The Trump Bubble, TB's Unicorn Growth, Dom Perignon, Blood Boy Winner

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world today. We are excited to talk about an amazing development in the show. We got a massive shout out in a huge newsletter by one of the best writers on the Internet. Packy McCormick put us in his newsletter in one of the most important pieces he's ever written. It's called the Trump Bubble and we're going through it today. Stay tuned. Jordy, what do you got?

All right, Packy, where to start with this guy? He has been ahead of many trends and somebody who's excellent at sort of crystallizing and owning a moment. Right. And so in this case, he sort of has, has effectively broken down what he believes is a new potentially multi year trend called the Trump Bubble.

And we're already seeing like evidence of this just post election. Bitcoin goes up to 90k. The whole stock market, everybody's gone. Even just normal fang stocks were way up. There was like a massive trade. I was talking to a trader who was like, he predicted that Trump was going to win. He just bought everything that was Trump aligned. Like he bought defense stocks. He bought anything that he thought would, would move. And it played out very well for him.

Yeah. And before we jump into this article, I think it's important to highlight that Packy, like ourselves, is not a political analyst. He does not discuss politics. He's fully focused on just analyzing the moment and technology trends. And so he actually highlighted before he even jumped into this that he's had a number of incidences where he's covered something and made a lot of people mad. Right. That sort of people tend to get mad on the Internet. He a while back wrote a piece called why the Democrats Lost Tech and he had a lot of people that got mad at him for even painting any type of positive light on Trump. And then funny enough, a lot of Republicans got mad at him as well because they believed that there was nothing at all redeemable in the Democratic Party. Interesting. His broader point with the article is that there's nothing that impacts the industries that he's investing in and that he's obsessed with more than this sort of like new Trump administration. Right. And so that's a little context for the piece. So like John said, the last week or so has been pretty risk on, I think a lot of, you know, there's just been broadly a lot of companies doing really well, except for a number of pharma companies yesterday when a certain person got rfk, RFK got appointed. But yeah, Paki's broader point is that we're at the beginning of the mother of all bubbles, which kind of makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Yes, yes.

Sort of.

Yeah. What's interesting about this is like there's one narrative that's like, oh, we're going into this bubble. But at the same time it's like the business cycle always kind of restarts after a major crash. And we saw that major crash 2022, 2023. Things were really rough. It makes sense that this would be the beginning of something. It's just crazy that it already feels bubbly. But I think back to like when I got to Silicon Valley in 2012, we were doing like essentially YC and all these different VCs would come and speak and there were a ton of articles in TechCrunch like, like Tech is in a bubble. Like the tech bubble. Like the, the Series A crunch. Like you won't be able to raise Series A. And that bubble literally lasted for over a decade, but it felt like a bubble then. And I think the less.

And there were sort of minor oscillations. Right.

2017, 2018 was sort of a rough minor sell offs. But like, like for, for the most part, like going long through that period was like the phenomenal strategy. And so even when it's frothy like like the, the, like the business cycle is more, is more of a, like a massive driver than, than like any specific like, like bubbly valuation in a single stock or a single asset class. Like I wouldn't be surprised if like the true beneficiaries of the Trump administration are, you know, not necessarily realized right now.

Totally, totally. It's a long term thing.

Well, Scott, shout outs in here besides us.

Yeah, well, I mean right away he shouts out, Bern Hobart's book, which we've.

Talked about, just got in the mail actually. Tammy sent it to me.

Amazing. Yeah, yeah. He shouts out boom bubbles in the end of stagnation. Recommends that everybody read it because it's kind of like a cornerstone of his entire thesis here. We didn't do a review, but yeah, the high level with the book is that there's basically five overarching traits shared by all of the technologies and mega projects that they had studied, which was one definite optimism and constrained vision. Fomo fear of missing out and you only live once dynamics, which we love.

FOMO and yolo.

FOMO and yolo.

Okay.

Excessive risk taking and overinvestment, parallelization and coordination, reflexivity and hyperstition. And he basically says that he feels many of these himself right now. I remember he tweeted maybe a couple weeks back that he is extremely overexposed to bitcoin crypto technology. I think he's an advisor to Andreessen crypto and, you know, obviously is. Is actively active investor, you know, both personally and through his fund. But even he, he was feeling FOMO despite being almost 100% allocated to technology. Right. So that is pretty significant.

I mean, if you think back to the original, like the, the last crypto bubble, like a lot of people were trading with like 10x, 100x leverage.

Yeah.

And right now, most people weren't sitting there with 100x levered positions.

Yeah.

They were just.

Should have been.

They were kind of like hodling, you know, and being like, okay, I'm getting through this bear market, but they're not sitting there with some massive margin position. So. Yeah, I mean, once that comes in, it's going to be insane.

Yeah, yeah. So he spends quite a bit of time defending bubbles, which I don't think we have to do on this. Like you and I. A lot of people like to use bubble as like a way to slander.

Something, but all of our listeners are students of capitalism.

Yeah.

They understand.

Yeah, I think we can skip over that. Yeah. But yeah, I think the.

You should go get the book and we should do a review on the show.

Yes. He talks a little bit about signs of a bubble. I think that, you know, Manhattan Project, Apollo Program, those are bubbles that had direct government oversight. Right. They were like government created bubbles in a way.

Interesting.

Yeah. Massive overinvestment.

Yep, yep.

And his position is that the Trump bubble is going to look more like Moore's Law, which Byrne and Tobias in the book say is perhaps. Moore's Law is perhaps the most compelling and enduring example of a two sided bubble, wherein the expectation of progress in one domain spurs progress in another, which then propels growth in the first. Right. And so the idea here is like, we're in this two sided bubble. Right. The Trump administration is telling people that it will be easier to build, invest in and accomplish big things. This is Paki's words, which is already making people more excited to build, invest in and accomplish big things. Right. So it's a sort of like incredible podcast feedback loop. Yeah, yeah, it's a podcast feedback loop. Positive, positive feedback loop. And in our case, it's a podcast feedback loop. I'm known to have a Freudian slip here.

Content that we can react to. Eventually this whole show will just be us reacting to our own content in an endless loop.

Yep.

An Oroboros.

Exactly. So yeah, he, he shouts out Augustus saying that he captured the sentiment as well as anyone. We have a four year window to go as hard as fucking imaginable. Right. So here we are reacting to things that we've already reacted to anyway. So I think it's, it's the core kind of idea is that just people believing that things are possible now is kind of creating some real momentum with this bubble. And yeah, it's across the board. Education, health, everything kind of every category is kind of moving in a positive direction. So at one point Packy shouts out, he says, I obviously love Jordy Hayes, John Coogan and Eric Gliman's proposal to help bring transparency and efficiency to the government spending with ramp, which we talked about last week and this obviously came up somewhat as a joke. Right. We were talking about how, I mean.

I'm sure that's how the government, I'm sure the original moon landing was like a joke. They're like, ha, ha, wouldn't it be funny if we landed on the moon? Or like, wouldn't it be funny if we built like a nuclear bomb? But then like, obviously people set it.

In and big silly things happen.

And that's the reason we had the, the Apollo program.

Yeah. And we had, you know, something we covered early in the show was some of the government spending on sort of boring, boring line items, things like soap dispensers, over the last few decades have gotten to be so egregiously priced due to lack of competition and lack of downward pressure to more efficiently spend money. And so in many ways getting the federal government running on RAMP is not, not at all a joke because it will help us drill down and figure out where spend is being wasted that could be invested in healthcare, education, not unreasonable. And it's great. Yeah.

Thank you, Packy for the shout out.

And what did Sean McGuire have to say over there, Sequoia? Sean McGuire said he's getting messages from physics PhDs asking how they can work in the Trump government.

That's huge.

Which again, I think part of this optimism loop is that for the first time in our lifetime you have non political types that want to work in the government, which can't be understated.

I have a friend who was, lives in Taiwan and has spent a lot of time in China and he said like the biggest difference between the way the Chinese government works is that they compel the best and brightest to work in the government. And a lot of that's forcible. But they like, it's just Night and day. And, and if we can, you know, obviously in America, because we're the land of the free, the home of the brave, like, we need to do things differently. But if we, if it's a meme, if it's a Packy post, if it's a tweet, like whatever it takes to get people to actually think that working in the government is, is a reasonable path, is a valuable path to something, a better life, like, that's really, really important. It shouldn't be seen as like, oh, like I got stuck with this or I got to get out of here as soon as I can and use this as a jumping off point.

Yeah. In China, the elite, the ones that stay in China are oftentimes the one that are in. The ones that are in the party. Right. In the government. Many of China's elite actually end up, you know, leaving, you know, becoming expats. But anyways, you know, back to kind of the, the high level promises of the Trump administration make requirements less dumb. They want, you know, they're pushing for regulatory reform across the board. They want to delete things like eliminating certain agencies. Eliminating the Department of Education might be a bit extreme. It sounds like maybe we should have an education department.

Elon said that there's 425 different departments and he was like, I think we can do okay with just 99.

Yeah.

It's like a funny phrase. It's a funny thing to think about.

Yeah, yeah.

You can't even name them.

It would be kind of interesting to think about just putting like a very arbitrary rule. Like any government organization can only have 99 departments.

Yeah.

And so if you want to add a new department, you have to cut one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Something like that.

Because there are laws too where it's like the case tax and the law is just getting more and more complex every year. We're adding, adding, adding. And we need to be doing some, some code, code review here.

Yeah. And you know, a few others. Simplify and optimize. They want to streamline the processes that do exist. They want to accelerate cycle times, which means speeding up approvals. So if that's stuff related to the private markets. Right. SpaceX wants to launch a rocket. How do we get them approval for that faster? And then just automation. How do we modernize government systems? Right. We've talked about wanting beautiful DMV apps here in California. Can we do that on a national scale? Yep. So, and you know, broadly, kind of Packy sums this up by saying a willingness to make big changes is also a willingness to break things. Right. And that's a willingness to take on certain amount of risk.

Sure.

I think the government's gotten very risk adverse over the years, but we're now in the situation where the government, the new admin, seems to be willing to take risks. And what that is leading to is people in the markets also going extremely risk on.

Right.

Simultaneously, everybody's going super risk on, which could create the mother of all bubbles, which we've been praying for. So it is great to see things coming around, I think.

Yeah, I think that's where a lot of the optimism is coming from. Is like there's been a lot of critiques about like, you know, are the people that are going in administration like experienced enough? And the answer is like, probably no. Yeah. But like, at least they might jar something loose, try something different and there might be, you know, a few experimental successes that lead to outsized power law esque returns. And that's the value of shaking things up. It's like how like a huge portion of the alpha that was generated in Silicon Valley from the year 2000 onward was literally just saying, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're a 19 year old kid, we trust you with a million dollars to go build something.

Yep.

And, and, and this is kind of.

That version of that 100% another. You know, we don't talk about politics on the podcast, but you know, it's worth calling out that a big critique of Trump overall from the other side has always been that he is a threat to democracy. And one of the broader trends that we're already seeing, you know, we talked about a few minutes ago, is this idea that a bunch of people now want to basically are more excited about participating in, in our government system, in our democracy.

