Airtable's $11.7B Haircut, Jensen's No-Fire Rule & PLG Is Dead!?

All right guys, it's time. Neil, where are you right now?

I'm in the magical kingdom of Legoland.

Oh, there's Lego. Look at the Lego back there. Lego and the dragon back there. That's good marketing right there. Guys, this is hard work. Neil is recording from Legoland. Are you on your iPad or your computer?

My laptop.

Oh dude, Neil's got a good connection too. All right, so let's, uh, let's jump into things. Neil, I will, I will, I will carry you today. Okay, so let's just talk about something real quick. Do you see the Airtable sold today?

Yeah, they have $900 million in cash, so they got $1 point something billion. The cash, of course, they get back out because that's theirs. So, you know, I know a lot of people are talking trash because they're saying 20% growth year over year, but I think a lot of that information is just off.

Yeah, so just so everyone knows, Airtable basically in— I'm going to share this with you. I think there's one lesson I want to call, and this is from Jason Lemkin. This is pretty good over here. So If you want one takeaway from the Airtable deal, if you look at this over here, you can see that in December 2021, they were doing about $156 million in annual recurring revenue. So ARR, right? June 2026, they're doing $480 million. So you had 3.1x ARR growth, which is pretty damn good in my opinion, right?

On all accounts.

Now, their equity value in December 2021 was $11.7 billion. Now, as of August 2026, the, the, I mean, they sold for For, I think they sold for this range, right? Did they sell for— no, they sold for $1.25 billion in cash, but this was the equity value.

Yeah, because they're adding on, I believe, the cash they had in their bank account, because that counts as equity as well.

But I think this is what's interesting, guys. It's not like, oh, they didn't embrace AI, because they did. I remember for quite a while their founder was talking about AI. And it wasn't— the lessons here aren't don't raise too much or embrace AI or move faster, or VCs are evil or get profitable. There's only one lesson here. It's grow or die, right? And so in many cases, by the way, when you're growing on a, on a, like a 9-figure ARR number, 20% is by all accounts pretty damn good, right? But he's just saying that you got to grow even faster. That's 2026 because the expectations have risen. So I think that's interesting because by all accounts they were doing these things over here.

Yeah, but here's the thing, because I got quite a few text messages of this being like, dude, did you see that deal just happen? Airtable got bought out by bending spoons. I got, dude, the amount of texts I got on that, I think it was either 4 or 5 today, right? Which is a lot.

Who's texting you on that stuff?

Other entrepreneurs who have SaaS-based businesses and they were worried about valuations and they're even worried more after this. And I was, because they're just like, at 20%, this is ridiculously low. Who says they're growing at 20% a year? People are looking at what they're at now versus where they were years ago and assuming it's 20% growth a year. It could have been flat the last 12 months. It could have been they added the growth in a non-profitable way and they were just burning cash on the balance sheet to get it, right? There's a lot of other factors. It could be that their churn is increasing and there's something that must have went sideways in the business that the public isn't seeing. And why would Bending Spoons want to trash talk the company that they just acquired being like, no, here are all the things that are wrong, right? That would just make them look bad. They're in the business of fixing, cutting and fixing. And when you look at Airtable, no investor, I would say 99.99999% of investors would not sell a deal if it's actually really growing at 20% a year. They have strong retention, the unit economics are good, the business is healthy. This is a fire sale. The only reason they got a fire sale is because something's wrong. And of course they're not going to spill their bad blood over the internet and talk about what's wrong with the business.

So let me tell you why I think the Airtable outcome is a great one. Okay, let me tell you why. So most people haven't seen this piece over here. Okay, so Airtable right here in highlighted on my screen over here, you can see prior to entering into the purchase agreement, seller and its affiliates implemented a reorganization pursuant to which seller became the sole holder of the shares and assets and liabilities relating to the HyperAgent business, uh, business line were transferred by the company to HyperAgent Incorporated. Okay, HyperAgent is the agent business. So they still get to keep on, they get to keep the new entity, okay, while they offload the old piece, right? And it's not necessarily a terrible outcome for everyone, right? I think it takes an okay outcome to a pretty good one, I would say, for the founders of Airtable, at least. I can't speak for the employees and the rest of the shareholders here.

Well, the shareholders did not lose money. I'm guessing they didn't. I don't know how much Airtable raised. How much did—

That's why I say okay outcome.

Yeah, they raised $1.35 to $1.4 billion in venture capital, so they got their money back plus more. You know, it's not the end of the world from an outcome perspective.

Yep. So I think it's a good outcome for the founders. I think it's a good outcome for Bending Spoons. We'll see what they do with it. And by the way, like I remember, by the way, Bending Spoons bought Evernote. And I remember when I was in Italy, I had a lot of notes in Evernote and I was kind of these, these notes, right? I had a lot of stuff saved from years and years, um, and they were smart because Evernote, I think, would allow you to trial for a very long time. But Bending Spoons, the way they charge you for Evernote now, they'll charge you $7 for the trial and then they charge you per week, right? So that's how they make their money on it. And I'm like, okay, damn, like pretty good. They just adjust the pricing, they cut staff ultimately. I'm oversimplifying it a little bit, but there's a playbook that they're running is my point here.

The Bending Spoons playbook is just another version of what private equity runs. But Bending Spoons has been buying the ugly ducklings that a lot of private equity companies did not want. Because if you look at most private equity companies, they're looking for consistent growth on a 3-year period, ideally 20+% great unit economics. And they ideally want just businesses that they can buy and they just grow without them doing much, and then they can end up reselling them. Bending Spoons was— they were buying the ones that had issues and they're like, we will go and fix the issues. Private equity tends— most of them don't want to fix the issues because most of these PE guys are not operators themselves.

Yep. So here's— I mean, there's something that's related here. Let's just talk about business operations. We're not talking about private equity here. We're not talking about VC, but I want to talk about a core value, Neil, that— so Alfred Lin, who's one of the co-founders of Zappos. Yeah. And then he's partner at Sequoia now. So he wrote this piece over here and our mutual friend shared this with me. He texted this to me. But you can see this over here. This is the Empire State Building on the left side, okay? And then on the right side, this is the Millennium Tower. Now, the Empire State Building, how long do you think it took to build this building in New York, Neil?

Uh, I don't know, 4 years, 3 years?

410 days, okay? Now, this tower, the Millennium Tower inside of San Francisco, this Millennium Tower over here, how many years did it take?

I'll go with 5 years.

Exactly, 5 years, right? And so why did it take 5 years, you think, Neal?

Well, the tower in San Francisco, don't they have issues with the ground? And there was a lot of complications.

Bad foundation to begin with, but there's a lot of bureaucracies to even get it going in the first place. So it just took forever, right? Now, the title of this article here is Speed Above All Else. Okay. So, and this is something I think we should reinforce here. So Commuters' most important value and most often challenged is speed above all else. Velocity and speed were core values at Slootman's company. So Frank Slootman, you have Snowflake, right? I think he was at some— another big company, but many people challenge this speed as a core value, okay? So multiple times a week, I'll get the question or challenge, if we're in healthcare, how can our value possibly be speed? Or you can either have it good or you could have it fast, right? and/or some other ridiculous either/or type posit, right? And then he's just saying like, this is a false dichotomy meant to pigeonhole you into mediocrity. And he gave some examples here. Now I want us to talk about this, right? So Google Maps was a POS before, a piece of shit, right? And it was clunky.

Oh yeah.

