Stripe's Billion Dollar Crypto Deal, AI for Police, Elon's Diablo Addiction

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Have I told you about Coogan's Law? Of course you have. I've told you about this. It's.

I mean, you see it everywhere.

Yeah, yeah.

Once you. Once you know of it.

Yeah.

Can't help but notice it.

I mean, there's a number of these laws that people, you know, repeat in tech. Metcalfe's Law, or, you know, what's that one? Anything that can go wrong will those. Or Moore's Law. The rate of computing is doubled. They're not true scientific laws in the sense that they came out of scientific papers, but they're axioms that define. What's that one?

Anything spacked by social capital will drop 90%.

So Coogan's law is the value of a coined phrase is proportional to the square of. Of the amount of algorithmically consumed content. Basically, my prediction here is that coining phrases like laws is going to increase in value as feeds, and just the overall consumption of content becomes more algorithmically driven and more compressed. So as we move to tweets and TikToks and short form, you need to be coining phrases at, like, an increasing rate. And if you look at who's really popular in tech, they've almost all coined phrases, you know, like, it's time to build American dynamism. Software is eating the world. There's so many of these. Balaji has the network state. Lulu has going direct. I don't even know I talked to Lulu, and she said that going direct was not her phrase, but she, like, took it to a whole nother level. Lindy man, same thing. He didn't come up with that concept, but he, like, he's Lindy man. Yeah. But he, like, dominates it.

Yeah.

And so finding a really key, pithy phrase that you can build your whole brand around. Super key. And going to be increasingly valuable if you look back to, like, the great books, like, you know, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, like, those guys didn't need to compress their ideas down into pithy phrases. No one talks about, you know, like Shakespeare's law. You know, you just read all of Shakespeare because that was the only thing that was. They weren't competing with tweets, but now you're competing with tweets. And so you need to really, you know, compress everything down.

Yeah.

And so Coogan's Law is a reference to that.

Right. There's a guy, Zach, I think I'm gonna butcher his last name. Pog Grob, who. His whole. His word is obsession. And so he's just constantly. Every, you know, 50% of anything he ever talks about ties back to obsession somehow.

Yeah, yeah.

And part of his cult of obsess is pick a word or a phrase that you just become one with, and then you just repeat it over and over and over and over. And it works because I don't even know the guy. I have some mutual friends. But I'm bringing it up right now in the context of all these other phrases that have become popularized in different ways. And it's just because every again, almost every single time he's saying anything, it comes back to obsession. Right. Which is just his rallying cry.

I have a group of buddies who are, like, in the content world, and they all have these. They call them razors, you know, like Occam's razor. This guy, George Mack has Max Content Razor, which is only create content that you would consume yourself, which is good. But it's also kind of silly that he even needs to coin a phrase. Right. But it works really well because it sticks in your mind, and it's this whole, like, just compressing a big idea down. Paul Graham founder mode. Like, yeah, there's a lot that was said about that, but it sticks in your mind is like, okay, well, whatever that is, whatever makes successful founders. We're calling that founder mode now.

Yeah.

And there's a phrase for that. And, yeah, clearly there was a gap in the vernacular, in text vernacular, where we needed a word for, like, what is the Steve Jobs, Elon, Brian Chesky mentality. And founder mode just slotted in there.

So it's kind of founder mode for us is listening to our own podcast.

Yes.

Because you've already had the conversation, ideally.

On vinyl. On vinyl, which will be coming soon. So if you're not subscribed, subscribe, and then you'll be the first to know when the vinyl.

Vinyl drops. Yeah, yeah.

It's good.

Yeah. It's a different experience. The tonality, the analog nature of it. It almost. It's the closest thing for us to feel like we're back in the room. We're where the recording happened. Right. Sitting at this wooden desk, feeling the energy from the crystal ball.

What did our one fan describe it as? A rustic feel.

A rustic analog.

Because you hear the people ruffling.

Yeah. Rustic audio.

Yeah. It's organic. It's all natural. It's a return to tradition. Right, that's good. Should we go into the top story of today?

It's hard to. Hard to follow Coogan's Law, but.

Well, next time we need Jordy's Law.

Right.

So we're gonna come up with that, and then we're gonna be coining a lot more phrases and you're gonna hear them. We're gonna try them on here, and you'll hear them here first.

Yeah, yeah, that. That's a whole new segment of the show is new law coining phrases. We're tracking phrases and laws. We could have. We could have a chart that was just like, you know, going long and short on these different phrases.

I mean, in some ways, it's extremely silly to just think that, like, okay, you. You have some idea, you've written it out. Maybe you've actually put a lot of thought into something and realized something.

Taste was the other one.

Yeah.

Somebody came out and wrote a piece on taste in terms of startups, and it's like, okay, does that really need to be said?

Yeah, but it's controversial in some ways. It does.

Yeah.

And. And, yeah, I think a lot of people do forget about, like, the importance of, like, compressing it down and something that can be viral.

It's. It's like, it's. It's a meat. They're always memes. Right. It's time to build.

Yep. Solana's really good at that.

Founder mode.

Moon should be a state.

Moon should be a state.

That phrase is. Is so much bigger than that. It's talking about.

Solana's Law would be how many times people call you a billionaire in a derogatory way is equal to how political, you know, what would. The lobby is. So there's something there. Right. It's like if people are. If people are getting angry at you and calling you a billionaire.

Yeah.

You probably are just a capitalist.

It really is clear that, like, he's. He's particularly good at just these. These pithy phrases because every. When he writes a piece, the titles are always really good.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, he had one that was like, moral inversion. Just this idea that another life.

He was a journalist.

Yeah.

If he wasn't a billionaire, he would have been a journalist.

Yeah. Yeah. And then. But now he's doing. With the Daily. I don't know if you're subscribed to that, but since three takes, three morning takes, and each one of them has, like, some sort of clever, you know, pun or, you know, headline, and I'm like, how do you come up with these? Because it's really hard, but I guess.

You know, they're muscle.

You can be really good.

There could be some real alpha and us just ripping all the Takes from him. Just going back through the daily and repeating them as original thoughts and focusing more on the algo. Just trying to grow faster.

Yeah, yeah.

And then he'll be trying to plan his takes out to be like, okay, well, I can't do the daily anymore. I've got to drop it the. The morning that. After they record.

Yeah, well, I mean, as long as that's. As long as that's more profitable, then I'm down.

I. There's a topic that we have to cover. I'll actually wait. It's. We can put it in the reaction section. But I just got an email that was from this guy, Eric Newcomer, who's a journalist, and he says the subject of the email is reflections on Newcomer four years in. And the preview line is Newcomer is on track to generate more than 1 million in profit on more than 2 million in revenue this year. Pretty good. Which is fantastic. And it just shows that he's living every journalist's dream, which is to be rich. But. But instead of being just rich and successful, they choose to attack and try to tear down the sort of like, crabs in a bucket phenomena.

Yeah, yeah. Crabs in a bucket for sure.

Crabs in a bucket. Journalists in a bucket.

Well, he's a Harvard guy. He's buddies with Max Child. You know this guy, he runs this AI startup. He's a little more in tech than most people think.

Yeah.

He knows who butters his bread because he's got the events business. A lot of sponsors at Cerebral Valley.

There you go.

He's bringing in the big bucks. He's not going to be writing hit pieces for very much longer.

Yeah. But I think. Yeah, eventually. Eventually you just got to turn around.

Hit pieces aren't going to get you blowing profiles to Lake Como.

There you go.

No one. No one.

You need to be a peer. You need to be a peer.

Exactly.

You don't become a peer by writing hit pieces.

No, no.

You become a peer by generating huge.

No one's. No one's inviting Taylor Lorenz to Saint Tropez. Right, right. Like she's not going to St. Moritz.

She's climbing in through the. Through the H Vac system. You know, she's like. She's in the. She's in Hotel du Cop Ducat or whatever in the H vac system because it's. It's 82 degrees in there. Oh, yeah, yeah. Anyways, we need to get into the story.

Yeah, the top story. We got to talk about Stripe acquiring bridge for over $1 billion. Are you big in crypto? I'm like, generally a believer. I like bitcoin, but I'm not really deep in any.

And we like bubbles and stuff. Speculation.

I do, I do. But I was thinking about, like, why do we need to talk about this? And I think the real reason is just that, you know, whenever one of these billion dollar acquisitions happens, like, there's a new class of wealthy individuals who are on the scene. And like these founders, they're going to be the ones you're bidding, bidding against at Christie's, they're going to be the ones, like if you're fighting for a new allocation in Ferrari F80, like you're going to be going up against this guy. So you got to know who he is. So we should do a little, a little overview of Zach Abrams and Bridge just to kind of set the, set the story. Because it's a pretty, it's a pretty fascinating journey to get to this billion dollar outcome. So Zach grew up in North Carolina, attends Duke, and he's only done one podcast. I searched all over the place. I could only find one like 20 minute podcast that he did, but it was really great. And he talks about when he was at Duke, his dream.

That might be Abrams Law. The number of podcasts you do is inversely correlated with enterprise value.

The Duke is clearly actually working and building stuff, not just stroking his own ego. But he said that while he was at Duke, his life's goal and his dream was to become an operating partner in private equity.

Amazing.

I love it. And he, and he achieved it immediately. He goes to this private equity firm and he focuses on like opening and closing factories for this auto parts business.

That they bought new real PE guys. Closing stuff.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So he's like 24 and he's like shutting down manufacturing plans, opening up new manufacturing plans. And it's like a beast of a time because it's post recession. I think it's like 2009, and it's the auto parts business. Like, no one's buying new cars and stuff. It's just like really rough. But then 2010, he realizes that, like, okay, I want something different. There's a startup scene out in Silicon Valley, moves out there. He starts a fintech company called Evenly, and he sells to Square pretty quickly after a year and a half. And so this is. He gets into Square, pre ipo, pre cash app, pre a lot of the crypto stuff and kind of sees that start growing. So he's a product manager at Square, works there for a few years, goes to Coinbase where he Leads the consumer business. And what's funny is that I didn't fully fact check this, but he's his co founder at Bridge is Sean Yu who I believe was also his co founder evenly and also worked with him at Coinbase and also worked with him at Brax.