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

And Elon is the number one example of that. Like he sort of dominated the private markets and then where can you go? What's the next sort of like battleground? He chose politics. That was the biggest way that he could have an impact on his business. But it's cool to see that the approach that he's taking with the, with doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, you know, they're already using, you know, X to like be highly, highly transparent and communicate.

I think it's already an account posting.

There's already an account they're posting. They've got some good posters running it, I'm sure. And Vivek has said DOGE will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud and abuse. Americans voted for drastic government reform, and they deserve to be a part of fixing it. So this idea that the people that are kind of like, spearheading these changes actually do want participation, which is the foundation.

Yeah. We like, literally need like a whistleblower for that $150,000 soap dispenser.

Yeah.

Like, somebody sees that and it's just like, this is ridiculous. Yeah. And. And there's some sort of incentive because I can basically go viral and get an Elon retweet if I. If I post this. And so I'm going to call it out as opposed to just like, oh, it's just business as usual. Like, that's always the way the government is. Like, it doesn't have to be that way.

Yeah. So anyways, I think as much optimism as there is in tech right now, I don't think it can be understated how much fear I'm sure there is in Washington. I would love. Maybe we need to go over there and do some. You know, we're not journalists, but we could go start having some conversations. People on the ground get a sense of how they're feeling. Because if you are working in a bloated government organization right now or you're a lobbyist that's been reliant on the pharmaceutical industry, you know, those types of people, there's a lot. This is like the changes that the new admin wants to make are a direct threat to a lot of the way of life in Washington, dc.

Yep.

From, you know, from the bottom to the top.

So overall, fantastic article, Paki. We just have one bit of feedback. The name should have been the Trump Pump.

The Trump Pump.

The Trump Pump.

Trump Pump.

Trump Bubble is good. I mean, Packy is fantastic with his titles. The great online game. Like, he comes up with these really good coinages. He's like a master of Coogan's Law, where the more coinages the better. But this one Trump pump, maybe somebody already said it. Maybe needed to.

Yeah.

Maybe we want to talk about bubbles specifically because of the stripe book, but the Trump pump is.

Yeah. And the last thing I would shout out. You know, we love advertisers, we love advertising. Thank you to True Med for sponsoring Packy's piece. Justin Mares, Callie Friends, the show. Thank you for supporting independent writers.

Yeah. And if you're going to review piece like a newsletter, like a Packy piece, like, you should give credit to the.

Advertiser without them, none of that.

Can't just rip his quotes and pass it off as your own.

You need to Pass along the ad. Thank you to True Med.

Yeah, thank you to True Med. Let's go to Matt Grimm. He asked me to fix something. He says it's an insane market inefficiency that we can't buy nicotine packs at airport convenience shops. John Coogan, please fix. Thanks. And I wanted to talk about this because, like, a bunch of different things are changing in the tobacco industry, the nicotine industry. There's another viral tweet by Peter Hassan who says, the war is over, fellas. Our pouches. Our pouches are safe. And it's RFK holding a pack of pouches just locked in. Locked in. And he's going to be nominated to run the nhs, which I believe will oversee the fda. And so he, he will have a pretty huge say in how those get approved. But it is, it is very interesting and, and a lot of people were asking me, like, wait, like, this seems obvious, like, like this is, like, people come to, you know, people come to me all the time with ideas like, oh, you should, like, you know, sell this in grocery stores. You should sell this drone delivery. Like. Yeah. I mean, for the first, like, couple of years when we were mostly online, people would always say, oh, you should sell this in retail stores. Yeah, obviously, like, there's a lot of hurdles to do that. But the hurdles for selling in airports are even more cumbersome. So they do sell nicotine products in duty free and you don't pay taxes, but you have to be flying internationally.

And don't you have to. You can't necessarily open them up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mostly you're buying cigarettes and you're buying large quantities and it's basically because that's like an embassy and it's like an international waters.

We've tried to buy dom, DOM during the duty free and open it.

They won't let you open.

They don't let you open it in the store. It's really frustrating. Even though they even sell glasses. Yeah, don't let you open it in the store.

But the, but with the Hudson News thing, like, or the, you know, the, the, the airport stores, there's just this very interesting legacy where. So in order to be a retail store that sells nicotine products, even nicotine pouches that don't contain tobacco, you still need a tobacco retailer license. And so that's somewhat cumbersome. And if you look back at the history of tobacco products, there was never a product in the post cigarette era, once they banned smoking on planes, that wasn't disruptive to the person next to you. Yep. So even if you could argue that it's like vaping on the plane is not gonna like bring it down. Although, you know, you could smoke on planes and they didn't. They weren't falling out of the sky.

Yeah.

It was more like a health issue. But even if you could make the argument that vaping next to someone is like, safe.

Yeah.

It's like annoying. And so they would never sell those because everyone would be like, why are you selling these? They're annoying. And same thing for smokeless tobacco. Like if you're chewing dip and spitting and the person has a dip cup or Gatorade bottle next to you, like, that's just going to be kind of a nuisance.

I once was on a flight back from New York and had a woman aggressively vaping in JetBlue Mint. And she was about. I was sitting up, working, as I do on flights. She was on the lie, flat sleeping, secretly smoking her little vape. And we ended up getting into this huge thing and she went to the, to the hostess. Hostess or whatever and said. Kept saying, he keeps accusing me of vaping. I'm not. Will you talk to him about it? I'm like, I'm not going to do this. But yeah, that's. That. That I believe that flight was from New Jersey to L. A. Actually explain things.

Yeah, totally. But so now you know, obviously tobacco free nicotine pouches are incredibly popular and it does seem obvious, like, why hasn't Philip Morris tried to put Zinn in. In, you know, Hudson News? And I was trying to dig into like, you know, okay, what, what is the real reason? Well, a lot of it has to do with like the licensing. Like you actually have to go get Hudson News new licenses. That takes a long time. I think this will happen, but it's going to require some like a very aggressive move. And the reason why I wanted to discuss this was I wanted to brainstorm with you. Like, if I make this my life's work to get Lucy Excel breakers pouches into. Into Hudson News, like, what playbook should I run? And I'm thinking, like, there needs to be a grassroots campaign. There needs to be memes. We need more guys like Matt who are taken seriously in the government and in the business world to be talking about it. But then I also need to be getting intros to the Hudson News CEO.

From like his whole network probably listens to the show.

Probably listens to the show. So give me a call if you do.

I would say one.

Then also like, yeah, what else? Give me the whole Kind, you know, jordy marketing playbook to manifest this into reality. Because I was thinking like, I should just put out a call on Axe, like if you introduce me to Hudson News and we get a deal done, I'll buy you lifetime.

Yep.

Because. Because it's going to be so valuable.

And a lifetime supply of pouches.

And a lifetime supply of pouches. Yes. So. So I will happily do that because if, if, if we get the deal done, it'll be extremely valuable to me personally. But, but also I think there will be a knock on effect from being the first pouch in airports that will. Even if we're not making a ton of money on the actual deal, I think we'll get press around it and airport travelers will see it and be like, what is going on? Wow, this brand, really?

This brand xl.

Exactly.

So give me a point. So I'm a pragmatic guy. An interim solution to this. We're gonna be rolling out some technology brothers. Shirts, hats, various types of merch. So what I would say in the short term, once that goes live, all the technology brothers out there, if you can wear the TV branded product while you're traveling, it's a way to signal to other brothers.

Sure.

That. That you are basically a mobile nicotine dispensary. Right. Because I think imagine anybody, anybody in our audience would be, would be fine to share a pouch, of course. With another brother.

Of course.

Maybe even a few. Right. A lot of, A lot of guys. You know, anytime two technology brothers are walking to the airport, one just closed a nine figure licensing deal for their company. The other one is fresh off of a pre seed pitch. And maybe the pre seed founder doesn't have a ton of pouches, but the guy that just closed a nine figure deal did. And so they can make a trade. Take my. Can take a few. That's an interim solution. But yeah, I like the Patek giveaway. I think that kind of, you know, I think we need to see more companies using luxury watches as bounties to say like, you know, if somebody's hiring for a role and they're like, oh, if you find an engineer, we'll give you five grand. It's like, I don't care about that. But if, if you're putting up even something of the same value, like a Cartier Santos.

Yep.

I'm going to be much more incentivized to actually go and make that happen.

And it's more tangible and it's like. But it does have liquidation value in the sense that. Yeah, okay, yeah, I, you know, I got this referral fee. I got this thing. Maybe I need the cash.

And a watch is a story, right?

But a watch has a story and you could pass that down. You could keep it on forever. So I am very serious. I need to actually write that post and, like, canonize it.

That could be a project. That could be.

I've got crazy intros before just by tweeting. Oh, I would love to be in, like, this retail chain and someone will be like, oh, I'm actually like, brother in law with the founder or something. So the serendipity engine on X is insane. So. So you heard it here first. We're gonna put together a plan and nicotine pouches will be sold in airports. Mark my words. But in other news, this podcast has been growing like wildfire. You hear it every time we introduce the show. We're the most profitable podcast in the world. That's been true since day one. But more recently, we've become the fastest growing podcast in the world.

That's right.

And that's really huge. So we need to celebrate that we recently hit 1000 followers on X and major milestone. Major milestone. And so we will be opening up a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate.

Yes, we do. As we do.

Okay. And we're gonna need to talk through this so that the listeners have something to pay attention to while I'm working on this getting this open. So do you. Do you drink a lot of champagne?

I drink champagne on occasion. I try to. I find that if I'm drinking, it can sort of impede my nicotine caffeine consumption. I'm not a big espresso martini guy. And so I'm usually. I try to just.

Three martinis at lunch guy.

Yeah. If you're doing creative work. Creative work. You would want to get the ordeals. Or deals.

Yeah, or deals. Or spreadsheets.

Or like, if you're doing an IPO road show, you want to make sure that you're drinking early in the day.

Hey, there we go. Okay, here's to 1000 followers.

1000 every day. Many more. And we're going to be doing a bottle of Dom. Every thousand followers.

Every thousand followers forever. Yeah. Well, it only gets. It only gets more from here.

Yeah. I mean, maybe two bottles at 10k. We might need a lever up and do 10 bottles.

10 bottles.

And do our first 10 hour episode.

First 10 hour episode. That'd be fantastic. So the champagne is flowing. We're here to celebrate. Cheers. To technology brothers, the fastest growing podcast in the world.

There you Go.

There you go. Cheers. The. Yeah. The fastest growing.

Honestly, tastes like Ramp. Have you ever, like, if Ramp was. Yeah, yeah.

A champagne, it would be the Dom Paragon. But literally, people say that about Ramp. They always say it's like the dom perignon of B2B. Sass. Right? That's like. That's a cool time.

You see that flying around when people ask, oh, should I use Ramp or this other company? A lot of people say it's the Dom perignon. Yeah.

Of B2B SAS. And so we also did a little celebration with the fans. We. We promised that to our 1000th follower, we would give them one complimentary Blood Boy. And Cersei vocal cry was the winner. And so she will be receiving one complimentary blood boy. So we'll talk to you soon, Cersei, and thanks for supporting us. We really appreciate it. Let's go to some DMs. We got some questions from the fans. Let's go to the first one. Mickey with the blicky says Jordy Hayes. Question for the pod. I filled out this form on an investing app and lied about my income and net worth. Then at the end, it asked me if I was accredited. I'm not, and I said yes. So now I'm verified to invest in pre IPO companies. And can I get in trouble for that? What do you think?

