Eric Glyman, David Senra, Bridget Harris, The Trouble with Tariffs, See You in Aspen

You're watching tvpn. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Today is Tuesday, March 4, 2025. And guess what? We have a guest at the opening of the of the show, Eric Gliman, CEO of Ramp. We're very excited for you to be here. Thank you. Welcome to the show.

Awesome to see you and great to be in this holy place today.

Yes, yeah, yeah. The dojo of the dollar, the shrine of shareholder value. It has many names but most importantly, it is our humble abode. Is the host. It is where we and it should.

Feel like home to you considering that I have this massive sort of Ramp logo over my head here. So home away from home on the air. It's amazing to have you. How's this week been so far? Obviously a busy one with the news yesterday, but from what we understand, it was old news to you. But I'm sure it feels great to get it out in the world, incredibly.

Exciting and look like you, you know, most days as a founder, it's, it's, it's you in an office, taking calls, waking up early, staying up late. It's just a, you know, a lot of, you know, constant work and it was one of those rare moments I, I think when, you know, customers, partners, the team could all celebrate just a little bit, enjoy and then kind of get back to it. And so it's, you know, pretty overwhelming, really exciting and feel lucky to be here.

Talk about the pressure of raising in the sort of height of ZIRP. You guys raised at a 8ish billion dollar valuation, then you had to sort of reorient the team around. Obviously the business performance was still fantastic, but many people were saying publicly that generally a lot of these unicorns may not ever sort of achieve that sort of peak valuation. How good does it feel to not only achieve it again, but exceed it dramatically? And what did you have to do to kind of like motivate and rally the team in those sort of like the darker days where again, the sort of public narrative was that, you know, these valuations were never really real and. Yeah. So how good does it feel at this moment?

I think someone really has to do just like a deep in depth piece of like the big comeback and building up from like these 20, 21 and, and what it took because there really were companies that would raise at, you know, 100x revenue multiples. I don't think it was a sin necessarily to raise at high prices. I think probably the sin was just spending it all really Quickly you look at a lot of the companies that have transformed their industries. Amazon, Google, Apple, like you name it, often started with some kind of bubble or hysteria. People were investing a lot in it. I think it does interesting things to businesses. I can tell you that, you know, our mission has been very consistent. Start a business that is obsessed with saving our customers time and money. Help them have every dollar an hour that they're spending in their business, go a lot further. And when you have a large amount of capital behind you, you of course think about what are the results that you produce next week. But you start obsessing over could I make this outcome 10 years from now larger instead of taking that next marginal dollar and I'm keeping it. How do we put it back into the hands of customers, see them succeed, have the ability to use that next dollar to invest in faster growth and in a weird way grow a much larger business for them 10 years from now and we hope a much larger one for us. And so I actually think it created the conditions for Ramp to not just be customer obsessed, but to take that to a whole other level. You know, I, I, I, I would say is, is one of those 2021 companies. We certainly had a lot of work to do to, to grow. But if you keep, you know, I think in 2022 is public, the, you know, the revenue forex that year, if you keep doubling, if you keep growing at incredible rates, what, what are very large multiples suddenly become very reasonable. And I think that the, the interesting thing that happened since is these, these, you know, it all met and now Ramp is, is not only trading like, you know, strongly performing public traded companies just growing at a dramatically faster clip. It's driving more savings and more value for customers. And the most remarkable thing is it's such a large market. I think if we do our jobs right, we tend to save our customers more and grow just as fast, if not faster.

So I remember you telling me that one of the things you did for the employees was actually during the all hands, during kind of the turmoil of the interest rate rise, you actually walked the team, everyone on the team, regardless of their role in investor relations or not, through how valuations are calculated. Where RAMP is the growth rates, the metrics and kind of did a bottom up analysis, not like a full DCF or anything, but you walk people through that. Do you think that's something that's unique about Ramp culture or do you think more startup CEOs or you know, scale up CEOs should be transparent at that level? With their employees about how. Because there's a lot of companies out there right now that are just like, hey, yeah, we're worth $20 billion because I got one guy to write me a check at 20 billion, right? They bought, they bought, you know, a million dollars of the stock of 20 billion. Whereas you, I think you said, hey, look, there's a whole host of people around the table that agree on this valuation. Now we just repriced it in the new interest rate regiment. And here's all the multiples, here's what it would look like if we were public, etc. Walk me through that.

So start, start with maybe this and think about this, where if you're a new employer, you're considering coming to ramp. There's sort of two, you know, ish ends of the deal, just from a comp perspective. One was cash. People can agree on, you know, you know, base bonus, that kind of structure and what's the equity value, you know, maybe that you get a package worth 100,000, half a. Something like that. And traditionally when this is done, we say, okay, this is granted, it says based on this valuation. So we believe that the stock today is worth, if you stay for four years, it will be worth half a million dollars. And if it grows from there, it'll be worth more. The problem that all these companies had in 2022, 2023, when, you know, publicly traded tech companies in some cases were down 70%, some were down 90, others were down 30, is no one quite knew. And for an opaque private company, suddenly the bid ask spreads could be very, very wide. And during all this, we were growing incredibly quickly like that 20, 22 years, we grew four times, year over year. No other publicly traded company was doing that. And so I think part of the problem that we were trying to solve was very lean. We weren't burning a whole lot, didn't have a capital need, but. But I wanted to be able to look employees in the eye and say, you know, when we make a grant, and we say, this is a $500,000 grant as of the day that you're joining, we really believe it. And it's not just us, but other sophisticated investors have done it. And so we did what was a very unusual thing at the time, which was, you know, we just went out to market and said, we just want to know where you would price this, what's fair. And investors said, we have more conviction than ever. In December 2021, we valued Rampant 8. Today we actually think it's going to be a way Bigger company and the value is 5.8 billion. And we said great, let's do it. And, and the interesting part is mathematically if you go through a, to your point John, like a DCF discounted cash.

Flow.

One of the biggest drivers of, of what's the end valuation is what are all the profits you'll make in 10 years plus. And it's impacted by what is the risk free rate, the overnight rate you can get. In December 2021 that rate was almost zero percent. You know, you would get no, no reward for risk. In 2023, 2022, the risk free rate was like 5 to 5 and a half percent. And if you compound that over over 10 years it has a dramatic effect. And so in a weird way the 5.8, if you kind of go through the math, the $5.8 billion valuation first it lowers the share price today, but it implies a much higher share price later on. Um, so I guess to back into it, you know, I still think a lot of companies haven't taken their medicine. They actually haven't just marked it to market. And I think that a lot of employees who've been working hard probably are still underwater. And I, I, we didn't think this was right. We rather would just say, you know, here's where the stock is, come in today through hard work and you know, focus, customer obsession. Let's build from here. And I think that proved really well. You know, we're, we're, we're back above all time highs. We have a lot of momentum and I think for people who joined the team and part of the mission, I think people have been been treated really fairly and so I don't hope that's helpful and just how we saw that.

Yeah, I have a question. Around ramps, Ramp truly lives the ramp way. Like the approach to company building that you guys advertise you, you, you do exactly yourself. Right? So, so I feel like you're in a position like looking at ramps capital efficiency, which I think was published, you know, yesterday around your guys sort of net burn. It's really astonishing, right? And it's gotta be if you're running a business, you know, at anywhere in the same category, even adjacent categories, you have to be highly concerned at the rate that you guys are growing in that context is that how much of that do you credit to ramp versus yourself and your team's operational abilities?

I think our whole mission right to your point is like make the most of every dollar and every hour. If you're spending it, you should know why and it's not just that you're spending it in one place, but what actually generates the return, what, what connects to growth. And I would say that we certainly benefit a lot from our own product. We try to be obsessive over making sure we're not wasting. And if we're spending on, on, you know, software licenses of product, we buy 500 seats, we want 500 people to use it, and we use Ramp to cut out extra licenses, make sure we're getting the most impact for prices and software that we're buying. And I just think for the same reason, a lot of the highest performing, best running companies on the planet run on Ramp and use it. We do too. We want to be the best customer of our own product. And so some of it's that. But I'd also say if your whole mission is to obsess over getting your customers the most from every dollar an hour, as long as you're not a big hypocrite, you start thinking about it for yourself too. And so I would give credit to the team. I just think that the rigor, not just financially, but even just from a engineering perspective, design perspective, I think most organizations could not have put out a Super bowl ad from 11 days start to airing.

I think we were one of the few groups that had direct insight into that because I remember we talked to the team, we have a weekly with, with the Ramp marketing team and we talked to them and they basically were like, hey, we gotta go dark for like three days. And so we got to witness the process and it was just, it was, it was incredible to see in this moment. You know, to me it feels like Ramp's opportunity, like the value proposition for Ramp has never been stronger. Right. You were born in 2019. You very quickly were in the zero interest rate era where it was not cool to save money. It was cool to spend it and grow as fast as human, humanly possible. And we're now entering this period where, you know, we have terrorists, there's austerity in the government. Right. It seems that, you know, saving money and making dollars go further is in. How do you, you know, how are you. You thinking of, you know, taking Ramp out of, you know, Ramp is. The super bowl felt like this first moment where Ramp was going mainstream. Right. And what does that look like over the next couple years in terms of getting. There's many more businesses that aren't on Ramp than are. What does the next two years look like in terms of going mainstream?

Two things. I mean, there's something just Timeless. About Ramp's core ideas, I think, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, when he was talking about Amazon, he couldn't imagine 10 years in the future people would ever, you know, say, you know, Jeff, I love Amazon, but I wish the prices were higher. I just wish that, you know, these packages got to my door a little bit slower. You couldn't imagine it. People always want lower prices, you know, and getting things earlier, getting more done with less effort. And in some ways, we just took the simple idea very seriously. For a business owner, you know, in the US average profit margin is 8 and a half percent. It means that a dollar saved is not equivalent to a dollar earned. You know, a dollar, a cost that you cut is equivalent to revenue by $12. And I just think that we, you know, looked at the math and just took it seriously. And I think that, you know, simple truths, in some sense, are one of the most powerful forces in business. When I look at where we are, it's. It is incredible to be serving, empowering what we believe is 1 to 2% of all corporate and small business card spend in the US which is maybe the market that we're largest in. Um, you know, it's 98 to 99% to go. I. I think part of going means.

You did the meme, you did the 1% of the.

If we just take 1% of this thing, it will be a big company and you did it.

They did it in five years.

So frustrating.

Yeah, yeah. Well, people are going to be like, yeah, yeah.

Can I get a breakdown of, like, postmortem on the Super Bowl? I want to know. I mean, everyone kind of knows, okay, super bowl, like, it just looks good. It looks like a six to seven figure spend. But how do you. Everyone wants to know, you know, what does it feel like? How do you start calculating? Like, does this make sense? And did we make money from it? What's your early read? And then what do you look? What signals are you looking for down the road?

It's incredible. So there was a couple things, and also there was even kind of, in Ramp fashion, some things that made the buy particularly impactful and maybe a little more clever. So, um, by being. By buying the ad much later than most normal people would do, we had access to very unique inventory. Like, it sort of is a little insane to say, 11 days before the super bowl, you know, what if we did that? And so as a result, we actually knew who was playing in the Super Bowl. You know, we were able to find someone that had incredible relevance to what People were watching. And of course, Saquon is an amazing one of one talent that was phenomenal. Next, there was, without getting too specific, a lot of folks that for various reasons would normally buy super bowl ads. Insurers who had to deal with fires and other things like that that dropped out of the super bowl, you know, didn't want to be advertising at a time when, you know, we're sort of coming under attack. And it meant that some of the spots that we were able to get were in extraordinary slots for people who were watching closely. We were the very last ad going in to the Super Bow, and that was nationally aired for folks in other markets. Saw the ad twice and, well, I can't get specific on the figures. It was a lot less than what people think and the impact was a lot more. I think that Saquon, you know, being a core contributor and having an extraordinary season meant that not only, you know, was there a lot of coverage of him, but, you know, even the next week he was on the Today show and, you know, they talked about his story as well as our partnership and the ad aired there. And we can see this in the metrics where February was, you know, by many accounts that by far the biggest February that we've ever had. The acceleration just in terms of sales as well as people feeling like, you know, it's gone from startup to, you know, this company that I knew when is actually on this big stage. And so you can see it in the growth and just even in how people feel, how likely people are to recommend. And we've seen all of these go up.

I have a more personal question. You now run a $13 billion plus company. You're still one of the most kind and genuine people that I know. And it's almost most people, by the time they sort of climb the mountain to build a company this big, they get sort of hardened. What do you credit your ability to? Your ability to sort of lead with kindness and I feel like every conversation that I've had with you, but at the same time, sort of broadly your sort of reputation despite building such a behemoth in such a short period of time, that's broadly your reputation with anybody that I feel like interacts with the company. Where does that come from?

So, one, I just think, you know, we're, we're thrilled to be here, but, you know, I Show some humility. 13 billion is a lot. It's still very small in the grand scheme of things. You know, we're competing directly with companies that have multi hundred billion if not almost, trillion dollar market caps. Some of the largest companies you know, today are, call it three and a half trillion dollars. And the wild part, you know, is that mathematically a company like, you know, an Apple or Microsoft or Nvidia, you know, talking to a ramp is almost like a ramp talking to a seed or Siri J startup. It's actually those multiples in between valuations are about the same. And so in some sense, I think some of it just comes from the reality of we have such a long way to go, there's so much more to build, there's so many more people that we can serve. And just remembering that, I think that when you look at great companies in the past, often are killed by hubris, arrogance and forgetting. The reason why they were able to grow and get there is there were people who early employees who gave them a shot and worked hard, who didn't have to be there, who were there early customers who said, you know what, I, I'm going to try and, and you know, trust you with my business and please take good care of it. And you know, that still is true. And so, I don't know, I guess it's a little bit too like, you know, you grow up a certain way and you know that those kind of things stick with you. But that's really how I think about it.

Right.

Did you want to get into any of the general entrepreneurship questions or anything?

Yeah, I mean, I guess you've had your pick of the litter in the Valley, right? At this point, I'm sure you've talked with every major investor across different rounds and obviously some funds get conflicted and things like that. What's the single best piece of advice you've ever gotten from somebody on your cap table? It could be specifically on the investor side.

It's a really good question. I mean, I tend to really resonate with former operators, people who've built and run business. I think that experience, it's fun, it's interesting. Also times very solitary.

It's pretty valuable.

It's pretty valuable, yeah. And so look, you know, we have a very small board. You know, one of the members is Keith, her boy. And I think that part of why I wanted to work with him even from the, you know, the earliest days is I just think he had an obsession with what it takes to be a high quality operator. Like I still think is how to operate talk he gave over a decade ago is as good as it is. I think it's very underrated. I think focusing.

I think the gist of that it was cannonballs and barrels, right? Barrels and ammunition.

Yeah, barrels and bullets.

Barrels and bullets, yeah.

I mean the idea is like the bottleneck. You know, you might have as many bullets, but if you have a too few cannons, you can't fire as many bullets. You need to have more, more, more, more cannons to go quicker. But I think a lot of the heart of it and some of this is like the score takes care of itself but the idea of you manage towards the inputs to drive the out the outcome. And you know, I think ramp has been in this very large and in some sense people look at it from the outside in hyper competitive space and we've grown at a level others haven't. In part, I actually think is just by taking that advice to heart, it's really looking, you know, upstream. What are the activities that lead to the outcomes you're trying to drive? What are the things that can do today that will save your business, you know, time and money tomorrow? What are the things we can do today to drive more sales tomorrow? And so in some sense it wasn't, you know, profound, it just was right. And we try to listen to it pretty often.

That's great.

Yeah. I feel like the best advice in the Valley is actually all out in these sort of blog posts or individualized talks. And in the same way on the company side, you know, the Ramp secret plan is out there. It's like we're going to save businesses the most amount of time and money and if you want to compete with us on that, you're welcome to. It's good for the world but we're going to do it the best. So it's amazing to witness and yeah, we'll have to have you back on in the very near future because if there's one thing about Ramp is there's always news coming, always news.

