Founder Mode Is Real (And Airbnb, Flexport & Apple Prove It)

You know what, that goes back to the whole concept of founder mode, which is what Paul Graham wrote about a few years ago. So you have Brian Chesky, right? He was just saying of Airbnb, he was like, dude, we had hired all these like professional C-level people and we had hired all these layers and you just like, you're supposed to let them do their thing or whatever. And he found that he wasn't operating the business to his— it wasn't his business anymore. And he found like more and more there's all these layers and all these, you know, layers of management where he just, you just couldn't make any decisions. And that's when the company was really struggling, right? And then he decided, I'm going to get rid of all the layers. I'm going to get rid of all these C-level people. I'm going to get rid of all these. I'm going to run it my way. And now he's running an organization that is flatter and it's moving faster than it's ever moved. And it's no different than Flexport CEO. He stepped out for a little bit. There's a professional CEO, step back in, boom, it's moving again, right? And I think so we're constantly— Steve Jobs, he got— sure, he got fired from Apple and then it took him 12 years, I think, when NeXT And then eventually he got his way back into Apple, and then he really turned the company around, right? And so it just shows you again, over and over, founder mode. Like, you might say one person can only do so much, but I'm telling you, the founder usually has the most vision, and they have that invisible hammer where they can just make things happen. So use it if you're a founder.

Yep.

Yep. By the way, there's actually 2 questions here since we're live right now. So I'm going to read this over from Ryan over here. So he says, he calls us the 2 agency GOATs here. So he says, I run a B2B video production agency. What are your guys' thoughts on how AI will disrupt the video production industry in the next few years?

So I think people still pay for ideation. I still think people pay for a lot of the behind the scenes stuff. I don't think they pay, and they still pay for like video filming and all that kind of stuff. They want more efficiencies on using technology. Let's say editing's a huge cost or processing a video. They want a lot of that stuff just done more efficiently. But we don't see video recording agencies or B2B video agencies going away. It's just more so people are looking for them to be more efficient. Now, this doesn't mean you need to charge less. It means that you need to make sure what you're offering for that price makes sense to them. So for example, let's say in your scope you would come up with 5 ideas. You would then go to them and film and shoot, and then you'd go and edit, and then you go put it online and you promote it. Now let's say the editing, which was a big expensive part, is now 50% more efficient. Well, maybe instead of 5 ideas, you give them 5 initial ideas and based on what direction they like, You give them 5 more refined ideas, and then from there you script and you get their feedback, and then you go and adjust. And then once they approve, you then go and film in person, and maybe you fly to them instead of them coming to you, and then you go and edit, and then you help promote. All I'm getting at is you're just adding a few extra things in there to make it worth their while for the same price, at least.

You know who I think did a really good job with this? PB Launch. And so I like her model. So Ava is her name and she just, I think she just has too many clients and she was charging too little initially. I think she charges more now, but the original deal was like I was paying a couple grand a month and she would give me 30 short-form ideas and everything was prepared, packaging, like the type of film that I'm doing, like based on like the, this formatting over here. And it would tell me all the shots as well. So everything was prepared for me. It was done for me.

Yeah.

And there's not a lot of thinking that I needed to do there. Now, the only issue was that we didn't tweak the ideas enough to focus it more on B2B. It was very much wider TAM kind of beginner founder content that would make it attractive for like someone trying to start an agency, for example, right? And we couldn't— I couldn't quite get it going in the right direction with our customer service rep. So I think the offer was correct, I think had it been just her working with me, that's worth it, right? Because to Neil's point, he just mentioned, oh, people coming over to you to film with you and then maybe putting all the packaging together for you so you don't have to think. And maybe you like 70% of ideas, 80% ideas. That's actually something that's very valuable that we both pay for. And the other thing I would say is I look at what's working on Instagram. We talked about this a little earlier. All these people that are saying, the yap for a little bit and like comment for this resource over here, which is just like, it's like a PDF of like that conversation. But like, if someone, you're going to do all that done for me, that's something I would pay for.

Dude, I totally agree. People want to pay for done for you people who have experience because they know the results are more likely going to be better. And when you think about pricing and packaging as a marketer, you got to look at it from not what is my cost, but more so what are the results produce and what is that worth to another company?

Yeah.

All right.

We got another one over here and then we can hit one more topic here.

So, do you—

because we talked about multiples earlier, right? So let's do one more on multiples. So Mark James asked this, do you think CPG companies will eventually have higher multiple valuations and SaaS will have lower multiples because of AI?