Okay, so I have a very good solution for this. Yeah.

Just go to your boss and say you need $200,000 a year, because as soon as you're making $200,000 a year, you are.

You are investor. I thought it had to be for, like, the last taxable year. Or is it. Is it. Who knows? There's a lot of. There's a lot of regulations.

Walk in and just demand it and say, look, I need to. I need to allocate capital. I need to create shareholder value. I need 200k, boss, or I'm out of here.

I'm out of here.

And you're gonna get it.

And then if. If your boss says no, run your next job hunt and tell everybody before you submit your Resume, I need 200k.

Regardless, because I will be angel investing 90% of my.

Yeah. Or go apply for roles that have, you know, 500k base comp and tell them, I only need 200k.

There you go.

I'm gonna outwork anybody. 300k a year.

This is good.

Yeah.

And then. And then, yeah. Sleep in a shed and invest 190k.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Move in with your parents and just. And focus on Capital deployment. Right. Exactly.

Exactly.

No. So I remember, you know, being in Mickey's shoes when I was a young man, you know, getting angel investment opportunities here and there. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of lack of clarity around these things. Some founders care, some founders don't. A lot of more seriously run companies, sort of. Well, I don't see a lot of formal accreditation checks. I write most of my checks out of a fund now, so it's not as much of a thing. But, yeah, here's the thing. It's actually much less of an issue for the individual. I don't think Mickey's gonna get in trouble for doing this. It really comes down to the company. So if Mickey is on a platform deploying money and they can kick you off, they. Well, yeah, of course they could kick you off. I. I imagine if Mickey's not using an alt, he will after this podcast goes live. Hopefully.

We might have just burned.

Burned your angel investing career. But. But no, the bigger issue is it sounds like he's.

He actually hasn't made an investment, though, and I think that's where the securities laws come into. It's not. No, but it's probably not illegal to sign up. It's bigger securities issue if you actually do the deal.

Yeah, yeah. The bigger issue is for the company and the platform, if Mickey makes a bunch of investments that are very risky and they go to zero. And Mickey and other people accredited, say, hey, I wasn't accredited. They marketed these, you know, sort of, you know, investments to me.

Yep.

And the main thing, Mickey, angel investing is really very, very high risk. You will not get your money back for five to 10 years. Maybe nothing at all could go to zero. It is one of the silliest investment activities of all time. It pays if you're good at it. But what I would say is whenever you are officially accredited or in your current state, start small. Don't invest all of your liquid assets too quickly, because then you'll start seeing better deals and in six months and you won't have any money to put to work.

So good luck out there.

Good luck.

Let's go to another DM we received. Hi, John and Jordi. I've been investing in the large growth equity VC arm of a crossover fund, and I'd love to move to one of the Holy Trinity firms. Can you give me a little insight as to how they differ culturally? Holy Trinity, Kleiner Sequoia and Founders Fund legacy. Yeah, I mean, fantastic firms. I mean, obviously, I'm super biased here. So I can't really comment that much but I can tell a little bit culturally. I mean Founders Fund, everyone knows it's like kind of the pirate ship of the three. It's a little bit crazier, a little bit weirder. Yeah, weirder. And like it's always been very freewheeling in terms of like the press strategy. Like you have on one end like Peter writing a book that sits in airports and is like universally recognized as like a great business book.

Almost the foundation of this podcast.

Yeah, yeah. And then you have like Delian just like being a madman on Twitter and just like posting all sorts of crazy stuff too. Yeah. And Mike and, and just like both of those are acceptable and that's, and that's very, it's a, and the other.

Thing cultural thing at, at Founders Fund and I think the reason that founders gravitate to them quite often is the entrepreneurial nature of the partners. So many of the partners have, have a fast growing venture backed startup that they're also doing.

Yeah. Ton of incubations. Peter with Palantir, Trey with Anduril and there's going to be more. So it's been. Yeah, it's been. It's just a very entrepreneurial firm. No matter where you sit in the organization, there's everyone like you're never going to get like here's your task list for this week.

Yeah.

And at some, I mean specifically at a growth. If this guy's at a growth equity like crossover fund, there's probably like an element of like dialing for dollars. Have you seen this where you know, it's like we need a price for every company so we gotta get in touch with like every single IPO candidate. Every single candidate. That's, that's late stage. Just call all of them, get the data. Just, just you know, pound and pound and pound and, and founders much more like whatever your strategy is, we're cool with that.

It's not a consensus partnership either. Right.

So let's move on to Sequoia. I mean Sequoia obviously like long term rival. Can't, can't say too many nice things about them. But you know we've talked about this before. We love Sean McGuire and what he's doing to pivot that brand to. It's essentially dark Sequoia. Like you know, Elon has done the dark MAGA thing and Sean has brought a very unique energy to Sequoia.

That kind of bucks historical trends.

I mean literally everyone thought he was going to get fired for what he's doing because it's so bold. And there's been even articles about like, the pushback that he's got on. Like, hey, maybe are you taking like, are you too, too aggressive on some of these positions? But he's fought the war internally and he's, it seems like he's won, which is amazing because fundamentally, like, you have all these intra, all these intra VC rivalries. Like, I don't care about as much as what the VCs are doing. Building technology for America versus our enemies.

Yeah.

Abroad.

Yeah. The other thing you have to imagine, Sean has a bit of leverage given his close relationship with Elon.

Sure.

Creating the new Deep state.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, yeah.

And then, and then you go back. I mean, like, I love some of Founders funds, you know, legacy investments. The story of Ballantir, the early Zuck.

Deal pretty much crushed your champagne. Nice work.

Yeah. Like, the early Zuck deal is legendary. Airbnb and Stripe, but like Sequoia is just in a different tier when it comes to the legacy stuff. Like Nvidia, Google, isn't it Four out.

Of the $5 trillion companies are covered.

By the Holy Trinity. Every.

Everything Sequoia did, maybe they did, they didn't do Facebook, Apple, Nvidia and they didn't do Microsoft.

But. Yeah, but. Because Microsoft didn't really race. But, but yeah, Apple, Nvidia, Google, and then Kleiner, you go back even further and you have a whole other tier of like amazing legacy.

And you know, it's almost like a Vacheron.

It's exactly like Vacheron. It's like underrated now, but has like an incredible historical legacy. And of course there's like the, the talent wars of the Holy Trinity that people talk about a lot right now. Where, you know, Everett Randall moves over to, to Kleiner, he brings Lee Marie Braswell from Founders Fund.

Keith goes to Khosla.

Goes to Khosla. There's a lot of like, you know, trade deals going on right now. Yeah. But I remain extremely bullish on Sean and extremely bullish on EV I think EV is just, we're just bullish on risk.

Right?

Exactly.

Anybody that's taking risk, we're excited for you. Yeah, we're happy for you.

And so, and so to answer the question of like, where you fit in, you need to understand like, okay, what is your strategy and how, how much are you want to push things culturally? How many systems do you want in place? How entrepreneurial is your deal making process? And I think that's kind of. You go into a client or there's going to be a larger staff, there's going to be more support infrastructure. And to be clear, and some people are going to flourish in that environment.

It is harder to break into the holy trinity than the NBA.

Yep.

Hands down.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. Just statistically.

Statistically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So good luck out there. Start networking and start sending some of those firms good deals because, you know, start sending us. Yeah, send us deals and.

Yeah, happy to make a warm intro.

And we'll make some intros. Let's go to another DM we got. This is hilarious. When I first read it, I'm gonna keep it anonymous, but someone DM me and said, where does Founders Fund keep its cash between investments? And I love this. I love this because it sounds like they're going to do a bank heist and they're going to try and steal the money that Founders Fund has. But it also is a very legitimate question in that I don't think a lot of people know, obviously most of our listeners know, but a lot of people don't know where VC firms actually do keep the cash. And just the mechanics of raising a fund. When you raise a billion dollar fund that doesn't sit in your bank account, that's just commitments from LPs and then you make capital calls on a per investment basis. So the money might.

Or like programmatically, quarterly.

Yeah, exactly. So like you're, you're not necessarily just sitting on a billion dollars in some money market fund. It's sitting with your LPs and, and when you want to make an investment, you call the capital, it moves through your account very quickly and you only have a few days there. And then there are also credit lines that allow you to pull things forward if you're off by a few days.

Yeah. And the reason, so the reason that that is important is it increases the performance of the fund. Right. So if you call the billion dollars, if you have a billion dollar fund, you call that capital on day one, but then you deploy it over four to five years. That's money that's just like sitting there, not really generating return for your LPs. And so they would rather spread out those calls over time to keep that capital in actively in the market and other investments or treasury bonds or whatever.

Exactly. And this was a big thing during like the SBB crisis. A lot of firms were, you know, they did have some money tied up, but it wasn't exactly a situation where the VCs were going to lose like all their money because most of the most of the funds that have been raised are invested just in liquid assets. Because the LPs have. Have fun.

We should. We should do a. Something at some point. We should do a look back at the SVB crisis.

Oh, yeah.

Because I'm happy to provide my point of view of running a new book.

At the time, mine was. I was inside the time we were getting accused of, like, causing it. It was the most insane thing. And our buddy who we mentioned before, Bryn Hobart, was the one who, like, deep dove SVB early and broke the story essentially that, like, their balance sheet was messed up. So, yeah, we should do a whole thing. I've touched on it before in content, but we could easily do an hour on that. But now let's go to Brother of the Week. Each week we try and honor one technology brother who exemplifies what it means to drive innovation forward, to allocate capital efficiently, to live the lifestyle, to enjoy luxury goods. To be a capitalist and a consumerist, to be materialist.

Yeah. And this week, loud and proud Opulence.

Loud and proud opulence. And so this week was tough. There were. There were. It was a really tight race.

Yeah, very tight. Yeah.

There were a lot of really solid candidates.

And this candidate, kind of a cut above. Cut above. And we'll start by saying that he is in the exclusive club which is residents of the Venetian Isles in Miami. And this name might be new to some, but I don't think it will be new to many. Somebody who has inspired a generation of investors and operators. He is a historian in his own right. And also a capitalist. Right. Yeah. He's somebody that has made a living and a very good one at that, sort of telling these stories of the history's greatest entrepreneurs. Handful of investors here and there's. And he's somebody who less than three weeks ago, we met with in Miami and we talked to him about the podcast. At the time we were recording one day a week. And he said, you guys are not taking this seriously enough. You need to go home to California, go to your studio and lock in. And we certainly have done that, otherwise we wouldn't be opening a bottle of champagne today. Selling, celebrating, you know, a very large number entering the Four Figure Club on X. Yeah. And being not only the most profitable podcast on earth, but the fastest growing. So today's Brother of the Week. This week's Brother of the Week, David Senra. David Senra himself.

So congratulations, David, you will be receiving your Brother of the Week plaque. Plaque in the mail soon. And we just wanted to Highlight one particularly great David Senra post. He writes Henry Ford and meetings, and it's a screenshot from some of his notes. He said Ford didn't like meetings at all. Sometimes in the middle or at the beginning of one, he'd spring up as if he had to go to the bathroom or mumble that he'd forgotten to check on something, always giving the impression that he'd be right back. He never came back.

There you go.

I love that.

