welcome to technology Brothers the number one live show in Tech we are live from the Temple of technology in beautiful downtown Los Angeles it's Friday February 7th 2025 this show starts now Jordy what do you got for me John the question we got some amazing break news uh we got first
up massive news out of Y we got to ring the siiz gong for a bunch of developers bunch of Founders from overlap they are part of YC summer 2024 they build multimodal AI agents that can understand search and edit videos and they raised a $ 1.9 million SE seed round let's ring the size gong
for them congratulations to everyone over at overlap we wanted to highlight this because this honestly seems like something we need we yeah I would 100% demo this we'd probably be power users we are creating more content in Tech than anyone has ever even tried to do before yeah our
goal for people that don't know we're trying to get up to doing 120 hours a week live streaming we're we're we're at about 15 hours a week right now so we got a ways to go but uh overlap seems like a tool that would help us uh you know better utilize all the content that
we're creating and make it you know right now we have a team of uh you know we have Ben our producer then we have a team of editors that help us take the content that we create and repurpose it for other platforms so uh this looks like exactly like something that we
would use um and uh I'm sure their their sort of long-term strategy is to you know completely displace all uh podcasters and so it might be one of those things where we're kind of like funding our own demise but impossible impossible we are built different I will fight the AI apocalypse personally and I
will go toe-to-toe with any ASI AGI system you can't create these takes in Silicon it's impossible it's impossible it's impossible we're going on record we're going on record i' like to see I'd like to see uh d uh AI drink Don perryon uh to celebrate growth Milestones I just
don't think it's gonna happen but uh these guys deserve a little sip of champagne for this moment uh it's obviously day one for them still but I'm excited to try out the product and congrats on a nice uh nice little round nice little round coming out of demo day
let's uh let's break down their announcement uh their seed round came from a bunch of different investors they got YC combinator collab fund transposed orange Collective Pioneer fund and the 23 pund fund we're proud to welcome angels and operators from Amazon figma
anthropic Loom Netflix meta and open AI what they do they this is how they describe it open overlap builds multimodal AI agents for media companies and video creators that's us baby our first AI agent a video marketing agent can autonomously understand search and edit videos this agent now helps dozens
of companies and creators by instantly transforming their long videos into clips for social media this is what we're trying to do we're trying to be everywhere uh we got to get on LinkedIn we got to get on Instagram uh this takes a lot of work is not LinkedIn is not
ready LinkedIn is not ready for us we are going to flood LinkedIn uh and I I really do think that we can bring some great content there have a lot of fun and ultimately get a lot of views and and and uh have a big impact which I'm excited about and they said over the
last few months our customers have seen a 10x increase in engagement while saving over 20 hours per week I love that we are working 120 hours a week uh if we can make it 140 with the help of AI I would do that immediately and so what's next their seed round accelerates their mission to
define the role AI will play in video workflows with this Capital they're gearing up to accelerate product development expand the team and scale their impact stay tuned for more updates as they push boundaries of what's possible at the intersection of video
and AI so congrats to the overlap team we love to see some big bunding rounds happen out of YC demo day well let's move on to our next story we have some breaking news out of figma they announced a new product uh Improvement aspect ratios can now be locked in figma
people have been asking for this we go let's go and it sounds like a minor thing but look at the response this is they're promoting what you know a a slight product revision the designers went crazy this was not only not only did this post get 4k uh likes but it was also a trending topic on X like I went
into the X like search feed and it was the it was one of the top topics the streets of Brooklyn have been absolutely begging for this John I mean they've been they've been campaigning protesting hitting the streets you know cold calling trying to get Dylan to make this
happen they rolled it out uh and it's just cool you know as as big of a company as figma is many people that use it there's still things that they can do to meaningfully improve the product and to be honest uh I'm very excited about this like I had kind of a workaround to
to do this like a aspect ratio lock but it wasn't something you could do in the canvas so very excited about this and I think they probably if they were public right now that that you could imagine the stock would have jumped easily five six% off the news uh this is absolutely
massive for the design community and uh you know startups everywhere so congratulations to Dylan and the team yeah we are we are huge fans of figma here we used it to design our the pitch deck for our uh for TB uh that we send to everyone that we partner with we're using it to design the show overlays
that you'll see uh coming soon to the live stream and so it's an incredibly versatile tool we're using it to design our new website and uh and and and and fun fact uh when Jordy makes a meme he actually makes it in figma I do I Do's one the most advanced meme makers
