nike has a better brand than Hilton for that reason.
Jordi:Right? Yeah.
John:And so, I I I think that that's an interesting exercise. And it goes back to the stuff that's in the the the Facebook Red Book. Like, their brand was was articulated through all these various images. And that's why, you know, when we build decks, we like to put a lot of images in there. And it's just a great way to, to to really test, are you thinking clearly about your brand?
John:Can you express it as as a watch, as a wallet, as a t shirt, as a piece of clothing or anything? Like
Jordi:Yeah. And it's also what what what Theo does is also interesting because he's building consumer brands where attention is is really all that matters. He's in places where he's gonna meet people that are relevant. So if he's driving a g wagon 4 by 4 around Los Angeles
John:Yep.
Jordi:With a Moonpals logo all over it. Yep. That's gonna start opening doors. You gotta drive something to get around.
John:Yeah. You may
Jordi:as well drive something that that starts a conversation. The, the the Roma Spider that he's getting for the Fiorentino label like that, that's perfect Lee suits the brand. Like, it it looks like a Fiorentina. Yeah. What you know, it looks like something that the the the the founder of a fine suiting company would would drive.
John:And it
John:works for Volta too. Yeah.
Jordi:It's great.
John:And I
Jordi:and I and it's funny in the context of I bet you the Fiorentino Ferrari will sell one suit per month Yeah. That will ultimately pay for the cost of the car. Yeah. So he's driving he's driving for free. Yeah.
Jordi:So
John:Yeah. It is it is funny. Let's go to something that could be its own dick, its own deep dive. Enron is back.
Speaker 4:Some of the Freudian slip. Yeah. It's something that could
John:these guys are gonna be in so much trouble eventually, but I love it because these guys are, so Enron is back on on X and Twitter. They put out this launch video and it's shot like a classic Enron ad. It looks like it could be an ad for ExxonMobil. Enron, of course, the the famous energy trading company that went bankrupt and a massive fraud scheme, in in in the dotcom boom. And, when
Jordi:did they actually go under? Because I was definitely
John:under. 2001?
Jordi:Yes. I was 6 years old. Yeah. And, so this is my, you know, it's one of those things I heard a lot about Enron. Right?
Jordi:But I'm excited to, you know, get to know it. Right? As, like, an adult now. Yep. Right?
Jordi:Like, get to experience 2,001.
John:Nailed it.
Jordi:December 2, 2001.
John:Yeah. December 2, 2001. Enron goes bankrupt. 25 years later, almost, they're back. So these guys are launching a coin.
John:They're launching a crypto token around Enron, meme coin, going a little bit farther with the marketing than most meme tokens.
Jordi:It's it's it's interesting. I I didn't read the white paper, but it's funny because okay. When they do, that's gonna be groundbreaking because we know they're gonna be revolutionizing the future of energy and commodities trading on the blockchain.
John:Yes.
Jordi:And it's funny that they're they they're they could have taken, you know, it, the rollout was, like, very good, I would say. Like, it wasn't just a launch video. They had bill I think they got billboards in Houston where Henry Con was headquartered. It's clearly, it's clearly very good marketing execution. And it
John:seems like they actually got the IP a while ago. I wanted to do some stunt with it and just No.
Jordi:I had I had, I had heard that this was in the works for a really long time, but I actually wasn't sure. I expected the execution to just be kind of mid.
John:Yep.
Jordi:So so far the execution's been good. I just I I don't I I it's so hard to kind of
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Make a prediction of what's gonna come here because ultimately this is the best way to view it, this is an entertainment product that is investable. Yeah. It's not I'm not saying that you should invest in it or or that it's gonna generate any type of return, but this is just a modern form of entertainment. Right? It's just, like, stunt meme.
John:And they're good at this. They did birds as birds aren't real before this whole Yeah. Viral marketing campaign around the conspiracy theories and stuff. And, I mean, there have been successful meme coins before. Doge dogecoin.
John:So it was a joke.
Jordi:It would be funny. It'd be funny if it ends up stabilizing like like true social words like, hey, this is barely a real company in many ways. But from from a revenue standpoint at least. But Enron could probably sell as much merch sales through their brand as true social has done ad revenue.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:$1,000,000 in the last 12 months. Yeah. So maybe it becomes a sustainable, you know, stable market.
John:Tracking it here. Make sure to subscribe. Tracking it closely. Covering it. Just Steinman, been on the show before, says request for startups.
John:GPT trained on US geologic survey data, maps of any and all their varieties, and anything else that can be shoehorned into a GIS database. So if you're building something, you're looking for an idea, I think you got a customer because Josh wants something. He's very vague about what he wants to do. Yeah. So he's looking for minerals, maybe geologic surveys.
