welcome to technology Brothers the most profitable podcast in the world uh have I told you about Cogan's law of course you have I've told you about this um it's I mean you see it everywhere yeah yeah once you once you know of it you can't help but notice it I mean there's a number of these laws that people you know repeat in Tech met Cal's law or um you know what's that one
anything that can go wrong will right you know those or uh Mo's law the rate of computing is doubling they're not true scientific laws in the sense that they came out of scientific papers but they're axioms that Define what's that one anything spaed by Social Capital will drop 90% so kugan law is the value of a coined phrase is proportional to the square of the amount of algorithmically
consumed content basically my prediction here is that coining phrases like laws is going to increase in value as feeds and just the overall consumption of content becomes more algorithm algorithmically driven and more compressed so as we move to tweets and Tik toks and short form you need to be coining phrases at like an increasing rate and if you look at who's really
popular in Tech they've almost all coined phrases you know like it's time to build American dynamism software is eating the world there's so many of these bology has the network State Lulu has going direct uh I don't even know I talked to Lulu and she said that going direct was not her phrase but she like took it to a whole another level Lindy man same thing he didn't come up with
that concept but he like man yeah but he like dominates it and so finding a a really key piy phrase that you can build your whole brand around Super Key and going to be increasingly valuable if you look back to like the great books like you know Augustine Thomas aquinus like those guys didn't need to compress their ideas down into piy phrases no one talks about you know like Shakespeare's law
you know you just read all of Shakespeare because you that was the only thing that was they weren't competing with tweets but now you're competing with tweets and so you need to really you know compress everything down yeah and so kugan is a reference to that right there's a guy uh Zach I think I'm in a butcher his last name POG GR MH who his whole his word is Obsession and
so he's just constantly every you know 50% of anything he ever talks about ties back to Obsession somehow yeah and part of his Cult of obsession is pick a word or a phrase that you just become one with and then you just repeat it over and over and over and over and it works because I don't even know the guy I have some mutual friends but I'm bringing it
up right now in the context of all these other phrases that are you know have become popularized in different ways and it's just because every again almost every single time he's saying anything it comes back to Obsession right which is just his like rally and cry so I have a group of buddies who are like in the content world and they all have these they call them razors you know like
aam's Razer uh this guy George Mac has Max content Razer which is only create content that you would consume yourself which is good but it's also kind of silly that he even needs to coin a phrase right right but it works really well because it sticks in your mind and it's this whole like just compressing a big idea down Paul Graham founder mode like yeah there's a lot that was said
about that but it sticks in your mind it's like okay well whatever that is whatever makes successful Founders we're calling that founder mode now and there's a phrase for that and that clearly there was a gap in the vernacular in text vernacular where we needed a word for like what is Steve Jobs Elon Brian shesky mentality and founder mode just slotted in there so
it's kind of founder mode for us is listening to our own podcast because you've already had the conversation ideally on vinyl which will be coming soon by the way so if you're not subscribed subscribe and then you'll be the first to know when the vinyl vinyl hit drops yeah yeah it's good yeah it's a different experience the tonality the analog nature of it it almost it's the
closest thing for us to feel like we're back in the room where the recording happened right sitting at this wooden wooden desk feeling the energy from the the crystal ball what did our what did our one fan describe it as a rustic feel a rustic analog because you hear the you hear the paper shuffling yeah we rustic audio yeah yeah it's organic all natural it's a it's a return to tradition right it's good
should we go into the top story of today it's hard to hard to follow kougan law but well well next time we need jordy's law right so we're going to come up with that and then we're going to be coining a lot more phrases and you're going to hear them we're g to try them on here and you'll hear them here first yeah yeah that that's a whole new segment of the show is is new laws
coining phrases we're tracking phrases and laws we could have we could have a chart that was just like you know going long and short on these different phrases I mean in in some ways it's extremely silly to just think that like okay you you have some idea you've written it out maybe you've actually put a lot of thought into something and realized something the other one
somebody came out and wrote a piece on taste in terms of startups and it's like okay does that really need to be said you know but controversial in some ways it does and and yeah I think a lot of people a lot of people do forget about like the importance of like compressing it down into something that can be viral it's it's like it's a it's a m they're always memes right it's time to build
yep uh Sal's really good at that Moon should be a state Moon should be a state that phrase is is so much bigger than that it's talking about Solana's law would be how many times people call you a billionaire in a derogatory way is equal to uh how politic you know what what would the law be is there's something there right there something it's like if people are if
people are getting angry at you and calling you a billionaire you probably are just a capitalist you it really is clear that like he's he's particularly good at just these these py phrases because every when he writes a piece the titles are always really good yeah like uh I mean he had one that was like moral inversion just this idea that in another life he was a journalist if he wasn't a
billionaire he would have been a journalist yeah know and then uh but now he's doing with the daily the I don't know if you're subscribed to that but it sends three takes three morning takes and each one of them has like some sort of clever you know pun or you know headline and I'm like how do you come up with these because it's really hard but I guess you build a muscle you can be
really good there could be some real Alpha and us just ripping all the takes from him just like just going back through the daily and repeating them as original thoughts and just and focusing more on the algo just trying to grow FAS and then he'll be trying to plan his takes out to be like okay well I can't do the daily anymore I've got to drop it the the
morning after they record yeah um well I mean as long as that's as long as that's more profitable then I'm I'm down um I um there's a topic that we have to cover I I'll actually wait it's we can put it in the reaction section but I just got an email uh that was from this guy Eric newcomer who's a journalist and he says the the subject of the email is new is Reflections on newcomer four years in
yeah and the preview line is new newcomer is on track to generate more than 1 million in profit on more than 2 million in Revenue this year pretty good um which is fantastic and uh it just shows that that uh he's living every journalist dream which is to be rich um but but uh instead of being you know just rich and successful they choose to uh attack and try to tear down the sort
of like crabs in a bucket phenomena yeah yeah crabs in a bucket for sure crabs in a bucket journalist in a bucket well he's a Harvard guy he's he's buddies with uh Max child you know this guy who runs this uh AI startup he's he's a little more in Tech than most people think yeah and and he knows who he knows who who Butters his bread cuz he's got the events business a lot of sponsors at
cerebral Valley there he's bringing in the big bucks he's not going to be right hit pieces for very much longer yeah but I think I yeah eventually eventually you just got toie hit pieces aren't going to get you blowing profiles Su to uh Lake Como there you go no one no one you need to be a peer you need to be a peer and you don't become a peer by writing hit pieces you become a Pure by generating
you know huge uh no one's no one's inviting Taylor Loren to San chope right right like she's not going to Seitz she's climbing in through the through the HVAC you know she's like she's in the she's in uh uh hotel duap or whatever uh in the HVAC system because it's it's 82 degrees in there um anyways uh we need to get into the story yeah the top story we got to
talk about stripe acquiring bridge for over $1 billion uh are you big in crypto I'm like generally a Believer I like Bitcoin but I'm not really deep in any of like bues speculation I do I do um but I was thinking about like why do we need to talk about this and I think the real reason is just that you know whenever one of these billion dollar Acquisitions happens like the there's a
new class of wealthy individuals who are on the scene and like these Founders they're going to be the ones you're bidding bidding against at Christies they're going to be the ones like if you're fighting for a new allocation in the Ferrari f80 like you're going to be going up against this guy so you got to know who he is so we should do a little a little overview of of Zack Abrams and
and Bridge just to kind of set the set the story because it's a pretty it's a pretty fascinating journey to get to this billion dollar outcome so Zach grew up in North Carolina attends Duke and he's only done one podcast I I I searched all over the place I could only find one like 20 Minute Podcast that he did but it was really great and he talks about when he was a Duke his dream it
might be Abram's law number of podcasts you do is in inversely correlated with Enterprise yeah yeah the dude was clearly actually working in building stuff not just stroking his own ego but uh he he said that while he was a Duke his his life's goal and his dream was to become an operating partner in private Equity amazing I love it and he and he achieved
it immediately he goes to this private Equity Firm and he focuses on uh like opening and closing factories for this Auto Parts business that they bought and it was real PE guys closing stuff exactly exactly yeah so he's like 24 and he's like shutting down manufacturing plants putting up new manufacturing plans and it's like a beast of a Time CU it's post recession I think it's like
2009 and uh it's the auto parts business like no one's buying new cars and stuff it's just like really rough um but then 2010 he realizes that like okay I want something different there's a startup scene out in Silicon Valley moves out there he starts a fintech company called evenly and he sells to square pretty quickly after a year and a half and so this is he gets into square pre IPO
preash app um pre- a lot of the crypto stuff and kind of sees that start growing so he's a product manager at Square works there for a few years goes to coinbase where he leads the consumer business and what's funny is that I I didn't fully fact check this but he's his co-founder at Bridge is sha Yu who I believe was also his co-founder at evenly and also worked with him at
coinbase and also worked with him at bra so I think this is one of those this is like this is this this story is fantastic because it completely justifies VC's pattern matching right it's like okay Finance backgrounds has like extreme work ethic understands how business Works starts a company sells to square probably wasn't like an amazing outcome but you know stays on with his