I'm not using any of those slop meme generator apps on the phone if you want to do numbers you got to be you got to be in figma grinding you got to have your whole workspace you got to have good you know images to pull from you got to have good fonts ready so uh it's a craft you got to respect it it's
almost a full-time job for me if I'm not streaming I'm meing and uh thank you to figma for making that possible I love it and let's stay with figma and talk about uh the CEO Dylan he's an absolute dog we've talked about him before on the show he's a beast uh he is breaking down
the impact of figma uh responding to sahil uh from gumroad sahill says many have confused design with knowing figma and this is again figma is just a tool you got to be a crack designer you got to know the tool but you got to know how to use it and so Dylan says always liked
uh RS sms's framing figma is like a staircase the first step should be easy to take and further steps should lead you to build Mastery over time we're on a mission to make figma more accessible than ever the craft of design still takes decades to perfect couldn't agree
with yeah so I would I would I would you know use my own personal experience with figma I started using figma without um any real design you know uh education right totally self-trained I think I had good taste but I didn't actually know how to use the tool at all and I
wouldn't have considered myself designer at all I still don't really consider myself a designer but I am so competent with figma that I can create pretty goodlooking designs at least like MVPs for ideas that I have and that's like really accelerated my uh sort of design
timelines and really help me work with designers and so yeah I think it's amazing that figma is not figma is easy to use it's not incredibly easy to use but if you just start using it you'll figure it out quickly and it's um you know it's fairly intuitive so just because you're not a designer uh yet
doesn't mean you shouldn't be in figma using it it's a super powerful tool and I think that framing is great because um yeah it is a staircase I figured out how to drop a picture in and add text over it and then suddenly I was you know making websites or product screens or
things like that so very powerful and uh it doesn't take much to get started figma's uh staircase and let me tell you jordy's Cals are absolutely jacked they're bulging out from all those stair climes he's been doing uh but seriously uh figma is an incredible company they
went through this uh I mean really long grind it took him three years to launch the product Dylan started building the company in 2012 they didn't go they didn't actually launch the product until 2015 they've raised a bunch of money then the crazy Adobe deal happens gets
broken up in antitrust now founder-led company super well capitalized absolutely on a mission and think about the timing with all these new generative AI you know products exploding they have the distribution they have the users there's so many of these features that they can add um I
uh uh there was a company called um uh what I'm blanking on the name diagram diagram by Jordan singer um Sarah my wife invested in the company and uh they actually were acquired by figma because they were doing a bunch of stuff around generative AI so figma is extremely well
positioned to uh roll out a lot of these tools and uh just embed them in the existing software so it's they are 100% going after the developer Community now and this infig pretty soon is going to be a tool that is integrated directly into just a full stack developers toolkit and it's going to be something
that that even if they aren't a master of the previous iteration of figma it's going to be so much more accessible because of llms and just being able to orchestrate things like you would cursor in the in the IDE uh like you would Devon in a slack Channel working on uh
GitHub pull requests it's all going to be the same flow and so that's going to create way more versatility for uh a CEO who codes and uh does design it's going to be all over the place it's going to be amazing really excited for them uh so stay tuned for more updates we'll have
to have Dylan on the show soon let's go to another breaking news story massive product update from paler they have partnered with xai and they've integrated grock into the Enterprise it's now officially available in AIP the artificial intelligence program uh spear
headed by sham Sankar over at paler we're huge fans of paler and it's great to see that there's even more options for what Foundation model you want to use when you're building these datadriven workflows for the for the government I love how they just threw this graphic out it's very unclear
what's happening but it's looks awesome and this is a video we're working on showing videos we haven't figured it out yet but the video I think this is a before Slide the video the video guys don't know how to put video on a screen this is we got little building the as we fly
it here at TBN stick with us uh we will quote tweet this post you can go and watch the full video I'm sure it's fantastic uh let's move on to uh elano who is describing exactly what's going on there uh there is an antology of data that paler has created uh these
hierarchical workflows organizing all this data dropping AI on top of it and nothing feels better than dropping a big word like an ontology on someone you feel like a boss put in your vernacular put in your kit highly recommend using it fantastic yeah and ELO's emerging is
one of this year's hottest posters he's been absolutely on a tear he's got the palent tyrians behind him he's rallying them the stocks rallying uh it's just up only for uh the team over at paler so love to see it fantastic team and great to see them partner with Elon and I