I think CPG, depending on the company, already has really high multiples. I was talking to a CPG company that is running a process right now to sell. I think they're using like Nomura Bank or one of them. And they're telling me, yeah, you know, I should get 15 to 20 times profit. And I was like, what? I'm like, 15 and 20 times profit on a CPG company? They're like, yeah, that's standard. And I'm like, all right, if that's what you're saying, but I've never heard of that. And I'm not saying they're wrong. It's just to me, that's really high. Yeah.

By the way, this is, this is cool. So I don't know about you right now, but are you running ChatGPT ads for NP Digital right now?

We're one of the first. We were in the beta program.

So how's that going for you guys? Like, you don't have to give specific numbers.

Well, but I'm not allowed to talk about it because I talked about it once online. They told me to take it down. Really? ChatGPT told you to take it down? Yeah, because contractually I'm not allowed to.

I see. I see. Yeah. So here's the headline here. So ChatGPT, so it has 900 million weekly users, 20% shopping intent chats, and many brands already spending $10K to $25K. Right. And I remember a couple of months ago, this is already a couple of months ago, but I was talking to a group of founders and it's like, oh yeah, I'm spending on ChatGPT ads right now, 25 cents per click, right? And so I think this is a great opportunity for people to jump in because usually when an ad channel comes up, like the clicks don't come down usually, right? It starts to get more and more expensive over time. So I think it's smart for you to jump into it. I think, by the way, this actually relates to Adobe. So Adobe has said that AI retail traffic is up 138% year on year, and now it converts 54% better The non-AI traffic, right? And so that's on the organic side, but also this is on the paid side too. And I will say for us, and I think probably same thing for Neil too, we do get a lot of our leads coming in from LLM research, right? Whether it's from ChatGPT or whether it's from Claude.

Yeah, dude, I agree with you. Yeah.

All right, so, but I don't know if you've seen this part, Neil. So one thing I'll say this is this, I use Amazon Alexa all the time. In my home. I have 2 of them, right? You probably have more, Neil. It is the stupidest assistant that I have, but I'll say this. Amazon says that 20% of shoppers keep chatting with its new AI ads and 7 in 10 are new to the brand, okay? So basically, they have their little chat app is becoming like a mini sales rep and they're pushing this format across the open web.

Wow.

And I hope it works out for them, but I will tell you, Alexa is still dumb as a rock. 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.

I like Alexa, but I tend to use it for stuff like, what's the weather going to be like today?

Exactly. But you try to ask anything that's a little more sophisticated, it just goes full dumb on you.

Dude, my son, when he doesn't get the answer he likes from Alexa, he's like, Alexa, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm gonna go to Siri.

And what does Alexa say?

I don't know, but you can hear him yelling at it when he's asking it questions. He's like, you're wrong, you're looking at the wrong source. I'm gonna go to Siri.

Oh, that's funny. That's funny. Yeah, but I don't know, it's all this token spending, all this token maxing stuff, all this AI this, AI that. I think we're going to be just fine. Let me ask you this, markets, crypto markets don't look good right now. Okay, let's do a little prediction because we talked about the SaaSpocalypse a little bit. What do we think is going to happen in SaaSpocalypse? What do we think is going to happen to crypto? What do we think is going to happen in the next 6 months here? Because we're at the halfway point of the year.

Not financial advice.

Not financial advice.