co-founder learns the game is at a hyperscaler go works at coinbase another hyperscaler goes and is at bre early another hyperscaler with his with his original co-founder the whole time and then starts a new company and raises it 40 pre which probably felt like really expensive for a lot of people but they're like hey he was sold his last company to square he with his original
co-founder and so the pattern matching is Extreme all the way through not technically hyperscalers by the way that term's reserved for uh the big tech companies that are building like massive Cent right scale scale scale and and in the financial world it's he never like went off and did something random yeah so when he and and and you know he's now he's not like he wasn't he wasn't foming
into fintech exactly he started in fintech in 2010 right so he's like a decade and a half into his career when he's really building Bridge right so I think here's the reason that this story is important is this is the only major liquidity event that I can think of in crypto that wasn't token oriented oh yeah right like can you think of another have a token and no they definitely
didn't have a token because they didn't need it it's all just infrastructure and but I cannot think think of another major outside of coinbase IPO can you think of another crypto company that was a eight you know sorry 10 figure uh acquisition it's just you can't think of one they're all I me a similar business would be like chainalysis right but I don't know if they've sold or I so like
but that's a company that doesn't have a token they just do the research and I think they're doing very well right but again but this is like the Instagram moment almost of of in and and the funny thing is this will inspire an entire massive wave of new crypto infrastructure investing it's good timing I have a a a company that's similar to bridge uh for Latin America
yeah um that does stable coin infrastructure they're called mtao they're going to be raising this quarter if you're um if you're listening um this is uh yeah Dyan field posted this about uh uh he's the CEO of figma and he said in 2006 I asked Joey Krug Joey what are going to be the biggest use cases for crypto he quickly and succinctly answered speculation stable coins and
prediction markets mcoins Stripes acquisition of bridge and polym Market the world is starting to catch up to Joey and that's like exactly what's happening right now you have pump. fun tons of meme coins also just speculation on bitcoin and eth as like underlying assets but then now we're seeing a lot of infrastructure in stable coins which makes a lot of sense it is really hard
to refute if you're a crypto skeptic and uh and then polym Market which is obviously taking the world right now yeah so it's it's interesting so I met Zach in 2022 uh it was must have been post his initial fund raise which I think was at 40 I think you did two two rounds like a series a and I think they raised 53 total probably 10 on 40 in that first thing and then I think they probably did
like 40 mil on 100 or 200 or something I met him in the context of we were doing a lot of work with stable coins at party round sure uh we supported stable coin investing on chain um which was funny at the time because the reason that that what he was doing was important is because we even had deeply crypto native companies that were using our product that didn't want to raise using the
stablecoin functionality because it was too much of a hassle once you had the stable coins to convert them and all that stuff so he was solving an important problem I I had already backed a company called layer 2 that um is doing sort of similar stuff to to bridge um more focused on like sort of like banking applications but um they were I thought layer 2 was a good
bet at the time they were powering all of angelist stable coin infrastructure uh Bridge took it another Direction and when I jumped on with Zach I wasn't um Zach's obviously super smart uh I should have probably tried to invest at the time but he wasn't raising and he basically just mined me for information for like the entire 30 minutes like he was just like not really wanting share
anything cuz I think he wasn't didn't know exactly what he was doing yet so he just used the entire meeting to just like you know just mine uh information of how we were thinking about stable coins and we had a bunch of crypto sort of companies as customers so anyways should have should have uh bet big on Zach uh at that time but um didn't really I I don't know don't kick
myself that much because it wasn't like a fundraising specific meeting um it's interesting though but um yeah I think it's I think it's fantastic for crypto at a time when speculation and prediction markets like you're saying are getting all the attention to say like hey here's a here's a major liquidity event by the most story relatively recent Silicon Valley
company being stripe yeah um putting it on the map and like legitimizing it um which is just good because I have a lot of I'm personally heavily an early stage uh crypto and and ultimately I think that it was always very clear that stable like nothing has product Market fit in crypto like stable coins like if you actually look at like I think the most it's um usdt is has more revenue on a per
employee basis by like 10x than Black Rock whoa um which is sounds insane but I think they have like 100 person team and they're doing billions of dollars Revenue something like that um so I think that uh it's very like legitimizing and it's just very positive the only the only thing that was unfortunate about the way the whole announcement went down is that seoa
didn't really get the credit that they were wanting and so Shawn had to really come out yeah the information really snubbed him snubbed him felt very personal yeah he had to come out and say hey we led the series a yeah it wasn't Ribbit or h you know's like I don't even know who those funds are um anyway so they issued a correction thank God yeah journalism is saved but it was a dark day for
journalism yeah it was rough it was rough um I've actually used stable coins uh I paid a video editor in Argentina yeah uh and because the currency was fluctuating like crazy and it was really really hard and the fees to get dollars there were crazy yeah we as Americans we want usdc usdt adoption it's good for the dollar it just allows US dollar dominance um I had a I was on I was on a
I was on a surf trip with four argentinians when I was 18 traveling from Ecuador to Panama and I was on like a six-month trip at the time and my Argentinian friends had to cut their trip short by like 8 weeks because their currency just got demolished mid trip and they were sitting obviously in Argentinian Pesos and so they're imagine getting your budget like slashed like in by 60% you
know so they just literally had to go home um and so yeah just think it it um I you know I pray for the continued dominance of the US dollar as long as we both shall live live um for the sake of our children and their children yeah but um stable are good you know stable coins are are um are a big Catalyst for the dollar it's kind of fascinating I mean I
it doesn't seem like anyone's announced like Bridge's revenue or how big they were but it um do you have they did it it was like1 15 million dollar run rate so huge multiple but it seems like they have a massive regulatory Moe or or have done a lot of hard work on the reg side that's what I actually don't um as you know yeah idea guys non-technical Folk I don't know what they built that was so
valuable that stripe couldn't build it themselves and felt like they had to what you don't know is like how much of this this is almost like stripe hedging like strip's been had a lot of stable coin initiatives internally they've been trying P right yeah they've been trying they've been working on this space for a really long time so I'm I'm excited for
it to come out more of like what did they build that was so yeah critical that they had to pay 100 times revenue or whatever they paid well this uh Anon signal wrote on conviction Finance Zach has managed to do the near impossible obtaining solid licenses with the two major jurisdictions of the United States and Europe where they are both permitted to transmit large sums of money and
exchange currencies on behalf of users essentially a ramp one for the Euro zone is located in Poland the other US Delaware C Corp is located in Berkeley us C Corp has money transmitter licenses approved in 22 States and they got more uh and they're close to 48 states now if not they already have them and so it feels like Bridge went out and did all this like heavy lifting on the
regulatory side to actually get approved and then they also have very high transfer limits I guess there are tiers to the money transfer like like you know uh approval uh levels and so they did all this hard work and I wonder if that's if that's difficult for strip because they're such a big company maybe they're like you know it becomes more of a political issue the politicians want
to extract more of a pound of Flesh or something because you would assume that like okay a bigger company would actually have an easier time getting Transit lies it's sort of interesting stripe knows how important stable coins are to their business long term did they only spend like $50 million trying to make this happen did they spend $100 million internally did they spend $500 million internally and
like fail yeah right I just don't know why they didn't have the lobbying power they have the technical prowess and the like War chest to have made this happen and so maybe Zach is um who knows maybe uh maybe Zach you know plays like Oh I'm a nice guy I don't do podcast just you know I just I'm just interested in money but then behind the scenes he just was was just
an absolute animal right just seems like just doing deals with the mafia in Poland Poland he did what he did in Europe now he was in yeah he was in Poland on Founder mode meeting with the mafia to get this done yeah one one thing I was listening to that podcast with him and he he pointed out this very interesting thing that I couldn't quite get to the bottom of was is that there's some sort
of like Legacy ruling in the American banking system where dollars in a bank account need to be demarcated between checking and savings and I and I'm not exactly sure why I think it might actually just be to for the measurement of the money supply um I couldn't really get to the bottom of it but um he said that like one of the things that the stable coin infrastructure
unlocks is the ability to have a yield bearing account that then you can also transact with so basically just merging a checking in savings account and now like a crypto skeptic would say like well that's like a stupid technical feature like why can't you just make a uh a combined checking and savings account or a a yield bearing checking account but it's like well there's so
much cruff in the legal system around the American Financial system it's like maybe yeah you do just need to like have some sort of Green Field fresh start and that's enough I don't know yeah so at Capital we had uh we had a high yield checking account so it's not that um it is a good I mean I I think the there's so much um platform and infrastructure risk and all this stuff
right like one of the reasons that they maybe had to buy bridge I'm just speculating is that Stripes existing Bank Partners had no interest in taking on that level of risk right we at Capital we were rolling out a stablecoin custody product when we were informed by our bank partner that we we were going to have to jettison a lot of our digital asset oriented customers and so our
entire product strategy like fell apart because we couldn't do the thing that our customers wanted and in fact had to be like hey you guys should like leave basically um so there's so much um that that is I feel like the whole Bridge story is such a good example of risk-taking right there's so much that bridge was trying to do that when they started was unclear if it was even going to be