So yeah, so this is one of those. This is like, this is this. The story is fantastic because it completely justifies VC's pattern matching.

Yep.

Right, yeah. It's like okay, finance background, so has like extreme work ethic, understands how business works, starts a company, sells to Square, probably wasn't like an amazing outcome but you know, stays on with his co founder, learns the game, is at a hyperscaler.

Yep.

Goes, goes and works at Coinbase. Another hyperscaler goes and is at Brex early, another hyperscaler with his, with his original co founder the whole time and then starts a new company and raises it 40 pre. Which probably felt like really expensive for a lot of people, but they're like, hey, he was sold his last company to Square, he's with his original co founder and so the pattern matching is extreme all the way through.

Not technically hyperscalers by the way. That term's reserved for the big tech companies that are building like massive.

Right, right, sorry, sorry.

Scale up, scale up, scale up, scale ups. And in the financial world. Yeah. He never like went off and did something random.

Yeah. So when he. And you know he's now he's so he's not like he wasn't fomoing into fintech.

Exactly.

He started in fintech in 2010. Right. So he's like a decade and a half into his career when he's really building Bridge.

Yeah.

So I think here's the reason that the story is important is this is the only major liquidity event that I can think of in crypto that wasn't token oriented.

Oh yeah, right, yeah.

Like can you think of another? And no, they definitely didn't have a token because they didn't need it.

It's all just infrastructure.

But I cannot think of another major outside of Coinbase ipo. Can you think of another crypto company that was a, sorry, 10 figure acquisition? It's just you can't think of one.

I mean a similar business would be like chainalysis. Right. But I don't know if they've sold or ip. So like that's a company that doesn't have a token. They just do the research and I think they're doing very well.

Right.

But again no, but it's your point.

Not a liquidity this is like the Instagram moment. And the funny thing is this will inspire an entire massive wave of new crypto infrastructure investing. It's good timing. I have a company that's similar to Bridge for Latin America.

Yeah.

That does Stablecoin infrastructure. They're called Minteo are going to be raising this quarter. If you're. If you're listening, this is.

Yeah. Dylan Field posted this about. He's the CEO of Figma and he said in 2006 I asked Joey Krug, Joey, what are going to be the biggest use cases for crypto? He quickly and succinctly answered speculation. Stablecoins and prediction markets. Meme Coins, Stripes acquisition of Bridge and Poly Market. The world is starting to catch up to Joey and that's like exactly what's happening right now. You have pumped out fun, tons of Meme Coins. Also just speculation on Bitcoin and ETH is like underlying assets. But then now we're seeing a lot of infrastructure in stablecoins which makes a lot of sense. It is really hard to refute if you're a crypto skeptic. And, and then polymarket which is obviously taking over the world right now.

Yeah. So it's, it's interesting. So I met Zach in 2022. It was. Must have been post his initial fundraise which I think was at 40.

I think he did two, two rounds. Like a Series A. Yeah. And I think they raised 53 total. Probably 10 on 40 in that first thing. And then I think they probably did like 40 mil on 100 or so. 200 or something.

I met him in the context of we were doing a lot of work with stablecoins at Party Round.

Sure.

We supported stablecoin investing on Chain which was funny at the time because the reason that, that what he was doing was important is because we even had deeply crypto native companies that were using our product that didn't want to raise using the stablecoin functionality because it was too much of a hassle once you had the stablecoins to convert them and stuff. So he was solving an important problem. I. I had already backed a company called Layer 2 that is doing sort of similar stuff to. To Bridge more focused on like sort of like banking applications. But they were. I thought Layer two was a good bet at the time. They were powering all of Angel List Stablecoin infrastructure. Bridge took it in another direction and when I jumped on with Zach I wasn't Zach's obviously super smart. I should have probably tried to invest at the time but he Wasn't raising and he basically just mined me for information for like the entire 30 minutes. Like he was just like not really wanting to share anything because I think he didn't know exactly what he was doing yet. So he just used the entire meeting to just mine information of how we were thinking about stablecoins and we had a bunch of crypto sort of companies as customers. So anyways, should have bet big on Zach at that time, but didn't really. I don't know. I don't kick myself that much because it wasn't like a fundraising specific meeting.

It's interesting though.

But yeah, I think it's fantastic for crypto at a time when speculation and prediction markets, like you're saying or getting all the attention to say, like, hey, here's a major liquidity event by the most storied, relatively recent Silicon Valley company being Stripe, putting it on the map and like legitimizing it. Which is just good because I have a lot of. I'm personally heavily invested in early stage crypto and ultimately I think that it was always very clear that stable, like nothing has product market fit in crypto like stablecoins. Like, if you actually look at like, I think the most it's USDT is has more revenue on a per employee basis by like 10x than blackrock, which is sounds insane, but I think they have like a hundred person team and they're doing billions of dollars or something like that. So I think that it's very like legitimizing and it's just very positive. The only thing that was unfortunate about the way the whole announcement went down is that Sequoia didn't really get the credit that they were wanting. And so Sean had to really come out.

Yeah. The information really snubbed him.

Snubbed him. Felt very personal. He had to come out and say, hey, we led the Series A. Yeah. It wasn't Ribbit or Han or, you know, Sean was like, I don't even know who those funds are. Anyway, so they issued a correction.

Thank God.

Yeah. Journalism is saved. But it was a dark day for journalism.

Yeah, it was rough. It was rough. I've actually used stablecoins. I paid a video editor in Argentina.

Yeah.

And because the currency was fluctuating like crazy and it was really, really hard. And the fees to get dollars, they were crazy.

Yeah. We as Americans, we want usdc, USDT adoption. It's good for the dollar.

Yeah.

It just allows us dollar dominance. I had a. I was on a. I was on a. I was on a surf trip with four Argentinians when I was 18 traveling from Ecuador to Panama. And I was on like a six month trip at the time and my Argentinian friends had to cut their trip short by like eight weeks because their currency just got demolished mid trip and they were sitting obviously in Argentinian pesos. And so they're imagine getting your budget like slashed like by 60%, you know, so they just literally had to go home. And so yeah, just think it, it I, you know, I pray for the continued dominance of the US dollar as long as we both shall love live for the sake of our children and their children. Yeah, but stablecoins are good. You know, stablecoins are, are, are a big catalyst for the dollar.

It's kind of fascinating. I mean it doesn't seem like anyone's announced like bridges revenue or how big.

They know, but it.

Do you have it?

They did. It was like $15 million run rate. So it's like huge.

Multiple hundred. But it seems like they have a massive regulatory moat or have done a.

Lot of work on the regulatory side. Yeah, that's what I actually don't as, you know, idea guys, non technical folk. I don't know what they built that was so valuable that Stripe couldn't build it themselves and felt like they had to. What you don't know is how much of this, this is almost like Stripe hedging. Like Stripe's been had a lot of stablecoin initiatives internally. They've been trying to build Paxos, right? Yeah, they've been trying, they've been working on this space for a really long time. So I'm excited for it to come out more of like what did they build that was so critical that they had to pay 100 times revenue or whatever they paid.

Well, this anon signal wrote on Conviction Finance. Zach has managed to do the near impossible obtaining solid licenses with the two major jurisdictions, the United States and Europe, where they are both permitted to transmit large sums of money and exchange currencies on behalf of users. Essentially a ramp one for the Eurozone is located in Poland. The other US Delaware C Corp is located in Berkeley. US C Corp has money transmitter licenses approved in 22 states and they got more and they're close to 48 states now. If not, they already have them. And so it feels like Bridge went out and did all this like heavy lifting on the regulatory side to actually get approved. And then they also have very high transfer limits. I guess there are tiers to the money transfer like, like yeah, you know, approval levels and so they did all this hard work and I wonder if that's, if that's difficult for Stripe because they're such a big company. Maybe they're like, you know, it becomes more of a political issue, the politicians want to extract more of a pound of flesh or something. Because you would assume that, like, okay, a bigger company would actually have an easier time getting trans.

Yeah, but it's, it's, it's sort of interesting. Stripe knows how important stablecoins are to their business long term. Did they only spend like $50 million trying to make this happen? Did they spend $100 million internally? Did they spend $500 million internally and like, fail?

Yeah.

Right. I just don't know why they didn't have the lobbying power, they have the technical prowess and the, like, war chest to have made this happen. And so maybe Zach is, Who knows? Maybe, maybe Zach, you know, plays like, oh, I'm a nice guy. I don't do podcasts. You know, I just, I'm just interested in money. But then behind the scenes, he just was just an absolute animal. Right. This seems like it just doing deals with the mafia. He did what?

Getting anything in Europe.

He was on, he was in, yeah, he was in Poland on founder mode, meeting with the mafia to get this done.

Yeah. One, one thing I was listening to that podcast with him and he, he pointed out this very interesting thing that I couldn't quite get to the bottom of was, is that there's some sort of, like, legacy ruling in the American banking system where dollars in a bank account need to be demarcated between checking and savings. And I, and I'm not exactly sure why, I think it might actually just be tough for the measurement of the money supply. I couldn't really get to the bottom of it, but he said that one of the things that the stablecoin infrastructure unlocks is the ability to have a yield bearing account that then you can also transact with. So basically just merging a checking and savings account. And now like a crypto skeptic would say, like, well, that's like a stupid technical feature. Like, why can't you just make a combined checking and savings account or a yield bearing checking account? But it's like, well, there's so much cruft in the legal system around the American financial system. So it's like, maybe, yeah, you do just need to like, have some sort of greenfield fresh start and that's enough. I don't know.

Yeah, so at Capital, we had, we had a high yield checking account. So it's not that it is a good. I mean, I think the, there's so much platform and infrastructure risk in all this stuff. Right. Like, one of the reasons that they maybe had to buy Bridge, I'm just speculating is that stripes exist. Existing bank partners had no interest in taking on that level of risk. Right. We at Capital, we were rolling out a stablecoin custody product when we were informed by our bank partner that we, we were going to have to jettison a lot of our digital asset oriented customers. And so our entire product strategy like fell apart because we couldn't do the thing that our customers wanted and in fact had to be like, hey, you guys should like leave basically. So there's so much that, that is. I feel like the whole Bridge story is such a good example of risk taking. Right. There's so much that Bridge was trying to do that when they started was unclear if it was even going to be possible. And so oftentimes opportunities like that attract unsophisticated founders that don't know what they're getting themselves into and then founders that are sophisticated and already successful and comfortable with the risk. Right?