John:Like, I don't know. There was that news about, China banning the export of gallium and germanium. Yep. Have you seen gallium? It's fascinating.
John:It it it it's a metal. It looks just like, you know, a tungsten cube. You put it in your hand, it melts because the melting point is, like, 87 degrees.
Jordi:Crazy. It's
John:very weird. It's used in all these defense applications.
Jordi:We should put,
John:China manufacturers 99% of it.
Jordi:So we should put a little bit of gallium in our in our merch, drop.
John:Definitely a tungsten cube would be nice.
Jordi:Yeah. It's good to have that brand.
John:Yeah. If you're if you can't tell what metal what what what element your brand is, you you need to step
John:it up.
Jordi:You're lost.
John:Let's skip the old factory stuff.
Jordi:Wait. Let's let's take a quick
John:Okay. Yeah. We're gonna take a quick break. We'll be right back. Let's go to Reggie James.
John:He says, had a dream last night about SF. So today, I'm flying to SF. Every time I landed SFO, I feel like I booted into the wrong server, and then he lists his loot.
Jordi:Loot list?
John:Capital. The trousers, Margiela, the sweater vintage
Jordi:Margiela.
John:The glasses are mascot. The bag is vintage. Ralph Lauren from Tokyo, and the hat is Penn. Fantastic.
Jordi:Yeah. I, if you're going outfit for outfit with Reggie, prepare to get mugged unless you're in a perfectly tailored suit which case, you know, he'll have to respect. He'll have to respect that. But anyway, this is an example. I mean, he he's been we're entering there.
Jordi:We we've talked about this at length. We're entering the era of loud opulence. It's becoming cool again to express yourself through clothing. And we gotta give Reggie credit. He's been doing this for years years years way before loud opulence was was really in the in the zeitgeist.
Jordi:So, so anyways, post your, post your next
John:He clearly knows so much about fashion.
Jordi:It's crazy.
John:Yeah. If you see his breakdowns of Zuck Yeah. He's like, just wait until Zuck learns about this designer.
Jordi:And then he does.
John:Yeah. Yeah. He's like, he's literally on the leading edge of this stuff. Just being like, okay. Zuck's here in the in the journey.
John:He's gonna get
Jordi:here. I think there's I think, there's there's opportunities to take all of that data that's been produced around the history of these different labels and designers and condense it into more of a, like, specialized l l m almost of, like, what is the like, what is the most coveted piece Yeah. In, like, you know, that that Margiela created in the the early 2000. I mean, there's all that stuff.
John:That do that stuff.
Jordi:Yeah. There's YouTube channels, but it's not that
John:through it all.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:I don't wanna listen to a 20 minute video always.
John:Yeah. Yeah. And just understanding, like, the taxonomy and the and the hierarchy is very, very difficult. Like, who are the key brands, but then within those brands, what are the different levels
Jordi:and stuff? Yeah. And taste is not just about how much money you can spend on an outfit. Otherwise, you'd be walking around Balenciaga Balenciaga head to toe. So
John:Last thing I love about this is is had a dream last night about San Francisco. So today, I'm flying to San Francisco. Like, talk about, like, don't let your dreams be dreams.
Jordi:Like Don't let your dreams be dreams. Just taking immediate action. Manifesting.
John:So the next time you have a dream about going somewhere, just Act on it. Carried no interest, says bringing back American manufacturing is one of the most important challenges we face as a nation. And Gary Tan is being delusional. Calling Gary out. Interesting.
John:That's okay, by the way. VCs have to be delusional. It's part of the job. The source of his and many VCs delusion is that they think bringing back American manufacturing can be solved by robotics software inefficiency. Unfortunately, the problem is much deeper than that.
John:Time for a quick history lesson because it's important to understanding how we fix this. Let's head over to China, and then he breaks it all down. It's interesting. I I I I've been a little bit more bullish than him on, robotics having an impact on American manufacturing because robotics can move much faster if it's ramping exponentially than retraining a whole I
Jordi:would take the I would take the other side, and I think what he's saying is he's he's he certainly understands that technology is gonna be very important to onshoring our manufacturing capacity and all and all those different things.
John:Yep.
Jordi:That said, he's saying to compete with China who invested 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars effectively in non dilutive funding Yep. To get their manufacturing to where it is today.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:We can't purely rely on technology. I mean,
John:that's even the story of TSMC. Right? Yeah. The tiling government.