This is the disclaimer for anyone listening. I don't know about the next 6 months. I know Tomer Bravo said the SaaS apocalypse is over, yet the stocks keep going down. No one cares. I know he's worth over $10 billion and he's one of the biggest players in SaaS, but no one cares what one person says who's involved in that industry. I think sentiment's going to take some time to change. I think it'll change within the next 12 months. You're already seeing earnings growth. If the earnings growth can continue in the SaaS end, right, and beat quarterly expectations and keep accelerating growth for a lot of companies in SaaS, I think people will be much more flexible on SaaS valuations. Now to go to crypto, a lot of what's caused crypto to do well is the hype. And here's what I mean by that. Like if you look at Bitcoin, there's no real useful value for 99% of people who have Bitcoin. It's just, they just hold it like a version of like gold, right? Or a coin and just like silver coin or platinum or whatever. I get gold has many other uses, but people just use it being like, oh, it'll go up. I'm not saying crypto's dead. I'm not saying it won't go to a million or $500,000 or whatever people want to end up claiming. That I don't know. But people, when from what I see, don't care too much about crypto because they're all about AI right now. AI, chips, memory. They really see not only how is a— they don't look at it as just hype. They look at it as real tangible value that's impacting the world. So people just don't focus on crypto that much. And I don't see— I'm not saying crypto can't be big and the pricing won't go up. I just see crypto not as quote unquote as popular as it once was from a hype or marketing standpoint versus some of the new things that people will be talking about, right? They already talked a lot about AI. Eventually they'll be talking about like quantum computing. And I don't think people are going to be talking about crypto as much. And the main reason being is they have other new shinier objects that are making impacts in the world that are causing people to get rich, like AI, MU. When you see some of these stocks go up like 10x in 12 months, people are like, cool, Park my money in there. Dude, a lot of these crypto people were just trying to get rich quick, and now they're seeing they can do this on the AI stocks, so they're just like, yeah, forget this crypto, it's going down or sideways. So a lot of these young kids are just trying to park money on whatever's hot right now.

You know what's funny? A lot of the crypto people have magically become AI people, right? And like, I legit love the AI stuff, but I will say this, it's not financial advice, um, Like, I've held on to my crypto, right? Like, whatever crypto I have, I've held on to it, right? And so what I would say is, like, I'm a believer is my point. And, you know, I'm a long-term believer too. Now, I'm also a big long-term believer in AI. And what Neil said, like, I was watching one of the co-founders of Coatue talking about this. I don't know if you saw this on CNBC, your favorite channel, but he's just like, yeah, I don't know what to think about Bitcoin now because it's like, you know, people wanted like something, there needed to be some hype for people to dump all their money into like during the pandemic. but it's not there anymore, right? The hype is clearly in all this data center buildout and like going to space and like AI, and like, that's very exciting. We're talking about productivity there, right? I do believe these, like, you know, talking about store of value, you know, using Ethereum smart contracts, Solana, like that's all very real. I think these things all come in together. And here's the good thing, where I'll end it off here. I think it's good that crypto has less hype because that's when it starts to smooth out, right? It doesn't just like chop all the way like up and down all the time like that. So eventually I think it smooths out over time. So not financial advice. We're not telling you to buy crypto or AI right now. We're just telling you where we think the market is. And a lot of this stuff is marketing, right? The hype cycle is everyone just running towards whatever's hot right now. And by the way, I think a lot of this stuff is like overpriced right now too. So yeah.

Dude, it is. And I always tell people, if you're going to invest in something, you know, you can pick like Nvidia or Bitcoin or whatever you want, but My first choice that I always tell people is invest in yourself.

You know who said that, Neil?

Well, Warren Buffett's been saying that for years.

I mean, Warren Buffett's right here. He's in the room with us. You see that?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, there he is.

I didn't notice him, but yeah, he's right there. Yeah, but I'm a big believer in that. Improve yourself.

By the way, let me give you a hack here. So Neil just mentioned Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett has all these sayings, right? Um, you know, Be greedy when others are fearful. The best investment is in yourself, right? There's all these sayings that he has, like, you know, it's rule number one is don't lose money, right? And it's like, you know, and then Charlie Munger, which is the other statue, is like, you know, you never want to— the greatest, the hardest part about investing is like just waiting. It's in the waiting, right? And they have all these sayings. Now, when you buy these statues, am I saying you need to spend the money to buy these statues? But no, but it's helpful for me because even when the background, it constantly is reminding me all the time to be less of an idiot, less of an idiot. If I can just reduce my idiocy by 10% just by having these statues, it's worth it. So food for thought.

Well, they're saying on be greedy when others are fearful. I have been with the SaaS stocks and I've been losing my shirt.

Nope. That's not just for a little—

we said this is a longer-term trade, not just like a Well, I bought it for a multi-year trade, so I already figured there's a chance that I can end up losing money in the short run.

Yeah, but if anything, if you believe the thesis, you would buy more right now.

I have been. I've been dollar-cost averaging and I've been buying more. I think my last purchase was less than a week ago or 2 weeks ago. No, 2 weeks ago.

And here, I'll give you another good Warren Buffett one and we can get out of here. If you won't even hold it for 10 seconds, then— oh, if you won't hold it for 10 years, don't even hold it for 10 seconds, right? And that talks about your holdings.

And then again, there's all these good sayings you guys should learn from the greats.

Anyway, that's it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.