Yeah.

Because a lot of people would have said like, oh, what you're trying to do is you're going to get destroyed by stripe or you're going to get destroyed by block and square or what you're trying to do. Like no bank's going to allow that or you're never going to get money, transmitter licenses or whatever the things that. There would have been a lot of ways to, to if you were writing an investment memo on the business, be like, what could go wrong here? And Zach, I'm sure was totally aware of all of those risks and still comfortable with it. And it shows that, it shows that there's so much alpha and just being okay with the fact that you're taking on a regular, you're taking on a lot of regulatory risk, you're taking on a lot of platform risk and you need to just. That's part of what creates these sort of exponential opportunities.

Do you think there'll ever be a stablecoin depegging in the sense that like normally when a stable coin depegs, it's like a disaster because it means that like it's been discovered that they don't actually hold the assets. But I wonder if in the future stablecoins become so popular that they be. They essentially become global.

Yeah.

Super valuable. And then the, the U.S. the Fed is like printing too many dollars and the dollars become inflationary and, and just like the dollar went off the gold standard. Imagine if like the, imagine if USDC or USDT become so big that they say, you know what, we're, we're no longer backed by the dollar because we are more stable than the dollar.

Yeah.

Right now they're using.

Yeah, I mean that's it, that's, that's.

Been the big stability.

So that's been a huge critique of. So Coinbase has always taken the approach that everything like they've taken a very transparent approach. Tether I don't think has ever come close to the same level of transparency. Yeah, there's always been, there's a huge amount of saying tether USDT can say oh yeah, we're a stable coin, but what if, but it's a private company and what if they've just been, they could have been giving themselves for every dollar, you know, dollar that they take in and, and sort of minting a new stable coin. What if 30% of the time they were like we're just going to take, you know, I don't know. Right. Like you just don't really know what's going on. And that's why they're, they're USDT depegged. During the whole FTX saga there was like a lot of very, very minor. Yeah, it was like, which was like.

Off by 30% one day and everyone was like, okay, this is the end.

Yeah. And so I think that there will undoubtedly be a time in the future where a major stablecoin like blows up. Right. Because part of crypto by saying, hey, decentralized finance, which is another way of saying unregulated finance or like digital, you know, crypto based finance, the whole thing has just been speed running. Why we have all these financial regulations in the first place.

Right.

So if you allow anybody, if you allow a global team of anons to start creating financial products. Yeah, you're going to. Similar things are going to happen to the wild west of America when like 10 dudes were like, yeah, let's create a bank.

Yeah.

You know, and this is like the cattle bank, you know, whatever. I mean, just are they're just freestyling finance.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the bull case here is that it's like, yes, they are speedrunning. Like let's regulate financial products for the first time. But just by virtue of the fact that they are not immediately slotted into the existing regulatory scheme, you're able to take a second crack at creating more effective regulations that make more sense and allow for speed and transparency or whatever. And you're just. It's just like, you know, it's the same thing as the people that want to like, go and build a new country. Just because there's like so much legal cruft. Because every year in America, we're adding like 10 times the amount of laws that we're deleting, right?

Yeah.

So the amount of laws is just growing, growing, growing. That slows down innovation. That slows down the financial sector. And so it's like, yeah, it is the wild West. It is really bad while it's completely unregulated. But there's a really big bullish case for whatever regulation comes. It's just going to be a little bit more fresh and a little bit more from first principles and hopefully a little more permissive and just informed by the wins and losses of the last few decades in the traditional finance system.

Absolutely. The other thing that's interesting about the whole thing is that Stripe was willing to pay 20% of what. What people believe Circle's eventual IPO will be. So people are projecting Circle IPO at something like a $5 billion valuation. Circle. Let's look at what their market cap is right now. But I.

You mean for the stablecoin market cap? Because that's just the value of all the stable coins.

Yeah, but they generate really, really high.

And then they get a percentage on that as their market cap.

You can buy USDC for 99 cents right now, depegged. It's the end pegging game over. What is the. So the market cap is $34 billion right now.

Yeah. And that's for all the stable coins.

Yeah, they get a fraction. The reason that that's substantial is it means that Circle is. Has taken on $34 billion and is earning interest yield on that, which right now is somewhere around 5%. And they're giving a lot of that back as incentives, but it's still very, very profitable business. So anyways, something that Zach and the Bridge team did resulted in it being their $15 million company being worth a billion dollars. And we'll find it out over time, I imagine.

Yeah.

I mean, certainly crypto needed a win.

Yeah.

That wasn't speculation. It's not enough to be. It's not even though Pump fun. Who knows what the enterprise value of a business like that is. Right. Because it feels like very like it's on the most shaky regulatory ground possible. But they're doing I think like 100 million a year and fees. Right. So that's a massive win from a revenue generation standpoint. But what is that company worth? So I think crypto needed a win and it certainly got one.

I mean it feels like this year there's been three major wins across all three of those speculation wise Bitcoin is near all time highs. Like in terms of the digital gold thesis, like it's very, very solid. And so this whole, you know, fear that was being sowed by the crypto skeptics was correct around some of the bubbly NFTs. But clearly it was wrong about bitcoin because it's had much more staying power than those folks predicted. Right. Like everyone was predicting that bitcoin once it sold off from 65 at the height or I think it was like 70 for a little bit during the peak down to like it was in the 30s and maybe even high 20s at one point. Well it's back up and if it keeps, if it keeps going up and down, like yeah, it's, it's volatile but it's here to stay in one way or another. And then you have polymarket like absolutely dominating like the news cycle and providing some sort of insight and, and you know, some, some value that's like the generic much more. Yeah, I mean there's, there's the degen gambler aspect to it but there's also just like the, like the normie value of like, of like people want to look at a percentage of who's going to win the presidential election that has value. People will pay for that. People. And that, that seems like something that's more fundamental and more easy to value than like what is an art piece worth. Right?

Yeah.

Like if you're a business or a hedge fund or something and you think that the, there's going to be some economic impact to a Trump election versus A, versus a Harris. I wonder like having that data is valuable.

I wonder if this is available to see on chain. But what percentage of poly markets bets are on the election versus anything else? Like it must be like 98%.

I don't know if it's 98% but it's certainly high. There's like a billion dollars of liquidity in the, in the election right now. I asked Shane like what does he think the next, the next biggest market will be after the election and I think they have some pretty exciting things planned. I don't believe they use bridge, but they do use stablecoins on the background in the back end. But they're a very crypto native company so they're able to implement that. And Zach's been in Shane's Been in crypto for years in the Ethereum community. But for so many other companies, using Stablecoins is a huge hassle. I mean, you don't want to roll your own infrastructure there. Like, with my first business, we took, we accepted Bitcoin payments through Coinbase in 2013 and it was a mess. It was a disaster, I think. I mean, we lost like $10 million because we sold it too early. We should have held it. And then also it was just like a nightmare from, from an accounting perspective because you basically are operating in foreign currencies and you have to reconcile those so your balance sheets like fluctuating left and right. And so you wind up accepting them. And then for anyone who has a product with any sort of return policy, you wind up acting as a hedge. Right? Because like, let's say that you're selling.

I'll take that Bitcoin back.

Exactly. Let's say you're selling microphones for $500. You buy 10 microphones for Bitcoin, you have $5,000 in mics. If the price goes down, you just sell those microphones and get your cash back at dollars. But if the price goes up, you return the microphones and you get, and you get the bitcoin back.

Bitcoin back.

And so you wind up in this weird scenario where like, if the price is going up, you tell the customers, well, okay, we will refund you in the currency that you gave us, or if it's going down. So you're always like playing this weird game of like, what do I give back to the customer? Because you act as a hedge. So it's just really, really difficult. But obviously if you can just plug stablecoins in, it makes a ton of sense. And that's what's happening. That's actually the biggest win.

What if it comes out that Stripe paid a billion? Because Zach had taken his entire 50 million dollar round from Sequoia and just gone super long on Bitcoin. And then he's sitting on like, so the company actually got bought for $100 million, but then there's a billion dollars and it's like Sequoia is like, you know what, we made this bet once with sbf. It didn't work and you fucking did it.

You know, I was waiting. You know the famous story about the FedEx founder?

Yeah.

Yeah. So the FedEx founder, he's down to his last dollar. The company's about to go out of business, famously. He goes to Vegas, puts all the company's assets on black, comes up black he doubles his money, he's able to make payroll. The business keeps growing. Now the conspiracy theory is that it wasn't. He didn't go to the casino. He went to, like, a loan shark in Vegas or like the Mafia.

No, the real Ben, where's my tinfoil hat?

Is that. Is the water in the. Shot him? Can you just keep it on the other side or something.

Would be on brand for me to have water in the shot.

Yeah. The whole time.

No. So I think the real conspiracy theory is that he was narco traffic, you know, doing like, trafficking drugs, getting a lot of cash, and he needed a story in terms, to say, like, all he would have to do to make 100 grand in cash is do, like one run for the cartel. And then all of a sudden he's got.

Oh, because he's in FedEx. Yeah, that makes sense.

Because he's in the trucking.

Exactly. So you could be like, okay, I'm just gonna do one.

So if you want to. If you want to create a hypothetically legendary. Hypothetically legendary story of how you bet your company on the @ in Vegas and you suddenly came up with all this cash. Yeah, that's a pretty good way to.

That's super fascinating. Yeah, you'd have all the infrastructure to do it.

But anyway, so, yeah, my tinfoil hat off. But I think that.