Jordi:Yeah. And then and then so so what he's saying is, you know, if you look at this in the context of, okay, we're we have all these new manufacturing startups, all these robotics companies that are that are doing important things, simultaneously, we have Doge that's trying to deregulate and create more efficiency within the government. There probably should be another he he's kind of arguing for this, another group that's saying, hey. If we're really serious about bringing American manufacturing home, we need to be okay with a little bit of extra inflation and spend 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars Yep. To make this happen.
Jordi:It can't just be a private market thing.
John:Yeah. Well, you saw the Pat Gelsinger news. He's out as CEO of Intel. And, the Chips Act was supposed to kind of reassure American chip manufacturing. And I I believe that Intel still hasn't gotten paid for anything from the Chips Act.
John:And that was kind of, like, the obvious Chips Act thing. That was just your give Intel a bunch of money because they're the only ones that are set up at all to build a fab in America. Of course, TSMC is coming here, and the Arizona plant's going really well. So I'm I'm very optimistic that things will work out.
Jordi:But Yeah.
John:It was still interesting. And Ben Thompson's critique of the Chips Act is that it's he wanted it to be set up like Operation Warp Speed where there are there there are defined guaranteed sales. So you're you're only creating the incentive that if you build it, we will buy it. You're not give you're not putting money into the company and just saying, like, hey. Go.
John:Hopefully, it works out. Yeah.
Jordi:It's
John:like you gotta actually make the thing, but if you produce a 3 nanometer chip in America, we will guarantee that it
Jordi:will sell.
John:And then the government won't might not even have to buy that many of them because once they're made, you know, Apple and the
Jordi:market will
John:The market will buy them. Absorb it. But but but but you know that you can underwrite it because there's 0 risk. So interesting. I like that there's a different take there.
John:Let's stay on Gary Tan and go to one of his posts. Gary says a lot of software can be built quickly now, but it is becoming a lost art to actually make it self serve in consumer quality. You must sand down all the edges and fix the p two bugs instead of only focus on the demo paths. This year, personal software will force its return. Love that.
Jordi:Yeah. I think I think it'll be interesting in the in the age of, AI, Gigaslop, which is a new which is a new term. Yep. There's gonna be a lot of really, really poor, like, software products that technically do the job, but don't do it very well and are are not very user friendly. Yep.
Jordi:And I I actually think there will be more teams that sort of build quietly, really have a lot of confidence in their products, build them in a really user friendly way. And instead of just shipping that gigaslop, like, you know, the next day or, you know, a week later, take the time to really get it right. And and Gary's Gary's point of view is, as a designer himself, he's really pushing and and getting up on a pedestal and and pushing the industry to to care about design and and what he's describing is, like, ultimately design
John:challenges. Like, Gary is a craftsman. Like, if you look at his YouTube videos that he was making, like, eventually, it morphed into interviews and stuff. But some of the early ones are, like, he spent, like, a full day recreating a scene from, Trainspotting, which is a movie I haven't even seen. But he, like, went and vlogged and, like, set up the camera and filmed all this stuff and, like, really he, like, has all these nice lenses, really understands, like, how to make things look and just create a quality product Yeah.
John:In everything.
Jordi:It wasn't just like, oh, I I I should be doing content. It's I I should be doing content and I'm gonna do it.
John:Yeah. Yeah. No problem. See the, YC with, like, the team that he's built there. It's it's very good.
John:He sees everything as a product Yep. And everything to be designed, which is the right right right frame of mind for sure. Let's stay on the venture capitalist and go to Bilal Zubiri over at Lux Capital. He says, every founder slash CEO I texted with today responded within minutes from early stage founders to CEOs of now public companies. Founders are always on.
John:They are always building, always trying to move the ball forward. Interesting. Now if you want the real test, have your new associate text the the founder and CEO and see if they get back to you that fast. Yeah. Yeah.
John:A lot of founders are like, oh, shit. GP is texting me. I gotta fucking they can answer this. But but I do agree with the sentiment. They're like, you know, people need to be quick on their own.
Jordi:I I I think I I yeah. It's it's one of those things. If you're messaging with a a hyper engaged founder or operator, they will get back to you really important
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Really, really quickly if they find you you what you're talking about to be important.
John:Yes.
Jordi:If not, it will be completely lost in the shuffle.
John:Exactly. Yeah. I'm sure the law is not showing up with, like, hi there. I'd like to talk to you about the like, all the intro and
Jordi:all the way. Sending sending that day's competitor.
John:Yeah. Oh. Like,
Jordi:hey, did you see this? Did you see this?
John:Is this a competitor? No. I'm sure it's super high signal, like, great conversation. So Yeah. Yeah.
John:Learn to communicate on both sides. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Guillermo Roche, founder of Vercel, says, imagine trading an hour of doomscrolling a day for an hour of exercise a day and what your life would be like in a year.
