Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss why entrepreneurship beats passive entertainment, venture capital's biggest bets, and how ChatGPT is changing website traffic. Ahrefs data shows traffic deceleration from AI, while top-of-funnel content strategies are shifting.
Chapters
Mohnish Pabrai says that this is 1,000 times better than Netflix. And so he basically said that this is like an orgasm. You're having an orgasm every hour. He's like, you don't need free time. This is better than free time. Do you know what it is?
No.
It's business. So he did an episode with The Diary of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett, that podcast. And if you think about it, the times you spend on your business, time I spend on my business, A lot of, yes, there's a lot of stress with it, but you feel like you're playing a video game all the time. There's so much, I'll be honest with you, when I'm watching Netflix, when I'm watching anime or something, I start to think about business and I start to think about how useless I am on the couch.
But video games you don't.
No, not video, 'cause business is the video game now. It's so fun. And am I having an orgasm every hour? I don't know if I'm having an orgasm every hour, but I feel like it's so fun. And I know similarly enough to you, you've called me before and you told me this, that when you close a really big deal, you get really excited, right?
Yeah.
And so I'm not saying you're having orgasm or anything, but I do feel like this is 1,000 times better than Netflix, and that's why we're okay with the suffering that we have to go through to run a business.
The ups and downs make it more enjoyable, as crazy as that may sound. I like the downs, 'cause I've had years in business where things are just going really good, and I get lazy and I feel like I'm not having as much fun.
Yeah, it's, I think as men, sometimes you can say, okay, we're masochists or whatever, but it, We're okay suffering. We're okay taking the pain because we know the pain makes us more resilient and it makes us stronger. I'm not saying physical pain, but there's a lot of mental pain and anguish that goes with this, right? Like we're not construction, like we're not on the oil rigs or anything. I think that's way more physical pain that I don't think you can take it, or I don't think I can take it for sure. But I think we're talking about mental pain that we have to— the anguish we have to deal through. Business is such a fun journey, and I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I do agree with Mohnish that it's for sure better than Netflix.
Yeah.
And at least I'm excited every hour or most hours.
Yeah, no, I think business has been really fun and I also like the downs because for me it gives me purpose and it makes the ups even better. But I found the book topic here. Here's the title of it, How Reading Books Can Stop You from Getting Rich. So you put this in, I'm curious because you already know my opinion on this.
Yeah. So, you know, I think There tends— because there are so many podcasts available and so many books available, and don't get me wrong, I'm the first proponent to read books and I've read a lot of books, right? And then I was in a meeting the other day, he's like, man, you've read so many books, right? But all the books in the matter— in the world won't matter if you overread. What ultimately matters, for example, let me give you an example. So let's say I'm practicing tennis, okay? So I can read all the books. There's a great book called The Inner Game of Tennis, great philosophy.
How the hell did you read it?
No, I didn't. I have the book sitting at home, but I have— so many people have mentioned it, so I'll go ahead and buy these books, right? A lot of these books I haven't read in my home, right? I use them as reference. If I got this from Syed, if 2+ people tell me to buy it or I hear it, I'm just going to buy it, right? So, but in tennis, just because you read a book, are you going to know how to return a serve? Are you going to know how to serve?
No.
You're going to have to pick up the patterns. Or just like if you're doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you're going to have to know if you're in— if you're getting destroyed in a certain position, you're going to have to learn how to adapt to that, right? You don't learn that unless you're actually in the trenches. in business, in sales. You don't learn sales just by reading books. So I'm not saying don't read these things. I'm not saying don't buy a course or whatever to get the baseline knowledge, but you still have to get there in the trenches. And I think the problem is a lot of people right now, they're listening to all these podcasts and like maybe you're listening to this podcast too much and maybe you just need to go out there and do. I think there's a happy medium between the two. And so I think there is a situation where if you read too many books, it's going to stop you from getting rich because you've stopped— you keep— it's mental masturbation. You keep learning these things, but you're not doing.
Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think reading is good and you should read to some extent, but you already know my opinion on reading too many books and listening to too many podcasts.
Yeah. I mean, to Neil's credit, actually, since I've known you, you've never talked about a book. You're just talking about doing. It's just doing. And to your credit, like you'll start new things and you'll make a lot of mistakes and I'll make a lot of mistakes when I start new things, but that's how you actually learn. You learn by failing.
For me at least. Other people may learn from books. For me too.
I think with anybody you learn by failing, right?
Yeah.
There's not one person that doesn't learn by failing.
Yeah. And I have read some other, some books that have taught me some interesting lessons, but generally my problem with reading isn't that reading's not good. A lot of it is philosophical. And when you want to try to go do something in real life, it doesn't work out the way that the book ends up telling you.
Dude, I will say though, I read a lot more philosophy now or philosophical quotes and I save a lot more things into my bookmarks. Because when you look at Marcus Aurelius, for example, Dude, okay, richest guy in the world. He was the emperor of Rome and he had to deal with wars, he had to deal with politicians, he had to deal with people trying to get in his way and all that. And all he wrote was his diary, his meditations, right? His philosophies. And I think a lot of philosophies, they stand the test of time and they're so general, right? It's not like they're prescribing anything. So I think philosophies help keep people grounded and then eventually you establish your own philosophies.