Yeah, I was always thinking that during the last crypto boom, when everything was just ripping, there was. We were gonna hear the story of a company that raised some money, didn't find product market fit, but put their whole treasury in some altcoin and wound up with, like, just a huge treasury. And then maybe they would. Maybe they would keep building, use that, and then actually make a win. And it'd be like, wait a minute. That company came out of, like, stealth. They raised a $1 million seed round, but they have a thousand employees or something, and they're just launching this product. Like, what happened? It's like, oh, well, yeah, because they turned that million into 100 million, essentially gambling. And it would be like a FedEx style story. But everyone I talked to in crypto was like, yeah, there's been people that do that, but then they just ride off in the sunset. They just leave and they don't. And they just stop building. They just drop out, which sucks. But yeah, with this, with Bridge, the one really interesting example that I did see of, like a company using this, and it was a perfect example of this was scale. So they have a bunch of contractors internationally. They want to pay them quickly in Dollars because there's no fluctuation. And so they use, I think they use a product that's built on top of bridge.

I love how we say there's no fluctuation of the dollar. I mean, while it's been devalued.

Yeah. But like, relative to a lot of these places, like, people will be so happy to get paid in dollars on the day that they work. And that's something that stablecoins can bring. So it's interesting to watch crypto rack up these very real wins. Whether it's like bitcoin becoming essentially Lind.

Haters will say it's Photoshop.

Yeah, exactly. Well, haters will focus on the bored apes and it's like, yeah, that was one thing that didn't work out.

It was Yuga Labs that was our customer that really. That didn't use our. When they, when they raised with us, they didn't use the stablecoin functionality.

Well, should we move on to brother of the week?

Yeah, this was a tough one.

But first, I need to tell you about NetJets. If you're looking for the ultimate in flexibility and convenience when it comes to private travel, NetJets offers an unparalleled experience with access to the world's largest fleet of private jets. NetJets allows you to enjoy the benefits of private aviation without the hassle of ownership. NetJets operates the largest, most diverse private aircraft fleet in the world and offers a full range of personalized private aviation solutions to meet and exceed the high standards of the world's most discerning travels. Travelers tell a personal story about flying on a private jet. Do you have a lot of experience in the private jet world?

Not as much as I'd like, John. I think that private aviation is the last true luxury. It is something that David Senra said. What's that?

One of his mentors told him. One of David, the life goal is to get a private jet.

That's the only thing that matters.

The only thing that matters.

The only thing that matters. Here's the thing. You can sleep in a private jet.

Yep.

You can't fly a house. Right. So what does that tell you? Yeah, optimize for the jet, don't optimize for the house.

That's true. Yeah.

I'm surprised that's not more of a thing. If you think about it, RVs are big and why are people not just saying, you know, I'm going to get, I'm going to buy this jet or I'm going to, I'm going to leverage Net jets primarily as a, you know, sort of like this sort of RV in the skies.

Right. There is this interesting thing where people always complain, like, oh, we don't have flying cars yet. We don't have flying cars yet.

But we do.

We do. It's just not evenly distributed yet. We have. We have private jets, which you can take anywhere, like it's a flying car. And then we also have helicopters.

Yeah.

And if you put those two together, I'm surprised that.

Yeah, I'm surprised that it hasn't become more popular to develop, you know, something, you know, maybe this is a partnership with NetJets. Right. But developing, you know, a city in Arizona that's way off the beaten path, that has consistent air, you know, private air travel between LA or somewhere that's a comparable distance to New York. Anyways, there's, you know, we're thrilled to partner with NetJets as consumers and as a show and, you know, we. We look forward to many, you know, more trips with them in the future and.

Yeah. So thanks to them. Should we move on to the brother of the week? We got to give it to Daniel Francis getting doxed. You might know him as Daniel Johnson, dj. Or Growing Daniel.

Growing Daniel.

Growing Daniel. One of the greatest posters. He announced his startup Able this week, and it is an AI startup for police. And he's based in San Francisco and he launched it in an interesting way. I mean, he has over 100,000 followers. Basically everything he posts goes viral. Like, he's fantastic at shitposting, but he chose to launch this in kind of the most normie way possible. Just like a TechCrunch article.

TechCrunch article.

But his aura, Gary tan powerful. That.

Yeah.

Oh, did he. Did he do an interview with Gary or something?

Gary, I think, was just a big investor.

Yeah. Yeah. So, like, like, you know, he could have. He could have gone on a podcast, he could have done a launch video. He knows people. He could have done all sorts of stuff. But he went with just the TechCrunch article, which is kind of hilarious. And counter.

I think he might still be having a little bit of an identity crisis. He's like, I'm the number one shit poster on tech Twitter.

Yep.

And I'm building AI for cops.

Yeah, it is a little hard because, like, yeah, maybe, you know, his account is shit posting. Like, there's a couple of shit posters that I follow. Like, there's this one guy, Chris Backie. Do you know him? Yeah, he worked at. He ran Lasky. He sold it to Twitter and He worked at X and then he left. And when he left, he was like, big news. Like, I'm leaving the company. Like, thanks, everyone. And he's always shit posting. So my reply was just like, oh, this is like your best joke. Yeah, this is hilarious. Like, can't believe you even, like, you even got rid of your badge. You know, this is like searing comedy. Great satire on like, what, what cringe people do when they leave companies, you know. And so you could see this, like, backfiring. If he's like, hey, I'm launching this, like, police AI startup. Everyone would just be like, oh, like, this is the best shit post ever. He's like, no, guys, it actually is real. I'm actually like a real person.

Yeah. It's funny to think about him in some Milwaukee police station, you know, doing a customer like, meeting or conversation or a sales thing. And they're like, so, you know, we have a few minutes before the chief arrives. Tell me about yourself. You know, what, do you have any family and law enforcement? And he goes, well, I'm somewhat of a sheriff myself on Tech Twitter, actually a little town called Technology Twitter. I don't know if you've ever been.

There, but I actually met Elon Musk.

Yeah, I mean, I think that this is not. Here's the thing, people aren't going to want to say there's. There's always. Anytime somebody posts a lot and is building a company, all the VCs that suck at posting try to signal them, you know, and sort of like shit on them and be like, oh, this is not a serious founder, or whatever why he's posting it. But. But whether you like it or not, if somebody can figure out how to post really well, they can figure out how to build a company and get attention and communicate in the right ways to raise money, to hire great people to get customers. So for some reason or another, the skill set of posting translates well to doing well.

It's important compression of ideas, Right?

Yeah.

So like posting a banger tweet is just taking some sort of like, complex that's bouncing around in the ethereum and boiling it down into something that's funny or fits into a meme format that gets attention. Yeah, exactly. And it relays a complex concept in a very short amount of time.

Yeah.

And. And that is just a valuable skill as long as you don't get addicted to it and you're not just making posting your entire life or like getting sucked into it and having some weird.

But I don't think he has Daniel it's an edge because his income allows him to take a lower salary from.

Yeah, he probably makes a decent amount, right?

Yeah, yeah.

He's probably making like 10 grand a month or something.

A couple.

A month from that. Oh yes. Cyan is in here.

Yeah.

Oh, you got Long journey. That's great. Justin's over there.

Yeah.

That's awesome. Nyc. I love it. Did you see the. His.

I will say it is the most hilarious business that he could build straight up as a poster to go build AI for cops. I'm totally for it. I want. I want the police to have more funding.

Yeah.

I think that they have gone through a decade of being ostracized and put down and told that they were bad people. When these are people that get paid way less money than they should probably to do a job that is very challenging. And you, you know, half the country seemingly hates you, whether they're people that are breaking laws or people that are just police haters. So I think it's. I think it's totally a smart move because he can go make building AI for cops cool and attract other smart posters. But it's. It's funny from the lens that I would say that, you know, somebody like Ayush who's building Warp is like a, you know, talented poster. There was a lot more overlap in terms of the customer, the buyer.

The buyer's already has audience. Yeah.

I just don't think, you know, maybe two cops follow growing. Daniel. 100,000.

Yeah. The only value is maybe hiring engineers.

Which is deeply valuable.

Yeah.

But.

And investors.

Yeah.

Like every major VC who's on tech.

Is aware the real. Yeah. The real edge is ability to raise capital and hire talented people that otherwise wouldn't be going and applying for a job at a AI for Cops startup.

Yeah. Do you remember his stunt at Twitter when.

Course.

It was iconic.

Of course.

I was actually. I got dinner with Raul the night before that happened.

No way.

And we were just like hanging out. And then I went into like a meeting at Founders Fund the next day and we all open up our phones and we're seeing like he. The guy that I had dinner with the night before and Daniel just out for front of. In front of Twitter hq. Like talking to Deirdre Bosa at CNBC about how they got laid off and like causing this like, viral, like fake news cycle and just iconic.

That was amazing. And it's.

No, that was really like the moment.

No fluke that both those guys have gone on to build interesting companies. Yeah, they have because they're interesting people.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think, I think both of them like have the ability to not get lost in the sauce on Twitter.

You could raise a whole. The, you could raise a whole fund dedicated to funding posters.

Yeah.

Right. It's just the poster index.

Yeah.

And I think it would outperform, perhaps. There's only one way to find out.

Only one way to find out. Gotta fund the posters.

Fund the posters.

It's an interesting category to be in. Like, I'm pretty sure the company that makes the body cams has, is doing pretty well. I think it's. I think it's the same company that owns the tasers. I forget what company that is. But. But they're, they're like a multi billion dollar public company.

Yep.

It's just, it's just hard because like selling into police departments is. It's a real. It's not like real stream where there's one body.

The real play is building. Twitch meets Police Body Cams meets Poly Markets.

You can bet on it.

Bet on arrest.

What's going to happen?

Chases.

Yeah.

And yeah, we're in pursuit of this person.

Will they pull over? Will they make a run for it?

Yeah.

Okay. I see a Hellcat engine. He's. He's breaking for it. Yeah, yeah. The other company that's done really well here is. Are you familiar Flock Safety? Yeah, yeah. They are crushing it. And, and that a founders fund. Yeah.

And they made that another big acquisition.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

They did Aerodrome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And everyone thought it was really, really hard to build like the, the ender roll for like the local government because it's just so fragmented and you have to go like jurisdiction by jurisdiction. But some people have cracked it. And so, you know, if he can figure that out, it's going to be good. It's going to be good. I'm excited. So congratulations to Daniel, the brother of the week.

Brother of the week.