think just on yesterday's show you said that uh you could imagine a world where Elon was a co-founder of paler it feels like that it feels like an Elon driven company karp obviously has so much of the same founder driven energy just a fantastic company and we're excited to
see them uh release huge products and integrate with uh with more llms and really uh hopefully make the government more efficient which is what we're all excited about this yeah and give them some uh even the government should be able to make memes internally so if they can use grock's image generation product
as well just you know flip some stuff around Microsoft teams that'd be awesome as well dude I mean grock's image generation is remarkably good I I had it generate an image of saquan Barkley who's the uh who's the next top story that we're going to go gonna go to uh
saquan Barkley and Jeb Bush are both investors in ramp and I needed an image of both of them at a business meeting at share ramp shareholders meeting smiling and it nailed it it was UN uncannily good it was been fantastic the Jersey was on point all the details were right
the number of fingers was correct and it looked exactly like them I was very satisfied I got my money's worth test the finger test the finger test was passed and and all the other all the other uh image generation systems uh denied it they were like no I won't I won't create an image of Jeb Bush which
like I I think it's fair use like you know this is something I could have done in Photoshop um just just copy and pasting so I don't know but uh you know we're following up on the the the breaking news from yesterday I don't know if you saw this Jordy but uh obviously ramp is
running a Super Bowl ad or as we think about it uh you know there will be a showing of the ramp ad on on Sunday and there will be some football to help promote that ad yeah I think actually so so Kendrick Lamar uh actually agreed to do the halftime show once he knew that
ramp was running an ad that makes sense because he wasn't sure that football would be enough of a draw to really get people you know there packing out the stadium but once he heard about the ramp ad easy yes from him yeah I'll be there I'll help create the right environment
for people to be you know experiencing the ad so uh very very excited that Kendrick Kendrick Lamar decided to step up and um help promote ramp on Sunday yeah yeah it's fantastic um well saquan Barkley is starring in that ramp ad you'll be able to see it uh live on Sunday and uh Eric Gman I you know we
were joking we didn't really know s Juan Barkley was uh when they told us but now we're super fans uh you know massive supporters mostly of his uh Investment Portfolio but he's also I guess pretty good on the field too uh but uh an absolute uh goated investor future Hall
of Famer in the business Hall of Fame for sure yeah in the TB in the TV probably be has a bright future posting too he's got he's clearly got you know good taste and and good ideas and and that's usually what it takes to you know dominate the timeline so after he's done
dominating the field on Sunday I'd like to see a 20p part thread breaking down here's how the game went here's what we could have done better here's what we're going to be taking into the offseason and uh you know maybe you know a little bit of Celebration as well um and you
know looking at this picture um I could see you with an ear you know a similar earring but maybe like a podcast microphone just kind of dangling there so even when you're off the air when you're walking around the street people know hey this guy's a podcaster he's wearing a suit I'm going
to treat him with a level of you know respect that uh that a hardworking podcaster deserves yeah for sure and I like the ey black you know that's to to keep the Sun out of your eyes uh stop the reflections there's a lot of light on the set we might need to do wear some
ey BL occasionally just make sure everything's dialed in and we're really focused in when we're podcasting but let's go through this uh so so Eric sent me some backstory on uh on saquan Barkley there's a there's a great profile on him saquan Barkley is a superhero for the Eagles his origin
story is straight out of a comic book too the man who has led the Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl run the man who has been the most exciting player in football almost quit the sport just before his career was about to take off that was 14 years ago in eastern
Pennsylvania before saquan Barkley became saquan a hulking hurdling blur with superhero like muscles I love go I watched a highlight reel of him I mean I'm I'm a super fan now it it is incredible he he has some I looked up some pictures of of some uh plays yesterday because I wanted a shot of him
running with the ramp card into the end zone you know go yeah and uh anyways um an absolute dog and so uh they have a bunch of quotes here to help tell the story of saquin I thought it'd be fun to go through this just because you know even though yeah he's he's dipping his
toe in the business world for the first time he's clearly an incredibly inspirational figure and has done something remarkable and studying greatness on in the business world and Beyond is is something so valuable there's a reason why David senra has covered Kobe Bryant Michael Jordan on
the founders podcast sure yeah even uh Keith one of Keith R boy's favorite books is the score takes care of itself you fantastic book fantastic book yeah and so uh Brian Gilbert former head coach at whiteall his high school I don't want to exaggerate but the varsity
coaching staff and I literally brought him in because we'd heard after his freshman year of high school he was going to quit football Barkley was frustrated struggling with his self-confidence some kids had matured faster than him sophomore year didn't he didn't play varsity because his best