possible and so often times opportunities like that attract unsophisticated Founders that don't know what they're getting themselves into and then Founders that are sophisticated and already successful and comfortable with the risk right yeah because a lot of people would have said like oh what you're trying to do is you're going to get destroyed by stripe or you're going
to get destroyed by block and square or or oh what you're trying to do like no bank's going to allow that or you're never going to get money transmitter licenses or whatever the things that there there would have been a lot of ways to to if you were writing an investment memo on the business be like what could go wrong here and Zach I'm sure was totally aware of all those
risks and still comfortable with it and and it shows that it shows that there's so much Alpha in just being okay with the fact that you're taking on a regular you're taking on a lot of regulatory risk you're taking on a lot of platform risk and you need to just that's part of what creates these sort of exponential opportunities um do you think there'll ever be a stable coin
dep pegging in the sense that like normally when when a stable coin deegs it's like a disaster because it means that like it's been discovered that that they don't actually hold the assets but I wonder if in the future stable coins become so popular that they be they essentially become Global super valuable and then the the US the the FED is like printing too many dollars and the
dollars become inflationary and and just like the dollar went off the gold standard imagine if like the imagine if usdc or usdt become so big that they say you know what we're we're no longer backed by the dollar because we are more stable than the dollar yeah right now they're using the dollar stability so that's been a huge critique of of um so coinbase has always taken the
approach yeah that um that everything like they they've taken a very transparent approach yeah tether I don't think has ever come close to the same level of transparency yeah there's always question there's a huge amount of you know saying tether usdt can say oh yeah we're stable coin but what if but it's a private company and what if they've just been they could have been giving
themselves for every dollar you know dollar that they take in and and sort of minting a new stable coin what if 30% of the time they were like we're just going to take you know I don't know right like you just don't really know what's going on and that's why they're they're usdt deeg during the whole FTX Saga there was like a lot of very very minoring L which was like off like 30%
one day and was like okay this is the end um yeah and so I think that uh there will undoubtedly be a time in the future where a major stable coin like blows up right because part of part of crypto by saying hey decentralized Finance which is another way of saying unregulated Finance or like digital you know crypto-based Finance the whole thing has just been speed running why we
have all these Financial regulations in the first place right so if you allow anybody if you allow a global team of anons to start creating Financial products yeah you're going to similar things are going to happen to the wild west of America when like 10 dudes were like yeah let's create a bank yeah you know and this is like the cattle bank and you know whatever and they just are
they're just freestyling you know Finance yeah yeah yeah I mean the bull case here is that is that it's like yes they are speedrunning like let's regulate Financial products for the first time but just by virtue of the fact that they are not immediately slotted into the existing regulatory scheme you're able to take a second crack at creating more effective regulations that make more sense and
allow for Speed and transparency or whatever and you're just it's just like you know it's the same thing as the people that want to like go and build a new country just because there's like so much legal crft because every year in America we're adding like 10 times the amount of laws that we're deleting right yeah so the amount of laws is just growing growing growing that slows down
Innovation that slows down the the financial sector and so it's like yeah it is the wild west it is really bad while it's completely unregulated but there's a really bullish case for whatever regulation comes it's just going to be a little bit more fresh and a little bit more from first principles and hopefully a little more permissive and just informed by the the the wins
and losses of the last you know few decades in the traditional Finance system absolutely the other thing that's interesting about the whole thing is that stripe was willing to pay 20% of what people believe circles eventual IPO will be so people are projecting Circle IPO at at something like5 billion valuation Circle what let's look at what their market cap is right now but I you
mean for the stable coin market cap because that's just the value of all the stable coins yeah but they really really high and then they get a percentage on that as their Market W you can you can buy usdc for 99 cents right now dpeg it's the end pegging um game over what is the so the market cap is 3 4 billion do right now yeah um and that's for all the stable coins they get a the
reason that that's substantial is it means that circle is has taken on $34 billion and is earning interest yield on that which right now is somewhere around 5% uh and they're giving a lot of that back as incentives but it's still very very profitable business um so anyways some thing that Zach and the bridge team did resulted in it being their $15 million company being worth a billion
dollars and we'll find it out over time I imagine yeah I mean crypto needed a win yeah that wasn't speculation it's not enough to be it's not even though pump do fun who knows what the Enterprise value of a business like that is right because it feels like very like it's on the most shaky regulatory ground possible but they're doing I think like 100 million a
year in fees right so that's a massive win from a revenue generation standpoint but what is that company worth so I think crypto needed a win and it's certainly uh got one I mean it feels like this year there's been three major wins across all three of those speculation wise Bitcoin is near all-time highs like in terms of the digital gold thesis like it's very very
solid and so this whole you know fear that was being sewed by the crypto Skeptics was correct around some of the bubbly nfts but clearly it was wrong about Bitcoin because it's had much more staying power than those folks predicted right they like everyone was predicting that Bitcoin once it sold off from 65 at the height or I think it was like 70 for a little bit during the peak down to
like it was in the 30s and maybe even high 20s at one point well back up and if it keeps if it keeps going up and down like yeah it's it's volatile but it's here to stay in one way or another and then you have poly market like absolutely dominating like the new cycle and providing some sort of insight and and you know some some value that's like much more yeah I mean there's there's
the dgen Gambler aspect to it but there's also just like the like the Normy value of like of like people want to look at a percentage of who's going to win the presidential election that has value people will pay for that people and that that seems like something that's more fundamental and more easy to Value than like what is an art piece worth right yeah like if you're a business or a hedge fund or
something and you think that the there's going to be some economic impact to a trump election versus a versus a Harris win like having that data is valuable I wonder if this is available to see on chain but what percentage of poly markets bets are on the election versus anything else like it must be like 98% I don't know if it's 98% but it's it's certainly High there's like a billion
dollars of liquidity in the in the election right now I I asked Shane like what does he think the next um the next biggest Market will be after the election and uh I I think they have some pretty exciting things planned um they they I don't believe they use um bridge but they do use stable coins on the background on in in the back end um but they're a very crypto native company so
they were able to implement that and Zach's been in or um uh Shane's been in crypto for years in the ethereum community but for so many other companies using stable coins is like a huge hassle I mean you don't want to roll your own infrastructure there like with my first business we took we we accepted coin payments through coinbase in 2013 and it was a mess it was a
disaster I I think I mean we lost like $10 million because we sold it too early we should have held it and then um also it was just like a nightmare from from an accounting perspective because you basically are operating in foreign currencies and you have to reconcile those so your balance sheets like fluctuating left and right and so you wind up accepting them and then for
anyone who has a product with any sort of return policy you wind up acting as as a hedge right CU like let's say that you're selling take that Bitcoin back exactly let's say you're selling microphones for $500 you buy 10 microphones for Bitcoin you have $5,000 in mics if the price goes down you just sell those microphones uh for and get your cash back get dollars but if the
price goes up you return the microphones and you get and you get the Bitcoin backin and so you wind up in this weird scenario where like if the price is going up you you tell the customers well okay we will refund you in the currency that you gave us or if it's going down so you're always like playing this weird game of like what do I give back to the customer because you act as a hedge so
uh it it's just really really difficult but obviously if you can just plug stable coins in it makes a ton of sense and that's what's happening that's actually the win out what if it comes out that stripe paid a billion because Zach had taken his entire $50 million round from seoa and just gone super long on bitcoin and then he's sitting on like so the company
actually got bought for1 million but then there's a billion dollars and it's like seoa is like you know what we made this bet once with SPF it didn't work but you did it you know uh I I was waitting you know that famous story about the FedEx founder yeah yeah so the the FedEx founder he's down to his last dollar the company's about to go out of business famously he goes to Vegas puts all the
company's assets on black comes up black he doubles his money he's able to make payroll the business keeps growing now the the conspiracy theory is that it wasn't he didn't go to the casino he went to like a loan sh dark in Vegas or like the mafia I no the real yeah Ben where's my tinfoil hat um um is that is the water in the shot for him can you just keep it on the
other side or something um it would be on brand for me to have water in the shot yeah the whole time um no so I think the real conspiracy theory is that he was Narco traffi you know doing like trafficking drugs getting a lot of cash needed a story in terms to say like all he have would have to do to make 100 grand in cash is do like one run for the cartel and then all of a
sudden he's got oh because he's in fed yeah that makes he's in the trucking exactly so you could be like okay I'm just going to do one so if you want to if you want to create a a hypothetically legendary hypothetically legendary story of how you bet your company on the C at at in Vegas and you suddenly came up with all this cash yeah that's a pretty good way to that's that's super fascinating yeah
you'd have all the infrastructure to do but but uh anyway so take my tinfoil hat off but I I I I think that um yeah I was always thinking that during the last crypto boom when everything was just ripping there was we were going to hear the story of a company that raised some money didn't find product Market fit but put their whole treasury in some altcoin and wound