Should we do some tweet reactions? I like this one. So Elon Musk has been playing Diablo relentlessly. I mean, the guy is one of the top 30 Diablo players in the world right now. Something like that. And so Alex Lieberman over at Morning Brew says, how does this man have time to play video games? I would absolutely love to see a screenshot of Elon Musk. Calendar would be a fascinating window into elite time management, prioritization and delegation. And so, yeah, I mean, he's running SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, boring company. All pretty serious efforts. Then also campaigning constantly and doing tons of interviews. He's also Running Twitter X. Yeah, constantly. And then apparently becoming one of the greatest Diablo players ever in the world.

Yeah. And then, and then aren't there people that are saying that he's not actually playing and maybe he has a whole team of people that are playing so they warming up the account for him.

Exactly, yeah. So one of, one of the other great Diablo players did kind of a breakdown and said that. So Diablo basically has new season content every quarter where there's like a new final boss and new levels and stuff. So even if you're maxing out your account when the new season drops, like you have several hundred hours of content in front of you just to get to the right level to beat the final boss. And so in order to be where he is, which is beating because in this tweet he says like 5 minute T150 clear, which is like the hardest thing you can possibly do right now. Hope there's some mid season content because he basically like finished the expansion pack like in like a month and a half and it's supposed to take you like three months or maybe longer. And so, uh, so one, one of the Diablo like, you know, fans says like in order to do this, like you literally have to be playing like 40 hours a week or something like that. Maybe more.

Yeah.

And so now there's like this theory that maybe Elon has a team of interns or something like playing on his account, doing a lot of like the grinding and leveling and then he can just log on for the best. Which is, which is like amazing delegation if that's true. Yeah, it's the other thing maybe just playing.

It's giving ammo to. I mean the guy spends a lot of time on jets, right?

Sure.

Starlink, I'm sure Starlink testing Starlink, making sure it's working. What better way to test the product than, you know, Diablo? I think that this is potentially giving some ammunition to the folks out there that say Elon's not a real. He didn't build SpaceX, he didn't do this or that. He hires team. That's like the, that's the number one gotcha that people like try to get Elon for is like that. Yeah, it's like you didn't do that. Other. You hired people that did that. Which is like, okay, okay, you should.

You should hire people.

You should hire people and build neuralink too. Yeah, I think everybody would benefit if you could do that. But yeah, this is giving some real, you know, ammo to those people who are going to do a Takedown piece, which I'm sure journalists will find a way to paint this in a. Elon's deceptive video game practices apply to much more than just, you know, online games. Elon's treating the entire world like an online game.

Yeah.

He thinks leveling up is all that matters when, you know.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's. I think it's human humanizing. It's good. Like, the idea of, you know, this very powerful and wealthy person, like, not having fun or, like, letting off steam at any point is, like, very blackpilling to me.

Do you think that he is over having kids and now is just like, I'm going to be a kid?

He was joking about it recently, right? He was saying he was going to have Taylor Swift's baby.

That would be.

That would be where he was like, I can't wait.

Yeah, yeah, that part of the simulation.

I think he's. I think he's down and I think he's hitting such economies of scale with the. With the children that, like, I would be surprised if it ever stops. I have this theory that, like, there's a lot of. There's a lot of, like, old dudes who.

I don't know.

There's a lot of, like, old billionaires who are, like, constantly getting divorced and remarried. And I think at a certain point, it's like, they just, like having weddings because weddings are just, like, big parties and like, an excuse to. To. To. Because you. Because you look at. You look at. I forget. It was like, maybe the founder of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, like, he had, like, three weddings in the course of, like, nine years or something. He's getting remarried every couple years, and it's like, okay, why doesn't he just, like, date or, like, not get married? But at a certain point, it's like, he probably has some legal team that can, like, structure the perfect, like, prenup. And then he just gets to throw a wedding and his girlfriend likes that. And so he's just like, yeah, okay, run it back. We'll do another one. It's not a big deal. And then when they break up, it's like, yeah, they get divorced, but to him it's just like breaking up with someone. It's, like, very, like, low stakes, I think. Yeah, but it's like an excuse.

That would be. That would be.

I don't see it.

But yeah, if Elon. Elon should. Should open source his entire, you know, family building playbook, including, even if he's not getting married to these women, I'm sure They're signing documentation that basically says if we have a child taken care of. Yeah, yeah. These are the terms.

Well, he gets.

He sends a term sheet.

Well, he got destroyed by Pavel Durovation recently because Pavel has like 50 kids. Because he was not only.

He got mogged.

Oh, he got totally mogged. Because Pavel, it came out that he has like 50 kids because he's been like donating sperm at sperm banks and stuff and just doing like all this crazy stuff.

That's. That's.

It feels a little.

It's not.

It's not linear.

Yeah, that's not a. That's not a cool way to have 50 kids.

No. For Pavel. Yeah, that makes sense. Over a hundred.

That's just, to me, reckless and weird. Just like.

Yeah. You know, he is a dripped out technology brother, though, so.

No, I support. I support. I guess I support. I just think that. Why not just have 50 children with 50 women if you're gonna. I don't know. I guess he does. He just doesn't. He doesn't fuck.

Yeah. Well, let's move on to this one. So Will, who I think was. Was at OpenAI for a while, I follow this guy. He says, I don't understand the recent trend of college dropouts specifically raising some insane 10, 20, $100 million at 100, 250, $500 million valuations pre product or pre revenue, often for idiotic. Are people unable to see how they're themselves. It's not just free money, my brother. And he kind of went on to say, like, yeah, he knows a lot of people that were young and they raised too much money and now they're buried under a prep stack and it's kind of.

Well, so this is generation. This is the dark side of pattern matching.

Yeah.

Where pattern matching Zach, who had been in fintech for over a decade, building at Square, his own company, then Square, then Coinbase and then Brex to the go. Then build another fintech company. But pattern matching. Oh, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out to build the social media app and then go on to make a. A plethora of devastating, you know, mistakes and mishaps with people and the, you know, the government and all these different things. And then when I saw this tweet, the number one, the company I was thinking about is company called Mach, which is making.

I. Oh, wait, Mock Industries.

Mock Industries, which is like an mit.

Yeah.

Dropout. And you know, they're building. I think they're building hypersonics.

It was like hydrogen weapons.

Hydrogen power, big can weapons.

He was Gonna shoot down weather balloons and yeah. Drones and just defense.

The issue is, is.

But yeah, got a lot of money.

Very quickly speed running in some of these industries that, where the stakes are a lot higher. Like defense tech.

Yep.

You're seeing some of those issues with mock where one of their employees like was hospitalized with like devastating injuries because something blew up. And there's a real. I don't think I'm all for giving smart young people lots of money to do ambitious things, but it's almost like they're find the balance of it. Right. So bet on the kid, bet on the dropout, but go get them somebody from Lockheed Martin. Well, that's the under their chaperone.

That's the under discussed thing about Facebook. They had some like VP of engineering who was like 45, who was there very early. I forget what this guy's name is, but he was like allegedly like very important in like stabilizing the company early on when it was a bunch of crazy kids running around. And, and he had like just the right level of respect to be like, okay, when he speaks up, we should listen. But he's not trying to like be like, oh, we got to bring in netsuite. Like, he wasn't like, he wasn't slowing anything down, but he was providing like just enough like, you know, basic rules. Because at one point like Facebook was all just like one file on, on a web server. And like when you wanted to make a code change, you would just be like, everybody, I'm pushing the code, like, nobody make any changes. I'm going to update the file or whatever. Like the files on the web server is like, it was like crazy. And he like brought in like cool stuff that like, cool process that everyone's like, okay, yeah, this process actually makes sense.

Yeah, just cool.

It's, it's interesting because I think there's two things that are kind of on a collision course with these crazy high valuations and high early checks. And it's one that the funds are bigger than ever. And even though we went through the zIRP era and VC fundraising went down, there's still so many more billion dollar funds out there than there were 10 years ago. So there's just more money to deploy and you got to deploy it to get the fees. So there's all these incentives aligned with like, we gotta deploy big money. So let's push out the IPO window, do more growth stuff. Let's put more money into earlier stage companies, like write bigger checks. That's fine. And, and then simultaneously the two hot industries are immensely capital intensive AI. So I'm going to come in and say, yeah, I'm going to do a training run. I need to hire, I need to hire a bunch of engineers that are going to want a million dollars a year and I'm going to also need to buy a bunch of Nvidia GPUs and do a bunch of capex and build out a training center. And even if I'm not capital intensive income capital light, a training run might still cost $10 million for my first thing. So like there's just higher computing costs and we're not in the zero marginal cost era of AI. And then defense is the same thing. Yeah, I'm going to need to buy a bunch of CNC machines, a bunch of like a bunch of aluminum. Like all this stuff has cost. It's not just this, oh yeah, you're yc, you get 100k and you're going to go spin up a web server and your cost is going to be perfectly matched with your revenue. Like when your website blows up and starts getting a ton of traffic. Well yeah, you're going to have paying customers then. So all of a sudden we have the two hottest categories are highly capital intensive, at least in theory. And then you have funds that are perfectly set up to fund those capital intensive businesses. So it's just like anyone with an idea, let's get a big check in there. But the problem is that if you wind up pivoting to something that isn't as capital intensive or doesn't find like the immediate product market fit, you wind up buried under this huge capital stack. And I think that's what, I think that's the pain people are feeling right now. But yeah, I think probably get a call from Jeremy Gifon soon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jeremy Mock Industries is Jeremy's like, who knows? No, I think that the challenge is so this happens with, let's say, I think the rule is maybe it's depew's law, which is the faster you get a lot of money, the dumber you will be with it. Right. And so if you win the lottery, you're going to just spend that money horrendously. And that's almost always what happens because you didn't have to learn how money works, you didn't have to learn how hard it is to make it. And so you're just doing like crazy, crazy stuff. And this happens even with angel investing. People like, oh, I'm going to do angel investing and their worst five investments Sometimes you get these people that are like, oh yeah, my first two angel investments are unicorns and that's because of the networks they were in. But more often it's somebody search angel investing and makes like the worst five investments that they'll make in the first five deals that they do. And so I think the challenge here is when money comes really fast, fast and easy. Like you're an MIT dropout that raises $50 million in the first year, you're just going to make a bunch of really bad decisions. It's everything from you're going to spend $400,000 on a brand identity because your VC connected you to a, to a.

