Zuck's Little Red Book, Best Family Car Under $30 Million, Franchise Shaking Moves, Make Yelling Great Again

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the fastest growing podcast in the world and also the most profitable podcast in the world. We got some exciting news today on the show. We are awarding our second reply guy of the month.

Jordy, look at this guy. This is going to be obvious to some if you've been in the comment sections of our post today. None other than Baldo Granados is our reply guy. Absolute dog. I mean this guy has been putting in the work.

I'll read me some of his best posts.

Leaf through this quickly. He's got some low tan bangers in here. I mean the guy's been an absolute animal. I mean around the clock, applying first reply every single time. Hundreds and hundreds of replies. He not only replies to our stuff but he replies, you know, and even posts about our partners. He says after hear seeing Anduril's merch success, I wanted to throw out an underrated merch item for try for ramp Ramp earmuffs because no one wants frostbite while reviewing expense reports.

I like it.

A lot of potential in that post. It's a good another one we got to inspire the next generation of capital allocators.

That's just a banger by itself.

Just by itself. Two likes. We're investing in this post at two likes. Quality stuff. He commented on an ad we did for another one of our partners, Celsius. He, he actually recommended that we explore other varietals from Celsius including wild berry. A refreshing choice no matter the occasion. The guy's got a gift for the written word and he's even out, you know, replying to our partners over at Ramp saying building the ramp network market dominance is only a matter of time. So anyways, this guy could be a writer for the show.

It's fantastic. Thank you.

Really, really exciting emerging poster. And remember Baldo, you can get reply guy of the month more than once. So don't stop, don't stop now that you just got some recognition. But this guy's at Cornell. He's got a startup.

Awesome.

And I'm excited to see what he does. No doubt this is just start.

That's fantastic. Well, thank you.

Thank you, Baldo.

Let's move on to the Facebook Red Book, one of their foundational documents for the organization Hidden.

Well, I would actually push back and say in, in, in the way that in many ways the bible was the foundation of western, you know, just general society and thought. The Facebook red Book has been the same for the startup economy in many ways. So it is not just a little book. There's been billions and potentially trillions of dollars of value created from this source of wise wisdom.

So we're breaking it down today. It was formerly a document that you had to find on ebay. It was pretty rare, passed around. But our good friend Matt Parkhurst over at Anti Metal got a copy, sent it over to a very high quality archival scanner, had it scanned and uploaded the PDF for everyone to read.

PDF is available, I think on anti metal.com or just go to Matt's.

We'll quote the post.

Yeah, we'll quote.

So you'll be able to find it below. You can print it out or you can try and go find a hard copy. But let's go through it first thing. I mean, amazing visuals. Like every single. It. It feels like a brand book, even though it's more than that.

It feels like a coffee. It feels like a coffee table book. Yeah, like really, really, really. But. But not over the top. Like it's not trying too hard. It was clearly, yeah, very intentionally made, but also very efficiently made.

What I love is that has the. It has the aesthetics of a brand book, but you can already tell that the brand for the company is extremely broad and wide. Like there's, there's a picture of Kevin Bacon in here. There's pictures of ancient, you know, ancient art, the Berlin Wall falling, graffiti and protesters. It really is not saying that Facebook is for any one specific type of person, but the message is very clear. Like the brand is for humanity.

It's the world.

It's the world. And that's amazing.

And the other thing right away that stands out, it's over 100 individual pages, but the, the actual text is fairly sparse. And they're able to only. Yeah, really only trying to communicate like a handful of specific learnings, which I think is cool.

So it kicks off with. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a mission to make the world more open and connected. Changing how people communicate will always change the world. Changing how ideas spread changes how societies function. It changes how people speak, live, and tell stories. It's kind of the Marshall McLuhan thing. Like the medium is the message. The tech company defines how humans communicate and that will actually change the world. And it's crazy because, I mean, obviously the narrative in the very early days around Facebook was like, oh, it's this like, you know, poke. It's this dating app. It's this hot or not. And it's clear that very early on they realized like the impact would have at scale and they were able to really capture all of that. It's fantastic.

Yeah. And I think this was key at a time where I don't know if you look back like it was, it was not in the same way now that Anduril has been able to get really, really talented, mission oriented people to come work on defense for the first time in, in decades. You now at when, when Facebook was really getting off the ground, there were would have been a lot of engineers that say I'm not going to go work on like a, your little app. Right. Like I want to work on something important. And so part of the way that they've positioned this is like, no, the work that we're doing is extremely important. We're like creating entirely new mediums similar to the, to the printing press which they, which they pull out.

Say connection is the fundamental unit of society. Increasing the number of ways people can connect and the number of people they can connect to is a powerful tool for good. It's fascinating because Google in the same way as like an ad company and that can be kind of boring to go work at an ad company. But Google was very amazing in the early days saying like our mission is to organize the world's information.

Yeah.

And that's just like awesome when you think about all the different things that can come from that. It's interesting that this was not promoted externally more.

Yeah.

Like if you go back and you interview someone about what was your perception of Facebook in 2008 or 2010, they wouldn't necessarily have gotten that in the same way that Google went public with their message. But clearly it worked and in the recruiting and like talent and retention realms. So.

Yeah, yeah. And, and right away, you know, one of the sections, Democratization of influences it's called, it says in the past controlling the media meant controlling the message. If you, if you owned the only printing press, you controlled what people read. The same was true with radio and tv. But what happens when everyone has a printing press? When the playing field is level, Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned. The best ideas win. So this to me stands out pretty dramatically because this last election cycle was the perfect evidence of that. Like it did not matter how much CNBC and CNN and the New York Times and all these different sort of traditional media sort of trashed the president elect. It really didn't matter because he had earned his own platform and influence. It was just had an order of magnitude more engagement. And the funny thing is like the way that social networks have evolved now and everybody and people love to Complain. Oh, you don't actually own your audience on, on, on Facebook or Meta X, Instagram etc. But what, what they're saying right here is it must be earned. And in many ways today with the algorithms, you need to come on the platforms and earn that influence and audience every single day.

Yeah.

It's not like a, you know, basically like, oh, we're giving this audience and you can, you know, say whatever you want to it over and over and over. You now need to earn it. Which is why, I don't know, some of these sort of legacy media accounts will post on X and get like two likes. Right. Even though they supposedly have 20 million people in their audience. Right.

Because they're just not, they're not creating good content anymore. They're not winning in the algorithm. Yeah, it's interesting that like the best ideas win creating like this town square, this very open communication standard. Zuck's obviously had like a ton of criticism around de platforming and bias and the algorithm and what gets promoted and what doesn't. But if you go back and look like it just feels like that was never driven by him. There was always external pressure, just tons of, you know, congressional inquiries and whistleblowers and hit pieces. And it feels like he's, he. For a long time he was doing his best given all the pressure, and now he's kind of created something that's really, really balanced. I feel like it's pretty good. We haven't heard about a lot of deep platforming and then, and then at least when he, when he kind of dipped his toe into the short form with threads, he wasn't saying like, this is going to be a left wing space. It was just like we're not going to do news or politics at all. And some people love that, some people don't. But it's like at least it's not hyper partisan. So the idea is like maybe, maybe threads isn't a place for, for ideas about everything. And some people don't like that, but it's still meritocratic in its own little niche in the same way that Instagram is meritocratic around things that are esthetic and things that are, you know, images and, and, and videos. But I love that there's a section here called Zuckerberg's Law. Yeah, Huge, huge embracer of the coin. It coined, he coined his own law, which I love.

Smart.

And Zuckerberg's Law is written here as.

The man, basically the man who created the timeline. Yes, created was the original user clearly.

Understood the importance Of. Of compressing his overall thesis into something that. That could be repeated. And so he boils down Zuckerberg's law as the amount of each content. Each. The amount of content each person shares doubles every year. Very, very concise. And that makes a ton of sense. People are sharing all sorts of stuff now, and not just in the amount of text, but then as people went to images. Images. You know, an image is worth a thousand words, pictures worth a thousand words. Video tells a much bigger story. And Zuckerberg's conclusion is this means the amount of information share humanity is increasing at an exponential rate. However, the amount of time people spend consuming content has not changed. There are no more hours in the day. And so what that means is that, like, the algorithm is inevitable, that there has to be some sort of filtering for all this. And that's why these. These content recommendation platforms are so powerful, because you're seeing the cream of the crop across the entire network. And obviously, Facebook has had to go through major upheaval, especially on Instagram, as they moved away from the following feedback to the algorithmic feed, like what TikTok does. But.

Well, that was. That was one of those. Yeah, it was one of those things like, yeah, it's interesting to see what your friends are doing, but it's more actually more interesting to see what your coolest, most interesting friends that aren't really your friends, but you feel like they're your friends.

People who take it really seriously.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the next, the next one, after Zuckerberg's law, they talk about two massive opportunities, which, again, this is all like, this is. This is being. This was written at a time where.

They didn't have a video product.

They didn't have a video product. Like the. Everything was very nice pre Instagram. Yeah, obviously pre Instagram. But there are two opportunities they identified was creating better ways to share. As people share, more of the demand for new and improved tools for sharing will continue to grow. So the Instagram acquisition makes total sense in that capacity of like, hey, this tool's catching on. People are sharing and this sort of medium that's adjacent to what we're doing, we should overpay. We should pay a billion dollars for this tiny app and snap it up and then delivering information more effectively. With so much content, it is essential to deliver it in ways that are relevant, understandable, and quick to consume. And so I think this just ties into what you were saying about algorithm. Algorithmic feeds always being inevitable because again, if people are doubling the amount of content that they're sharing every year and we only have so much time in the day. When you open Facebook, Instagram, X, et cetera, you want the most interesting, most relevant content to be there in the form factor that's most easy to consume. Which is why I love algorithmic feeds. It serves me up stuff every single day. It's a great ad format as well, which we love.

It's curation at scale.

It's just like, like, who was it? Was it Teal that talked about this? Or it's a good sign that if you don't know who said a quote, you just attribute it to. But it's like the true and test of intelligence is like being able to predict the future. And in many ways, like the red book just predicted the future 15 years out, like almost to a T. Yep. The next one. You want to. You want to get into this?

Yeah. Build products around people. Data doesn't care about you. It won't bring you soup when you're sick or take you out when you've been dumped. But people will. People are surprising. Give them something exciting and they'll build on it. One out of seven people in the world are on Facebook, that's amazing. But six out of seven aren't. That's a lot more people to connect. Just really, really like world domination.

Yeah. And it's interesting. Everybody like the big when. When people would attack Facebook over the last 10 years. So after this was written, it was always about, oh, they're just harvesting your data and they're using your data against you and they're using it to manipulate. Helping people manipulate elections and all this stuff. And it's just cool to see that internally they're not like data rules all, you know, you know, and who knows, like maybe their actions were different at different points, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that even after all that controversy, I have very positive feelings towards Instagram and just meta broadly as a company. And I actually don't mind that they're harvesting my data. It's going to mean like after this three hour podcast, they're going to serve me up a super relevant ad conversation. They're going to serve me up a tech ad.

There you go. I did get some. That's so funny. The next one is the hacker way. The hacker way is about pushing boundaries and testing limits. It's doing more with less, finding creative solutions and making things work, sometimes with nothing. It's effectiveness over elegance. There is always a way. I love that. And they've always had that hacker culture and they talk later about hackathons. Innovation through action. Hackathons are the place where ideas become reality. They've led to major failures like timeline, or major features like timeline born from idea called memories. The process wasn't smooth and it involved a lot of failure, but it worked because people were determined to make it happen. And yeah, I mean, the original pushback on the Timeline launch was insane. People had like, all these groups about, like, boycotting Facebook. It was a total, like, stated preference versus revealed preference. I think there were even protesters at Facebook hq, like, bring back the old, like, you know, ui. And I don't even. People always get upset. What was it before?

I can't even imagine.

I know. I can't even imagine.

My, like, early memories of Facebook are just like people having very almost private conversations, like posting, I guess, on each other's wall.

You could post on your own wall. Yeah, you could say, update, I'm recording a podcast today. And then I could go to your wall and say, hey, Jordy, it was great recording that podcast with you today. But in order to get information about Jordi, I had to go to Jordy's page. There was no timeline to synthesize all the changes that were happening on everyone's page. So you would literally just scroll around to people's pages and be like, I wonder what this person's up to. I wonder what that person's up to. It was very aimless. It made no sense. Like, it's. It's very primitive by comparison.

And I'd be like, yeah, if I look back on my feed now, it's like, you know, my best friend from growing up being like, hi, Jordy, I'm really excited for our ski trip in two months. See you then. And then, like, another post from him. The next post.

Yeah. So it closes with what makes us better. Three points. One, focus on impact. Solve the problems that matter most to ruthless prioritization. Pick the right problems to solve. And three, keep shipping, stay focused, and keep moving forward.

Yeah, there's another part of the book too that that I think was relevant, which is like, in our industry, there's only sort of two timelines that matters. There's six months and 30 years.

Yeah.

And it's wild that he has what, you know, that the organization was able to execute on clearly many, many six month timelines in a row very well. While at the same time their little red book, like, perfectly illustrated the reality 15 plus.

And I mean, it underscores everything that he's doing with Meta and VR. Like, everyone agrees that, that's, that that bet is very early.

Yeah.

But it just doesn't matter if you have a 30 year timeline.

Yeah.

So fantastic piece. I recommend you go read the full PDF. We'll post it below.

There's some really great. It's pretty, there's some, there's some pretty great pictures in here. There's. There's one of Sam. Lesson from slow hanging out. Just like with an entire real technology brother right here. Look, he has his entire timeline printed out.

Okay.

It's like a bunch of posts printed out.

There you go.

So anyways, lots of cool piece of history and cool Matt to make it available for everybody.

I love it. Well, we'll wrap up there. We highly recommend you go check it out and we'll move on to some personnel news.

Our favorite segment.

We got some. We got some major personnel news. We're doing three different huge moves in Silicon Valley today.

Let's take it off to sit up straight for this.

Get, get locked in, get ready because these are going to rock the tech world. Jordi, you want to kick it off with yc?

All right, everybody, we got some breaking news in the startup world. Y Combinator just made a high profile off season pickup, bringing in Ankit Gupta as a visiting partner for their winter 20 batch. This kind of player acquisition. This is the kind of player acquisition that sends shock waves through the incubator landscape. This pick screams Gary Tandemy. And while a stint at head coach has been brief, he's certainly making a statement with this move. What do you got for us, John?

Yeah, let's break down the stats on Gupta. He's a Harvard double degree holder in computer science, rocking both a BA and a Master's. Graduating magna cum laude with Phi Beta Kappa honors. This guy has deep playoff experience as the co founder and CTO of Reverie Labs, where he built AI enabled solutions for drug discovery, raising $31 million and partnering with Roche Tech to drive multimillion dollar deals. His skill set spans cutting edge AI, ML, full stack engineering, and a track record of scaling startups more than 15x by headcount. Think of him as the Patrick Mahomes of AI.

Look, Gupta also has experience as a research engineer at Vicarious AI and stints at Google and Palantir.

Gary worked at Palantir.

I know.

There you go.

Where he flexed his technical chops. And now he's set to bring his strategic vision to Y Combinator. Working across sectors, but keeping a close eye on startups. Pushing the boundaries of AI, biology and healthcare.

With his pedigree leadership and ability to scout and develop talent. Gupta's addition to Y Combinator solidifies their status as the premier incubator for the next generation of startups for the tech ecosystem. This is nothing short of a blockbuster signing with 6% of YC startups already becoming unicorns. If Gupta can add the value that we think he can, there's no reason he can't add billions to YC's future returns. Stay tuned. YC Winter 2025 is going to be legendary.

Legendary.

Stay locked in, folks. We got more breaking news. More breaking news, another personnel update, some personnel news.

Look, we got some breaking news out of the Flatiron district. Ramp has locked down one of its absolute stars, Andre Kovalev, with a big contract extension after he hit his four year cliff. Andre's been a key player at Ramp, leading the charge on massive launches like Ramp Travel and their partner program. This guy's been absolute dog when it comes to building and scaling innovation at one of the hottest companies in fintech.

He's an absolute dog. Now, we don't have all the details on the contract yet, but we're guessing it's likely a high six or maybe even seven figure package. Likely another four year extension. Probably no Cliff this time. For a top performer like this, Ramp's move shows that they're not just in the game. They're building a dynasty under Eric Gliman's leadership.

Absolutely. John, what does this mean for Ramp? Well, they're doubling down on retaining elite talent and Andre's decision to stay with the franchise is proof of the powerhouse culture that they built. Ramp is clearly taking advantage of the lack of the salary caps in tech. They are playing to win and moves like this prove it. This guy is an absolute beast. Congratulations to both parties.

Congratulations. And lastly, we got some, we got some personnel news. Breaking news from Sandhill Road. Andreessen Horowitz, the juggernaut of venture capital has just made a massive sign. Christian Kyle is joining the team as a scout investor. This is a huge play for Andreessen Horowitz as they continue stacking talent to dominate the startup landscape.

So who's Christian Kyle? John? Well, let's break it down. This guy is a vice president at Astranus Space Technologies where he's leading the charge on government relations, international relations, PR and marketing. He's got experience as a chief of staff and director of biz off at Biz Ops at Astranis as well, where he helped guide one of the most exciting companies in Space tech. Before that, he founded Direct A roaming decentralized tech startup and cut his teeth at Deloitte. Love that for him as a consultant.