up with like just a huge Treasury and then maybe they would maybe they would keep building use that and then actually make a make a win and it'd be like wait a minute that company came out of like stealth they raised a $1 million seedr but they have a thousand employees or something and they're just launching this product like what happened it's like oh well yeah because they turned
that million into 100 million yeah essentially gambling uh and it would be like a FedEx stle story but uh everyone I talked to en crypto was like yeah there's been people that do that but they just ride off in the sunset and they just leave and they don't and they just stop building they just drop out which sucks um but yeah with this uh with with Bridge the the one really
interesting example that I that I did see of like a company using this and it was a perfect example of of of this was uh scale so they have a bunch of contractors internationally they want to pay them quickly in dollars because there's no fluctuation and so they use I think they use a product that's built on top of bridge I love how we say there's
no fluctuation of the dollar I mean been devalued yeah yeah but like relative to a lot of these other places like like people would be so happy to get paid in dollars on the day that they work and that's something that stable coins can can bring so it it's interesting to watch crypto like rack up these like very real wins whether it's like Bitcoin becoming essentially Lindy haters will
say it's Photoshop yeah exactly well haters will focus on the board apes and it's like yeah that was one thing that didn't work out it was so it was Yuga it was yugal Labs that was our customer that um really that uh didn't use our when they when they raised with us didn't use the stable coin functionality um well should we move on to brother of the week yeah this was a tough one uh but
first I need to tell you about netjets if you're looking for the ultimate and flexibility and convenience when it comes to private travel netjets offers an unparalleled experience with access to the world's largest Fleet of private jets netjets allows you to enjoy the benefits of private Aviation without the hassle of ownership netjets operates the largest most diverse private aircraft
Fleet in the world and offers a full range of personalized private Aviation solutions to meet and exceed the high standards of the world's most Discerning travels uh Travelers uh tell a personal story about flying on a private jet uh do you have a lot of experience in the private jet world not as much as I'd like John uh I think that uh private Aviation is the last true luxury
something that uh David senra said you know told him what's that one of his mentors told him the life goal is to get a private jet once you get only thing that matters the only thing that matters the only thing that matters here's the thing you can sleep in a private jet yep you can't fly a house right so what does that tell you yeah optimize for the jet don't optimize
for the house that's true right yeah U I'm surprised that's not more of a thing if you think about it RVs are big and and why are people not just saying you know I'm gonna get I'm going to buy this jet or I'm going to I'm going to leverage Net Jets primarily as a you know sort of like this sort of RV in the skies right there is this interesting thing where people always complain like
oh we don't have flying cars yet we don't have flying cars yet but we do we do it's just not evenly distributed yet we have we have private jets which you can take anywhere like gets a flying car and then we also have helicopters yeah and if you put those two together I'm surprised that fly any yeah I'm surprised that it hasn't become more popular to
develop you know something you know maybe this is a partnership with netjets right but developing you know a city in Arizona that's way off the beaten path that has consistent air you know private air travel between LA or somewhere that's that's a comparable distance to New York um anyways there's you know we're thrilled uh to partner with netjets as consumers and as a show and
you know we we um look forward to many you know more trips with them in the future and um yeah so thanks to them uh should we move on to brother of the week we got to give it to Daniel Francis getting doxed uh you might know him as Daniel Johnson DJ or glow growing Daniel growing Daniel growing Daniel one of the greatest posters he uh he announced his startup able this week um and it is a an
AI startup for police and he's based in San Francisco and he uh he launched it an interesting way I mean he has over 100,000 followers basically everything he posts goes viral like he's fantastic as posting but he chose to launch this in kind of the most Normy way possible just like a tech crunch article Tech crunch article but his Aura was so powerful that oh did he did he do an
interview with Gary or something Gary I think was just a big investor and yeah yeah so like like you know he could have he could have gone on a podcast he could have done a launch video he knows people he could have done all sorts of stuff but he went with just the tech crunch article which is kind of hilarious and counter I think he might still be having a little like bit of an identity crisis
he's like I'm the number one poster on Tech Twitter yep and I'm building AI for cops yeah it is a little hard because like yeah maybe you know his account is ship hosting like there's a couple ship hosters that I follow like there's this one guy Chris Becky do you know him he worked at he ran lasy he sold it to Twitter and he worked at X and then he left and when he left he was
like big news like I'm leaving company like thanks everyone and he's always posting so my reply was just like oh this is like your best joke yet this is hilarious like can't believe you even like you even got rid of your official badge like you know this is like searing comedy great satire on like what what cringe people do when they leave companies you know and so you could see
this like backfiring if he's like hey I'm launching this like police AI startup everyone would just be like oh like this is the best ship post ever he's like no guys it actually is real I'm actually like a real person yeah it's funny to think about him and some Milwaukee Police Station you know doing a customer like meeting or conversation or a sales thing and they're like so you
know we have a few minutes before the chief arrives what tell me about yourself you know what do you have any family and law enforcement and um he goes well I'm somewhat of a sheriff myself on Tech Twitter actually a little town called technology Twitter I don't know if you've ever been there but um I actually met Elon Musk um yeah I mean I think that uh uh this is
not here's the thing people aren't gonna want to say there's there's always anytime somebody posts a lot and is building a company all the VCS that suck at posting try to Signal them you know and sort of like on them and and be like oh this is not a serious founder or whatever why he's posting but but whether you like it or not if somebody can figure out how to post really well
yeah they can figure out how to build a company and get attention and communicate in the right ways to raise money to hire great people to get customers so for some reason or another the skill set of posting translates well to doing well it's it's the compression of ideas right so like posting a banger tweet is just taking some sort of like concept that's bouncing around in The
Ether and boiling it down into something that's funny or fits into a meme format that gets attention yeah exactly and it relays a complex Concept in a very short amount of time and and that is just a valuable skill as long as you don't get addicted to it you're not just making posting your entire life or like getting sucked into it and having some weird em but I don't think he has for Daniel it's
an edge because his ex income allows him to take a lower salary from he probably makes a decent amount right yeah he's probably making like 10 grand a month or something Couple Grand a month from that um oh yeah Cy is in here yeah oh we got long journey that's great Justin's over there yeah that's awesome and YC I love it do you did you see the his it's it I will say it is the most
hilarious business that he could built straight up as a PO as a poster to go build AI for cops I'm totally for it I want I want the police to have more funding yeah I think that they have gone through a decade of being ostracized and put down and told that they were bad people when these are people that get paid way less money than they should probably to do a job that is very
challenging and uh you you know half the country seemingly hates you whether they're people that are breaking laws or people that are just uh police haters so um I think it's I think it's totally a smart move because he can go make building AI for cops cool and attract other smart posters um but it's it it's it's funny from the lens that I would say that you know somebody like aush
who's building warp is like a you know talented poster there was a lot more overlap in terms of the customer the buyer his audience yeah um I just don't think you know maybe two cops follow growing Daniel out of his 100,000 yeah the only value is maybe hiring Engineers which is deeply valuable but and and investors yeah like every VC who's on Tech aware the real yeah the real the
real Edge is ability to raise capital and hire talented people that otherwise wouldn't be going and applying for a job at at a AI for cops yeah startup yeah do you remember his stunt at Twitter when of course it was iconic of course I was actually I got dinner with Raul the night before that happened no way and we were just like hanging out and then I went into uh like a meeting at Founders
fund the next day and we all open up our phones and we're seeing like he the guy that I had dinner with the night before and and Daniel just out front of uh out front of Twitter HQ like talking to Dear DeRosa at CNBC about how they got laid off and like causing this like viral like fake news cycle and just iconic that was amazing and and it's no that was really like the moment it's no fluke
that that both those guys have gone on to build interesting companies they they're interesting people exactly yeah and I think I I think both of them like have the ability to not get lost in the sauce on Twitter you could raise a whole the you could raise a whole fund dedicated to funding posters yeah right it's just the poster index yeah and I think it would
outperform perhaps there's only one way to find out only one way to find out got to fund the posters fund the posters it's an interesting it's an interesting category to be in like pretty sure the company that makes the body cams has is doing pretty well I think it's uh I think it's the same company that owns the tasers I forget what company that is but uh but they're they're like a
multi-billion dollar public company yep um it's just it's just hard because like selling into police departments is uh it's not it's not where there's one the real the real play is building twitch meets police body cam meets poly Market you can actually you can bet on what's going to happen chases and um yeah we're in pursuit of this person will they pull over or will they make a
run for it yeah okay I see a Hellcat engine he's he's breaking for it um yeah yeah the other company that's done really well here is uh are you familiar with flock safety yeah yeah they are crushing it and uh and is that a Founders fund company and they made that another big acquisition oh yeah yeah they did yeah yeah yeah and and and everyone thought it was really really
hard to build like the the for like the local government because it's just so fragmented and you have to go like jurisdiction by jurisdiction um but some people have cracked it and so you know if he can figure that out it's gonna be good it's gonna be good I'm excited so congratulations to Daniel the brother of the week brother of the week should we do some uh tweet reactions I like this