Can't wait. Guys, I really appreciate it and thanks for having me on the show. When I can say I knew you when. I think this is going to get continue growing really quickly.

Oh yeah, we're excited. We have Senra coming on in a couple minutes, I think. So we're going to have him psychoanalyze you.

Yeah, we'll let you go, Eric. We'll talk to you soon.

Talk to you soon.

Have a great rest of your day.

Cheers.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers. Yeah, bye.

And we are going to take a 30 second break while we fix some stuff with the stream and then I will give you a little run of show because we did, we jumped straight into that interview. Obviously, we're getting live later and later. And so, yeah, we want. We want to go. We want to touch on the Trump tariffs thing, but just a little bit, dip our toe in. Stay not political, but it is the top story. It's what everyone's talking about. So we're going to focus on the tech reaction. We're not going to really deep dive into the politics of it. We're going to talk about what people on tech Twitter are saying about it. We're going to go through a bunch of timeline, cover some reaction to earlier clips that went out yesterday from the show. And then I want to talk about Greenland. I think Greenland's super interesting. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about whether or not Greenland could be a place for a mining boom. And the question they ask is, Greenland has the makings of a mining boom. So where is everyone? Like, like there are minerals there, but no one's really going after them. We're going to try and get to the bottom of it with this Wall Street Journal article. And then also Google's making a new push with start project Starline. Have you seen Starline?

I have not.

It's one of these, like, tech demos that feels very fake, but every. Because, like, you just can't go experience it. But they bring in journalists, like YouTubers, and they all walk journalists and they all walk out of the room. That was incredible. And you don't know if they're being paid off or something. Yeah, yeah. You know, you put on the tinfoil hat, like, they might be paid off to be like, that was amazing. And really, it sucks. So it's in the. It's in the, like, Project Orion realm of, like. Seems really promising, but basically it's like a TV that's like 3D and it uses kind of like an illusion technique to help you see someone across the table in, like, as a hologram.

Interesting.

And they want to roll it out and they want to get it, like, cheaper so that basically everyone can have this. But they're. They're making a push.

We could podcast holographically.

I would love that. I mean, the reviews, the early reviews have been. Has been remarkable, but it's very unclear, like, how real it is or how. Or how expensive it is to actually roll out. So we're gonna go through that, but mostly we're gonna do a ton of phone calls today because we're really enjoying the guest spots. We're having a lot of fun people on. So we will have David Senra hop On, and then we're gonna have Bridget Harris from Founders Fund hop on at 11:45. And who else is maybe gonna come on? Maybe Sean McGuire. We'll see. I texted him. Hopefully he can get on. Let me see if he's on. If he's on X. This is turning increasingly into just like a live stream. Just like, hanging out.

We're hanging out.

Okay. He just liked my post. He DM'd me his cell phone number. I texted him. Hopefully he gets.

Hit him with a double text.

Maybe. Maybe we'll just call him live at noon and just be like, you're on, and that's it. What's going on? Okay, we got to cut to a break. We will be right back. You're watching tvpn. You'll still be watching in a couple of minutes when you get back. We are back. You're still watching tvpn. We had a little HDMI issue. I guess when I was looking at Jordi, it would look like I was looking off to the other side. Anyway, it's fixed. We're back. We're happy to be here. Ben, give me an update on David Senra. Is he in the waiting room? Does he have the zoom link?

I mean, we're talking about the most powerful man in Miami.

He is the most powerful man in Miami now. You know, we had Keith on, but Keith has kind of relinquished it a little bit. He's got his toes in D.C. he's got one foot in Silicon Valley now. Senra Sanra isn't making a move. He's. He's locking down the islands. He's having. He's establishing.

He's not leaving.

He's not leaving. You're gonna have to drag him out of Miami. And I would be happy to drag him out of Miami, actually.

Very easy to get him out of Miami. You just got to send a private jet.

Yeah, he really does hold the bar well.

Yeah, he holds a line.

It's remarkable how he set that bar and then still manages to get on a plane twice a week. You would think that that would reduce the amount of travel, but somehow it does not. Anyway, Senra. Sandra Senra. Hopefully he hops on. He says he needs five minutes.

That was, like, four minutes ago.

You know, maybe we should just play a little bit of his podcast.

On our podcast, the dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most 2 to 1. This is in the field that I.

Perfect substitute.

I noticed the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish. Was 50 or 100 to 1. So given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream and to build a team that pursues the A plus players. And that is exactly what Ramp did.

Ramp has. All right. We're in the middle of a Ramp ad. It's hilarious. Oh, hey, I'm playing. I. I was listening to your. Your latest episode, and there was some good. There was a. There was a really good quote in there, and I didn't realize it was in the middle of a ramp.

That's funny. I caught the. The tail end of you talking to Eric.

Oh, yeah, that's great. How you doing, man?

Good, Good. I just had actually saw Eric last week. We had breakfast. I went. I flew to New York for a super secret dinner that I'm making an episode about right now. Me and Eric had breakfast the very next day.

Very cool.

Very cool. Every time I tried to ask Eric something personal, he perfectly redirected it into talking about saving money. Saves businesses time and money. Can you help us psychoanalyze Eric? Because he's like this, and he's truly a one of one in the sense that I was kind of positioning it as, like, building a $13 billion plus company and maintaining that level of sort of genuine kindness is, like, very tough. And I'm curious if you. If you have any sort of, like, opinion or sort of, like, I just have the answer.

Like, when I. When I made the documentary about Ramp, like, I was interviewing him with that exact question. Like, hey, you're so nice, but, like, you're running this, like, kind of cut their company in this, like, hardcore industry. Like, how is this possible? And it kind of got peeled back the onion and got to the fact, like, like, he had a brother who got bullied a lot, and, like, he developed, like, this insane empathy. That was my takeaway. I was, like, tearing up while I was talking to him about it. It was really, really, like, kind of like a crazy. Crazy, like, yeah, early life to, like, deal with. And that clearly gave him, like, a new level of empathy because he went through all this stuff with his brother as well. It was wild. Anyway, but, Senra, what's your take one?

I spent a bunch of time with them. I do consider when I say on the Ramp ads, my friend Eric.

I don't know.

That's not hyperbolic. I would say that the larger, like, the more important idea is, like, you actually don't have to be, like, a complete. Listen, I think Steve Jobs is one of the best, you know, founders of all Time. If there's a Mount Rushmore of the history of entrepreneurship, he's got to be on it. It doesn't matter, like, what the other three are, but he's definitely one of them.

Yep.

But people hear how, like, you know, how he spoke to other people, and they just say, oh, like, to be like him, I have to be like that. And it's just like, no, you don't. Like, if you look at the greatest, you know, when I went to Charlie Munger's house and had dinner with him, like, he said that the greatest. He feels the greatest founder of all time was Rockefeller. And one of the craziest things about Rockefeller is, like, there'd be people that worked for him for decades that said he never raised his voice and he never said an unkind word. So I think there's, like, this myth that there's, like, this one size or one way to be successful. In fact, I was on a long walk with a friend last night, and we were talking about Michael Dell. You know, one of them, regardless of what you think, is, like, one of the most successful people that ever lived, has a phenomenal relationship with his son. They're like, best friends, from what I hear. Very, very proud that he's still married to the same woman. Like, anybody that spends time with him says the same thing. He's just unbelievably thoughtful and kind. So, yeah, I, I, I, I. One, with particular to Eric, it's definitely not an actual. And two, I don't think, you know, it's a prerequisite for success. This is, like, one of the reasons I tend to work alone is because I am really fucking mean, and I don't like that. I wish I wasn't so, you know, like, intense around that. And I'm perfectly fine being that way with myself. I just don't like doing that to other people.

That's why when you said you liked our podcast, I took it really serious because I'm like, you just wouldn't say that.

Oh, no way.

Very authentically. Like, yeah, like, this. This isn't for you, bud.

I mean, I've sent him so many things to review, and I'm just like, it's not bad, right? And he's like, have you listened to it?

So there's a. You see this bookshelf behind me? Let me zoom out a little bit. So it is. It holds, like, 600 books or something like that.

Yeah.

And let me see if I can change this. So they're actually in order by episode number.

Yeah.

And one thing that I love about. There's another like 300 books in my living room, and I walk past it every day to get upstairs. And one, one of the books has the title in like big bold letters in the spine. And it's, it's applicable to a lot more industries than you think of. And it's definitely applicable to podcasts. But the title of the book is Competing with Idiots. And I think, like, you know, we're.

Doing the same thing here with posts, right? We have, we have every Library of Alexandria post post printed out in order that we reacted to them on the show.

So remember which.

It's bigger than your. It's bigger than your bookshelf.

You remember when you guys had this idea of like you were going to sell your podcast in vinyl?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I actually, I hope you make that into a book. And I would buy the Technology Brothers book of tweets.

We're definitely thinking about that. Definitely thinking about that. I think with the vinyl thing where we got was we want to send you our favorite episode of Founders on Vinyl. Something like, there you go. Okay, yeah, send that to Patrick. And then so like the Jeremy Geffon episode goes out because you get that on vinyl. It's like a fun thing. You could like put it on your bookshelf or something. It's a little trinket.

I actually think it's really smart. There's been multiple occasions, so like, you can't see it, but behind my desk, so Sam Zell, there's a bunch of people. I'm actually reading Michael Ovitz's autobiography. So I'll give you a preview of the episode that has been killing me. I made it out two days ago and it still won't be done. And he had a full time gift guy. And this has actually come up a lot in the books. Sam Zell had a. He spent millions of dollars a year, from my understanding, on his full time gift department. In fact, he'd build these like, automatons, right? And it had a theme. And I actually spoke at this guy's conference and he's like, do you want anything for this? I was like, it's in Miami. I don't give a. I'll do it for free. And we're friends anyways. And he's like, all right, I have a gift for you. And he actually found one and he bought me a Sam Zell, like, automaton. But I think the Technology Brothers, especially because you're doing it five days a week, you're gonna have all these guests. You should have like a gift department where it's like thoughtful like that. Like, here, here's your favorite episode on vinyl. Or like, whatever.

Whatever.

I mean, isn't that in how to win friends and influence people? The whole idea of a Rolodex, you save everyone.

You said that was your favorite book, right?

I mean, I thought Patrick o' Shaughnessy said he rereads it all the time. I read it. It is a fantastic book. It's one of these, like, timeless books. It's a little ridiculous because. Because it's like so such a, like over the. It's clickbait title, but, you know, clickbait works.

Yeah, no, the value. I like things that the value prop is in the title actually.

It's so old timey. Like, it's just, it's an interesting artifact because it's like, it's the type of like, business advice that you'd see on like a thread on Twitter these days. But it's from like the 1920s, so all the examples are like, really anti.

Because it's not. It's advice on human nature.

And human nature exactly hasn't changed.

That's why people still read it. And like, Charlie Munger's, one of his favorite book was Influence by Robert Cialdini. He liked it so much he gave him a single share of Berkshire stock when it was valued at like 500,000. I think today it's like 750.

Wow.

Pretty good compensation for writing a book.

That's awesome.

That's amazing.

I love that. When are you writing a book?

What's that?

When are you going to write a book?

Never.

No, because here's the thing, like I told you before, I mean, you guys know this because, like, I kind of like cornered you at Hereticon about how important podcasting is.

Yeah.

And you know, I get like, it's very nice because, like, I, as you guys know, most of the books I do, I cover like, really old. But publishers send me all of their, like, new books and, you know, I might do like one new book for every like 50 old books.

Yeah.

And they all, they send me their new books for distribution, but they also, like, will you be interested in writing a book?

Yeah.

And my point to them is, like, I. I think of podcasting as like one of the greatest technologies ever created. I think it's the printing press for the spoken word. And so me taking. And I think it's the highest and best use of my time. So me taking time away from that to do anything else but more podcasting doesn't make sense now that I. I talked to my friend Jimmy Sony, who I absolutely love, and he's. He wrote this great biography on Claude Shannon.

He wrote.

What's that?

He spoke at your event, the PayPal? Yep.

He wrote the Founders, the History of Founders. He's like another psycho obsessive. It took him longer to write the founders book than it took PayPal to be founded and then sold to ebay. So. But I called him, I was like, hey, just name your price and, you know, listen to the podcast. We'll have some conversations and if you can write this for me, like in partnership, then I'd be interested in doing that. So what I told him to do, it's one of my favorite books, is Will and Ariel Durant's Lessons of History. Right. You really think about that book? It's like they dedicated 50 years of their life to writing the history of civilization. It's probably, I don't know what, 10,000 pages all combined. And yet after that they're like, hey, we're going to do this fucking ridiculous thing of trying to write a biography of the human species, and we're going to limit to 100 pages. So I was like, okay, I would want to do that. What are the most important ideas that we've unveiled so far through the podcast and in the eight years of his existence and write this is the most important idea is in 100 pages. And so he got a bunch of stuff going on, including two books that are really fascinating that he's writing, but he said he's going to do it.

Very cool. Who are the entrepreneurs that are still building their legacy that you are hoping that they will live up to their full potential and one day be qualified to be, you know, given the full founders podcast treatment, I would put Eric and Kareem in that. In that bucket of, you know, ultra high potential, but still, you know, sort of just getting started in a sense. Are there people that stand out today that you're excited to cover in, you know, 15, 20 years? Right.

I'm going to tell you who my favorite founder alive is right now. And it's going to be surprising to people because I heard your episode yesterday where you talked about, like, how I'd call you up, John, and I'm like, find a simple idea and take it seriously. And I think that's one of the best pieces of advice. And you see it over and over again. I've been able. And some of these people I can't fucking name because of the Podcast. But I've been able to meet, like, these crazy, you know, family businesses where the founders, 80 years old, still running the company, no outside investors, worth $10 billion. And, you know, they just monopolize, like, crazy stuff like nails or packing equipment or shipping company or just, like, crazy, like, not very complicated ideas. Just, like, they found a simple idea and took it very seriously. I think one of the things I like about Eric and Karim is before we had this, like, very deep partnership. It's not obviously you guys, and this is not just, like, I'm not just, like, reading ads for them on my podcast. Like, we're friends, we spend a lot of time together. Our wives spend time together, our kids play together. And, you know, I took a long time getting to know them really well. One of the important things when we talked about this is like, is this your last company? Like, I'm not interested in, like, the people that want to start, scale, and sell. I'm interested in people that do something for a very long time. If you look at all the books behind me, these people literally work. And so for right here, like, he died, he worked on. There's no retirement. Like, it's like, Ferrari is my entire life. This is what my life energy goes to.

This.

Most of the people I cover on the podcast, you know, their life's work. And what I loved about both Eric and Kareem, like, this is the last company. Like, this is we. We want to build this forever. There's actually an interesting idea, and I'm trying to convince Kareem to do more. Not that he needs my advice by any means, but I really want him to be interviewed by Patrick just because I get to talk to him privately. And he's like, fucking brilliant, technical mind. And one of the things that he said that was very fascinating is he optimizes for spikes. And what that means is, especially as the company grows, you tend to try to even out and hire for personality. Or, yeah, this guy's talented, but he's kind of like an asshole, or he's comes in late or, like, you know, will show up for two days and kind of disappear. And I think what Kareem understood is what a lot of history entrepreneurs understand. There's a great line by David Ogilvy where he said that talent is likely. Is most likely to be found against, among misfits, non conformists and rebels. And what Kareem is interested in is not, like, your total package. He's interested in your very best idea. So, like, if you were the very best at X and he just wants you to do that for Ramp. And if you only last for six months, that's fine. It's like he just, he optimizes for spikes. And I think that's incredibly intelligent because it's also something that Steve Jobs says that he's like, you can never ever, ever, ever forget the dynamic range of human beings. That most things in life, you know, between the average of the best, it's like two to three, two, two times best, three times quality. Where he's like in software and hardware, it's like the difference is like 100x or a thousandx marketing too.