It didn't work before. And then Bret Taylor here, who runs Sierra now, was pissed off and he rebuilt it from scratch within 48 hours doing a coding binge over the weekend. It became the infrastructure that still runs. It's 1/3 of the size and literally 10 times faster load times, right? Then you have the initial iPod. It was conceived, designed, and shipped to customers within 7 months of starting by, what is this guy's name? Steve Fadell and Apple, right? And so it became the basis of a 10-year transformation of Apple into a trillion-dollar empire. That 7-month sprint was somewhat unprecedented in consumer hardware, but built a foundation. And we just talked about the Empire State Building, right? So the Millennium Tower built in San Francisco in 2005, It took 5 years with multiple committees, planning sessions, and community-guided safety. It is now leaning, tilting, deemed unsafe, and cannot be fully used. So all he's saying here ultimately is that you cannot have the people on your team that are just like, oh no, we can't do it. It's either got— it's got to be speed or something else, right? Um, and this person, and we've all worked with this person before, they slow you down. And, you know, ultimately you want to build with great testing frameworks, pre-mortems, an intense heads-down focus, right? So, all that to say, Neil, is this, right? You want to raise your standards. You want to make sure that you're here to accomplish a job. You got to increase the velocity and urgency. So, I think it's a good reminder to people here that when people try to say, oh no, we can't do it that way, it's your job, especially if you're a leader, to say, oh no, but we can.

People just love giving excuses. And these excuses is why just things don't progress and then they wonder why other people overtake them that were much smaller in the beginning.

Yep. And by the way, on that note, Neil, do you know why— so talking about speed, okay, I'm reading through this Nvidia book right now. It's called Thinking Machines. So it's yet another Nvidia book from my Taiwanese homie, Jensen Huang. And do you want to know why he never fires people?

Because if they can't fit into the culture, they just want to quit themselves and they can't bear it.

So, here's the thing. In the book, Jensen Huang, he will get into shouting matches with his distinguished engineers. He'll basically get everyone into a room and he will light them up for like 90 minutes, right? 90 minutes, you're lighting someone up, everyone else is just watching. It's very awkward, right? But he doesn't let the person go. Now, in another situation, he had someone, I think it was a leader, like an operational leader, That was responsible for logistics, for example, right? They got in a shouting match and he's like, you don't know what you're talking about. And then the guy was like, I don't know what I'm talking about? I've been doing logistics for 20 years. Literally, she went to Taiwan. She found out that what Jensen was saying was actually correct. She went back to Jensen and she apologized. And Jensen's like— and then she's like, well, why? He's like, why are you apologizing? And she's like, because of X, Y, and Z. And Jensen's like, he didn't say apology accepted. He's like, that's the right answer. And he didn't light her up or anything like that, but everything is about just moving the ball forward ultimately. And Jensen himself has said, I'd rather torture you into greatness than let you go. And here's, here's the thing, when I look at— when I look at— I'm not saying I'm Jensen Huang.

You think Jensen doesn't fire people at NVIDIA? Because they had to fire people in their whole history.

They for sure fire people, but Jensen would prefer not to fire people because there's so many examples of these distinguished engineers where he wouldn't let them go. In fact, when someone would quit before, like a really good engineer, he would actually almost get on his knees and get him in the office, like beg them to stay, right? So, his whole thing is he'd rather torture you into greatness versus letting you go. And when I look at the reason I'm so big— you mentioned this in the past— I'm so big on teaching people is I'm so big on kind of torching them into greatness in my own way, right? I prefer them to grow, right? And sometimes they just can't, right? But Jensen really doesn't like firing people. I'm not saying he never does, but he would prefer not to.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of different management styles. I was watching an earnings call, this was a long time ago on Amazon, and they were doing layoffs, or it may not have been an earnings call, but it was an announcement either way. And they were doing layoffs and they weren't talking about how they were laying off factory workers. You know, because not factory workers, uh, fulfillment center workers. I don't know what it's called, you know, people helping with logistics and stuff like that. And one of the people called out, well, you don't really need to. Your churn is like X amount of months or a year or whatever, so you just don't have to rehire. It's actually just cheaper to let them go than it is to give them severance. And, uh, you know, of course no one really said anything on that end.

There's no response?

Not really. There was a response, but it was like a canned response. It wasn't, in my opinion, an honest response.

Yeah. So here's like, as I'm going through that book, right, I'm going to share a couple other stories here that I think are interesting. So if you think about Nvidia's most unusual bets that made them the largest company in the world. So, Neil, let me ask you this, okay? Would you do this? Would you forego your entire year's worth of profits to not serve your core customer, to bet on an unproven technology that after you launch it falls completely flat for the first year?

You cut out during half the thing. So you're saying, would I forego my whole year's profit to forego my ideal customer? Or my core customer? What'd you say?

First of all, I didn't cut out, Neil. You cut out because you have shitty internet because you're at Legoland. So I don't cut out because I'm hardwired in. Let's make that clear. So let me repeat what I said. So would— okay, imagine you're Nvidia. Okay. Your profit is $200 million a year at the time. Okay. At the time, $200 million a year. Now you are hellbent on this new way of doing things, but this new way of doing doesn't serve your core customers anymore, and it's largely unproven. And by the way, you launch this new thing, you've already invested hundreds of millions of dollars already, it doesn't work for the first year, and investors are calling for your head, right? Is that something you would do?

Well, I don't have investors, and the reason that they probably did it is because they believe whatever that new thing was was the future, and a lot of the existing stuff may not be around for a long time. In essence, they pivoted, and sometimes you have to make those hard choices. Another example of this is Intercom. Intercom was doing okay. They weren't doing amazing. They weren't declining like crazy or anything like that, but let's just say, I don't know the revenue numbers, but let's just say somewhat struggling as a startup, and they raised a lot of money. They created Fin, pivoted, tried this whole new product, focused all their energy on it, and then they sold to Salesforce, I believe, Was it $3-point-something billion? Ended up paying off.

$3.6 billion.

Yeah. And there's a lot of examples of it working out. Nvidia's a great example because you can see their stock price and their revenue and their EBITDA because it's all public information. And there's also examples of companies that have probably pivoted that we don't hear too much about that haven't done well. You look at Motorola and the Razr, they brought it back. I don't know who the heck buys the Razr. I was at Petco Park for one of their baseball games, the Padres versus the Giants the other day. They had Razr ads all over. I don't know one person that owns one of those flippable Razr phones. And I'm not saying that's the same thing as them pivoting, but companies try to adapt and change your strategy all the time. And sometimes it doesn't work and sometimes it does. We remember the great ones. We don't remember the failures too much. And the same goes with Apple. I once Googled Apple's list of products that failed. They have so many products that you and I don't remember or can't recall of that they thought were great ideas that failed. And I think the question is, is if it doesn't work out, can you keep going because you have enough reserves in the bank, or can you revert back? Sometimes you can. And for those businesses that can, good for them. The businesses that can't, it can create a real big issue. And when Nvidia did this, the example you're giving, If Nvidia takes 1 year's worth of profits and reinvests it all, remember, if it doesn't go work out, they can always go back to the same old business. It doesn't mean the same old business will be the same size. It could have shrunk because they didn't focus on their core customer, but you have a profitable business. You probably have cash in the bank account because it was profitable before. So you have a lot of optionality. And I don't think it's actually that tough of a call when you have that much optionality. I do think it is tougher because they're publicly traded. I think it's really tough when you only have one swing and you're betting the farm on it, right? The Nvidia example, it's a— they were always a— or not always, for a long time, they were a very healthy company from a financial aspect.

That's actually not true. So, so if you look at the— if you look at the beginning of Nvidia, and even Jensen has said for 15 years—

No, no, I'm not talking about 20 years ago. I'm talking about last 10 years before this AI boom. It was a very healthy company financially.

No, even with that too. So you didn't even let me give the story and you reacted to it. So let me give you the story. So, so the, um, now there's a couple examples in the beginning where, by the way, um, they fulfilled on their— this is in the very beginning, by the way. I'm gonna give a couple stories here. So, um, when you look at— they had a deal with Sega to do, uh, the NV2 chips for their, um, for the, the Sega Saturn, right? And I actually had one of those devices before.

Yeah.