He also worked with Jason Carmen at Astranis, who we love on the show. But don't sleep on his academic game. He's got an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BS from the University of Michigan where he crushed in economics, psychology and applied Science statistics. Now Andreessen has brought him in to power up their growing scout program. While the exact contract terms haven't been disclosed, you can bet there's a cut of carry on every deal he does. This is incredibly bullish for the hard tech community. Kyle's deep connections and experience in space and hard tech make him the perfect fit to bring cutting edge startups into the A16Z portfolio.

Look, John, we got to call this what it is. This is a dynasty move by Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Christian's already built a fantastic podcast interviewing hard tech founders. And with 2025 on Horizon, the industry is watching closely to see what plays he makes next. Absolute dog of a signing. Stay tuned here.

Stay tuned. Stay locked in. Thank you. Let's move on to some Q and A. We got some DMS from wonderful folks in the audience. We'll start with a public post from Counter Pressure. They say, hey guys, I met this LA model from Columbia. She asked me to co sign on a car lease for her. She has a 258 credit score. She's hot, but not quite hot enough. I'm not sure if she has a job. Should I help her get a Civic? What do you think, Jordy?

I like it, John. I like the play. It sounds risky, but we like to go, we like to go risk on, on this podcast. And look, you know, if you're looking for love in this competitive market, you got to be willing to take some risks here and there. You know, I don't know what kind of. I don't know what the retail price is of the kind of car you're looking at, but if. If finding the love of your life is worth 20 or 30 grand to you, I think this is an easy bet.

Yeah, I say take the risk. Let's go on to the next one. We got a dm. Hey, John and Jordy. I recently sold some secondary and after taxes I netted about $30 million. I'd like to rotate about 10% of that into a new daily. I want something sporty that can still fit 2 car seats. As I have 2 sons under 5, what car would you recommend, by the way, my sons love the pod and take turns screaming risk on and lever up when they're in the back of my current car, a Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT. What do you think, Jordy? $3 million for a family vehicle. I think you got to go Mercedes G Wagon, 6x6.

The 6x6 is great. The 4x4 is a good option. Although my personal experience with the G63 variants is that it is certainly tough to fit car seats in them. They are not, they're not very long.

You could get one.

Not very long.

Yeah, you could get one of those off road beasts, one of the, you know, Van Life, something really decked out. Just. Yeah, just fit a ton of family members in there. You could, you could have seven kids in the back.

Van Life. Van Life is certainly, certainly tough. I mean, at this point, I think if you're going for something that is trying to spend $3 million on a family friendly car is not, it's certainly not easy. There's not a lot of four seaters. But I'm gonna have to go with. I'm gonna have to go with a Conesig Gamera on this one.

That's a great one.

Phenomenal car.

Yep.

I mean, this thing is an absolute dog of a car. I don't think you're gonna find something faster or more expensive.

Yeah.

With four seats.

Yep.

So to really optimize around that price target, I don't want to come back to him with something that's under, under seven figures just because he clearly is trying to. He wants to lock into a more stable asset. You know, the markets fluctuate every single day with cars, even if they're depreciating, they're usually pretty fixed rate. Right. You might be losing 5, 6, 7% a year, but you're not going to lose 100% in a year. Like if you're trading options, wild card.

Pick would be get two SUVs. The Purosangue, the latest Ferrari SUV. Not gonna blow your whole budget on that. So then also pick up a mint in fresh condition Lamborghini. Not the Urus though. You get the LM002.

The Rambo. The Rambo Lambo I actually got.

They're both gonna be in the shop 50% of the time.

Yeah.

But the Purosangue is modern technology. So if you're not feeling to fire up the Rambo Lambo, you get in the Purosangue. But if you're feeling adventurous, you fire up the Rambo Lambo.

The Rambo Lambo is. I'm surprised.

Mass. Underrated.

Super underrated. It's. It's a beautiful silhouette. And driving a Lamborghini SUV just feels so right.

And you can just tell people, oh, yeah, I just have a Lambo suv. And people will just assume it's nervous. Oh, okay.

Yeah, whatever.

But, yeah, then when they see it, they know.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a really. If, you know, you know. Car.

Exactly.

Funny thing about the pursangue.

Pure blood.

The. The pure blood, those things are getting into, like, the seven hundreds. If you want to pick it up.

Right now, you can also get a Mansory kit on it. If you want to pump it up.

A little bit, pump those numbers, get.

It lowered a little bit for the kids.

Yeah. Arrow kit on it. Yeah. People don't think about lowering their family SUV's enough. You can get. You can get, like, you've seen those Honda Odyssey lowered, which is. You don't realize this until you have kids, but once you have kids and you got one or multiple car seats, like, you want a car that's actually low to the ground. That's where some of these SUVs kind of suck. And so having something that's lowered, it's like, you know, having the kids sort of a chest level is really ideal.

So, I mean, you know, an LMO2, you're not even gonna be pushing a million dollars with that, so even a mint one. So, you know, you could take the purosangue, take it to west coast customs, get the sliding minivan doors put on.

There we go.

And then also add hydraulics, like, it's a low. Low. So you can boost it up, but then you can also lower all the way to the ground. Get the kids easily.

That's.

I think we solved it.

I think we solved it.

Good luck out there. We're on to the next.

And congrats on the liquidity event.

Hey, John and Jordy. I recently got a promotion at work. I'm a PM at Meta, and I'm looking to get a new car and watch to commemorate the moment. I previously made about 100k a month, and now I'm clearing 150k a month, including bonus. I currently drive a kith BMW M4 comp and wear a day date. Can you give me some ideas for potential upgrades? I love questions like this. This. It's important.

I love questions like this. And I. And congratulations on the promotion.

Congrats.

I'm surprised we didn't pick it up.

In some personnel news.

Personnel news already. Anyways, you know the kith M4 comp is. Is a beautiful looking car. I'm not, I'm not a BMW guy myself but I, but I can appreciate, I can appreciate that car. At this point you're making, pulling in 150k a month. Where. Where would you go with this?

Dorado. Great option.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean especially, you know, if you want to be able to. If you're in the Bay Area, you want to be able to take it skiing, snowboarding, whatever.

Exactly.

Is a great option.

296 if you're not going off road.

Yeah. 296 it's kind of underrated but it's a fun.

It's beautiful car. It's a beautiful car.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then I just, I feel like the trap that I always find, you know, myself getting in and friends getting in is wanting a car to do too much. And so the right answer here is actually probably like get a daily, you know, something. Something, you know, maybe like a Ferrari Roma something that's a little bit more under the radar. It's not going to blow anyone away at a car meet or anything like that. And then get a, get a, get a weekender like.

Yeah.

You know, more of a collectible car. A countach something. Carrera GT something. Yeah, Carrera GT something that, that you're going to be proud pulling up the car on the weekend and you know, it can still be a little subtle. You know, it doesn't. You don't have to go for a huracan SEO or anything like that. But, but anyways, don't try to get a car to do too much at once. It's a trap. Try to do that with.

What about watches? What are you thinking?

Oh, I think it's, it's obviously Holy Trinity time.

Yep.

Holy Trinity. And I don't, I don't know that you can. You know he's working at. He said Meta.

Yeah, he's a pm. So. So Patek ap Vacheron, like which speaks to the role of the PM at Meta.

Best look I think Meta is a, is a culture that's not super flashy. So.

And yet the boss is rocking an FP Journe regularly hit her collection.

So if you want to, if you want to stand out, if you care more about standing out to Zuck than your, than your direct peers, I would go for you know like overseas complications. Something like that. Like something that's a true hitter. Some of their ultra thin models are fantastic. Something like that. That's going to be low profile. You're not going to get questions about.

Like you're trying, but Zuck will notice.

Zuck will notice. It's going to blend in in the lunch line and you're not going to be sort of bashed in slack or teams or whatever they use.

I mean, you could also go the other direction and just try and take it to the max. Richard Mill.

That's true.

Just be the only one in the office.

Yeah, yeah.

So in your face.

Yeah. And it's funny because it looks kind of like a cartoon watch.

Exactly.

And so again, it's like one of those. They're not usually like an if, you know, you know, watch. It's a racing machine on the wrist. But at the same time, you know, you're. You're going to get the right attention wearing. Wearing an rm.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, the other, the other option is just pick up a Cubitus Patek. It's a controversial pick, but Zuck has one and so I think he's thinking about the cubitus in kind of a contrarian way. Yeah, it's like it's this Patek that everyone's hating on in the community, but maybe there's something there.

But it's still a Patek.

It's still a Patek. And I will fight you on the cubitus. I think it's underrated. Let's go to Erroneous input. Just a fantastic meme produced on our behalf just as certified banger. And it has Jordy raising the roof somehow, which I don't know how he got this image. He must have scrubbed through 10 hours of content to get that perfect shot.

I mean, we have a lot of content to pull. It's a great screenshot. He also, he also made one of you to the certified platinum.

I think it's me pointing or something.

Yeah. Yeah, it's great.

Well, thank you. Erroneous input. I mean, on a roll, potential future reply guy of the month here.

Totally.

I mean, it's quality over quantity in this case, but I see a bright future ahead, so. Well, thank you. And then we got one more from Sisak. Says tech Bros. Pod needs to slow down. I can't possibly keep up with this much content.

And I. Unfortunately, we're speeding up.

Yeah, we're speeding up.

We might get up.

We might go to five days. You might be getting 15 hours a week. We've done 10 hours a week. We're going to push it even farther. It's go.

Yeah, we've heard it. We've heard from a few listeners they, they put us on, you know, when they're hitting the gym at 4:30 and they're, they end up being frustrated because by 7:30am they're, they're out of content. And so we kind of need to lean into some of our, our, our bigger, you know, fans and really deliver what they want. Not, not try to provide always for sort of the median.

Yeah, Exactly. Listen on 2x, listen on 3x, listen.

On 4 or 5 acts.

Just get it in your brain. The don't skip any minutes.

You know that like it really got when, when Mark went on jre.

Yeah.

It really got memed of people being.

Like, oh, gotta listen on Godifax.

Does he really talk that fast? Yeah, he talks quite quickly.

Okay. I didn't really notice that before, but I love to see it.

Yeah. Because, because. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2x for you is just like 1x for that for immortal.

Let's go to the timeline. Will Menitis. Happy birthday to Will. He's been on the show before, says Amtrak on Thanksgiving. Entire aisle is blocked by a VC's bag. Dozens piled up. He's standing there yelling into a cell phone about some deal getting marked down. Someone offers to help with his bag. He snaps, can't you see I'm on a call? And Will says, we are so back. You love it. You like to see an aggressive capital allocator.

No, I want to bring. For some reason in tech, yelling has been a big no no for the last 10 years. And I think we need to bring it back. Yelling is a great way to get your point across. If used highly strategically. You cannot yell all the time. You cannot yell on every call. You cannot yell once a week. You probably shouldn't yell once a month, but once a quarter. Keep that as a tool in your toolkit and really let loose. There's a way to do it respectfully, right? Sure, you can yell respectfully.

Yeah. I mean this is serious alpha for the listeners. But one of the first lawyers I Silicon Valley was like, look like, yeah, some VCs love to yell. Uh, here's a tip. When you're getting yelled at on the phone, just turn down the volume and put the phone farther away. And I was like wound up doing it. And it was phenomenal because it just takes the edge off so much. Because if you're up in the desert.

Yeah. Cuz if you're, if you're on a call, you control, you control the amount.

Of yelling and then all of a sudden it just sounds like someone's yelling.

You can be like Sorry, I can't hear you.

Can't really hear you.

Yeah, you gotta flip it on him.

Let's go to Zach. He says most of the. Many of the most successful writers and entrepreneurs I know built their entire empire on Apple Notes. I love it. Anti Second brain guy.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think.

I mean the simplest thing, it's just, it's a canvas and Apple Notes has like so many features. You can draw, you can do bullet points, like everything, everything you need to do. You can share stuff, you can create shared things. I mean, Google Docs is the same thing.

Yeah.

Once you get more structured, it's like you're spending more time organizing than you are actually thinking.

My, my thing. I don't know if you do this, I just text myself like stream of consciousness. That's the only like note taking app I really use. Like, I just, my wife's always just like, like you text yourself more than anyone. Like, you talk to yourself more than anyone. And I'm just like constantly just like typing away. But it's great because I just have this like timeline, infinite timeline of the stuff I'm thinking about and what I need to get done.

Yeah, it's great. Use Apple Notes. Make sure you're leaving mental, mental notes everywhere. Lucy Guo says I don't have an addictive personality outside of working out. So of course when the opportunity presents itself, I do three berries in a row. Thankful to the universe for giving me so much energy. Fantastic.

I think she has an addictive personality to creating shareholder value.

Yeah.

Decacorn.

Yep.

Probably potentially a future deck of corn.

Financials are fantastic. Animal, animal, Absolute animal.

Absolute dog.

And, and I think, I think she's been profiled in the, in the information and there's a little bit of a thing where people kind of clock her as like not having the default tech personality because she's like talking about working out and working with the these like content creators and she's like almost like cool in a way that's unheard of in tech. Like, she's cool with like she was.

Early to loud opulence. Right. She. She was driving Ferrari.

Yes.

I think aroma y. Yes. She'll correct us, I'm sure in the comments if we're wrong, but I think she was driving a roma in like 2020 F40.

No, no, no, no. Fantastic. And, and, but, but I think the real takeaway here is that like, I think that there is a world where Lucy designs her personal brand are all around scale AI and being this like very serious business processing BPO and, and doing B2B SAS essentially, which is like that business. But she knows the, of the business that she's building now needs to speak to the type of content creator that talks about.

Well, in many ways now she's now much more well known for being Lucy than being one of the co founders of scale.

Exactly.

Which is.

And so, and so there's a lot of, there's a lot of founders that are in tech and they, they fear being seen as some like a member of the industry that they're actually part of. And so if you're part of the influencer economy or like the creator creator economy, like, like you need to feel authentic in that. If you're just there talking about like what software and you're using or whatever, like that's not going to appeal.

Yeah.

And so I know what I, what I love. Massively underrated.

What I love is I, I feel like there's an entire cottage industry of, of Lucy like haters. People that don't want her to win and she's just a winner. Like she just keeps winning every single year. I gotta go. Really, I'm very short Lucy haters because you know they've taken somebody else huge losses. I mean, honestly, prop props to her for just, just. I think she gets, she's like, oh, you think I'm annoying? I'm gonna go do three berries and add like a million dollars of GMV today to my platform.

She always talks about how like she like maxes out the woodway at Barry's. Like she broke the machine. It can't go any faster.

It's broken.

It's fantastic. Critter says, I can't wait until we have slurs for moon people. And Dirtman, a good friend of the show, says the 51st state and is talking about building on the moon. Very funny. Did you read Moon Should Be Astrologers?

I mean, pirate wires.

Fantastic essay. And I ordered my newest Moon should be a state shirt. Highly recommend you go pick them up.

Pirate wires might be sold out. Might be sold out by now.

Probably there's only 500. They're rare.

Rare.

They're drops.

But if you see somebody out in one of those. But yeah, it's funny. Every. Everything can be a slur. Tech bro is a slur. That's why we're the technology brothers. Canadian is a slur in some circles.

Yeah, Jeremy's got to work on that. Yeah, yeah, he's gonna make it cool again.

But yeah, Jeremy and Sam, do your best to make Canadian cool again.

I actually had like a crazy, almost like emotional moment with the moon. I was putting on the moon should be a state shirt. And my son's like obsessed with the American flag. Anywhere he sees an American flag, American flag, American flag, he just gets pumped up, he sees the American flag on the back and I'm like, oh yeah, this is like a moon should be a state shirt. And, and he was like, what's that? And I was trying to explain it to this three year old and I was like, well, I have some friends. You know the moon, right? And he's like, yeah, I love the moon. He's like, well, like I have some friends that are trying to make it so we could just go visit it whenever we want.

And he was like, won't even need a passport.

And yeah, yeah. And he was like, that's amazing. And then he was like, I will need a rocket. And I was like, well, it's funny you say that because I have some, I also have some friends that are working on that. It's like FF is like moon and SpaceX and like, I mean the create the lesson lesson.

The lesson that your, your son is going to grow up with is that. My dad's got a guy for everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dad's got a moon guy, my dad's got a rocket guy.

Yeah, basically. Basically. But it's like, I mean it's not like the SpaceX people are like my guys. It's more just like, like I'm clearly aligned with them. Like this is the vision.

Spiritually, spiritually, loosely working towards. Yeah.

And he was just like, that's amazing. Like that's exactly what we should be doing, dad. Like, I couldn't agree more with your plan.

The kids are based is.

It was so good. Every time he sees a cybertruck he's like, I need that, I need that. I asked him what color, he was like, red. I was like, my hands are tied here.

I have to drive a red cybertruck school drop offline. It's going to be crazy.

Let's go to signal. Signal writes LMAO. If you're an employee of a startup started by 4x VPs of Google and alike who are already insanely wealthy, why would you work hard for them? What skin do they have in the game? Literally nothing. Perhaps they are all great people, but it strikes me as an awful way of creating mission and a culture that someone gets super inspired by. Well, maybe they just want to go bigger, you know, maybe they're, maybe they're deca. Deca Billionaires deca millionaires and they want to become Sentis or Benares.

It's such a, it's. It's so one signal has been dropping some absolute bangers every, every time I see their, their name.