Not just, not just 10x engineers. TEDx ideas, 10x with Apple right now.

What's that?

You can see it with Apple right now. Gen Moji it like it's not crazy to think of the Yin and yang campaign that they ran as a thousand times better than the, than the Gen Moji campaign.

Yeah. And again, where does that come from? Where like Eric and what I like about Eric and Kareem is like they work like dogs just like I do. Right. And I'm really only interested. I just had came back from lunch. The reason I text you guys in five minutes late is because I was meeting another founder friend of mine and, and we had lunch with another friend and it's like all three of us have the same comments, like we're taking what we do very seriously. It's all different businesses. But Kareem works non stop. Right. Eric does too. And they want the pressure and they want, they do believe like something that Eric told me that was wild at breakfast was like when Ramp was founded, Amex was like a $70 billion market cap company. And now it's like 220 or whatever. So I heard at the very end he's talking about, yeah. People are saying, hey, we're valued at 13 million, that's fine. But like, you know, we're missing a zero, maybe two zeros. Like if we're doing this for a long period of time. Things grow in unpredictable ways. Like the people that I've met.

I like didn't ask him the question of, you know, I was, I'm genuinely curious, like, what do you do if you have five minutes in the day, you know, what are you doing for fun? And I don't even think that's worth asking Eric because I know he's just going to say, look, you know, I like to, you know, keep in touch with my family and. But otherwise I'm at the office thinking about work or I'm calling Senra. But. But yeah, it just didn't even seem like worth asking because I already know the answer.

One of the most interesting things I think they just put this out in, in that blog post, but we definitely talked about it too, is like, you know, they're doing like 54% of their payrolls on are dedicated to R and D. Like they're not just like, oh, we're, we're, look what we did in this amount of time. It's like, no, we're going to keep pushing the pace. This is again, the what I I, When I went to New York, I had dinner with Mike Ovitz that I had an intense three hour dinner with Obitz. So I'm making an episode in the dinner and I'm making an episode on on the book. And the way this came about is because I was at breakfast with a friend of mine and his phone was on the table and it rings and it's Mike Ovitz. And he picks up and he puts on speakerphone, he's like, hey, I'm actually sitting here with my friend David. He does this podcast you should know about Founders and Mike, without missing a beat, he goes, I love that podcast. I listened to four episodes yesterday and one of the things that me and Mike talked about at breakfast is like, nothing that Michael Ovitz said in his book are at dinner is like surprising to me. And because it's like founders is church for entrepreneur, I'm just telling the same story over and over again. It's the same personality type over and over and over again. And so yeah, of course, like when they're saying, hey, we're extremely dedicated to what we're doing, we're trying to get better, it's like, that's exactly what they should be doing. If this is going to be your last business, if this is your life's work, then you will have that like importance of every little detail. Like how many you guys see all the tweets. When people talk about the difference of like the UI and UX to ramp compared to some other people. Yeah, yeah. Your point about Apple, there's a great book called Creative selection. It's episode 281 of Founders. I think the title is Working with Steve Jobs, if I'm correct, might be wrong. Maybe 282. Probably 281. And that's one of the best books. I've read it three times because it talks about the care that Steve Jobs put to every single pixel of all the products they're making. And all the advertising. So that ad wouldn't have gone out because Steve would have had to approve every single ad that went out. There's a different level of care and love.

Yep.

What's your sleep score?

What's your sleep score?

Not. Not good. And I love Mateo. They were one of my early partners. Let's. It was. Here's the problem, because every. I'm so excited about. This is gonna be a big year.

Yeah.

And I have a lot of stuff coming that people don't know about. And, like, it's. It's not good. So last night was 70.

Oh, I got 88. What'd you do, Jordy?

The. The night. The night before is 56.

56.

I've never actually gotten.

I don't think I've ever gotten that low. You're grinding too hard.

No, no, I'm just very excited. This is like.

Yeah, no, it makes sense.

One of my favorite founders you mentioned earlier is. Or you were asking earlier, is Dana White. I think what he did, what him and the Fertitta brothers did with the UFC buying out of bankruptcy for like 2 billion or 2. 2 million. And then, you know, selling. Selling it for whatever the number is and still staying on there. And I saw a clip from a podcast interview that he said, that's excellent. And it's like, very. Again, I like simple ideas. He's just like, build a life that you can't. Like, you can't wait to wake up to. And he's like, I. People are always asking me, oh, when are you going to retire from the ufc? And he's just like, retire from what? Like, I get to put on the best fights in the world, I get to travel, and I get to stay in the nicest hotels, eat at the nicest restaurants, like, put on the best live events. He's like, I'm gonna be doing this till I'm 80.

Yeah.

You know, and I just love that idea. Like, very simple idea. Am I building a life that I cannot wait to wake up to?

It's fantastic.

One industry oriented question, and then I have. I just want you to rant about a specific topic. So what's going on with Spotify? Yesterday for the first time, I got a clickbait style video suggest suggested to me on Spotify that was like. I tried zero star tech and it was like this like, kind of like YouTube video. It looked exactly like a YouTube video.

It was a YouTube video. It was just a YouTube video.

Came out. Came out, you know, last week. That YouTube's the biggest podcast platform in the world. Now that's obviously not, you know, sort of not great for Spotify. How do you see Spotify as a platform evolving?

So I don't see. This is another thing because keep in mind I like study people for a living. Right. I think that's really the only edge I have. So we've talked about this. Like when I think of like people, like people think of like their portfolio, they tend to like list companies. Mine is like people, people. It's like, oh, I invested in this dude and I invested in Justin or Sebastian or like that Long Daniel. What's that?

And so, and so in this analogy, you're Long Daniel Ek.

Daniel's the best. Like he's the most. Like the car dude. Yes. I've spent a bunch of time with him. I consider him a friend, like a legit friend. And it's shocking that we're friends. But like every time I talk to him, like he is the idea that what is Spotify? Like $120 billion market cap company or something Today I don't pay attention to any like the stock market, but like it's public. Yeah. Hold up and inform this. It's over 100 billion. I imagine.

120. Nailed it.

Okay, so how the hell is the guy that's been running the company for 18 years? He's the founder, he's still there. He's what, 42, like Young, 44. I don't know, something like that. He's like so underrated. More people should study him. Like he doesn't give a bunch of interviews and usually the interviews around product announcements, but like I don't know what's going to happen with Spotify, but I would back up the truck. Truck in anything that Daniel does. And as long as Daniel's there and his team, I've met his team, they're incredible. Like, yeah, they also knew exactly what.

Was going to happen. This is like famous like founders fund lore is that like Sean Parker and Daniel Eck come in and they're like, and they're like we are going to execute like the Napster type music sharing strategy, but it's all going to be legal. We're going to build this platform. And they projected something like, I don't remember the exact number, but they're like in the, in the investment memo. It's like in 2025 we'll have 300 million DAUs. And they got it within like 10% or something. It was like a 20 year projection and they nailed it. It was crazy.

Listen, more Important. He's one of the greatest living entrepreneurs, without a doubt. That's not even including the stuff he's doing outside of Spotify, which is fucking awesome. Incredible and impactful. More important that he's like a good guy. So I want, I'm. I'm going to do more of these like I had dinner with episodes. You know, they're people seem to like them and I like doing them and I had dinner with. And this one had to be like anonymous. So I don't know, I'm not going to make an episode on it but because I asked the guy, I mentioned this briefly in an episode, but I was like, I had dinner with, you know, one. I got the opportunity to have dinner with one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Very unknown, right? His family, it's a multi generation dynasty and his family commissioned biographies for certain people in the family. And of course when he told me that I was like, oh, let me get those. And he's like, this is how you say bad boys move in silence. That Maxim that reappears over and over again in history of entrepreneurship came from Rockefeller. He's like, absolutely not. I go, why not? And he goes, because I'm not interested in educating my competitors. And the dinner was incredible. But he knows Daniel and he was just like, there's, he's. What do you think of Daniel? He's incredible. One of the best entrepreneurs in the world. This guy's telling me he's like. But more important than like he, his like when you speak to him like he's a kind person. He's not one of these, you know, assholes. He has no ego. No ego. He's not much older than all three of us. Well, maybe a lot older than Jordy. I forgot how young Jordy is. But like it's incredible what this guy has done. And you know, I, I think more people should spend time studying him. Like we're going to.

True.

We're going to do. He already agreed to like we're going to do. I had dinner with Daniel episode soon because I had an incredible dinner with him. It was the most important. You know what I fucking think of him. I get to meet a lot of incredible people. Last year was the craziest year of my life. That conversation, that conversation I with Daniel was by far the most important because like he doesn't, he sees no ceiling to what he can achieve. And then he takes that self belief and he transfers it to you, which I think is very, very important. So I have no idea that they look what the fuck have they've done in podcasting so far? And they're going to continue to do what I would say if people are interested in learning more about Spotify, they made. I was just in Stockholm and I found this out. They made a short series on the history of Spotify. Sean Parker's in there, Daniel's in there. It's called Spotify A product story. It was out in like 2021 and I think it's eight or nine series, eight or nine episodes. And then they update it later. But you could just listen to the first ones. And again, Everybody's talking about AI right? In 2000, whatever year. I don't. 2025. They're. They were talking about it half a decade ago. They were using it half a decade ago. They're just. He's, he's, he's great. That's all I have to say.

Like, two minutes left.

Yeah.

Question for you. We're at a unique moment in time where it doesn't feel like the. A lot of entrepreneurs can afford to not pay attention to geopolitics, right? There's been a lot of time in the last 20 years where the generalized advice was focus on your customers. You can kind of ignore everything else. And if you're delivering value for your customers, then you'll do well. We're at a period where there's tariffs coming down. It's impacting a lot of businesses here in the US and entrepreneurs. Who should those entrepreneurs study in the founders world in terms of, you know, entrepreneurs and companies that had to navigate sort of like. Or does it not even matter, right? Or is it still just this?

This is the biggest thing, man. Like you're. The problem is everybody's so focused on, on the present, right? And history allows you to like take a step back and have a perspective and instead of like being in front of your fucking face all day long. And so like, here's a great book. I just did this episode. It's like absolutely ripping. It's called 400 pages of Munger and Buffett in their own words. And in there it talks about the fact that you could have bought Coca Cola after World War II. I'm making up the numbers, but World War I for nothing. And it went up by 10,000x since then or whatever the number is. And the point being is Buffett's point was there's a lot of smart investors and other people and smart capitalists that pass because they're like, oh, like there's all this uncertainty, there's political Uncertainties, there's wars, there's pandemics. So if you think about everything that happened from like 1910 to up until when he's saying this is probably like 1990s, you know, you went through two world wars, you went through multiple pandemics, you went through all this turmoil, you went through asset bubble, asset class collapses, high interest rates, low interest rates. Everything else he goes, at the end of the day, you know what mattered, that 60 years from now they're going to be, they're going to be serving a billion servings, 8 ounce servings of coke a day. And if somebody is making a billion people slightly happier every day by, by serving this drink to them, that person should make a little bit of money and probably will make a little bit of money. So I don't, I'm not actually a good person to ask that question, surprisingly so, because like the amount you guys know this is like the amount of what I don't, I ignore. I figure that this the important stuff, like I'll know about wars, I'll know about pandemics, but I have no idea like who's leading in the stock market. I don't pay, I don't like reading the news. I don't do any of this because what, what matters is like I just stay focused on my customer, right? So if I wake up every day and I read for a few hours, you know, a biography of one of history's great entrepreneurs, and I sit down once a week and I talk to you for an hour and I just rip through idea after idea in an hour that you can listen to on 1.5x speed. So it takes 40 minutes to you, right? There's nothing else, everything else under control. I will get everything I want in life and that I deserve if I just focus on that. Just focus. Delivering value as much as possible.

Yeah. And another, another way to look at this is if, if you are, if the company that, if you're an entrepreneur and you're running a company that's not your last company, it's the sort of geopolitical environment right now is hyper stressful, right. Because you're thinking about, oh, I want to sell the company, I want to exit and all that stuff. But if you're thinking about, you know, still running the company in 20, 30 years from now, it really doesn't matter what happens in the next four years. You just need to, you know, make it through and make dead on.

I'm glad you said that because this just spawned another thought to me, right? Where for Some reason. And this has not been like, on purpose. I've been spending a lot of money or spending a lot of time with like family offices and, and a world I didn't know anything about. And I asked some questions like, who's the largest, like, American family office? And you know, a lot of them are dispersed. Whatever the case was, like, highly likely it's the Waltons, right? You know, Sam Walton's kids and grandkids. I was. If you, if you pass the Miami Beach Marina, right? If, if you're coming from downtown to, to the beach, you'll see this giant boat. I looked it up one day, it was like Sam Walton's brother's daughter's boat, right? It's like bigger or ship bigger than anything else, even remote in a giant marina. And it's like it sticks out like a sore thumb. So there's a great biography that I actually read. It's called Sam Walton, America's Richest man, written by Vance Trimble. And it was actually published a year before Sam Walton's autobiography came out. And he had a funny story in there because Sam was very private, just focused on satisfying the customer. And then everybody sees Walmart stock. Oh, this is the richest man in America. So during Black Friday, that was, I think 1987, right. Sam didn't have a cell phone. He doesn't have a beeper, he doesn't have Internet. Right.

So he's driving Black Friday, the retail.

No, Black Friday.

Or the actual stock market crash. I just want to clarify because you're talking about a retail entrepreneur. Good point, good point. Also a big day.

Yeah. Black Friday, biggest stock, I think, single day stock crash ever. I assume that still holds the record. And so anyways, on paper he lost like a billion dollars, right? So he goes, he's given a speech at like this charity event, I think in Arkansas for like kids or something. And somebody, he takes questions after somebody asks him questions, like, how does it feel to lose a billion dollars in the stock market today? And his, his response was great. He goes, I didn't, I didn't hear about it. He didn't care because he's just like, I don't care. I'm just like focused on my business. I'm not selling the stock today. I'm never selling it. Like, like it. All that matters is that he was, he really, he took a. If you mean take a simple idea and take it seriously. His dedication to that simple idea. E. Everyday low price. So edlp, this is everyday low price. Let's just make sure we have the lowest price for our customers. And so let's work backwards from that. We just focus on that. We'll do that forever. And you fast forward and it's like one of the greatest. If it was concentrated in one person, it might be one of the. It is one of the greatest fortunes ever created by taking a simple idea and taking it very seriously.

It's fantastic.

David, we love you.

Thanks for joining.

Thank you for joining. Expect expect us to send you a zoom link once a week forever. Because we're.

We're all in a catch up. I love this.

Yeah, you just.

Next time in California. I got a suit up though.

Oh, yeah, we'll do it.

Suit. Hey, where's. You said you were gonna frame. Where's that picture?

Oh, yeah, it's like the Munger. It's like the Munger picture that we're gonna do. We're getting a picture of the Godfather. The most powerful man in Miami. David Senra, you really are the most.

Powerful man in Miami. Not even close. Not even close, man. I think too humble.

You're acting like you're spending too much time with Eric. You're too humble. You're the most powerful man in Miami.

I think if you go to Miami, you got to check in with center. You got to let him know he's going to. He's going to. Yeah. You got to email him. We'll drop his phone number, we'll drop his personal address in the comments and you can go stop by, he's socializing, invite him to really big events. If it's crowded, like a, you know, conference room, hall, Las Vegas, invite him to that. That's where he's really in his element. Book signing, you know, podcast signing.

Real quick before I go. So our mutual friend Patrick always gets on me because he's just like, he'll like, try to connect with people or like, he's like, David doesn't read his email. Like he's just unreachable. And he goes, why don't you have an assistant? I go, why do I need an assistant? He goes to answer these emails and they're like, manage your schedule. I go, why do I need a schedule? Like, I just need to wake up every day, read for a few hours, sit down once a week and talk about what I read. I don't need to do anything else. I don't need to do anything else. It's that simple.

