The One-Person AI Company Doing $401M: What Marketers Should Copy

Is token maxing stupid? We're going to talk about how Groove's, their ad strategy that's got them to sell for $1.2 billion. It's the little gummy bears, right? The little vitamin gummy bears. We're going to talk about how one agent is winning Stripe disputes on autopilot, $1,200 dispute won, right? There's a lot of cool things to talk about. We even got some classics for you as well, some marketing school classics. All right, so let's go ahead and get started on this. So. Neil, which one sticks out to you? Here, I'll just start first, okay? Here, let's start with the concept of the AI jobpocalypse narrative is a lie. So the AI jobpocalypse narrative is just completely wrong. And this actually comes from Andreessen Horowitz over here. So let me just show you this, Neil. So we like charts, right? So check this out.

Mm-hmm.

So narrative violations abound. Demand for software engineers is actually rising, okay? That's number one. Number 2, software devs are rising as a share of new jobs. That's number 2. Number 3 is AI-exposed industries are seeing above-trend wage growth and then open PM jobs. So product manager jobs haven't been higher since 2022. Okay, check this out. So demand for software engineers is rising. So you look at this from 2025, this is like, I don't know, June 2025 inflection in software hiring. So it was going down indeed, job postings for software engineers. And then all of a sudden, boom, it shoots up this dark blue one over here. But overall, Indeed job postings are still trending downwards. So what does that tell you, Neil? Let's start with this one first.

Shows that people need more engineers because they want to keep using Claude and all these other solutions to make their companies more efficient, better, and grow faster.

Yep. So my take on this is if you have AI-pilled engineers, they're doing more ultimately. So everyone's talking about this concept of token maxing, which we'll get to in a second. But the reality is now your engineers are truly— people used to talk about 10x engineers. Now we're talking about 100x engineers. We're talking about 1,000x engineers. You can just do a lot more with one individual who's powered by itself. Here's a caveat though, Neil. So we have some engineers in Eastern Europe and I was talking to him recently, one of them. I was like, hey, do you know other engineers that are like you that are super AI-pilled? Because we'd like to have more people like you. We need more engineers. And he's like, oh no, no, no, you wouldn't want people like us. I'm like, why? He's like, no, no, no. I'm like, what do you mean no? And he's like, he's like, because they believe that you should still write code by hand. I was like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, we can't have that. So yes, demand for software engineering is rising if they're AI-pilled. Yes.

Uh, and it's not just even software jobs we're seeing, at least on our end, We haven't seen for most roles, at least in marketing, where AI has been causing more layoffs. We've been actually seeing the usage of AI increase in marketing. So for example, I was giving a lecture—

A lecture?

Or a speech. It was at a university though. That's why I was saying lecture to around 300 people. That was yesterday. And during that lecture, majority of the people were, and this was in Spain, but majority of the people in there worked for global brands, right? So they were just, think of a big large corporation that's publicly traded. They were working in their Spain office. And I was asking how many of them in the room use Claude? More than half, it was roughly 60% that said that they use Claude. And when I asked them how many of your marketing departments have gotten smaller, no one really raised their hand. I think there was maybe 1 or 2, but it was a small amount and it was for more reasons related to business performance. Than actual, uh, more business performance than actual, like, because of AI. And then when I dove into it even more with them and I asked, what has AI done to your marketing? You want to know what the number one thing everyone said that it's caused with humans and workers?

What?

It's caused them to have to work more. So they've all found that AI has not reduced headcount. It did not reduce the amount of hours they're working. It's actually causing more work. Not that, yes, it is making them more efficient in marketing and in other roles, but it's also causing them to have to do new tasks and new work, and that's adding up.

Yep. So one thing that we'll come to as well, I was just looking at Coinbase cut, I think, 14% of staff or something like that, and they're just trying to reimagine the organization, right? So the org chart, I think they want to have less and less layers. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of and co-founder of Coinbase, introduced this concept known as the one-person product team, right? Or the one-person teams, because that one person now can do so much more. I just look at a lot of the things that I shipped on my own this week where I just didn't want to wait. And that is happening now, right? So I think the demand for not just software engineers, to Neil's point, I think it's demand for AI-pilled talent is continuing to rise and it's going to continue to rise because these people can do so much more. I think the key thing, which we'll talk about maybe later, is how you go about making sure that you create the conditions where they can continue to do good work and do more. But you don't want them to burn out. I've mentioned this a couple times in the last few episodes. My number one concern right now from the AI pill people is that they might burn out. So that's something worth talking about. Now, software devs are a larger share of new jobs. So jobs created overall, software devs versus overall. So this is cited from Morgan Stanley Research, AlphaWise. So software developer is in the blue over here. And then in the gold, you have percentage of US-created jobs, which are software developers. So that's going up. I mean, it's still, you know, we see it rising from a low of maybe 1.5% to a high of, this looks like 2.5% or so.

Cool.

And then on the— by the way, you see software developer jobs on the left side. So that's in the thousands. It went to a low of, I don't know, this is like $22,000 to a high of $35,000 or so, or I guess this is like $37,000. Okay, next one over here. Above trend wage growth for system design and AI exposed industries. So computer systems design and related services, high AI exposure. So that's all moving up and to the right. You can see the dotted line over here. This is ChatGPT. I think this is interesting. Again, I think we're just going to see more and more abundance. Technology has always created more. People are like, oh, someone was leaving a stupid comment on my Instagram. It's like, well, this time it's different. It's like, oh, you mean it's different than the agriculture? When we moved to industrial age, when we moved away from agriculture where it was like 98% of people were in agriculture and then it moved to 2%? Like, oh, we've never experienced a shift like this before. What are you talking about, man? Technology changes everything. And I'll just ask you a question, Neil. Would you rather be the king of the world 500 years ago?

Yeah.

Or would you rather be who you are right now?

I'd rather— I'm going to go with I'd rather be who I am right now because when you said 500 years ago, I was thinking about it. I'm like, wait, they probably didn't even have toilets.

Exactly. Exactly. Let me break it down for you a little more, Neil, because somehow— I was like, wait, no toilet paper?

No, no, no.

You don't get that. Let me tell you what you do get. So Neil, I did some research on this, right? If you live in a castle, let me tell you how it works.

Okay?

If you live in a castle, when you take a, when you take a poo poo, okay, when you're like, it goes all the way into a pit. It's like an outhouse, okay? And then it smells and it comes all the way up, okay? Not only that, you have, everybody has like a bunch of diseases and things. You don't have air conditioner, no air conditioner, no toilet paper, no toilet, okay? No cell phone, no internet, no nothing, okay? And you just sit on your throne all day. So you'd rather be the king of the world or who you are today? Exactly. Technology has made our lives better and that will never stop.

But if I had to bet, I think most people would choose the king from 500 years ago.

You know why, Neil? Because most people, you just need to think about it a little more. That's all I'm saying.

Yeah, no, and, and that when you answered it right away, my first inclination, like, who wouldn't want to be a king? And then I started thinking about it, I'm like, uh, 500 years ago is a very different time. You're missing out on too many things that makes life easier. Yeah, like no microwave, you know? Like, think about food options. The variety of food we get right now You wouldn't get all those varieties of food 500 years ago.

No DoorDash, no Uber Eats, right? No, no flight. Okay. No, nothing.

No, no, but you're a king. Someone will get you all that stuff. But yes, you would have to go to places on a horse, right? It's just like there is no car.

That technology wasn't around. You didn't— you weren't the benefactor of that technology because it didn't exist. You know what I just thought about, Neil? You're going on a vacation soon. So you say there's bad internet. Why don't you bring a, uh, a Starlink with you? I actually have one in my closet.

Ah, I, I have Starlink as well.

I've thought about that. Okay, there you go. But you don't wanna— you don't wanna game it.

That's good.

Okay, anyway, so I don't wanna game it because my kids want to spend time with me where I'm not working that much. I can't take a whole week off or 10 days or however many days are booked, but, um, you know, I was talking to my wife and she's like, still work, just try not to work for more than like 3, 4 hours a day. And I'm like, oh, that's so nice, reasonable.

That's so generous. That's good. That's 3 to 4 hours. When I was traveling in Mexico, uh, last week, I was working 3, 4 hours a day.

It's great.

And then, and then, um, the, the girlfriend was like, oh, uh, do you, do you feel like you're bored or whatever? I'm like, no, no, no, no, you need to take more time. You take more time. Okay, it's good. Anyway, I have this chart up here.

But before we go to the chart, did I ever tell you how much time my wife requires me to converse with her on a daily basis? Like, give her attention? Like, how much time?

30 minutes?

10 minutes a day. She's like, look, just try to interact with me for 10 minutes a day. And she's like, I'm happy with that. She's like, I know you're busy working, but she doesn't expect much. So I was like, all right. Kids expect a lot more, so I have to do quite a bit more with them. My wife, 10 minutes, she's happy.

How long with the kids?

Uh, there is no set time. I try to— when I'm, when I'm in LA, if you notice, I don't ever do dinners with anyone. Very, very rarely. I try to do dinners with my kids, no phones at the dinner table. Um, I'm willing to sit there for 30, 40 minutes. My kids probably last 15, 20 minutes.

Okay.

