The marketing behind Sam Altman’s biggest project, Jack Altman raises 150M for Alt Capital, and more

So Sam Altman is trying to raise $7 trillion to go on this ultimate chip mission. 7, that's with the T, everyone. Just some context for everyone, a trillion is 1,000 billion, and then a billion is 1,000 million. So take that into account. That's a lot of money.

That's a lot of money. I don't think he's trying to raise $7 trillion. I don't think anyone thinks he's trying to raise $7 trillion. He's just putting a big number out there, and I bet you he'll be happy if he gets $5 to $10 No, $5 to $10 billion.

Yeah. Yes.

He's not going to get more than $5— I could be wrong, but I doubt he's going to get more than $5 to $10 billion.

You know what we call that, Neil? What do we call that in marketing?

You aim for the moon and—

That works too. Anchoring. Remember the book Influence?

Yeah.

So when you— let's say you go buy a jacket, it's like $500 on the price tag. But then I come up to you, I'm like, hey, Neil, it's actually $100. You're like, oh.

Seems cheap.

Wow. Deal.

I got a deal. Oh, it's not $7 trillion. I only got to put $5 to $10 trillion.

This is a steal. So this is the ultimate anchor from Sam.

Yes, that's really what he's trying to do. And funny enough, his brother just recently announced at the same time that he raised $150 million for Alt Capital to invest in startups.

And he was like, dude, just let me have this week. Did you see him tweet at Sam Altman? He's like, let me just have this week.

And then he ended up putting a Photoshop version of a news article that he's like, he raised trillions of dollars for his Alt Capital.

It was funny.

It's funny.

But okay, so let's talk about— here's the thing. So Jack Altman, there's Jack Altman has Lattice, I believe. That's his the startup that he has. It's an HR startup.

He's a chairman.

Okay.

Oh, he's no longer running the company.

Oh, got it. Okay. I didn't know that. Yeah. So so now he's he's raising money to go do more stuff.

Like no, he already raised the money to do more stuff. Okay. So he also raised seventy five million dollars for I believe the University of Michigan earlier last year too.

So I think this is worth talking about too because we've kind of talked about this before, but it's like you know these is the next calling after your business. Should you go raise a fund? Because in 2020 to like 2022, everyone was becoming a VC. Everyone was raising a fund. And you had like these solo capitalists as well, right? So is that the right move for everybody?

I think most people have it skewed. A lot of these guys don't start a fund after they're an entrepreneur or they're done being an entrepreneur. They were investing a lot while they were an entrepreneur. So they have a track record and they've made some good bets. And then they go and raise a fund.

But people oversimplify it and they make it look as if— everyone starts doing it as if it's easy. It's not.

I have this buddy. His name is Andy. I'm an investor in his fund. It's called Unlock Venture Partners. Andy sold his first company to Aquantiv, which ended up turning into Microsoft. Microsoft ended up buying Aquantiv. And then his second company sold to Vizio. You know, the TV company?

Yeah.

So he did well as an entrepreneur. He had an amazing track record as an angel. I don't know what his returns were. But let's call it 30-40% IRR. It was something ridiculous like that.

On a big number too. It's not like—

Yeah, and he's done a ton of deals. And his cash returns were amazing, right? Which is very important because a lot of people on paper talk about the returns, but his cash returns were amazing. So then he created this venture fund called Unlock Venture Partners. And I remember Andy telling me before he started Unlock, he's like, dude, being an entrepreneur is such a grind, exhausting, a lot of stress. And You know, he's done well as it. He's raised quite a bit of money. He sold businesses. And then he started a venture business. And then he's like, dude, it's a grind, just like being an entrepreneur all over again.

Everything's a grind.

Everything. You gotta meet up with investors in certain countries. They require you to drink to get to know them. And I didn't know this, in certain countries, like in Asia and China, did you know you can have a drinking buddy who drinks on your behalf so you don't have to drink as much?

I didn't know that.

I didn't know either. I was like, oh, this is kind of cool.

Yeah.