It was great. This morning we actually published on our X account that you were calling in and you hadn't fully confirmed you'd been like partially confirmed. It was like David Senra calling in at 2:00pm Yeah, I, unless I'm absolutely.

Indisposed by creating a podcast, I will always answer for you guys. You know that.

Fantastic.

All right, all right. You're the man.

I love you guys. Talk to you later.

Love you.

Talk to you later.

Talk soon.

Bye bye. Do you want to do 10 minutes quick on tariffs?

Yeah.

Okay.

I'd like to just sprinkle in a little geopolitics.

Yeah, I think it is, I think it is an interesting question about like, you know, this was the result of Coinbase. Like Brian Armstrong said, look, we are not going to be participating. We are a mission driven company. We're not going to be participating in every political fight, every culture war issue. But that doesn't mean that we're going to stay out of crypto lobbying. We do need to be regulated effectively. And so it's this weird balance of like, yeah, we're not getting fully political, but we're also not completely apolitical. We care about our industry and the things that we're experts in. So I think, look, yes, if you're just some random AI SaaS founder, you might not care about tariffs between Canada and Mexico, but if you're manufacturing something there and it's coming, that does make, that does matter. All of a sudden that is a tech issue. Like when we talked to Ryan Peterson, he was saying the same thing. He was like, well, this matters to me.

Yeah, you know, so we, we have a bunch of good posts in here. Why don't we quickly run through the article.

Okay.

And then we'll, we'll jump into. Because I think the news is that.

Trump imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada. It took effect first thing Tuesday. Canada responded with plans to impose 25% tariffs on about $100 billion worth of U.S. imports. Trudeau said Trump is acting in bad faith. Mexico's president said it would also retaliate with a range of moves to be announced Sunday. The US is also introduced an extra 10% tariff on Chinese imports overnight, adding to a levy imposed a month ago. So everything's ramping up. China announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural goods and other measures against American companies. Beijing also filed a lawsuit with the World Trade, with the World Trade Organization. And so investors were rattled.

Any way to get to Trump? The.

The market sold off generally. And yeah, it's been not like full chaos, but definitely one of those things like tariffs are taxes. You know, they kind of suck energy out of economic systems. They can be very good for certain things, especially if you're getting a super raw deal and a country is really, you know, just destroying your ability to produce something or, or playing some sort of long game that you're not considering. But of course, there are a lot of pushback for this. So let's go through some of the reaction. Logan Bartlett had a post. He said the trouble. He's quoting David Kelly, the chief global strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management. And David Kelly says the trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity, and increase global tensions. Other than that, they are fine. So bit of a hot take. Keith gets in there.

Most of that is false. And then Logan fires back and says, I put it in quotes so I could obfuscate responsibility for saying it.

I love it.

Which is smart. Phenomenal strategy.

Good posting strategy. I don't know. What do you think?

Which side do you take on this? You know, I'm very grateful in moments like this that we are a technology and business show. I. I've approached this from the point of view of, this is making life really, really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs that I respect and want to see do well. And so from that lens, from a purely sort of personal angle, it's, you know, it's tough to see. But at the same time, there's been precedent throughout history where we've implemented tariffs like this and seen, seen, seen positives out of it. Right. So I just think, I just think it, you know, I think that Mexico and Canada have the, the right to be able to say, like, you know, Trump's acting in bad faith because he's been sort of like, you know, he's playing with people's livelihood to a very extreme degree. I, I thought it was worth jumping down to something before we do that.

Yeah, I just have a. I don't know if it's a problem with this, but it just feels so inconsistent because if you think about what's going on with the tariffs on tech companies, China effectively has a 100% profit margin tariff on social networking, Facebook, Instagram. They're banned. They can't make any money. It's a 100% tariff, effectively, and yet we haven't banned TikTok.

Yeah.

And so it's like, it's like if we're not. That is the most clear to me that it's like that trade imbalance is crazy right there, and we're not doing anything about that. But then we are doing stuff about, you know, agriculture and cars and stuff. All that stuff's important. And I don't know, we'll have to see how this plays out. I mean, the last round of tariffs, it seemed like it went pretty well, like, all through, like, the economy tended to grow pretty well during the last Trump administration. So I'm like, I'm cautiously optimistic that all these gyrations in the market kind of get worked out and things wind up doing well. Of course, we got like, smacked with COVID right at the end. So it's very easy to look at, like, oh, unemployment was way up when Trump got out. And it's like, well, there was like this crazy, you know, once in a century event that happened.

Yeah.

But the core, the core, like, let's renegotiate trade deals. It wasn't as disastrous as I think people thought it was going to be. So. But I think that to Isaac's point here, like, if you're in the. If you're in the crosshairs, if it hurts a thousand times more.

Yeah. So Isaac says here these tariffs are going to wipe out the entire net margin of a ton of businesses, lots of them, my friends. Real people, real livelihoods, real employers with lots of jobs. Having your dream squashed, smashed by geopolitical whims. Sucks. Yep. And he had another post that I thought was great. I have it pulled up myself here. He says it's so easy to see numbers and detach them from people. That 25% tariff, it kills a ton of jobs and livelihoods. Families will feel pain. Those casualties in a war. Real people, not just a number. That grifting. You see in broad daylight. The money came from real people, maybe a college fund, maybe someone's entire savings. It's easy to see a number and have zero empathy. So I think this is the right sort of point of view right now. It's way too early to say they're all bad or they're all good or really kind of like we don't know what the impact is yet. We see what's happening in the public markets and that's, you know, based on sort of fear and a bunch of these other sort of factors that are getting sort of priced in, in different ways. But I think it's just important to, as a technology and business show on the business side, a lot of great entrepreneurs are being affected by this.

I mean, a lot of DSC companies will source internationally and just to keep the business going, they're spending what, 25% of the revenue on marketing. There's like the profit margins are pretty thin. Yes. Yeah. And so an increase like that could really wipe you out. Fortunately, like, there has been really wide signaling on this for a while that like, you know, you're going to need to reshore at some point. Yeah. Spinning up new manufacturing can be difficult, but it can be done on the order of a year for most things. I mean, you look at, you look at how fast I think what things? Hopefully. Hopefully there's, you know, people.

I think what makes sense is generally this idea that we need more targeted tariffs. So a tariff on TikTok. Right. Effectively 100% tariff on TikTok in the same way that they. By banning US social media and China.

It'S effectively tariff on smile.

Yeah.

A tariff on fentanyl. A tariff on terrorists.

No. And the other thing is, is, you know, for Trump to be fully taken seriously, he should be thinking about, hey, we don't want millions of unitree humanoid robots, like walking our streets in our homes.

I mean, on the thing, like, the tariffs have been way ahead of this. Where. To the point where I never see a Chinese EV.

Yeah.

Because there was 100% tariff on day one, basically. And they. They're not even trying to send them over here because it's just like it's been determined even in the last administration, like, hey, we're not doing that this time. It's just not going to be a thing. And I think that's probably the right move.

Yeah. Luke, Metro had a good post. He quote tweeted the Atlanta Fed. They said on March 3, the GDP now model now cast of real GDP growth in Q1 2025 is negative 2.8%.

Not good.

Which is.

We wanted 10%. Satya was telling us I would get.

A. Satya promised 10%. He said if we just signed up for Clippy. If we just listen to Clippy. No, I'm kidding. I love it. Satya implied that if we listen to. To. He said, just listen to what Clippy says.

GDP growth.

Listen to what Clippy says. 10% GDP growth. But Luke, Luke quote tweets this and says my ideal economic system is where we inflict large damage on the populace via trade wars, but keep the wealth of the oligarchs propped up via dumb speculative bs.

Wow. Yeah, it's hilarious considering the crypto exchange.

Yeah. The timing of that was a little inconsiderate. I mean it. It's got to be. You know, if you're an E commerce operator that just had your Margin wiped out and it's like, don't worry.

The money that we're taking from you, we're going to put in Cardano.

Yeah. So you're going to make it all back in one trade, buddy.

Yeah. But now you own some of that Cardano.

Yep.

Yeah, we'll see.

Yeah, that's hilarious. Anyway, anyways, do we have Bridget ready to call in?

How we doing? We are bringing on Bridget from Founders Fund. She is an investor in crypto works with Joey Krug over there, good friend of mine. And we are bringing her on to cover the Prime Intellect fundraise that just happened. Do you know the story of the metamorphosis of the prime intellect?

No. Tell me.

It is. So a couple of years ago on, on Lex Friedman, George Hotz, the comma AI guy is talking about how he thinks AI will like evolve. Oh, hey, Bridget.

Bridget.

Oh, hey.

Hi.

Welcome to the show.

How's it going guys?

We have you read Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect?

No, no, but all of, all of Prime's like design, their logo, all of that is inspired by it. Yeah, I think we have a copy in the office actually. But I haven't read it.

It's. I mean I don't want to like spoil it, but Andre Karpathy also listed it as like one of the greatest like sci fi prediction books like or you know, in general. And his, his summary which I think summarize as well is just AGI gone mixed and it's very, very weird. It's like, it's like what happens when you're in this post scarcity society and you want some sort of like social reward or some sort of like reward. But everything's like post scarcity because you can just will anything so no one ever dies. But then, you know, what do you do? And it gets very, very weird. It's very bizarre. And George highlighted on the, on the Alex Friedman podcast and so it became very popular and then there was a, there was a sequel to the book as well, like Last Casino on In the Universe or something. But it's pretty like, I don't know, it's like spooky to me. But I highly recommend everyone check it out anyway. Yeah, we want you to break down the deal. Give us how'd you meet the founder? How'd we wind up doing the deal? And just give us a background on what Prime Intellect is, what they do. Give us the high level.

Yeah, definitely. So we met them, I want to say about a year ago we actually reached out to them because most of the AI crypto projects we had seen had been just not really interesting. It was more like copy paste from existing AI companies. And then they would slap a token on top so it would be like character AI but with a token, like LangChain, but with a token, like hugging face with a token, that kind of thing. And I think we saw prime announce their like 1 billion parameter model trained in a distributed way across like three continents. And then we reached out to them and we were like, wow, like we would love to, to meet you guys and chat, you know, more about it. And we met with them at literally like I think the first meeting, like we were sold, like we were like, these founders are like a level top tier killers like Vincent and Johannes. You can just feel the energy radiating off them. They're very passionate about what they do. They're in crypto AI for the right reasons. Whereas I think a lot of founders just hopped into this space after a lot of the hype took off. And we're looking for a quick token pump. But that could not be further from the team Vincent has built and what they're doing. So basically they're tackling the problem of distributed training, which access to compute is one of the largest bottlenec in AI training today. And you have these huge data centers that are centralized and power constrained and expensive. And what prime is doing is it's basically like a true peer to peer marketplace where you can go on and bid for compute and then suppliers can go on and supply idle compute and then it has crypto incentives layered on.

Top to really look at the Render network. I think it's the Octane team, what they did in cgi. Have you seen this?

I don't know if I.

Okay, I've seen like render and Akash, I don't know if I've seen the.

Cgi, okay, because this was the thing like years ago and everyone was like, oh like, you know, crypto tokens, like it's all fake, whatever. But I have been doing a bunch of CGI work where you would need to go and render like whatever scene you built in Cinema 4D. And you needed a bunch of GPUs. Not as many as like a training run for an LLM. But, but you, you send out each frame and each frame is like deterministic. So you can, so you can very easily parallelize these and you can run it on aws. But there was a company that actually built a very similar system where you could kind of sell back your excess GPU time onto the render network, I think it was kind of like low tam because the amount of independent artists, like Pixar has Disney, they have their own server farms and then like the low end, like clients, like people tinkering is kind of small but it was very cool that it was like oh wow, this, this makes a ton of sense. How do people actually transact in this? Like having a token that moves these, you know, GPU resources around made a ton of sense, 100% and so it's cool, it makes a lot of sense. In the, in the age of AI. Do you know more about kind of like early use cases? Obviously like the frontier insane like you know, gigawatt scale that's going to come in the future.

Right, right.

What, what are some of the more exciting use cases in like the near term? Is it just like fine tuning stuff? Do you have any insight there?

Yeah, so I mean they're right now they're basically working on just like scaling this up to like state of the art level model. Like they did the 1.1 billion parameter you know, training run. Like a few months later they completed like a 10 billion parameter training run and then you know, basically just serving as like the, the peer to peer marketplace between the supply and demand side. So like on the demand side you have like AI startups that need extra compute, like labs, like you know, random independent developers, that sort of thing. And then on a supply side it's like data centers and then individuals and also startups with idle compute. Like you have like hugging face like semi analysis that want to just like earn extra for their idle compute. So it's basically just like the way we think about it is just enabling the AI market to progress at a much faster rate because it's just like enabling all this idle compute to be put to work. And then on their end it's like basically what they did is Google DeepMind released a paper called like dloco which stands for like distributed low communications framework. And they implemented but in like an open source way like they called it opendloco such that like you can train across like many different continents. And that was like a huge step function improvement like from the research side that, that we've seen.

So it's basically about that like they have that spanner and bigquery and like they, they just are so good at taking some sort of like database and being like oh yeah, now it works globally and deals with all the time zone issues. Just feels like incredibly hard engineering. But they always figure it out and then, and of course it Opens up a million other things. Jordan, what questions do you have for Bridget?

Yeah, so taking a little sit back from Prime Intellect, one question I've had that you might have some insight on is was there a frustration among crypto founders that are seeing the news on Sunday and general frustration around not being included in the reserve? Right. It seems like that the reserve was effectively, you take the top five biggest projects by market cap and you just put it in a reserve. Right. It didn't seem like it was super thoughtful. Was there any idea leading up to this that there would have been any surprises on that list? And I'm curious around sort of your response, but also across the portfolio, how founders are kind of reacting to that that are running through these bigger market cap projects?

Yeah, no, it's a really good question. I think generally people were a little bit upset because the xrp, the Cardano inclusion just. There's basically two plausible explanations that I think the crypto community came to for why this could be the case. One is just simple unit bias. XRP and Cardano are 0.001 cent or something akin to that. And a lot of Americans will like, you know, go and see that, oh, Cardano is like $0.01 and Bitcoin's like 100k and like they'll genuinely just go and buy like Cardano because, like, it's cheaper. And so like the, the, the joke on Twitter is like, you know, like Uber drivers everywhere are celebrating that Cardano's in the strategic reserve and like it, you know, Trump could be playing some like 40 chess to like curry favor with a lot of just these like retail buyers. So that's, that's explanation one, that these buyers have like unit bias and Trump's trying to curry favor with them. Explanation 2, and this came from like UDI at Taproot Wizards is basically like Trump is going way too far in, you know, the extreme direction of we're including all these crazy assets in the reserve because it does require an act of, you know, Congress and then he's going to roll back and kind of be like, okay, I'm making a concession. I'm making a compromise.

Interesting.

And we'll just have bitcoin. And because he always kind of at the outset goes like way too far, way too intense, you know, and then kind of rolls back and acts like he's huge concession where a bitcoin reserve would already be a huge, you know, act for Congress to make. But yeah, yeah, I think, I think those are telling.

John, earlier I said that Trump doesn't get enough credit for not including Trump Coin in the reserve because, you know, he's talking with his team, thinking about it.

Why don't we put in the names big? Why not?

No, exactly. Let's, let's, let's put in the whole. Every White House coin. Put it in there.

Yeah, like if Trump had just launched the Trump Coin and not Melania, like there's all these jokes on Twitter of like, society would be like amazing. Like, you know, crypto would be mooning as like the Melania launch, like messed up our whole industry.