friend was ahead of him sequan had to work that's how he's wired and that's why he's so great I said listen you may not be the best one right now but we see potential in you we see how fast you are you've got to give it more time he said coach I'm so skinny if I come up and
play varsity football I'm going to get broken in half we said just get in the waight room and get stronger thank God he listened and this guy and this guy squats like almost a thousand pounds now just absolute dog absolute do love it uh and so uh the former V Varsity White
Hall quarterback who he played with Nick shinski uh oh shisi says he was always the freakiest athlete and the IST human but it seemed like there was always someone a year or two older who was a little bit better he was never the guy as crazy as that sounds because now he's the epitome of
the guy I love it go uh going back to Gilbert he says he played a little varsity as as a sophomore in 2012 at the end of that season that summer we went to Rutter as a team Camp his improvements that he made that offseason are different from any other athlete I've seen he had a tremendous Camp then
Rutter's head coach Kyle fled brings in him him and me into his office and offers him he says it was based on what he saw that day in the film they'd watched which was JV film because that's all we had so sick this guy just goes on a tear one one one thing that
immediately comes to mind so uh squin freakiest athlete nicest guy right that's that's that's his reputation uh it makes sense that he would partner with with ramp and specifically Eric Lyman because when you meet when you meet Eric or or Kareem or or or or the or the ramp exec team they're all
genuinely the kindest people that and it it almost is this weird dichotomy because they're absolute Savages in business and that yet Eric is just like the nicest like sweetest human right and so it's it feels like a really perfect partnership so uh he wasn't even the
number one running back in the state of Pennsylvania uh no one on the staff looked at this High School film and thought this was going to be a generational Talent this guy it would they thought this guy's pretty good let's take him but we got to have Andre Robinson the the the actual number one
running back in the state of Pennsylvania as far as why he flips so fast he went up to a white out game in 2013 and I think he was like oh my God this is night and day from ruter to Penn State 1 million per the white out game changed his life Gilbert says saquan is
such a pleas and I don't want to disappoint anyone and doesn't want to disappoint anyone he asked me to how to tell Ruckers I said we're going to call Coach Wilson and tell him he said can you tell him I said no you're going to tell him you're going to feel better like you've achieved
something by doing this it's going to be hard but you can do it he was so nervous but I think that little step towards knowing that he hates disappointing people but sometimes having to do what's best for your own good helped it made him grow a little bit a while later he
called me he said I just got a call from Ohio State same with no Notre Dame Urban Meyer called him Brian Kelly called him sequan didn't waver he never went on another official visit never went on another unofficial visit he asked me if he could go on five official visits to
Penn State because he didn't want to go to any other school so he goes to Penn State uh I would have loved to have coached him but even now when I watch him I root for him because he's he's a great kid uh and so the Penn State head coach says to be honest with you even up
until his senior year he wasn't thought that high of he was a good player but nothing crazy then he had a dominant senior year then he played in some East West All-Star Game and they didn't even start him at tailback he played fullback in the game James and I went out to see
him play Early in his senior year he had like 200 yards of offense and four touchdowns in the first half and I was like I think we can leave now I was texting the pilot our job was done he says we're leaving what do you mean we're leaving the game started at 7 and
it's only 7:38 I have a cool picture from me and Spence standing on the sideline our local photographer shot a picture of us from over our shoulders with him in the background I have it hanging in my basement so sick cool uh cool little connection so he was at Penn
State uh at the same time as Bo nickel technology brother and uh future uh UFC middleweight world champion um so anyways bunch of also nicest most you know humble guy fantastic State's doing something right so they say have you heard the story about the track deal when he was in high school Gilbert says
this story is legendary Franklin uh he wouldn't miss opportuni to do something special I was at the District track meet when that White Hall hosts every year at the 100 meter dash this girl ran and finished first but there was a mistake with the clock so they had to redo it
and when they redid it she came in second saquan witnessed all this so he went over and gave her his gold medal so amazing he said you deserve this people local pubs and restaurants will ask if it's really true yep it is what a good guy that's amazing uh for me realizing
he was special it was probably the first day we were in full pads at summer camp he read he ran a basic inside Zone play he hit the a gap and then made a jump cut all the way back to the edge and went like 70 yards everyone's going crazy he comes right back to me and says should I have pressed it a little more
that's where the legend of sequin started I remember the run from the Oklahoma drill when the three linan basically blocked nobody and the 3D lineman came through and he shook them all that was welcome to Squan Bart moment have you seen that so good in the first year we kept