How wealthy was was Elon when he started?

Yeah, so this is, I mean you could argue that Elon invests. He, he claims he invested every dollar he had into everything.

Sam was super wealthy and he.

No, but that's what I'm saying. It's very person to person. I'll meet founders that are sort of post economic and they're trying to do their new thing and you can just tell they don't have that dog in them. And then you meet.

Yeah, I think the most important thing there is not necessarily the money, but the VP at Google because the VP at Google is not necessarily a super entrepreneurial person by default if they weren't there early. So if they joined a 10,000 person org, that's a lot different than founding a company, exiting, having some money and then being like, I gotta take.

Yeah, just because speed is so important. I feel like Google's been in this position where they can plan things across decades and multiple years and if you apply that style of leadership to a startup like you probably will never get off the ground.

Yep. Let's go to Isaiah Taylor, founder of let's go to Isaiah Taylor. He says if you're a VC reading this and want to make a large bag and b save American manufacturing, stop what you're doing and invest in atomic industries, Range View and Hadrian. Then ask Aaron, Cam and Chris who else you should write checks to. We win this through innovation. I love this. Shouting out the boys, the absolute boys. It's great. We are losing and it's a quote tweet of Zane saying we are losing SMB manufacturing shops, kind of identifying the problem. But Isaiah just writing the playbook for the VCs. It's good. He's doing their homework for them.

Yeah, I mean this is how a lot of VCs actually invest is they invest in one good founder and they say who else should I invest in? And then they go try to invest in those people. And it's a pretty good strategy. Yeah. That's how I've approached angel investing where sometimes I'm sort of evaluating a company early on and I'm like, well I don't think this person is as good as this team. But even if they're in the same orbit at all, it means they're like probably pretty good compared to the Average person that's attacking that space.

Yeah. It just speaks to the beauty of the Gundo. Like they've kind of bootstrapped their own, like, YCS community where they're syndicating deals together, sending employees around. Like there are now employees that fly in from like the east coast and just tour all the companies and just wind up at one, which is just really cool. And it was fun making like that little video about.

And there's like the bonfires and stuff, which I think they still do.

Yeah. And it's important when they're small because they can kind of share resources and syndicate stuff. It's great.

Yeah.

Let's go to Lisa Sue, CEO of AMD and Jensen Zwong's cousin. I believe she says, wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving. I'm very thankful to our amazing AMD extended family, friends and fans. And I wanted to call this out because. Wrist check. She's wearing a beautiful Rolex Oyster Perpetual.

Let's go, Lisa. Happy Thanksgiving to you, true technology brother from the technology brothers.

Yes. And it's important because this is in with Jensen. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, famously doesn't wear a watch. And. But his cousin does. And so clearly, clearly Christmas comes along, maybe she gets him something, he wears it and the world has changed.

It's up to you, Lisa. The power is in your hands.

I'm very optimistic about it. Sam McAllister says poetry camera in action last night at Tate powered by Claude. This is so cool. I was so stoked by this. So it's a camera that you take a picture of and then that picture is sent to Claude and then it writes a poem based on what it sees in the image. Gadgets. I love gadgets.

Yeah. This reminds me of that app that we heard about being built at a hackathon where you would just speak a sentence into a microphone and then it would generate this 30 second visual of whatever you said. So it was almost like you were hallucinating basically. But all of these things were. You take some organic input like a picture or voice and then it just generates something absurd. It's just such a fun form factor.

It has a receipt printer in there. Probably very unhealthy.

We gotta get the do not touch the receipt.

But just an amazing gadget. And I really hope this is for sale on Instagram and just blows up during the holiday season. Yeah, that's my fear, is that this was like a hackathon project and it doesn't actually get productized.

Gotta get commercial.

We need more kind of like bootstrap founders making little like AI.

Yeah. If you make a little gadget like this, you can sell a hundred thousand of them. And like.

Yeah, you know, and, and, and it's, it's, it's fascinating because the, the person that designed this is clearly not thinking like, okay, I need to disrupt the iPhone. And so. Because the, the whole problem with like, the humane stuff was like, they, they, they, they, they understood Apple's moat and they were going after Apple as X, by the way.

Yeah, this is not good. But I have not seen a single thing like what's going on over there.

Yeah, well, I mean, part of it was that when you got the pin, you had to set up a new phone number because they didn't want it tied to your phone at all. They wanted to keep it completely off of it. Because obviously if you integrate it all.

Avi's gonna end up buying humane.

Yeah, maybe, but this is something where it's, it's just like a fun little gadget and maybe they could build more gadgets off of it. Maybe it does turn into a generational company. Like, I'm obviously rooting for them, but I just love that it's something unique and something that leverages like, what's like the tech that's available. You couldn't build this years ago. And like, people would love to buy this.

It's great.

Let's go to Sarah Hess. She says me at Thanksgiving telling my family that defense tech investment is about to explode and America will bring a new era of global peace that will last for thousands of years. And it's a picture of. What's that movie? Basic Instinct.

Yeah.

Yeah, Great.

Sarah's Sarah understands aesthetics, great aesthetic.

And it's, it's good because we did a Thanksgiving post and you know, it was like, it was like me at Thanksgiving waiting to tell my family that I was featured on some, you know, tech niche tech podcast. But great way to kind of like reframe it towards what you do, like defense investing.

Sarah at Hereticon Founders get kept kind of pitching her these sort of like half baked defense ideas. And she would be like, so who's your customer gonna be for that? And they would like kind of stumble over it. And they're, she's like, well, so how's that gonna work? And then they'd like stumble over it. She was just mogging. Every single time. Every single time I heard somebody try to pitch her, it was just like very, it was like very simple questions, but just completely mog them. So if you have an idea in defense tech and you want to stress test it, go talk to Sarah. She will either validate what you're doing or mog you in a gentle, kind way.

It's great. This one's controversial. Paula writes, I'm never leaving this app. And it's a screenshot of some drama between True Ventures that hired Helen Min and Charlie Cheever, who's calling her out because he claims that she and her husband were blackmailing her. Him. But then Sunil PI chimes in and says, conveniently left out that you were previously in a relationship with Helen. And I think all of these were deleted. But five, not before 5,000 people like this post.

I don't even think we should. We should probably cut this out. Yeah, it's not really worth talking about relationship drama among. Among VCs that. We can leave that to the information.

Yeah, I think, you know, politics are on the table now. The all in podcast has made politics completely acceptable for VCs to talk about. But the personal life is tough.

Yeah, let's leave.

You gotta keep that. You gotta keep that on Blue sky, please, guy. Exactly. Ken says, people keep saying we're so back, but it's quite obvious we're at a place we've never been in the history of the country. I love it's a quote from Unusual Whale saying, billionaires Bill Ackman, Mark Andreessen and Travis Kalanick are reportedly getting involved in Doge. You know, I read this and I was wondering, like, is this really that new? I feel like the robber barons and the oil billionaires and the railroad barons, these guys were deeply involved in politics. Politics.

It's lindy to exert your will by leveraging the government.

Yeah. But also just. I don't know. I like the. The story. You know, how Henry Flagler started Miami now. Like, he was Rockefeller's business partner on Standard Oil, made a ton of money. His wife got sick. The doctor said, you got to go to somewhere warm, a warmer climate to keep her healthy. And so he was like, I'm just going to start building railroads South. Kept building until he hit Florida. Starts this starts the city of Miami. They wanted to call it Flagler because he was like developing everything. He was like, no, no, no, that's too. Too much.

We'll call it Miami.

Yeah. And then. And then he kept building and he wind up building like the causeway that's now like, really iconic in a bunch of movies.

The one that connects.

Yeah. All the key.

Miami Beach.

Yeah. No, no, no, no. Not those. You guys. You Go further south. Yeah. And so he was just like this maniacal builder. And, and when I go back and think about like the power broker Robert Moses, like he was deeply involved in the government Dr. Through like kind of interesting ways.

Yeah.

This doesn't feel, this doesn't feel entirely new to me. But. But no, but it's.

No, it's new for us because it's the first time the tech elite have become deeply immersed.

But at the same time like the railroads were the technology of the day. Oil drilling was the technology of the day. Gold mining was the people that made.

Their money in software.

Yeah, exactly. It's not like you, you go back and you're like, oh, like they didn't have technology. They did. It was just called like the first industrial revolution is like the steam, steam technology. Like and it's certainly not the first.

Time capital allocators have become involved in government. You have Nancy Pelosi, absolute size lord, who's been running it in D.C. for a while.

Yeah. This is great. Elon says, I was telling Sylvester Stallone that I watched Demolition man again and how well it predicted the crazy woke future 30 years ago. Fascinating movie. Have you seen Demolition Man?

No.

It is a fantastic movie. Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes both get their, their like a super grizzled cop and a criminal who get frozen in cryo sleep and then they get thawed out like 30 years later and it's like 20, 25 or something. And the technology predictions are insane.

No way.

Self driving cars are exactly like they are where it's like, like it's not full self driving. Like there's still steering wheels but when you put it in self driving mode, the steering wheel kind of compacts which isn't exactly what happens, but it's like pretty close that it's like level three, level four. Yeah, it's kind of getting smaller. They have this crazy VR stuff where Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock have this like intense romantic experience in VR. Like very reminiscent of what's going on. There's a whole bunch of other, a lot of like fear mongering around different dietary restrictions. They go to Taco Bell and it's like a five star restaurant that's like Michelin starred. And he's like, can I get some salt? And they're like salt was banned. Can I get some? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Can I get some ketchup? And they're like no sugar's also been banned and stuff. It's very funny. And they have all these like, like anytime he Cusses. There's just a, there's just an AI that's listening and finds him. It's funny that they find $100 for saying a bad word and he has to rip off the receipt. It's very funny. It's a great movie.

It's funny the things that they get wrong are diet related because diet cycles so hard. Yeah. Salt and sugar were very bad for two decades and now everybody's like, oh, actually you should have supplement salt and like, sugar is actually good in certain cases or whatever.

Yeah. But fantastic movie. Highly recommend you watch demolition man levels IO says 30 year loyalty to one brand and it's Marc Andreessen wearing Ralph Lauren 30 years ago and then just a few days ago on the Joe Rogan Experience. And I love that. Pick a brand, grow with it, make.

It your whole personality.

Make it your whole personality. It's great. He's done the same thing with watches. You know, we've seen, we posted that. You know, a lot of people were asking us about what watch he was wearing on the, on Joe Rogan. It was Omega.

Yep. Seamaster 300.

Yeah. The James Bond watch.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But not a fit for an allocator of his size.

We, we recommended a Graph Diamonds hallucination or eight of them, really. But it's one of my favorite watches now. I get a kick out of it every time I look at it. I, I watched an interview with the founder of Graph Diamonds. It's fantastic. But, but this is great. Like, he's just one of those things.

A lot of people in tech have struggled with personal style because it does take a lot of mental overhead to develop and curate it and make sure your outfits are working and all that stuff. Unless you just put on a suit. But one of the ways to kind of speedrun it is just to find a brand you really like and that's, that's stylistically consistent like Ralph Lauren is, and then just only buy from that brand and everything's going to work together pretty well. Don't have to think about it as much. And it's much cooler than being like, well, I'm just going to wear jeans and a white T shirt every day.

Exactly. Yeah. Let's go to Anna Mostorak. She says Australia has officially become the first country in the world to ban social media use for individuals under the age of 16. The legislation was passed quickly and without any real opposition on the final day of the parliamentary year. The law will be enforced through digital identification and other unspecified age verification technologies.

So this is, this Is. This is wild. I saw a really funny post from somebody who is like, this is what all the Australian kids. All the Australian kids are gonna be on LinkedIn now. Like, I just loaded. I just cleared another two figure day at my lemonade stand.

Like, is LinkedIn not banned?

I guess maybe LinkedIn. Maybe LinkedIn.

Social media.

Yeah, but it's funny how they're. You can't. You can't stop the Internet. Right. So if, if, if what? What's exciting to me about this is it will just create a bunch of other emergent apps that get created with. With hacks of like. No, this isn't a social media app, it's an art app.

Yeah.

And you can draw and then people are like texting and like drawing.

It's like. It's like that Gen Z founder who does his meetings in cops.

Yeah, exactly.

He's turned COD into Zoom.

Yeah.

And so someone will turn Fortnite into social media.

Yeah, yeah.

Or Roblox, which is already.

Yeah, it already is. Yeah. It's just. It's so funny because I probably talked about this on the podcast before, but I studied abroad in, In China.

Yeah, we get it, bro.

Yeah. Never been back since. Never will go back again unless. Unless G drags me there himself for dissenting on this podcast. But. So all Western social media and major technology platforms are banned in China, but every single person still uses them. Right. They all use Instagram. Like, they all use YouTube. You just get a VPN and there's always going to be a workaround. So trying to ban software products, even networks, is just never going to work. So good luck, Australia. I would like to. They're really making. I have quite a few friends in Australia from surf trips over the years and. And I think they would all be stoked if we made them a state. So put it on that. Put it on the pipeline.

Yeah, the five eyes. Just make it five new territories. Let's stay in the east and go to Russia. Right wing Cope says the Russian ruble is officially worth less than a fortnight v. Buck Mog.

Oh my God.

Really rough year for Russia. I mean, it's interesting, it doesn't correlate perfectly with the. The war, but you imagine that some sort of sanction caught up now, now they're devalued?

No, I think. I would imagine that it's more people predicting that the war is going to end. We don't talk about geopolitics, politics or social issues on this podcast, but Russia's entire economy is predicated on the war right now. And so if the war stops, the value like their economy is just going to go. That's like why Putin doesn't have an incentive to actually end the war is because it's a war based economy.

Should we be long v bucks war in the digital world?

Yeah. Yeah. Go long v bucks, short the ruble.

That's great. Howard Cushlin shares a photo of a Lamborghini Urus and says we park our Lambos in the front yard here in Palo Alto. Also, inconspicuous color choice, and I believe it was green. Beautiful car. Fantastic. You know, people call it an RSQ8 ripoff. It's a, you know, just an Audi with nicer clothes on. But we love the Urus here. We've promoted them in the past and we're happy to see someone.

Yeah, we won't. San Francisco. San Francisco won't truly be back until every other car is a supercar.

Yes.

And so that is the only metric.

That the Urus is entryway into the.

Yeah, it's arguably not a supercar, but it's in a supercar price range.

But whoever owns this is getting a call for the next batch of Lambos when they drop, right?

Yep.

And, and, and it's interesting because driving an Urus in Miami is very different than driving an Urus in Palo Alto.

Totally. You're not making a statement in Miami. Oh, here's another course, bro.

That rents car. Exactly. Crypto person. NFT guy.

Yeah.

In Palo Alto. You know that this person is standing out.

Totally.

And afraid to get, you know, laughed at.

Speaking of standing out, we have a promoted post from Ralph Lauren. Ralph Lauren is a. Is. Is a fantastic way to stand out. Yeah. So, favorite brand. One of our favorite capital allocators, Marc Andreessen, has been wearing Ralph Lauren for over three decades. And Ralph Lauren says today, a night of giving back at our Milan Viadella Spiga flagship store. Visitors to Ralph Lauren's flagship will have the opportunity to make a donation to an Italian foundation called the AIRC and dedicate a personalized star ornament that will be featured on Ralph Lauren's giving tree, rlholiday. So anyways, this store looks fantastic. Any technology brothers out there? Hopefully you can go get a chance to visit. What a celebration of the season. And thank you to RL for keeping capital allocators looking sharp for three decades in a row. And no signs of slowing down there.

I have to interrupt the show for a real quick announcement. I have a fraud account that's impersonating me on X goes by Jess Coogan. If you are contacted by this account, please report and block. It's very annoying. This. This impersonator is messaging basically everyone with the cringiest copy ever. And I'll read it. I'm Coogan from Founders Fund. Our firm specializes in investing in and adv groundbreaking initiatives, facilitating strategic connections with key opinion leaders kols to fuel growth. Our current portfolio includes Polymarket, OpenAI, Gecko Robotics, and Emerald Cloud Lab, all seeking collaborative opportunities with influential experts. We believe your expertise would be a valuable asset. So if you get this dm, please troll them as best as you can. Send them something funny.

Honestly, screenshot it.

Send it to me.

Here's a challenge. No, here's a challenge. Challenge for all the listeners. Get the scammer to invest in your venture fund.

Yes.

Get them to invest in your rolling fund. That is a challenge.

Scam them.

Scam them. No, don't scan them. Try to drive some returns they see.

Turn them, turn their life Turn them turn Turn their life around. Probably down their luck that's why they've turned to life of crime.

Yep.

Make them some money.

Make them some money.

They got 10 bucks. If you can get 10 bucks out of them, turn it into a thousand.

There you go.

100X.

There you go. Good challenge.

Faraz been on the show before from Giant Step says don't just buy someone else's used jet or yacht or supercar. Commission your own build. Have to agree with this one. I don't want someone else's old boat. Hard agree. Quoting Tristan Tate. Let's go.

Yeah, so love to see Faraz, you know, quoting quote, quote, tweeting. In many ways, he's an MG1 owner. He doesn't want to drive, you know, he doesn't want to. To live in your old boat or fly your old plane. Talk about fantastic capital allocator multiple. We had a post recently. He replied with a list of all his biggest liquidity events. Quite the track record. He even put a picture of a bunch of cash, which presumably was from one of those deals. So anyways, this is the right attitude. Commission your own boat. Talk to your Gulfstream rep up, get your. Get something bespoke made. You won't regret it.