They fulfilled on the initial set and then they're supposed to do, I think, sorry, it was NV1 for Sega Saturn and I think NV2 for the next version, but they didn't have enough money to make the NV2, right? So they actually went to Sega and they're like, hey, can we just give you equity in the company? And you guys are like, can we just keep the money? Because if we need to return the money, we're bankrupt, right? So they gave them the equity there. Now that was when they were stupid in terms of how they, because they have to make these new chips all the time, but they they made an error in that bet on the NV2, right? We'll just leave it at that. And so they've made tons of architecture issues. They had tons of architecture issues with their chips as they continue to grow. Now, leading up to maybe 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, actually, Neil, they bet on CUDA, which is this unproven technology. Now, what happened here was they originally were catering to gamers, right? Like I used to buy— one of the best customers you can have is a gamer. Why? Because they're addicts, right? They will always— they'll always be upgrading their devices and things like that. So their core audience is gamers, like they're upgrading for, you know, playing Quake, Doom, and things like that. Okay, so what happened was they started to see that scientists were using it for intense calculations, for maybe like protein folding and things like that, right? So they started going that direction. They're like, whoa, maybe this is a novel use case. And then scientists started using it in different ways. And they're like, maybe we should go in this direction. And Jensen started to see more and more people talk about this, talk about machine learning and things like that, right? And then that's when he's like, oh, well, if we want to get more people to use this stuff, we need to lock them into some type of like our architecture, which is CUDA. So he bet hundreds of millions of dollars, not just one year's profit, but hundreds of millions of dollars on this thing. And then what happened was, turns out that nobody was interested in the first year, right? And then actually for the next 2, 3 years after that, nobody was really interested. It was lukewarm. But it took a lot of effort. And thank God, I think he had the majority voting shares, right? He had voting rights so he can continue to make that bet. But he saw it moving in that direction. A lot of his engineers and architects saw it moving in that direction. So he stayed with that bet. And thank God it worked out for them because that's a situation where it was getting really bad. In fact, he set aside $200 million just for returns and all of the critics were getting pissed. It's like, This is NVIDIA's about to die. Like, in fact, Dell, which had a deal with NVIDIA, they're like, we're not going to work with you anymore. We're going to work with ATI. And so, um, but to Jensen's credit, he stuck with it and he had the conviction to stick with it for like 4 or 5 plus years.

So let me just give you some financials so you can see, or people can realize where they were at when I'll give you the 15 years versus 10 years ago, because 10 years ago they were much better than 15 years. I could give you the 10 years if you want. In 2011, they did $3.54 billion in revenue and $253 million in profit. Totally agree with what you're saying, they can spend more than that, but at that time they had a surplus cash of $2.49 billion in their bank account. So all I'm getting at is I totally agree with you, it is a hard bet, but it's different than a startup making a bet when you're at that size and scale, right? I totally get it's risky and you got the board to deal with and people want your head and stuff like that. Maybe he had voting rights like you were saying, but it's a different situation than you and I betting the farm because he still had $2-point-something billion in cash in the bank account in 2011.

Hold on, Neil. You say, you said 10 years ago, 15 years ago?

I gave you 15, 2011. I can give you 10 years numbers as well.

You said 2011, right? Uh-huh. Yeah. So do you know when CUDA came out?

I'm basing it on the 15 years that you told me.

2007. It was even beyond that.

All right. So let's see, 2007. So 2007.

Created in 2004 and then 2007.

NVIDIA revenue and profit 2007. Let's see. Okay, uh, 2007, $3.07 billion in revenue, $448 million in profit. $3-ish billion in revenue, $448 million in profit in 2007.

The thing I'd be interested in diving in on is how was the stock trading for these years? Because I know there's a period of time with CUDA that they're trading sideways almost and they weren't really growing, right? Um, versus the years before that they were crushing it. And so The thing to call out here too, and then we can move on, is when you look at CUDA right here, it was released officially in 2006. You look at the timeline, public SDK was 2007 or so, but CUDA was the thing that they bet on that really, if we look at it, how long did it take to get traction and how did their stock price track with it? I'm actually curious around that.

Yeah.

I think what I'm really getting at here is a conviction thing for the audience, right? It took roughly 6 to 10 years to gain massive conversion. commercial traction. And the stock remained relatively volatile and effectively flat to negative between late 2006 and late 2012. So 6 years bouncing 30 cents and 80 cents, right? Investors grew deeply frustrated with the capital drain. So a lot of pressure, but my point is he stuck with it.

Yes, but also stock price is very different than business economics. And 2005, before CUDA, because you said 2006, 2005, it was $2 billion in revenue, $100 million in net income. 2006, $2.38 billion in revenue and $300 million in net income. So they were still growing, but I get what you mean. You can get ups and downs and volatility and stuff like that as well.

Yep. Okay. So let's just, let's just have this tabled out so people can kind of see this and we can, we can move on here. So 2006, $2.38 billion, right? Net income, $301 million. Okay. And then 2007, it goes $3 billion. So it goes up, revenue keeps going up to Neil's point, right? Let's just look at revenue. $2.38, $3 billion, $4 billion over here. And then in 2009, they start— they go negative for 2 years over here. What's that?

Yeah, that was also the financial crisis.

That's right. That's right. Yep. Um, but look at this over here. If you look at revenue, uh, after financial crisis, like they're not— they're kind of, uh, kind of trading sideways, right? And then not as profitable as before. Actually, no, 2012, they become much more profitable. Anyway, the point, guys, here is he had the guts to stick with it. And in a lot of situations, to Neil's point, you hear of the survivorship bias, right? Where you kind of see the survivors. But my point is, look, he's the longest-lasting CEO for a reason. Some bets he's going to get right, some he's going to get wrong. And sometimes they made some really bad bets. And it's not always going to work out, but you have to have the speed and the guts. to make those decisions, going back to the article that we talked about earlier.

Uh, and I don't know if he has superior voting rights or anything like that. Uh, it's not easy for Jensen Huang to get voted out based on specialized voting rights. So yeah, people are probably for his head, but he's had specialized voting rights, which makes it hard to kick him out.

Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, Then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. Yep. So Neil, I'm curious, you're on this vacation now. You went to the beach, you know, you're at Legoland right now. You went to the Padres game and then yesterday you were talking to me on the phone saying, you know, you're enjoying this life. So, you know, let's hear more about that.

Yeah, so without getting into too many details, it all ended up happening. To be clear, I have 2 kids. I've never actually been alone with my kids for more than like, not even a day, right?

No.

I've never had to actually just watch them myself with no help. When they were younger and my wife had to go do things or go somewhere, we had nannies and all that kind of stuff to help out. They're older now, 5 and 7. So I don't really have, or not even really, I don't have nannies or anything like that to help out, which is fine. Kids are really self-sufficient. My wife had a family emergency on her side of the family. So I told her, just go, do whatever you got to do. I can watch the kids. And she assumed it was going to be a day or two, but some things luckily fell into her favor. So she's staying a little bit longer. So maybe it'll be a week to 2 weeks, and I'm probably a day away from it being a week. I think tomorrow marks a week of me just watching the kids on my own with no help. And there's a few things that some of them already knew, but first off, it is way easier to work in the corporate world, run a business, grow a business, than it is to be a, I don't know what the term is, like a stay-at-home parent. I think that is extremely difficult compared to running a business. This is just my 2 cents.

For you, that's for you. It could be different for someone else, who knows?