Platform that seems good to the top.

Agency and you're not thinking about the real cost of that. You're going to make a hire that's not a good culture fit because they just care about cash comp and you're gonna just overpay for them. And then now you're dealing with this person that.

Not holding the bar on hiring. Yeah, I just need to hit my hiring quota.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, Optimize. You're, you're telling you, you know, these people get excited about being like, oh yeah, we're, we're a 20 person team.

Yeah.

It's like, well, you don't even know what you're building yet.

You don't even need to be like fully starving. But just like a year or two of like being somewhat cash constrained is going to set the culture up for years where you're going to go back and like the CEO is just going to be. When some VP comes to them and is like, I want to spend $500,000 on a branding package, they're going to be like, what? Like I did our first brand myself. Like, yeah, like, why do we need to jump there? Let's just do a half step. And then, and then all of those are going to add up to like saving money and being a little bit more judicious and a little bit less like frivolous. And then you won't have a culture of frivolousness, which I think is like the real danger with like the.

Yeah. Overall, when people are, I don't think, I don't think it's bad for the world that this stuff happens, to be honest. And it is, in fact, the entire model is predicated on if you back 20 MIT dropouts and one of them builds a generational firm, then it worked.

Yeah.

That's the entire model of venture capital. So will. I think it's a funny Tweet, and I respect that point of view, but he's not really realizing what the real game of venture is, which is if one of these companies becomes 10% as big as SpaceX, then the entire investment strategy worked.

That's true, but he's not talking to venture capitalists here, he's talking to entrepreneurs.

His brothers.

Yeah, he's talking to the brothers. And so what he's saying is not that like, yes, all of these deals could add up to plenty of funds doing well and even the bad funds, they're going to return capital, they're going to be 1x funds, maybe 2x funds, they'll be okay. It's not like the cash will really get totally incinerated. The the problem is, is that I think he's trying to just raise a flag to college dropout young people that it's like, yes, you can go and do the, the fake work of twisting your idea into something that fits a VC narrative and say, oh well, like we could be asset light, but we can raise more money if we say we're going to train our own model. Or we could, we could do this, but if we say that we need to buy this huge manufacturing plant and put up a big American flag, we'll be able to raise more money. So let's go with that path even if it's not the right path for our business, even that's. Even if that's not what the capital structure of our industry demands. And so you wind up building for the VCs instead of for the market, for the customer and for yourself. And so I think that's kind of the, the meta take here to some degree.

Yeah.

But yeah, gotta kiss a lot of frogs game. Should you. This one, I love this one. Evan Armstrong writes, obviously I am excited for my child, but also really wish I had like two more months to write just today. 1 Pre product robotics company raising a 2 billion valuation. 2. Bridge getting bought at 90x revenue. 3 Rumors about new models coming. Can't help but want to publish on this.

Amazing.

I know this is a man who prioritizes work over everything else.

Skip paternity leave, brother.

Yeah, it is. It is the most important thing that keeps the, keeps the society, keeps capitalism grinding the relentless market techno capital is nothing without those who are willing to put their family to the side.

I took off 36 hours when my son was born. Not necessarily proud of that, but he was born Saturday. Like you know, in the early, early hours of the morning.

12 hour Monday, 12 hour on call.

I legitimately had a 1212 hour meeting of back to backs on Monday. But we had to like that that was the only way. I didn't do that with the second one. But yeah, I mean, I think that that's just a sign that Evan loves his work.

That's great.

And he. There's a lot of stuff. Stuff. We wouldn't have this podcast if there wasn't stuff to talk about.

Also, I mean, underrated about this tweet. Work life balance always goes viral. So I don't know if this got dunked on, but, like, if you're rage baiting, like, this is the best possible rage bait. If you're just trying to grow your account, like, because people will fight about this forever.

Yeah. Because he could have tweeted. While I'm a big fan of organic intelligence being my new child, I'm really a fan of artificial intelligence. Exactly. And the child that I'm having today, I could have had the same child 400 years ago. But AI and large language models didn't exist 400 years ago.

Exactly. So if you just dial this up, he just rewrites. This is like, I haven't seen my child in months, but I've been writing. Boom.

Yeah. They're actually so every is chugging along. I've subscribed to their stuff forever.

Yeah.

I think that they are too nice of guys to be in the media business. They now they. They spun out a word processing.

Oh, yeah.

Product, which. Which seems cool, but they're not like Eric Newcomer who's putting up seven figures of ebitda because, you know, maybe they are now. I don't know. I have no idea. But I think that Evan is too nice to rage bait. You know, like he. He only went 50% of the way there.

Yeah. What is the actual. It's every.

Yeah. It's a media company. I think they're focused on. On AI.

Yeah. I've never seen them get absolutely raked over the coals by tech or the communists. And you got to have an enemy. You don't have an enemy. You don't have an ally.

Yeah.

The only reason people rally together.

The enemy of my. Yeah.

No, seriously, you have to have an enemy. If you don't have an enemy, there's no reason for someone to be your ally.

We should. Who we need to pick an enemy.

The working class, obviously.

There you go.

Yeah. We all know that the working class gets too much credit and it's long and it's. And respect for the. For the financial. Yeah. Blue collar.

Yeah.

Yeah. They're clearly the enemy.

Yeah. We haven't done our jobs until people are calling us billionaires in a sort of negative.

Exactly. Pejorative.

Yeah, pejorative.

I mean, unironically. The enemy that I always focus on in the tech stuff is China, essentially. And the four.

That's an easy. And that's so authentic to my lived experience because I studied abroad in Shanghai.

Yeah.

I studied while I was there at basically the Harvard of China. I worked at a tech tech accelerator like, while I was there. And within 48 hours of setting foot in that country, I knew that I wanted to do everything. I wanted to spend my life making sure that we contained China.

Yeah.

And that. And that they didn't export their sort of way of life to the world. So I don't have any issues with the people of China, of course, but their way of life.

Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like that's. I always try and remind people in tech when there's these little feuds, like, oh, Miami versus San Francisco, like, which is cooler? Or like the Gundo versus sl, like AI versus hard tech. Or even like the intra fights between like the VC firms like Andreessen, Sequoia Founders Fund. Like they're all beefing or whatever. And I'm like, okay, like, there might be good reasons for these beefs, but like, let's refocus on like the real battle. They're all going to America.

They're all going to enjoy a conversation at Milken.

Yeah. Everyone, everyone's on the same team here. And. And I try, and I try and refocus. Especially like when the Gundo Bros start going hard on sf. I'm like, do you think China is having these fights over. Over Wuhan versus Shanghai. No. They say, what is Wuhan good at? Biotechnology, bioweapons development. What is Shenzhen good at? Copying American consumer electronics. Like, they're both excellent in their own ways. In the same way that the Gundo is great at hard tech and San Francisco is great at AI. They're not fighting.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

They're working together as one team. We need to be one team over here now.

America. Yeah. Who's the L? Who? We need to find the LP in Sequoia, Andreessen and Founders Fund. This is probably Saudi.

Oh, there's tons. Not even Saudi.

That's going to be like, put. Who's the. Who's the one person that can put all the GPS on one group chat and be like, stop squash this right now in front of me.

You know who it Is. I think it's Zuck's family office. You know that.

Yeah, yeah.

I forget what they're, what they're called, but I'm pretty sure they're LP and everything. Yeah, but there's a bunch of others, endowments and whatnot.

Dad, the GPS are fighting again.

Yeah. I do think that I love the idea of like, you know, being a founder became high status. So it was like, oh, I gotta, I gotta graduate from college and get on the track and, you know, start a company.

No, drop out, get into a good school.

Then it was like, drop out and oh, like I'm just gonna go straight to angel investor or like start a VC firm. And it's like, okay, like, kind of odd. And then we talked about that one guy who is like, he's starting like fund management software. It's like one layer of abstraction. Pretty soon it's just going to be like, I'm just going to go be an lp. I'm going to go straight to be an lp. Straight to be an lp.

Yeah. The investing is something that I feel like I grew up in the. So immersed in the Silicon Valley ethos of you can just do things, you can do anything. That the, the number one way in which I've felt that experience really matters is in angel investing. Because I just started angel investing and I didn't know, you know, there was no. I didn't go to Jason Calacana school.

I was going to ask if you had done that.

Like, I didn't, didn't do that. I just started investing in cool ideas with smart people and it's overall been very, you know, fruitful, that strategy. But there's been a number of. It's like, okay. I talked with Zach.

Yeah.

Within six months of him incorporating, Bridge didn't invest. I met Shane from Polymarket. Like we would DM back in like 2021 and I didn't go back up the Brinks truck. And. And now having had those experiences, I'm like, next time when I meet people like that, now I just figure out a way to give them money as fast as possible.

Yep.

And experience matters. Like my returns from this era of my investing life will be better than the prior era because of that learning.

Yeah. Well, are you going to invest in any fentanyl vaccines? You see this article?

Oh, yeah. This is the. I think I texted this to the group being.

I think this is in. Bloomberg says a fentanyl vaccine is a long shot that just might work. What did you find interesting about this?

So I just think it's funny because it's the private markets doing what they do best, which is finding solutions to problems that the government is not capable of solving. I just think that the government is probably a lot more able to tackle the fentanyl issue than, Than, than.

Well, they have a monopoly on violence and they should import. Enforce that at the ports.

Right, right, right.

And, and, but at the same time. Yeah, I mean, if you, if you sell this through. But it's just clinics, potentially, people come in when they're not at.

Or they're just funny. It's just hilarious. Yeah, they're at rock bottom and they say, like, they're like literally going to buy some sketchy cocaine right now. Please can I get this vaccine? So will it, will it kick in. In the next two hours? Yeah, you know, because I just, I don't. I don't know, but I, but I, I think it's. I really don't know who the customer is for this. I mean, I can imagine, but it seems like sort of a very. I don't know, like people that think, like, I'm very happy to report that I don't ever expect to encounter fentanyl in my life. And so this vaccine, I'm.

You know what I need? I need an ayahuasca vaccine so then I can go into the jungle with all the tech billionaires and be like, yeah, let's go on this Ayahuasca retreat. Totally. Like, and they're all getting one shotted.