Fantastic. Nathan's been on the show before, he says 12 hours and counting. Oh, we actually already covered this one. The GDP to grow here. We can skip this Very, very silly. Let's move on to something else. Let's move through. Oh, this is an interesting conspiracy theory. Bone GPT says Greg Brockman's SABBATICAL lines up with how long it takes to get get a top secret clearance. Similar timing as the Nakasone hire and several defections. Been a hell of a year for OpenAI. Sam's been asking for regulatory capture. These are the moves to engineer it and I think this is it. Got a thousand likes. Everyone likes this theory, but it's very silly because like, people don't take sabbaticals to get top secret clearances. Like Elon is building rockets that go all over. I need to take the.

Take that off. Take that off.

I don't buy it. Take it off. It's like we would be hearing about, oh yeah, this defense tech founder got a program of record and then the founder had to take six months off. Like you've never heard that before. What is this six?

Not a thing.

It's like, it's like maybe it takes six months and how much of a black pill would it be on our, on our, on our intelligence agency?

And if you had to stop intelligence.

Community, it was like, oh yeah, anytime someone needs to get security clearance, they have to take six months off for their job. Like that would be so stupid.

All I will say is bone. Keep posting, but add one of these to your profile picture please, because as long as you're ripping these.

Nice try, but I don't add some.

Add some tinfoil.

It's not that he couldn't get top secret clearance. I think a lot of tech people should have clearance. Like, I'm all in favor of that, but this is very silly to to assume that it lines up and play some like date. It's a numerology in this case, and I'm not buying it. Will Yee over at Ramp says the truth is that Claude's branding is horrendously mogged by Chat GPT's branding. Claude as a name is an obvious and failed attempt at making AI sound human. Like it is virtue signaling friendliness and approachability. The serif font, brown low contrast color scheme. The scribble logo, fake and dishonest and everyone subconsciously knows it by. In contrast, ChatGPT is no nonsense. It's clearly a tool and OpenAI leans into it. Black and white, simple sans serif font. Everyone is using ChatGPT Cloud to cheat on their homework or generate some SQL. No one is here to chill or vibe and whatever. If I need to drill a hole, I'm reaching for a drill called Dewalt 20 volt max cordless. I'm not reaching for a drill named named Charles that looks like a Mid century modern living room.

I don't even think we need to respond to that. The only thing is, yeah, he didn't say this directly, but Claude is a French name.

Yep.

And being French is inherently un American.

Yeah.

So chat GPT though sounds very. It's very SF code. It.

Yeah.

Which is, which is bullish.

Yeah. I mean it's.

We like both. We like both.

Great, great product goes. Goes back and forth. Sometimes they're winning sometimes.

Yeah. But a lot of their, A lot of their out of home camp. Claude's out of home campaigns, like they've clearly been trying to spend a lot of money to break through into.

Yeah, yeah, detect Twitter because like the developers respect them for sure.

Totally like technically get it. Arguably, I think a lot of people are using it more than open.

The average person is not eval driving driven. They're not like, oh, this one scored two points higher on mmlu.

Claude's strategy has been, hey, let's buy like these huge, you know, billboards and all these things. And a lot of their ads have just been falling very, very flat for me.

Yep, yep, yep. It's not, it's just not breaking through. I don't know. We'll solve it on the next podcast. Let's go to arib. He says selling a course is the male version of only 3 fans. 11k likes.

It's funny, I. Somebody else posted today, what is the male equivalent of Only Fans? Is it an investment newsletter?

Yeah.

And. And that's like pretty accurate as well. But I don't know. I think we need to go and get the data. I bet you there's a lot of male. I bet a lot of the people on Only Fans are men.

Yeah, right.

It's not a gendered platform.

Even though the real question is what is our course going to be? Be.

Yeah, yeah. Selling secondary.

Selling secondary. Yeah, that's right. And. And style guides. A watch buyer's guide. Do we have a promoted post?

Promoted post from our friends at Dupont Registry. Today we have a beautifully specked Ford GT Carbon Series presented in night Ms. Blue. They even added a little devil emoji. Very cool. Very Internet native of dupont Registry to. To add that. But anyways, if you want want a true American supercar, the Ford GT is the obvious car to get. I think this is in your personal pipeline at some point next year. And honestly like this, this to me is, this is by far, this is the only American supercar that I truly cannot wait to own.

Sure, sure.

And this is a fantastic example. We should probably dial into TJ Parker at some point and get his opinion on the, on the Ford gt.

But yeah, yeah, we need to narrow him down. He's too much into these Porsches. We got to get him okay. For the American Dynamist investor. Yeah, yeah, you got to narrow it down. Tj. He's gonna squirm.

He's gonna squirm. There's nothing he absolutely dunked on. He dunked on Miatas.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's nothing like a 1940s Porsche that goes two miles an hour.

No resto mods.

No resto mods.

TJ, we kind of need to issue a correction.

We highlighted the Amy Leon door collab. He said it was mid. He gave us a 0 out of 10.

0 out of 10. No points on the scoreboard.

But yeah, stick to the classics. I, I, he made some great recommendations in that thread. You can go look him up and pick something up. Let's go to Emily is in sf. She says we need to make space for exited founders to call out the VCs who wronged them. There are so many repeat offenders that new founders don't know about. But once founders get liquid, they act like it's water under the bridge and the cycle continues. Well, it is water under the bridge. If you're rich, who cares if somebody wronged you, if you came out on.

Top, if you can mog them and.

You know, it's a, it's an iterative game. It's a repeat game. You know, the, the, the VC who, who screwed you over, if you did have a great liquidity event, probably got fired. And that firm is probably still chugging along with a new partner there in the turnover.

A lot of turnover recently.

Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know, do we need, do we need exited founders to call out VCs more?

I think back channels do the work. In many ways they do. I don't think it's, there's so much nuance in, like, different situations and stuff like that. Like, yeah, I don't think it's worth. It always reflects poorly on the person saying it to go out and publicly for sure. And the only example of this is, like, is Palmer, you know, repeatedly ratioing Jason.

Not an investor, though.

Not, not an investor. But again, it's like, it doesn't reflect, to me, it doesn't reflect poorly on Palmer when he does that because Jason's like, continues to instigate it.

Yeah.

But yeah, I just never starts it. I just think this is why, like, founders just, just do go to go to a VC's portfolio page. Message all. If you're. If you're exploring signing a term sheet with somebody, and it didn't come from a quality necessarily, like a quality intro. Do 5, 6, 7, 10. Follow the Graham Duncan method. Take 10 messages, reference calls for you. And the main. The main thing is only do this if you actually are really exploring a partnership. Because I've had this weird thing where probably like, 10 times founders have reached out to me and been like, hey, what do you think about this fund?

Oh, yeah.

And I'm like, meanwhile, but. But. And they want an intro to the fun. And I'm like, what are you doing, dude? Like, I'm not. Like, go have a conversation with them. And if you're gonna explore.

Sure.

Like, don't use that as a way to start a conversation so that I intro you. Yeah, Like, I'll intro you if it makes sense. But don't try.

Also reference check.

Don't try to reference check a VC before you're an active conversation.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. I was more reflecting on the fact that, like, the, like, the. The distribution of personalities within every fund is, like, crazed. So reference checking an entire fund is, like, impossible.

Totally.

And, yeah, I mean, the other things that I just think, like, like the water under the bridge thing, like, a lot of these, if you had a bad experience, it can just become a formative experience that you learned from, like, oh, you got yelled at, but you learned how to turn down the volume on the phone, so that didn't matter. And now you're stronger, and it's like, yeah, I got kind of. I got kind of beat up at the gym that day, but now I'm a beast and I'm ready for the next one.

Yep.

I'm gonna yell back even louder. Working on my voice. Voice to a vocal trainer, voice coach.

Boom, boom.

I'm the one that yells you now. Josh Kaplan says every moment in business happens only once. The next great podcast won't be, like, all in. And he attributes it to Peter Thiel, which I don't think is real, but very funny.

I think he was refined to you at that. It's just funny.

Oh, great reply.

We're gonna. We're gonna. We might put this in our. In our partner partnership deck. So actually, give that to me.

Let's pass that on.

This is great. Thank you, Josh. It might not look like all in, but it will certainly look like technology brothers.

Yeah. I mean, I think that there is something. Something real there about, like, don't just copy the format that you see that works like, it's just not. It's.

Yeah. It's already been satisfied doing a. Right now doing a biographies focused one. When there's senra.

Yep.

And acquired stuff. It's just not gonna work.

Yeah.

You're not gonna get better at them.

Yeah. You just have to find the white space.

Copy copying and, you know, invest like the best is gonna be really challenging too. You need to find your own lane and.

Yeah. As opposed.

And copies.

McAfee show for tech personalities. Now that. That's a winning strategy.

That'll hit.

So figure out how to remember stuff. I mean, there's so many innovative media formats out there. If you look at what's happening in, like, gaming and, like, kids and streaming and so. Yeah, there's still not a single tech streamer. No one's figured that out. Massive white space, if you can do it. Praying for exits. Been on the show before. Says, wait till this guy finds out about Jane street and Citadel. And it's a screenshot of a CS major asking, I want money. All I want is money. I love it. Yeah. Probably will wind up at Jane street or Citadel. That's the. That's the place.

There's a UFC fighter whose nickname now is Money Moicano.

Okay.

And he was relatively unknown, and he started winning fights, and after he would win, he would just get on the mic and be like, dana, I want money. Give me money. And so now this is the same guy that was quoting the front the French Revolution.

Oh, yeah. Wow.

That guy's a total legend. So anyway, anyways, if you want money, go and ask for it. Close mouths, don't get fed. Go interview at Citadel or Jane Street. Tell them you're here because you want to make as much money as possible.

Tell them the technology brothers sent you.

Tell them the technology brothers sent you.

Yeah. I mean, you can also go to early stage startup or something. There's a bunch of different ways. You know, if you're in college, just raise, like, a $400 million fund.

Yeah.

You'll be good off the road.

Start a podcast, raise a $400 million fund.

There you go. Let's go back to Sarah Hass. She says, wow, really? All the girls that talk to you are CCP spies. You must be building something really important. And there's a picture of Anne Hathaway being like, oh, yeah, it's funny. Did you see the CCP Spies meme?

Yeah. Which is. Which has been going on for a.

While, but it hit, like a really fever pitch. Yeah, we need it.

We need to create a, we need to create a leaderboard of memes and just constant like the power ranking.

I think Jason Levin has that. He put this in there and was. And other people were using this image as like a meme.

No, but I just mean more like, like high level, like not the game itself, but the ccpc. Like kind of like a UFC style, like pound for pound list.

But it is, it is like so cringe how, how it became very trendy to be like, oh, I'm building something so important that like when I go to a startup happy hour for my seed stage company, like China wants to spy on me and Xi Jinping has to know what I'm doing. And it's like, probably not, bro. Probably not.

Yeah, your, your, your GPT wrapper is not that important. Important.

Also, like, yeah, also you really shouldn't be worried about CCP spies. It's cringe to accuse every Chinese woman you meet of being a CCP spy. You should be worried about your Canadian bro friends.

Yeah.

From a communist country. They blend in.

They're right at the border.

These are the guys you got to worry about. Yep. So cut off all your Canadian friends. All your male Canadian friends, they gotta go.

Except if they're capital allocators living in New York.

Yeah, that's okay. We'll give them a pass.

Jeremy Gafon.

But the rest of them, risky.

Risky. But no, I, I do think though that it was like so, so AI and defense tech, probably the two hottest spaces right now outside of like energy and some other few other categories. But those were the first two times in a while where I felt like there was this real sense of oh, you do have to totally rethink this.

There is a shift or. For sure.

Yeah. You just should talk about what you're doing a lot less. You certainly shouldn't be building in public with your defense tech company or. Yeah. Or even like there, there is an argument of like if you're working on some super frontier technology and AI. Yeah. Maybe you shouldn't open source at all right away. But that doesn't mean we need full regulatory capture.

Yeah.

And there's like nuance and there's a balance.

Yeah. There just is such a difference. If you just look at like the priority stack for the, the CCP spy like agenda. Like it's got to be just like get into Oracle and just get all the data at every Fortune 500 company or whatever. Or like get into like they, they, they, they hacked like the, the depart, the ocp. You hear about the OCP hack. They got like, you know, personally identifiable information on like every single government employee. A dream for Doge, really doing Doge's work ahead of schedule. Just asked Xi Jinping, who should we fire? But yeah, there was also.

There was also a bunch of.

The target.

There was a bunch of, like, blustering on X about potential investors that. That could be foreign agents. And you pushed back on that hard. And you were like, all this. Anything that's in a deck now is publicly available, usually within a year.

Yeah.

And it's not even any. And again, the thing about startups is the reason that it's so bearish when a founder says to you, oh, can you sign my NDA before you look at my deck? Is because as a founder for 99.9% of businesses, you should be able to tell somebody your exact plan, step by step, every single thing you're gonna do, how you're gonna acquire customers and all this stuff. And you should still be better at doing that. And you deserve to win. Only. Only almost. Only if you can tell the whole world what you're doing. So don't like. At the same time, I think it's very bad to go build in public and post screen like you are. If you're building in public, you're inviting, you're casting a really wide net for potential competitors. But in private, you should be able to tell people what you're doing without this risk of, oh, if I tell somebody, they're gonna go home that night and launch my company on Stripe Atlas and be competing with me. You know, it just takes so much to actually make something happen.

Yeah. It was also just this idea of like the CCP spies going to cocktail parties, specifically because the conversation at cocktail parties isn't anywhere near as valuable as just hacking into a company and stealing the ip, which is something that China's clearly doing. It just takes the form of cyber security and you'd never see this person around. Or if you do, it's like somebody who's working at your company and like putting everything on a flash drive. So you just need better. It's. It's not really that if you tell someone like, oh, yeah, I'm building a, you know. Yeah, the Launch 3 ISR drone with industrial capability launch codes are on my nightstand. Yeah, I saw that one. That was good. Gauthier has been on the show before, says the two horsemen of the American dream. And it's the Herman Miller chair and the Ames recliner. Right.

Well, Herman Miller. Herman Miller owns the.

Oh, they own Both.

I think they own both.

Okay. Yeah. It's like the work chair and then the relaxing chair. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse thing. I don't really get the analogy here. It's just like this is. This is what people.

So my office setup is like right now, one Herman Miller chair and I'm adding the recliner as well because I want. Those are my two states of work, basically reading information and at in front of my monitor or, you know, doing, you know, zooms or whatever. So I think it's very accurate. Those are the only two chairs you need to create a billion dollars of enterprise value.

Love it. Eliana Yunus says in today's New York Times, Palantir Tech is partnering with Selkirk Sport for these pickleball paddles. He actually gave me two pickleball paddles which we'll put on the set that are Palantir branded.

Perfect.

And says Selkirk is leveraging Palantir self service AI technology to outperform the competition. I mean, huge commercial business like everyone still thinks of Palantir is like just purely government contracting, but they have a huge commercial side.

Yeah, yeah. We should ask for Palantir tennis rackets too. I don't necessarily support or endorse pickleball, but I support Palantir and I support American innovation.

Yeah. Eliano put him in the set. Worked out with him on Monday.

We'll put it in the set until they can get the tennis race. I could sent out.

Yeah. But yeah, he's been crushing it. He has a whole Palantir merch store. You can go buy shirts and hats.

And he's got an army of retail traders united behind him.

Huge, huge, huge. Reddit, huge. There's whole YouTube channels about the Palantir stock. And they're having a good year.

They're having a good year. Gonna be a happy holiday.

Yeah. Palantir is now the biggest defense company in the world. They. They flipped raytheon. Finally. Crazy 150 billion dollar company live Laugh, pal. Do we have a promoted post?

Promoted post from our friends at Tiffany and company. And it couldn't be more timely. Technology brothers out there, men and women. Tiffany is a fantastic place to go shopping for your loved ones this holiday season. Today they are saying making hearts beat faster. Since 1837, the iconic Tiffany Blue Box is reimagined by 24 talented illustrators through the month of December. And they have some great illustrations here. One of the most, some of the most iconic packaging of all time. Tiffany box. Can't say enough good things about it.

Speaks to the value of just doubling down on a color.

Doubling down on a color. Owning a color.

Owning it.

Yeah. The Tiffany blue Nautilus is fantastic. And anyways, whatever you're thinking of getting your loved ones for the, that, you know, this holiday season, they'd probably rather have something from Tiffany than whatever you're thinking. Pop by the store and tell your sales associate the technology brother sent you.

And speaking of the holidays, we have a gift guide, the 2024 gift guide for the Tech. Right. From the foundation for American Innovation fai. I spoke at their conference recently. They gave out Lucy breakers to everyone that attended.

There we go.

And we are included in this as well. They are promoting our product as, as a potential giftable product. Giftable product for someone in tech, which I love. And so we highly encourage you to go check out.

It's one of the only ways that you can gift locking in.

Oh yeah.

You know, because most gifts are a distraction. It's like, oh, I got this new sweater.

Yeah.

What am I going to do with this? Oh, I got this new, you know, pan. Something like that.

Yeah. No, it's great. I appreciate that. Them. Let's go back to Signal. Signal says most people wish they had more and more time away from work, but in reality, they'd waste it or do something stupid like train for a marathon or worse, play pickleball.