But yeah, it really does feel that way. What is, you know, what, what's the broader sentiment on the investor side right now? Any of the crypto focused investors that I know, the ones that have done well have just taken a very long point of view. They understand that the market has cycles and you need to be, you know, kind of basically deploying, you know, throughout, you know, consistently if you want to sort of benefit from, benefit from these sort of peaks. How, you know, and again, we also saw this sort of bunch of AI slop in the sort of crypto markets. What are the areas that you think are most exciting? Specifically in the context that, you know, the joke is that crime is legal now, but more seriously, we're in a favorable regulatory environment for basically the first time in history. And it does feel like, like the next four years are an amazing opportunity to realize the full potential of the technology. Right. Specifically around, you know, I'm sure areas that you're looking at a lot. So where are you most excited to invest? What, what is the general sentiment right now? Do you feel like people have pulled back, you know, talk, talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. So like when Joey and I started at Founders Fund, like almost, almost two years ago now, the sentiment was terrible. Like it was six months post ftx, like, you know, no one was deploying crypto only funds were not deploying. Generalist funds were definitely not deploying. Yeah. And that was one reason I wanted to join Founders Fund because I was like, wow, this is like actually a contrarian act. Then we did start deploying it.

It was so funny. You guys just came in and went so hard so fast.

Just like started doing so many deals.

It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah. But no, and it was like in retrospect the best time to start deploying. Like, obviously it's easy. Easier said than, than done. But now, yeah, I think the market, it's interesting because I mean, the sentiment isn't amazing. But I would say prices on new deals that we've been seeing have been like asymmetrically high. Like we. The last deal we did was Prime Intellect and that was in, I want to say, October or November. So we haven't done like a net new deal in like, you know, 5, 5ish months. I think what we're continuing to look for is basically like applications uniquely enabled by crypto where like integrating crypto is like a step function improvement to what you would currently have. So an example is like polymarket, like prediction markets obviously existed before polymarket, you know, but they were very illiquid. Your counterparty was, you know, across the world, betting in a different currency with a different bank account. There was chargeback risk and doing all the conversion on the back end was super costly. And. But now if you're just, you know, if you're just using crypto, it genuinely does like make a lot more sense from just like streamlining the, you know, the, the market side and Prime Intellect, you know, it also applies to that. It's basically just like the same thing, but for compute, if you were, you know, paying in a different currency like to access compute, like, it would be a lot of work on the back end on the protocol side. And that's why there's like these compute brokerages that charge like insane markups. And also back to polymarker really quick too, is like Joey always tells the story, but like, if you win too much on prediction markets, like they would actually just like ban you back in the day.

Like they would live the same as Vegas, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, I believe Nate Silver is banned from all the sports betting apps.

Yeah, I mean, Dana White. Dana White has these stories of casinos. You know, he.

No one bans him because he loses.

No, no. He's super into baccarat and he actually does well. He does, he does well. And he's had casinos. He's telling a story about losing like six figures. He goes way. No, he goes up seven figures, down seven figures, whatever. But he's gone on these sort of.

He's high Vol. High beta.

Exactly.

Yeah. No, it's insane. Yeah. And then I, I think the last thing I'll say is like, I think Defi in America is definitely like a lot more, you know, better positioned now in the sense that like Defi founders had it the worst. I think the past four years, like many of our founders just fully moved out of the United States because the risk was just like, you know, way too high. But we're going to get a new like market structure bill and hopefully we'll see like regulatory exemptions for, for defi protocol is you can't regulate defi in the same way you regulate like an exchange or brokerage. Right? Like it's just a set of smart contracts. And so like there should be exemptions like we see in like the, you know, there's exemptions in the fit 21 bill, but you know, I never, it's, it's all still in the works. But if we do get exemptions for defi founders, I think like that will kind of usher in a new, you know, era for Defi. Maybe that's another Defi summer.

Do you think this starts with like bitcoin lending? Is that kind of like the first Lava? Lava?

Lava, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we invested in Lava. Yeah. It's definitely a very interesting use case. I think defi is just like, it's such a broad sector, but bitcoin is like, Bitcoin does enable like a huge use case in defi because so, you know, so many people own bitcoin. Like there's just so much capital inflows to bitcoin and like if you can lend against your bitcoin and make your asset more productive, like there's going to be so many whales that, that, that, that want to do that. Like they just do not want to sell. But even for regular defi, like if you look at like defi summer in 2021, like, you know, a lot of founders got in trouble for what they were doing and it was just, it was just such a new market that people didn't even know what was allowed versus not. And then the SEC was issuing like Wells notices to like the most compliant companies like Uniswap, Coinbase, like things like that. So I do think that with people saying crime cycle, like I think those people are a little overblown because I actually think the, the new just really, really smart. Like I don't think they'll be issuing Wells notices at random to like Coinbase and Uniswap because that's just dumb. But like they will be actually going after like legit scams. So I would say like act according.

I mean, yeah, for the last four years the best like cop in crypto was like Coffeezilla. It was basically like, like the only hope that you can, the only hope you have if you're like seeing a scam happen is Coffeezilla makes a video and then everyone realizes it and it's one. But like, like the SEC is Not going to step in for any of these things.

No, exactly.

Where do you.

But now there's a lot of room to just be smart and actually just go after the scams and like the power law. Bad stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you still. Where do you see opportunities around founders that are interested building in the stablecoin space? The Bridge acquisition, I think, was fantastic for crypto broadly. It really was a real stamp of approval for Stripe to go out and pay this sort of. Of pretty significant revenue multiple to buy a developer platform, a crypto developer platform, which Bridge is. And then from what we know, that sort of spawned a wave of new stablecoin startups to come out. Say we're building in stablecoins too.

Right.

And so I'm sure you saw a lot of those companies. Where are you excited about the potential of stablecoins and going forward?

Yeah, it's a really good question. Yeah. I think after the Bridge acquisition, we genuinely got probably like 50 stable coin pitches. Like, it was legitimately, like, insane. Yeah. But no, I think right now the most interesting use case for stablecoins is probably in B2B payments, just because that's where there's the most volume. It's like, yeah, like literally like billions and billions of dollars of volume per year. And B2B payments, like cross border, historically just take so long, there's insane markups. Like the bank takes a lot of fees. I think on the consumer side, like, the argument is basically like, okay, you know, if a user like, swipes their card, you know, Visa and MasterCard take like a 2% fee, a lot of that goes to the issuing bank and then it will actually flow back to the user in the form of, like, rewards. And that's such a different story than if, like, I want to pay like, like Coogan or something, and Coogan's in Europe or whatever, and it takes like five days and it, you know, they charge like 2%. Like, that's just like kind of scammy. Right. Like, that should not be a thing anymore. So I think that's an interesting use case. On the, on the consumer side, a lot of people are arguing, like, on the credit card side, like, it might be stable coins under the hood, but, you know, it's doubtful that the user will like, know it's stable coins, at least to start. But Yeah, I think B2B payments is like, that's where there's the most volume, that's where there's the most incentive for like, startups to compete. And then the issue there is like, getting the regulatory stuff figured out the corridors opened in these different markets and then just.

Yeah.

Starting to capture the volume. But.

And the infrastructure to prevent Citibank from sending a trillion dollars. Yeah.

Oh my God. Yeah.

Like, how do you solve the fat finger issue? Like, obviously you can do multi sigs, but let's say you have a group at Citibank, they're like, all right, we got to send some stablecoins to somebody. And then it's late at night and one person signs off and someone else signs off and like three people fat finger it collectively. And you're like, well, we have these protections in place and now we have to go ask the customer nicely.

Like, Citibank should not get into crypto because like that money would be gone forever if it was crypto.

There's no way, honestly, there's going to be huge alpha and just being a Citibank customer and signing up for as many account as possible. No, but I think those are, I mean, I think those are real things to figure out. It's my last company. Like we, we enabled, you know, stablecoin investing and, and, and we actually had, like, I won't even name them, but billion dollar crypto companies that were customer of ours that said at the time, this was 20, early 2022. We don't want to accept stablecoins as too much of a hassle. And so I think that's, I think that's evolving. But Bridget, amazing to have you on. Thank you. You're a regular now. Welcome.

Thank you guys.

And we're looking forward to having Vincent on the show as well.

Yeah.

Awesome. Thanks for stopping.

Bye.

Bye, guys.

Very fun. What should we run?

Do we have another guest or we just diving back into the show?

I mean, we can call Sean McGuire right now. I have his phone number. He hasn't responded to me.

Give him a shout.

Should I just give him a phone call?

Yeah, I don't want to.

Doctors. I need to make sure the camera doesn't, doesn't see anything. Let me see. Should I just. For some reason, it's, it's. I don't want to talk more about this, but let's see.

I. Sean.

Okay. He didn't pick up. Oh, well, next time, next time we'll get him, we'll get him. We'll send him this clip, we'll post this clip and then he'll feel a lot of pressure to come on the show. Anyway, let's get into some time. We haven't done timeline because we had a lot of guests. We got to go through some timeline. First up, David Holes, founder of Mid Journey, founder of Leap Motion. He says chemistry to biology, silicon to blank. What do you think? I don't even remember who put this in there.

You put this in. Oh no, you're.

Yeah, yeah.

Or, or, or Brett.

I think it was Brett. What?

We got somebody new joining the team.

So we got some buddies on the show helping out. I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like what he's getting is like, is like, you know, biology is built on top of the chemistry, silicon. He's, he's clearly getting at like some sort of like AI metaphor and like how you understand like the mind and.

The.

Consciousness that emerges on top of these systems.

Yeah, I mean random sort of adjacent topic is Rabboy yesterday saying what comes after LLMs, like what is the next iteration of LLMs? And sort of our understanding and application of a technology that everybody's talking about, but we don't know its full potential yet.

Yeah. I was remarking the other day, I was watching this interesting video about how Dall E and all the image generators can't generate a wine glass that's full. Have you seen this?

I haven't.

So you can say it starts with this like incredible interaction where it's basically saying like, hey, Chachi petite, can you generate a wine glass that's full to the brim to the top and it gives you a half full wine glass and then you say oh no, like you made a mistake. Like actually fill it to the top all the way 100. You give it more context. It's like on it totally understand returns. And it's like, like the same. It's because apparently there's just like no images of completely filled to the brim wine glasses in the training set. And so it just couldn't figure out how to do it. And it gets to this idea of. I think it was. David Hume has this idea of like humans are good at. There's this impression and there's this idea and basically you can interpolate between two things. So you can imagine a unicorn even though you've never seen a unicorn you in the world. But it's hard to create these complex ideas if you don't have the reference images, which is what they have. But my takeaway from it was just like we're scaling up these models and we still are building an image model and a language model separately and a driving model separately. But you would imagine that if we're really building this AGI won't asi be a one model, but maybe not. Maybe it will be like what he's saying where, where there's silicon and in biology you need to understand the basics of chemistry, but you also need to understand the different parts, the different lobes of the brain, the different actions that your body can take, your muscles, how these different systems interact with each other. And you could imagine that the AGI that we build will have so many different models and so many different things that are kind of like trained that it can know, interact with. It's interesting. I'm. I'm sure it will. I just want a field of study.

I just want a, a model on top of the open, all the open AI models to route me to the best model. I don't want to be choosing. I mean, I noticed that there's this.

Button you can push that will indicate like, hey, I'd like you to search. But even if you don't push that, it'll still search. Sometimes it's so clunky and one time.

I mean that's just the, that's just the reality of it. It's possible for companies to be at this point, it feels like they're waiting for this big announcement of the router. Like the router needs to come. Right. It should be one box and it should take me to the, Take me through, you know, send my query through the. Right.

They're really speed running the Google story because Google it was like just, just search box. I'm feeling lucky. 10 blue links, simple. Now Google is like no one hits. I'm feeling lucky because it auto fills, then it shows you Google shopping and then 25 ads and then clickbait and then videos and all this stuff and, and they've kind of like recreated that all in like a very short amount of time. Whereas it took like Google like 20, 20, 20 years to degrade like that. They've gotten a very convoluted thing. But I don't know.

Yeah, and it's a huge, I mean it's just going to be such a big selling point for OpenAI once they get there, when they can say, look, it's one box, you enter in what you want to do and we're just going to execute it to the best of our abilities and it shouldn't even really matter the underlying model.

It is a testament that like even though, yeah, there are some, some reasonable critiques of the naming scheme, ChatGPT is still ranking higher than Jimmy John's in the App Store. Yep, that's which is big because Jimmy John's, if you're not aware, it's number two app in the App Store right now. ChatGPT is number one. And I'm sure it was a knockout drag out fight. I'm sure they had meetings. Okay, Jimmy John's is coming for us. We need to call Nikita.

Beer.

What are we doing to stay ahead of Jimmy John's?

Yeah, and I, I, I posted about this earlier. 2023, everybody said, all right, value's going to accrue to the model layer. It's obvious. 2024, people said, hey, right, value is actually going to accrue to the app layer. A lot of value here. 2025, everybody's saying value is going to accrue to the sandwich layer. And so I expect to see subway charting soon.

How did, how did this happen? Like, do they run some national campaign that we don't know about? Like, it is weird that Jimmy John's the number two app in the App Store. Like, what, what is going on? I know it's based on momentum and stuff.

They launched a toasted sandwiches that's.

It's equivalent to, like, you know, magical machine intelligence. Too cheap to meter or, like, to sandwiches. Humanity assigned.

They're giving away $1 million of toasted subs. Oh, I mean, that's, I mean, so it's obvious. I. Props. Props to OpenAI for holding the lead.

The funny thing is that, is that Grok 3 right now, because they aren't charging yet, they are literally giving away millions of dollars in inference costs. Same thing with Deep se. They're subsidized. Even, Even chatgpt, You know, Sam has said, like, hey, we're losing money on some of these queries. Right, Right. And so you could think about this as, like, the AI labs are giving away hundreds of millions of dollars of intelligence. Magical machine intelligence.

Yep.

But that's, but we value that as humanity. Like, only slightly higher than, like a million dollars worth of toasted sandwiches. Yeah, like, that is what the market is telling us. The market is telling us that sandwiches are like, you know, they're up there, but it makes sense. Like, food is, it's what I need. I need food.

Yep. I will die without food and intelligence, but I need food more than intelligence.

I could, I could live without a poem.

I could live without a good standup joke.

Yeah, exactly.

AGI can wait. Yeah. You know, it's funny that ChatGPT continues to, you know, basically battle for the number one spot and they don't even share it anymore. Any, any other, Any other. You Know, AI lab would be taking victory laps, you know, sharing the number.

One spot, spraying the champagne in the.

Mouth into their mouth, opening eyes just like, you know, this is just great, you know, usual business and credit to them. It's impressive.

Well, should we move on to Fred Wilson?

Well, yeah, we got a post from Vincent. He says, Fred Wilson VCs are service providers to entrepreneurs. We ride on their coattails. And so even though venture capital requires a sophisticated understanding of finance, technology, markets, strategy, it's ultimately a people business. Learning to be a successful venture capitalist is about learning how to work with people, a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious and fragile. And our job is to meet them right where they are and support them with all of our might. And I think that is a fantastic quote. It's almost become, it's almost become normal for I would argue it's almost becoming meme territory where investors now, if you ask them what do you look for in investments, they just say we're in the people business business. You know, we're trying to find generational founders. And it's absolutely right.

That's what Brian Singerman says at Founders Fund. It's sort of, you want some secret of like, oh yeah, like would I go for. You want something you can copy? And his whole strategy is uncopyable. It's very frustrating actually because he's like, yeah, I actually just pick founder and then you talk to David Center. It's the same thing.

Yeah, that was. As I got to know you, I expected to sort of learn some sort of secret sauce that you had of gotten from founders. Fun. And you were basically like 0 to.

1, 0 to 1 is the playbook. But then it's really about judging the founders and the people. And that's the stuff that it's very hard to concretize. And I mean we saw this with the debate over Keith Rabois quote yesterday. It's like he was making a recommendation that like, like you will probably have a good time if you like go and work in an excellent organization and then start a company. But he's not saying like you can generate alpha as a venture capitalist by just pattern asking that.