So I don't have to be the one that Yeah, he's like, you can actually have someone who drinks on your behalf because I'm allergic to alcohol, so I don't really drink. Yeah, and he's like, dude, it's a grind.

Is that what you say now? You're allergic to alcohol?

I am allergic.

I am too. Well, you know, when Asians turn red, you're actually allergic, but you don't turn red.

I don't turn red, but you've had a hangover, right? Yeah, I think most of us have. If I take a little sip, like you take the— you guys can't see here unless you're looking at the video version.

That's why subscribe to YouTube.

But if you take this bottle cap amount, It's tiny. If I take a sip of that—

Hangover?

I have a hangover within the same feeling, but within 5 minutes of drinking that sip.

Wow. Okay. I like that line though. I'm allergic to alcohol. I'm gonna use that in the future.

No, I think there's something wrong. I can't take a sip. And I— it happened post-COVID. So during COVID I never really drank a lot anyways. Pre or post-vaccine? Uh, none of it during COVID So what I mean by that is During COVID I never drank. And then when things started to open up, I started taking a sip of alcohol. Forget having COVID vaccine or anything like that. The moment I took a sip of alcohol, my body reacted really poorly. And I think what happened is I went like a year without drinking any alcohol. So my body just built up intolerance to it. They're like, nope. Same with like milk. When I was a little kid, I could drink milk. Now I can't drink milk.

By the way, we're not saying bad things about vaccines. But, you know, just to set the record straight. So, that's interesting. I didn't know that. We'll talk about it more afterwards. Did you want to finish your thought?

But no, so what Andy was getting with being a venture capitalist, he's like, dude, I'm grinding it out just as hard as being an entrepreneur. And what most people don't realize is I'm an LP in quite a few funds. People who are VCs, they make good money typically 10 years after they started their first fund.

It's a really— Each fund is a 7 to 10 year grind.

It's a long cycle and people forget that.

Yeah, yeah. Look, not everything is as easy as it looks, and everyone is in the business of serving their customers. So no matter what you do, you don't— you can't just get away and work in like a cave. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. This kind of ties in with the last episode we did around Tucker Carlson, where He starts his own media brand, but he's also diversified on X, on YouTube. He's got his own website. And so I'm looking at a tweet over here or post, and Meta just cut off third-party access to Facebook groups, killing a bunch of companies in the process. So the founder of one company, PostMyParty, said, I will lose 7 years of work and over 10,000 customers. It's a multimillion-dollar loss. This is from a guy—

What did Meta cut off? I'm confused on this.

Third-party access to Facebook groups, killing a bunch of companies.

Oh, got it.

Yeah. So this guy's tweet or Twitter handle—

But they're not killing groups.

They're not killing groups, but I think—

But they're killing the people who are taking all the data from groups and then creating their own communities outside of Facebook.

There's not enough here, but I mean, we can see how this might affect people. But this guy Niche Down says platform risk is very real. So when you think about Reddit's changes to their API pricing, right, like, you know, remember there's a tool I used to use or an app I used to use called Apollo, and that had 1.5 million active users on it. That change alone killed the whole thing. And I think it was doing like maybe $10 or $20 million a year or so. Twitter changed their API pricing, right?

Yeah.

Charging $42K a month, that killed loads of third-party apps. So it's just like, there's a lot of platform risk and that's why I always recommend that you build out your email list, you build out your SMS list, you build something where you can control it. To an extent, you have control over your website unless Google decides to like, you know, hit you with a manual action. But you know, those don't happen often as long as you don't do anything stupid.

Dude, and when you think about platform risk, what Eric and I are talking about is you just got to be omnichannel. We've talked about that a lot. And we're not just saying that for social, we're also saying that for things like email or SMS or even SEO because a platform could change your rules. And then people are like, oh, should I just not invest any time into these channels? And it's a big misconception. And I tell people, funny enough, that they should not waste any more time creating social media content. People are like, what? What are you talking about? And I tweeted about this the other day, but check out these numbers. This is a number of content that's published on a daily basis on each platform. TikTok, 23 million. YouTube, 216 million. Facebook, 350 million. X, 500 million. LinkedIn, 2 million. Instagram, 95 million, right? So when you look at the amount of people that are creating content on a daily basis, it's so much. And when we did analysis of over 5 million social media posts, 5.2 million, 59.41% had no engagement, no likes, no comments, no shares, nothing.