There we go. There's the pickleball slander. We support pickleball slander. We do not play pickleball on this show.

Well, I'll take the other side of this. So I don't play a lot of pickleball. I played once. But incredible, incredible story of, of asset utilization.

Totally.

Because if you run a country club and you have four tennis courts, you can subdivide a single tennis court into four pickleball courts. And so you're just getting four times the amount of people in, four times the revenue, higher margins, same capex. It's genius.

So my favorite, one of my favorite stories of capital incineration from the last two years is people like two years ago you started getting pitched pickleball teams. It's like, oh, we got this crazy opportunity. We got the Austin, the Austin Dolphins pickleball team. They got one of these new slots in the pro pickleball league. And it's like I kept asking the people that would pitch me this, have you ever watched a single minute of pickleball? And they're like, no. I'm like, so why is this going to be like a high performing asset? They're like, well, pickleball is like the fastest growing sport in the United States. And I'm like, yeah, but. But where's TV and a team? Like, nobody watches you see it on espn. You're like, this is a joke.

Yeah. It's hard to see, like, highlights even. I feel like I don't even see that many viral highlights. Yeah, I see more viral highlights from, like the fighting sports, like totally. Car jitsu where they're fighting, or the bear, the jiu jitsu in suits. That's viral and amazing. There's all these different slap boxing stuff. There's so many.

I'd rather see any combat sport even.

Well, combat sports are much more viral and you're in. In order to really break out, you have to have some sort of viral mechanism for growth. So the question is, like, how do they solve that with pickleball?

Yeah.

Make it full contact.

Even badminton is. Is exponentially more fun to watch because it's so high speed.

They should make it like hockey, where you can drop the pickleball paddle and just speak it out.

Fight.

Yeah, I think that'd be good.

Yeah, yeah. If. If pickleball players had UFC style.

Yeah.

Gloves on. They're like four.

Should have like a quick release net. And if something triggers it just drops the net. Everyone drops and they just start.

Yeah, yeah. Four ounce gloves just.

Yeah.

Cracking people anyways, signal acquire pickleball, professional pickleball and turn it into a fight sport.

There you go.

That is your task.

Jeremy Giffen says a material part of compensation for a lot of people is just being given something as opposed to nothing to do with their time. Time.

Yeah. I think this is real. I think you can. If you. If you've ever taken a vacation, and usually. So you arrive there, check into the hotel, you have a nice night, the next day is great. And the day after you're like, all right, what are we really doing here? I've got this book that I could have been reading at home, and we're just eating and just consuming stuff and not. And. And then you realize, okay, a huge part of, well, being as a human is just doing things and being productive. And the more you produce, generally the better you feel, and the more you consume, generally the worse you feel. And so creating an environment where people are only consuming, everybody's going to be really unhappy. So that is why. And maybe that's like American. That's just very part of American culture, but I think it's probably pretty broadly applicable across.

That's why it's so important to Vacation at places like aman.

Yep.

Because you strike up a conversation on day two, someone else's capital allocator, you start having deals on day three, XL comes out, you're building models and you're back in the grind.

Yep.

The week's gonna fly by fly Creatine Cycle says Technology brothers will happily leak production secrets to a petite Chinese spy just for a chance to say orthogonal to the woman at the SF party. And we thought this was slander, but then we realized we are technology brothers. We are the Technology Brothers podcast. But when you post about us, please use capital T, capital B and put the TM after it, please, class. And so he's talking about tech Bros generally. And we've already discussed this. We kind of disagree with this, with this idea. But it's good to get the message out. Just let everyone know, be careful out there, what you're building is important. And don't leak any production secrets.

Yep.

Do not go to Sean McGuire. He says the incoming Trump admin is working 16 hour days, six days per week. And Elon chimes in saying it's actually seven days a week. I love this.

I mean he's taken the Frank Slootman approach from Snowplay, Snowflake, where you're just always, always setting the pace. You know, if your team thinks they're working hard, show them they can work harder.

Yep. What was Frank Slootman's book called? Oh, it's so good I forget it. But we should review that at some point. I can't, I'm blanking on it. But yeah, I mean whether you like Trump or not, like it's good to have people in the government working hard. Better than not working at all.

First time in a while.

Better than not. Fake jobs. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see what comes out of the admin. I mean we're still so early. Like, I guess they're working mostly on like nominations and just picking people. I think they have to hire like thousands of thousands of people in like a very short amount of time. So more.

Yeah, that, that's, that's, that's what I think people is kind of under discussed is you have this new administration and then you're sprinting and of course you're going to hire a bunch of, make a bunch of bad hires. Have a startup had to hire a thousand people in three months. You would make, I would imagine. You know, I don't actually know what like great sort of like hiring success rate looks like, I would imagine. And if nine out of ten People you hire turn out to be great. That's pretty good. But if you're trying to hire a thousand people in three months, the failure rate's probably going to be 20, 30, 40% even of just like people that you didn't have. You know, Trump admins been getting to know a lot of those people. They obviously have the experience from 2016 to 2020, but it's still, you know, you're having to kind of date really quickly.

It's really hard to recruit people too. I mean a lot of people have been in the administration and now they want to make money in private, in the private sector. And so you do a whole new pitch to convince them to come over.

Totally a lot of momentum.

Follow up from Deep Dive we did on previous episode. Antonio Brown is following up about Pirate wire reporting and Shane Copeland, founder of Polymarket he says I posted something sent by the Call she team about the Polymarket creator. I didn't do research on it and honestly didn't even know what I was posting when I posted it. I was doing other business with Kelshi and just tweeted it. I want to say sorry to Shane Copeland as I know he's been getting a lot of some things you're sent, you don't understand them or the weight. Didn't even look into it. Just did it. Never a wrong time to do the right thing. Shane's a good guy. What a great story.

I love it. I, I, I love seeing a B do the right thing and just own up to it. It clearly when you looked at the original text thread, he clearly wasn't putting a ton of thought into it. He was just like okay, sounds cool. I mean it was a funny his thing was a funny post. It was him with Tim Walls. Tim Walls does look guilty of something. I don't know what it is.

Yeah, yeah.

So anyways, I love seeing it's funny. AB is having the most beautiful post athlete arc of pretty much any anyone outside of Pat McAfee.

Yeah. Also just like a master class in like apologizing from like a really, really bad scandal. Like yeah, really, really bad. Like the pirate wires article we read was what made him look really, really bad skating. And and he just, well I would.

I would argue it made Kalshee look a lot worse.

True, true, true. But still it's like you know, just quickly owning up. Clearly this didn't go through some committee. There's no crisis PR firm behind this. He's just reading the room.

Yeah.

And just understands the vibe and understands you Know what's going on and can just address it.

Potential brother of the week. It's okay to mess up. You got to say sorry.

Master, Master communicator there. Simp for Satoshi says the first production Truffle one unit has been produced. It's exciting. Do you know about this company?

Yeah. So I, I think we talked about this on Saturday, but I got a chance to meet Simp for Satoshi last week in here in la. He moved down from the bay. He felt like it was too much of an echo chamber up there. And they're building basically these like personal GPUs that you can put on your. Right on your desk and run their model locally. Nothing touching the cloud. So they're going to be selling into some of the Reddit llama community. And let's say you're an investor or an allocator and you want to be able to not feed OpenAI all of your proprietary data. This is going to be an awesome solution for that. And I like, they're pushing the form factor, form factor forward. It feels like this something out of like a psychedelic jungle. Like it's just like sitting there like glowing. Like it's just, it's cool. Their aesthetics and visuals are awesome and, and world class poster. Love them or hate them, you can't ignore them.

That's true. That's true. Yeah. George Haas has a similar project with the, the Tiny box. Have you seen this? It's, it's, it's a, it's a custom made computer. It's like 10 grand, maybe 20 grand. And it can run like the bigger models locally. But it's the same thesis like you want to run, you want to have an AI in your home that you can interact with in any scenario.

Yeah, that's the real second brand.

Yeah, I love that. Even for like doomsday prepping. Like if you have this thing in your bunker and all you need is just power somehow. So you could have solar panels, you could have just a bunch of batteries. Nuclear, small nuclear reactor, even just a gas generator and you have access to the entire memory of humanity.

Totally.

So you can just ask it any question, tell me a story. And it's just going to have everything like the LLMs, incredible compression engines.

Yeah, they just store. I compared it, I compared it. The, the truffle one is going to be. I forget, I think it's going to be like a few grand roughly. But I compared it to almost like the, the whole like Arduino movement. You remember? Like I remember growing up my dad was like. Like, would use Arduinos, like, in some of his high school classes that he would teach. So he'd always have them at home just kind of like running, and they'd have their little lights and whatever. So I think it's kind of like the evolution of that in many ways.

Another promoted post.

You know, I love promoting the world's greatest car manufacturers. And we actually have a promoted post today from Bentley Motors. At Bentley Motors, they say artistry that commands the road. Start something powerful. Bentley. Hashtag Continental gt. Hashtag Mulliner. This is the Continental GT Speed is the. If I didn't drive a Turbo S, I would drive a continental GT speed. They're showing one of the GTs here, but the most beautiful, timeless car performance. Silent. It's lower key, much lower key than a Rolls, but gives you similar level. Levels of comfort. And yeah, this one. This one's just beautiful. It is a hybrid, so that might piss off some of our audience, but they do it right. And thank you. Thank you to Bentley for making the world a more beautiful place.

Yeah, it's a step up from an S class. Something a little bit different.

Yeah, yeah. We want to see more of these street parked in sf.

Absolutely.

That'll be a sign that things are really turning.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

So head to your local Bentley dealership and tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Josh Browder. He says, I witnessed Bill Browder receive his knighthood from Princess Anne at Buckingham palace yesterday. The royal family work on Thanksgiving, and I'm so proud and thankful. That's amazing. Do you know this is.

This is brother behavior right here to the max, you know, I want. What is it called? What's the book called? Red.

Red notice.

Red notice.

Yeah.

Such a great book. I think I read it maybe in high school and. And figuring out the connection between Josh and his dad was, like, crazy because, like, they're both clearly just like, geniuses and like their own. In their own ways and. And not afraid to. In many ways, Josh doing do not pay and using it to saying, like, power back to the people. Like, let's let anybody just, like, fight back against. Against the system. Using technology is just, like, totally different. Like, he's carved out a totally different lane than his dad, which was like trying to take down the oligarchs.

Well, that's the crazy thing about the red notice book is that you open it up and you're like, oh, this will be a cool story about, like, a hedge fund guy who's like going to Russia doing deals. And that's what the first part of the book is. And then his business partner Magnitsky gets thrown in jail and dies. And spoiler alert, I guess. But it's a fantastic book. You should still read it. And, and then he spends the last half of the book like campaigning to basically get revenge and like, you know, you know, like retribution for what happened. And then the passes the Magnitsky act which like literally changed the order and the relationship between the US and Russia. It's crazy.

Yeah, he kind of mogged the oligarchs.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah, they all had a terrible time after that. It was rough. There were all these asset seizures. It's crazy. He really, really went to battle. Let's do Kevin Kwok. Kevin Kwok says, how did Stripe and Shopify get into this red Queen race over making the most hardware looking digital tracker for Black Friday sales? Someone, someone will one day write a nature paper on something something bird mating plumage and engineer hiring. One day UIs. Did you see the. The over the top digital tracker for Black Friday sales from either of these companies?

I did see both of them and I saw, I think Connor, Connor McDonald we were having dinner with tonight, technology brother and CMO of Ridge. He was joking and he was like, all I want. Shopify made this like extravagant device and.

Put it on the sphere.

Yeah, yeah, sorry. Stripe made the device, they put it on the sphere. Connor's like, all I want is something that compares this, this year's Black Friday Cyber Monday to last year's in a single dashboard. That's all I want. You put it on the sphere. Just give me this like simple update to the dashboard. And yeah, I think this is, I.

Mean this is top of funnel marketing.

This is, this is marketing.

It is marketing because you see the Black Friday tracker and you're like, I should have a Shopify store or a Stripe store.

Yeah.

Because clearly there's a lot of people making money today. Yeah. And it's cool. It's a good flex. It's a good like exploration territory for UI and development and I think it's fun. Probably acts as a. It's kind of like that Cesky thing about how you know, Steve Jobs has like the annual keynote speeches and then Chesky adopted that. Like if you're in deeply entrenched in E commerce, like having Black Friday as a drumbeat every year. We got to step it up up in Black Friday.

It's kind of, it really is, it really is poorly timed with the holidays though because I don't know. We. We experienced. You know, we launched Rora like about two weeks ago at this point. And so like, we launched because we were trying to launch as fast as was reasonably possible, but at the same time, going right into every. If you've ever been close with somebody with. That's deeply entrenched in E commerce for like, Thanksgiving is not an enjoyable holiday because it's the most intense. Two, like, potentially sick. You know, three months of prep. Up until that point, Thanksgiving happens, and then you have like two hours until the big starting, the biggest. Where you're gonna hit the year's records for the next four days potentially. And so it's the most critical time. It's. It's a, It's. It's a super high stress time. Cause if an ad goes haywire or a button is broken on the site or a code stops working, you can literally lose 100 grand in an hour. And it's not uncommon for one employee to lose their, their company, like their entire annual salary in an hour just because they fucked something up. So the stakes are so high, and it's very American that we go from a day of family and gratitude straight into the. Into four days of the most excessive commerce and spending. And then, okay, now we're gonna go back to at least. At least Christmas time is usually as soon. I think it's like December 17th is a lot of brands stop telling people that they can fill. Fulfill Christmas orders. And so at least they get Christmas in the new year to kind of like, relax. But then if you're a brand in health at all, then it's back like day one in January. New Year, New Year, like full, full tilt.

So, yeah, it's interesting because I've been doing Shopify stores and E commerce for almost 15 years now and never really had a Black Friday push because it's always been cpg.

Yeah.

So it's not a gifted product. We've done gift stuff, but it's never like a driver. But I talked to the guy who ran pebble, the smartwatch company, and he was like, 90% of our revenue comes in Q4. Because it's a gifted product.

Yeah.

And so they have to do all their inventory forecasts based on that. It's. It's so intense business because if you get the projection wrong, you have too much inventory, then you have to liquidate it. It's like really, really hard as opposed to just thinking like, okay, like, every month will be kind of like the last month when you're selling, like a food product. Or whatever.

Totally.

Let's go to the Peel Pod, Turner Novak's podcast. He said no pod. No new podcast this week. Listen to Tech Bros Pod instead. Thank you, Turner, for giving a shout out. And we would recommend this to anyone who has a podcast where they maybe don't have the dedication to put up the numbers. Just send them our way.

Yeah. If you. If you. If you are going to miss a recording one week, let us know. We will produce a dedicated episode for your listeners.

Yeah.

Where we will impersonate you for an hour and a half. That's in your format.

That's actually a great way to grow. You know about feed drops on podcasts.

Yeah.

So. So it's like you'll do a swap. I think Founders podcast did this with Invest like the best, where they swap you feed swap. You literally just drop one episode into the other RSS feed to just let everyone know, hey, today you know you're going to be hearing from another podcast. Check it out. Hope you like it.

Here's the strategy, though. In venture, there's a lot of dead podcasts. Right. There's a lot of podcasts that hit, you know, maybe they record 10 episodes and then the 11th takes a while to come out and the 12th just never comes at all. So we should go acquire all those old RSS feeds and just roll them up.

Yeah. If you have an old RSS feed, reach out to us.

DM us. We will acquire. We will acquire it.

Yeah, we're like.

We're like the tiny. We're like the tiny of. Of RSS feeds.

Send us your special situations, though.

Yeah. We'll make you an offer in 24 hours. To be a fair offer, it's not going to be the highest price that you might get if you ran a full process, but we'll get you an offer in 24 hours, which will make it easy and you can get a nice little liquidity event on our behalf.

Yeah. Let's go to Eric Lyman, the founder of Ramp CEO. He says, get rich, young man, for money is power. And power ought to be in the hands of good people. I say you have no right to be poor. This was very popular in 1915, but it's best kept to yourself in 2015. Interesting.

And I think he almost posted this because it feels like that's actually no longer the case coming back. I mean, yeah, I think this is. This is being proud of your success is. Is becoming a little bit more normalized now.

Yeah, but it's not just that. It's the good people, specifically Totally. It's like, it's like if the capital goes into hands of people with bad morals or bad ideals, like you will see bad outcomes.

Yeah.

But if it's in the hands.

Yeah. And there's this idea of people that have this sort of nihilistic view and they're like, oh, the world's such a fucked up place, I'm not even going to try or I don't want to participate in the system that's so bad. But, but if that's the case, if you really believe that's the case, if you want to change the world, one way to do that is to accumulate some amount of power, influence and money certainly helps with those things. So succeed young men and women.

I mean, I also say that there's a moral obligation because so many rich people spend their money so poorly. You got to get, if you have good taste, you got to get rich so you can class it up.

Class it up. Yeah. More closing dinners on yacht odds.

Let's go to this post that has one one like I think it's probably a reply to us says sailor has pre.com bubble brother behavior a champion. And it's a quote from an article in 1996 Michael Saylor is an intense guy. On weekends, friends say Washington's 1996 high tech entrepreneur of the Year has taken a date to the office, handed her a book and asked her to read all day while he works. A couple of years ago, Saylor flipped his red Toyota sports car several times in an icy highway, escaped with cuts and bruises is several, several times. And headed back to his job, Dupont Co. Executives recall. For fun. Saylor himself says he reads 2 inch thick tomes on the history of Western civilization after he gets home from work at midnight.