And I'm just sitting there like a demigod. White knuckling.

Yeah, yeah. Getting stronger.

You're having to fake. You're having a fake. I'm like, oh, yeah.

It's so crazy. Like, the world's open. Like, I had this brilliant idea. Like, it's a nicotine company. You should invest. Like, wow. Yeah, that's what, that's what the demon told you. I was like, yeah, it told me that. Told me that. Nicotine pouches, 100. Big, big category.

20 on 20 on 200.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. I just think getting like, if you're going to do that vaccine, just start doing. Start back, start creating vaccines for everything. I mean, the vaccines are a great business model, so.

It is.

I want a vaccine for low testosterone. Yeah, that's one. Another one would be like inbox zero. You know, it's like a vaccine that.

What if there's a microplastics vaccine? Take that. Just. Your body just deflects the plastics.

Yeah. Force field.

Force field. Anyway, I don't know how we're going to cover this. But the COVID of the Economist this week is fantastic. It's the SpaceX rocket taking off the starship, but instead of the core tube, it's just the dollar and it says America's economy is the envy of the world. And it's a deep dive on the resilience of the American economy. Often hated on, but extremely resilient. And Robert Sterling post this like mega thread of all the things that he loves about America and it's just amazing. I'll read some of this culture that celebrates risk taking ingrained, ingrained hatred of bureaucracy. Robust capital markets, Starbucks, nitro cold brew, cheap and abundant oil. You can just do stuff. Investment bankers that work till 2am Low barriers to entry for entrepreneurship, Manifest Destiny, private equity, DE C, corporations, M and A markets, meritocracy, low Capital Gain Sacks, McDonald's, New York City University, Greek Life System, Walmart, GPU clusters, Sandhill Road, Michael Jordan, 50 states competing for business, the Homestead act, the old school darpa. No union reps on corporate boards like the entire state of Texas. Like you just rift for so long and just sent this massive list of cool things and how are you not bullish?

How are you not bullish after reading that?

You really, you really have to be. But I love that it's, it's two, it's two lenses on the same idea. Like, you know that the Economist wasn't writing like this, right? The Economist is going to have this very thoughtful article that explains basically the.

Same thing conclusion in a much more complicated way.

In a much more complicated way, much more nuanced.

And I like how it, almost every single thing listed off was like, like intense American consumerism and then, and then, and then finance. Finance.

Yeah. Ability to get filthy rich even if you're born poor. State school engineering programs, pickup trucks. Yeah. It's just amazing. It really, it really is such a wonderful country. I always like that, that, that teal line where they're like, oh, are you going to leave? He's like, to where? Yeah, yeah, it's the least bad option. Like you might complain about America, but it is the best. We're just number one.

I never, I, I think we grew up in the, in the period where young people thought that America was bad. We, I don't know what, I don't know what was the cause of it, but it's almost like things were so good here that people were trying to find reasons to not like it for some reason. But in I've been to, I've been to 40 plus countries, many of which I've spent, you know, a week plus in. And the, the closest thing I got to wanting to live there was I, I would buy a vacation home in Switzerland.

Yeah.

Just because Switzerland is outside of the United. Like I would say Switzerland is my favorite country. That's not the United States. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

I just love being there. I could see spending a lot of time there, but I never once in my life was thinking, I want to spend three quarters of the year.

Every time I traveled, I would always just come back to like, oh, like I went to Thailand and I was like, oh, this is Russia's Mexico. Like I went to Cape Town. Cape Town, South Africa. It's just la. Like there's a beach and then there's mountains. It's beautiful. It's amazing. People drive around on freeways. It's very similar to la.

Yeah.

Like you go to all these, I think the countries and it's like there's like America is so unique in that we have, we have Manhattan. So that's like your Tokyo, your high finance, like really dense city. You have la, sf, unrivaled Miami, but then you also have Hawaii, like a chain of islands. So it's like all of a sudden like underrated.

Underrated.

Fiji's. Fiji is great, but it's a lot farther and it's not 10x better than Hawaii. What's the next Alaska? Like? Okay, I never need to go to Russia.

Yeah.

And yeah, and America really just did a good job of capturing like every single biome. So there are, there, there are tropical areas, there are desert areas, there are mountainous areas, forest areas, tundra. Like we have it all. Whereas very few countries have every single biome covered. Russia doesn't have tropical areas. They got to go to Thailand.

Yeah. The, the thing that you need to do if you're American, and I think a lot of our listeners right now are American, is as you go about your day to day life or you go on a work trip or you go on a vacation within the United States, view it from the eyes of some Italian kid who grew up in a small village and is visiting like Los Angeles. Right. Like we're sitting here recording with a straight shot view of skyscrapers that are home to some of America's greatest companies. Right. If you're from a small fishing village and you get to look out and see kpmg, I mean that's like a core memory. Right. And so it's our duty to view our world through their eyes. And when I drive back and I'M passing, you know, the other Jonathan Club. The beach club. The beach club. And seeing, you know, this, this Ferris wheel, like on a pier or I'm driving on PCH or I'm. I see that I'm on the 405 and I see the Hollywood sign, you know, really in Chateau Marmont. Chateau Marmont. You know, these iconic places. It's important to try to. Don't just have your eyes glaze over and look back at TikTok, you know, Enjoy it, enjoy it, enjoy it.

Yeah. America's undefeated. It's not going anywhere, no matter what happens.

Sorry, sorry. This, this one was.

I have this riff with, you know how Josh Steinman tweets, good morning, we're gonna win every day. And I was thinking about, like, what is a mantra that, you know, you could tweet every single day? And mine was just listing out every single country that's not America and calling them un American.

Yeah.

Canada is un American. France is un American. Greece is un American.

Un American is a good. That's a potentially a phrase that we could. That we could coin.

Yeah.

That we could own.

It's literally true. Canada is un American.

Almost everything that I don't like is un American.

Yeah. Should we talk about Tim Ferriss?

Tim Ferriss is un American. I like Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss is the most American.

No, no, I'm just saying I like Tim.

But this specific clip from his podcast where he did a 30 day dopamine detox. No caffeine, alcohol, sex or sweetness. He didn't. Which sounds like. It sounds like I'm not going to hug my wife or something. But he was saying that he would not consume any sugar, anything that was sweetened.

Yeah. The funny thing with this is I could do. I could do. Yeah. One, I could do all those things. But whatever dopamine release that I negated from skipping coffee or nicotine or any of these other. Or a nice piece of chocolate cake in the evening would immediately be undone by picking up my daughter, giving her a hug, you know, like the same whatever.

Like, to, you know, steel man him. Like that is the point of the dopamine detox is that you will. You'll proportionally get more dopamine from picking up your dog. Right, Right. You're not like, okay, this is like, you know, like 110% of TikTok. It's like TikTok isn't even in the equation. So it's just like the purest of the pure.

Yeah. For you it would just be waking up in the morning and being like, I have three sons.

Yeah, exactly. I do wonder if he stopped posting during this detox.

Yeah.

Because that's the real deal for a content creator.

Yeah.

Did he stop capital allocating? Did he stop investing because the rush.

I do think, I do think. I think Tim stopped angel investing.

Oh really?

Like it was too much.

Too much dopamine.

Yeah. I mean the angel investing is deeply addictive.

It is.

It makes no sense to do.

Yeah.

Financially.

Yeah. I just, I always wonder where these dopamine detoxes. If, if like when you cut something out, like usually you find yourself finding a crutch. Like I noticed. Like if I, if I stop using one. Like I stopped using a lot of the endless feeds. But then I find myself just opening up like the Wall Street Journal more and that's probably better, but I'm still like using that.

Still a rat on the treadmill.

Exactly.

Going to hit the.

So I wonder what his, what his like cheat meal was during this dopamine detox. Like what was he doing to get.

I don't, I don't. The only. Probably post the only video that I would watch. It's funny, I don't think either of us watched the video.

I did it talking to Kevin Rose, the guy. Dig.

Yeah. So I would watch, I would watch a 30 day long video of Tim doing a dopamine detox. That's the real dopamine detox is just to watch Tim's extremely boring life in monk Mode. It takes 30 days and you can sleep when he sleeps, but you have to let, you have to be woken up by his alarm.

That's pretty sick.

So that's probably the, that's a whole, that's a whole category of content where you just live someone else's life.

I feel like that's something like Jocko Premium subscribers would like pay for some sort of live stream. Like come live my life with me. Like tap, tap into this live stream and you're just gonna like come along for this whole thing. Like when I wake up, you wake up. When I go to the gym. You go to the gym. It's kind of people.

Morning, you guys.

Yeah, virtually. It's pretty scary.

You can scale it. Yeah.

And that's definitely, there's definitely like a, like a, a lot of his. On his like off site events obviously very bounded by like the number of people that can attend. But if you just put out the.

30 day video, imagine one can do it Falling, falling asleep listening to Jaco effectively tell you a bedtime story today. Was a great day. Tomorrow is going to be a better one. And then, and then he just like, is sort of rambling and you sort of fall asleep. And then he says, Morning, sweetheart. It's 4:00am It's 4:00am I don't want to be up right now. You don't want to be up right now.

I gotta start posting the Jocko wake ups with the Patek at 4am because he has like the really athletic, like Navy SEAL shock. G Shock. Yeah. And it's just the Patek at 4am Be like, time to go to work. It's the best. I love Jocko.

I love Jocko. Jocko. As soon as he's a billionaire, he can call in and be on the show for sure.

He's gonna be close. He has only a matter of time, multiple products that are like the top on Amazon. His, his business is insane. He has so many different monetization methods. Did Senra ever send you that, like, breakdown? Oh, that's great. It's like, it's looking like in a single, in a single long Jocko episode, like all of the ad reads and all of the monetization that's going on, There were like 10 or 15 different products and calls to action. So it's like an athletic greens competitor, an LMNT competitor, a protein powder. But then it's also like a subscription to the premium service.

And then I bought his book.

Yeah, the books. And then it's like, and it's like there's a hundred dollar tier for like a course that you buy and you watch. There's like a thousand dollar tier for like going to a big conference. There's a $10,000 tier for going to like the VIP conference, getting kicked in.

The nuts by jock.