So, in many ways, you have to imagine that Cesky and his recent tirade against meetings was inspired by Henry Ford, and he probably is a founders podcast listener. So thank you to David for the encouragement and exemplifying what it means to be a technology brother.

Thank you, David. Let's move on to the timeline, and we will start with Lulu Maservi, one of my good friends. She writes, it's incredible that there's a Ramp love fest on here every few weeks. Imagine how cracked the team has to be to organically build a fandom for a B2B SaaS finance product. And it's a screenshot of. Of someone, quote, tweeting a question about should they go with ramp or someone else, and they say ramp by 100x margin. And yeah, it is. It is incredible, but it's a testament. It's interesting because it's like the Ramp fandom is. It's deliberate, but I don't believe it's ever been in a deck. Like, I don't think they ever wrote, we need to build. It's more just like the founders and the people that they associate. The network is really great. And it includes David Senra, it includes Patrick o', Shaughnessy, and so includes Lulu. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if you're. If you're, you know, you're following Lulu and you're like, I fuck with her. I like the stuff that she's putting out. Like, who else is she fuck with? Yeah, and it's ramp, it's cognition, it's androel. So you're like, I mean, here's the thing.

This is cool. So a lot of people think to have a great brand, you need to spend a lot of money on a branding agency. And, you know, we spent, you know, multiple six figures on. On our, you know, technology brothers branding, which is still, you know, rolling out. Not that you need to do that, but we felt it was important and more podcasts should do it. But here's the thing. A great brand is not the font that you choose. It's not your logo Mark it's not how pretty your website is or how many times people copy your website or how many times people copy your choice of color. A great brand is what it stands for and how it makes people feel and something that people want to be associated with. So in the case of Ramp, RAMP stands for operational excellence. Right. And they came up in a time, they came onto the scene during the ZIRP era and so their position of actually we're going to help you save money was very contrarian at the time. Everyone else was spend, you know, spend, spend, spend, spend, check out all the rewards you can get. They were saying, now we're actually going to give that money back to you and we're going to help you spend less on your cards, even though that's not directly beneficial to us. And at the same time they have built a. Is it a decacorn yet? Is it close?

Something around there?

Something close will be soon. They've done that in five year time horizon, which pretty much only Donald Trump has done in the last five years. So not only do they stand for operational excellence and help companies achieve that, but they have done that themselves and they've set that example.

Right.

And so they've created this halo effect around the brand and that other companies want to be associated with. So now if you're a, if you just incorporated your company on Stripe Atlas and you want to make a statement to your team about what your company stands for, you're going to use Ramp, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It's how we're able to achieve our ridiculous profitability even at a small scale.

Yeah. There's also something interesting about them kind of building almost like a non sequitur brand around the engineering excellence of the organization. Like most people would be like, I don't even know if I need IMO gold medalists or IOI gold medalists to write my B2B software. Like I'm good with like mid tier programmers. Most of the time they don't know that that's what they want and they want like the real polish in their software and they want the software to be an expression of almost art.

Yeah. And here's.

But, but, but, but it's really stuck out in the last company I know that did that was Google. Do you, have you heard about Jeff Dean? You know this guy?

No.

He's like, he leads their AI, but he was like the most insane programmer during Google's rise. And there's like these arcane websites out there of Jeff Dean jokes and they're basically like Chuck Norris jokes. And it's like Jeff Dean's keyboard only has two keys, 1 and 0, because he like programs in binary or like, you know, and then there's like 20 more jokes and like you really need to understand computer science to get the joke. But they like, Jeff Dean was just this like insane phenomenon and it really like set the culture at Google and you could almost say the same thing. Like, you know, people like, you know, do you need, you know, you know, gold medalists to write B2B SaaS software? Well, do you need Jeff Dean to write search and ad software? Like yes. Yes, you do actually, because there's a big opportunity and it's really important. So like get the best.

Yeah. I had having the opportunity to go to, to dinner with Lulu, Eric and Karim from Ramp in Miami a few weeks ago and they invited one of their engineers who had actually was moving over to marketing.

Oh yeah.

So one interesting thing about Ramp's organization is it's so engineering led that Ramp's cto Karim actually runs marketing and they oftentimes are focused on recruiting engineers to their marketing team because they want to take an engineering led approach. And, and I can't comment on some of the things that they're doing in order to drive customer acquisition using that method, but they're a step above any other team. Right. They didn't go recruit out of some big New York City like marketing agency. Right. They're like engineering culture through and through.

So let's go to Josh Kaplan. He is posting a deep dive on the Gundo from the Blaze called Hard Text Main Street. It says Augustus Dirico on the Gundo practice of office checks. If you're not in the office at 12:04am Chugging white monsters and popping zins, you deserve to get your funding cut. And this is, this is interesting because.

Great picture.

Yeah. I mean, fantastic picture. But I've always said that it's underrated that the Gundo guys beat the allegations of being too Twitter brained and too addicted to posting. And they very, very elegantly switched from just constantly posting and needing to do all the work themselves to get attention in media to the media comes to them now and they just down. And I bet this got like a ton of reach. It's very valuable, very important for SEO. And it was probably like, you know, a one hour lunch and they took some photos.

High leverage.

And Augustus, it's very high leverage. Exactly.

It's way easier in credit to them. They're some of the best posters of the generation.

Fantastic. But they didn't get too into it.

Where they were like, no, they post way less than the AI people. The accelerationist for sure.

They post way less.

They're averaging.

Yep. And I think that's good because they're actually able to go and build something real and take time for the important things and then they can still pop up and post. But it's very much like, you know, shower thoughts. Like, it's really like slack time. They're not sitting there being like, let.

Me write a whole segment for Augusta's shower thoughts. When he's. When his drones are flying over, he has a second to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's basically. Yeah. I mean, like, like, obviously they need to.

On that note, they need to maintain attention.

Oh, yeah.

Promoted post quickly. We wanted to shout out that Augustus is at Rainmaker, who was featured in. In that article is hiring, hiring, hiring. Need more engineers, please, sir. My tech development timelines are starving. So if you are an engineer, feel free to ping Augustus directly apply for a job or DM us and we're happy to give you your opinion on the company and working with Augustus as he's a friend of the pod. So great, great opportunity for the right engineers out there. And make haste.

Yeah, I think it's rainmaker.com if you want to make rain.com makerain.com There you go. If you want to learn more, we highly recommend it. I've made a whole video about the Gundo. There's a great Jason Carmen video about Rainmaker. Plenty of ways to learn more and find out if a job at Rainmaker is right for you. Let's go to Blake Robbins. Good, great investor, just great guy all around. He says the inevitable AI side hustle is to flood TikTok reels and shorts with AI edited subway surfer video plus top Reddit posts, plus text to speech. Is that inevitable or is that like, already happening?

It's already. I think it's already happening.

I think it's already happening.

So Blake is a good example. A lot of people go say, oh, touch grass, get offline, go walk in the park. Blake's like, no, I'm going to stay more online. I'm going to take pitches while he's the investor.

I was pitching while talking, while playing video games with him. Yeah, yeah, it was amazing. And I was asking him if he was.

He's an example of. In our very online world, I would. Anybody that tells you to get offline is maybe doesn't have your best interests at heart because Blake is a fantastic investor and found some great Companies over the years very early. But. But yeah, we've seen this. A lot of people are saying, you know, you can make $10,000 a month making some AI influencers. Not sure about that. But the clipping strategy is very established as a way to, you know, at least generate a lot of attention. You don't need to be particularly an expert in anything yourself to get great at clipping.

Yeah. When we get into more of the VC trade deals, who's working where, who's moving from one firm to the other, we got to analyze Blake. Because he was at Benchmark, they let him go start another fund.

He was at that Detroit fund for a while.

Yeah. He's moved around a bunch of tons to analyze. There would have been a top draft pick for me if I was running one of the major venture firms, but Holy trinity, you know, we'll see. We'll see how he ends up. I like that. He has his own fun, though. He's master of his own destiny now.

Yeah.

Santiago says. Wait, did you just say Dutch East India Company, dude? They were the OG venture capitalists. VCs today are soft herd animals. These dudes were hardcore. They'd be like, there's an island that produces something we want, and if we get it, will 30,000x our investment. And it's. I guess that's him.

Yeah.

With the ovcv, which is the. The Dutch East India Trading Company logo on Rogan. Which is funny.

Yeah, it's funny, right? Yeah. Yeah. Aaron was talking about, you know, cornering the nutmeg market, but yeah. Yeah, it's funny to think about the Dutch East India Company looking at, you know, a venture capitalist today is typically pretty happy with 100x, 200x. That's kind of the range where you start to go, okay, this was a good bet. And, you know, they probably looked at something like that, being like, man, with the risks that we're taking on, like, I need at least lower.

Like, a lot of the growth equity funds are just like 20% IRR deals. No zeros.

Yeah.

Like, imagine it's a good strategy. Like, it's worked, it's smart, it's rational. But private equity, it doesn't feel like. Yeah, it's. Private equity doesn't feel like venture venture means needs to be. There's a 90.

Yeah. So here's.

There's a 5% chance this is a trillion dollar company. 90% chance it goes to zero. 5% chance the founder goes to jail, and I'm disgraced, and I never work again.

Here's A that's the company that, that practices. Friend of the pod, Justin Mares and Lee, the team over at Long Journey, they practice true venture today where they will back a founder who's still working in some university on some like crazy project or poster. That's like the most absurd thing you've ever heard. And they take, you know, they're making these bets where they'll invest very small six figure checks at very reasonable valuations given the risk profile. And I'm extremely bullish on the strategy. It makes me feel like an idiot for entering companies at 15 posts.

Yep.

Or 20 post.

I mean, I was talking to Lee the other day. He was the first investor in Crusoe.

Yeah.

Like fantastic company, like Crushing. And also I was talking to Cyan about something they. They invested in a diamond company.

Yeah.

Like where's that on any market map? Yeah, but, but they were like, yeah.

We want to be investing off market.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Off market maps for sure. I think that the thesis was like, well like lab grown diamonds are going to get cheaper. People will eventually switch over. But now it's like, oh, actually diamonds are important to like cheaper chip fabrication in some weird way.

Here's somebody. I texted a market map to my friend Amar the other day and he goes, damn, that market map looks like the menu at a TGI Friday. And I was like, that is a good example of like if the market map looks like a TGI Friday's menu, probably it's passive.

Stay away.

Don't make your first bet.

Stay away.

Because the game is.

Stay tuned for the Technology Brothers market map. We will be mapping out every poster that we mention on the show. And we're very excited to drop our first market map. Let's go to Ken. He says by 2026 there will be two jobs. H vac technician and YC founder. Everything else will be done by computers and the H Vac technicians will have higher average annualized revenue.

So here's the thing. There's a guy I use for random handyman stuff around the house and I were talking the other day, he's helping me with something and he was like, dude, I've been taking these engineering classes, I've been learning to build websites and I didn't try to dissuade him from doing that because I think it's like, you should know how to build a website. You should know how to make an application. Right. These sort of things are basic skills, like replacing a screw in your house almost. Right. You should know how to like paint a fence Maybe something like that. But I told him, I was like, look, every single person out of the last 400 people that I've texted could make a website today and ship it. Like a tiny fraction of those people like know how to properly like clean a gutter and maintain the gutter in a home. Right. And an even smaller fraction are going to know how to like you know, service and H VAC unit. So I told him, I was like, look, you're already very skilled in these areas and if you really productize what you're doing and get smart about building a team and marketing, I guarantee you that you already have momentum in this area. Like you're going to be making more money than the average web developer in, in three years.