Correct. Yeah, for some other people, I think they naturally do better playing with kids all day than running a business. But for me, it's easier to work than it is to raise kids all day. I'm not saying my kids are bad or hard or anything like that. It's just more so, I believe I'm more built or suited to build a company than to play with kids all day. And I think both are admirable things to do in life, and there's so many other things that are admirable as well. But just playing with the kids, being with them, trying to do calls in between and work in between, you know, the family dynamics are really good where my kids, I can see where they love me, where they're missing a father figure because I travel so much for work, and things that I can improve upon. And I came to the realization that I'm traveling, and I know I'm traveling, and I'll never stop traveling. But when I dissect the traveling that creates ROI versus not creating an ROI, it would be easier for me to buy companies to fill in the gap than it is to travel more. And actually probably more profitable as well to buy more companies. It actually is when we ran the numbers. And so I'll travel less, travel for bigger things, and try to stay home more. But this didn't come from just me being with the kids by myself for a week. I had a summer lull in which I wasn't traveling as much during summer, and it was really nice. Like, I enjoyed activities like, oh, let's go to the grocery store and buy groceries. I know groceries are expensive, but still just going to the grocery store and doing that as activity or going to parks or going to Target or whatever mall and just walking around and not buying anything. A lot of this was fun. And I also didn't realize groceries are crazy expensive. I don't know how most people afford them because my kids were just putting whatever in the cart and I'm like, $400 or $500. I'm like, how the heck do we spend this much at groceries? And this wasn't Erewhon, right?

There you go.

Uh, Whole Foods. Yeah, Whole Foods.

So expensive.

How— what?

Whole Foods is still expensive, just not expensive as Erewhon. By the way, look at my hat.

Oh yeah, you got an Erewhon hat. Uh, that's cool. But even if it's not as expensive, and I do agree it's expensive, so if we went to Ralphs or Vons, what would have been $400? It's not like groceries on Whole Foods are 30, 40% more. So it's like, how does the average family afford this stuff? And I'm like This is just crazy, you know, and it's— I don't know what the government's going to do about it, but it's just, I don't know how this is sustainable for a lot of families.

So this vacation has put you in touch with reality?

Yes, because we would Uber Eats stuff from Erewhon, and I don't even know what the cost for that is.

Yeah, yeah. Um, anyway, I think it's good perspective. And those of you thinking like, it's— I think sometimes when you slow down on a— you take a little break, it actually speeds you up because That time to think is like, oh, whoa, why don't I just go buy more companies? It's actually really important. That's a high-leverage thought, right? If you actually decide to execute on it, it's a very high-leverage thought, right? But it does change a lot of things and it does prioritize hundreds of people in terms of how they do things at your company.

So dude, you and I have always talked about when people zig, you zag, or you adapt with different conditions. When I was in travel mode, I was in travel mode just doing meetings and grinding and doing what I needed to do to try to grow the business. When I was at home and I wasn't traveling and I promised the kids and the family I would take some vacations with them, I not only got bored during certain times, but I wasn't able to do my standard meetings because I wasn't in new countries all the time meeting with our existing and potential customers. It's hard when you're on a Disney cruise ship. So, we talked about in a previous podcast episode that like, oh, what are you spending your time on now? And I mentioned how I'm reaching out to more companies because I was bored sitting there. I was like, Yeah. I'm like, we got cash in the bank, we have a line from our bank, let me just hit up a lot of random companies. And we have an M&A team that just goes and finds deals anyways, but I'm like, let me just go and find the companies that I think would just help us grow faster. Started reaching out and we have 2 in the pipe from my efforts, and I'm hoping both those close sometime this year. Yeah, so that's good.

And by the way, before I open it on my side, How does your M&A team feel about you jumping into source on your own?

They don't mind at all. They like it. They think it's great because I'm able to do stuff that they can't. Like when I have my first call with people, I ask them all the questions about their business, revenue, profit, churn, all that.

They don't—

people don't know all the information right away, but they can give me rough ranges and numbers, even revenue and profit. What people show you in reporting later on versus what they tell you on the phone is usually 2 different numbers. Not drastically off sometimes, but it's going to be off sometimes by 10%, 20%. The second thing is I'm able to tell people on the first call how we structure our deals and what we're willing to pay based on the numbers that they're giving. And it just makes things so much easier because my team has to get approval on certain things, or not really approval, but They're not just going to throw out numbers. And from a founder-to-founder perspective, I can just say like, this is how much we trade for. This is how much I would be willing to pay for you. If you're interested, we'll pursue conversations. If not, let's move on. And I remember you introduced me to someone at HubSpot, the event, uh, the guy was based in Spain.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're like, Neil, this would be a good business for you. I tried doing a deal right then.

I didn't say it'd be good. I said you should have a chat with him.

Yeah, you should have a chat, but you said he has a good company and you were telling me about it.

I thought he had a good company and you did your DD, so.

Yeah, no, he— and he did sell it. He ended up selling it. We told him in advance right then and there on that conversation when Eric did the introduction, like in person, I told him what we pay for companies. He told me the rough numbers. And then when my team carried forward, he said, oh, I don't want to sell for that. And he wanted double. And I'm like, but no one pays double. Eventually, He continually ran the business, fixed it up, and then sold it. I don't know what he ended up getting for it, but it was a good business. And Eric did a good introduction there. By me jumping in early on, I'm able to save my team a lot of time because I can just cut to the chase. And some of those conversations are just better being done by entrepreneur to entrepreneur versus him asking me, or she or him, whoever the entrepreneur is, hey, how does working with you What is it like? How am I going to be integrated? Who collects the leads in these regions if you ended up buying us? Is it your team, my team? And they have all these questions. A lot of those questions I say, hey, these are better suited for Mark on my team or Mike or whoever it may be, or Brittany or whoever. And then they go and answer those questions. I stick to what I'm good at. The team sticks to what they're good at, and it's a great combination.

All right, so that's good. Like, one thing I want to talk about, Neil, is I want to talk about how— let me just show you this chart over here. Okay, so let me pull up this chart, or more so, yeah, I think table. Let's pull up this table. So basically, Neil, everyone is now becoming a part-time marketer or engineer. So if you look at the little table over here, you can see that every single role row here, right? Every role slash row, is they have some form of engineering that's happening over here, and they also have some form of marketing that's happening. It doesn't matter if you're customer experience, design, engineering, whatever, you're doing some form of marketing. Now, obviously, a marketing person is going to spend 36% of their time doing marketing, and engineers supposed to spend 53% of their time on engineering. But you can see these rising as the, the main things. And, and the thing is, Neil, like, you and I, right, we're marketers naturally, but I do find myself building more stuff now. And sometimes, yes, we're going to think about finance, we're going to think about design as well, but I think this is overall, this is one of the big findings in their study at Procter Gamble. So this is just people at Procter Gamble, I guess. But I find that really interesting that we've talked about the Coinbase philosophy of the pod of one, where one person, like one marketer, can be part designer, can be part engineer, and vice versa, right? So I think that's interesting and it's going to continue to rise. I think a lot of this stuff is just going to merge together.

Yeah, totally. And one caveat here, just for everyone to know, Procter Gamble is the 5th largest advertiser globally as well. So advertising and marketing is also in their DNA. They spend a lot more than most companies.

Yep.

But I do agree, in general, people are going to start doing more things because of technology and their ability to code and stuff like that. Because if you also look at Procter Gamble, People aren't inherently engineers, right? On the marketing side, yes, they're a big spender on marketing, but people in different departments generally aren't engineers.

You know, I was having lunch with my CTO today and we were walking and he's like, I actually think that, you know, we're going to need more people that have, you know, product builder type marketers that are deep in marketing but can build products. Versus like a standard engineer from the past that, you know, will build up like a UI and then like build up like a typical SaaS product, right? And so he's— and I'm like, I honestly think it's going to be a mix of the two. Like, you might need some of that, you might need to kind of build out like a traditional UI, um, and then you're also going to need like marketers such as yourself, Neil, or myself that has the taste and judgment, and we know how to at least build a V0 of something to get it 20, 30, 40, 50% there. Um, which then brings me to my next point. Elon actually tweeted this yesterday. So he said this, source code is on the verge of becoming like assembly. So CTO sent this to me yesterday. I'm like, I don't even know what that means, right? So I asked Twitter or X to summarize it. And Elon basically is saying that AI coding tools have advanced to the point where developers increasingly trust outputs without reviewing generated source code, mirroring the historical shift away from manual assembly programming after reliable compilers emerged. I have no idea what that means, right? So he's like, the next evolution is AI systems will produce optimized binary Executables directly, eliminating traditional source code as an intermediary step in software development. There's too many big words here, okay? So I'm just like, dude, what does this mean practically? So practically, it means software development stops being about writing and editing lines of code and becomes about describing what you want and verifying that the resulting program actually does it. Okay, so here's the key thing here. So Neil, you and I, we don't review code, right? Now, people talk a lot about technical debt and things like that, right? They talk about the codebase being very bloated, and Nvidia is actually notorious for having a very bloated codebase. Whereas before, if you came from Silicon Graphics, it was very perfectionist, right? Elon's saying it's probably going in that direction where you're not even going to be talking about having too much technical debt because the stuff is going to be so good, eventually it's going to clean itself up, and we're not even going to need to understand what's under the hood. That's all that he's saying, and I think it's already happening right now. But the crazy thing again is when I talked to you on the phone yesterday, we have people that we know where they don't let their engineers, they don't trust AI, it's not reliable, right? I think a lot of disruption is going to go in this direction and humans are just going to say, hey, I want this, and you verify, hey, is this actually what I wanted? If it is, great, no complaints.