one so Elon Musk has been playing Diablo relentlessly I mean the guy is one of the top 30 Diablo players in the world right now something like that and so Alex liberman uh over at morning Brew says how does this man have time to play video games I would absolutely love to see a screenshot of Elon musk's calendar would be a fascinating window into Elite time management prioritization and
delegation and so yeah I mean he's running SpaceX Tesla neuralink boring company all pretty serious efforts uh um then also campaigning constantly and doing tons of interviews he's also running Twitter X constantly and then apparently becoming one of the greatest Diablo players ever in the world yeah and then and then uh aren't there people that are saying
that he's not actually playing and maybe he has a whole team of people that are playing so they warming up the account for him so he just get come so one of one of the other great DIA players did kind of a breakdown and said that so Diablo basically has new season content every quarter where there's like a new final boss and new levels and stuff so even if you're maxing out your account
when the new season drops like you have several hundred hours of content in front of you just to get to the right level to beat the final boss and so in order to beware he is which is beating because he mean in this tweet he says like uh 5 minute t-150 clear which is like the hardest thing you can possibly do right now hope there's some midseason content because he basically like
finished the expansion pack like like a month and a half and it's supposed to take you like three months or maybe longer and so uh so one one of the Diablo like you know fan says like in order to do this like you literally have to be playing like 40 hours a week or something like that maybe more and so now there's like this this theory that maybe Elon has a team of interns or
something like playing on his account doing a lot of like the grinding and leveling and then can just L on for the best which is which is like amazing delegation if that's true maybe just playing it's giving ammo to I mean the guy spends a lot of time on Jets right sure I'm sure starlink testing starlink making sure it's working what better way to test the product than to play you know Diablo um
I think that this is potentially giving some ammunition to the folks out there that say elon's not a real he didn't build SpaceX he didn't do this or that he hires team that's like the that's the number one gotcha that people like try to get Elon for that yeah it's like you didn't do that other you hired people that did that which is like okay you should you should H people you should
hire people in build Nur link too yeah uh I think everybody would benefit if you could do that um but yeah this is giving some real you know ammo to those people who are going to do a take down piece which I'm sure journalists will find a way to paint this in a elon's deceptive video game practices apply to much more than just you know online games elon's treating the entire world
like an online game yeah um he thinks leveling up is all that matters when you know yeah I mean I think it's I think it's human humanizing it's good like the idea of you know this very powerful and wealthy person like not having fun or like letting off steam at any point is like very blackpilling to me do you think that he is over having kids and now is just like I'm gonna be a kid he
was joking about it recently right he was saying he was going to have Taylor Swift's baby that would be that would be or he was like offering I can't wait that part of the simulation I think he's down and I think he's hit such economies of scale with the with the children that like I would be surprised if it ever stops I have this theory that like there's a lot of there's a lot of
like old dudes who I don't know there's a lot of like old billionaires who are like constantly getting divorced and remarried and I think at a certain point it's like they just like having weddings because weddings are just like big parties and like an excuse to to to th because you because you look at you look at I forget it was like maybe the founder of News Corp rert Murdoch like
he had like three weddings in the course of like nine years years or something he's getting remarried every couple years and it's like okay why doesn't he just like date or like not get married but at a certain point it's like he probably has some legal team that can like structure the perfect like prenup and then he just gets to throw a wedding and his girlfriend likes that and so
he's just like yeah okay run it back we'll do another one it's not not a big deal and then when they break up it's like yeah they get divorced but to him it's just like breaking up with someone it's like very like low stakes I think yeah but it's like an excuse that would be that would be I see that way yeah if Elon Elon should should open source his
entire you know family building Playbook including even if he's not getting married to these women I'm sure they're signing documentation that basically says if we have a child you Tak care of yeah yeah these are the terms well he gets he sends a term sheet well he got destroyed by pav durov recently because pavle has like 50 kids because he was not only he got mogged oh he got totally
mogged because pavle it came out that he has like 50 kids because he's been like donating sperm at sperm banks and stuff and just doing like all this crazy stuff that's that's it feels a little unnal not it's not L yeah that's not a that's not a cool way to have 50 kids no over 100 biolog for Pavo yeah that makes sense over 100 that's to Reckless and weird just like yeah you know he is
a dripped out technology brother though so no I support I support I I guess I support I just think that why not just have 50 children with 50 women if you're going to I don't know I guess he does he just doesn't he doesn't yeah uh well let's move on to this one so uh will who I think was at open AI for a while I follow this guy uh he says I don't understand the recent trend of
college dropouts specifically raising some insane 1021 million at250 $500 million valuations pre-product or pre-revenue often for idiotic are people unable to see how they're themselves it's not just free money my brother and he kind of went on to say like yeah that he knows a lot of people that were young and they raised too much money and now they're buried under a
pref stack and it's kind of a war generation this is this is the Dark Side of pattern matching yeah where pattern matching Zach who had been in fintech for over a decade building at Square his own company then Square then coinbase then um brex to go then build another fintech company but pattern matching oh Mark Zuckerberg dropped out to build the social media app and then go on to make a a plethora
of devastating you know mistakes and mishaps with people and the you know the government and all these different things and then when I saw this tweet the number one that the company I was thinking about is a company called mock which is making um I let's see oh wait uh mock Industries mock Industries which is like an MIT yeah yeah yeah Dropout and you
know they're building uh I think they're building hypersonics it like hydrogen weapons hydrogen powered weap he was going to shoot down weather balloons and drones and just defense Ty the issue is is but yeah got a lot of money very quickly speedr running um in in some of these industries that where the stakes are a lot higher like defense Tech yep you're seeing some of those issues with
mock where one of their employees like was hospitalized with like devastating inj injuries because something blew up and um there's a real I I I I don't think uh I'm all for giving smart young people lots of money to to do ambitious things but it's almost like they're find the balance of it right so so bet on BET on the kid bet on the Dropout but go get them somebody
from lockie Martin to be their chaperon that's the under discuss thing about Facebook they had some like VP of engineering who was like 45 who was there very early I forget what this guy's name is but he was like allegedly like very important in like stabilizing the company early on when it was a bunch of crazy kids around around and and he had like just the right level of respect
to be like okay when he speaks up we should listen but he's not trying to like be like oh we got to bring in net Suite like he wasn't like he wasn't slowing anything down but he was providing like just enough like you know basic rules because at one point like Facebook was all just like one file on on a web server and like when you wanted to make a code change you would just be
like he everybody I'm pushing the code like nobody make any changes I'm going to update the file or whatever like the files on the web server was like it was like crazy and he like brought in like cool stuff that like cool process that everyone was like okay yeah this process actually makesense which is cool um it's uh it's interesting because I think there's there's two things that are kind
of on a collision course with these like crazy high valuations and high early checks and it's one that the funds are bigger than ever and even though we went through the Zer era and and VC fundraising went down there's still so many more billion doll funds out there than there were 10 years ago so there's just more money to deploy and you got to deploy it to get the fee so there's all
these incentives align with like we got to deploy big money so let's push out the IPO window do more growth stuff let's put more money into earlier stage companies like write bigger checks that's fine and and then simultaneously the two hot Industries are in in immensely Capital intensive AI so I'm gonna come in and say yeah I'm going to do a training run I need to hire I need
to hire a bunch of Engineers that are gonna want a million dollars a year and I'm gonna also need to buy a bunch of Nvidia gpus and do a bunch of CeX and build out a training center and even if I'm not Capital intensive even if I'm Capital light a training run might still cost $10 million for my first thing so like there's just higher Computing costs
and we're not in the zero marginal cost era of AI and then defense is the same thing yeah I'm going to need to buy a bunch of CNC machines a bunch of like a bunch of aluminum like all this stuff has cost it's not just this oh yeah you're YC you get 100K and you're going to go spin up a web server and your cost is going to be perfectly matched with your Revenue like when your website
blows up and starts getting a ton of traffic well yeah you're going to have paying customers then so all of a sudden we have the two hottest categories are highly Capital intensive at least in theory and then you have funds that are perfectly set up to fund those Capital intensive businesses so it's just like anyone with an idea let's get a big check in there but the problem is is
that if you if you wind up pivoting to something that is isn't as capital intensive or doesn't find like the immediate product Market fit you wind up buried under this huge Capital stack and I think that's what I think that's the pain people are feeling right now but yeah they'll probably get uh they probably get a call from Jeremy gon soon yeah yeah Jeremy mock Industries
is Jeremy's like who knows um no I think that the challenge is um so this happens with with with uh let's say the I think the the the rule is maybe it's to Pew's law which is the faster you get a lot of money like the Dumber you will be with it right and so if you win the lottery yeah you're going to just spend that money horrendously and that's almost always what happens
because you didn't have to learn how money works you didn't have to learn how hard it is to make it and so you're just doing like crazy crazy and this happens even with Angel Investing people like oh I'm going to do Angel Investing and their worst five Investments sometimes you get these people that are like oh yeah my first two Angel Investments are unicorns and that's because of the networks they were