Wow. True bubble brother right here.

True bubble brother. Wow.

Bubble brother.

Thanks for sharing that. I would never have found this. I love this. I, I love archival.

I respect.

It's great.

There's two kinds of behavior that I respect. Somebody that hit a local top for their company in the dot com bubble and runs it back up 20 years later and achieves a new all time high in the, in whatever the 2020s bubble that we're in is, and then somebody that can flip their car multiple times on a single drive and still make it home is also fantastic. So shout out to all the bubble brothers out there.

That's great.

Are we even into the latest?

Yeah, we are. We are. Paula, who I believe we covered earlier in the show, says, I subscribed to the information just so I could read this specific article. And. And it's a quote by Mark Andreessen's wife, who says she calls her husband's giant bald head my egg.

Amazing.

Wild. That she went on the record with.

Bob, my dude, my arrakis.

In the 1952 presidential election, Richard Nixon's opponent, Adlai Stevenson II, whose bald head was similarly shaped, was dubbed an egghead by Republicans for being a nerd. Interesting.

I just don't think it's. I don't think it's a diss anymore. No, I don't think you can say, hey, you look like Humpty Dumpty. It's more like you look like your brain is bigger than mine and I'm threatened by it.

Well, the famous image has been photoshopped so many times that no one knows the truth.

That's the original.

Yeah, exactly. It's been so deep fried. Endless photoshopping.

Like now we're. We're looking at an archive version of the Facebook red book. In 10 years, it'll be like the archive copy of Mark Andreessen's the iconic Eggman.

Yeah. And he's wearing an Omega. I love it. Jesse Powell says POV. You are staying in a $1,000 a night Airbnb. And it's a picture of Amazon Basics polyester sheets. I guess. Yeah. I mean, the. There's a lot of Airbnb hustlers who have figured out that profit maximization happens when you reduce your cogs and reduce your capex.

I love Airbnb as a business, and I have some good experiences in Airbnb. I do not use Airbnb under any circumstances anymore. I just don't.

I mean, it was great when I was starting my first company and we needed like a big place for a bunch of people who are coming into town. It's affordable. No, but that's way cheaper than buying a bunch of hotel rooms.

Totally. Totally. I think it's actually best suited for startup off sites.

Totally.

At this point because it's like, yeah, you don't expect your. But if. But for me, taking a holiday with friends or family, I don't want to stay in an Airbnb where the quality is just so variable and the average host is running it as a business. And that's why that created space for Wander, though, to come out. Wander really standardizes the experience.

There are a few options. I know some people that do longer term Airbnbs and at that point it's like, okay, on day one, just order the sheets that you want to use. If you're going to be there for two months because you're some sort of nomad. Just make it your own. And yeah, two months in a hotel is maybe going to be a little bit crazy compared to some long term.

If you're going to be there for a couple months. Egyptian cotton.

Yes.

Maybe go on italic dot com. Yeah, you can get some off brand.

Yeah, that's good. Let's go to Nas. Jack says the current state of Futurism and posts an image from Futurism, the blog and says Elon Musk's plan for a city on Mars will likely end in horrifying mass death. Wow.

Yeah, so. So I also saw another screenshots from Futurism and there's like four deeply negative articles on what is the inevitable future.

Yeah.

And this is just like another example of the collapse of mainstream media is hey, I guess we just have to be negative on anything to get any type of attention.

Yeah. Well what it is is that they're going for lowest common denominator.

Yeah.

They're going for broad clicks because they don't have particularly well targeted ads. They're not doing ads for Patek, let's be honest.

Yeah.

And so, so they need to be negative because that's what will spread. If it bleeds, it leads. Negative news travels faster, gets more clicks.

It's so funny to catastrophize something that is like years, 100 years out. Oh, something bad could happen in the future. I guess that's how humans have always thought. Right. But have a little positivity.

Yeah, that's great. Let's go to near says in a world of AI agents, the age of the engineer is over. The time of the idea guy has come. It's a picture of the orcs from Lord of the Rings. It's very derogatory towards idea guys.

Yeah, I resonate with that. That's kind of. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I feel like that it's true.

I was looking, I was looking through my, my chat GPT logs and I was like, like other people just wouldn't think to search this stuff. Like anyone can get these results, but only I could think to ask them. Yeah, it's true.

So the best part is if you, I think, I think near probably replied with this, but somebody actually animated it using some model to have to be like a whole like scene and replied with it. So that's great.

Yeah. I mean ideas are underrated. Personal connections are underrated. In the age of AI, like rote memorization is clearly Over. Yeah, let's go to Rohit, remembering the best product launch of all time. And it's Sam Altman announcing the launch of Chat GPT. So this just tweeted it out. Today we launched Chat GPT. Try talking with it here. Chat.OpenAI.com on 30th November 2022. So over. It's been two years.

But my favorite part of this, he had a typo.

Oh, he did?

I don't. Somewhere in the thread, I think he like made a mistake. It was like, oops, maybe. Maybe it didn't get printed out.

Yeah, maybe it's low.

But he was like, oops, sorry, meant this. And that's the greatest product launch of all time. They get to 100 million users in two months and now it's the fastest product that went fully into the mainstream and I don't know how long.

So do you remember the buzz around this beforehand? Like what specifically? So before he publicly launched ChatGPT, Sam was doing these like, monstrous fundraising like, pitches where it'd be like him and every investor in the Valley on the same call.

Yeah.

Not doing like individual. It was just like, join this webinar basically, if you want to be in.

So amazing.

And would just like. There was an information article where I think one of the funds asked like, what companies should we invest in? And they were like, really impressed with the results because. Cause it like analyzed a portfolio and came up with some ideas and it was just like blowing everyone's mind because no one had ever interacted with an LLM like this. And, and then, and then as soon as it launched, it was like sensational.

And. And can you believe that it was only. Was it a year ago that the Microsoft round happened and Microsoft bought like.

No, the Microsoft round happened before ChatGPT. Like, well, before Microsoft came in.

Like when. No, no, no, I know they invested early, but there was the one where it was like 10 on 20.

Yeah, 27 billion was right after this. Like this, like this, this product was the pitch that did the round at 27. And now they like. I think it's been leaked that there's like a new round going on at like a much higher valuation.

Yeah, it's like 150 or so.

Yeah, exactly.

So if you, any, any of the investors that were on the webinar being like, I'm not going to invest in this, that was like the potentially the biggest miss of their career, basically.

Like, I know some people that like missing. And it was, it was always because. Because of the like. Oh, they'll never figure out the, the, the, like the structure and, or this.

Isn'T a consumer company would have been the other criticism. It's like you're launching, you're a research. Why are you guys going to create the next dominant consumer?

Yeah, no one really pegged the consumer flip at all, at all. It took a long time for that.

And it's a huge. And it's. And it's. Now it's a. This is the most dumbed down example possible. But I've got to experience with Rora for the first time building something in silence for a really long time and then launching it and going 0 to 100 with sales. And it's given me a lot more confidence in now investing in companies where I'm like, I'm gonna invest in you, I'm barely going to hear from you for the next year and a half and then you're going to launch. It's either going to work really, really well or it's not. And OpenAI was a company that had to work in relative silence. Like it had hype, but it was silence for years and years and years. And then when they launched it was literally 0 to 100 million in two months. And so it's honestly a good case study out there. It's totally counter to the YC approach of just like launch early and often and just like get feedback and just ship something to get that market feedback. Because if you are an experienced group of entrepreneurs, you can basically just toil away building the thing for years and launch it and get with the way the Internet and distribution works now. You can sell a ton of something really quickly, get a ton of users really quickly. And so it's just a, it was.

Also because they launched it with 3.5 which now if you use it you're like, whoa, this is, is way worse than four. But it was still magical. And then they followed it up with four in like three months.

Such a good.

People were like afraid. Like people were really, really like this is going to destroy every job ever. This is like the fear mongering was insane. But yeah, it was, you could, you could, you could obviously see that at other companies there would be a big impetus to hey, let's wait for four. Like we know four is going to be better. Let's, let's wait and just launch this chat GPD product when we have the new model that's going to blow everyone's mind. And they didn't, they launched quick, more quickly than that. And it was actually better because it showed this, like, pace of execution that was like uncanny. When in fact that 3.5 model had been out for a while and people were talking about DaVinci and that particular model, it was 3.5002, I believe. And that one was already getting great results because it was the same model that was eventually in the first version of ChatGPT. You just have to use it through a different UI. So people in the AI community were like, okay, it's getting really good.

Like, yeah, yeah. There was that company copy AI that got. Went from 0 to 20 million annualized revenue in a year and then had to completely pivot because people just use ChatGPT. Yeah, the lot. The last thing I would say on that point. So somebody. I saw somebody post something. I think it might have been Signal, actually credit to Signal for just, you know, having some of the best takes of the week. But whoever it was was saying college students are at such a rough point in time right now where they're able to use AI products that are just doing all their work for them in school. So they're going to just learn way less. And then they're entering a workforce where all of the jobs that would have been done by early entry level employees are being done by Julius or just ChatGPT itself. Right. Like, we use ChatGPT so much to prep for the show, just to, you know, we used it for the red book. Right. You used it to summarize the book and that easily could have been done by like an entry level, sort of like, you know, editor type person.

Yeah, but I mean, I think about the work that we did with that red book, I didn't even have it summarize it. I just had it take the messy extracted text from the PDF, just clean it up and that would be someone's job. But it's great if that's someone's job who's just prompting now. I think that's actually better.

Yeah.

Um, let's go to Palmer Lucky. He says I'm going to be showing.

We should hire a prompt secretary, basically.

Yeah, that's great. Uh, let's go to Palmer Lucky. He says I'm going to be shilling for Mod Retro all weekend. If you aren't interested in the fruits of my Internet forum side project that took nearly 17 years to reach fruition, you might want to smash that mute button. I love it. Even Palmer gets it. Black Friday is important. This is the holiday season. Go get a Mod Retro. This isn't a promoted post, but we are happy to support Palmer here. Great game.

This guy's not afraid of the algo. He's not afraid. He says mute me if you want.

Yeah, it's great. He knows. And also, I mean, what a, what a fantastic gift for kids. Like, it's, you know, you forget how the Game Boy, you can lose yourself in it for hours and hours and hours, but it's not gonna be some, you know, Internet connected Skinner box. That's not nearly as a dick.

It's, it's very fun. It's not nearly as addictive as the, as the average iPhone game.

Totally, totally. And you're not.

I actually found, I found my, I found my Game Boy color recently which was a Pikachu edition. And those things are going. If you have the original box and papers and everything, it's, it's like $4,000. And then if you don't have the box, it's like, yeah, 200 bucks.

Jackson Oswalt says there's so much money in the world, it's actually embarrassing. I don't have at least a hundred million of it by now. Now I think about this every time I fly and I'm coming in over Los Angeles and I'm just looking at all the different buildings and I'm like, every one of those houses is worth a million dollars on average. Every one of those office buildings is worth like 10 million. Someone owns all of them. Someone owns a piece of all this stuff, whether it's through a fund or something like that. The wealth is there. You can physically see it. Yeah. And you got to go out and get it. It. It's stuck in your laptop.

Stuck in your laptop.

Yeah.

Your job, us to find it. I think Jackson is, is on the path to finding the 100 million hidden in his laptop.

I agree.

We'll check back in with Jackson in five years.

We will. Let's do another promoted post.

Promoted post from our friends at McKinsey and Company. Thank you, McKinsey, for all that you guys do to help companies get more efficient and drive profits. McKinsey says from climate risk to cyber threats and a growing talent gap, app insurers face a critical moment to rethink risk management. The key, empowering CROs to move beyond control roles and lead with strategy listeners. You guys can explore the trends driving change in risk leadership. Go to MCK CO3CT1VWH. You can read this piece all about climate risk. And we highly recommend, even if you're, you know, running the 2000th Chat GPT derivative app in the App Store, you should Be thinking about climate risk. It's a threat to all of us, so get after it.

Pavel Asperuhav says, if you're building, don't get lost in the AGI sauce. VCs can afford to do it. They've got the two in the two and 20. You as a founder, don't get a management fee. Stay tethered to reality. I like this. It's a good, it's, it's a good post. There are a lot of people that just wind up getting obsessed with the AI futurism and forget that, like they need to actually build something.

You need to lock in.

Lock in. Yeah. Pavel's a master of the lock in culture.

Yeah, I, I, I don't actually think it can be overstated enough. How, how a founder is a bet. In a VC portfolio and a founder, you are betting your life, life on the idea that you choose to work on and the nature and because Silicon Valley is so supportive of giving, you know, investing lots of money in young people. Young people. When I started my last company, my prefrontal cortex was not finished developing. Right. And I wouldn't have chosen the same idea today as when we first started. And so it's really on the investor to make to, to under, you know. Yes, you're looking at a, an investment as a part of your broader portfolio and a specific bet. But it's, it's, it's always helpful when the, when the f, when the investors are truly orient. Care a ton about the company winning. Every single company winning just because, you know, not, not everyone, surprisingly. Some, some are very much just like it is what it is, you know.

I mean, it's also just been like the two in 2020. The two and the two and the 20 used to be a lot smaller. Like you think about the first. Like Kleiner Perkins Fund and Eugene Kleiner going inside Genentech, I believe. Or maybe it's Tom Perkins, like working at the company one day a week, like doing their finances and closing their books and just making sure that things were, the trains were running on time.

Yeah. Or Chris, Chris Sacca. The greatest. Like the fund that arguably set off the solo GP wave was an $8 million fund fund. So the management fees on that is like you could barely live in SF at the time.

Yeah. So he has to make, so he.

Had to make it work. What did he do? Stripe Uber? Twitter.

Love it.

Docker.

Yeah.

I'm missing one big one.

Fantastic.

But back against the wall, cowboy boots on the feet. The guy did it, made it happen. Imagine what he would have done if he had a suit on.

Yeah, well, speaking of suits, Kevin says, love that jacket, Jordy. You look like Colonel Sanders. If he had a liquidity event.

Kevin gets it. That is exactly what you were going for. What I was going for Colonel Sanders with a liquidity event. So if you want to look like Colonel Sanders had a liquidity event, go find Fantina label John Fantino. Get yourself a fine white linen silver suit.

That's great. Eric Lyman, CEO of Ramp, says the need for AI and finance has never been more clear. Manually inputted accounting data creates openings for bad actors and human error. Automation prevents those openings. We have the technology. Let's make financial waste a thing of the past. And he's showing a few different screenshots. Macy's says accounting employee hid up to $154 million in delivery expenses. And the Pentagon fails its 7 7th audit in a row. But CFO says progress is being made. Rough. Yeah, we gotta get these firms on Ramp for sure.

Yeah, yeah. And I honestly, this is one of those things. Every single new company coming out of YC that's doing some AI meets finance for corporations. You are competing directly with a very fast moving gorilla which is ran a very, very, very, very aggressive gorilla.

It's like you think they haven't thought of this?

Like there's a bunch of, there's a, there's still like so much white space. It's such a large sector of the economy and so critical to every business and, and individual's like ability to operate in the world. So there's plenty of white space. But you're not just going to build.

Ramp with AI because that is just Ramp. I mean early on I remember they, they were, they were one of the huge beneficiary of GPT4 for the receipt scanning because they could just, just do exactly what we did with the red book where they would OCR it with Google, take all the text in the, in the picture and then throw that through chat GPT or GPT4 just to clean it up. And it just sped everything up so much for them. And so it's like they're not asleep at the wheel. They're going to build this stuff and we're excited to see where else AI pops up up in the Ramps.

Yeah, I, I met a company, I want to say like two weeks ago that's, that's using that sort of same method to just do much, much, much, much faster. Basically diligence on small businesses, like super small businesses, you know, under seven figures a year in annual revenue to be able to offer them credit more efficiently. So, like, there's still still tons of ways to apply the tech that isn't necessarily squarely in. In Ramp's wheelhouse. So, hey, and. And if you build a great team and you're doing something interesting with AI and finance, shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you might land back at Ramp.

It's fantastic. Dhruva says GM announcing a licensing deal with Tesla for FSD will be this era's 1997 Mac World. And if you're not familiar with the 1997 Mac World, World, Bill Gates called in to the Apple conference pledging $150 million investment in his struggling competitor. While the crowd jeers and booze, this was an iconic piece of tech history. Bill Gates is, like, looming in this massive, huge street. It was so crazy this happened.

I cannot wait for Elon to. Yeah, I feel like Elon would. Would show up in person to that event, though. The gm, like, keynote, and he'd be like, you know how he does his awkward thing, right? Hey, hey, everybody.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and he does his little, like, spiel, and he's like, should we hit the bar?

Yeah, I mean, it'd be great. I mean, I. The Tesla fsd. I mean, I don't know if they'll ever actually license it. This is a firm prediction. We'll see if this actually happens. But I like.

I like Druva. I like Druva going bold because it'll be an iconic quote tweet if it happens.

Yeah, exactly. He's not saying, oh, this might happen. He's predicting it.

It will happen.

It will happen.

Check back in five years.

Technology brothers. What's the top GM product? Probably the. The. Do they own Corvette, right? They do. So the ZR1. Give me FSD in there. Give me a naturally aspirated or turbocharged V8 that goes 230 miles an hour. That also drives itself.