Yeah. So let's dive into speaking of what marketers are spending their time on. Let's talk about how the best marketers are becoming part-time engineers. And I know you have this as a topic here. I'm curious to what that person said on X, but I agree with this. And the reason I agree with this is marketers now can create product and free products quicker than ever. If you look at how much people spend on advertising, in many cases it's actually cheaper to release a product that a lot of people pay for your competitors that costs money and release it for free and gobble up a lot of visitors and audience that way than it does for just running ads on Google or Facebook from a profitability standpoint. I did a lot of that in the early days with Ubersuggest. That's why we bought AnswerThePublic. And that model's worked out really well for me. And I know there's a lot of other companies that have released free products to create their flywheel.

Yeah. So it is the table that I just showed you, Neil, but let's talk about what we're doing right now. Okay. So I'll give you some examples. So whenever we build product right now, We say to the engineers, we say to people, hey, everything that you build, we need to have a marketable moment. So whether you're using a Hyperframes video where it's like a 20 to 30 second video, and by the way, when they make one of those and I put it up on my Twitter, 40,000 views, right? So, and there's a lot of these Hyperframe videos that have like a million views plus, right? There's a lot of these launch videos. So we want a launch video on a specific feature or product, or by the way, for our Skills Dojo, which we've given away for free, if you want access to skills, evals, loops, that type of stuff. Well, we're just going to— we're promoting other people's skills. We're promoting our own skills. That gets a lot of reach as well. And then we can market to those people. So that's for free. The ClickFunnels API to MCP, that's for free as well. The API Gateway, we're going to have a free version of that too. Carrot, we're trying to give a free version of that for free. So we're just trying to give a lot of these free things out and that way people can use it and then we can figure out, hey, who in here is actually a product qualified lead that fits our ideal client profile? And then we can reach out to them from a sales angle side and then follow up with them, right? And then just continue to follow up with them with different angles over time. And that's working for us right now. But the key thing that we made a change in is, hey, engineers, you're all marketers now. We're going to teach you how to make these marketable moments. And we literally have a channel on Slack where every single week we're just talking about marketable moments because then that informs the salespeople. That also informs the paid media people on what we want to amplify. That also amplifies what we might want to do from an organic social standpoint too. So that's what we've done. I'm curious to know what you guys are doing right now.

We focus on one simple thing when we try to release product from a marketing standpoint. In other words, the product helps just build a bigger audience. What are we giving away for free that people charge for and they feel value in that you can't really find for free right now? And if you can't answer that question, then what you're building probably won't get you the results that you're looking for from a marketing perspective. You can have the best email sequences, the best social posts, the best marketable moments when it comes to creating a video, but if the offer itself isn't valuable enough, it doesn't work, and then you just wasted all this time building whatever you're trying to build.

In conclusion?

In conclusion, make sure whatever you're building as a marketer is something that people are used to paying for and they wouldn't expect for free. And the moment you give it away for free, they're shocked, they're ecstatic, they share it. That's what causes virality. That's what does really well when you're building and releasing products as marketers.

Yeah, and keep in mind, by the way, Seth Godin used to say this, basically today's wow is tomorrow's average. And that changes a lot faster now too, right? I think it's, uh, uh, not Neil, but Seth Godin had a book called Purple Cow, and Purple Cow is just a cow that stands out, right? You want to be that purple cow, and that purple cow is changing every single day. The target's moving very quickly, um, so you just have to be, uh, ready to adapt. Um, by the way, Neil, um, I have a little topic here. So do you want to know how Palantir lands and expands for cheap?

No, but I'm curious.

Well, this was early days Palantir, right? Obviously they popularized the forward-deployed engineering model. So I was watching a talk with Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir, and he was talking to, um, 8VC, I think it was like a, like a VC firm. And the main thing that they did in the beginning, I'm not— it was like they just made sure that they got their tentacles in there, uh, in terms of the 4 deployed engineers working at these companies, right? And then doing some stuff for maybe, um, you know, not, not too expensive to start with. But what ends up happening is because they end up asking for more and more over time, the, the, the expansion revenue just goes up to— we're talking about 7 figures, we're talking about multiple 7 figures, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars a year. And what happens is you build so much goodwill when you build with these people where they just don't want to get rid of you. And Neil and I were talking on the phone yesterday. The thing is this, and this is from Neil sharing, so maybe I'll let you share it, but when you do a damn good job and you're so integrated, it's hard to get rid of you, right? So Neil, you can add a little more there from our conversation.

Yeah, so then when you look at it from a perspective of land and expand, if you get in with a company and you help them out with one product, Or service item, and then you convince them to do 2 or 3 more. So if you help them with eventually multiple products and then you do it in multiple languages and territories, whether they like you or not, it's not easy for them to rip you out. And this is what they call, at least in SaaS, switching costs or in business switching costs. A lot of times it's hard to rip out Microsoft or it's hard to rip out Salesforce or whoever it may be. So you just stick with the solutions that are cheaper to pay for than it is to rip them out and switch them to something else. Now in that calculation, a lot of businesses also run the scenario of if we don't switch them out, what are we losing in growth or potential revenue or whatever it may be? But the moment you're just like, oh, the other software does everything that the current one we pay for, it's just half the cost on an annual basis, but to rip it out, it costs $2 million and annually you only save, you know, $300 grand. You're probably not going to rip it out and take the multimillion-dollar hit.

You know what Neil is talking about here? When we think about a moat from an agency, there's a book called 7 Powers. And the only moat, in my opinion, that a traditional agency has, at least for today, is switching costs, right? Because if you're talking about You have, uh, there it takes a lot to get through procurement. You're a global organization, you're working with them in different areas, you have multiple services in there, it's hard to rip you out. Now, if you're talking about multiple integrations you have and things that you've built, it's even harder to rip you out, right? So that's what you want to think about, switching costs. But then if you want to think about some of the other moats for a business, because 7 powers, right? There's, there's moats. Um, someone, Gary Tan from Y Combinator, argued that speed is actually a moat, and that, that's arguable. But when you look at Coca-Cola, for example, what do they have? They have brand power. Okay. When you look at Toyota, what do they have? They have process power. How do they create cars at such a scale? You can argue Tesla even has that, right? Or you can argue that maybe they have a cornered resource, right? So if you have all the copper in the world, then that's a cornered resource. Now, ideally, if you can have 3 or 4 of these, then you have a really defensible business. But in my mind right now, I think when you look at like an agency, like what can you do? Like, Network effects would be another, uh, another, uh, moat that you can have, right? Like a, like a Meta, for example, has network effects, and that, that's, that's not easy to defeat. And so the more moats you have, you think about a castle. In fact, Neil is actually in a castle right now. He's in a moat.

I am really in a castle.