trying to protect him he had unbelievable physical tools but we were conscious of throwing him to the Wolves too soon because we didn't want to scar him after that Buffalo game we were like okay we got to play this guy then it was how do we get him ready to play the in
the Big 10 without throwing too much at him I went to our position room and went up on the board I wrode up the number 26 and circled it my D lineman asked what it was I said this is called the theory of 26 it means if any of you m MFS hit this dude in practice and hurt him
you're GNA have hell to pay don't touch him he's like the quarterback leave him alone I don't want one of them big dudes falling on him after his freshman year he said he wanted to get he wanted to get he wanted to be the best running back ever what do I need to do to get better he went back
and looked at some of the long runs where he got run down it happens against Ruckers against Michigan we went back and did a series of looking at winning in open space breaking tackles and making guys miss saquan Barkley said you try to improve in every aspect of the
game I watched film on myself I did self-evaluation I wanted to get better at finishing the Run break loose and make another guy Miss and get into the end zone eliminate the next play because anytime you have to line up again you give the defense another opportunity you
can have a muffled snap anything my freshman year I was explosive but I didn't have true speed my 20 and 30 yard burst was really good but when I got to go 60 or 100 I didn't really have another gear I really wanted to increase my 40 time so sick I love it crazy and
so uh yeah the this story kind of ends with Huff going into next year I told them you got to be prepared to have the biggest letdown season of your life I said now teams are not going to let you beat them you have to be able to find success and the little things maybe you
don't rush for 200 yards and three touchdowns but you can eliminate a few negative plays improve your pass blocking get better at catching the ball coming out of the back field develop other parts of your game and he was like okay I'm good with that I love it yeah what a beast so fans now and he um it
was just awesome to see Jeb and sequan on the timeline yesterday just dominating uh even Jeb Jeb uh Jeb baited everybody little engagement bait he included uh you know what looked like a bullet point at the start start of his post a lot of people said hey somebody sent him this post he chose from the
bullet points and uh he was just copying pasting it in but uh you know what you know people quickly point out they said hey Jeb is a master of the timeline he included that to drive engagement so his post would go more viral so I think so you don't get to be someone like Jeb
Bush without being an absolute dog and taking every little extra step to get that extra reach to get that extra impression uh and I love to see him you know performing on the timeline yeah so lesson for Founders if you if you have somebody on your on your board or your
cap table who's an interesting poster who you want to feed a tweet to uh let him include a bullet point maybe even include a little spelling mistake in there so people are like oh like this is this is artisanal quotes are good too if you include like one or you know quote
at the start or the end people are gonna say hey somebody sent you that to copy and paste in but that's viral fuel yeah that's viral fuel I I so that's so funny so uh I I don't think we talked about this post on the show but I posted uh Carl marks failed to consider that
making money with your boys is the most fun activity on Earth yeah and I uh I posted I like reviewed it like a few times and I posted it and I had a typo in the fourth word Carl marks fail or fifth word KL marks failed to consider I said considered and it still got 14,000 likes oh my
God like how does that even work it's more organic it knows it's not slop and llm would never make that type of mistake and then I said I said you got to put a typo in every post to prove that you're human and AI would never have the creativity to to think you know oh I'm gonna try to trick people into
you know thinking I'm Human by put by making a mistake right so um anyways we got some uh fantastic with Squan Barkley tons of great lessons for business there I mean the guy uh total come from behind story just absolute grinder works on all aspects of the game clearly reviews
every piece of footage really understands how to improve and spends a lot of time in the gym uh working on the fundamentals and and uh that can be true in business so lots to learn from on and off the field I I'm generally against wearing you know jerseys with uh another dude's
name on the back we're getting some TB jerseys made that'll be you know just cougan and Hayes but um I'm almost inclined to you know try to get a saquon Jersey by Sunday and just be you know just be cheering you know not for the game but for the ad waiting for that 15
seconds to just you know just blow me away can't wait all right we got some earnings presented byu.com uh I'll have public up and and you can run through this and uh I'll Source any data we need to kind of support yeah if you could look up what Amazon's done over the last five days 24
hours I want to know I want the update from you from public.com um but it's earning season boys we covered Google we covered Apple we covered Facebook and meta and now we're on to Amazon uh sh spell I don't think we have this slated but I mentioned this to you yesterday
Roblox which which uh that that uh what's that research uh Hindenberg research had done a take down on they reported a drop in in sort of usage and like 30% of the stock got wiped out so if Hindenberg was still in uh in Roblox they would have done you know pretty well off of that but let's get into