Yeah, it's like taste and like arcane knowledge that doesn't exist on the Internet is like what's valuable.

Like yeah, I've seen what I, what I'm seeing in the creative market right now is the truly, truly talented creatives that have incredible impeccable taste and execution and have built great teams around them are busier than ever then the bottom half of the market. Like the historical web developer. Like I'm gonna make 200k a year developing, maintaining a website like almost like blown out like non existent, like not a great career path anymore.

Not gonna be an accredited investor for very long.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you want to be a credit investor, do not become a website commoditized web developer maintainer.

Let's go to Trey Stevens, one of my colleagues at Founders Fund says what do we want? An Anduril Merch store. When do we want it?

Now.

And he is commemorating the launch of the Anduril Merch store. Very cool CGI render. They're going to be dropping something. I don't think they've actually talked about what they are dropping but I, I've heard it's a very unique and cool plan.

We'll have to do a live.

Yeah, we'll have to unboxing. I'll get.

Yeah. So here's, here's the thing. So the most hyped merch drops on on, on X right now are Andrew and Palantir. But the issue is they both stand for very similar things.

Yes.

There's a lot of like conflict. It's hard to really pick a side.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, we need, we need a third player to come in the mix so that people can kind of like, you know, there needs to be conflict otherwise there's no opportunity.

And I mean I just imagine when I see a Lot of Android and Palantir gear. It's a lot of T shirts, it's a lot of sweatshirts. It says, quiet luxury. It says, hey, I might have written a seed check in this company. Now it's worth $100 billion. Yeah, I'm wealthy. But that's not the future. The future is loud opulence. Loud opulence. You need to be screaming.

Yeah. So I think there's an opportunity for a defense tech, you know, firm to come out that's maybe competing with these guys and say, we're going loud. We support kipping pull Ups. Gold plated Dr. We support, you know, Palantir has been very clear. They do not want you drinking or doing kipping pull ups while wearing their merch.

Exactly.

And so that creates an opportunity for a maybe pro crossfit. Pro drinking.

They said no drinking in the.

Yeah, yeah.

Huge problem.

No more than. No more than two drinks.

No more than two drinks.

Okay.

I wonder if we can get like a dom perignance exception. Yeah, I think that. I think that's essential.

No more than five bottles of.

Yeah, I mean, we're gonna finish this bottle today.

It's no problem.

Come on, let's go. Matt Turk says business trip to Europe. 6:30am Wake up. Check phone. Except cookies. I already see where this is going. I didn't read this one. 9am meeting. Use laptop. Except more cookies. 12pm taxi to lunch. Except cookies. Yes. 4pm new checks news. Except cookies. 11pm Netflix. But first, cookies. 1am restroom. Except cookies.

This is a joke, but somebody ran the numbers and they said something like, Europeans will spend billions of hours accepting cookies. It's just like a constant.

It's so insane that there's no, like, opt out. This is like the worst thing.

Like, Europe. Europe's going down for being known for great pastries to being known for even. Lots of even.

Even Apple's doing this where it's just like every single app, I have to say, allow app to track or accept or deny.

Like, and you always do because you want to support advertising.

I literally do because I'd rather have targeted advertisements than non targeted advertisements. Like, I want to see an ad for a Patek Philippe. I don't want to see an ad for, you know, some hublot. Like, they should know me by now. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, very disappointing. Europe. I really hope we can push back. Back against this in the United States because obviously I never go to Europe.

I don't travel. For Apple. For Apple, it was a brand thing. They realized that they had an Opportunity to be the privacy. Big focus, big tech company.

Even though they competitors.

Even though they. Yeah, yeah. Even though they know every single thing about us already and it doesn't matter.

Big tech feels like being a user of big tech products. Like when you're using Facebook or when you're using an iPhone, it feels like you have divorced parents. And it feels like Apple is actively in a fight with meta.

Yeah.

And it's like I'm trying to use. I'm trying to log in to my sunglasses. They work together.

Like, I'll drop the kids off.

Exactly. And then they kind of bicker at each other like, oh, oh, oh, you want to use these meta glasses? Like, well, do you want to. Are you sure you want to accept the terms? Do you want to do this?

You said you were going to pack lunch for the kids. I picked them up. They said that they didn't have any.

Exactly. It's so. It's so frustrating. And yeah, I'm getting close to burn it all to the ground, but we'll let them keep going.

The.

The Apple company is not happy with me, but I'll keep using that shit. Let's go to Ashley Vance. He says, my exclusive today is the big on the biggest investor in brain and longevity science that you've never heard of. James Fickle turned a crypto fortune into a research empire. I love this. So better elites. This is an example of better elites.

Is he sungazing right now? I think he is. He looks like it. Base.

Yeah, there you go.

I sungaze before the podcast. Yeah.

I try and like tease it in. I try and go for a ride.

Yeah.

Outside.

I don't, I don't raw dog it like some people that we know.

I try and run outside and catch some rays in the, in the early morning. I mean, if you can get to the gym or to whatever you're doing in the run and like the sun's coming up. Nothing's more inspiring. That, yeah, it's fantastic. But yeah, I don't know. Longevity and brain.

Yeah.

Crazy money.

I think a great journalist, she writes some great pieces and I think that she is.

Hey, hey, hey. Easy, easy.

I'm just saying certain journalists, you know, are friends of the pod, adjacently friendly and other others are, you know, less friendly. But no, I think Bloomberg has been making moves, credit to them. Right. They got Kate Clark last week. They've got Ashley.

Emily Chang.

Emily Chang. Big, big momentum over a lot of people. Yeah, it's great. Shout out to the journos.

Let's go. To Nick Malinovic he says D reg expectations are creating a lot of upward movement for public fintechs.

So I brought Nick up on the show before talking about how his strategy. It's very dangerous as a VC to just pick a single category and just make that your entire. Make that your entire identity and focus. And Nick's strategy to date has been to have smaller funds and, and make sure that he's actually generating real carry. Phenomenal investor. I think he's had a community and a media platform forever and really has done a good job of making sure that. I think anybody that is building in fintech that's worth backing is probably aware of him at this point. And he kind of. As much as there was a crypto bear market, there was also a huge.

Fintech bear market in the public markets for sure.

Look@dave.comdave.com book value and it's up 40%. Yeah. A bunch of others.

So wait, is this the last seven days? Oh my God. Like I'm looking at this and it's like sezzle's up 103% and I think it's the last seven days.

I'm not sure. But maybe Nick should open a Publix.

Yeah. Start a hedge fund, man.

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean I know, I know a decent amount of these companies but there's a ton on here. It's. Yeah. It's good to be back.

It's good to be back.

Good to be back. Matt Fried writes. I don't know, I feel like Waymo can solve most of their problems by adding just one additional seat.

So Waymo's counteract pillbox turret on top. Remember we've talked about the bird, how bird really suffered in LA because it became the new hot thing to vandalize to throw a bird off of a 10 story skyscraper. So we've seen Waymo's get into similar situations where they're alone in a street and maybe a bunch of people decide to start doing donuts around the Waymo and maybe jumping on it and lighting it on fire. So anyways, I think, I think Waymo would be smart to. I would look at potentially partnering with Anduril and getting some of their FPV drones that just sort of like follow the Waymo Flock safety. Flock safety works. But I want like something kinetic, right? Like you need, you need that kinetic potential.

Didn't they acquire some of the drone company? But it's those.

No non kinetic, non kinetic. So no Waymo needs you know, suicide drones trailing it and there needs to be laws to protect AI.

Right.

Because I think humans are a bigger threat to AI right at this moment than AI is a threat to humans. So to make sure we don't piss the AI off too much, we should allow AI rights.

Yeah.

Self defense is a, is a important principle.

Yeah. I mean everything about this, the decision to start in San Francisco just feels better and better because it's like an extremely chaotic city where I mean they obviously did the pilot in Arizona, which was like a super safe, like super wide open streets like always, like dry, no hills. And then once they got that going, they went straight to the hardest Mode, like Level 1000 going into San Francisco, like crazy streets, tons of pedestrians, like shoddy streets, like all sorts of weather, fog. And also people that will vandalize you. So if they can solve that, it's going to be a breeze to go to Chicago or la.

Here's. Here's going to be the big unlock for Waymo. So when Waymo instead of doing uber black, because all Waymo cars are like clean and fairly spacious and it's nice inside, so maybe black doesn't matter, but they should have a Waymo Turbo S functionality. Right. You would call a992 Turbo S and just say like, hey, look, drive however you want but just try to keep it 15 over the speed limit, which is maybe like where police aren't going to bother you. But just stay under that and let me really enjoy the car while I'm in it.

Right like that.

So Waymo, please roll out Turbo S's. We will pilot them around Los Angeles.

Yeah, this is correct. Elon says use Grok for answers that are based on up to date info. ChatGPT has no idea on whom Donald Trump has assigned new responsibility of enforcing our borders. Grok is real time. ChatGPT is outdated. Interesting. I mean there is something great about Grok being integrated with the timeline. I love that. But I actually haven't used it that much. I've used it for a couple generative images because I feel like it's a lot less restrained there. So if you want to do something fun for a kid and you want to do like, oh, it's going to be Mickey Mouse and Paw Patrol together. Boom, boom. Go to Grof.

Yeah, I think I haven't been going.

For just like the news, the default LLM. It's not in my home row in that way.

Yeah. I think we should go on record and say that we support AI. We are excited about all the foundation models, but we are excited about ways that These foundation models can differentiate, right. And this is one of them. Not only is XAI have sort of an interesting distribution hack through X, but they certainly have found ways to resonate with a broader audience outside of the college students that are using ChatGPT to solve their homework problem or write an essay for them.

Yeah, that's great. So got to mix that in more. I use perplexity. I use ChatGPT. Claude, every once in a while really kind of go back and forth on it. I kind of subscribe. Subscribe. Because every once in a while you see the meme of like, oh, Claude's like doing really well. Like the responses are really good and it has been good, but the UI honestly is great for me, so I back off. But I think if you're programming, Claude has been, has become like the default integration for cursor. So, yeah, I think, you know, we could be seeing some bifurcation, some specialization. Well, let's go to the other. AI founder Sam Altman says more generally, I am feeling good about a bright future for cryptocurrency. Here we go.

Risk on, risk on.

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the interesting things. Like, you know, there a lot of the AI people have been very, very bearish on crypto because they see it as this like zero sum rivalry. Like either the VCs are in AI or crypto, they're going back and forth. And that's somewhat true. Same thing with talent. Like, developing for crypto is hard. Developing for AI is hard. So you need the best, you need the best talent. You want to be sucked away by some person that's like, oh, I'm making, I'm getting so rich working at a crypto company. But it's good that he has this perspective at the top end of saying this isn't zero sum. We actually probably need both, especially as we go to like, you know, more global payments, the stablecoins, the prediction markets, the speculation, the digital gold.

Yeah, I think part of it is there's real competition in the capital markets for there, there's, there's. Sometimes the capital feels infinite, which is an incredible feeling. But more often than not, these bigger allocators are looking at, you know, all right, we should be deploying into crypto this year, we should be deploying into AI this year. And, and both industries in a perfect world would want to take all that.