Yeah, he was literally in a castle doing this. He just ran away to take care of his kids. So, and by the way, look, you can see there's a, there's a female knight over there in the background, right? In fact, this looks like it might be World of Warcraft looking at the, the, the, the lion over there. Anyway, I'm going to continue to carry this episode while Neil's gone. So one thing I'll say is this. Oh, look, Neil brought his backpack over here. Neil, by the way, are you in a World of Warcraft?

No, I'm in the Lego theme. I'm at the Lego Hotel, Lego Castle Hotel, and whatever the theme is, but I'm assuming it's just fighting. Oh, okay.

He's in a Lego Castle Hotel. That's amazing.

Okay, great.

So I was just talking about the modes, but let me talk about one thing new, Neil. Have you used ChatGPT Voice yet? Have I sold that to you yet?

Yeah, you sold it to me. I still don't use it, but you sold it to me. Dude.

Oh, well, you can't do it with your kids. Okay guys, let me explain how good this is, okay? So ChatGPT Voice, when I went to go see my dad over the weekend, I was like, you know what? I'm not going to listen to a podcast because that is mental masturbation, right? I want to get things done. So I opened my ChatGPT Voice, which is, by the way, it's open on this computer over here so it can control all the apps that I have. And it opens, it controls my other agents. I was like, hey, you know what? I want you to note the top 3 highest leverage things that I'm working on right now. And I want you to tell me the next steps. Okay? I want you to tell me the next steps and then I want you to execute on them. It started executing on all those things and it kept moving the ball forward. And that's the main thing. It kept moving the ball forward. Right. And then I had a 40-minute commute to my dad and then 40 minutes back. And I just kept doing it. I kept working through it. My phone got really warm. And then what happened afterwards is I, on my way to see my dad the first time, I was actually worried. I was like, oh crap, I'm going to be late, right? And I just said the thing. I was like, hey, can you text my dad? Tell him I'm going to be about 5 minutes late. And then it sent the text message and then it confirmed with me that he responded and he received it. And I'm like, that's good. Let's continue to get back to work. Now, this is really big because you now have like a Jarvis from Iron Man. You can tell it what to do. and it knows your context. And not only that, I can control my other harnesses. So I had my Herbie's desktop app open too. I was like, hey, I want you to continue work trees on that one too. What else can you continue there? And so, because a lot of this stuff is about— sure, people talk about setting up loops and graph engineering where you don't have to prompt it, but in many cases you still have to kind of check on the thing and improve it over time and make sure it's not just YOLOing and doing whatever it wants. Maybe you can do it with code, but when it comes to marketing, when you're sending like sales emails or when you're sending like recruiting emails and things like that, You have to have some form of human in the loop there. And so that has been amazing, and it's only going to get better.

But you do know, for the— at least the texting example with your dad, you can just talk into your phone and it just does it automatically anyways, right?

I, I'm too late. But by the way, I'm still working with the thing. And so like, I can just, as I'm working, I'm like, by the way, send a text message, right? But by the way, I— sure, I can say, hey Siri, send, send a text message, whatever. But can I confirm that he received it and he sent the reply to me? I can't do that, right? But with this thing, it's like Your dad actually got it.

Probably can. Have you seen the new Siri?

No, I haven't. Tell me about it.

I haven't used it either, but they say it's really good.

You can't promote something where you haven't even seen it yet.

No, but I read about it yesterday.

All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. You probably can, right? But they're so, they're so far behind. But I, I think this is going to become the default way, Neil, where, um, actually now Hermes came out with something where you can replace your Amazon Alexa with its voice because Amazon Alexa is really stupid right now. Uh, it's gonna get smarter over time, but it's really stupid right now. Like, it, it, it like screws up so many things, right? So imagine you wake up in the morning, Neil, instead of asking, how's the weather? How about, how's the weather and knock out my top 3 things right now? That's how the weather is.

Yeah, dude. And by the way, with technology being so advanced, what I really hate about all the apps, whether it's AI or Siri or Alexa, if you ask how the weather is, it can be wildly inaccurate. Like, there's been so many cases where it rains throughout that day and the weather apps will show it's not raining at that exact moment. And I'm like, man, These guys can't get this basic thing right.

Yeah, and it's 2026 and I'm sure they're going to get it right. I think it's just they like— but I just look at ChatGPT Voice. I think that this is going to change how we work and we're just literally going to be dictating because here's the thing, on that commute back and forth, had I spent 80 minutes to 100 minutes listening to a podcast, well, that 100 minutes now I actually just got work done. And so that is a new expectation. You're not going to be listening to podcasts as much because people are just going to be working more, talking more to these things.

So, you know, I've never done the podcast in the car. I've really— I've tried that.

What do you do? You probably call people, right?

Uh, so I've done kids podcasts where like it's trivia for kids. I forgot the lady that does it, but it's, it's, it's— she's all about trivia for kids. Um, I can't do the voice Siri thing because my— or voice anything because my kids will chime in the moment I'm doing any voice thing in the car. Like they'll ask You know, on Tesla, you know how you can ask questions? My kids love it. They'll ask animal facts or random stuff. So, I either do phone calls or I talk to my children because with phone calls, even if they speak, the person on the phone knows it's me when I'm talking. So, I can still get a conversation going and I can be productive and get stuff done through that way. It is hard when it's not a phone call. Because most voice assistants, if I'm talking, will pick up their noise and they'll just get a kick just trying to throw me off and put in other stuff that they're not supposed to put in.

Well, yeah, I mean, you have to be engaged in a different way because you have, you have, uh, you have, uh, customers in the car, or kids in the car, I should say. Um, you have to entertain them. Um, by the way, Neil, so I mean, on this note, okay, ChatGPT Voice is great, right? But then I, I started— I installed Jack Dorsey's Buzz. Okay, so I want to show you how I'm working with Buzz right now, and I think this is going to change how work is. And to be frank, I've already been working like this inside of our Slack. I've been talking about having agents inside of Slack, but this is pretty cool. Like, anybody can install Buzz. I'm sharing the chat that we have over here. This is like Slack for agents, okay? So I'm making this world of business game in my free time, okay? Where you can basically— Neil, because we have this thing now and this is open source, I can actually finish off that game now where if Neil completes a quest, I give him $20 in stablecoins, right? Or if he does, if he implements a workflow and one other person uses it for the next 4 weeks, maybe I give him $500, right? and then you have a leaderboard for it. So I'm working on that right now with this thing, and I made this plan, and then I have all these 4 agents in here, right? I was like, hey guys, I want you to review these plans and give me different perspectives. And they just start working in here. Here's how it is right now. Here's my perspective. And then they start talking to each other. Fable Five, Claude Code here. Here's what I think over here. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it just gets work done. So imagine I can use the ChatGPT voice, plus I can use this and say, hey guys, just do all these things over here, right? Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And then now We can do way more work.

So, to clarify for anyone listening right now, if you watch the video version on YouTube, you'll see what Eric's talking about because he's screen sharing and showing you. So, make sure you check out the video version to get some context. But speaking of talking in the car, dude, I was driving to Legoland today and I was talking to my CFO. His name's Paul. My daughter, once she realizes Paul, because he knows he's a finance guy, she's like, Hey Paul, do you want to make some charts and diagrams and work on today's projections? And I'm just like cracking up.

That's funny. What— how did he react?

He cracks up, but he knows because she'll try to call. Like, she knows the password for my phone. Both my kids do. And like, they'll text too. They'd be like, what's this month's numbers? And like, I don't talk like that, so they kind of know because it'd be like, hey, what's the growth of this month? Or what's year over year? I'd be more specific.

That's exactly how you talk. How are we doing with numbers?

I wouldn't say this month's numbers. I would say, did we hit this month's number? Or targets. I wouldn't just say like, what's this month's numbers? It's too generic. But either way, they get a kick out of it. Yeah, they know the type of people I'm talking to and their roles, and they'll say different things. So, with Paul, it'll be charts and diagrams and projections. With Mark, it'll be, did we hit the sales numbers? Because I always ask him that, and I ask him for country to country.

Yeah.