Amazon a stable humble giant uh although they are down 3% um in the week so I mean that's a big move for a big company like that uh so they just had their earnings their shares fell after sales Outlook is weaker than expected the company to is is expecting to allocate a
record amount of capital expenditure to AI this has been an ongoing Trend uh analysts are worried about overspending in the data center world uh some of those Investments can be very good but there is risk because cash is coming out of the balance sheet and so let's go to
the Wall Street Journal they say Amazon shares slipped Thursday after the company projected lower than expected sales and operating income and said it plans to allocate a record amount of capital expenditure this year to build artificial intelligence infrastructure
Amazon is the latest large tech company to unveil big spending plans for AI even as some investors are starting to question whether the spending spree is prudent virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it Amazon
chief executive Andy jasse said on a call with analysts Amazon projected net sales for the first quarter of between 151 billion and 155 billion as well as operating income between 14 billion and 18 billion the high end of each Outlook came in below wall Street's expectations
and so uh the company's net sales last quarter Rose 10% from a year earlier to 187 billion in line with analyst's expectations net income Rose 88% to 20 billion higher than predicted so very good year last year uh little bit rougher going forward revenue from Amazon's cloud computing unit AWS
increased 19% to 28.7 n billion slightly lower than expected analysts said they were closely monitoring this number after disappointing cloud computing results from alphabet and Microsoft what you thinking Jordy uh I'm thinking that Amazon has been weirdly out of the headlines on all
things AI capex it's just not something that you're thinking about and not really hearing about much I mean obviously people like Dylan Patel are spending a lot of time writing about it but it hasn't been top of mind for a lot of people but given how how much of their businesses in Cloud you would
think that they would be using that to drive the narrative and trying to build momentum around um you know the narrative the Amazon narrative around Ai and it just doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like you know they obviously have like the actual like core data center
infrastructure and Cloud leadership but it doesn't feel like there's no um they don't they don't have their like SS yet right like somebody who's coming out and you know going on C CNBC trying to get on technology Brothers likely uh you know things things like that so they
just don't feel like they're um while they are like critical and they're running a lot of this you know work they don't feel like they're part of the conversation right now well I I I think that's a great take and I think there's mainly two reasons why we're not hearing
that um even though AWS is the oldest cloud computing provider and I think by far the largest um but I think there's two things that are going on one is that they don't have a like a direct consumer narrative around AI in the same way uh so Google everyone's saying oh how is AI
going to affect Google search you got to tell me about Gemini they're launching products that directly compete with open AI they have the TPU they've really talked about this and the Transformer was invented at Google so there's a whole bunch of history there around Google and AI everyone kind of expects
that obviously Zuck is doing the same thing he made this massive bet they've trained llama there's a huge narrative there zuck's completely driving that they did the huge AI capex the massive GPU buy and then even in Microsoft which is a little bit less focused on AI
productization obviously they're stuffing you know uh co-pilots everywhere but they have that massive position in open AI so anytime open AI is in the news you can talk to SAA whereas Amazon they have deals with anthropic they host a lot of stuff obviously there's Alexa and there's AI
in their products but it's not as strong of a narrative and a lot of it comes from the fact that they're no they're kind of no longer in founder mode like Jeff Bezos is out and I was trying to understand um do you think Jeff Bezos goes back in the next four years you
think he does as CEO uh no no I just think it's a really interesting you know question and conversation to be had uh I bet I bet he wakes up some days just itching to be back you know behind the wheel of uh one of the biggest ships in the world um it seems like there's
there's there's quite a you know looking at the core retail business um I I think it there's lack of potential like real leadership in Ai and that's because you think about who goes on CNBC to talk about Amazon's AI prospects and I can't name that person and I talk about
technology for three hours a day with you here on the show and so that's that's probably a problem and it just shows there's not um you know we've seen this with Saia in many ways he's going founder mode yep even though he didn't start the company right like he is clearly the face and the leader of that
company and if he decided to leave stock would drop you know I'm sure you know a meaning away um then you have uh Zuck obviously doing his thing you know the other issue is the entire retail side of the business I actually pulled up a post from Sean Frank who we've had on the
show probably a hundred times now um he has been talking for a very long time about how little new interest there is in selling on Amazon you remember there was a time when everybody was selling courses on how you can make you know $5,000 a day selling on Amazon you don't