in but more often it's somebody search chual investing and makes like a their the worst five Investments that they'll make in the first five deals that they do yeah and so I think the challenge here is when money comes really fast and easy like you're an MIT Dropout that raises $50 million in the first year you're just going to make a bunch of really bad decisions it's everything from you're
going to spend $400,000 on a brand identity because your VC connected you to a to a to the top that seems good right to the top agency and you're not thinking about the real cost of that you're going to make a hire that's not a good culture fit because they just care about cash comp and you're going to just overpay for them and then now you're dealing with
this person that not holding the bar on hiring you're like I just need to hit my hiring quota so yeah I optimize you you're you're telling you you know these people get excited about being like Oh yeah we're we're a 20 person team and it's like well you don't even know what you're building yet you don't even need to be like fully starving but just like a year or two of like being somewhat
cash constrained is going to set the culture up for years where you're going to go back and like the CEO is just going to be when some VP comes to them and is like I want to spend $500,000 on a branding package they're going to be like what like I did our first brand myself like yeah like why do we need to jump there let's just do a half step and then and then all of those are going to
add up to like saving money and being a little bit more judicious and a little bit less like frivolous and then you won't have a culture of frivolousness which I think is like the real danger with like the yeah overall when people are I don't think I don't think it's bad for the world that this stuff happens to be honest and in fact in fact the entire
model is predicated on if you back 20 MIT dropouts and one of them builds a generational firm y then it worked y That's the entire model of venture capital so will I I think it's a funny tweet and and like I respect that point of view but he's not really realizing what the real game Adventure is which is if one of these companies becomes 10% as big is SpaceX than the entire investment
strategy worked that's true but he's not talking to venture capitalist here he's talking to entrepreneurs Brothers yeah he's talking to the brothers and so what he's saying is not that like yes all of these deals could add up to plenty of funds doing well and even the bad funds they're going to return Capital they're going to be One X funds maybe two x funds um they'll be okay it's not like
the cash will really get totally incinerated the the problem is is that I think he's trying to just raise a flag to College Dropout young people that it's like yes you can go and do the the fake work of twisting your idea into something that fits a VC narrative and say oh well like we could be asset light but we can raise more money if we say we're going to train our own model or we
could we could do this but if we say that we need to buy this huge manufacturing plant and put up a big American flag we'll be able to raise more money so let's go with that path even if it's not the right path for our business even that's even if that's not what the capital structure of our industry demands and so you wind up building for the VCS instead of for the
market for the customer and for yourself and so I think that's kind of the The Meta take here to some degree yeah but yeah gotta kiss a lot of frogs the game should we do this one I love this one Evan Armstrong writes obviously I am excited for my child but also really wish I had like two more months to write just today pre one prepr pre-product robotics company raising a two billion
valuation two Bridge getting bought at 90x Revenue three rumors about new models coming can't help but want to publish on this amazing I know this is a man who prioritizes work over everything else skip fraternity leave brother it is yeah it is it is the most important thing that keeps the keeps the society keeps capitalism grinding the Relentless Mark of techn capital is nothing without
those who are willing to put their family to the side I took off 36 hours when my son was born not necessarily proud of that but I he was born Saturday like you know in the early early hours of the morning 12 hour 12 hour Monday 12 call I legitimately had a 12 12h hour meeting back of back-to-backs on Monday um but we had to like that that was the only
way we had to do that uh I didn't do that with the second one um but uh but yeah I mean I think that uh that's just a sign that Evan loves his work that's great and he is there's a lot of EX stuff stuff we wouldn't have this podcast if there wasn't stuff to talk about also I mean underrated about this tweet work life balance always goes viral so I don't know if this got dunked
on but like if you're if you're rage baiting like this is the best possible rage bait if you're just trying to grow your account like because people will fight about this forever yeah because he could have tweeted while I'm a big fan of organic intelligence yeah being my new child I'm really a fan of artificial intelligence and exact and the child that I'm having today I could have had
the same child 400 years ago but Ai and large language models didn't exist 400 years ago exactly if you just dial this up he just rewrites this he's like I haven't seen my child in months but I've been writing boom yeah they're actually so every is chugging along I've subscribed to their stuff forever I think that they are too nice of guys to be in the media business they now they
they spun out a word processing um product which which seems cool uh but they're not like Eric newcomer who's putting up seven figures of IA yeah because you know maybe they are now I don't I don't know I have no idea um but I think that Evan is too nice to rage bait you know like he he only went 50% of the way there yeah what what is the actual it's every yeah it's a media
company I think they're focus on on AI yeah I've never seen them get uh absolutely raked over the coals by Tech or the Communists and you got to have an enemy if you don't have an enemy you don't have an ally yeah the only reason people R together the enemy of my yeah no seriously you have to have an enemy if you don't have an enemy there's no reason for someone to be your ally we
should who we need to pick an enemy the working class obviously there you go yeah we we all know that the working class gets too much credit and it's long and it's and and respect for the for the financial professional yeah Blue Collar yeah yeah they're they're clearly the enemy um yeah we haven't done our jobs until people are use calling us billionaires in a sort of negative exactly
yeah uh I mean unironically the the the enemy that I always focus on in the tech stuff is is China essentially and and the for that's easy and that's so authentic to to my lived experience because I I studied abroad in Shanghai yeah I studied while I was there at basically the Harvard of China I worked at a tech tech accelerator like while I was there and within 48 Hours of setting
foot in that country I knew that I wanted to do everything I wanted to spend my life making sure that we contained China and that and that they didn't export the their sort of way of life to the world um so I don't have any issues with the people of China of course but their way of life yeah certainly yeah and and and I feel like that's I always try and remind people in
Tech when there's these little feuds like oh Miami versus San Francisco like which is cooler or like the gundo versus SF like AI versus hard tech or even like the intro fights between like the VC firms like andreon Sequoia Founders fund like they're all beefing or whatever and and I'm like okay like there might be good reasons for these beefs but like let's refocus on like the real battle
here is America all going conversation at milin yeah everyone everyone's on the same team here and and I try and I try and Focus especially like when the gundo Bros start going hard on SF I'm like do you think China is having these fights over over Wuhan versus Shanghai no they say what is Wuhan good at biotechnology bioweapons development what what what is what is Shenzhen good
at copying American Consumer Electronics like they're both excellent in their own ways in the same way that the gundo is great at hardtech and San Francisco is great at AI they're not fighting couldn't have said it better myself they're working together as one team we need to be one team over here in America yeah who's the L who we need to find the lp in seoa and dreon and Founders fund
this is probably Saudi oh there's tons not even Saudi that's gonna be like put who's the who's the one person that can put all the GPS on one group chat and be like stop squash this right now in front of me you know who it is I I think it's zuck's family office you know that from I forget they're called but I'm pretty sure they're LP and everything yeah um but
there's a bunch of others you know endowments and whatnot dad the GPS are fighting again yeah I I I do think that I I I love the idea of like you know uh being a Founder became High status so it was like oh I gotta I gotta graduate from college and get on the track and you know start a company drop out I gotta get into a good then it was like drop out and oh like I'm just gonna go
straight to Angel Investing or like start a VC firm and it's like okay like kind of odd and then we talked about that one guy who is like uh he's starting like uh fund management software it's like one layer of abstraction pretty soon it's just going to be like I'm just GNA go be an LP I'm straight to be an L straight to be an LP yeah the investing is something that I
feel like I grew up in the so immersed in the Silicon Valley ethos of you can just do things you can do anything that the the number one way in which I've felt that experience really matters is in Angel Investing because I just started Angel Investing and I didn't know you know there was no I didn't go to Jason calican a school of ask if you had done that like I didn't didn't do
that I just started investing in cool ideas with smart people and it's overall been very you know fruitful that strategy but there's been a number of it's like okay I talked with Zach yeah within six months of him incorporating Bridge didn't invest yep I met Shane from poly market like we would DM back in like 2021 and I didn't go back up the brink truck and uh and now having had
those experiences I'm like next time when I meet people like that now I just figure out a way to give them money as fast as possible yep and experience matters like my returns from this era of my investing life will be better than the prior era because of that learning yeah well are you going to invest in any fentanyl vaccines you see this article oh yeah this is the I I think I texted
this to the group being being I think this is in Bloomberg says a fentanyl vaccine is a long shot that just might work what did you find interesting about this so I just think it's funny because it's the private markets doing what they do best which is finding solutions to problems that the government is not capable of solving I just think that the government is probably a lot more able
to tackle the fentanyl issue than uh than then well they have a monopoly on violence and they should enforce that at the ports right right right and and but at the same time yeah I mean if you if you sell this through medical clinics potentially people come in when they're not at or they're Rock Bottom just a hilarious yeah they're at rock bottom they say like literally going to buy
some sketchy cocaine right now please can I get this vaccine will it will it kick in in the next two hours you know because I just I don't I don't know but I but I I think it's um I really don't know who the customer is for this uh I mean I can imagine but it seems like sort of a very I don't know like people that think like I'm very happy to report that I don't ever expect