My kids don't know all the countries, so they'll throw out random country names in Europe, and some of them are cities because they don't know the difference between a country and city for all of them yet. They're young. And then if it's Mike Camo, they'll talk about like, hey dude, how much money are we going to make this month? Or what are we going to take in salary this month?

That's funny. By the way, did I tell you I was sitting on that AI operators call? So again, you have a lot of people that are working at these larger companies, right? 9 figures plus. And initially, all the CEOs were like, how do we cut headcount? How do we cut headcount? How do we cut headcount? But all these other people are like, well, no, they had to kind of walk the CEOs away from that language. And it's more about how do we enhance what we're doing? And I think that's really important, right? The messaging, the way communicate something is really important too. And so I'm not saying Neil wants to cut headcount necessarily, but it just reminded me of how quickly we change opinion on this AI stuff. And one thing I want to bring up, I was listening to Gavin Baker talking today. So you know Gavin Baker, the investor, right, Neil?

Oh.

So he's actually a popular investor. Like, you know Brad Gerstner, right? He's kind of in that circle. Like, they podcast the stuff and they're really good investors. Gavin Baker was saying this, and I didn't know the number was this small. Neil, how many people in the world would you say are actually super AI-pilled?

I don't know, fraction of a percent?

Yeah, so it's like 0.007%. Okay, so according to what he said, so he says that it's likely that 500,000 people in the world are super AI-pilled right now, if not maybe even 250,000. So if you divide that By $7 billion, it's 0.007%, right? It's a very small number. And Neil and I were talking about this yesterday because even though I would consider that I'm in some pretty AI-pilled groups, I like to talk about this stuff. Neil's in a lot of these groups as well. Both Neil and I, my CTO, other people, and I was talking to someone else today, he works at one of these companies. We can say less than 10 people we know that are super AI-pilled. So what does that mean exactly? If 250,000, 500,000 people are AI-pilled, what that means is we're going to need way more compute, way more electricity, way more a lot of things. And agencies are not dead, okay? The harsh reality of AI right now is maybe we're just in the second inning, maybe, and that's it, right? But all this talk about, oh, agencies are going to be dead, no one needs ad managers anymore, this and that. You can say we're biased, but I just, I don't think you can say that for a lot of these roles and a lot of the roles that people don't want to do anymore. We're just, they're going to be reskilled into other areas. So harsh reality, only $250K to $500K, that puts things into perspective.

Yeah. And that means companies are going to have to pay others who are experts. This is why things like service-based businesses or agencies are not dead. And I see them lasting for a very long time because People pay other experts and you could say, well, why don't they just hire those people internally? Well, I can ask you the same question. Why don't people hire amazing SEO people internally 10, 15 years ago? You know, some do, some pay external contractors, like from like Upwork and places like that. Some hire agencies, some hire companies where they place headcount into their organizations temporarily, like Tata or whatever it may be. There's another one from India. What is it called? Infosys or something like that. I could be off on the name where they'll place like temporary employees within your organization. So there's a lot of options, but I believe if you're really good at what you do, people will continually pay you. If you suck at what you do, people may temporarily pay you.

Yes. And I also think that it's never going to change that hard talent is easy— is hard to come by, right? Because hard talent is always like a percentage of people and that's never going to change. So anyway, I just wanted to call that piece out because there's a lot of doom and gloom all the time, and sometimes I even call that stuff out. So that's what it is. So let's go with, I want to talk about how product-led growth is dead, Neil. It's no longer about PLG, it's now about ALG. You want to know what ALG is?

No, I want to know what it is, but I don't know what it is.

What it is. Okay.

No, I said I want to know what it is. I don't know.

I know, I know. I'm joking.

I'm joking.

I'm joking. Okay. So, so Guillermo, from a CEO of Vercel, he says, this is why ALG will be the king for startups. Okay. It's agent-led growth. So have agents adopt your product first, then have meetings if needed. The companies that start with the meetings are likely not your ideal customers. Okay. So the dangers of selling to big companies if you're a startup is that they don't say no outright. They have months of meetings with you first. Since you hate meetings, that seems to you a sign of commitment, but it's not. They love having meetings. It's almost all they do. That's what big companies do, right? And the funny thing is this. I talked to one of my friends who works at Apple, and his role at the company is to be taking notes, and his team takes notes about meetings About meetings and meetings and meetings, right? So he has meetings to discuss the meetings, to figure out how to disseminate information about these meetings. Okay. And that's what you do at Apple, right? And not everybody does that, but I'm just saying that if you— or I'm not just saying this, but Guillermo's saying this— if you have a product, so imagine again, you have an API, you have an MCP, you have good documentation around it for AEO SEO purposes, the agents discover it and they start using it. Look at how fast Supabase is growing. growing, right? Uh, you look at all these other products out there, uh, people are using like these Cloudflare agents and things like that. So you need to have an agent-led growth strategy. And I don't think product-led growth is necessarily dead. In fact, I think you need to have some product qualified leads in terms of the stuff that you give away for free, but you need to have an ALG strategy as well.

Yeah, because for some businesses, agent-led growth won't work, um, as well. And for some businesses, product-led growth works better, right? I think it depends on the industry you're in. A prime example of this is like toilet papers, thinking like old school Procter Gamble, you know, it's— you're not really going to do agent-led growth for toilet paper. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. Your ideal customer for toilet paper, and I know this because I've done marketing for toilet paper, is typically the head of the household, which is a woman who's in charge of the family. is the number one purchaser of toilet paper.

Well, hold on a second, Neal. What's to say the robots don't need to wipe their butts?

Eric's like trying to say that with a straight face.

Anyway.

That was good.

Let me move to—

let me move to this one over here.

So Higgsfield, by the way, guys. So Higgsfield is, they help you make creatives at scale. Let's just leave it at that, right? So Matt Epstein tweets this. So by the way, so Higgsfield went from 0 to $400 million ARR in 14 months, okay? So he says, pay attention to what Higgsfield is doing right now because this is craziest distribution playbook ever. So this is the craziest distribution playbook from Higgsfield, okay? So they do daily launches on X. They have thousands of creators on IG and TikTok every day. They're posting every day. They have full movies made entirely out of AI. They're working with every major KOL. So that's basically like a key influencer, let's call it that. And then UGC farming at insane scale and an influencer marketing machine running 24/7 and they're clipping everything, right? So that's what they're doing. And I do see the Higgsfield stuff every now and then, but I think it's interesting because we're— I think People are doing this, but not many people are doing this really well. I think Hixfield is doing this well. I think Gamma did this well for a period of time. Who else comes to mind here, Neil?

There was that guy who got caught and he said he lied about his numbers, but he was getting a ton of press from it. Korean founder, I think he went to Stanford. He had that startup, I believe he got backed by like A6. Which one?

Cluey.

Did you say Cluey?

Yeah.

Cluey ended up doing it really well and getting early traction, but the problem was is the product didn't work the way people expected. So the numbers didn't work out really well too. Before a lot of this AI stuff took off, Jasper was doing it too. And Jasper was doing it before people were really using like ChatGPT. They were just using it, they were doing it with APIs or their product was released out there through APIs and anyone could create content easily. And they were just getting a ton of people to push that narrative online and that helped quite a bit with them.

You know what I'll say? If you look at Jasper, for example, nobody really talks that much about Jasper anymore, right? But Jasper basically—

It's moved to enterprise. Enterprises talk about them a lot now, the regular. But yes, in general, you're right. The average person does not talk about Jasper because that was their marketing. You can create social posts really easily and all this kind of stuff. They moved upstream to enterprise. Enterprise talks about them quite a bit now. The non-enterprise has pretty much forgotten about them from what it looks like.

So, Neil, like, because I have looked at them maybe a couple months ago from enterprise side, so they've definitely gone upmarket. My question is, how are they really doing as a company? Because if you look at— if you just look at Google Trends, and Google Trends isn't the end-all be-all, right? But, you know, just because the overall sentiment has— not sentiment, but the kind of wind behind their sales has gone out from consumer, Mindshare. I just wonder how they're doing as a company now, right? Like if we, if we look at their LinkedIn, for example, Jasper AI, I think they have a couple hundred employees. Do you, do you have any visibility?