Right.

And so, but we, we've talked about this before with Sam, one of the re. I honestly haven't followed worldcoin closely enough. It does feel like they're building some pretty crazy momentum from like talent standpoint.

I've been super bullish on worldcoin from day one just because Samson involved.

Yeah, yeah. And you've said like Sam just makes money.

Yes.

Period. So.

Let'S go to the bear case for crypto currently or maybe just some cautious optimism from Robert Leshner. He says a cheat sheet of things that could blow up at 200k BTC, crazy volatility, spot exchanges, missing, missing coins. I think that's like maybe like a Robin Hood thing. Is that what spot exchange missing coins mean? Like if you're trading like essentially synthetic Bitcoin and you don't actually necessarily own the under the underlying assets, asset derivative exchanging exchanges, miners that overwrote call options, defi borrowing markets, hedge funds, high leverage traders, including you plan accordingly. Funny, it's all the lessons from the last bubble. Basically.

I, I, I first heard that as miners, as in like young people.

I mean so many literal miners were huge in crypto, especially NFTs, especially in the ICOs. Lots of young.

Can you imagine the NFT boom during like if you're in middle school and you like, and you had like a crypto wallet.

Yeah, yeah. And you get like 100 bucks and you run it up to.

Yeah. But the thing that's interesting about here is people always think about like, like systemic risk in crypto as being prices dropping a ton but the meteoric rise. And I think this is a great call out can and I think I've, I've talked to Robert like one time years ago but like very early and right with crypto. But yeah, people aren't sort of prepared for the systemic risk that comes from just the market crap of crypto potentially doubling in the next few months.

Do we have any more promoted posts today?

Good question. Actually on the note of crypto, we have a promoted post from BlackRock. BlackRock says our chairman and CEO Larry Fink highlights in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed which we love that the most realistic path to reducing America's debt burden is through growth. He discusses the opportunity for US capital markets to drive growth by building hashtag infrastructure, particularly in data centers and hashtag AI technology. Larry says any realistic path out of debt has to rely mainly on growth. We need to increase the size of our economy so that what we owe becomes smaller relative to what we make. So incredible. We should consider printing this out and just kind of putting it on the wall because it's worth coming back to.

Hey, this is fascinating. I heard this interesting take from Ben Thompson, that if you're a government and you're in debt, there are two ways out of it. One is to kind of unstagnate yourself and bring about economic growth, which is what Larry is arguing for, which I strongly support. It's a very hard problem. There's a piece of deregulation, there's a piece of innovation, there's a whole bunch of things that need to go right to actually get GDP above 2% to like the 3, 4, 5% range. That would be.

Yeah, we've talked about this on the podcast. Going from 2% annual GDP growth to 4% would solve like pretty much.

Pretty much everything.

Exactly. So, yeah, but the other.

But the other way that governments are tempted to solve a debt crisis is always inflation. But democracy has this like built in kind of escape valve for inflation because inflation hurts the average voter, the average consumer so much. Because even though right now, like inflation has declined, that's the rate of inflation. The prices didn't go back to before the inflation.

Look at the tech.

Yeah. And so a lot of people are still hurting even though, yeah, the prices aren't going up anymore. They're, they're still high relative to what people perceive, you know, a banana should cost or a gallon of gasoline should cost. And so there's a lot of pressure. And most of the US elections are like referendums on the economy. Referendums on the right track, wrong track, how is the country doing? And so there's this, hopefully over time there's this forcing function to like, do not inflate the debt away. Instead, let's focus on growth, let's focus.

On and, and going back to the Trump pump, the sort of virtuous cycle of saying, let's get government spending in control, let's spend more efficiently, let's spend in the right places, let's accelerate and let's, let's focus on growing the economy, which I think is a core tenets of the new administration, regardless of your political beliefs.

Yeah, let's go to Buco Capital bloke. He Says Private Company SaaS employees hearing that the IPO window is closed with markets at all time highs. Dogecoin Mooning and Carvana up 800% year to date. And it's a picture of Shane Gillis. So a great sketch.

So I think with a gun in his mouth, this guy's very sharp on sas broadly. I have no idea where he works or whatever, but he's clearly an insider within that world. And I think what he's actually speaking to is all of the if you're in the top 20% private companies right now, every single one of those companies is looking at, we are going to go public within the next two years.

It just takes time. Like, the IPO window is open now.

Here's the issue, though. There's thousands of other private unicorns that are backlogged that. That are. No, that just don't have the traction or momentum. And so he's talking about these employees that are maybe at the number 49. Oh, yeah, unicorn chassis company who's like, yeah, we have 30 million of arrow, 40% a year. And yes, the IPO window is closed. Right. Just because you shouldn't probably go public.

That makes sense. I just think, like, generally they shouldn't be hearing the IPO window is closed in that scenario. They should be hearing the IPO window is about to open up in a big way. We aren't good enough. We need to double down. We need to grind.

We need to gear.

Yeah, we need to get into gear because this is the opportunity if they.

Want to go public or I think, you know, some of those companies, maybe they. Maybe they end up merging with others and creating enough revenue.

Let's go to Adam Singer with a related post. He says Dogecoin is up 170% in the last month. And it's a picture of someone throwing the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham in the trash.

That photo, I feel like, is very Lindy over the last few years, almost every single year you could use it in some capacity. Almost every single day or month.

I had a friend who bought Dogecoin right before the election.

Deutsche coin, Dogecoin.

I wonder if it's related to like literally like the Doge, the Department of Government, Industry or.

I think it ends up. I mean, it. Doge obviously has always traded to some degree based on Elon's attention towards it. Right.

Hilarious. Because the founder, like completely distance himself from this. You know the history of Doge. No, so the. The founder of Dogecoin created it as a. As a joke because he was anti cryptocurrency and thought that all cryptocurrency was a scam and a fraud. And so he created the dumbest possible thing, the dumbest possible token Dogecoin based on.

He effectively kicked off Meme Coins. Meme coin.

It's the first Meme coin.

Yeah. He's the reason that Pump Fun has done like 200 million of net.

He created an entire industry and he sold all his Doge and he's been very against it and he's put out these, like, long posts saying that, like, this is everything wrong. $100, $100 bills. I think he sold too early. I don't know. Maybe he still has some.

Did you hear. Did you hear about the. The best trade of the last week was a trader that turned $17 into about 3 million with peanut.

Peanut, I've never heard, but I heard.

About that trade, so. And that made me think meme coins are the new American lottery for the terminally online. Right. And anybody like just that one trade will probably inspire a billion dollars of new investment into meme coins. Totally. Right?

Yeah. I mean, I remember during the last dogecoin pump, there was this guy who was like, the dogecoin millionaire, and he was doing podcasts about how he put his life savings in dogecoin, ran it up to a couple million. It completely tanked. He had like 10k, was broke, and then he was like, I'm not selling, I'm not selling. So I hope he didn't sell any. Hope he's back up because, you know, we'd love to see.

I want to put the word out that we're back up.

Let's go to Siki Chen. Blader. Is that how you pronounce it? We'll see next year. Feels like it will be the best year in the history. In history to be in tech as a founder, employer, employee, investor, anything you got 1k likes. It has that vibe. Right. Build in winter. Never felt so real and so good.

I love Siki. I've actually never met him in person. Just he runs Runway online. Interact runs Runway. He started that company. I think he was an early RV company. Yeah, he started.

Yeah.

Blank on the name of it, but it's the IRL Playground.

VR. Yeah.

No, not Playground.

Yeah.

I forget what it is, then. What's the name of the VR company that Sigi started?

It's in.

Yeah, but they had a really tough time in Covid.

Yeah, exactly. Because it was in person. VR experiences.

But now he's got this amazing company called Runway that I think Gary. Yeah, Gary invested in. Andreessen's in it. Cool. Anish, my friend over there, I think led one of their rounds. But Sikhi's always been just extremely, I would say, like, tech positive. And his company Runway, is doing something really interesting. They're basically applying some of the same kind of mechanics that you have in Figma to P&Ls and pro formas and helping everybody at a company better understand the numbers in their business.

Yep. Do we have another promoted post?

Yep. This Promoted Post is from Cartier. They say in steel, rose gold, or paved with diamonds, the Tank Americana celebrates the casual, chic spirit of a continent on American time. Hashtag Cartier tank. So anyways, if you are a technology brother and looking for a nice gift for significant other, the Cartier tank is a great option.

Fantastic.

It's certainly an investment, but it's something that has stood the test of time.

Are you familiar with the history of the Cartier tank?

I don't know the tank. I know the Santos.

Oh, yeah, no, the tank is, like, fabulous. Of course I wore a tank. Yeah. But it was worn by Jackie Kennedy. It was worn by Muhammad Ali and Andy Warhol.

Yeah.

And so it's this interesting blend where it is seen in some ways as like a feminine watch, but it's been worn by arguably like the most masculine guy in history, Muhammad Ali, and also this interesting artist in Andy Warhol. And so it's cut across. It's cut across all of the cultural barriers in a really fascinating way. And it's just a really striking design. It's beautiful. The take Americaine is a little bit more rectangular, a little bit more centered.

Rectangular. This one is.

But it's a fantastic watch and. And I highly recommend it to anyone who's in the market. Well, and thanks to Cartier. Let's go to Mary Gunarate Otne. She says Genius Bar employees asked me what I do for work, and I didn't lie. We're so back. What does she do?

So Mary has a crypto protocol I invested in.

So the last couple years are rough. Yeah.

They, her and her co founder Luke have just weathered the absolute storm, focused on fundamentals and actually building products that their users love. They've iterated multiple times. They've stayed focused. I love the team over there.

They did Jason Calacanis who told them, pivot to AI.

Yeah. They had a lot of people like jcal telling them, pivot to AI, Pivot to AI, Pivot to Defense tech. Refused. Anyways, brilliant team. And I'm happy to see that Mary's no longer embarrassed to say what she does for a living because she is a phenomenal founder. And cheers to Mary. Cheers to Mary.

Potential future brother of the week.

Yep.

Let's go to Zach. The founder of Bridge sold his company to Stripe recently. He says, in the last week, I've heard that a dozen developers building with Bridge are raising rounds, have term sheets. It makes me so incredibly happy. We're entirely focused on empowering these builders. Supporting their success is all that matters.

So it's funny, when Bridge got acquired for 1.1 billion about a month ago, everybody was just like, oh, stablecoins, Bridge, Stripe. That makes sense. I don't think it was talked about enough that Stripe likely made that acquisition because they saw that the brightest, most exciting companies building in stablecoins. We're using Bridge, which was exactly what. What Stripe built their entire business on making sure all the best new founders in the Bay Area were using Stripe. So anyways, people that felt like that was a crazy price to pay, or they were like they only have 15 million of revenue or they're paying this crazy multiple on revenue to acquire the business. Stripe was basically, I imagine, making a venture style bet into a company that they saw themselves in. So excited to see what comes out of developers building on Bridge.

And congrats to Zach again.

Yep.

Reggie James says the cost for lack of vision, a crowded market.

Yep.

Underrated tweet 63 likes deserve 6k low tam banger banger. Really good point. Really good point. This is the market map thing. If it's on the market map.