Uh, and then I'd probably do like some puzzles or other things like that, or whatever games they want. I don't do that daily, but I try to whenever they want. Um, and it's more so me not doing it as much as they actually want. They would take it every day, but sometimes I'm busy. And when I am in LA, I try to pick them up. Or take them to school, if not do both on a daily basis. So that gives me 30 to 40 minutes each way with them where there's nothing and we're just talking and seeing how their day goes. Usually if I ask them at the beginning, they're gonna give me random responses. And please excuse my language, but I'm like, oh, who'd you play with today? They'll be like, poo poo pee pee, right? But then after like 5 minutes, they'll really have— start having deep conversations. Like my son the other day, he has a bag that you that he takes to school. And I was like, William, when you leave the car, it's your responsibility to take your bag. He's like, why do I do it? I'm like, it's your responsibility. You need to learn to handle your possessions and take care of them and be responsible. And he's like, no, it's your responsibility. He's like, I only have to carry the bag because you're forcing me to go to school. If you didn't force me to go to school, I wouldn't have to take the bag with me. So in theory, it is your responsibility. And I was like, okay, you didn't use the word theory, but I was like, all right.

Do you feel like he's smarter than you at your age? No, sorry, at his— when you're the same age, do you think he's smarter than you?

He's 4 turning 5. He knows the square roots of numbers in his head, and he can do multiplication of double-digit numbers. He can do a double versus single in his head. He can't do double and double in his head. can do division in his head from a double digit to a single. But yeah, for a lot of stuff, addition, subtraction is easy for him. Uh, yeah, he is more gifted. But I, I had to— I'll also give this caveat. I think a lot of people in this world, including you and I, have more potential than where we're at right now. The difference is, and, and this is a sad reality, I'm able to give my kids some of the best education there is in the world. A lot of the people who apply to my kids' schools actually come from China, and they had to put on the website like, you need to actually live here. And it's very competitive from applicants from China for the school I'm in Los Angeles because one of the best academic schools for elementary in the whole world. And because I'm able to provide those kind of things for them and spend the money and and get them private chess tutors and jiu-jitsu tutors and baseball tutors and all this kind of stuff, like one-on-one, they're able to learn and consume information way more than I ever was or even you are. And some of it you could say is genetics, but I think a lot of it is the surroundings that you and I will be able to give the future generations. And I wish, you know, more of the world could experience that somehow, right? But there's only so much you and I can do from donating and stuff like that because We don't have enough to figure out how to get the whole world onto that kind of thing.

So let's tie this into how this applies to people as well, right? And so I see AI as a big equalizer as well. So here's the thing, Neil, I would say at age 4, the reason I asked that question is age 4, your son, because the things you're talking about, I'm like, for sure smarter than you at that age or smarter than me, right? But because they were provided with the opportunity and also there's this amazing technology that will help equalize things. AI tutors and things like that as well, right? So I think things are going like, I know there's negative sentiment in America, but again, when you look at other countries, when they think about this stuff, very positive sentiment. So let me just pull up this other chart over here and we can move on. So if you look at the open roles of product managers since 2022, look, in 2023 it was 4,000. Everyone's like, oh my God, look, it went from 10,000, dropped all the way to 4,000 in this time period. It was like, oh, we're not going to need product managers anymore, right? So it drops down. And then what's happening is it's continued to rise from the low. It's risen 79%.

Okay.

This is from Lenny's newsletter. And I think this is really important because, Neil, I think really AI-pilled product managers, we're actually looking for them right now. Actually, one actually reached out to me yesterday. He worked at Uber before. I think he worked at another one of these Silicon Valley startups and he's been like a head of growth. But if you're good at product, you have taste and you're super AI-pilled, the way I see it right now, is you're able to combine a lot of the elements around design, development, and product. And so I think those people are able to do a lot more with less, right? And so that's why this is going up. So again, a lot of narrative violations over here. And then Andreessen Horowitz wrote that the whole AI job apocalypse is a complete fantasy. I think we're gonna see some turnover in some areas, but especially in a lot of AI-enabled industries, I don't think we're gonna see that happen. So let's move on from this.

Yeah, and we have some charts coming out in a few weeks. We did a survey and a study, and what we're finding is in marketing departments, at least the adoption, and when I say of AI, I'm not talking about people just using ChatGPT, I'm talking about them using Cloud Cowork, Cloud Code, et cetera, in marketing has drastically increased. And what we're also seeing is not only are organizations consuming AI, at least in marketing, they're not really firing and they're actually spending more money in marketing as an organization in total because A, people are getting more done and they're paying for a lot of AI tokens. And I believe what we're going to actually see is not AI causing a big cut in human capital, at least in marketing, but it's actually going to cause a big increase in spend due to the fact that we have to pay for all these tokens.

Dude, okay, so let's go to token maxing in a second, but let's hold that thread for a moment. But because you just mentioned the people thing, I'm going to take the other side of this one for this topic over here, okay? I'm going to take the other side. So let's talk about the economics of GameStop, $11.5 billion company, buying eBay, $48 billion company, because you saw this on CNBC, Neil, because I know you watch CNBC. Maybe you were traveling, so maybe you didn't see it, but the CNBC anchors were like, hey, so how do you make the math work? You're an $11 billion company. And then it was like a really awkward, like, 5-minute interaction where it's like, look at the website, look at the website, just look at the website, right? He's like, yo, it's gonna be half debt, um, half cash, and that's what we're gonna do. Did you see that interaction?

Uh-huh.

But it's not gonna end up happening because GameStop can— they can't afford to buy them, and eBay's not gonna want to take a lot of GameStop shares.

Okay, so here's what I'll say. GameStop CEO says eBay needs way fewer people. So I saw this interaction over here. I'm going to share my screen. Okay, so hopefully you can let me know if you can hear the audio as well, Neil. So here we go. This is from TVPN.

All right.

Do you see this?

Yeah. Okay.

So this is the this is Ryan Cohen from the CEO of GameStop, and then these are the two hosts over here.

Is most of that marketing spend isn't making money, but everyone's trying to. protect their jobs, and there's kickbacks, there's all kinds of perverse incentives. And so I'm running the business like a family business. You know, it's, it's really not that complicated. And you look at eBay spending $2.5 billion to grow 1 million users, $2 billion in cost cuts between sales and marketing and corporate overhead. It's not a lot. And it's not something that's going to take a few years. It's something that is going to happen fast, fast, fast, because I'm putting leverage on this thing, and I don't want to run a leveraged business. So I'm not going to run it hot. I'm going to pay down the leverage, and I'm going to increase earnings. They're spending $5.5 billion on operating expenses on an $11 billion business that has no inventory and is asset light. So there's 11,500 employees, and it doesn't make sense. You don't need all that. I could run that business. I could run that business from my house. Like, it's eBay. It looks the same as it did in 1995.

I need 11,000— Okay, Neil, then we can react to this.

What he's saying is true, and it's not just eBay. Most large organizations are bloated, and they don't need as many people. They don't need to spend as much. And even if you look at Coinbase, yes, Coinbase laid off a lot of people, but crypto's not booming as it once was a year or a year and a half ago or whatever that timeframe was, when Solana was in the $200s and Bitcoin was at all-time highs. So Coinbase is probably not doing as well financially. And I'm just making this assumption. I haven't seen their earnings, but based on their stock price, I'm pretty sure I'm correct on that one. So when you look at it, a lot of these companies don't need as many people. It's just like Block and Jack Dorsey. Oh, we're laying off 40% because— yeah, no, your company hasn't been growing. So you're spending all this money for people to grow the business, but they're not growing it. The staff you need to maintain the business is a much smaller, uh, portion of people. eBay spending a ton of money to grow, and he even said that the numbers— $2.5 billion to only add a million more users. That's not worth it. You're better off just saving the money, not growing as much, and whatever your growth rate is, it is, but make it much more of a cash cow. And I'm guessing that's what his plans are. Does that mean he can run that out of his home? No. Do I think that he believes he can run that out of his home? No. But he's just trying to make a point. And yes, it is an exaggeration, but you can probably run that business with a few thousand employees. Worst case scenario, I think you can cut half. And I haven't dived into the numbers, but that would just be my rough guess. Best case scenario, you can probably get down to 1,000, 2,000 employees max.

Here's what I'll say about eBay. So I think when you become larger and larger, a lot of bureaucracy comes and starts to become inefficient. This is, again, we go back to the previous chart. You're still going to need the super AI-pilled people. You want those people on your team. I think some of the examples he was giving me, there's a lot of people, they take forever to respond. There's a lot of assistants. There's an assistant's assistant. And then they're flying around in jets. They're on vacation all the time and all this stuff. That tends to happen when you add more and more layers. You get further away from the truth. And so I think his thesis is strong. I don't know if he's going to be able to pick up— if he's able to pick up eBay, amazing. Yesterday, what's funny, Neil, is he was actually— he was on X. He's like, he just started buying stuff on eBay and selling stuff, and then they banned him. He shared it to Twitter that he got banned, right? So I think he's great at driving attention for this. I think there's something to be learned. I think there's a great business lesson from this as well. I don't know if he's going to get it similar to you, Neil, but I think his thesis is strong and somebody should try to pick it up and do what he's talking about. And I think what's going to happen is those other people that unfortunately get cut, I think they're eventually going to reskill themselves hopefully, and then find something else to do. And I think there's going to be more balance there. But I think first and foremost, when you run a business, it's about taking care of the business first and foremost. It's not about having an assistant and an assistant's assistant and then having all these private jets and taking all these vacations and things like that. That gets away from the main point of the business.