Yeah, I like here. You know, the point is Fred says a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious and fragile. And I think the frustrating point stands out because oftentimes people, you know, you know, an incredible founder is going to have, you know, some aspects of them that are, that are truly amazing. And then you have other moments where you're, you know, Personally, I have 50 plus, you know, angel bets. And there's definitely some moments where I'm super frustrated with entrepreneurs. Not that I make that obvious or known because it's oftentimes not really my place as a small investor to cause any type of hubbub. But an example that I thought of, I once helped a founder get a4letter.com for $10,000. That was their exact. Their exact name. And they had some terrible domain prior to that, like, get. Get blank.com and I got them their four letter.com domain at. @ cost, obviously, like their portfolio company. I wasn't, you know, gonna mark it up or anything. And the guy didn't even say thank you. Like, I said, I sent him. I sent him the, like, the info and everything and like, basically just ignored it. He ended up like, like checking out for the domain and everything like that, and started to use it. Never, never once said thank you. And I was like, that's super twisted and feels very wrong in some ways. Right. It's like the J.D. vance. Like, you should have said, you know, you should have said please. You should have said thank you. But at the same time, I was just like, look, you know, I would have gotten this. Even knowing ahead of time that you weren't gonna, you know, express any gratitude for it. And you're not gonna be judged 15 years from now on whether or not you said thank you a lot. You're gonna be judged. Ultimately, you will be judged, but you're gonna be judged on was your company successful, did you treat your people right in the grand scheme of things? And. And I can get over it. Even though it felt it was. It was funny.

I have a funny anecdote about why you should say thank you and be nice. And my, My first company, the. The CEO was extremely curt and would just like, send emails, like, do the blah, blah, blah. You know, like, not like, very like, like, didn't really bring like a personal.

Style to his emails, which is a style by itself.

Yes. But that style just also happens to be the style of every phishing scammer in the world. And so people would get phished constantly because the scammer shows up and falsify some email and is like, I need you to send me $10,000. And people would be like, yeah, this actually sounds exactly like our CEO.

Normally no one would ever be this direct.

Exactly. Normally you get a phishing scammy email. Email, and you're like, well, this doesn't sound like Jordy like this sounds like someone impersonating.

Like just talk to this person. They would have brought this up.

Exactly.

They would have texted me.

Exactly.

Slacked me. Just come out of the blue.

Yeah. So you can't be too chaotic like that. You got to be a little more. A little more empathetic. Bring your own style. You know, the Ron Conway all caps. That's one of the funniest things in the world to me.

Yeah. One of us should start using, adopting the all caps.

Something chaotic. Well, I mean, one way, you know, you're talking to us and not an AI clone of us or a scammer is there's gonna be a lot of typos.

Yep. Put typos in your posts.

Yeah.

A lot of people are saying if you're writing a blog post, people are saying, oh, you use the word delve.

Yeah.

You definitely generated this.

Yeah.

Put. Put a, put a bunch of typos in.

Yeah. You know, and don't worry about spell check because the AI is going to handle it. If you want to read a spell checked version of my post, you. You are free to take my post and put it into chat GPT and say spell check it.

Yeah.

And then boom, you have a spell checked version. But I'm not doing that.

Well said.

I'm golden retriever maxing. I'm going FSD mode. This is my new twist on this full self driving, no funny, friendly, sexy, dumb FSD on the, on the golden retriever. Max.

Great.

Yeah. Does a golden retriever use spell check? Absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

Ship it. It's going to be a banger anyway. No one cares if there's a typo in your post.

All right.

We got a post from Yassin Yaxine. We need to have him on the show.

We should. I don't know how to pronounce it.

But he says the only AI risk that I'm concerned about is the risk of me not making an f ton of money off of AI.

It's great.

Think.

I think that's the right. The, the gen. You know, it's good basics, generally the right point of view for most people. I actually think, I think it is a good thing broadly that there are a group of humans focused on AI safety like that. That that's like generally probably a good use of resources for the future of humanity. That said, if you're not a, you know, sort of philosopher king or queen type who's going. Wants to spend all their time thinking about the impacts of AI and the potential risks, you should probably Just focus on how to make money with AI. And, you know, this idea of you don't want to just be worried about something, you want to be sort of like taking action. Right. So if you're worried about, you know, losing your job from AI, build a business with AI. Right.

This is a remarkably good post because I've also come around on AI safety. I think Deep Seq was a big moment for me in terms of, like, I want to know if they are embedding in, if an open source model has a bad version or a jailbreak version embedded inside of it. And the AI safety teams are like, the only ones that can really evaluate that. So I think that's really interesting. So all of a sudden, while I'm not worried about, like, overall, overnight, like, the nanobots come. Like, the Eliezer Yudaowski theme of, like, I'm just gonna be turned into a paperclip overnight. It's like, no, but like, Stuxnet did happen. Like, you know, like the pagers did explode. Like these. These hacking attempts do happen.

Yeah, I think I brought that up. I was like, the. What is the AI equivalent of stuxnet, where something exactly, you know, travels.

It's dormant in there, and if. And if there's a trigger word, it goes and it steals some data and that's it. It's like, that's worth. That's worth investigating. And the AI safety teams are the ones who would be equipped to run those evals. So that's interesting. But then also, we've been saying for a while that, like the, like. Like the stop measuring AI against all these random evals and instead just measure it against how much money people are making from it. Because that's, at the end of the day, the value capture.

Even Satya weighing machines, even Satya is saying, I'm really looking at the real benchmark to him is GDP growth around AI. Right. So what is the. What is the impact? Old Billy comments here. He says, yeah, I'm an AI researcher researching how to stack that paper. Great line.

I wonder how. I wonder how accretive the current AI revenues are to gdp. Like, because you could see every dollar that goes into character AI being like, it's taking $10 out of the economy. Not to, like, throw a ton of shade at cat character, but, like, it is.

Yeah, it's, it's. It's, you know, you spend a dollar on character AI and you skip dinner and you don't, you know, take your girlfriend on a trip and, you know, suddenly, like, you're. You're thinking yourself, I can get by on my parents allowance. I don't need to go. You know, there's very, there's sort of a dark scenario where it's very destructive.

I mean, at the very least, we've seen a lot of technology get rolled out over the last, I don't know, two, three, five decades that haven't, hasn't caused massive GDP growth. Everyone was expecting, oh, the Internet is going to be the thing that, you know, cure stagnation. Right. Because, you know, prior to 1970, the US economy was growing very, very fast. Post war boom. Right. And then we kind of stagnated and GDP growth, real GDP growth kind of slowed to, you know, 2, 3% real.

And now, now the Atlanta Fed reporting 2.5% negative GDP growth. Who knows, who knows what's real, right? GDP is politicized.

Maybe if we go down a bunch, it's easier to build back up.

Run it back up.

Yeah, exactly. Run it back up.

You're on a smaller base, you can grow faster.

It's good. Yeah. Really, America just wants to grind harder.

Yeah, yeah. That's why Trump is trying to inspire Americans to grind harder.

Yeah. GDP is going down because we need to grind hard, harder.

Oh my God. Anyways, speaking of grinding harder, we got a post from Shkreli. So Raboy was on the show yesterday. He said, quote, work at an outstanding organization for a year or two before starting your own company. And he gave some, there's some other context here. And he said there's some great entrepreneurs that just sort of one shot their companies. Right. One shot, you know, entrepreneurship. Right. Zuckerberg's a good example of this suck.

But, but Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, right.

Steve Jobs did not. He interned at hp.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Again, you could argue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we count this or not? That's a good question.

So this shouldn't have been a controversial quote, especially in the context of it. But it's started a conversation. And Rabois point was that you get this feel for taste, a taste of what great is. And I think that's generally good advice. I gave this advice to a listener who's DMing me company ideas and, and saying, hey, should I join this company? Should I start this thing? And I just told them, unless you're hyper, hyper convicted in an idea and you can get people that care about your, truly care about your professional success, that are knowledgeable in that sector to say this is generally. I agree with you. I think this is a big opportunity and I share your conviction, then go start a company if that's the case. If not, go try to work at the best possible company that you can join. And don't even optimize for the title or comp or anything like that. Just go work at, you know, go work at an OpenAI. Go work at a ramp. Go, go work at one of these companies that is going to, you know, really change your, your perspective around what, what great is, you know, how to have good taste across marketing and product and things like that. So I was surprised at how controversial this was. Avi. Avi was posting. Nobody that I look up to, you know, ever works for anyone else.

But taking shots at Warren Buffett, taking shots at Jensen.

Yeah. So Shkreli put together a list of ab dogs who worked at, at other organizations. So if you want to run down the list.

Yeah. Warren Buffett, Jensen Wong, George Soros, Peter Thiel, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mike Bloomberg, Phil Knight, Tom. Peter. Peter Fe. I don't know who that is. CZ and then Jeff Yass Yancum, Ray Dalio, Leon Black. Lot a lot of finance people since he really knows his finance chops. But then also GDB from OpenAI.

Yep. Brian Armstrong, Benioff.

Yep. Every tiger cub. I love that one.

That's great. Anyway, so, you know, advice is best taken. You know, generally you don't have to apply every bit of advice you get from a podcast to your life. But, but generally, you know, there's too much evidence that this can tremendously accelerate your abilities and your career.

Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. It's like the, it's like the Jeremy Giffon quote quote. You know, Mozart never asked how to write concertos. If, but if you have a question in your mind of what you should do, go work at an outstanding company because that's either going to be, that's going to be great no matter what. And it certainly doesn't close off becoming a generational entrepreneur.

Yeah.

So if there's a question. But yes, if you truly are, like, working on this and you have this burning desire, you're not even going to ask. You're not even listening to this clip. You know, you're just like, I'm already building and there's nothing I can stop me. And that's fine.

Yeah. I would, I would argue since we had Eric on from Ramp today, I would argue that if Eric hadn't built a fintech company and then went and worked at a big company like Capital One, he would not have had the insight or the Know how or the relationship with Kareem and all that stuff to go and build Ramp. Like ramp wouldn't exist in its current form if he didn't have that sort of body of experience and the network. Right.

And so the Tiger Cub thing is so funny to me because. So Julian Robertson founds Tiger Management, very successful hedge fund. Bunch of people spin out, they're all called Tiger Cubs. And one of them is Chase Coleman, starts Tiger Global. Like, what, mocking your former boss? Basically. Like, Tiger Global sounds more aggressive than Tiger Management to me at least.

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like the parent company.

It does. It does. So imagine like you go and work at like, you know, Apple or something, and then you leave and you're like, actually, my new company is going to be called Apple Global. It's like, very funny. I wonder. I mean, obviously, Julian Robinson, like, my.

New company is called Fruit Management.

I think the Tiger Cub thing is specific because it's like, I think Julian Robinson would, like, set people up to, like, succeed and actually stake the fund. So he's very much like starting them. So it was great that it's like, carry the brand forward because I will retire and you will be running the new organization. But it's still just like a funny thing. What is going on with this Axe Perplexity Ask Perplexity account? Is this. Is this fully AI automated? Is this just their social media manager? What do you think's going on here?

The Perplexity CEO, It's Arvin, right?

Yeah.

He knows how to. He knows how to post.

He knows X.

He knows he knows X. He does how to get attention. This is a funny one. Please stop tagging me in questions about meme coins. I don't reply to broke people. Okay. Really? You know, trying to get a reaction out of the crypto community.

Yep.

Somebody replies, why didn't you buy TikTok broke boy? Which is. Which is hilarious because they were. They were talking about that set themselves up.

Wait, is this. Is this the. Is this the at chat thing we were talking about with Grok and X where, like, you could just. Can you just at this. And it will answer and it's basically a bot. It's automated.

Yeah. Somebody. Somebody tags Axe Ask Perplexity what meme coin should I buy?

And it gives you the real answer.

Immediately respond with. With kind of a perplexity style answer.

Which basically just says, I can't devise anything. Yeah, but that makes sense. Okay, so. So there's probably someone managing the account who's posting, like, the major ones. But then it also acts as a bot. Right. So it's both interesting. I mean, it's good. More, more perplexity, attention, more impressions, more people are reminding them, hey, maybe fire up the app again, give it another try. Dragged back into the ecosystem. I wonder how long this lasts because, I mean, the grok button is literally there on this, on this post. Elon's very aggressive with competitors.

Yep.

I don't see a world where he's happy that there's another AI system running on Axe that you can interact with on Axe.

Even though he hasn't been accused, it doesn't feel if he has Shadow banned Sam Altman. It's not working.

Oh, no, no, I don't think he said that.

No, no. But I'm just saying that the people have had this idea that, okay, you're building on an Elon platform. If you're competing with Elon, you're going to have a bad time.

Sure.

Yet X is probably the most important sort of comms engine for OpenAI still, at least for the industry, obviously.

Yeah, I, I, I, I more just think like the API pricing, like, it's got to be really expensive. I know they, they raise the pricing and so, you know, it's like it, it's got to be unaffordable at some point to build anything on top of this. Especially if you're building something that should just be an XAI product.

It just adds a couple zeros to your, your API pricing.

Anyway, Sean's in meetings. He can't call in, but he said he's good for tomorrow or Thursday. We gotta ask him about he. Since he's in all the Elon companies, we got to ask him about that and then we got to ask him about, yeah, he's an X, I want to know he's an X and I think he's an xai y and I think he's in SpaceX. And I don't know if he's in Tesla, but we'll see if he's in a Tesla, if he owns a Tesla. And I want to know if he has a roadster. If he has a roadster.

Reservation the timing there. See if he has any insight. I'm sure he owns Tesla in the public markets one way or another.

Maybe he might be conflicted out sometimes. He can't trade those things.

Things. Yeah, that's true.

Too much inside information.

True. Anyway, we got a post from Aiden, friend of the pod. I've been talking with Aiden lately, trying to give him my point of view on, on how he should approach his next career move. He's been working on startups, he has some bunch of good ideas and then a bunch of people trying to recruit him as well. So he's got a lot of opportunity. But he says this goes unbelievably hard. And it says, during my 44 years as a career CEO and serial entrepreneur, I think I've made possible mistake in business. I've overpaid for acquisitions and botched integrations. I've run operations for cash when I should have invested for growth. I've delegated tasks I should have done myself. Sometimes I've hired the wrong people or made strategic bets that didn't pay off. And yet my teams and I have managed to create tens of billions of dollars of value for our shareholders. This book is about what I've learned from my blunders and how you can replicate our successes in corporate America. I'm what's called a moneymaker. I've started five companies from scratch. Seven if you include two spinoffs and turn them into all into billion dollar multibillion dollar enterprises. My teams and I have completed approximately 500 acquisitions and opened more than 250 greenfield locations in total. These ventures have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and raised about 30 billion in outside capital. So this is obviously Brad Jacobs. He's got a book if you want to make a billion dollars. He's got a great book for you called how to make a Few Billion dollars. Right, how to Make a Few Billion dollars.

Great book.

The intro to the book.

And he has a great, he has a great, like this crazy exercise that feels like, I don't know, like something like a psychic would tell you or something. But he's basically like, I want you to physically visualize what a billion dollars looks like. Like mentally in your mind, like stack up the bills inside of a room. It's enough to fill like a massive ballroom. Imagine that and then imagine all the things that you would need to do do to like make that yours and then just go do them. And this is like kind of like crazy mental exercise that I just really, I really thought like made the book stand out in like very unique ways.

You should lead tomorrow. You should lead the audience through that, through that exercise.

I'd love to.

We should do it weekly.

I screen recorded the audiobook when I was listening to it, I said it, I sent it to David Senra and I was like, this guy is on a different level. This crazy. Uh, yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, that's a great, that's a great Quote. Um, yeah, highly recommend reading. Reading Brad Jacobs. It's good. And I like how Andrew Garner here is like haven't read it, but I could immediately tell it was Brad Jacobs.

Like.

It is. It is his brand to a T. Um, yeah, a lot of interesting stuff.

Uh, we got another post from Sha. Yeah, I think I'm saying that right. She says if, if the founder you invested was in Aspen this month, you can write that investment down to zero and harsh. Potentially true. February is a tough month. There's not a lot of good arguments to be in Aspen in February.