So you don't have vision. Here's an example. So WorldCoin clearly has vision. It's had a lot of critics over the years. Oh, why do you have this? Or why are you scanning everybody?

Vision.

Yeah, yeah, they're scanning eyeballs, like all over the world. And in one of the world's most competitive industries, where people will switch between products very rapidly. You know, they'll cycle through multiple protocols in the same day, crossing across different L2s to L1s to L3s, not caring. They've carved out a lane and have a vision. And you could maybe argue that they don't have competition in what they're doing. So Reggie's very unique entrepreneur and I think historically has always tried to do the same. Right. Like, have that unique point of view and focus.

Yeah. He also just always focuses on, like, taste and design and like, these interesting things that always get forgotten by the core Silicon Valley folks.

The YC crowd.

Yeah, well, it's not just the YC crowd. It's like you can dismiss design and taste if you're just a developer and you only care about, like, what is the programmatic truth? What is the mathematical proof of this thing? And maybe design takes a back seat to that. Or if you're just the business guy and you're just like, whatever makes money, maybe this taste thing or having good design or having a strong opinion or a vision. That doesn't make sense this quarter. But Reggie has Always been good about, like looking further into the future. And I think that calls back to like an earlier era of Silicon Valley, which I really respect. Let's go to Gabby Goldberg. She says the Hawk to a girl ships faster than most of us on this app. And it's a quote tweet of TechCrunch saying the hawk to a girl launches Pookie Tool, an AI powered dating advice app. And it's fine.

Yeah.

And I love this. You had a good take about this because there's been a lot of doubt in AI recently.

Yeah. But my thing I was, I was happy to see she wasn't discouraged by the recent potentially scaling sort of wall within AI.

There's a lot of fear in AI.

She's not, she's just shipping, she's building. That's what everybody should basically be doing. You can't be afraid. You just gotta ship. And here's.

And there's a lot of hate on rappers right now. There's a lot. Oh, you shouldn't build a chatgpt rapper. Well, what does she have? She has a cornered resource in her audience.

She's got attention where.

Yes. Who knows if this is that much better than just asking vanilla chatgpt. But if she can drive people to this app, she can monetize that. She's effectively acting as like an affiliate of OpenAI. And sure, it's not going to be a trillion dollar company, it's not going to disrupt open AI, but it's going to create a lot of value.

And that here's a potential thing with the Internet. So historically, people would have their 15 minutes of fame. Right. Hawk to a girl.

You know her website now, 16 minutes.

That's great.

Fantastic. As soon as she saw that, she's.

She'S really good, she's smart. She clearly has a smart team around her. Actually note, she does her podcast with Joey, Joey from better. But look, historically you'd have your 15 minutes of fame and then the traditional media would move on because you were no longer.

You wouldn't have captured any of that.

You couldn't capture anything in that moment.

She has millions of dollars already now.

You can get 15 minutes of fame, get your 5 million followers, however many it is, and then continue to monetize that and ship against it and iterate. And so I think that's underrated. More people should be trying to get their 15 minutes of fame and because it can actually convert into a very, very meaningful career for her, I'm sure she's having the time of her life.

So yeah, it seems great.

So classic American story of making a sex joke or having some sex related video and then turning it into a career like the Kardashians.

Yep. Fantastic. Let's go to Chrisman Frank. He says some are calling Elon the George Soros of the right. That's not really accurate. He's more like 44. George Soros is of the right because Elon Musk has $320 billion and George Soros has seven.

Here's the thing, okay?

Put on the tinfoil hat. We're in. We're in the conspiracy zone.

The conspiracy.

The scientists are out of the room. It's bro, scientists now.

Yep.

Let's hear it.

Experts. Take a step.

Take a step back.

So here's the thing. I'm fully in favor of this. I like that. We're rebuilding the deep state. We're making the deep state. Great again.

Great.

That said, I do have to imagine that George Soros, who has done some of the most heinous political acts in the history of the country, is the kind of billionaire that would want his sort of net worth to be under, like, under projected. Right.

Okay.

The real billionaire class is saying, I don't want to be on the Forbes list. If I have to be, Put me down at this much. I don't want people to know that I have $200 billion. Like, I'd rather people just think that I'm like, you know, a brokey beaner with, you know, $7 billion.

Sure, sure.

Like he. At a certain point, once you're a billionaire, like any sort of adding numbers to it doesn't do much. You're a bean air.

And Soros is harder to clock because it's all in this fund and stuff. It's not like with Elon. It's very easy to just say, okay, he owns 20% of this big company.

And I have to imagine he's very pro taxation just across the board. You have to imagine that he does some creative things with his accounts, including offshore activity that would mitigate that. So shout out to the new Soros, Elon Musk.

Fantastic. Let's go to Zeke at zeked Up. He says, I can't wait to pump my system full of niche tech Twitter influencer John Coogan's proprietary lock in chemicals. And then he, quote, tweets, my mom told me not to smoke cigarettes. She didn't say about online chewy chemical brain boost pouches sold by a handsome conservative investor with a podcast about combining technology and frat bros.

Incredible. Put it on the. Put it on the wall. Frame it, frame it right now.

I, I, I don't even think I could reply to this because I didn't even know where, I didn't know where to start. It was just like, Zeke, thumbs up.

Wait, when we posted about, when we posted about the Blood Boy giveaway, somebody.

Said, oh, yes, Rip, he's going to be the Blood Boy. I don't know Zeke, does he have Blood Boy physiognomy or something?

Yeah, we're going to have to, to do kind of a deeper analysis there.

Okay.

Yeah. But before we get into the next.

Oh yeah, yeah, we got a promoted post. Let's go.

Promoted post from LangChain. We asked, you answered. Our State of AI Agents report is here. We surveyed 1300 industry professionals, from developers to business leaders on how they're using AI agents today. And the results are in. What are the top use cases for agents? What the biggest challenges when building agents? Who's finding success after deploying their agents to production? Go to LangChain.comstateofaiagents to get the full report. And thank you to LangChain.

Yeah, thank you to LangChain. Let's go to Gabby Goldberg. She says coffee shops. Yeah, Gabby's in here twice. She's crushing it this week. Coffee shops opening at 10am is the sign of a crumbling society.

That's always been my issue with New York. You ever go to New York and you wake up, I thought it was.

The city that never sleeps. You can always get coffee and drink.

No, seriously, I'll wake up in New York. I gotta wait like three hours.

What?

Three?

Is that real?

Yeah, shops open up super late.

Weird.

You gotta find like these random.

I feel like in LA, like Starbucks opens at 6.

Like that's the thing. Everybody's like, oh, the city that never sleeps. No, New Yorkers are not getting coffee at 6am Interesting. Maybe it's because the people that are actually getting up at 6am are just getting coffee at their office or they're drinking cocaine. That's always been my, yeah, that's always been my frustration with New York. Yeah, New York's got to get it together. It literally is hurting the economy that people can't get more cups of joe around the city at earlier hours. So yep, yep, Figure it out.

Let's go to Gary Tan. This is great because we see the follow back icon. That means he already follows us. But this is the first time on the show because we haven't followed him. After we post, we're going to follow him and then he will be an honorary technology brother.

Yep.

Potential brother of the week. Maybe.

Yeah, he, he might deserve brother of the week for the recent SF election.

And I mean, so many wins with this guy. It's just W's every single week. It's going to be hard. He's going to be in the running a lot. I can feel it.

Yeah.

So Gary says design for super early startups seems like it has become increasingly a lost art. This is kind of what Reggie was talking about. Great, simple UX that has clear call to actions, obvious nav, good use of contrast and no distracting ornamentation. Sadly waning. How you do anything is how you do everything. What a great post. And it makes sense because Gary is a designer. Like he designed the Palantir logo. You know this.

I did not know that.

Crazy. Yeah. He was like one of the earliest employees.

Did he do Coinbase designed the logo?

I don't know if he did Coinbase's logo, but I mean Coinbase was in my YC batch summer 12. Gary was around there. I'm sure he's super close with them. And then I think initialized did like one of the major rounds or something. Made a ton of money on that.

Wait, so you were in wise.

Yeah, with Brian.

So you. How much did you invest?

I didn't have any money.

We'd have to cut that. We're going have to cut this out.

But you know what, it was crazy. In our YC badge, the referral bonus for going on Coinbase at the time was one bitcoin.

That's wild.

It was like, dude, if you sign up, I'll give you five bucks in the form of one bitcoin.

That's amazing. Yeah. I would say like small example here is the reason that more startup, there's no excuse not to have great design. Early stage company is all it takes is, is one person with good taste.

Yes.

And even one person with a freelancer that has good taste. Right. That's, that's, that's all it takes. Right. It doesn't. You simply have to care about it a tiny little bit and you can make it happen. And more people just like hire the designer that they know or they go online or the one who's like and.

Has already like there's this weird like trend where you know, there's someone who has a lot of taste.

Yeah.

And then they start scaling their operation and they start delegating and you're still paying $300,000 for like B tier, C tier talent. Because the real tastemaker is Working with, like, the Fortune 500 clients now, and you're out of the game.

Yeah. And I, I, you know, Party Round had great design early because the first hire that we made was Brandon Jacoby. He was the first person to join the team. He had been at cash app for four years. He was still like, 23, 24 at the time. Time. So it wasn't like we had, you know, it wasn't like he was like, no, I need to make 350k a year base. So I think that investors should be extremely judgmental of companies that have poor design because it's basically, you should figure out a way to get it done for almost zero dollars.

I agree.

And then all it takes from that point on is hiring one person who's a great designer, and you should be able to attract that person. Otherwise, you're not compelling as a founder or if you don't care about design, great designers will not want to join your company.

I agree. Bifrost Orbital says the youngest teenagers to have built satellites at the age of 16 have made it to Y Combinator. Onkar CEO, now 19, and Geffen CTO, now 23.

So you wanted to, like, Incredible accomplishment.

Yes. Congrats. Congrats on yc. Pretty good.

Pretty good traction on this post. That said, I wanted to invite these guys to send us a note and we will help you learn to post.

Because this could have been way, way more viral if it was from the actual founder's account and it was a deep dive into. Tell me more.

Not in the third person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me more. Like, what were you doing at 16? Show me a picture of the satellite that you bought.

I would want to see, like, first line. We built our first satellite at 16.

Now we're in YC. Here's the story. Boom. Exactly.

So anyways, we. We don't do this often, but pro bono consulting. Pro bono consulting will help you guys learn.

This will pop for sure.

And I imagine these guys, you know, within the next 10 years, we'll get brother of the week.

Yeah, I. I agree. I couldn't agree more. So hit us up. We will help you. Thanks. Moving on. Dennis says a GPT wrapper of Chat GBT itself makes $5 million a month.

And, you know, you know, that is crazy. There was. There was a time where you could search Chat GBT in the app.

Oh, yeah.

And not crazy, because it was all just like, iterations on the name, like the same exact name, like a bunch of trademarks. That's why they bought chat.com OpenAI doesn't actually have to do anything, really, because they're all just paying open AI.

It's all just front end.

I would say, like, a lot of that revenue is probably just going back to opening.

I do wonder what the margins are on this. Like, are they able to mark it up enough and kind of fool enough people? I'm sure it's a very cynical. It's a very simple job.