Yeah.

But the point he made about marketing, I think, is something that I hope sinks in for a lot of you guys who are listening right now. You shouldn't spend to grow at all costs. That is a very terrible model. Yes, you can spend on things like branding if you genuinely believe they're going to have a payback, they're going to pay dividends in the future. And if it's a long payback period, that's okay. But spending foolishly year after year after year, especially in an older company like eBay, spending $2.5 billion on sales and marketing, $2.5 billion a year on sales and marketing, and adding a million new users based on the data that he's sharing, that's crazy. That doesn't make sense.

Dude, so totally agree. Let me share one more thing, and then there's a, there's a point here, and then let's, let's go over to token maxing. So by the way, if you guys are enjoying this, comment, share.

This is great.

It's fun when we're live. Neil, I'm looking at my screen more because my camera's better and it looks more crisp than yours. This is a pretty good camera, right? Let's go back over here. All right, you see the screen again?

Yeah, I see the Ryan Cohen thing still.

Okay, so the end of this, remember I was talking how TBPN does the ads at the end? This time I found the ad, so I'm going to show it to everyone and then show what's working for me on Twitter right now, and then we can move over to token maxing. TBPN's daily newsletter has op-eds that are written by Jordy and I. In addition to top tech headlines and the timeline's best posts. Sign up for free at tbpn.com. Okay, so I wanna explain what I just played over here. So we did the eBay video first. There's that interaction and then they basically clipped that part. And I call this a mid-form clip where it's like 3 to 10 minutes or so and it's horizontal, it's not vertical. These tend to do pretty well on Twitter or X. You see this one has 644,000 views. So that's 644,000 impressions that you have for a post roll over here. To get people onto their newsletter and it advertises their show too. And so I think we're going to see more of this. And I wanted to test this as an example for the work that we're doing right now. So if you go to, I'm looking at my page right now. I think this one is, maybe it's with you. Oh, the fourth. Not bad. Okay. Look, Neil. So there's a video of Neil here with his kid's laptop decorating it. And then this is us talking about Anthropic as a single growth market. This is from this podcast, Neil.

Okay?

2 minutes over here, 54,000 views. That's not bad, right?

Yeah, it's not bad.

Yeah. So you got 2 here. So my point of saying this is you have 1,100 bookmarks, 535 likes. I think there is— this one's 1.7K. I'm looking at another one here, 10K over here, and then 2.2K. In fact, whoever wants to advertise on this podcast, the next advertiser will have to pay for these impressions as well because we will also stack these on. So here's how I'm thinking on that one. Not bad, right? So my point of saying all this is that if you're trying to grow on like X, for example, the reason I think TBPN did so well is because they were selling these impressions, especially on X. And you had very tech-forward people listening to this stuff, right? So what do you think about this?

It's not a bad way to monetize, but with their ad, I only saw go subscribe to their website. I didn't hear them pitch another company or product or service.

I saw other companies. So I think it just depends on what you see. Like last time I tried to show it, I couldn't find anything. No, no, the one you just played right now, it wasn't a pitch of another company is to subscribe to their own channel. I've seen them pitch other companies.

Oh, I got it. You're saying they rotate it up, so it's random.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we should definitely do that. You know what's funny for this podcast, Neil? I have to record the podcast for you, or the podcast ads for you promoting your company because you won't do it for yourself. So if you would ideally do it for yourself, we can include yours as well. So, because we're working—

Just tell me what you want me to record.

Ubersuggest. I'll just tell you right now, Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic, and NP Digital. Yeah. You can just make like 3 30 seconds at the end. Please don't do it when you're traveling. Do it in a nicer setup.

3.

Yeah. I'm giving Neil a to-do here.

Okay. I sent myself a note.

All right, cool.

Oh, with video or no video?

I think you should do video because we want it to be horizontal. Okay.

Cool.

All right. Because I think we're going to get a lot more views this way anyway. Okay. So let's talk about the next topic here. So A lot of people are talking about token maxing. Okay, so, you know, I've been watching some videos. Everyone's like, yeah, you should token max. What token maxing is first and foremost is spending as much as you can on tokens. Okay, so here's the uncomfortable truth about token maxing: simple execution beats clever strategy when timing is right. So what that means is if you spend on token maxing, like let's say Neil says, oh Eric, uh, if you work for me, you have to spend as much as possible. I would just run my tokens on stupid tasks all day. I may just have an agent just to hit that number so I don't get fired. But if you say just token maxing alone is pretty stupid because it creates perverse incentives. When you create a metric like this, you have to have a pairing metric. A pairing metric means sure, you can try to token max, but maybe every time, at the end of every month, you have to go to your manager and say, hey, here's all the things that we built. Here's how it helps customers or here's how it gets us customers. Because if you don't have a pairing metric there, it's going to just drive a bunch of compute up. You're going to pay an arm and a leg and you're going to get nothing from it from your organization.

Dude, I totally agree. I don't understand why people would want to just juice up their costs. It doesn't make any logical sense other than their bosses looking at it as a way of, did you use AI? And we can see based off of your spend. I think that's just a terrible way. They should start looking at Things like what tasks did you actually complete? What were the results from it? What's the ROI? Did it reduce churn or increase LTV or repeat purchases? And I genuinely believe that's what a lot of the data and analytics teams will start looking at, or CIO or CFO. They'll start grinding into the numbers because you can't just say in marketing, oh, we're all spending 5 or 10% more of our marketing costs in total. Because of AI. Oh, what are we getting for that? Who knows? But look at this spend. People are just going to be pissed.

Yep. Again, I don't think we're saying don't look at your tokens. I think we're both saying that look at your tokens, absolutely, but your token spend, but you have to make sure that you're working closely with your team because if unmanaged, it's just going to go all over the place. Speaking of which, Neil, my token cost got up to basically like a $12,000 a month run rate. I was like, oh my God, this is crazy. What I did was I literally, all you have to do now for Neil, if you want to cut it to zero for yourself, is you're paying for the Claude Max subscription, $200 a month. You can even pay for the ChatGPT $200 a month. The important thing is you create a long-term token, which will last for a year and use the Claude CLI command line interface for that. You literally, you can just go to your Claude and say, how do I make a 1-year token? You create that token and then you just run your, whatever you're using, like an OpenClaw or whatever. That will basically cut your cost. I cut it down to $0.87 from $400 a day, Neil, to $0.87 a day.

Yeah, that's awesome. You shared that last week or was it the week before? There was an issue for a few-day period, it started, or a 1-day or 2-day period, it started rising again.

It got up to $400, so I fixed that. Now officially it's on the Claude CLI or you can use OpenAI OAuth. I will say another thing, Neil, that's funny about this stuff. Is, let me just ask you right now, let's see where you're at. What do you think is the model that's ahead in the world right now? The number one model, AI model?

I would say it's Anthropic who's winning right now, just based off of your valuation and how many people want to buy their stock and how many people in my organization use Claude versus any other company's products. They have access in my organization. You have access to Microsoft's products, Google's products, OpenAI's products, but yet majority of my employees are using Claude.

Yep. So here's the thing. You would also agree that in the world there's a little bit of a lag when it comes to adopting like the internet or email and things like that, yes?

Yes, but the lags have gotten shorter and shorter over time. So for example, when it comes to AI, the reason, or let's actually go with e-commerce. The reason it really started picking up is everyone started having these devices and it made it easier to buy. If you start looking at things like AI, well, you don't have to get people on the internet as— or when people had to get on the internet, not a lot of people had computers. Now everyone already has devices that plug right into the AI, so it's easier for human beings to adopt the technology at a much quicker pace.

Yeah. Let me tell you where I'm going with this, Neil. Until very recently, everything was about Claude. They were marketing very quickly. It's like they could do no wrong. Mythos came out, Opus 4.7, amazing. Oh my God, they're shipping constantly. Claude, Cowork, all this stuff. Here's the thing, Neil. In the past couple weeks or so, because I tend to live in this world, OpenAI is slowly taking the crown back. Everyone now on X is talking about Codex. They're talking about ChatGPT 5.5. They're talking about the /goal commanders, all these things. I think it's pretty funny that in AI, we're very promiscuous. There's a tug of war. All that matters in this world when you're talking about trying to stay at the cutting edge of intelligence is the product itself. Nothing matters more. 1 or 2 weeks, 3 weeks ago, I would just be talking about Claude all day. And now I'm like, oh man, this OpenAI has made a comeback. I will gladly switch over to it. So it's like there isn't really a defined moat quite yet. I'm not seeing it yet.

No, no, it's coming soon. Yeah, I genuinely believe it's coming soon, and I think the winners are going to be Microsoft and Google. Because if you look at the technology right now, it's improved over time. Okay, when AI first came out, it's drastically improved from then to now, right? Uh, but in the earlier days, you saw much bigger leaps in the technology. You, you give it 2, 3, 4 years The versions that keep changing, I don't think they're going to be leaps and bounds better each new cycle. And I believe the Microsofts and the Googles are going to be like, it's included with your subscription for your company and it's free. And I believe that they will just dominate and take over a lot of the corporate spending, which is where Anthropic is growing extremely fast due to the fact that they already have the customer base and they'll take free over paid.