Yeah.
If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T.ai, and we'll see you on the other side.
On a random note, you have something else in here that Silicon Valley bet the fun moments.
Yeah.
What is this, like when they went all in on a company?
Yeah, so even, so when you look at a venture firm like Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia, for example, these are some of the largest venture firms in the world, right? So a lot of people don't know that Andreessen Horowitz bet 17% of their fund on Skype back in the day. So Skype was bought by Microsoft for $8 billion and then I think they just sunsetted it. Sequoia bet 15% of their fund on WhatsApp. Thrive Capital bet 20% of their fund on Stripe. And then GV Team, I think Google Ventures team maybe?
Skype was bought by eBay. Andreessen bought it out from eBay, sold it to Microsoft.
Did I even know that? Yeah. And then Google Ventures team bet 22% of their fund in Uber, and then Founders Fund just bet 70% of their fund into Cognition, and they also bet 30% of the last growth fund into Enduro. So all that to say is, even with venture capital, sometimes if you have conviction on something, you have to swing hard. And investing, sometimes they say it's not about the number of bets that you make, it's about the slugging percentage. It's how hard are you going to hit when you know that you have something?
Yeah.
Just like you're all in on your business, I'm all in on my business. So even these, these bet the fund moments or bet the company moments happen with funds.
Yeah, I figured it happened with funds because if you look at some of the returns, they're really outsized for how much money the fund has. So you can assume that they put in a much bigger chunk of their fund into it. An interesting thing that I know that a lot of funds do is when they know that they have the Andrils or whatever it may be, They'll put in whatever they can from the fund into that company. You have to remember, most of these funds have LPs. It's not their own money. So there's limitations on how much they can actually put into one deal. Sometimes they may try to get approvals or whatnot so they can go more aggressive. But what's interesting is, is when they have a deal that they really love and they want to put more money, a lot of times they'll reach out to their LPs and say, we think this is a great deal. This is why, you know, we are putting as much as we can. We have more to allocate. Who wants to throw in more? And they won't take carry or anything like that from it or management fees. And the investors love it because they can just allocate more money. And here's another thing that people don't talk about when these funds are investing. Let's say if you raise a billion-dollar fund and you have someone who gives you $200 million and they're your marquee investor, $100 million, and they're your marquee investor, anchor investor for that fund. A lot of them will have a deal saying, I'm your anchor investor. I give you $200 out of a billion. You need to also deploy $200 more million of my money without carry and without management fees.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Uh-huh.
Yeah. That's interesting.
And I don't think the Sequoias and the Thieles—
They probably don't do that.
They don't have to end up dealing with it.
Because they're already well known. Yeah.
They're already well known and they're pretty much grade AA++, whatever you want to call it, funds. But it's some of the other ones that are smaller, up and coming, like $400 million, $500 million, even a billion. A lot of them have to do deals with their LPs and allocate more money without taking And you have the upside.
Dude, you speaking of investing just kind of reminded me of the economy, the economic situation. So just a fun question for you, 2 questions for you. What are the odds, 1 through 100%, 0 through 100%, that you think we're going into recession or already in a recession? Probability?
I don't know because I don't know how a recession is defined anymore. Okay. Because sometimes they would say, oh, 2 quarters of negative GDP growth. Well, we've had that. And then they say we're not in a recession. I'm not trying to point fingers at them and saying they're changing the goalposts or anything like that. I'm not an economist, so I don't know how a recession is defined.
Yeah. Okay. So you pass on the first question.
I pass on the first question.
Second question is probability-wise, 0 to 100%, what are the odds that you think maybe in the next 6 to 12 months or so that the stock market will crash?
I was just listening to an interview on this a few days ago, and it was from one of the big hedge funds out there, and they made a really good point. They're looking at like over a You know, the index of all the publicly traded companies, and they're looking at the average price-to-earnings ratio and the overall health of most companies' profitability. And I think the number, don't quote me on this, is something like most of these companies on average, when you average around, are worth around like 14 times profit, which to me is very reasonable. I'm not saying the market won't crash, But a lot of the valuations you're seeing in the public markets to me are very reasonable.
It's interesting because the reason I bring this up, I was watching a video with— I talk about George Gammon, so he listens to this podcast. Shout out to George Gammon. Check out his YouTube channel. So he had a video he just released recently on the jobs report obviously being revised down. And I think in his video it showed the Ford P/E ratio was the highest it's ever been, right? Whereas you're saying— yeah. So he mentioned that. But so he— this is interesting because he said, He thinks 85% chance of recession, but he only thinks 20% chance of the stock market crashing. Why? Because we're in an era where just the government's going to, the Fed's going to prop things up, right? And so he's thinking 20% chance, 85% chance recession, 20% chance the market crashes. And not financial advice, guys, but I thought it was just interesting coming from him.