You know, this would actually be a cool product that you could build. Request for startup. Go create. Create something that runs, that just fact checks, podcasts, historical catalogs. Because you could go back and, like, what was this week in startups predicting in 2015?

You know, Gary Vaynerchuk actually has, like, a guy on his team that does that and goes and pulls his old. His old predictions and then posts them when they come true, and they always go viral.

See, that could be. That could be an app.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So Gary's guy could be an app.

Yeah, yeah. Zach says speed. That's Everything, never lose it. And it's Calai ranking higher than Strava and my fitness pal, I assume.

Okay. So I think, I think, I think we, I think we featured this guy before and he was like, we followed him. Yeah, yeah. He's saying like I'm not something like I'm not sleeping till 10, till not 10. Figure 8 figures in ARR or something like that. So I didn't realize this kid is. I can actually call him a kid because he's 17. He's not even officially an adult yet.

Yeah.

And he's built Cal AI into something that is charting.

That's amazing.

You know, charting is, we've talked about this before. Is based on momentum, not, not overall downloads or anything. But still very impressive to be beating out my fitness pal and Strava given their scale. And I. And the app's super cool. You basically can like scan your food using your camera and like get an idea of how many calories it is. Makes total sense. And something that can be probably a lot more accurate.

Yeah. I was doing lunch with a guy who like took a picture of his Chipotle order to then enter it into my Fitness Pal later. And I was like, dude, you run an AI company. Like you got to cut out the middleman here. The AI should just be able to look at the image and just guess pretty accurately, especially if you've ordered that before. And he was like, yeah, I always get the same thing. So I just go into my Fitness Pal and copy it. And I was like, that still feels like the stone age.

Yeah. And this is, I mean this is such a good example of so many of the best applications or AI are super obvious. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't go and do it.

Yeah. Oh, this is great. Ben Little says if this guy is across the negotiating table from you, you're in trouble. The tells he wears a 3XL but should probably wear a 2XL. He wears an old school Rolex jeans with worn in loafers. Took four calls before takeoff at 6:30am and he's been talking about racing for an hour.

Animal. An absolute dog. An absolute dog. I would love to figure out who this guy is and do a personnel news segment on him because when he moves companies, he's going to move the market.

Is he moving companies? Maybe he's just an entrepreneur, some small business. Maybe he's been rolling up H Vac for a couple years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's. He's the guy. If you're, if you are running a search fund and you're bidding for an H Vac company. Just remember you're bidding against this guy. And good luck.

Yeah, that's great. This is an interesting one from Rune. Been on the show before. He says Shape Rotator was a hundred x less useful and more tasteless than Word Cell. I expect people will say Word Cell for a long time. Yeah, that Shape Rotator and Word Cell tweet was like shook Silicon Valley to its core. It really brought Rune to the forefront of, like, tech culture.

All it takes is one.

One banger, basically. I mean, Coogan's law. Coining a phrase to describe a phenomenon. What is a word Cell? Someone who's high verbal. What's a Shape Rotator? Someone who's high math. Those words don't stick out in your mind the same way. Yeah, I don't understand that. Shape Rotator was tasteless. It doesn't. It doesn't seem like it's that tasteless. There's that whole shape rotation test. Have you seen that?

Yeah.

It's like a test to see if you're. If you can rotate shapes in your mind and you can just give someone this test, and they either get it or they don't. But, yeah, there's a big. There's a big question about, you know, who's the beneficiary in the age of AI? The Shape Rotator or the word Cell. Maybe it's the word cell.

That's the idea.

That's the hot take.

The ideas guy.

We'll see.

We'll see that orc.

I mean, the bull case for Word Cell over Shape Rotator is that it's just shorter, like Word cell to. To. To two syllables instead of Shape Rotator four. And. And the more compression that goes into an idea, the easier it is to use. The shorter it is to type this, the more useful it is as a shorthand. So I kind of agree with him there totally. Crypto. Let's do this one. This is interesting. Raptor is my favorite new niche brand, says Andrea. Products are made by an architecture student. And it's a very elegant egg holder for a dozen eggs and something that's a juice squeezer that looks like something out of Blade Runner. Very, very cool.

Yeah, I just wanted to put this up to encourage people to look. You know, there's this. The. The. When you. If you're early in your sort of entrepreneurship journey, it's easy to be like, oh, all the good ideas are taken. Ramp is a great idea. It's already ramp. Right? I don't. You know, nobody needs to go rebuild, ramp or anything. But when you look around your everyday life. Right, like rebuild the Polycom. Right. Like I want, I want that.

We talked about printers.

Yeah, printers. I want somebody to make just a beautiful, stunning, super easy to use print.

The AI camera.

Yeah, yeah.

Is doing interesting.

Yeah. You can just look around everything. Everything in your life, everything that you touch and interact with as a potential business. You can make it more analog, you can make it more futuristic, you can make it easier to use. You know, there's just any number of. Of.

Yeah. I also like this just because the design language is uniquely not Apple, which really dominated the tech industry for so long.

Yeah.

It's like you got to copy Apple on everything. And then we saw this with the landing pages like linear, I believe was like the people were larping and yeah, it was very, very exciting to see someone break out and do something different. Gabby Goldberg says, imagine how powerful it feels to crop Jeff Bezos out of your Instagram carousel. And she says fall photo dump. Grateful for all the memories this season brought. And Jeff Bezos in a full Batman costume has been cropped out. Although.

So. But this is like the, this is like the 8th. This is like. It looks like one of the. One of many images.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

We need to go fact check.

Like, she clearly wanted to show the whip.

What is it carrying?

Yeah, it's at Lauren W. Sanchez on Instagram. And, and I, I thought I saw a, a community note on this later that said. That said that he's actually just in the previous photo. So if you, you swipe, you can actually. Both of them. A little bit of fake news, Gabby, you might wind up with a community note. I don't know. We're fact checking you right now, but.

I can't even find the Original post. But 3 days ago she's.

She's posting him.

She posts. She posts her. Her technology brother.

Why not?

All the time.

Jeff Bezos looks great. He's jacked. He's living his best life, having fun.

Why not post him my Chad Life by Jeff Bezos.

We. We Tuna says we owe a lot to these gentlemen. Eastern European developer, makes 15k a year. Will accept any GitLab ticket. Doesn't argue. I haven't really worked that with that many Eastern European. European developers, but I know that a lot of really, really sick.

It's an amazing. No, it's an amazing. It's an amazing approach to work which probably comes out of spending decades under a communist regime. And then you're in the capitalist system and you're like I can be productive and contribute to an enterprise that supports me back is is probably an awesome feeling.

So yeah, a lot of people, a lot of it's driven by the speed of the Internet. That was a big thing for Estonia. Their, their, their government just went super long on Internet infrastructure and so they built out high speed Internet. And so everyone, no matter kind of how wealthy you are in the country, you just get access to really fast Internet. Same thing with Poland has really amazing Internet. There's a few other countries and it's a high correlation between the speed of the Internet and the quality of the software developers which makes a lot of sense. Let's go to Will o' Brien. This is a long post so I'll read through it. He says there's so much opportunity in ocean technology right now that literally nobody has about talked. Talking about is probably the most underrated startup vertical. The ocean economy is massive. Over 2 trillion covers 70% of the planet. 3 billion rely on it as their primary source of food. 1 billion as their primary source of income. And while we have robots on Mars, low cost, high performance drones, supersonic VTOL planes taking over our skies, the technology in our ocean pales in comparison to these domains. The main player in nearly every ocean value driver, transport, fisheries, defense, energy, oil and gas biodiversity are the large scale incumbent offering solutions that run on ancient software and hardware stacks with very little R and D spend. Fascinating. It's cool that he's like found a different angle in like hard tech and American.

Yeah there's there are some companies like I invested in, I invested in shinke probably like 18ish months ago at this point. And Safe, the founder. Safe the founder. Yeah. So Shinke is, creates robots for basically fishermen for fish processing using they basically. Yeah they created a robot that allows you to kill a fish you basically using a needle to the back of the brain which makes the fish die gracefully and not like die really stressfully because if you just, if you catch a fish, throw it on ice, it just flaps and releases a bunch of. Gets really stressed. Releases a bunch of cortisol I'm sure and other stress hormones and so, so yeah they're doing that, Will's doing that. And I, and I think the oceans have always been forgotten right. Like humans naturally have always been focused on the stars and we. And there's always this like fact that's like you know 80% of the world's oceans are completely undiscovered. You know it's like so there's a lot to explore down there. I would love to see a future where I really want to see a startup. This is going to. Is a crazy idea but, but, but I want a startup where you and your absolute boys can crowdfund a. A really capable autonomous, semi autonomous drone that you can just either fly or send out to sea. Like imagine if you had a little mini like drone submarine that was self sufficient and you could just send it out into the ocean and be like. It'd be. You just have a live stream of it. You could just like, like I, I would pay a lot of money.

I think the comms are really, really hard.

The comms are hard. Hard. Yeah. So let's say it's a surface.

It was truly fully autonomous.

Little mini, little mini reactor Starlink. Yeah, I just want to be a live stream of being like we're pulling up to this deserted island. Like let's go, let's go check it out.

Visibility is not good down there. It's very hard. But yeah, I mean maybe the right, the right equipment, you figure something out. It is cool. I mean there are some companies that are doing like I guess ocean economy stuff. Flexport is probably, probably counted in the ocean.

Very good example. Yeah, that's an example of like there's been no investment in this. Yeah. Saild drones and others kind of like I guess what, what Saildrone needs to start offer like live streaming services where you and your boys can, can get your own Saildrone and Yeah, I wonder what else.

I don't know. It's. It's fascinating. It's just cool to see someone highlight like a different angle, different, different niche in the, in the hard tech community. Let's go to JJ. He says Don Valentine was 40 years old when he found. Founded Sequoia in 1972. Wow, what a boss. But it makes sense. I mean he built, you know, he's. Wasn't he one of the traitorous eight or he was involved in like the intel story early on. I might be getting that wrong.

But yeah, it's not like he just was a H Vac technician and decided to get into venture capital.

I wonder, I wonder how. What his track record was before founding Sequoia in terms of investing angel bets. Yeah. I wonder if he was like. Yeah, we talked about him on Mount Rushmore, like potentially one of the Mount Rushmore angel investors.

Yeah, my, my favorite. There's a great founders. I mean there's so many examples. If you look at, if you just go back and listen to founders podcast, it's like every other person that he covers started their company like in their 40s or sometimes even 50s.

It really does debunk the myth.

Enzo Ferrari was like 45 and he had been in racing in the automotive world for that kind of his whole career. But he didn't start start the actual what became Ferrari until he was 45. Red Bull CEO is the same way. I think early monster, the monster CEO was really old Estee Lauder too. So there's a bunch of examples. And honestly, like, yeah, that's why it feels like there's this common trend in Silicon Valley where somebody hits 35 and they're kind of maybe post economic and they just kind of start floundering around and it's like, no, that's when you should go do your life's work. 40, do it at 45, 50, whatever, it doesn't matter.

But then pick up some. Don't die from Brian Johnson and build your business for 200 years.

For 200 years.

Why not?

Yeah, yeah, that's going to be great. The first CEO with a hundred year tenure.

It'll happen on his track.

Yeah, yeah.

Zuck. Zuck is looking to get CEO for, for 20 years already.

Wow, that's actually, that's wild to think about.

2005. Yeah, 2004. So yeah, must be 20.

You got to do something for 20.

For Zuck founders funds turning 20 next year.

That's big.

It's big.

I got to go to a promoted post. We've had two little break, two little ads. So this one is from Sotheby's. Sotheby's says a masterpiece of sound, a treasure that transcends time. Time. The Joaquin Moss Stradivarius, an instrument of extraordinary historical significance, is coming to Sotheby's New York in a one of a kind auction during masters Week in February 2025. This is a singular opportunity to acquire one of the world's finest instruments while directly supporting the next generation of musicians through NEC Music. So anyways, this looks like an absolutely incredible violin. They have a great video here. And this is a instrument that I hope ends up in the hands of the community. And I would, we would appreciate the honor of having it placed somewhere on the set, you know, even for a few weeks to kind of put it on display and get it, you know, in front of the audience.

They're not making Stradivariuses anymore.

They're just not.

It's, it is one of the craziest things that Stradivarius is a violin maker. He made a ton of them. They're still regarded as the greatest violins and they still trade and are used and played.

Yep.

Like it's something that violinists actually use.

Yeah.

I can't even think of another product that's.

Yeah.

That you would want.

Yeah. In the auto, like the automotive world, it's not like you're going to use the 1965 Le Mans winner in like the 20.

I mean, people, people drive Model Ts that have been restored. Yeah, for sure. But that's not 400 years.

And they're up at the highest level. They're not like racing.

Maybe castles in some degree, like people live in, in 400.

Castles still hit.

Yeah.

Castles still hit.

But I mean, I, I, I know, I think a who's restoring a old Viking ship right now. And so that might be up there, but it's rare. It's rare. So.

Yeah, let's.

Great, great option.

Have him send it past, you know, go test it out in the Middle east, see if it's, if that Viking ship still has it, you know, on the Red Sea.

Yeah, yeah. You have to mount a 50 cal to the front.

Yeah, yeah. A few, few drones.

Yeah. Let's go to Gabriel. He says, regular reminder, we're toward the end of the brief period of time which you can pay 20 to $30 for a bag of very good coffee that's roasted pretty well. By the end of this decade, the industry will have separated into giga slop and, and Veblen go goods like wine, 6k likes Vegas slop banger. Vegas slop is a great term. Veblen good. Also great. But we love Veblen goods here. Yeah, we love all sorts of Veblen goods. We don't have a problem with the Veblen goods.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong.

There's just more consumer surplus to go around. There's more economic profit to go celebrate wealth creation into the organization that created the Veblen. Good. I actually don't know that much about the world of fine coffee roasting, and I wasn't aware of this trip trend.

It is interesting. So, so, you know, Ben and I.

Yesterday morning, we like Volta here. We like Celsius.

Ben. Ben and I were getting some, some B roll for our upcoming launch video yesterday, and Ben and his roommate who was helping film were complaining about, like, the groundwork coffee. They were like, this sucks. And I feel like, I feel like we're at a point where this sort of Gen Z millennial crowd has such high expectations for coffee, partly because of the price point. Like, if you're paying $6 for this, like black brownish liquid. You want something that's good. Our parents grew up at a time where it was just like brown liquid. Good. I like coffee. Like, I'm just gonna have it. But the bar has been risen so much. I feel like it was probably used to all be gigaslop. And now there's this sort of certain bar where they're.

They're like, oh, Starbucks was like revolutionary. And now people call it Char box. And they don't like it and they think of it.

It's gigaslop.

Gigaslop. You're gonna love this one. Marty.com says go.com or go home. And then somebody says the.com is taken. What's the next best one? And Paul Graham chimes in with some other name dot com.

So good.

It's great dot com's valuable.

So it's. It's. We are not joking. It's so important.

Yeah.

There was an. And. And yeah, the. No, this. So this wasn't even. So the Cal. So I think the Cal.comfounder'tweeted this and responded to it too.

And it's Cal AI.

No, no. Calendar is the open source calendar scheduling tool that's like an alternative to calendar. And yeah. Cal.com you're right away super memorable. It's great. You can do cal.comcoogan or whatever. It's easy to remember that.com almost made the business. It's so good. Right. Obviously you got to execute really well, but it makes a big difference.

What does Nikita Beer think about.com? because like, if you're in the App store, he's very well so name.

And actually he posted something earlier. I don't think we're going to cover it, but it was interesting. He posted a screenshot of the downloads chart of an app that he's advising. And he was like one of the key changes that they made to get it to go viral was naming it something better. So he might. I bet he's much less oriented around domains and much more. But still very oriented around names mattering a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Finding like the whitespace that shows up in the search results. A little bit of SEO in the name, but not too much.

Yeah.

Yeah. It makes a ton of sense. Let's go to this next one. Zvi. I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, but economists, I love you never stop economisting. This is from Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg Bloomberg. And Tyler writes a bigger change that is that the average walking speed rose by 15%. So the pace of American life has accelerated, at least in public spaces. In the Northeast, most economists would predict such a result since growth in wages has increased the opportunity cost of just walking around. Better to have a quick stroll and get back to your work desk. I love it.

I mean, you got to be strolling and working.

Yeah.

At the same time.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, you know, the. The long walk can be valuable and can be important for both your health.

Some of our best people ask us how we post. How we post.

Yeah.

And some of our best content comes on a stroll.

Yeah. But if you're. If you're doing the type of job where value can only be created at the desk. Pick up the pace.

Pick up the pace.

Start walking faster. Sprint.

Yeah. Maybe run. Don't do marathons, though. No, do not. We are strongly against marathons.

Yes. Oh, this is great. From a good friend, John Fiorentino. He says, I'm a Method founder. When I start a new business, I simply become the brand. I eat, sleep, and breathe the brand ethos, engulfing myself with its energy. Even my car becomes a vehicle for the brand, driving our mission forward every single day. And he shows a series of cars that he's owned. A lifted G Wagon, 4x4 with Moon pals, the Volta, Ferrari, and the jeans old school car. I'm not exactly sure what model that is, but yeah, it's fantastic. And it speaks to the different types of brands that he's building. And I always think that, like, if you are building a company and someone asks you about your brand and what car your brand would be if it was a car, and you got to say, you don't have a strong enough brand. Yeah, you really don't. And. And you know, with Red Bull, they owned the Mini Cooper with. With, you know, even Anduril, you see Palmer driving a Humvee and you're like, that makes sense. That tracks. Right.