John:Let's go.
Jordi:Imagine what your one rep max would be in a year.
John:Yeah. And that's why we do this podcast.
Jordi:You don't
John:need to doom scroll. You can just listen to this while you're lifting.
Jordi:Hope hope. Hope scroll. Hope
John:scrolling.
Jordi:It's levering it's leverage for the mind.
John:Leverage for the mind. That's a great one. Put that on sticker. Put that in the on the list.
Jordi:Write that down. Write that down. Read that again.
John:Read that again. Bookmark this. Print that out. It's great. Aaron Slidov has been on the show before.
John:He says, I don't think there's a single domestic defense startup right now that could manufacture 10,000 units of anything if they got an order. And this was very controversial. There are a lot of people who are saying, like, oh, no. There are plenty of examples. And he he would always reply, like, name 1.
John:And then they would be like, I can't really. And it's interesting because, I mean, obviously, like, you know, I mean, like, Palantir doesn't manufacture stuff. SpaceX, like, what they're not gonna make 10,000 rockets. Like, that's just not how their business works. And then all 10,000, like, you know, submarines.
John:Like, there's just not the scale of these things. Like, we don't have 10,000 aircraft carriers. Yeah.
Jordi:But it's a counter example of that, actually. So so deterrence as an example is manufacturing, primers and for the business, for that product line to work, we need to manufacture 100 of millions of units. Okay. Yeah. So that's like an example of a really high volume.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:It's not a sexy category like hypersonics, but it's a super necessary category. And it takes just as much work to develop, like, a factory line for that as it does to develop, you know, a factory line and and in some cases, more because for a super high, you know, order value product like a hypersonic, it's okay to spend a lot of time kinda making it Yeah. Putting it together and not having it be as automated. But for something where you need to manufacture millions of units Yep. It's much, much, much harder.
John:And
John:we saw this with the Ukraine, when the when the Ukraine war broke out, like, we depleted all of our reserves. I think we sent, like, every javelin. So we have over there. And then it was like, okay. Well, how are we gonna make more?
Jordi:Gotta make a few more.
John:So, yeah, it's good that he's beating the drum, accelerating, but we are still early in the defense tech boom. Like, a lot of these companies are just at the seed or series a stage.
Jordi:For sure.
John:Still not scaled yet. Yeah. But hopefully, hopefully, it gets resolved. Low low yield, Lucy says, you are not allowed to wear Carhartt if you know what KPI means. 35 k likes.
John:What a banger.
Jordi:That's huge. Huge. Lucy 3 posters. Is phenomenal poster. Yeah.
Jordi:Phenomenal poster. Game. And I think this is this is this is real.
John:Carhartt is the villain number 1 in the quiet life.
Jordi:If I see yeah. Yeah. They are the enemy of loud opulence.
John:They are.
Jordi:And if if I if I, you know, if I'm in New York and I, you know, pass you on the street and I see you in Carhartt listening to Technology Brothers, I'll rip your AirPods out of your ears, stamp them on the ground, and, put on a suit. I'll ban you from the RSS feed. Put on a suit. So do not wear Carhartt if you know what KPI means. Yeah.
Jordi:If you don't know what KPI means, learn
John:it. Yeah. It's great. Blake Anderson says b to b SaaS equals talk to customers. Consumer equals read comment sections.
John:That's a good point.
Jordi:This is real. You can do you can you can do so much consumer product research by just going to products in your category and just reading the comments. Yep. And there's probably like an entire business, like, research product that you could build that just scrapes consumer product company comment sections and reviews for feedback to generate new ideas from. So Yeah.
Jordi:It's very real.
John:I think that's a great place to end. Let's do one more promoted post to take us out for the evening.
Jordi:What a place to end. We have a post from Gucci. Gucci says as of today, they say in Miami's design district with Venus Williams and and, Angel Alessandra Alessandra, former, Victoria's Secret model, actually probably current Victoria's Secret model, they are for a special unveiling of the Gucci winter dream installation, hashtag Gucci gifts. And, anyways just some fantastic images these look like, some great winter sets very Miami, not so winter looking to me but at only 46 likes, this is a low 10 banger from Gucci. Let's do it.
Jordi:It's a great spot to end.
John:Let's amplify it.
Jordi:Let's amplify this. Thank you to Gucci for Go make some fantastic clothes. If you're at our Basel this week, go find the installation. We we aren't there. We are not there because we are recording this podcast and, this is important work.
Jordi:So we'll see you Friday.
John:So please subscribe, follow us, and thanks for tuning in. Have a great day.