Right.

And it doesn't mean that social media is a bad platform. It just means people are wasting their time because they're creating crap content. Just like in our last episode, we talked about the Morning Brew founder talking about how, you know—

Most content sucks.

Yes. NBC is losing subscribers. Business Insider is, right? TechCrunch is. And the reason they're losing subscribers is because their content sucks. And on social media, people are just creating shit content and they're expecting To do amazing. It just doesn't work. If you're going to create shit content, don't create content in the first place.

You know what the other problem is? The other problem is, I was talking about this the other day where I was interviewing a YouTuber and the bar for content is getting higher and higher. Like 5 years ago when you and I would publish stuff, maybe 2-minute, 4-minute video where we just wing it, that might do really well. Now it's like, no, you got to go— like these are now 15 minutes. These are no longer 5 minutes, right? We've had to adjust. So the quality for free is getting a lot higher. And it's like, what gives you the right to charge paid for like crappier content than free?

And it's not just, hey, Eric and I are spending 15 minutes per episode instead of 5 minutes. How much more time do we put in to figuring out what we're going to talk about before our podcast episodes?

Oh, a lot. We actually prepare now. Like there's a sheet that we send to each other that we have to fill out. We have to bring it. We have to bring good ideas. We have Brad from recordeditpodcast.com, um, and he helps set everything up and we're in person. I have to drive, right? There's like a lot more effort that goes into this now.

And money. We spend more money to produce a podcast. We spend more time, we prepare more. And that's what's happening with content. There's just so much content being created on a daily basis. And just look at these numbers that I pointed out earlier, right? From 23 to 500 on X to 350 on Facebook. It's just so crazy on the amount of content that's just being uploaded. And I get there's a lot of duplication, But you have to compete with a lot of people and a lot of noise out there. And if you don't stand out, you're just going to be drowning in an ocean full of noise.

Final thing we have for this one is, this comes from the CXL blog. They have a nice section called All Things Data-Driven Marketing. So I think this is a neat hack over here. So basically you can take one of your LinkedIn posts and you can connect with your audience with ideal— with LinkedIn thought leader ads. So for example, you post something, you can boost it, right? But the cool thing is you can go to Apollo.io or whatever. use for prospecting. You can find your dream 100 clients, all the contacts, and you can just upload them into a list for LinkedIn for retargeting. And maybe you can spend like $10 to $20 a day or so for your top content. And I think for people starting out—

Costs more than that.

Okay, fine. Maybe like $100 a day. Yeah, right.

But I've tried it, by the way. That's how I know it costs more.

Yeah.

So, um, or let me clarify, it costs more at least in the United States. Different countries, different— It works.

It works decently. I won't say it's like gonna be a game changer, but I think for those of you that are getting any semblance of traction, or you know who you're trying to target and you know you do well on LinkedIn, like, why not spend the extra, you know, $100 a day or so? Because a lot of people, you know, when we do the Agency Owners Association form, 99% of people, okay, 95% of people, what's their number one struggle?

Closing deals.

They need more leads. Yes.

Yeah. Number 2 struggle is going to be retaining customers, if I had to take a guess.

Yeah. I mean, we were just talking about on the phone yesterday, it's like what the churn for these agencies is like 50 to 80% in a year.

Yeah.

Like, that's, that's not a business.

It's not a business. And then some of them are like, oh, I want 5x my money. Well, I'm like, well, if I give you 5x and you're Generating all the leads. What's going to happen next year? Oh, what will happen next year is I'm going to lose all my money.

Yep. So anyway, that's it for today. By the way, please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. And then if you want to apply, you can just go to, for Agency Owners Association, marketingschool.io/agency. We'll talk about that maybe in the next episode. So goodbye.