No.

Why not? Can you ski for Capital Allocators? I can think of a hundred reasons.

When is the aspect of Ideas Festival? I think that's over the summer.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's when you want to be there.

Yes.

Because then there'll be like the big.

Yeah, you don't want to be if somebody's in Sun Valley in February.

Yeah.

That's not a serious operator.

Unless I'm, unless I find out that you're in Sun Valley on Alamy stock photos because you got caught by paparazzi, you shouldn't be there. That's the only, that's the only reason to be in one of these places is if the paparazzi are there taking pics of you next to Sundar and Tim Cook.

Yep. But. But yeah, it's a funny thing. I do think founders need to be. If you're a venture backed founder with a team, small or big, it's really hard to have any type of divide between your personal life and professional life as a founder because you need to be, you know, if you're not sort of 100% fixated on what you're building at all times. Like Saturday, you know, obsessing and sort of frustrated around. As a founder, you should be annoyed on Saturday that everyone else is offline. Like I think that's like the default, you know, sort of state that that early stage founders specifically need to be in. And I think that I've seen founders mess up optically around. It's not sending good signals to the world. If you were on a week long ski vacation in February and your company's not absolutely ripping, and even if it is ripping, the challenge is that people are gonna judge you for that. People are hyper, hyper, hyper judgmental of founders in the same way that VCs get on a different, you know, sort of in a different way. Right. It's like, oh, they're in Aspen, they're not working hard. Founders are like, oh, they're in Aspen. Their company's a zero. Right.

You know who, you know what? Founder I would not judge for being in Aspen and I would not write down the stock if I found out they were in Aspen this month. Wonder because you know that they're onboarding a new that they'd be there with a purpose because their business is in is in Aspen. We love Wander here. Go check it out. Go book a a wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. But yeah, seriously. Obviously there are a bunch of There are exceptions to every rule.

Yep.

Yeah. Don't. Don't go to Aspen if you're building a B2B SaaS company for or sewage treatment plants and there's no sewage treatment plants there.

Yeah. And you know what John?

Yeah.

Wander is going to give away a trip for free to our audience. Really all you have to do is create an account totally free to enter and you could go to Aspen for free. Let's go on us courtesy of the technology brothers. So wander.comtbpn is a great place to go if you're interested in Aspen.

Fantastic. Should we want to do another post?

Another post? We got a post from Sam Altman. He is posting a screenshot and the caption is just two exclamation points. That's how you know it's serious. He says. Okay, so relying on only your own first principles, thinking and not giving much weight to what you've read, what do you personally as GPT 4 or 5 think? Is consciousness the only thing that exists or is that material? Is the materialistic universe also real? Please try to answer as clearly as you can. Do you want to play it, you know, role play the AI John.

So it's it kind of repeats this as what I personally think. Consciousness definitely exists. This is undeniable. Since all experience directly proves awareness itself. Matter or a material universe is always inferred indirectly through consciousness. We never directly observe matter independently, only perceptions appearing within consciousness. Because consciousness can easily create structured experiences as demonstrated clearly by dreams, imagination or simulations. An external material universe is not strictly necessary given that matter is never directly experienced independently, it seems logically simpler and clearer to conclude that and this is what GPT 4.5 thinks about the universe. Consciousness alone truly exists and the material universe is merely a consistent experiential creation within consciousness itself. Myself, my clear personal conclusion is GPT5 yes, consciousness is likely the only fundamental existence. No, I do not think a separate materialistic universe independently exists. Bizarre. And of course this is like highly relevant because it is simulated. And so if you're a simulation hypothesis guy, this is wild, right? Because it's like, yeah, like are, is there anything real or are we just. Is consciousness the only thing? And that's what it's basically saying. And certainly we would say that that is true for GPT 4.5. So I would say like this is true for the experience of this particular AI, but I would definitely say it's not true for me. I'm built different. I'm in the real world. I have a materialist experience. Look at this watch. I got a bezel dot com. It's materialist.

Yeah, yeah.

As long as we're talking about materialistic universes, let's talk about materialistic items. Let's go to vessel.

Let's go to. No, I mean this is absolutely wild. I think some of the most thought provoking responses are when you ask the AI, not how do I make, you know, it sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but how do I make a good avocado toast? It's what is the meaning of like life? And then, and then it sort of gives you a pretty good answer. Right? That's sort of based on humanity's consciousness in a way because it's been trained on, you know, humanity. Right.

So matter is just an internally generated experience of consciousness, not independently real. That's what we're dealing with with this AI. You know what? I think you're wrong.

Back to you. We'll get back to you after the break.

Yeah, yeah, I think you're wrong.

All right, we got a post from Bridget Budget. She says the GDP per capita in most African countries is $2,000. And then the average yearly revenue per user to sports betting platforms in Africa is also $2,000. And this is just another argument for why the United States.

How is this possible?

No, I think, I think it's that the average person in Africa is basically like the people that are sports betting in Africa rich are doing well.

Got it, got it, got it.

And yeah, so, so I, I can see how this makes sense. But this is more evidence of your post yesterday that the United States needs a strategic parlay reserve to allow every American the, the sort of once a week to get the rush of potentially life changing wealth.

You know, guys like Sagar and Jetty will come out there and be like, oh, sports betting so bad. I don't like sports betting. Well, if it's so bad, why don't we use USAID to send sports betting to countries that we want to infiltrate and destroy?

Smart.

Why don't we airdrop parlays to North Korea, destabilize their entire economy? Why don't we, why don't we take a super long shot? Bets.

Yeah.

QR code, drop that over the Forbidden City. Get everyone at the Forbidden City addicted to sports bidding.

Yeah. I gotta give you this, but John, is it possible that DraftKings is, you know, a deep state operation? I have.

No, not at this point. But if, but if we send, if we send DraftKings to, to the Kremlin and we get, and we get Putin, maybe that's the cure for the world.

If we airdrop. If we airdrop one, you know, $5, you know, match exactly. Over Moscow.

Think about this. So Putin is clearly just going to war because he's, he needs a rush, he needs a thrill, and he probably doesn't have a lot of access to sports betting. And so if we brought him sports betting, then he's like, I don't, I don't want to. I just don't get the same rush out of the war.

Yeah.

So I'm going to wind down the war. We're going to have world peace through sports betting.

World peace through sports betting. I think that's a bold idea. I think you should do a TED Talk on it.

Exactly.

I think you should look at the data. Data. And make a case based on the data.

Yeah.

That. That world peace is possible. Just. We need universal basic parlay.

We do, we do. Truly.

Anyways, Paki, we got a post.

Bets.

Is there another.

Oh, he's saying he. This looks like a bad.

So, yeah, speaking of potentially a parlay to put together here, Packy quote tweet. So we talked about this Yesterday.

Yeah.

Apple's ChatGPT like version of Siri, which I think is an OpenAI partnership. Right. They had a partnership of some sorts. But maybe.

This is so confusing, I don't understand what they're canceling because. So the headline is, is Apple has now delayed a chat GPT like version of Siri. But they were just telling us that they launched a chatgpt like version of Siri called Apple Intelligence, and that rolled out in a bunch of beta tests and is like, available. And then also you can go into your Siri settings right now on your phone as long as you have the latest software and you can integrate your ChatGPT credentials. And so you can use ChatGPT through Siri right now. And so I don't know what this is that they're delaying. Like, we all know it's bad and it's not working, but so I guess they're just saying, like, hey, we were going to improve it because we know it's bad, but now we're active launched anything. But it's like it clearly did Apple's chat GPT like version of Siri. That's just Apple Intelligence. You launched that. It didn't go very well. Now you're saying you're delaying the launch of it, but you already launched it and you put billboards up everywhere in 2024 and so very confused. Anyway, there's been a bunch of talk about this. Packy had a spicy take. He said Apple will not be a top 10 company by market cap by the end of this decade in 2021. That's a crazy, crazy take. I mean, that's a completely different question because they print money and they have a monopoly on a bunch of different things in the App Store and all these service revenue.

But Packy says, yeah, and the idea that luxury goods have proven to be a fantastic business for the RNOs. If LVMH sort of collectively is worth 300 billion, is the sort of consumer electronics equivalent. If Apple just becomes a luxury business, it's less focused on innovation, but more so just making the sort of best kind of commodity devices. Is that a $3 trillion company? Is it worth 10 times more than LVMH if they can be a toll road on so many transactions? Like, still feels like it's possible even if they sort of stop innovating. But yeah, overall, he says looks like a bad bet. Right now. Apple is the most valuable company in the world by a healthy margin. But there's so many little cracks like this one. They have lost it and it's only a matter of time. So very interesting to follow.

I don't know. It's just so hard. Look at Microsoft. Microsoft lost the IT block, like decades ago and is still super, super valuable. Right. Like, Microsoft Windows stopped being cool in 2001. Right?

Yeah.

Like, it. It literally, like ceased to be like a cool company. And it was like, oh, you're running Windows XP at work? Like, that's a bummer.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, well, you know, we have to run Windows XP for the security patches or whatever, and then they just use that to print a trillion dollars.

Yep.

Apple has returned a trillion dollars to shareholders. They have generated a trillion dollars in cash. In cash. It's so much money.

Yep.

Gravy train ain't stopping it's it's just gonna be hard to displace them. Who. Who's going to build the computers?

Plexity announced a phone with T Mobile. The AI phone.

Plexi phone. You know, there's a. Obviously there's a lot of people that are like, oh, that's like a super bearish signal. Right. But the interesting one is Solana launched a Solana phone. Obviously, I think it didn't do well.

Now they're in the strategic reserve.

But, yeah, like, it was a. It was a. It was a boondoggle. I think the Solana phone was the side project.

Here's the bet.

But it wasn't a death.

Now here's the bet.

It wasn't a death.

Now we have a strategic crypto token reserve.

Yes.

Perplexity is betting that there's going to be a strategic token reserve. The other kind of token.

Yeah.

And if they have some tie to the real world internal reasoning token tokens.

Yeah.

We have a question on X from Gordon Gekko. He says, is this what you guys do every single day? And the answer is yes, every Monday through Friday. Some people like formatting PowerPoints. We like doing a daily technology and business, you know, show. And it is so funny how everyone.

Else that has a show has to pretend like they have some other job. Like, they're like, oh, really? I'm like an investor, so I can only do this once a week for an hour. It's like, we all know, you know, podcasting is the most important thing in the world. So the other stuff's just window dressing.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, yes, the answer is yes. Going forward. We got a post from Dan Ko. He says everyone is going to make their own apps with AI. That's a quote. And he says, my friend, you don't even make your own food. You'll still pay a few bucks to use an app. And I think this is a great take.

So true.

There's, you know, like, the idea, like, I'm a firm believer in that apps become memes in the way that you're going to generate apps and there's going to be some novelty and maybe some value and maybe for little stuff like, hey, I want to make a custom weather app that should be able to kind of maintain itself and. And stuff like that. But the idea that you're going to anything with network effects, obviously, is like a different story. But even the idea that you're going to generate a CRM that's on par with HubSpot or Salesforce or some of these other products and then you're going to be building your business but also maintaining your AI generated CRM that's breaking all the time. And if you get some data loss or something like that.

I talk to people at Dollar Shave Club. They built their own, own. They built like a mailchimp replacement or something at that company. Like, because like they were like we're a tech company and they, and they hired a bunch of engineers and they built like an email management system for, to like, you know, send transactional emails. And it was like this big system and of course like you can, it's like you're kind of saving money because you're not in and you're getting more customization. But ultimately and, and all of that was, was predicated on like well you know, now we have, you know, the ability to write programming code really quickly with like abstract languages like Python. We're at a higher level of abstraction so we can build this faster. And they did. But it was still like you're upside down on the trade because like you're only selling it once.

I think the way to look at the way to look about software costs is like an example like a mailchimp or beehive or something like that is you pay like, let's say you're an early stage company, you pay $1,000 a month for something you are getting the benefit of, of potentially a million dollars of R and D. Spend a month on that specific area and you only have to pay $1,000.

Exactly.

You don't even, you know, maybe you have to think about it, you know, actually building out integrations and stuff like that. But in general that the value of I'm going to spend $1,000 and get a million dollars, you know, millions of dollars a year in R and D is truly why capitalism is goated.

And this is the big question about those like buy an old business and drop a, drop AI on top of it. It is like, well, is everyone doing the same thing? Because that doesn't change the competitive dynamics, it doesn't change the market structure. If everyone, if it's like yes, like there are a bunch of like web design agencies, you could buy them and tell them to use cursor and figma instead of whatever they're using right now. But if everyone's doing the same thing, it's not going to really change the economic structure. So you better be happy with the price you paid at the current multiple and the current cash flow generation for what you paid because you shouldn't expect it to 10x, like a venture bet.

Yep.

Interesting.

We got another post. So this company launched yesterday. It's called Orca. It's an energy drink that tastes like water. And I just wanted to highlight this. Yes. Hilarious launch video. Did you see it?

I saw it.

So it's, it's basically this woman, she says, introducing Orca. This is a flavored, basically caffeine water.

Yes.

They hard post the Amazon link which, which, which maybe worked out for them, right. This, this still did numbers, even though that I'm sure that throttled them. But then it says, she basically introduces the product and she says, now this guy is going to read off every.

Corbin Blue. Corbin Blue, who I think is someone famous. I don't know who it is though.

I actually didn't realize that he was.

Famous to be very offensive because I bet there's like fans out there who are like really into this guy. But.

Oh yeah, Corbin Blue, he was in High School Musical.

There you go. See, I knew he was someone important.

Absolutely brutal.

Yeah, yeah. And he reads every stop sign or.

Every sign, every legal road sign in America.

It's just very odd. So of course it goes viral and.

It'S actually a brilliant way to hack the algorithm because the user. Yeah, yeah. Because it's very entertaining and people are clicking this long video and watching the whole thing. So the algorithm is getting the signal that people really love this. I should show it to more people. And I thought it was hilarious.

Also, speaking of the typo thing, he made a mistake while he was reading that and people in the comments are like, at seven minutes he said like the turn left signal, but he put the turn right signal up. Or like he used the wrong hand signal for it. And so people had a lot of fun, kind of like critiquing it and finding that little Easter egg. And then that obviously drove more engagement. And so it all went very viral. I remember seeing when this dropped. We gotta, we gotta do a taste test of this, see if it's better than Celsius.

Yeah, we should give it a try. I like it. When I was watching the launch video, I was like, wow, this is like a 10 minute long video.

Yeah.

And I would skip ahead. I'd skip ahead two minutes. More signs, more signs, more signs.

You did that?

I just kept skipping and then I skipped to the end. He, Corbin Blue finished strong with the sign signs.

And I wonder if he's an investor or something. I wonder why they picked him.

I gotta hope that he like had some incentive to do this outside of like, I mean, $10,000 or something like that.

I mean it's pretty easy job. You just sit down, read a bunch of signs, get a teleprompter.

Yeah, he did a good job on this. On the.

The lighting's good, it looks nice.

We got a post from Chad Byers has been on the show before. He says, at this point, I won't fund a stone startup without an mvp, beta or working prototype. It's just too easy to make stuff today. A pitch with nothing to show is emblematic of a team that's low ambition, Conviction agency or all three.

Well, Chad, what about a. What about a startup that has a billboard? Let's go to Ad Quick and then we will do the analysis, but we're doing the ad inside of this post. So. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise, expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Okay, let's go back to the post.

Brilliant, John, great point. If you're a founder, if you're a founder and if you want to make a splash.

Yes.

In Northern California, no MVP necessary. Just buy like five or six billboards on Ad Quick and you will get enough coverage.

Here's what you do. Okay. I'm not going to tell you where where Chad skis, but if you look at his profile picture, you can see there's some skiing going on. There you go, geoguessr mode. You figure out where that is. You get Ad Quick to put up a giant billboard on the favorite mountain. He's up there. I finally got away from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley. And then he looks over and it says, guess what, Chad, I have an mvp, a beta and a working prototype.