Yeah, dude, I'm trying to pull up a chart where it shows AI intelligence compounding over time, where basically it's right now at genius level and it's It's going to continue to get stronger and stronger. So I'll try to pull that up in a little bit, but let me just show you something, Neil. So we're talking about— Neil talking about Microsoft and Google being the winners in AI. There's a big reason why that's important, because when you look at Google and you look at Microsoft, they have the most distribution, right? It's distribution that matters, especially distribution is getting harder and harder in an AI-driven world where you can make whatever you want.

Yeah.

You want to be able to control that distribution. And Microsoft, they have those enterprise contracts locked down. Google as well. In fact, Google kind of has the whole stack. They have the tensor processing units. They have search. They have Android. They have Gemini. They have— what else do they have, Neil? They have Gmail. They have YouTube. They just have all the distribution in the world. They have all the data in the world and they're going to make use of that. So obviously they have Google Ads too. And then Microsoft, not too bad themselves. They're both multi-trillion dollar companies. So you were just speaking about, Neil, Anthropic and OpenAI. I just want to call something out here. So you look at this here, here, I'm going to share my screen real quick. So let me share my screen.

Let's go over here.

So Anthropic has decided to start a $1.5 billion joint venture with multiple Wall Street firms. So you got Blackstone in there, you got Goldman Sachs in there. They're all major investors. Basically, this is from Wall Street Journal. Anthropic Nears $1.5 Billion Joint Venture with Wall Street Firms. Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman Friedman, and Goldman Sachs announced the formation of a new AI services company. The organization will work with mid-sized companies across sectors to bring Claude into their most important operations. Applied AI engineers from Anthropic will work alongside the firm's engineering team to identify where Claude can have the most impact, build custom solutions, and support customers over the long term. So the company's backed by these leading companies. Oh, look, Apollo's in here. Sequoia's in here as well. These are General Atlantic's in here. These are major firms.

Okay?

So why is this important? People might be thinking, oh, well, first of all, first and foremost, Anthropic and OpenAI are doing this. That means that everything still comes back to services at some point. And you might be thinking, oh, I run an agency. Now I have no chance. No, this actually reinforces that people need agencies. They need services companies. to help with implementation here. So I think this is a net positive thing. It's not a negative thing. There's a lot of things that I see online right now where people are talking about building these single brains or company brains and all these things, and that reinforces the path that I'm on. But also when I look at Neil's agency as well, it's not like this stuff is going away. In fact, they're going to need it more because I think Anthropic and OpenAI, they're going to try to go with— their engineering resources are going to focus more so on the enterprise. market, right? It could be lower market enterprise or higher enterprise, but there's still a lot of room. There's still more customers than ever, and there's going to be a lot more entrepreneurs, I believe, as well. So I would try to double down, triple down, especially if a services business. Yes.

And services now, I think, is going to explode more and more because of all the noise that's around it right now and all the announcements, right? It's becoming sexier, at least temporarily.

Yeah. I mean, look, what is it? Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator talk about this, the new $1 trillion company is a services firm, right? Services as software. So that's why I'm more excited. I'm excited for Neil. I'm excited for myself. This has never been a better time to do business, I believe.

Yeah.

And what was the amount that they all raised? OpenAI did a joint venture with someone. I forgot what the amount was.

I forgot how much they raised.

Yeah, but it was in the billions and I'm assuming, I think Anthropic was $5 billion, right? $5 billion?

For the joint venture, $1.5 billion.

Oh, $1.5 billion. Maybe the other one was $5 billion.

Yeah, let me see. So OpenAI raises money for services.

That's right. Anthropic was $1.5 billion. The other one was, which you just covered, but the other one was $5 billion, I think. I could be wrong.

The deployment company. Okay. Yeah, I see it over here. So OpenAI has raised over $4 billion for a new joint venture focused on helping businesses adopt software. So who's in here? You got the other side. TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, and Bain Capital. All the biggest companies in terms of investment companies.

They're spending.

Yep. Enterprise growth, by the way, enterprise revenue for OpenAI now makes up over 40% of total revenue with targets to reach parity with consumer revenue by end of 2026. I think we thought, at least I was like, oh man, OpenAI is really falling behind. And then boom, before you know it, they're back. Let's just see how that lawsuit goes.

Yeah.

Yeah. All right. So let's— here, I'm going to pick another one here. I'm good at the screen shares, guys, when we're on the go. So I'm just going to keep calling these out. Neil, I'm going to let you pick one. Which one would you like to pick?

All right. So let's go with— oh, I want to do the Groon's one.

Okay.

Right?

The ad strategy that helped Groon sell for $1.2 billion. Or using your hook in the sheet, this brand sold for $1.2 billion off of landing pages.

Yep. Here we go, Neil. So this is Groove, this is Chad Janus or Chad Janus. Um, dude, I'm calling this out again, Neil. Look at this, this, this mid-form video, 367K views.

Okay.

So he, the Groove founder, Chad sold his 3-year-old company Groove to Unilever for $1.2 billion. And here's what he did that most brands don't. Most brands send every ad to the same generic homepage. That's why they bleed cash. Chad builds an entire world around every winning ad angle. The system is you test hundreds of ads per month to find the unlock. Once an angle sticks, so gut health, energy, focus, you rebuild everything around it. If someone checks a gut health ad, landing page is 100% gut health. A popup asks about their gut concerns. Emails, SMS tailored to gut health. His team is 30 people. That's pretty crazy. 30 people, 5 to 6 creative strategists, 4 to 5 media buyers, 3 on retention. Look, the media strategists or the creative strategists outnumber the media buyers, right? 3 on retention. The tool is use Replo, which is a Shopify plugin. Chad says they don't charge enough. You can now build a funnel, build a new funnel today. So I guess it's a funnel builder. Winners don't just test ads. They rebuild the entire experience around each winning message. Message match is the difference between $10 million And $1.2 billion exit. I'll let you go first.

I think Gruen did an amazing job marketing. One thing to mention is he's also ex-Unilever, so he understands marketing really well. They're one of the bigger spenders of marketing globally, and he came from there, built a good product, and it wasn't hard to get that product to go viral because that category just tends to do well. He grew really fast and I think it was a smart playbook.

Yeah. So by the way, I don't know if you know this, Neil, but when he started the company, his goal was to sell it to Unilever because he knows their playbook, right? And the other thing, I mean, I think it's always a lot of marketing stuff. We haven't seen a lot of new marketing channels in the last 10 years or so, but we often forget about the fundamentals. If someone sees an ad, let's say it's a green colored ad talking about your gut health, and then they land on a landing page that's orange and it talks about sleep, it's not going to be aligned and you lose trust that way, right? And people have very short attention spans. So whether you use something like a Replit for Shopify or on the B2B side right now, we still have Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T. Karrot allows you to personalize your LinkedIn ads. And then the landing page is also personalized as well, because you want those things to look relatively the same. And in this case, we personalize the company name, the name and things like that.

like that.

But I think this is smart. Good job on him. I think he can ride off into the sunset. And sometimes when you work at a company, you know their strategy and you're focused on it. And look, only 30 people. This again reinforces that you don't— the rise of these small teams, big businesses. You also look at Perplexity, only 30 people on the team.

Is it only 30 people at Perplexity?

Yeah. Here, let's just Google it for the hell of it.

I did not know that. But one thing about Grunz is, I'm pretty sure, and when I say pretty sure, if I had it, I'm guessing, I don't have any inside information.

Oh no, I'm wrong. It says 1,500 employees. Okay, that sounds about right for complexity because it's an AI company.

I'm like, that just sounds too low. But with Groon's, that $1.2 billion number is the flash number, like what they go out with the release with. Majority of these deals, what happens is you get X amount of dollars up front, the rest is hit on earnouts based on the company performing and hitting A, B, and C milestones. That's typically how almost all acquisitions work.

Yeah. I'm looking at it right now. So here's a breakdown of the structure. Reports suggest it's a cash acquisition designed to scale the brand under it. So yeah, there's probably a mix of multiple things. Yeah.

It's usually not simple. Like, here's the $1.2 billion, because then people can just leave and then you're not, you don't have the founding team. And a lot of people are just like, I got my check, I'm done. So they incentivize. Incentivize not by just having you sign a piece of paper saying that you'll stay for 2 or 3 years. Incentivize on which you need to keep pushing harder to grow this thing, and that's how you'll unlock more money. If not, you won't get the full $1.2.

Yep. You know, one thing I want to call out here, I mean, just going into agents. So Stripe just gave AI agents credit cards, and I think this is a really big deal, Neil, because— and combined with Cloudflare, where Cloudflare allows you to just buy products using agents, I think Think about it this way, Neil. If you wanted to spin up Cloudflare, you have your Stripe agent be able to purchase Cloudflare domains, for example, or other Cloudflare workers. You can spin up different pages that you want to— landing pages that you want to test rapidly. You can use a design.md file and anything you wanted to test, you could have these agents just spinning them up, put them on a subdomain or whatever, get them up. Or you can even say, hey, let's test something programmatically. Let's get a bunch of these landing pages up, or let's get a bunch of these pages up, see how they do. You can do that now. You can rapidly test because these agents are able to purchase for you and you're able to buy these workers quickly. This guy, Ollie Lehmann, says this. I can't believe they're going to do it again. The last time Stripe shipped a primitive this big, it literally birthed the modern SaaS. Shopify, Substack, Gumroad, all your favorite indie hackers. Yesterday, Stripe shipped the spending version. Anyone can now get an agent to spend money on their behalf. If Stripe's payment API created SaaS, this spending API creates autonomous commerce. So you basically just make this concrete, okay? So number 1, AI ad managers. You connect your Meta, Google, and TikTok accounts, set a monthly budget cap, and an agent runs your entire paid strategy, okay? Number 2, AI procurement agents for e-commerce. They supply supplier prices, auto-order when costs hit your threshold, sends you a morning summary of what was bought and why. And then you have AI travel agents that actually work. So they search, compare, Book and pay with your budget rules. No more toggling between 6 tabs to save $40 on a flight. And then finally you have AI bookkeeping agents. They will handle recurring operational payments your business already makes every month, contractor invoices, ad account top-ups, subscriptions, et cetera. So I think we're just going to see more and more of this stuff. And just looking at Stripe, just looking at Cloudflare and me just giving the examples on the marketing and kind of SEO, CRO side, The possibilities are becoming more and more, even more endless.