I think Tim Young is the CEO. My guess is they do around $60 million in revenue.

Okay. And then I know they pushed, um, the original co-founders out.

Yeah, they raised a lot of money. Tim Young is an ex-Dropbox, I believe, COO.

Yeah. So, okay, here it is. 1,000 employees or so, right? And then they're in San Francisco. This is the marketing agency platform, which is what everyone calls themselves. So I think it's worth calling this out because when Jasper first came out, keep in mind ChatGPT didn't even come out yet, right? It's when ChatGPT came out when it started to get weird. So I remember one of the original, Dave Rogenmoser, right? I think he was— he went to ask Sam Altman because I think he was talking to Sam Altman. He's like, hey, what does this mean for our business? Right? Because they were doing really well. And I think they were just crushing it because there's no ChatGPT yet. And the way people are using ChatGPT in the beginning is for copywriting. But as ChatGPT matured over time, people realized they didn't need to pay Jasper. And Jasper was very much a quote unquote a wrapper, right? Which is what they kind of just wrap themselves around these LLMs. So the reason I'm bringing this up is because there's another company out there and I know the founder, Stan, right? And they have Stanley. Now they launched on X. And they said they're making this, um, this chief AI officer for everyone and trying to democratize the ability to create content, democratize distribution. Okay, so on Twitter I saw a lot of the comments and like it was a cool launch, cool launch video. I think it got like maybe a million views or something like that. Um, but a lot of people are just like, well, why do I need this? This seems like it's just a bunch of skills. It seems like it's a wrapper. Like, why do I need to use this? And, and to be fair, maybe it is, right? But my point of saying this, Neil, is It kind of doesn't matter if you're a wrapper sometimes if you have the distribution already and you don't have your miss— you don't have incentives that are misaligned where you maybe overraised too much money or whatever. They're in a situation where they can still make it happen. And Gary Vee put some money into it. Stephen Bartlett put some money into it. And I'm just saying that sometimes it's okay to have a wrapper, especially if you have distribution already. And, you know, it's okay, but sometimes it doesn't work out if, you know, your cap table is upside down.

Yeah, on a side note, did you see what ended up happening with— I don't know how to pronounce his last name— Leopold Aschenbrenner and Ken Griffin?

Yeah, you're talking about the demise of a 25-year-old, $200 billion fund manager.

I don't know if it was $200 billion. I think it was like $40-something billion leveraged at 4x, but I could be wrong.

Yes, he did.

Yeah, either way, whatever the number was, it was very large. But people trust Ken Griffin. It was like old school versus new school. So he leveraged the internet and marketing. He believed that a rate hike could be apparent and he was pushing for surprise rate hike fears. And that was the day before the AI trade collapsed and forced the Forex leveraged Leopold to have to come to Ken and sell his portfolio at a discount. And he came quite a bit from it. But I thought that was an interesting financial marketing move. And another person who pulled something similar was— dude, I don't know why I'm blanking on his name. Bill Ackman. So Bill Ackman was investor, I forgot in what Canadian company, but I believe they owned Wendy's or a good chunk of Wendy's. And he's like, wait, the Wendy's asset and these companies are separate. They wouldn't take a call from him. So he took a credible source. So in marketing world, the influencer, this influencer was Blackstone, I believe. And he had Blackstone publish a letter and they paid attention to that letter. So then they ended up splitting the companies apart and it made everyone more money. But you can do similar things with influencers on the web. If someone's really well known in a space and you're trying to get a specific narrative out, you can always push the influencer or pay the influencer or work with them to help with that narrative. And in many cases, it can change the perception of your company or change the perception of a market condition. So for example, if you sell SEO services and people are like, SEO's dead, if you get a lot of influencers who are entrepreneurs and marketers to talk about SEO's alive and kicking and how well they're doing, It can help change the narrative even if they're not talking about your company, which then can help you generate revenue indirectly.

Yep. So here's one thing I'll say. Now, Ken Griffin did marketing to basically acquire his assets, right? But the letter that Leopold sent to his LPs was actually pretty good. It was very humble. And I was just saying like, I'm not going to, you know, Charlie Munger has said there's only 3 ways you go broke, ladies, liquor, and leverage, right? And he's like, I just added the first 2 because it's like more funny, right? But it's really leverage at the end of the day. Because when you think about if you're on 4 turns of leverage, if you're down 20%, you just multiply that by 4, right? It's hard to recover from that. And the numbers here basically are the public book is down 100%, but his private investments like Anthropic is what has kept it alive, right? So sure, he had to do that, but I think he's a very smart guy. I think he'll learn from this ultimately. And he did tell the LPs, like, it's not like we're completely wiped out. Maybe some of the recent people that invested are. But I think it's important that when you get knocked down like that, you learn from that lesson. You send a note apologizing and you say, hey, I'm down to have these one-on-one calls. I think that's good. I don't think he's dead by any means. And so, you know, that's a good thing. And I think, you know, people will learn from it, but leverage can be very dangerous. So my thinking here, Neil, I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. When you think about the turns of leverage that you're willing to put on, how many turns is it? Is it one? You know, how far will you go with leverage?

So are you talking about Leopold or whatever his name is came from FTX? I don't know if you knew that. A lot of the FTX people are big in leverage and I worked at FTX for a bit.

Neil was literally an employee. He was literally a full-time employee.

Yeah. First time for a corporation being a full-time employee other than like a theme park or like Party City where I was a cashier, right? I'm talking about like a white-collar job. But I met some really solid A-players there. And I have to say, yes, Sam did some bad stuff. There was a lot of amazing talent at FTX. Sadly, what he did was terrible for people. And sadly, when people— I think if they kept some of the assets, this is my personal take, like Robinhood, Anthropic, it would just be worth so much more now when you can just look at the stock and the valuation. So I think liquidation for some of these things happened at wrong times and it would've made people much more whole. But the leverage aspect, I was always different on leverage. I'm not big on OPM, other people's money. I'm big on just using my own money and being able to sleep at night. And not be as big because of that. And I like the cushiness versus going too hard on the leverage. So I would say I usually stick around less than a 1x leverage. I'm willing to go more than 1x leverage. I don't really ever see myself willing to go to 2x leverage unless there's like an amazing opportunity. But I'd rather at that point just take equity investment and get diluted and be able to sleep at night in case something goes bad, because I don't care how good of an entrepreneur you are. You can be Elon Musk. You're going to have failures. Mark Zuckerberg has failures. Elon Musk has failures. Bill Gates has failures. They keep pushing forward and their successes outweigh the failures by far. I just don't like the idea of betting all of my cash on one thing. And if something goes sideways, I'm back to, you know, starting all over again because I have a family, because I have a comfortable life. I'm just not willing to take that risk anymore, but I will go hard. Like if someone says, hey, there's this really amazing opportunity, I will sell my house. I will go mortgage stuff if I need to. I will sell cars and all that kind of stuff before I put on too much leverage. Or what I'll do, and I thought about this a few times, I will take money from my personal account, invest it in the corporate account so I can go more aggressive without having to put on too much leverage onto the company or more so debt.

And by the way, there's no right or wrong strategy here because I just searched up what Elon Musk and Bill Gates have done. So Bill Gates, Famously ran Microsoft with zero business leverage, maintaining a strict policy of keeping enough cash to survive a full year without revenue. So that's a principle right now. Elon has heavily used business leverage, right? He used tens of billions in debts to buy Twitter and relied on junk bond markets to scale SolarCity and Tesla, right? So there's different ways of thinking about it. You have to just decide what your risk tolerance is. Neil and I aren't saying one way is right or one way is wrong. So that's what it is. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and, uh, yeah, we'll talk to you tomorrow.