even need your own products and so Amazon has gotten optimized and optimized and optimized and they've just kept eating into the profits of the sellers on their platform um it's basically completely pay to playay now it's really hard to drive sales without spending a huge amount of your sales uh
of gross revenue on ads so I just pulled this up um there's a post this was from uh a little a week ago actually Sean says why is interest in Amazon businesses collapse one the overall Ecom Market has collapsed almost no deals are being done and those deals are 50% of
what they would trade for in 2021 solo stove was worth $2 billion at one point it's worth under 100 now that sums up investor interest two sales are stagnant Amazon Marketplace sales are uh Down single digits that means the average Merchant isn't growing all that
much no growth story so there's even less interest uh he says three all the big buyers went bankrupt so you remember uh companies like um thio and then you have like kind of other alternative like open store that are playing more on the Shopify space uh they aren't buying the
same number of companies and then the big thing is uh the fees have D you know increased so much that even if your Revenue has doubled since 2021 your eida is flat or down so you you you've doubled Revenue but your business is maybe worth less than what it was you know a few years ago and so that is
creating you know is definitely like seemingly like a lack of real real leadership right because if they had proper leadership plac in the proper narrative in place if they said hey we are going to be a real player in AI we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars on new
infrastructure then that might be a bull case right that might say hey they're going to take one of their Core Business lines and there's a real world where they you know multiply it but we don't have that and then we don't have um on the retail side all the sellers are
upset no no seller on Amazon is saying I'm so happy I built my entire business on Amazon right they're getting competed by you know Chinese sellers they're being knocked off there's a bunch of trademark infringement that happens um I uh one of my portfolio companies element
lmnt you know had a copycat product on the platform that was the exact packaging different name but a carbon copy of the product and Amazon let it run up to you know thousands and thousands and thousands of sales I think they've dealt with it at this point but it's a very hostile environment to be a
seller and we're not seeing you know real leadership on the on the cloud side so um yeah I don't know I don't know what to think I think it's still a pretty good user experience on the on the platform I my I think it's a great value exchange as a user from I pay I
don't know how many couple hundred dollars a year and I get a bunch of content and free shipping and that's great but um I think there's trouble on the retail side and um because ultimately Amazon's you know they're not you know now they own inventory but historically it was a very you
know uh inventory like model and that's what one of the reasons it made it such a great business and that's why Teemu it does like a meaningful amount of Amazon's you know uh net in you know profit from the retail business despite being a fraction of the size and so I'm
interested to see how it plays out but if you're Bezos and you're looking at all this and you say I have this Juggernaut the thing that is you know the thing that he put his entire life into and I could see him getting tired of yachts and you know hanging out with
his uh who his wife who um seems to be enamored by every celebrity that you know cross they cross paths with which has to be a lot um So eventually he might just decide you know what it's it's time to go founder mode I also think that he clearly has more interest in blue origin now and I like the fact
that he and Elon seem to be more um positive some now and supporting each other which which is great to see as well so who knows um but uh but yeah it's a great great American company for the most part and I'd like to see them uh you know really uh take the Reigns
and capitalize yeah I would love to see Bezos back at the helm he clearly has an incredible amount of soft power at Amazon still and um probably could step in think what's very interesting I mean I'd love to get a poly market up on does Jeff Bezos go back this year and then
roll that over to next year I know poly Market doesn't do longdd things but if you look at the Timeline Jeff bezo stepped down in 2021 this was just almost immediately once Lena Khan came in and the Biden Administration came in and you could maybe read that as he was
studying the history of Bill Gates at Microsoft he lived through that he was in Seattle attle when it happened there's actually a ton of overlap between their families I believe and investors because of the Silicon Valley business community and what happened in the uh in the micro in the Microsoft
case was Bill Gates was the richest man in the world and had a Target on his back and became kind of a scapegoat for Monopoly power and then dealt with this like really rough Monopoly case and even though it didn't destroy the company or really break up Microsoft in a
meaningful way I mean they had to kind of disaggregate Internet Explorer from uh from Windows the company's still been massively successful it's one of the biggest companies in the world they got through it but uh when you when you listen to Bill Gates talk about it he
says it was like incredibly distracting and it really ruined the job for him and then he spent the next and then it kind of broke his brain because he spent the next 20 years just trying to kind of rehab His Image through all these crazy philanthropies and so you can imagine