Dude, I agree. But we'll end up seeing over time that my— if I could do one thing, I wish I could wave a magic wand and skip a few years to see where technology is, because I think life is just going to be so much better.

I think there's going to be a lot of abundance for everyone. So at least for me, I'm not going to speak for you, Neil. Short-term, a little concerned for the world, but long-term, I'm very excited. So I just hope we get to the long-term. Yeah.

Dude, I hope we get to the long-term as well. And I'm curious to really see how it plays out with a lot of these governments. And the reason I say that is when you look at the marketing ecosystem right now, or let's actually go back to the marketing ecosystem like 10 years ago, you mainly had just 2 main players. You had Google, And then you had Meta, right? I know Meta back then was not called Meta, but same thing. And if you look now, you have Google, you have Meta, you have OpenAI, you have, uh, what is it called? Uh, TikTok, you have LinkedIn. And a lot of these smaller platforms have been growing, like the LinkedIns, the Reddits. And even though they're smaller, you kind of have to be on them because they have data deals with some of the other players like OpenAI and Google. So if you're not on the smaller channels, you don't do as well on the bigger channels. But because of monopolistic rules, you're seeing more and more separate platforms and you're not seeing like a Google early on being like, Perplexity's great, let's just go buy it for $10 billion. Like you're seeing the market becoming more and more fragmented. And even with search, it's, people don't just use OpenAI or Claude, they also still use Google. And people, I remember the VCs being like, oh, this is going to kill Google. Google's dead. Google hasn't died. It's potentially the most profitable or the biggest company by market cap. Wall Street's been betting in the next week or so they're going to actually be bigger than Nvidia. We'll see if that happens. But Google's actually been growing in popularity. And I haven't seen people being like, oh, I don't use OpenAI. Google gives me everything. People just use multiple platforms just like they use multiple social networks.

Yeah. By the way, when I use Google now, so I do often click on AI mode. So I do often switch to AI mode very quickly just to ask follow-up questions. And I think they made it work for them. Initially, I was skeptical that AI mode would work. They've made it work. And by the way, searches are continuing to grow still and their AI usage is continuing to go up. I just think there's going to be more and more demand. We've talked about this concept before known as Jevons paradox. When something becomes available and abundantly available, people actually use it more and more. Electricity, for example. Or electricity then led to compounding of flight, and that electricity led to the air conditioner, right? There's all these things that we use. We're going to find a lot more use cases with infinite intelligence. We just don't know what it looks like yet, and that's what Neil's talking about. We're excited because we don't know what the world's going to look like, but when you have infinite intelligence, man, is it exciting because the things that we were constrained by before, it's no longer constrained. Let me tell you one more thing, Neil. I was listening to a podcast with the Airbnb founder today on the— I think it was Invest Like the Best. Great podcast, by the way.

Brian or Nathan?

Brian.

Brian. Yeah.

So Brian Chesky was just talking about how instead of thinking about managing people, he spends 2 to 3 hours a day on recruiting. Because if you just recruit the right people, you spend all your time on recruiting, you don't need to manage them. You think about all the best people you worked with, all the best people I worked with, they don't need to be managed and they don't like being managed. They like knowing which direction to row in and they're just going to row.

Dude, totally agree with you on that. Um, if you hire the right people, it changes everything. If you hire the wrong people, it screws up everything.

Yep.

And I get why people say hire slow, fire fast. Uh, you don't want to hire too slow, but you definitely should fire fast. Um, I do not like the concept of I'm gonna let them learn their way into it. I found, at least for me and my management style, which is I don't do much managing, it doesn't It doesn't work for me either.

And I love that. I love doing that. It doesn't work at all.

And to go back to Google, here's a quote from Sundar, the CEO. Alphabet's Q1 2026 earnings post Google search revenue at $64.4 billion. This is again, just Google search revenue, up 19% year over year. As Sundar tied AI experiences to higher search usage, Google is seeing searches grow. More people are using it than ever before. But that just goes to show the marketing ecosystem, what it's going to look like in the future is going to be more options due to the European Union and the laws we have on monopolistic behaviors in America. You're going to see more platforms competing and companies and individuals using multiple platforms versus just one. And here's the kicker. I gave a corporate talk to one of the largest advertisers in the world. I was in their office in Spain. They're all on the Microsoft suite. I said, hey, do you guys use Copilot? They're like, no, it's blocked. We don't use it. Even though they have, they can in theory have access to it because of what they're paying for. They're like, no, we prefer these other AI platforms that they're using that. And they mainly are OpenAI and Claude.

Dude, Neil, check this out. The fact that I can do this during a call right now is insane. So you're talking about the growth. I'm like, it'd be cool if we kind of just, show people how it looks. Okay. So check this out, Neil.

All right.

You see this? Look, I was like, hey, draw a chart to show Google's revenue growth over the last 4 years. So next time when you talk about this data, just ask it to draw a chart for you. So I literally just put this in the search bar for Google. And you can see Google's annual revenue growth from 2022 to 2025. So 2023 starts at, it's $283 billion. Okay. Then it goes to, and maybe this is a little off on the chart, maybe $307 billion. And then 350, and then 402. So 2022, again, 9.78% growth. So 282 to 308, which is 8.68% growth. And then it grows 14% basically to 350. And then it accelerates even more, 15% in 2025. So they're not slowing down. And then I was like, dude, you know what? Why don't you just show me what it looks like from a quarterly standpoint? And then you can do that, right? And then you can see it's moved up on this little bar over here. They're all kind of Equal here, and then it kind of moves up. Isn't that interesting?

It is. But what's more interesting for anyone who's watching this, uh, podcast episode instead of just listening to it, you can see how Eric's using Google. Both him and I use Google like this, as well as other LLMs like this. But this just shows why Google is actually growing in search volume and not dying. They've adapted, and they've actually adapted really well and really quickly.

Look at this. Alphabet has reported 11 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth year-over-year revenue growth as of Q1 2026. That's just insane to me. Growth is driven by AI infrastructure, consumer AI products, and search query volume with Q1 2026 being the strongest quarter ever. I think what's amazing about Google is that people like consumer, I think is very difficult. They have consumer and enterprise nailed down. You don't have many companies that can kind of figure that out. And oftentimes those are the multi-trillion dollar companies like an Nvidia or you think about like a Microsoft, for example. So anyway, good stuff. All right. So I'm going to— here, let me talk about this. So there's this creator play that takes brands from $5 million to $100 million a year. Do you know what it is?

No.

$500 million to a billion?

No. $5 million a year brands to $100 million a year. So this is called the Hudson Method. This is from Sean Frank from Ridge.

Okay?

So I have personally seen 6 brands restart growth using the Hudson method. The steps. Number 1, seed hundreds of creators on TikTok, small new accounts, no one famous. That's okay. 2, pay them per video plus commission, but heavily incentivize them to post lots of videos. Bonuses for posting 100+ videos a month.

Okay.

Number 3, take all the creative, load it into every ad channel. You just solved creative bottlenecks and unlocked infinite ad angles. 4, scale ad spend on everything while still paying the creators commission on ad sales. Okay. So it isn't about TikTok shop sales. It isn't about GMV Max. It's all of it. You get free CPMs on TikTok, you get unlimited content and it jumpstarts the whole business. More ads, more angles, more channels. I think that's the most important sentence. More ads, more angles, more channels. This is named after the legendary founder of Comfort Hudson. All hail the UGC king.

I've seen this playbook run a few times. It can work. I've also seen it not work as well. It largely depends on if you have a really good product that works for consumers who, what we found, aren't willing to spend a lot of money. If you're selling something for $10, $20, $50, et cetera. If you're trying to sell things for $200, $300, $1,000, we do not see it work as well.

Dude, can I speak? I think a lot of it has to do with good product first, which is you need good people to create the good product, right? You also—

And price.

Yeah.

You also need good people on the marketing side too that really understand the game with this, right? They need to understand what is that influencer game? How are you supposed to see all that content and how do you scale it? Interestingly enough, Neil, let me show you something. So this guy reached out to me and I'm going to show you a video. He made a trailer for us because I want more good editing help. Let me show you this, Neil. Tell me what you think about this here. So let me hit play. Can you see this?

Yeah.

Okay, here we go.

The younger generation is going to use Gemini way more than ChatGPT.

You're like a boomer if you use ChatGPT.

Yes, and it's going to get shut down.