to encounter fenel true my life yeah um and so this vaccine I'm you know what I need I need an iasa vaccine so then I can go into the jungle with all the tech billionaires and be like yeah let's go on this Iasi Retreat totally like and they're all getting oneshotted and I'm just sitting there like a demig god yeah yeah getting stronger you're having to fely like oh yeah it's so crazy like the
world's open like I had this brilliant idea like it's a nicotine company you should invest they're like wow that's what that's what the demon told you I was like yeah it told me it told me that nicotine pouches are a big big category 20 on 20 on 200 right now exactly exactly um yeah yeah just think getting like if you're going to do that vaccine just start
doing start V start creating vaccines for everything I mean the vaccines are a great business model so it is uh I want a vaccine for uh low testosterone yeah that's one another one would be like imbox zero you know it's like a vaccine that what if there was a microplastics vaccine take that just your body just deflects the Plastics yeah force field force field anyway I don't know how we're
going to cover this but the cover of The Economist this week is fantastic it's the SpaceX rocket taking off the the Starship but instead of the the core tube it's just the dollar and it says the America's economy is the Envy of the world and it's a deep dive on the resilience of the American economy often hated on but extremely resilient and Robert Sterling posts this like Mega
thread of all the things that he loves about America and it's just amazing I'll read some of this culture that celebrates risk-taking ingrain ingrained hatred of bureaucracy robust capital markets Starbucks Nitro cold brew cheap and abundant oil you can just do stuff investment bankers that work till 2 a.m. low barriers to entry for entrepreneurship Manifest Destiny
private Equity Delaware sea corporations m&a markets meritocracy low capital gains taxs McDonald's New York City University Greek life system Walmart GPU clusters Sand Hill Road Michael Jordan 50 states competing for business the Homestead Act the old school DARPA no Union reps on on corporate boards like the the entire state of Texas like he just riffed for so long and just sent
this massive list of cool things and how are you P how are you not bullish after reading that you really you really have to be but I love that uh it's it's two it's two lenses on the same idea like you know that the economist wasn't writing like this right The Economist is GNA have this very thoughtful article that explains basically the same thing conclusion in a much more complicated in
a much more complicated way much more nuanced and I like how it almost every single thing listed off was like like intense American consumerism and then and then and then Finance Finance yeah ability to get filthy rich even if you're born poor state school and engineering programs pickup trucks yeah it's just amazing it really it really is such a wonderful country uh I always
like that that that teal line where they're like oh are you going to leave he's like to where yeah you know it's the least bad option like you might complain about America but it is the best we're just number one everything yeah I never I I think we grew up in the in the period where young people thought that America was bad we I don't know what I don't know what
was the cause of it but it's almost like things were so good here that people were trying to find reasons to not like it for some reason um but in I've been to I've been to 40 plus countries many of which I've spent you know a week Plus in and the the closest thing I got to wanting to live there was I I would buy a vacation home in Switzerland yeah just because I Switzerland is outside of the
United like I would say land is my favorite country that's not the United States yeah right I just love being there I could see spending a lot of time there but I never once in my life was thinking I want to spend three qus of the year every time I traveled I would always just come back to like oh like I went to Thailand and I was like oh this is Russia's Mexico like I went to Cape
Town Cape Town South Africa it's just la like there's a beach and there's mountains it's beautiful it's amazing people drive around on freeways it's very similar to La like you go to all countries and it's like there's like America is so unique in that we have we have Manhattan so that's like your Tokyo your High Finance like really dense City you have La SF unrivaled Miami but then
you also have Hawaii like a chain of islands so it's like all of a sudden like underrated underrated fiji's fiji's great but it's a lot farther and it's not 10x better than Hawaii what's the next Alaska like okay I never need to go to Russia yeah uh and and America really just did a good job of capturing like every single biome so there are there there are tropical areas there are desert areas
there are mountainous areas Forest areas Tundra like we have it all whereas very few countries have every single biome covered Russia doesn't have tropical areas they got to go to Thailand yeah the the thing that you need to do if you're American and I think a lot of our listeners right now yeah are American is as you go about your day-to-day life or you go on a work trip
or you go on a vacation within the United States view it from the eyes of some Italian kid who grew up in a small village and is visiting like Los Angeles right like we're sitting here recording with a straight shot view of skyscrapers of that are home to some of America's greatest companies right if you're from a small fishing Village and you get to look out and see
KPMG I mean that is that's like a core memory yeah right if you're and so it's our duty to view our world through their eyes and when I drive back and I'm passing uh you know the other Jonathan Club the um the beach club the beach club and seeing you know this this Ferris wheel like on a pier or I'm driving on PCH uh or I'm I see the I'm on the 405 and I see the Hollywood Sign you know
really sh uh you know these iconic places it's important to try to don't just have your eyes glaze over and look back at Tik Tok you know yeah enjoy it enjoy it enjoy it yeah America's undefeated it's not going anywhere no matter what happens sorry sorry uh this this one was good I have I I have this riff with uh you know how Josh Steinman tweets good morning we're going to win every day and
I was thinking about like what is a mantra that you know you could tweet every single day and mine was just listing out every single country that's not America and calling them unamerican yeah Canada is unamerican France is unamerican Greece is unamerican unamerican is a good it's literally that's that's a potentially a a phrase that we could that we could coin yeah
that we could own it's literally true Canada is American almost everything that I don't like is unamerican yeah should we talk about Tim Ferris Tim Ferris is unamerican I like Tim Ferris Tim Ferris is the most American no no I'm just saying I like Tim but this specific he put up a a clip from his podcast where he did a 30-day dopamine detox no caffeine alcohol sex or
sweetness he didn't which sounds like it sounds like I'm not going to hug my wife or something but he was saying that he would not consume any sugar anything that was sweetened yeah the the funny thing with this is I could do all I could do yeah one I could do all those things but whatever dopamine release that I negated from skipping coffee or nicotine or any of these other or a nice piece of chocolate
cake in the evening yeah would immediately be undone by picking up my daughter and giving her a hug you know like the same whatever I mean I think that like to you know Steelman him like that is the point of the dopamine detox is that you will you proportionately get more dopamine from picking up your dog right you're you're not like okay this is like you know like 110% of Tik Tok
it's like Tik Tok isn't even in the equation so it's just like the purest of the pure yeah for you it would just be waking up in the morning and being like I have three sons yeah exactly um I do wonder if he stopped posting during this detox because that's the real opening for a content creator did he stop Capital allocating did he stop investing cuz the rush do think I do think I think
Tim stopped Angel Investing oh really like it was too much too much dopamine yeah I mean the Angel Investing is deeply addictive it is it makes no sense to do financially yeah I just I always wonder where these W detoxes if if like when you cut something out like usually you find yourself finding a crutch like I noticed like if I if I stop using one
like I stopped using a lot of this the endless feeds but then I find myself just opening up like The Wall Street Journal more and that's probably better but I'm still like using that still on the treadmill going to hit the so I wonder what his what his like cheat meal was during this dopamine detox like what was he doing to get I don't I don't the only the only video that I would
watch it's funny I don't think either of us watched the video I I I did it was him talking to uh Kevin Rose the guy who had to dig yeah so uh I would watch I would watch a 30-day long video of Tim doing a dopamine detox that's the real dopamine detox is just to watch Tim's extremely boring life in monk mode I love it it takes 30 days and you can sleep when he sleeps sleep but
you have to let you have to be woken up by his alarm that's pretty sick so that's probably the that's a whole that's a whole category of content where you just live someone else's life I feel like that's something like Joo premium subscribers would like pay for some sort of live stream like come live my life with me like tap tap into this live stream and you're just going to like
come along for this whole thing like when I wake up you wake up when I go to the gym you go to the gym it's kind of people pay for that in person when you do that virtually it's pretty scal you can SC scale it yeah that's definitely there's definitely like a like a a lot of his on his like off-site events obviously very bounded by like the number of people that can attend but if
you just put out the 30-day video like IM can do it falling asleep listening to joa effectively tell you a bedtime story today was a great day tomorrow is going to be a better one and then and then he just like is sort of rambling and you for sort of fall asleep and then he says morning sweetheart it's 4:00 a.m. it's 4 a.m. I don't want to be up right now you don't want to be up right now I got to start
posting the jao wakeups with the pek at 400 a.m. cuz he has like the really athletic like Navy SEAL watch G gshock yeah and it's just the pek at 400 a.m. be like time to go to work it's the best I love jao he's incredible I love Jo Joo as soon as he's a billionaire he can call in and be on the show for sure he's going to be close he has he has multiple products that are
like the top on Amazon his his business is insane he has so many different modations methods did did senra ever send you that like breakdown oh it's great it's like it's looking like in a single in a single long Joo episode like all of the ad reads and all of the monetization that's going on there were like 10 or 15 different products and calls to action so it's like an athletic greens competitor an
lmnt competitor a protein powder but then it's also like a subscription to the premium service uh and then book yeah the books and then it's like and it's like there's a $100 tier for like a course that you buy and you watch there's like a, tier for like going to a big conference a $10,000 tier for going to like the VIP conference there's a 50,000 so so like
no matter what you're willing to spend he does really really good at like price lading and price discrimination because that's one of the hardest things with with podcasting and why it works with ads is that you you have some billionaires in your audience with us it's like mostly billionaires but um but then you also have some people that are like they're not billionaires yet and so