There's a 50,000. So. So like, no matter what you're willing to spend, he does really, really good at like price laddering and price discrimination because that's one of the hardest things with, with podcasting and why it works with ads is that you, you have some billionaires in your audience. With us, it's like mostly billionaires, but. But then you also have some people that are like, they're not billionaires yet and so they don't have the ability to drop, you know, $100,000 on, you know, a private, private event with the technology brothers. But yeah, how do you get money out of both of those audience cohorts? Yeah, well, you got to have an affordable net.

Jets is a really good example. Right. Where you might not be able to afford a private jets Jet. And we certainly have friends who are billionaires who own their own jets. They'll still use netjets. Right? It's not a one or the other.

But it's also a reason why you might hear some ads on this show for things that have lower ticket prices.

Because we want sleep, right?

Yeah. We want to monetize every single listener here. That's the goal of the show, to be the most profitable podcast in history. And that means that no matter who you are, no matter how much what your W2 says, no matter what your Roth IRA says, we want to get the most money out of you. Should we move on to Corey Levy?

Oh, I tried to. I tried to. I tried to keep it together.

So, Corey Levy. I mean, it's funny because this guy Dung time, but I mean, I love everyone involved in this. And is this, Is this Ben from Vesto here? I don't know. It looks like my friends, I don't know. But Ramp held an event with Khosla, with Keith called the Art of Hiring. And it featured Brian Chesky, Mike Shebbett, and Keith talking about how to hire and founder Mode. And Corey Levy, who runs Z Fellows, prolific early stage angel investor, essentially. I don't know, incubators accelerator. I don't know what term he likes, but he wrote kind of a breakdown, some notes from the Art of Hiring event earlier today. And he starts with Keith. And so he adds Keith. And the first line that gets cut off when you see the tweet is just don't hire anyone over the age of 30. And then there's like, there's like 25 other things that are all, like, super reasonable. But he led with the most controversial thing. And so there's a, there's a community note now that says age discrimination in hiring is illegal in the US Anyone who follows the advice from the first point is potentially committing a crime, which I just love. But obviously he wasn't saying that literally. Like, yeah, he's saying.

Well, I could see Keith saying that literally, but he's also, he understands the art of rage bait.

Yes.

Right.

Yes.

And using controversial things to generate attention, which does other things.

He's compressing the idea of, like, you need young energy in your organization. You need people that are hungry, who aren't. Who aren't resting, investing, who aren't already millionaires, who want to make their equity work. And so you need people that are show up and are hungry. And so how do you compress that down into something that will stick in someone's mind? Oh, well, don't hire anyone over the age of 30. Now it's probably a lot more nuanced than that. And I think Keith, if you talk to him for an hour, he would get into that and there's a million reasons why. And if you look at his companies and all the other companies, I'm sure there's people over the age of 30 of these companies. But it's a great way to get that to stick in someone's mind.

So it's funny because there's a.

Here just turn the mic towards you.

I was, I was talking with a founder that used to work for Keith and raise money from Keith and on the way over here today and running a business for the first time, it's absolutely crushing. He's about to raise like a very hot series. A cool. And he has taken every, almost all of Keith's advice. I don't know about this advice, but he certainly has learned so much from Keith. And the only thing that he didn't follow was the Miami thing. He really, he originally started the company in Miami and at one point it was probably the scariest day of his life telling Keith that he was going to go back to sf. But almost everything else he's followed to a T. And it's just worth this company. It's worked so well. It's worked so well. This is Dara. Yeah, so it's worked so well for Dara ignored the hype building in a very hot space which is like consumer AI has ignored the hype, stayed focused, focused on customers. All these things that Keith has parroted and reiterates and things like that. And it's just worked extremely well. It, it. And so the funny thing with, I will say that Dara hired one of my old engineers who is over 30, who does have children, but that guy's a fucking grinder. So yeah, I mean I think overall, I do think about this sometimes where as a 28 year old that has the lifestyle of some. Something that's more found from somebody in their mid-30s, at least in tech or mid-40s, depending on how late to children. Yeah, I do. That is almost like a recurring nightmare of like if I was competing against myself without children, what, how much more would I be getting done and things like that. I do think that the counter side to that is when people are in their 30s, they're. They can't afford to lose in the same way. Right. So it's like there is this whole other side of it and they have the benefit of. And so when you when you look at this tweet saying don't hire anyone over the age of 30, combined with young college dropouts raising 30 to $50 million pre product, the combination of those two things is terrible. Right. And you brought this up with Facebook earlier being like, Facebook having a really veteran engineer who brought structure and experience and all these different things. So, anyways, I would say that overall, Keith's advice, I'm, like, very bullish on any founder that takes, like, 90% of Keith's advice to heart and follows it. I think it's a really good framework. But. But again, the. Don't. Don't take anything too literally. Even Miami is giving. I mean, Miami is, like, state of mind in many ways.

And also, I mean, Miami is still like. I think we've talked about this before, but I mean, it still is just like a phenomenal place to go meet a lot of extreme people.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like. Like it. I think everyone agrees that it is behind on. On hiring engineering talent, but in terms of just like, lots of capital markets, powerful people having money there. Like, if you're. If you're a. If you're a founder and you're doing a fundraising trip, like, stopping in Miami and meeting a bunch of people is, like, very doable and very beneficial.

Yeah.

It's also just like an awesome place to live or awesome place to visit when you're a founder and you've been grinding in some, like, you know, tenderloin complex in San Francisco and you get to, like, you don't just have to go down to Sand Hill Road, which is, like, even more boring. You just go to Miami and hang out at all these houses.

I know that I will absolutely own property in Miami at some point in my life. I'm not in a huge rush to do it, but I really enjoy there. And we're going next week.

Yeah, it's fantastic. But, yeah, I'm excited for this video to drop. I'm sure that they're going to record it and put it out. I think it'll be good. I think. I think they're all really great.

It's funny. We're giving. We're giving him the benefit of the doubt. And Keith is, like, literally telling all these young kids, I swear to God, do not, like. I cannot. I cannot be more explicit about this. If somebody is 30 years old and one day disqualified, write it into your hr. Like, write it into your hiring policies. Put it on your wall.

Yeah, I don't even know where this is from, but you dropped this in the. In the Group chat. And I just wanted to read it because I thought it was a funny quote from maybe like a substack or something. This guy says, I look for the type of guy in London who gets up at 7 o' clock on Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed and logs on to a poker site so that he can pick off the US drunks coming home on a Saturday night. I hired a guy like that. He usually clears five or ten grand every Sunday morning before breakfast, taking out the drunks playing poker because they're not very good at it, but their confidence has gone up a lot. Someone who understands an edge. I love that.

I don't even think we have to add commentary.

Yeah.

It's just. Cheers to that.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Find an edge.

The hard thing, the hard thing with people like that is they usually end up making so much money they're really hard to hire.

Yeah, exactly. If you're making 10 grand a week, that's 500k a year. Like, what job are you offering them? I mean, I guess this is probably for like a hedge fund position or something or somebody who understands that, like, yeah, this is maybe not, not gonna stick around forever. Maybe. I don't know. Should we close with the new king of podcasting, Harry Stebbings?

Harry.

400 million dollar.

I will say, I think that, that, that picture could come back to bite.

So the story is podcaster Harry Stebbings raises one of Europe's best biggest venture funds. The British firm firm 20 VC pulls in $400 million to invest in early stage tech startups. And he claims it's to make Europe great again. Is he a Trump guy or is he just like riffing on that?

I bet he's a Trump guy. He appreciates great entrepreneurs. Yeah, right. Trump is.

I feel like he's pretty, like, like non, like apolitical.

Yeah.

Because like if you, if you go super well, it's.

There's nothing, there's nothing less cool than being. Not living in the US but being obsessed with US politics. It's like, get a life, you know? Like, get a life.

Yeah.

So, yeah, no, I think it's amazing for podcasting. It's amazing for Harry. He's. Now we kind of have him if we're, if we want to build the most profitable podcast in the world.

Yeah.

He's pulling down 80 million of management fees on that fund.

Yeah.

He's in our big shoes to fill. Big shoes to fill. Target on his back, right?

Target on his back.

It's not that but we're positive sum, right?

Exactly.

We'll do a $500 million fund.

Exactly.

So congrats to Harry.

It is interesting. Do you think his audience is primarily entrepreneurs or VCs? Because he really focuses. He does get some entrepreneurs on the show, but it's mostly VCs that go on the show. So he probably has an incredibly work. So he can get into, he can get small checks and deals. But like what happens when you know. Yeah, he's interviewing like Sequoia guys but then they're not going to let him like steal a hot round from them. So how does that work in terms of deal flow?

Yeah, the reason that I'm bullish overall on. I'm not bullish on the European focus.

Sure. Oh yeah. I mean, I guess that he's going to invest.

If he's going to invest the full 400 million in Europe. That's concerning.

Yeah. It seemed like the real alpha here was just he is probably one of the greatest bridges between European LP and US investments because he's, he's a name brand in America and if you are wealthy in Europe, you can't necessarily just call up an American VC firm and LP and do it.

Yeah.

So, so what? People raise really big funds because it's like, oh, they, they happen to be super connectors in like Brazil and so they can go around and just pull all the Brazilian capital together and then they come in and they invested in America but they're providing that service to the Brazilian high net worth individuals and institutions.

Yeah. The, the reason to be bullish on Harry is that what David Senra has done for founders.

Yeah.

Harry has done for contemporary VCs. So in the same way that David will be talking about founder and then tie in. Oh, here's how these other three founders also thought similarly and applied this way of thinking to their business. He's doing the same thing with VCs. You know, where, where he will be talking with one VC and be like, well, that's similar to how, you know, Peter thought about the initial investment in SpaceX or whatever. So I think that being a student, he's now a student and a player. Right. And he's drawing on, I think it's a very real thing that he could text probably 50 of the best GPS and get a response within, you know, a day of like, hey. And they can be like, well, here are the traps in aerospace. Yeah, here's why this won't work.

Sure.

Oh, this is actually really interesting. Let's look at it together. Yeah, you know, like that's real Alpha.

Yep. That's great. Well, cheers to Harry, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. Or listening.