We are going to start to see more one-person billion-dollar companies with one employee. Chinese public sentiment towards AI is significantly more optimistic and trusting compared to the US. People in China, they're all lining up in public to learn OpenAI. If you tell your model to speak like a caveman, that saves you a lot on costs. So it was like, me code this now. Me need this. I'm not even joking. Like, it cuts down like 50% on costs. I'm not even joking. This guy created 800 fake doctors to generate $1.8 billion in revenue with one employee. Have you heard about this?

Uh-uh.

Dude, dude, Neil, what do you think?

It's not bad, but I don't think it's going to generate much revenue, but I think it'll get views.

My point is—

He's a good editor.

When you have a good editor that just knows what to do, you don't need to manage them. That's my point, right?

Yes.

And so that's all I'm saying with this. It applies to kind of the Hudson Method as well. You need good people there. You need a good product. Everything comes down to people. And I do believe, going back to what Brian Chesky was saying, if you spend that 2 to 3 hours a day working with your recruiter on setting the tone for the top, you know, he said this, I want to set the tone for the top 200 people in the company, not just my executive team, the top 200. That is building true leverage. And that's how we should all think about this.

Dude, it is so hard to find really good people. When you find them, I've done this. I started doing this more later in my career. I hire them even if I don't need them right now.

Exactly.

If I know I'll need them in a year, I'll hire them still and just burn the cost. And people think I'm crazy and stupid for it, but I'm telling you, dude, When you're able to get that amazing, like, A+ player, you get them because they don't come that often.

Let me just put it to you this way, Neil. Uh, not you, Neil, but the audience. And by the way, Iman left a comment here. What is this about? Let me tell you what this video is about, man. It's about making more money, dude. All right, watch the rest of it. Okay, here we go. So, um, what was I talking about? Oh wait, about—

we were talking about A+ players recruiting and burning the money ahead of time.

Okay. So let's break down some math. Thank you for that, Neil. So when it comes to A-players, you're like, okay, let's say an A-player, I'm going to use simple round numbers. Let's just use $100 grand. Okay? Like a real A-player might cost you $1 million. Okay? Let's just put it that way. But I'm going to use $100 grand for the sake of this example, right? So you might be like, oh my God, I can't afford that. $100 grand is too much money. We're not going to be able to do whatever XYZ. But here's the thing. If that person can bring you $3 million because they're that damn good.

Okay.

30x return on that. Okay. Well, if you pay $1 million for someone, someone's like, oh my God, how's this person making $1 million? That's so unfair. That's not good to society, whatever. No, but if that million-dollar-a-year person is adding $100 million a year in value or $200 million a year, yeah, that's a good deal, man. So everyone's trying to get a good deal at the end of the day. Just think about it that way. People would be stupid not to pay for a good deal. And that's how we look at A players. You should, if you find that amazing person where you have, you just know that they got it, Neil, and you're having an amazing conversation and you're kind of like, damn, this person's smarter than me as well, you should pull the trigger.

Yes. And the best part about them is it doesn't take any time out of your day because once you hire them, you don't need to manage them. If you have to manage them and tell them what to do, they're not an A player.

They're not even a B player.

Yep.

Dude, you know what I'll also tell you as well, man? I was reading, it's also helpful. Oftentimes a lot of these A-players are creating content. So I've been reading a lot of content on how Ramp created this one product, right? I reached out to the person that wrote that article. And then yesterday the CTO and I were on the call and we had an amazing conversation and we're going to start doing some stuff together because I just don't want to wait. And that's the thing. When you're out there, the other meta lesson from a marketing standpoint is if you're out there creating content, people like to say you increase your surface area of luck. That's what you're doing. And then when I got on the call with him, I was like, oh dude, the ramp thing is not even what I want to talk about. I want to talk about you. I want to talk about you helping us. And that's how these things go. So Neil, I don't know about you, but I often, I have a list on my Apple Notes where I'm just like, these are people to hire. And so these are all people that I want to hire. Maybe I can't hire them all at the same time right now, but I always keep that list. And then what I do, Neil, is every 6 months or so, every 3 to 6 months, I just follow up. Hey, how are things going, man? Hey, how are things going? What can I do to help? How are things going?

Right?

And sometimes you even have to wine and dine these people. Like you take these people out to dinner with their wives as well, because their wives have to approve you as well, or their spouse. Um, I don't know how you've seen it. Share your experiences.

With taking people out?

Yeah. So when you're recruiting someone, you have to sometimes, if it's like someone top level, you have to get the spouse, spousal buy-in as well. Maybe you haven't seen it. This looks new to you, but I've had to do that before.

So, uh, the spouse part I know, in which sometimes they want their— I haven't had to actually talk to the spouses, but sometimes their spouses, you know, like they'll be like, oh, I want to talk to my wife or my husband, uh, before I make my decisions. But the taking people out, I never had to do that part. That was the part that, you know, was a left— uh, came out of left field for me. Like, I've never had to actually like wine and dine or take them to a baseball game or do whatever. Like, it's just more so Either I can convince them on the phone, or I can't.

Yep. Let me pull this up real quick. Let's make a switch. I do want to talk about Coinbase. Coinbase, by the way, they reported a 5% decline year on year, to Neal's point earlier. I think trading volumes have gone down maybe 25%, 30% or so. Coinbase crypto exchange, I think Neal's searching it up right now.

Well, it's also getting more competitive because other people let you buy the cryptocurrencies like Robinhood at no fees, from my understanding.

Really? Can you Google that too?

Uh, yeah. I don't think Robinhood— does Robinhood charge you to buy crypto? I'm pretty sure it's free. There's no trading fees.

No, really?

Yeah, commission-free trading.

Wow, that's crazy.

Buy or sell cryptocurrency, dude. The way they make money is the spread. Yeah, like if you're trying to sell your stock at $130 and they can find a buyer to buy it at $131, They make money, right? And they do really well from that. But if you want to buy on Coinbase, from my understanding, uh, let's see, Coinbase, they charge for cryptocurrency. Uh, let's see. Yes, Coinbase charges fees.

They charge an arm and a leg.

Yes, it's really fun. Coinbase Pro is cheaper. I don't know if it is anymore, but—

I think it's Coinbase One. So Coinbase One has no fees, but you're paying like $200 or $300 a month or something like that, but there's no fees.

Switch to Robinhood and it's free.

You just saved me $3,600. This is great.

That's a lot. Do you pay $200 a month or $200 a year?

I think it's here. Just Coinbase One cost.

But how did I save you $3,600?

Uh, you— no, I think it's $300. Yeah, okay, it's $3,000 a year. Yeah, so $300 a month or $3,000 a year. I paid the $3,000 for the year. Yeah, you get—

So you should just cancel and switch to Robinhood and just get your trading for free. Yeah, they both make money off the spreads, so like Why not just take the free?

I like my Coinbase One card, which gives me, uh, up to 4% Bitcoin rewards for my credit card spend.

Does Robinhood have a—

They have a good credit card.

With, uh, with the ability to earn crypto? Let's see.

All right. 5% cash back.

That's what they have.

Robinhood, as of 2026, offers credit cards that allow you to earn rewards which can be utilized for cryptocurrency. particularly with their Gold and Premium Platinum card. They have 3% cashback. The Platinum One launch offers 5x higher credit limits, 5x cashback, uh, gold crypto rewards. You, you can— people can dig in if they want. But like, dude, this is how I believe it's actually better to market instead of spending a lot of money on ads and even SEO and GEO and emails and all this stuff. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, But if you can just take a model like Robinhood and do more at a better price, your marketing goes much further and you don't have to do as much marketing to grow much quicker. And you can just see it in stock price. Like if you look at Hood, the last I checked, they were close to a $100 billion company. What are they right now? $68 billion. So their stock is down. You know, it was at $152, they're now $75. So yeah, they were over $100 billion at one point.

Yeah.

Call it $68 right now. If you look at Coinbase, it's a $50 billion company. So I think it's a better mousetrap.

I think there's also something to learn from what Robinhood has done. So they have, I think, 5 or 6 business lines that do over $100 million a year. So you have 9-figure businesses. And as you get bigger and bigger, the more products and services that you offer, the more value you can provide to your customer, the more you're able to retain them, and the more you're able to grow. So I'm not saying that, hey, you should Let's say you're listening, you're an agency owner right now, you should have like 10 different services at once. I'm not saying that, but once you start to feel like you're capping out in one area, you just start to add more services, right? So I know some people that are really good in one area, like influencer marketing, for example. Well, okay, you start to get a bunch of people in and it's like, hey, I see angles for other areas too. How can you upsell and cross-sell over there? And then that's how you can really expand. Because if you stay, let's say I was just someone doing YouTube agency, I can grow it to a certain level, But if you really want to expand, you're going to have to think about, oh, how do I start to help with making ad creative? How do I start to manage the ads as well? How do I add all these other loops and these workflows in there to add more value? Because that's ultimately how you make more, by adding more value.