Yeah, I believe in the old Buffett philosophy, whether the stock market crashes or not, if these companies are doing 13, 14, 10 times profit, and it's healthy, steady companies. 10 times profit, if that's your PE ratio, that's really healthy for large corporations. Even 14, especially if you have recurring income and it's very predictable and you're growing at a nice clip. I look at that as whether the stock market crashed and these stocks went down, as long as the business performs really well, I don't really care why look at it. And if it starts going down and crashing, cool, it creates opportunity to buy more.
Do you know what percent of Berkshire Hathaway they used to hold in cash before in the past?
If I had to guess, way less than 10%.
13%. What do you think it is now?
Okay, so I was wrong. Right now, I don't know, 40%-ish?
27%. But point is, this is the most cash that Buffett's ever held. It's about $300 billion or so. Yeah. So he just, you know, he kind of just waiting to, 'cause there's a lot of stuff right now is, it might be like a little, stock market is all-time highs right now, I think, right? Or near all-time highs.
Yeah.
Everything's pretty much all-time highs. Anyway, I just, I thought it'd be interesting.
But there's a lot of growth. A lot of corporations are making a ton of money right now. And when you look at the market and people talking about crash, a lot of the up movement has been from tech. If you go outside of tech, a lot of the companies like, okay, let's look at—
Outside Mag 7?
Yeah. If you just look at outside technology, like period. Okay. Like if I go to like, let's look at a company like Target. All right. If I look at Target stock over the last 5 years, it's down. If I look at year to date, it's down 34%. Their PE ratio is 10.5. And if you look at— oh, Google just shifted Google Finance. Let's go back to the classic view. If you look at their annual income, right, it's pretty much flat last 3 years. The stock could go up or down for a lot of variety of reasons, but like overall, Pretty healthy business. You know, their net income in 2025 compared to 2024 is down 1.14%. Like, you have stability. Am I saying this is the right time to buy that stock or not? Should the stock crash or not? That, I don't know any of that. But what I do know is a lot of these companies that are publicly traded have really healthy financials. And the economy right now with tariffs and all that kind of stuff, it's impacting consumers. To what extent, I don't know. Different reports say different things, but these companies are still performing decently well, at least not from a stock price perspective, but from a financial perspective when you look at their numbers.
Yeah. So we'll see what happens in the next 6, 12 months or so. We're not economists here. I thought it would just be interesting to talk about. But did you see that Tim Soulo did a post here from Ahrefs on how traffic from ChatGPT is slowing down?
So I saw that.
As of August 2025, ChatGPT, 0.21%. of a website's traffic. I think that's what it's saying. Google is 41.12%. I think this is search share. I think that's what it is.
I think it's from people using the Ahrefs analytics.
Yeah, website traffic share. So you see, oh, this is talking about the growth rate. So month over month growth comparison, you can see what's happening here. So Google is in the blue and then ChatGPT is in the green. So he's saying it's decelerating. Yes.
And the, I believe, I don't know how many, what's their sample size? Did you say like 40,000 or something like that?
50,000. And just to clarify here, this is website traffic share. So this is clicks coming to your website.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think you're going to start seeing ups and downs and there's not going to be consistency just like there is with algorithm changes. And then these people will try to monetize and that can make it even harder. But at the end of the day, if you can get AI to cite you, we're seeing more revenue and conversions and that should be your goal. Don't worry about it from a month-to-month perspective, but that data is really interesting that Tim shared.
What, just, just out of curiosity, what percentage of your blog now, because our blogs used to be more informational content than more bottom of funnel, call it, you know, I don't know, 50, 60, 70% is more top of funnel informational. And then now it's kind of shifted more towards bottom of funnel, more transactional. What's that percentage breakdown for you today?
I don't know the percentage breakdown. I do know we focus more on bottom of funnel than top of funnel.
Yeah, it's like significantly more.
But we still do focus on top of funnel, just not as much as we used to. I do not know what the percentage is. And we look at a lot of this stuff. It's hard for us as a business to measure what is more effective or not. And the reason being is our business at NP Digital has really shifted over the years. We started, I would say similar to the current Single Grain. I could be wrong. I don't know what your average client spend is, but let's call it $100,000 to a few hundred thousand a year.
Yeah.
Right? We started there and because we shifted to enterprise, it really skews everything because how you get leads, what's responsible for the leads, the way you get leads, the way you get included in RFPs, the way you close business, it's all changed. So the marketing has also changed with it. And like when we look at our blog, I don't know what your numbers are today, but I do remember years ago was the biggest driver of your revenue for new clients.
And same for you back in the day.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And today it's shifted actually today too. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't think it's even 10%.
Yeah. For you guys, no way.
It can't even be 10%.
Wow. Massive. Ours used to be, I would say 80% of our leads came from the blog back in the day. Now it's got to be probably like, I don't know, call it 30-ish percent, something like that.
I'm not looking at the leads though. I'm looking at just revenue.
Yeah.
So I don't know what portion of the leads come from the blog, but it's still a good chunk. The problem with my business is, is we, win or die by the deal. In other words, the deal is so large. If we close a deal, it's like, hooray, this is awesome. We did a good job. If we lose a deal, it hurts really bad.
Yeah. So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