You only need one, probably two engineers to build that product.

The one thing that I really hope is that I hope this is a kit. I hope this is some really, really young founder who will learn from this and wind up, you know, making some money, putting something away and then winding up and going and doing something much more ambitious soon. Because just. Just seeing 5 million a month show up in your Stripe account, moving it around, hiring, stuff like that.

We're gonna claim credit for this. Ten years ago, it was trading sneakers was like the hustler thing. Now it's a chat. GPT rapper for sure.

The Rizz app, all these different things. Like, yeah, Tarot card reader.

I want to see the Rizzler drop.

A hawk to a girl.

I want to see if she's going.

To build something real.

The chicken fry girl. Do a chat app that you can talk to Abusive Zach Brian on. Wow, that would have some numbers.

Here we go. Do we have another promoted post?

Yep. This one is from Akash, who is over at Ramp. He says the Tri Ramp and web engineering team is hiring. Let's cook. And he chose this tweet because.

So this is a promoter post specifically for Ramp as an employer. Employer place to go work.

Yeah. So if you're an engineer, go, go check out the jobs they have.

Is there a link?

And the reason that we chose this one is that Adam over at Repview.

Oh, yeah.

Ranked a bunch of potential 20, 25 IPO candidates and wiz was just a hair above Ramp. Ramp was Almost the number one IPO candidate.

Oh, by 0.07.

Wow. Yeah. So very. We would honestly could be. We kind of need to let the experts dig in.

I think we need to put that in the truth zone.

We'll dig in to put this in the truth zone, but go dm Akash, if you're interested in joining Ramp or apply on ramps. Ashby job.

Yeah. Dream job. Let's go to Sharif Sharim. He says nobody gives a damn about your roadmaps or strategy decks. Just show them a demo. So insanely great. It feels like you stole it from 5 years in the future. 1 K likes I love that. Yeah, I agree. I, I am pro roadmap and I'm pro deck. I don't know about pro strategy.

Decks are the funniest.

You don't necessarily show them to people other than, you know, investors need to see a deck, but I think there's still something valuable about writing. Don't.

Investors don't need to see a deck if you have a banger demo and you are super compelling.

Yep.

It helps if you're an insider. It's helped if you speak the language. It helps if you've maybe interned at a venture fund or whatever it is. But build a phenomenal demo, get some users, show people that you can ship and ship quickly and then still make a great deck because it'll help you get that, you know, maybe two extra valuation if you do it right.

Yep. Michael Miraflor says the Patek Philippe Generations campaign, obviously we're a big fan of this here, has been running for years and years now. One of the best of all time in my honest opinion. And I couldn't agree more. It's the famous tagline. You probably know this, you never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. And it's a side by side of an old ad and a new ad. And it's essentially the same, the same campaign. And it really speaks to the value of like getting your marketing message correct early, building that brand essence, something that you can live on for, live and die by for generations. I remember talking to the guy who did Warby Parker's early brand development and he said that Warby Parker, they landed on this idea of quote, the literary life. Are you familiar with this? So you've never seen it in a Warby Parker ad. It's never been on a billboard. It's not a catchphrase that they, that they use anywhere on their website. It's merely just the brand essence that they keep in mind when they're doing other stuff. What is Warby Parker? It's the literary life. So that answers the question of what do their pop up shops look like? They look like libraries because that's the literary life. What does the website look like? Well, it looks bookish. It looks like something that, you know, someone who reads in a coffee shop would enjoy. What about the colors, the tones, the music, the fonts, everything comes from that essence. And getting that right early is just like once the arrow has left the bow, it just sails. And so Patek Philippe is a fantastic, fantastic representation of that. And even though it's A watch brand. You can apply that to your tech startup. Absolutely, absolutely. We see it with Ramp. Let's go to dye workwear. Derek guy, he says, oh, I'm going to jail because Donald Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz as the eternal general for the United States.

And yeah, so these guys have an amazing history.

Basically.

Derek, Derek creates a lot of beef with powerful people.

Yes.

Powerful people tend to wear suits.

Yes.

And Derek has a lot of opinions and knowledge about suits. I'm sure when he sees this video, hopefully we don't get dunked on too hard. Derek, if you're watching this, go easy, go. You know, you can dunk, but then give us some pointers in the DMs. All right. But anyways, Derek has historically, you know, called out Matt for having some absolutely horrendous fits over the years. Like truly, some, some like worst fit ever worn in the White House type stuff. And so that created some beef.

Okay.

And you know, this new administration is ambitious. Right. There's a lot of people in Washington and some, some, some posters that have been living out that are a little bit worried.

Yeah, could be, could be rough. But you know, we stand with posters generally. So as long as he doesn't go to Blue sky or Threads, as long as Derek, you stay on X, you're safe. You're one of the good, strong. Let's go to Kelsey. There's a bunch of drama. Rajvir says the Kelshi founder has to be trying to get himself arrested right now. It's just an intention game because Shane got his phone raided by the FBI. We support Shane. We support Polymarket here. And then Sarah says leaked email shows Kelsey growth executive tried to plant a new story containing false claims about wash trading and money laundering on Polymarket. Kelsey appears to be spreading misinformation about Poly behind the scenes. And it is a great time.

If that is a real.

I don't know if this is true. I'm not.

That's a real email. I don't think we can. We're not journalists, so yeah, we're experts.

Yeah.

Many things called not truth zone. But we're not journalists. We're not fact checkers.

But it is, it is crazy how, how hot the fight between the prediction markets is. I mean, it feels like Uber and Lyft right now where, you know, if you're not in Poly market, you got to get into Kelshi.

Raj is big battle it out.

Is it going to be a power law winner? Is it going to be more oligopolistic? Like you don't really know. So they're testing the waters.

In many ways, the Kalshi versus Polymarket thing was a political battle of platforms. Right. Polymarket is stands for many of the principles that the new administration is for. Kalshi is for regulation. They've gone after being like, we are the regulated prediction market. And in many ways, the campaigns tracked. Right. So Kalshi was spending a million dollars a day on Facebook just to get into the charts. Polymarket had a lot more organic adoption and organic media. So in many ways there's parallels. Not surprised that the current administration is trying to come after Polymarket.

Indeed. Let's go to. Do we have another promoted post?

Promoted post.

Okay, let's do it.

The New York Philharmonic.

Oh, I love the New York Phil.

Sounds of the Season, a festive holiday matinee featuring New York Phil musicians conducted by Jeff Tiszick on December 14th and 15th. So learn more and buy tickets@nyfil.org soundsoftheseason and I would say this could be something where we get the technology brothers community together. We all on suits and let's go to the New York Phil.

I mean, we are recording this like blocks from the L A Phil. I'm a huge Gustavo Dudamel fan. My dog is named Gustavo Dudamel. Not a joke. Not. I play a pretty big Instagram account. Yeah, he does. He's 20k. But yeah, I mean, I love classical music. It's a great way to. I find it just very meditative because you go and sit, listen to beautiful music, you're off your phone. It just clears your mind. And it's still an opportunity to dress up, meet interesting people, the class of.

And immerse yourself in truly loud opulence. Right?

Truly, truly, truly.

Music is opulent in many ways.

Yes, yes, absolutely. And so can't recommend the New York Philharmonic enough. Please. If you're in New York or you're stopping by, go buy tickets and Google it. NY Phil. Probably New YorkPhilharmonic.com and we're, we're happy to support them on this show. Let's go to Michael Dubrowski. He says that there's a beta testing opportunity. Hate picking. Hate pricking your finger, but love biomarkers. We launched a new product at Syfox, his company. And I need five people to beta test and provide feedback. Use the link in comments to get 50% off.

Wait, is this thing.

We gotta try this. I mean, I think you can, I think you can literally test your testosterone on an hourly like a minute to Minute basis seems like a massive breakthrough. And this Michael is the man who studied the testosterone levels of YC founders at his off site. And so now he's gone a step further. He's being proactive.

Okay, we need to talk to this guy.

We do.

We should get it. We should get this on our arm while we record and track our levels throughout the pod.

Yeah. Where does it spike? Is it during we are ready. Is it during the brother of the week? You know, there's a lot of different places where you need to be maxing out. I mean, that's a big part of why we record at 11am every day, because that's when your testosterone is peaking. Let's go to Eclot. Eclot says if you're 20 to 30 and your main circle isn't discussing buying another country, terraforming, building a new city, lengthening winter days, creating rain, building a vast industrial base powered by nuclear, then it's time to find a new circle. Couldn't agree more.

And I would say that our circle is all.

Yeah, it's like, okay, this is Praxis Dryden trying to buy Greenland Terraforming. That's Thomas Puero and Augustus creating rain. That's Augustus building a new city. There's a bunch of people. Prospera Nuclear. We know a ton of nuclear people that are doing that. Doug Bernauer at radiant just raised $100 million to do nuclear. It's fantastic. And then the industrial base obviously goes to Aaron Slotov and Chris Powers at Hadrian.

Thank you to the absolute brothers. The boys for the gang doing your part.

Yeah. Shout out to all of. I wouldn't have my circle include any other way. Any other way. Any other way. It's fantastic. Do we have one last promoted post?

One last promoted post.

Let's do it.

Daniel Mason, close friend. And Daniel says we've received 5,574 job applications in two weeks. We've interviewed four people. Why? We're looking for a very specific kind of engineer, the kind who makes everyone else uncomfortable. Which I like that. Right. Oftentimes 10x ers kind of freak everybody out a little bit. They're like, maybe their keyboard just has a one and a zero on it. And they're.

Yep, Makes sense.

Anyway, so Daniel says no, someone. My DMs are open, so go to at DG Mason on X if you're interested. And there's more context on the role on his profile.

Go check it out. And we're happy to promote that on this show. Let's close out with ex gamers make great entrepreneurs. A post from Tom Benham. We're used to locking in for fucking 13 hours straight sometimes. LMFAO. Couldn't agree more.

Couldn't agree more.

Many, many cases and we've talked about this before but very interesting correlation between the great gamers. Elon, one of the greatest Diablo players of all time. Sbf, one of the worst League of Legends players of all time.

And look what happened to their companies.

Clearly wasn't taking it seriously, wasn't locked in, was a fake gamer which is the worst that you can possibly do.

The key is to figure out a way to find that early love for video games that many of us had and apply it to Excel. Right. You and I were up until God probably 3:30 last night in the technology brothers model make just tweaking making sure.

The profit is maximized.

Yeah and in many ways like it felt like being in a cod lobby. It felt like playing Starcraft 2. Right.

Couldn't agree more.

Those those early days. So apply that same zealous for the game to the game of business and become a student and player of capitalism.

Yes, become a student of capitalism. A player of capitalism. And that's our show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe. Give us 5 stars. Repost everything that we deliver on X.

Start clipping us.

Start clipping us. Become an Andrew Tate disciple for this show.

Yeah.

Take our content, amplify it however you want.

I want to do a small challenge. If you're a college student listening to this show, figure out how to make $10,000 a month clipping our content and posting it. Yes, we will support you in that. We'll probably try to hire you after you do it.

Fantastic.

That's a challenge for today.

And cheers.

Cheers.

To finish off the Dom perignon.

There we go.

1K. And being the fastest growing podcast in tech.

Delicious.

And the most profitable podcast in the world. See you next time.

That's our show.

That's our show.