Yeah. And interestingly enough, both of them actually have that. So Robinhood has 11 divisions that generate over $100 million a year in revenue. Coinbase has 12 divisions that generate over $100 million in annual revenue. But what you're getting at is a really key point for anyone who's trying to do marketing and specifically scale up ads. When you're trying to scale up your ads, you're going to hit a ceiling and you can keep testing different creatives, but sometimes you just can't spend more without just having diminishing returns. A prime example of this, which we talked about in a previous episode, was eBay. When you spend $2.5 billion on sales and marketing to only get a million new users, you're spending a little bit too much and you should probably cut it back. And it may be better to have 900,000 users and spend half the cost, right? Like there's a point where just spending that extra dollar just has massive diminishing returns. So an easy way around this is not— yes, you want to keep testing new creatives and keep tweaking your ads and trying to fine-tune them so you can scale them, but there is limits. But an easy way around this that a lot of people do in marketing is they create more divisions. So example with Eric, He has Carrot, he has Single Brain, he has Single Grain. So now you have 3 different divisions and he probably has even more that he can spend marketing dollars and ad dollars on, right? Another example of this is if you look at my ad agency, NP Digital, yes, we have multiple products and services like Eric does, but we also have multiple regions. So I can do marketing in the United States. I can do marketing separately in Canada. I can do marketing separately in Portuguese just for Brazil. I can do marketing separately in Montreal, in Canada, on the French side. I can do marketing in France, in French, and I can do that in 20+ countries, which is where we're in. And that allows us to scale faster without having to try to just max out the United States, which gets very costly and creates massive diminishing returns in your marketing. This is why companies expand product line and geography.

I think the key point is really, there's one word that sticks out. The word is optimization. At a certain point, you can no longer optimize. You have to think about the other word, expansion, right? And so again, but also if you're just starting out right now, Neil and I, we're not just saying, hey, just go try to expand right now. You got to— if you have something that's working well and it's not tapped out yet, you should optimize that a little more. And then maybe once you feel like you're maybe 80% there, you can start to think about other areas. Because both, I think Neil and myself had made the mistake of scaling too quickly. Premature scaling actually kills startups. You just got to be very careful. I've made that mistake one too many times. So speaking of startups, Neil, I want to talk about the new structure for startup teams. So the new structure for startup teams is one-person teams. So let me show you what I mean by this. So Coinbase, they are talking about this concept known as the pod of one. So this is the new organization, the new org building block. So as a Coinbase board member, this is Gokul. It's been a privilege to watch Brian Armstrong, which is CEO, and the Coinbase team build a true AI-native company. So the one thing that's worth calling out here is this. He's like, I want to focus on one thing that Coinbase is testing, which is one-person product teams. All right. So most of the AI discourse has focused on one-person companies. The most powerful and more broadly applicable construct will likely be one-person teams inside companies. So the old product org split across 3 people. You had the designer, For user experience, you had the product manager held the customer and prioritization context, and then you had the engineer that held the code and systems context. Coordination was the price you paid to combine those views into one shipping decisions. Agents reduced that coordination cost. This is interesting, Neil, because earlier we had just talked about how the rise— we're seeing a rise in product manager job postings. It went from 10,000 to low 4,000. Now it's up 79%. Okay. So a single high agency person can now ask agents to draft flows, write code, run QA, summarize customer feedback, generate variants, check edge cases, and produce release notes. Here's what I wanna call out and then we can react to this. So I think this one-person product team, it could be a product manager, it could be a designer, it could be a developer, it could be any of those. If they have taste around all these areas, they— if you're a designer, you might have more taste around design. Okay, that's how your product team's gonna look over there. If you have, you're an engineer, okay, you have more engineering taste, but you can do all these things together now. And this model rewards a very specific kind of builder. They're technical enough to inspect the work, they're product-minded enough to choose the right problem, very important, tasteful enough to reject mediocre output, designers are good at that, fast enough to ship before the org forms around the idea. The scarce skill, scarce skill is judgment. What do we think about this?

I think it's great. I have no issues with it. I like it. I also read it earlier too, but—

You also what?

I also read it earlier because I saw it right when it went live.

Yeah. So here's what I think about this. I think that sure, one-person companies are interesting. I still think you're going to need people no matter what, if you want to build a really good company. Everything around this world is based on people. I'm sorry to tell you. It's the world we live in, right? And I do agree the scarce skill is judgment, but this is why we've been saying that AI-pilled people, if this is the very— this is the forming of it, right? One-person product teams is in fact a super AI-pilled person. And that's why I'm stretching our people as much as we can. Literally, our people are going through a hackathon right now. Actually, Chris from my team is watching this as he's doing the hackathon right now on the team. So hey, Chris. But my point is you have to, one, both Neil's company and my company, we're trying to create the conditions for success so we can have these one-person teams. That's exactly what we're trying to do. And most people, they want to come along. You just got to set the conditions for them to be successful. And there's going to be some people that don't want to come along. So I said to Neil last week, or maybe the week before, I was like, I'm counting on people to get better. I'm also counting on some people who don't want to take the ride to not want to take the ride and kind of self-select themselves out, right? And that's why there's so much intensity going into this right now.

So yeah, and when Coinbase and others talk about a one-person product team that can do a lot of stuff, I think this kind of stuff is amazing for startups and companies that are trying to iterate and just get stuff out really quickly. But no matter what, if you want to build something big, it's not going to end up being one person. You're going to have to add more people to the mix. And yes, it can slow things down if you add too many people. But eventually you're going to have to have more people, whether it's for product or marketing or any roles. You can't be Claude and only have one person in marketing or Anthropic and one person in marketing and they can do everything. If they can do everything, that means you're using tons of agencies and contractors and vendors to help.

Bless you. Bless you again.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right, so let me show you something, Neil. I had actually formed a model on this. I've been working with my Hermes agent. Thank you, Jobe, or I don't know if I pronounce it Jobe Kenobe. I don't know how to pronounce it. Jobe? Jobe. Always a treat jumping into a think tank with these 2 legends. Thank you for that. We appreciate that. All right, Neil, check this out. So I'm literally working on this kind of new model for how we're thinking about agency basically. So the old operating model is up here. This is a .md file right here. So proposed operating model from agency pause to agent native revenue loop. So this is from a services context. So old operating model is you have a client account, your client account up top. So let's say it's like, I don't know, Mattel or something like that. Client account up top, you have an account manager. This is the agency. You have a strategist, an SEO specialist, paid media specialist, content team, designer, developer, depending on whatever services that they're paying for. Analytics support, reporting, and QA. And the characteristics of the old model is work organized by function, organized by function. Human specialists perform most production. Knowledge lives in people and scattered documentation. Reporting is often retrospective. You do like a postmortem, right? Margin improves mainly through utilization and staffing leverage.

Okay.

That model is starting to crumble a little bit, right? The future operating model, again, you don't need all this over here. This is just assuming it's completely built out. You have a client revenue system. So you have an outcome owner.

Okay.

It's like, hey, we're going to deliver more leads for you. You have a strategic lead, the smart marketer that I think is the MVP of this or the leader. Channel loop owner. So what a loop is, Neil, is when you have multiple parts of the process, keyword research, content production, the reviewing of the content, the linking, internal linking, backlinking, all these things, that is an entire loop. So you might have acquisition loops, conversion loops. This is where you might have your channel specialists running these loops. And then you have an agent fleet layer where you have the engineers making these agents. So my point of saying all this, guys, is it's time to move into the future. You have work organized by business loops and outcome. Agents handle repeatable execution and monitoring. Knowledge compounds in infrastructure. Reporting becomes continuous insight and action. Margin improves through automation reuse and productized discovery. I think I don't care if you're a product company right now, I don't care if you are a services company, this is how this stuff is going to look and it's going to be organized in this way. And I think these one-person teams are going to be sitting in these different roles. They're just going to be doing more. That's what we've been getting at.

The one thing I would add though, Eric has on the bottom, margin improves through automation, reuse, and productized delivery. Productized delivery. Sorry. Like, it's a little hard for me to read.

Yeah.

Your margins, as they improve, I recommend that you double down and you do more and keep your margins the same, but just give more for the money because that's the way you're going to win in today's world. Because if you just try to eke out more profits, I believe someone else is just going to come in and run a similar playbook and offer to do it for cheaper. So the one who provides more value, goes above and beyond, I believe is the one who's going to win.

We should talk about that, Neil. I mean, it's when you think about Silicon Valley startups, for example, they raise a bunch of money. Their VCs don't want them to become profitable. They want them to grow even faster. So they want all that money to go back and be like, oh my God, it's not profitable. It's losing so much money. Right? The reason I remember sitting with taxi drivers like, oh, he called me an idiot basically. Right? Like, oh, that business going out of business. You have no idea what's going to happen. Right? And it's talking down to me basically. I'm like, okay, we'll see what happens.

You talking about Uber?

Yeah. They're like, they're not making any money. They're losing money. They're not profitable. They're going to go out of business. I'm like, okay, sure. So look at Uber now, very strong business, right? And you got Uber Eats. They have all these different lines. And so my point of saying this is that Neil is saying, hey, not necessarily you don't want to burn cash exactly like a Silicon Valley startup, because maybe you can't afford to because you didn't raise a bunch of money, but you want to maybe take elements of that thinking to say, hey, what did Jeff Bezos say before? Your margin is my opportunity. Again, your margin is my opportunity. So that margin that you could be taking in for yourself right now, the profits, if you spend it more on better people on your team, right? You grow your team out more, which will lead to more product investment, more services investment. It's going to be better for you in the long run because it's very much like we're kind of exploring in this new world right now. You want to explore as much as you can, and it takes resources to be able to explore.

Yeah, dude. It's again, we'll see what happens in a few years, but I think it's going to be a fun journey.

Yeah. So speaking of fun journey, Neil, Amazon wants to own your supply chain now. I don't know if you saw this. So Amazon is getting into supply chain as a service, everything as a service, Neil. Okay. Dog walking as a service, right? Supply chain as a service.