they don't have the ability to to drop you know $100,000 on you know a private uh private event with technology Brothers but how do you get money out of both of those audience cohorts well you got to have a an affordable Jets is a really good example right where you might not be able to afford a private jet and we certainly have friends who are billionaires who own their own Jets
yep they they'll still use netjets right it's not a one or the other but it's also a reason why you might hear some ads on this show for things that have lower ticket prices because we wantep right yeah we want to monetize every single listener here that's that's the goal of the show to be the most profitable podcast in history and that means that no matter who you are no
matter how much what what your W2 says no matter what your Roth IRA says uh we want to get the most money out of you should we move on to Corey Levy oh I tried to I tried to I tried to keep it together um so Corey Levy I I mean it's funny because this got dun on but I mean I love everyone involved in this and is this is this Ben from vesto here I don't know
it looks like one of my friends I don't know um but ramp held a an event with Coosa with Keith called The Art of hiring and it featured Brian chesky uh Mike shebot and Keith uh talking about how to hire and founder mode and uh and Corey Levy who runs zows um uh prolific early stage angel investor essentially um I don't know incubator accelerator I don't know what term he likes but um um
he wrote kind of a breakdown some notes from the art of hiring event earlier today and he starts with uh Keith and he so he asks Keith and and the first line that gets cut off when you see the Tweet is just don't hire anyone over the age of 30 and then there's like there's like 25 other things that are all like super reasonable but he led with the most controversial thing and so there's a
there's a community note now that says age discrimination in in hiring is illegal in the US anyone who follows the advice from the first point is is potentially committing a crime which I just love but obviously he wasn't saying that literally like he's saying saying well I could see Keith saying that literally but he's also he he understands the art of Rage bait yes
right yes and using cont saying controversial things to generate attention which does other things he's compressing the idea of like you need young energy in your organization you need people that are hungry who aren't who aren't resting investing who aren't already millionaires who want to make their Equity work and so you need people that are show up and are hungry and so
how do you compress that down into something that will stick in someone's mind oh well don't hire anyone over the age of 30 now it's probably a lot more nuanced than that and I think Keith if you talk to him for an hour he would get into that and there's a million reasons why and if you look at his companies and all the other companies I'm sure there's people over the age of 30 at these
companies but uh it's a great way to get that to stick in someone's mind so it's funny because there's a um here just turn the mic towards you I was I was talking with a a Founder that used to work for Keith and raise money from Keith and on the way over here today and running a business for the first time it's absolutely crushing he's about to raise like a very hot series a cool and he has
taken every almost all of Keith's advice I don't know about this advice but he certainly has learned so much from Keith and the only thing that he didn't follow was the Miami thing he he originally started the company in Miami and at one point it was probably the scariest day of his life telling Keith that he was going to go back to SF but almost everything else he's followed to a te
and it's just work I I know this company yeah it's works so well it's works so well uh this is Dar yeah so it's works so well for Dar like yeah ignored the hype yep building in a very like hot space which is like consumer AI has ignored the hype stayed focused focused on customers all like all these things that that um that that Keith has pared and reiterates and things like that and it's
just worked extremely well like it it it it um and so the funny thing with um uh I will say that Dar hired one of my old uh Engineers who is over 30 who does have children uh but that guy's a grinder uh so so um yeah I mean I think overall I do think about this sometimes where as a 28-year-old that has the lifestyle of some something that's more found from somebody in their
mid-30s at least in Tech or mid 40s uh depending on how late to Children mid 50s yeah mid-50s um I do that is a almost like a recurring nightmare of like if I was competing against myself without children what how much more would I be getting done and things like that I do think that the counter side to that is when people are in their 30s they're they can't afford to lose in the
same way right so it's like there is this whole other side of it and they have the benefit and so when you when you look at this tweet saying don't hire anyone over the age of 30 combined with young college dropouts raising 30 to 50 million do pre-product yeah the combination of those two things is terrible right and you brought this up with Facebook earlier being like
Facebook having a really veteran engineer who brought structure and experience and all these different things so anyways I I would say that overall Keith's advice I'm I'm like very bullish on any founder that takes like 90% of Keith's advice to heart and follows it I think it's a really good framew work but um but again the uh don't don't take anything too literally
even Miami giving I mean the State of Mind in many ways and also I mean Miami is still like I think we've talked about this before but I mean it's still is just like a phenomenal place to go meet a lot of extreme people yeah yeah like like it it it I think everyone agrees that it is behind on on hiring engineering talent but in terms of just like lots of Rich powerful people having money there
like if you're if you're a if you're a founder and you're doing a fundraising trip like stopping in Miami and meeting a bunch of people is like very doable and very beneficial yeah it's also just like an awesome place to live or awesome place to visit when you're a founder and you've been grinding in some like you know tenderloin complex in in San Francisco and you get to like you don't
just have to go down to San Hill Road which is like even more boring you just go to Miami and hang out at all these people houses I know that I will absolutely property in Miami at some point in my life I'm not in a huge rush to do it but I really enjoy it there and we're going next week yeah it's fantastic but yeah I I'm excited for this video to drop I'm sure that they're
going to record it and put it out I think it'll be good I I think I think they're all really great it's funny we're giving we're giving him the benefit of the doubt and Keith is like literally telling all these young kids I swear to God do not like I I cannot be I cannot be more explicit about this if somebody is 30 years old in one day disqualified
disqualified write it into your HR do like write it into your hiring policies put put it on your wall yeah yeah yeah um I don't even know where this is from but you dropped this in the in the group chat and I just wanted to read it because I thought it was a funny quote from maybe like a substack or something this guy says I look for the type of guy in London who gets up at 7 o'clock on
Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed and logs on to a poker site so that he can pick off the US drunks coming home on a sun Saturday night I hired a guy like that he usually clears five or 10 grand every Sunday morning before breakfast taking out the drunks playing poker because they're not very good at it but their confidence has gone up a lot someone who understands an edge
I love that I don't even think we have to add commentary it's just just like cheers it's just cheers to that yeah it's great yeah find an edge the hard thing the hard thing with people like that is they they usually end up making so much money they're really hard to hire yeah exactly if you're making 10 grand a week that's 500k a year like what job are you offering them I mean I
guess this is probably for like a hedge fund position or something um or somebody who understands like yeah this is maybe not uh not going to stick around forever maybe I don't know should we close with the the new king of podcasting Harry steings Harry $400 million f i i i i will say I think that that that picture could come back to B so the story is uh podcaster Harry
steings raises one of Europe's biggest Venture funds the British firm firm 20 VC pulls in $400 million to invest in early stage Tech startups uh and he claims it's to make Europe great again is he a trump guy or is he just like riffing on that I bet he's a trump guy he appreciates great entrepreneurs yeah right Trump is I feel like he's pretty like uh like non like apolitical to like
because like if you if you go super hard nothing there's nothing less cool than being not living in the US but being obsessed with us politics it's like get a life you know like get a life yeah so yeah no I think it's amazing for podcasting it's amazing for Harry he's now we kind of have him if we're if we want to build the most profitable podcast in the world yeah he's pulling
down 80 million of management fees yeah on that fund yeah uh he's in our big shoes to fil choose to fill Target on his back right Target on his back it's not that but but we're positive some right exactly we'll do a $500 million fund exactly um so congrats to Harry um it is interesting I feel like do do you think his audience is primarily entrepreneurs or VCS because he he really focuses he
does get some entrepreneurs on the show but it's mostly VCS that go on the show so he probably has an incredible Network so he can get into he can get Small Checks Into deals but like what happens when you know yeah he's interviewing like seoa guys but then they're not going to let him like steal a hot round from them so how does that work in terms of deal flow yeah the reason that I'm
bullish overall on I'm not bullish on the European Focus sure um oh yeah I mean I guess that if he's GNA invest if he's going to invest the full 400 million in Europe that's concerning yeah it seemed like the real Alpha here was just he is probably one of the greatest Bridges between European LPS and US Investments because he's he's a name brand in America and if
you are wealthy in Europe you can't necessarily just call up an American VC firm and LP into it yeah so I've seen this happen a couple times people have raised really big funds because it's like oh they they happen to be super connectors in like Brazil and so they can go around and just pull all the Brazilian Capital together and then they come in and they invested in America but
they're providing that service to the Brazilian high- net worth individuals and and institutions yeah the the reason to be bullish on Harry is that what David senra has done for Founders yeah Harry is done for contemporary VCS so in the same way that David will be talking about founder and then tie in oh here how these other three founders also thought similarly
and applied this way of thinking to their business he's doing the same thing with VCS you know where where he will be talking with one VC and be like well that's similar to how um you know Peter thought about the initial investment in SpaceX or whatever um so I think that being a student he's now a student and a player right and he's drawing on I think it's very real thing that he could text
probably 50 of the best GPS and get a response within you know a day yeah of like hey and they can be like well here are the traps in Aerospace yeah here's why this won't work oh this is actually really interesting let's look at it together yeah you know like that's real Alpha yeah that's great well cheers to Harry and we'll see you next time stop thanks for watching we listening