But it's interesting, in the case of Red Bull, they owned the Mini Cooper from. But they made it their own.

Yep.

I would argue that if you asked the founder of Red Bull what car represented the brand, he might say like a GT3 or some type of Porsche RS. Right.

Maybe. But I mean, so much of the Red Bull brand is very stunty and jokey. Like they do that flug top, you know, that thing where they drive stuff off of.

Yeah.

But it's like almost. It has a little bit of tongue in cheek element to it, even though it is the highest performance. And. And then Maybe they'd also. The real answer would be the max version. Stap an F1 car.

Yeah.

Because that is the. That's the modern avatar.

Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, Monster has the monster truck. And. And I think. I think it's a. It's a. It's a. It's a. Like an easy out as a founder to just say, oh, well, we're a tech company, so we have a Tesla and Tesla's great. Love them. But that's not necessarily an expression of your brand. That's an expression of Tesla's brand, which is already like. Like the Elon's car is the Tesla, Right?

Yeah.

So what is yours? And, you know, it goes back to that. That quote about, you know, if Nike made a hotel, you could immediately imagine what that would look like.

Yeah.

There would be a really cool gym. It would have, you know, lots of, like, you know, athletic. There'd be posters about great athletes. It'd be very clear. But if Hilton. If Hilton made a shoe, you don't know what that would mean. And so it's just like Nike has a better brand brand than Hilton for that reason. Right. And so I think that that's an interesting exercise. And it goes back to the stuff that's in the Facebook red book. Like their brand was. Was articulated through all these various images. And that's why, you know, when we build decks, we like to put a lot of images in there. And it's just a great way to. To. To really test. Are you thinking clearly about your brand? Can you express it as. As a watch, as a wallet, as a T shirt, as a piece of clothing or anything? Anything like.

Yeah. And it's also what Theo does is also interesting because he's building consumer brands where attention is really all that matters. He's in places where he's going to meet people that are relevant. So if he's driving A G Wagon 4x4 around Los Angeles with a Moon Pals logo all over it, that's going to start opening doors. You got to drive something to get around. You may as well drive something that starts a conversation. The Roma spider that he's getting for the Fantino label, like that. That perfectly suits the brand. It looks like a Fantino.

Yeah.

What? You know, it looks like something that the founder of a fine suiting company would drive.

And it works for Volta, too. Yeah.

And I. And it's funny in the context of I bet you the Fiorentino Ferrari will sell one suit per month that will ultimately pay for the cost of the car. So he's driving. He's driving for free.

Yeah. So, yeah, it is funny. Let's go to something that could be its own dick, its own deep dive. Enron is back. Yeah. These guys are getting in so much trouble eventually. But I love it because these guys are so. Enron is back on. On X and Twitter, they put out this launch video and it shot like a classic Enron ad. It like looks like it could be an ad for ExxonMobil. Enron, of course, the, the famous energy trading company that went bankrupt and a massive fraud scheme in the dot com boom.

And when did they actually go under? Because I was definitely 2001. Yeah. So six years old.

Yeah.

And so this is my, you know, this is one of those things I heard a lot about Enron.

Right.

But I'm excited to, you know, get to know it. Right. As like an adult now. Right. Like get to experience December 2, 2001.

Yeah. December 2, 2001, Enron goes bankrupt. 25 years later, almost. They're back. So these guys are launching a coin. They're launching a crypto token around Enron Meme coin going a little bit farther with the marketing than most meme tokens.

It's interesting. I didn't read the white paper, but it's funny because. Okay. When they do, that's going to be groundbreaking because we know they're going to be revolutionized the future of energy and commodities trading on the blockchain.

Yes.

And it's funny that they're, they, they're. They could have taken, you know, it, the rollout was like very good. I would say, like it wasn't just the launch video they had built. I think they got billboards in Houston where Enron was headquartered. It's clearly, it's clearly very good marketing execution.

And it seems like they actually got the IP a while ago.

Yeah.

And wanted to do some stunt with it.

And this is what had. I had heard that this was in the works for a really long time, but I actually wasn't sure. I expected the execution to just be kind of mid. So so far the execution's been good. I just, I don't. It's so hard to kind of make a prediction of what's going to come here because ultimately this is the best way to view it. This is an entertainment product that is investable. It's not, I'm not saying that you should invest in it or that it's to generate any type of return, but this is just a modern form of entertainment.

Right.

It's this like stunt meme.

And they're good at this. They did birds as Birds Aren't Real before this whole viral marketing campaign around the conspiracy theories and stuff. And I mean, there have been successful meme coins before Dogecoin started.

As a joke, it would be funny. It would be funny if it ends up stabilizing like. Like Truth Social where it's like, hey, this is barely a real company in many ways, but from a revenue standpoint at least. But Enron could probably sell as much merch sales through their brand as Truth Social has done. Ad revenue, million dollars in the last 12 months. So maybe it becomes a sustainable, you know, stable marketplace.

Tracking it here. Make sure to subscribe. Covering it. Josh Steinman, been on the show before. Says requests for startups, GPT trained on US Geologic survey data, maps of any and all varieties and anything else that can be shoehorned into a GIS database. So if you're building something, you're looking for an idea, I think you got a customer. Because Josh wants something. He's very vague about what he wants to do. Yeah, looking for minerals, maybe geologic surveys, like, I don't know. There was that news about China banning the export of gallium and germanium.

Yep.

Have you seen gallium? It's fascinating. Fascinating. It. It's a metal. It looks just like, you know, a tungsten cube you put in your hand. It melts because the melting point is like 87 degrees.

Crazy.

It's very weird. It's used in all these defense applications.

We should put.

China manufactures 99 of it.

So we should put a little bit of gallium in our. In our merch.

Definitely. A tungsten cube would be nice.

Yeah.

It's good to have a brand. Yeah. If you're. If you can't tell what metal, what, what, what element your brand is, you.

You.

You need to step it up.

You're lost.

Let's skip the olfactory stuff.

Wait, let's take a quick.

Okay. Yeah, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Let's go to Reggie James. He says, had a dream last night about sf. So today I'm flying to sf. Every time I land at sfo, I feel like I booted into the wrong server. And then he lists his loot. Loot codes from capital. The trousers, Marila. The. The sweater, vintage. The glasses are mascot. The bag is vintage Ralph Lauren from Tokyo. And the hat is pen. Fantastic.

Yeah, I. If you're going outfit for outfit with Reggie, prepare to get mogged. Unless you're in A perfectly tailored suit, in which case, you know, he'll have to respect, he'll have to respect that. Uh, but anyway, this is an example. I mean he, he's been, we're entering the air. We, we've talked about this at length. We're entering the era of loud ops opulence. It's becoming cool again to express yourself through clothing. And we got to give Reggie credit. He's been doing this for years and years and years. Way before loud opulence was, was really in the, in the zeitgeist. So. So anyways, post your, post your next.

He clearly knows so much about fashion.

It's great.

Yeah, yeah. Have you seen his breakdowns of Zuck?

Yeah.

He's like, just wait until Zuck learns about this designer.

And then he does like six months later.

He's like, he's literally on the leading edge of this stuff, just being like, okay, Zuck's here in the, in the journey. He's gonna get here.

I think there's, I think there's, there's opportunities to take all of that data that's been produced around the history of these different labels and designers and condense it into more of a like specialized LLM almost of like, what is the mo. Like, what is the most coveted piece in like, like, you know that Margiela created in the early 2000s.

I mean there's all that stuff that do that stuff.

Yeah. There's YouTube channels, but it's not that. Yeah, I don't want to listen to a 20 minute video always.

Yeah. And just understanding like the taxonomy and the hierarchies is very, very difficult. Like who are the key brands? But then within those brands, what are the different levels?

Yeah. And taste is not just about how much money you can spend on an outfit. Otherwise you'd be walking around Balenciaga. Balenciaga head to toe.

So last thing I love about this is had a dream last night about San Francisco. So today I'm flying to San Francisco. Talk about like, don't let your dreams be dreams.

Don't let your dreams be dreams.

Just taking immediate action, just manifesting. So the next time you have a dream about going somewhere, just act on it. Carried no interest. Says bringing back American manufacturing is one of the most important challenges we face as a nation. And Gary Tan is delusional. Being, calling Gary out.

Interesting.

That's okay. By the way. VCs have to be delusional. It's part of the job. The source of his and many VCs delusion is that they think bringing back American manufacturing can be solved by robotics software inefficiency. Unfortunately, the problem is much deeper than that. Time for a quick history lesson because it's important to understanding how we fix this. Let's head over to China. And then he breaks it all down. It's interesting. I've been a little bit more bullish than him on robotics having an impact, impact on American manufacturing because robotics can move much faster if it's ramping exponentially than retraining a whole generation.

I would take the, I would take the other side. And I think what he's saying is he's, he's, he certainly understands that technology is going to be very important to onshoring our manufacturing capacity and all and all those different things.

Yeah.

That said, he's saying to compete with China who invested hundreds of billions of dollars effectively in non dilute of funding to get their manufacturing to where it is today, we can't purely rely on technology.

I mean, that's even the story of tsmc, right?

Yeah.

Taiwan government.

Yeah. And then, and then, so, so what he's saying is, you know, if you look at this in the context of okay, we have all these new manufacturing startups, all these robotics companies that are, that are doing important things simultaneously. We have DOGE that's trying to deregulate and create more efficiency within the government. There probably should be another. He, he's kind of arguing, arguing for this. Another group that's saying, hey, if we're really serious about bringing American manufacturing home, we need to be okay with a little bit of extra inflation and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to make this happen. It can't just be a private markets thing.

Yeah, well, you saw the Pat Gelsinger news. He's out as CEO of Intel. And the CHIPS act was supposed to kind of reshore American chip manufacturing. And I believe that intel still hasn't gotten paid for anything from the CHIPS Act. And that was kind of like the obvious CHIPS act thing. Give Intel a bunch of money because they're the only ones that are set up at all to build a fab in America. Of course TSMC is coming here and the Arizona plant's going really well. So I'm very optimistic that things will work out. But yeah, it was still interesting. And Ben Thompson's critique of the CHIPS act is that it's, he wanted it to be set up like operation warp speed. Where there are, there are defined guaranteed sales. So you're, you're only creating the incentive that if you build it, we will buy it, you're not give it, you're not putting money into the company and just saying like hey go, hopefully it works out. It's like you got to actually make the thing. But if you produce a 3 nanometer chip in America we will guarantee that it will sell and then the government might not even have to buy that many of them because once they're made, you know Apple and the market will buy them but you know that you can underwrite it because there's zero risk. So interesting. I like that there's a different take there. Let's stay on Gary Tan and go to one of his posts. Gary says a lot of software can be built quickly now, but it is becoming a lost art to actually make it self serve and consumer quality. You must sand down all the edges and fix the P2 bugs instead of only focus on the demo paths. This year personal software will force its return. I love that.

Yeah, I think it'll be interesting. In the age of AI gigasl slop, which is a new, which is a new term, there's going to be a lot of really, really poor like software products that technically do the job but don't do it very well and are not very user friendly. And I actually think there will be more teams that sort of build quietly, really have a lot of confidence in their products, build them in a really user friendly way and instead of just shipping that gigaslop like you know, the next day or you know a week later, take the time to really get it right. And Gary's, Gary's point of view is as a designer himself, he's really pushing and getting up on a pedestal and pushing the industry to care about design. And what he's describing is like ultimately design.

Yeah. It's not challenges. Like Gary is a craftsman. Like if you look at his YouTube videos that he was making, like eventually it morphed into interviews and stuff. But some of the early ones are like like he spent like a full day recreating a scene from train spotting which is a movie I haven't even seen. But he like went and vlogged and like set up the camera and filmed all this stuff and like really he like has all these nice lenses, really understands like how to make things look and just create a quality product.

Yeah.

In everything.

It wasn't just like oh I, I, I should be doing content. It's I, I should be doing content. It's not so do it. Yeah, yeah.

And you see that YC with like the team that he's built there it's, it's very good. He sees everything as a product and everything to be designed, which is the right, right, right frame of mind for sure. Let's stay on the venture capitalist and go to Bilal Zubari over at Lux Capital. He says Every founder/CEO I texted with today responded within minutes. From early stage founders to CEOs of now public companies, founders are always on, they are always building, always trying to move the ball forward. Interesting. Now if you want the real test, have your new associate text the founder and CEO and see if they get back to you. That fast. Yeah, because a lot of founders are like, oh shit, a GP's texting me. I gotta fucking answer this. But, but I do agree with the sentiment that like, you know, people need to be quick.

No, I think, yeah, it's, it's one of those things. If you're messaging with a hyper engaged founder or operator, they will get back to you really important, really, really quickly if they find you what you're talking about to be important.

Yes.

If not, it will be completely lost in the shuffle.

Exactly. Yeah. I'm sure Bilal is not showing up with like, hi there, I'd like to talk to you about all the intro.

Or just sending, sending that day's competitor like hey, did you see this?

Did you see this? Is this a competitor? No, I'm sure it's super high signal, like great conversation. So yeah, learn to communicate on both sides.

For sure. Yeah.

Guillermo Rash, founder of Vercel, says imagine trading an hour of doom scrolling a day for an hour of exercise a day and what your life would be like in a year. Let's go.

Imagine what your one rep max would be in a year.

Yeah. And that's why we do visualize. You don't need to doom scroll. You can just listen to this while you're lifting.

Hope, scroll, hope, hope, hope scroll, hope scrolling. It's levering. It's leverage for the mind.

Leverage for the mind. That's a great one. Put that on a sticker. Put that in the, on the list.

Write that down. Write that down. Read that again.

Read that again. Bookmark this. Print that out. It's great. Aaron slowed off, has been on the show before. He says, I don't think there's a single domestic defense startup right now that could manufacture 10,000 units of anything if they got an order. And this was very controversial. There were a lot of people who saying like oh no, there are plenty of examples. And he would always reply like name one. And then they would be like, I Can't really. And it's interesting because, I mean, obviously, like, you know, I mean, like Palantir doesn't manufacture stuff. SpaceX, like what, they're not gonna make 10,000 rockets. Like, that's just not how their business works. Anduril 10,000, like, you know, submarines, like there's just not the scale of these things. Like we don't have 10,000 aircraft carriers.

Yeah. But a counter, counter example of that, actually. So, so deterrence as an example is manufacturing primers. And for the business, for that product line to work, we need to manufacture hundreds of millions of units.

Right.

So that's like an example of a really high volume.

Yeah.

It's not a sexy category like hypersonics, but it's a super necessary category and it takes just as much work to develop like a factory line for that as it does to develop, you know, a factory line and in some cases more. Because for a super high, you know, order value product like a hypersonic, it's okay to spend a lot of time, time kind of making it, putting it together and not having it be as automated. But for something where you need to manufacture millions of units.

Yep.

It's much, much, much harder.

And we saw this with the Ukraine. When the Ukraine war broke out, like we depleted all of our reserves and I think we sent like every Javelin missile we have over there. And then it was like, okay, well how are we going to make more?

Got to make a few more.

So, yeah, it's good that he's beating the drum, accelerating. But we are still early in the defense tech boom. Like a lot of these companies are just at the seed or series A stage. They're not scaled yet. Yeah. But hopefully, hopefully it gets resolved. Lowly, low yield. Lucy says you are not allowed to wear Carhartt if you know what KPI means. 35k likes. What a banger.

That's huge.

Huge.

Lucy is phenomenal poster. Yeah, phenomenal poster. And I think this is, this is, is this is real.

Carhartt is the villain number one in the quiet.

If I see. Yeah, yeah. They are the enemy of loud opulence.

They are.

And if, if I, if I, you know, if I'm in New York and I, you know, pass you on the street and I see you in Carhartt listening to Technology Brothers, I'll rip your AirPods out of your ears, stamp them on the ground and put on you from, I'll ban you from the RSS.

Feed, put on a suit.

So do not work Carhartt, if you know what KPI means.

Yeah.

If you don't know what KPI means, learn it.

Yeah, it's great. Blake Anderson says B2B SaaS equals talk to customers. Consumer equals read comment sections. That's a good point.

This is real. You can do so much consumer product research by just going to products in your category and just reading the comments. And there's probably like an entire business like research product that you could build that just scrapes consumer product, company comment sections and reviews for feedback to generate new ideas from. So yeah, it's very real.

I think that's a great place to end. Let's do one more promoted post to take us out for the evening.

What a place to end. We have a post from Gucci. Gucci says as a of today they say in Miami's Design District with Venus Williams and and Angel Alessandra. Alessandra former Victoria's Secret model. Actually probably current Victoria's Secret model. They are for a special unveiling of the Gucci Winter Dream installation. Hashtag Gucci Gifts and anyways, just some fantastic images. These look like some great winter sets. Very Miami. Not so winter looking to me, but at only 46 likes. This is a low tam banger from Gucci and it's a great spot to end.

Let's amplify it.

Let's amplify this. Thank you to Gucci for making some fantastic clothes. If you're at Art Basel this week, go find the installation. We aren't there. We are not there because we are recording this podcast and this is important work. So we'll see you Friday.

So please subscribe. Follow us and thanks for tuning in. Have a great day.