Amazon, it caused, uh, it caused FedEx and UPS's stock to go down.

How much?

Uh, enough where it was on the financial sites, but I don't own UPS or FedEx stock, so I didn't pay attention.

Do you own Amazon?

No comment.

Okay, we'll just leave it at that. All right, so any business can now move, store, and deliver anything from raw materials to finished products using the same supply chain that Amazon and its independent selling partners. So here's what I'll call out. Neil and I, we use Amazon all the time.

Okay.

When Neil gave me these beautiful yogurt gummies called Yogis, I ordered it immediately. It showed up the next day. That is logistical magic. When he wanted Groentz, he ordered it from Amazon, right? When I'm on the plane, I'm ordering from Amazon. So stuff shows up back at my place already. So Amazon's logistics, I think is second to none. And now this is a service that's available to anybody. But when I say anybody, I'm not just saying every human, it's also available to every agent as well. Every— like earlier we talked about, oh, you can now buy— your agents can now purchase using Stripe. Okay. Um, and now your agents can now buy online infrastructure. They can all also leverage Amazon's logistics network to help sell stuff for you, or they can just take care of stuff themselves, right? So this part is really important. This is a physical part of the world, and I just think this is great. This is now called Amazon Supply Chain Services, ASCS, opening its freight Distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping capabilities to businesses of all types and sizes. Leading brands Procter Gamble, 3M, Lands' End, and American Eagle Outfitters are among the first to sign up. Look, Neil and I, we don't sell physical products, but in, in this type of world, maybe we will have some physical products just for the hell of it, right? Because it's pretty easy to just get going now. So—

On a side note, if you want another good snack, because Eric's talking about Yogi's, I used to bring— when we were doing podcast recordings for like 1 or 2 times, I brought him this snack that my kids eat, which is like just like a little breadstick, but it has like a little chocolate mushroom shape on top. So it's like a chocolate cracker that's shaped in the form of a mushroom. It's really tiny. So then he wanted something else the other time that was a little bit more healthier, got the yogis. But, uh, if you want another version that my kids love is Go to Air One, order Painterland Sisters. Okay, yogurt, and get vanilla flavor. Vanilla bean, I believe, is the flavor. They have a lot of them in stock. You can Uber Eats it. Get Ghirardelli chocolate chips, the baking ones, and pop them in there. Mix it. It tastes like delicious ice cream that's pretty healthy for you.

Neil, what a bad user experience! You can't talk about it and not show it. Okay, like this is what Neil's talking about over here. These are the Meiji Choco Shrooms. Okay, cook. Choco Rooms, uh, chocolatey cap with a crispy cracker. You know what, Neil, since you said that, add to cart. Okay, I'll show you. All right, so, so, but this, this looks pretty good. I, I've had some of these. I'm just like, I don't want to eat too much chocolate, but because Neil spited me, um, it's a chocolatey cap with a crispy cracker. And you look at all this stuff, I have like dark chocolate here and all this other stuff, um, and all these.

Do you know how many of those bags I have in my house?

If you had to guess, how many do you think? I think you probably have Like 6 boxes of these.

Uh-huh.

I have like hundreds.

Hundreds? Yeah, so 24 times 6. There you go.

Uh, we get the bigger bags, so ours don't have, uh, 24 per box, but it's a similar size box, but the bags are bigger and there's more chocolates in each bag. Uh, but we have at least 100 to 200 of them sitting in the house. 100 easily, maybe 200.

Well, while we're doing this, we might as well pull up the Yogi's too. So, uh, the Yogi's, I would just go for the strawberry on this side, okay? Strawberry is great. These are like real fruit bites coated in creamy yogurt. Okay, so we're, we're now sharing— we're sharing our product taste with you all. Um, and—

But check out Pain au Lait Sisters. You're gonna have to Google it. Vanilla bean flavor. I'm telling you, dude, just put the Ghirardelli chocolate chips in there. It tastes better than having like, um, uh, chocolate chip ice cream, and it's healthier. A lot healthier. High protein for the Pain au Lait Sisters yogurt.

Uh-huh.

They sell it in Erwan. Oh, and if you have lactose problems, it's— they have— it's lactose-free, so you won't have issues.

I don't like yogurt anyway. Well, Neil, we have 2 more minutes here, so what do you got in 2 minutes? Anything fun to share that you're working on? The one project—

one project that I'm working on. Okay, you'll like this one. I'm trying to figure out how to dominate China in marketing.

Okay, and the reason I say that—

yeah, I'm talking to a few people who are really good with China because here's the thing, China, I know a lot of people don't care for it as a market, at least people in the US, but when my mom keeps getting packages every single day from Temu, you know, like Why am I not the agency that's not only helping companies market in China but helping these massive Chinese companies? Because there's so many of them now market to other regions in Europe and Latin America and America, etc. Like, dude, some of these Chinese companies are just massive and they print cash. And it's like, this is a great market to enter into. Um, not only do I want to speak there at least 4 times a year If anyone's well-connected with China, hit me up. And I'm trying to figure out how to build a team there over time.

I love it. Well, great. You'll have a lot of experiences there. This is me saying this as a Chinese person, but I think it's a good market. You're definitely going to have a lot of experiences.

But before we change on the experience, one thing that China does, I use Uber Eats. So typically when I go to a hotel, I find that it's easier to just order Uber Eats than it is to get room service. And it is genuinely usually cheaper to use Uber Eats and actually get the room service. Like, but it depends on the country. Like, I was just in Spain. I was at the JW Marriott. Um, room service for 4 eggs and toast. Uh, I did not get a bottle of water because they had free ones in the room.

Well, €11. €11?

Yeah.

At that point, I don't do Uber Eats. The cost is just amazing. And I know that this kind of stuff makes me sound cheap, but it's harder to earn money than it is to save it. So I try to think twice before I spend my money. Um, but in China, or in a lot of hotels, when you order Uber Eats, they make you go down to get it. In China, a robot comes up and delivers it to your door. You just pull it out. And I'm like, this is great.

Yep. They're very much living in the future. I'll just leave it at that. So Neil's working on that. If you're, if you're connected in China, reach out to him. Um, here's what I'll show you what I've been working on. We, then we can get out of here. We should do this every, every, like every now and then, Neil.

So We should do that at the end of every episode. What are we working on this week?

Yeah. So dude, this site, look at this, SingleBrain, right? One trusted brain per client. So we're getting a lot of interest in this right now. And here's the thing I'll say about people looking for our revenue agents. Typically when you get on a sales call, sometimes they'll ghost you, right? Nobody ghosts in this scenario. Okay. So this is our new singlebrain.com website. And it talks about the marketing partner companies can't outgrow. We have this one brain, this one agent that manages the specialist fleet of Revenue agents or marketing agents, whatever it is exactly, and it explains the infrastructure. Neil, I'm sure those of you that can't see this right now, this website I created using Claude Design and I got my OpenCLAW to then deploy it on singlebrain.com. Then this logo was created by my team. This is pretty good. I came up with this concept known as SSR. You want your agents to be secure, stable, and reliable. SSR-grade trust.

Right.

SOC 2 compliant. And then, uh, Single Brain— Single Grain becomes a marketing partner companies cannot outgrow by giving each client one trusted brain connected to a managed fleet of specialist agents on isolated deployments built to SSR-grade trust. Dude, the typography here is good. I'd even write this stuff, Neil.

No, this looks good. Now zoom into the logo. I can't see the logo. Did they put a brain in there? It'd be cool if they did.

No, it's just a Single Grain logo but a circle. It kind of looks like a brain, no?

No, I can't. It doesn't look like a brain when you zoom in, but it's too hard for me to tell on my screen. But no, I also think it's smart that you kept the original single grain icon in there so that way it ties them together.

Dude, and look at this. I was going to give up on the second page over here. I'm just like, I'm too lazy to get the second page up. And I was like, huh, Claude Design, just make the second page done. And the cool thing is, Neil, when I deployed this, I went to my open call. I was like, hey, Are you— are we going to carry over the pixels, like the tracking pixels, the conversion stuff? Is that all going to— like, everything flowed to the new version and it did a smoke test first. I'm just like, dude, Neil, this would've taken us weeks to do and now I can do this end to end. Isn't that crazy?

What a good thing. Yeah. Still, we both still recommend having human modified and fine-tuning it and optimizing for conversions and stuff, but you should be using this for V1. Why not?

Quick and decent. Quick and decent.

What I've been pushing my team on is not just V1, keep iterating it on V2, V3, V4. Then when it gets like V5, then have a human go in.

Dude, now that you have /goal with OpenAI, it literally will just continue to work. That's when you use Codex, the app with it. I'll leave you with one more thing before we go here. OpenAI just came out with this thing called Symphony. Neil, you remember the Trello boards, the Kanban boards where it's like doing, done? So you can now just give the tickets to the AI and it'll just continue to do the tickets over time and you can continue to fill it up. And so now it's becoming more and more autonomous. That's why a lot of people are switching to Codex, Symphony, using 5.5, using /goal. So there's a lot of crazy stuff happening. That's why you guys should stick around. Check us out on YouTube, subscribe there. Now come to us over on X because we're both going to have post-roll ads for our stuff too. But that being said, yeah, we'll talk to you guys later.

Bye.

And before we leave, did you see Atlassian's 30% or no, 20%