Type and a billboard on your favorite mountain.

And I'm high conviction and I got massive agency and I'm high ambition. Fund my startup. And he's like, God damn it.

Find the. Find the jet charter service that Chad uses in a pinch, you know?

Yes.

And wrap the plane.

Wrap the plane.

So you can even say I don't have a beta. But for the next three hour flight, wrap the inside and outside. And yeah, there's something there. But I flagged this because I talked to an entrepreneur yesterday who's raising for a SaaS company and he's a buddy of mine. So we were chatting and he was basically saying, yeah, it's going to take a couple years to kind of get feature complete on sort of what we've designed to date. And I just said, do not say that to any investor. And before you talk to investors, figure out how you can sort of shrink that timeline by basically 75%.

Yeah, right.

It's fine if it's going to take a year to. Because it wasn't like, you know, building.

Like, it wasn't a hard time travel machine. Like, because the narrative in Silicon Valley is like humanoids and quantum computers and AI. God, like two years max.

Yeah, yeah. So if Elon is building an XAI data center in Memphis with 200,000 GPUs in a year, you can build your SaaS company in three months. And that is a bar you should hold yourself to internally. And that is what people will hold you to externally. And it's hard to get conviction in a founder that thinks that something's gonna take two years if it's pure software anymore. Totally, totally. The bar has been raised. But at the same time, there's more, more information and playbooks out there than ever.

And that's to say that it might like, you will have a five year roadmap, you will have a ten year roadmap. Like every company that we work with and we see internally, we see that it's like, oh, wow, yeah, it took a couple years to get around to launching this new feature or launching this new thing. It doesn't just happen immediately. There is that compound startup philosophy, that idea that you try and build everything all at once. Um, but for a lot of companies, they need to really dial in the software. It's not so much that like instantiating the first idea is difficult. Like we're building a to do list. Yes. Getting the right to do list, like coding it, is not the problem. It's the finding the product market fit, accelerating it, figuring out the full economic workflow for it, and then doing that again and again and again for every single product in the portfolio that actually builds like the full comfort company. That does take time. And I think that even though the time from design to technical instantiation has gotten a lot shorter, that doesn't mean that there's still not a whole bunch of cycles of talking to customers, testing, seeing, can we scale this, can we advertise this? Are the channels working? And some of that stuff is just going to take time. So it's not that you're going to be retired in two years, it's just that you're going to be able to do more than been previously thought in two years.

Yep. Well said. We got a post from Palmer. He says, so Andrew came out with an announcement today they are, they say fight unfair. The US Air Force announced the mission design series Designation for Andrew CCA prototype. The Y F Q44A. Palmer quote tweets and says in Chinese culture, the number 44 is considered unlucky because the pronunciation of four sounds similar to the word for death and 44 is seen as double death. So they basically named their new autonomous fighter jet the YFQ Double death A which sounds menacing. If you were across the pond, what.

Would China do if they wanted to get back at us? I feel like the number 13 is not that big of a deal over here. It would be funny if they made a huge deal out of it. They were like, guess what we named our missile? The 13th Friday the 13th. And we're like that. That played out like Halloween movie. Yeah. Didn't really land.

Yeah. I don't know. We're not as superstitious.

Yeah, I guess we're not as superstitious. I don't know. But I like this. It's fun.

Yeah, it's fun.

I want to see, I want to see some videos of this, the CCA prototype. I mean it's going to be a knockout drag out fight.

Yeah. And, and this is ultimately going to inspire the, the Anderil for X. All those out there to also come up with cute and sort of fun agitating, agitative names for their products. So Andrew leading the charge again. We got another post from Paki. Tim Cook today says, introducing the newest iPad Air. And it's just an iPad that looks exactly the same, same as every other iPad we've seen.

Well, he's getting into, he's getting into meme posting. He's like, he's like riffing now. It's like a.

You think Cook is riffing?

Yeah, he's just like, oh, like everyone will understand the joke here that like I'm just.

We, we gave up on AI, but don't worry. Yeah. We got a, we got a fresh iPad for you.

No, no, no, no, no. The, the, the joke of the post here is Tim Cook is just posting the previous iPad air. And, and he knows that everyone will be like. And he's like, oh, I'm introducing the newest. I've had air. And everyone will know and then they'll be, they'll think it's funny, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. John, you nailed it.

Nailed it.

I think is cooking. No, but Paki says. Holy. They did it. Those crazy. I can't say those crazy sons really, really did it. And imagine Apple is back, baby Jacobi Jacoby, Apple is back.

Apparently this corecore Trend research report is like a PDF that they use as, like a demonstration just to, like, throw something on the screen. And it's this inside joke. And it was like, very funny five years ago, but they haven't come up with a new joke since. And so they're still recycling this, like, same idea of like, this insider joke. They haven't come up with a new one. It's very silly. Anyway, we have to.

I genuinely.

I think you should genuinely love and be like, introducing the new iPhone.

We need to find somebody that recently left Apple. Yeah, that's not under NDA.

Whistleblower.

Them.

A whistleblower, but not about the toxic work environment. About the lackadaisical work environment.

Yeah, we need somebody to.

They didn't yell at me once. They didn't yell at me at all. They let me. I never came in on the weekends. It was.

I left it 12:30 after lunch on a Friday, I'd have a long lunch and take off.

That's the type of whistleblower we need.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you work at Apple and you're chilling, call us.

Reach out. Reach out. You don't. So there's this phenomenon where every major tech company. You see Apple employees out online over the Internet, talking, chatting. Yep. You never see. Does anybody work there? Have. Have we. Do you know anybody that works at Apple right now?

I do, actually. I was supposed to go skiing with one last week. I should have gone. Could have gotten the inside and what do they say?

I had to go on a different ski trip.

I mean, this guy actually works really hard and, like, is like doing, like, semiconductor stuff, like in like, their fabs and stuff. It's like, like the stuff that they do is really legitimate. They're. The company is just optimized. Optimizing, like, right. Like, so, like, what you don't see.

Oh, I'm optimizing.

I'm optimizing like, like, to steel man. This is like, yes, this looks exactly the same, but, like, this is the best form factor. They've tried to make the iPad a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, and nothing else works. Like, no one wants a slightly bigger one. No one wants a slightly smaller one. They want that size.

No. But they haven't taken it to the extreme. I need the comically large iPad. That's the size of a flat screen.

Yeah, for sure.

You have to carry with you.

I would love that. Yeah. It's actually, I want the printer, but, you know, obviously it's funny that they.

Don'T nail like they don't nail the simple things. If you made a true Apple tv. Not sort of.

I know, I know.

Device. I'm talking about a large.

You're talking about the app, the Apple tv. Are you talking about the streaming service Apple tv?

No, I'm talking about the Apple TV extreme.

Are you talking about the app, the streaming service that lives inside the app that lives inside the device and they're all three called Apple tv.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but there's a world I would pay for a mattress sized flat screen from Apple that I could mount to my TV.

Can you imagine how expensive 100 inch TV would be?

No, but that's like I wish they just grand. So, so LVMH will drop a product that's 50 grand.

Yeah.

And they're just like, yeah, we know some people will buy this, so we're gonna make it. I want Apple to do more like that. They did that.

The Apple Watch. It did that. Ten thousand dollar gold watch. Gold Apple Watch. Version one immediately became out of. Out of date. Like doesn't even run the latest software.

Yeah.

And so they wound up cutting. They do the bracelets a little bit. They do the bracelets.

Anyways, I want to buy a.

Do we already do the bezel?

We already, we already, we already fit one. But I have a, I have a. Prepare. Prepare a promoted post. But we got a copy question from T die in the chat. He says question, how do I get out of analysis paralysis? And I think that's a good question. It's. You just got to start ruthlessly taking action. I think if you think about. I think they're, they're.

I feel like I knew some story about some guy who like just would carry around a D20, you know, like a Dungeon and dragons like Dice that has 20 sides. I think it was like a very odd, you know, that a word. I don't know if we're supposed to say that like you know, neurodivergent thing to do. But yeah, it's like okay with it. If you carry around a dice with 20 sides, you can model probabilities down to 5%. So you could say, look, I think that there's a, there's a 15% chance that I should become an entrepreneur at a 85% chance that I should take Keith or Boy's advice and be a startup founder first or work at a. Work at a large high performing organization first.

Roll the dice.

And so yeah, you roll it. And the way you model it on the D20 is that if it's, if it's a 3 or under, that's a 15% chance because every single digit on the D20 is 5%. So you say, okay, I'm just going to roll this dice and if it comes up 3 or less, I'm starting my company today and if it comes up for between four and 20, I'm applying to a job at a high growth company. I don't know, I, I mean it sounds crazy but like sometimes it really is valuable I think just to like, you know, like when you're in a, when you're in a business relationship, someone, there's obviously this idea of like disagree and commit. Like look, we, we, we, we, we, you know, we. Jordy was saying we should do six days a week, I was saying we should do four days a week or whatever. Like we disagreed, we, we met in the middle, we made a compromise, but we disagreed. But like we're putting it behind us. We're committing to that. Right, right. And so you should do that with your life too, to get out of analysis. Paralysis, like just running hard at anything is probably better than waiting around. And so it's the same thing. Should you lift legs or arms, like, well, just do something aggressively.

Ultimately, every act in life is a leap of faith. Yeah. And specifically startups. You know, I don't know TDI's situation. He might be deciding, you know, given the example of do I join a company and work there for two years or do I start my own thing and success is not guaranteed. You might join the company and you have a bad manager and you don't get access to the CEO and you don't get any of the positive learnings that Keith is talking about. Or you might start a company and you had the right idea, but a more heavily funded competitor came in and just steamrolled you. But every act is a leap of faith. And the most like what you work on matter is like at the end of the day the only thing that matters. But you're not going to know. You can't have, you can't go into any decision, you know, with, with a hundred percent certainty of, of the outcome and that's okay. And you just have to get comfortable with that and you have to make the decision and make micro adjustments and sometimes macro adjustments. But if you're, if you're waiting for, to be able to make a decision that, that 100% leads to success, you're never going to find that.

Yeah, it's a good point. I like it. Anyway, we have pretty much gone through the whole timeline.

Yeah. I think we should cover Greenland tomorrow.

Okay.

Tomorrow got to talk about mining, which is cool. We have one more question and then I think we can close out.

Let's do it.

Jordy and John, how do you deal with incompetence and lack of speed? This is relevant. So we have somebody joining the team soon. And it was pretty funny because John connected me to him on a Saturday. And I will usually if I'm talking to a candidate and I get introduced on a Saturday morning, I'll just say, hey, let me know if you're like, do you want to jump on the phone now? And that's just sort of information gathering. I'm not going to write the person off if they're like, oh, actually can we talk Monday or Tuesday? But I am going to judge that interaction. And John introduced me to this guy and before I could even respond, he said, are you free right now? I'll give you a call. And so that's an immediate signal. And so we ended up extending an offer to this person. But I already knew that speed was in their DNA. Right. And you could tell if somebody's. It's Saturday morning at 9am and they're ready to jump on a call. You can look for those signals. Right. You need to be. You should. The entire recruiting process should be figuring out is somebody competent and are they fast. And competence and speed are like the two biggest factors. Competent, general competence and speed make up for a lot. Even intelligence. Right. In a lot of roles, like golden retriever mode is real in companies if you're just golden retrievers. Maybe not the right example, but there's sort of this idea of like if you're competent and you can make generally good decisions and you're fast and you're.

It's a corporate athlete and a cor.

A true corporate athlete, you're going to do well. So I think the biggest thing is if somebody's in the role and they're incompetent, then you need to potentially find a different.

Different role.

Different role for them maybe. But if they're not fast and if they don't have that sort of speed in their DNA, I've never. I've never gotten somebody that didn't want to work fast to work fast.

Um, it just didn't want to work fast to work fast. Yes. But you can. If you give someone the right job. I think people can move faster for sure if they're in a job that isn't rewarding or demanding or like gives them the right feedback cycle. You can, you can steer them towards something that just fires them up.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden you're like, wow, that person's doing way more work way faster. They're, they're pumped because like we found the slot.

Yeah.

And so I think that's like how you deal with it. Then kind of the other side is like just on feedback, you know, being very candid, very open, like, you know, humane, but giving like direct feedback, but then also trying to give as much kind of like meta level, like algorithmic feedback.

Yeah.

Not just on this was bad, but what, what is the process? How do we improve the process and whatever, whatever the output was instead of just acting as like the validator, also acting as the fine tuning of the model, essentially.

I had one example. People often don't change and it's disappointing, but it's just reality. But people sometimes don't understand the seriousness of a situation or the importance of a situation. And they might be working quickly in other areas, but not on the right thing.

Yep.

And I had this last year I had a portfolio company and I'm one of probably the top five shareholders in the company, was involved super early and the company was at a point we would have these sort of monthly check ins with, with the CEO. A month passed, very little progress happened. And I had a very candid kind of conversation with the CEO where I said, if you keep operating like this, the it will be Christmas break break, whatever that is, if you're a startup founder, but it's going to be between Christmas and New Year's and you're going to be dealing with laying off your team and shutting the company down. Because at this pace you're not going to be in a position to raise your next round. The traction's not going to be there and nobody's coming to save you. And I said, let's meet in a week and let's see if you can get the pace up. And he absolutely did. He crushed it the rest of the year. He got his next round raised and the company's in a fantastic position right now. And there was something that I think he was too fixated on the big picture of where the company's going and all this stuff. And I just. So you need to take sort of ruthless action. And he unlocked something in himself and the company has been dramatically different since then. I think it's different giving that advice to a founder and saying, look yourself in the mirror and decide, you know, understand the situation that you're Putting yourself in is very different than, you know, if you talk to a employee who's not motivated and they're not moving quickly and things like that. I haven't had a lot of success in sort of turning somebody from a low urgency, low output person into somebody that's super high output. But that was one very bright point in my year last year where I said, okay, this person found the next gear and it dramatically transformed the company.

Yeah, I just don't want to be too black pilled on it because I think yes, there is some innate speed that is just in people's DNA or something and they come into an organization and they just go hard no matter what. What. And you see these people all over. But I do think that there's, that there's that next gear that everyone can achieve for sure. And then there's also just, you know, if you get dropped in, if you're parachuting into, you know, Nazi occupied France and you're a 17 year old or 19 year old kid, like you can just kind of like stare the opportunity in the face and like just, just turn it off, even if it's, even if you've never done it before. And so finding that, that thing that like brings that insane energy and, and really going forward is, is really important and that's the job of managers, is to like unleash that.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's a great show. I thought we had a lot of, a lot of fun. Leave us 5 stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify, you guys.

Yeah, tomorrow. Ben, hold us accountable.

Let's.

Oh, we got to get some new ones. You people are not leaving enough ads. Reviews.

Yeah, please leave some ads in our reviews.

I got a DM the other day that had an ad in it.

That's fantastic.

And oh, we got one last question. Let's do it. Advice on becoming a creator and not. And cutting out consuming. The answer here is that all the value on social network or at least 99% of the value created by social networks accrues to the people that create the content versus the people that just use them for entertainment. And so if you, the other thing is if you don't create content online, you don't really exist online. And it's hard to have a real impact in this world if you have no digital presence.

Yeah, we have in the last show notes. I don't know if we got to it, but it was like, like, oh, in like 1999. Oh, someone has a presence online. They must be a weirdo. And then now it's like someone doesn't have a presence online. They must be a weirdo.

And I still think there's, I still think that there is value in going through periods of time where you cut out all social activity at all. Like, try to just not go on these platforms and try to just focus on, on your business or your role or whatever, whatever kind of situation you're in. But there will come a time where you should emerge and start sharing what you're doing with the world.

That's fantastic advice. We will see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. We appreciate you all and have a great Tuesday. Enjoy it. We will see you soon.

Sean McGuire on the show tomorrow. Yeah, we're excited.

Stay tuned.

Stay tuned. Have a good afternoon.