still trying to he's still trying to rehab His Image and and the most effective thing I've seen him done lately is he he did an interview uh and was photographed in a in a BGA Vanetta suit I thought he looked fantastic yeah thought he looked cool and so more of that and less you know running
experimental vaccine programs on uh you know India yeah he's also a big Porsche guy really oh yeah huge Porsche guy he uh he was he it was maybe like a little shot across the bout of Elon but he was always like I'm a t I'm a tyon guy uh you know oh I don't do Model S which I
think is a Miss but I think he also has like uh like a career GT a 959 a 98 uh probably he'll get the new one uh and uh it's I've been I've been uh I've been driving a tyon this week while while I'm in South Carolina Turbo S yeah uh it is H it's a very fun car absolutely rips um
but uh so I can see that yeah and so uh what I think about Bezos is uh 2021 Lena Khan comes in and remember Lena Khan wrote her senior thesis like her di her dissertation on Amazon as a monopoly and Amazon was not thought to uh to be subject to uh antitrust legislation because of the fact that it acts as an
aggregator as Ben Thompson described in the sense that competition is only one click away their strength comes not from cornering Supply it comes from cornering demand and what that means is that is that Amazon they might be able to raise prices but they never have and so it's
impossible to pres to to it's really really difficult at least to prove consumer harm which has always been the definition of we got to break up this Monopoly it's one guy owns all the steel or all the railroads and then because he owns all the steel he can say I'm
doubling the price of steel and everyone still has to buy and and you can imagine IM that that's bad it makes sense why we have antitrust legislation to prent that type of stuff in the case with Amazon it's it's seller harm and so sellers are pissed off sellers are are you know
still able to eek out a business but their businesses aren't growing in value yep and so that's a major you know again it doesn't mean that that there's a strong antitrust case to be built there because as a consumer I'm sitting here and I'm like well I pay 200 bucks a month or 200 bucks a year to Amazon I
get a bunch of content I get you know free Whole Foods delivery it's you know it's a pretty it's pretty good exchange um so yeah yeah we'll see we'll see how it plays out but without and so 2021 Bezos steps down this is like you know within days or within a year of Lena Con
coming in and then two years later the FTC files uh an antitrust lawsuit formally and so I think of it as the writing was on the wall the Biden the Biden Administration is gonna be very rough on me if I duck out now as CEO there's no scapegoat to go after and
it'll be much harder to Rally uh public support for an antitrust lawsuit because we won't be able to say look at this multi-billionaire look at the richest man in the world he's extracting value everyone needs to support this and that support even though FTC lawsuits are not
voted on by the American public there is pressure that happens through various uh elected representatives to the le lu Andy guy who no one really knows his name and he's just there being like yeah we're obsessed with cloud computing and it's actually a very uh it's a very hot
Market very competitive and look at Amazon Amazon yeah we might be the biggest in cloud computing but uh Google cloud is huge azure's huge and Facebook's also investing in data centers in a massive way and then there's a million other providers so it's it's a complete perfectly
competitive market yes we have great margins but it's not it's not a monopoly yeah now you have a bunch of new even you have new players like Stargate and you can point to them be like look they're they're investing $ 500 billion doll in their own you know so we're not
yep preventing new players from entering entering this Market it's still going to be very competitive um and so with lenina con out it kind of creates a space where Bezos could go back in if he wants and I've always been interested in I I always love when the founders uh
have been able to set up their businesses in a way that they can do everything in the one master bucket Zuck is the master of this like he has the Super voting shares and so when he wants to do the metaverse that goes in the meta bucket when he wants to do AI that
goes in the meta bucket uh elon's taken a much more decentralized approach but then he's recentralized with things like solar C City getting bought by Tesla xai is integrated with X and Tesla has some people over there so he's kind of creating this ketu of different companies that all have intertwined
Stakes there's a lot of overlapping investors people actually think about the portfolio of Elon companies as like Elon INC now and that's happening it's not all one company it's it's crazy to think that he could take just his personal positions public independently and
create an index Elon yeah and it would probably trade at at a 5x premium to book value you know something ridiculous y but Asos has always he's never been able to justify that fully like he I think Amazon did one satellite internet project but they they weren't he wasn't
able to go to the Amazon shareholders even though he has an immense amount of control he was able to go to them and say look we could be making money on retail but instead we're going to invest all of that in AWS and we're gonna have this amazing second business he wasn't
able to do that a third or fourth time he could have said hey look we have a lot of delivery trucks we want to make electric delivery trucks and so we're going to build electric vehicles in house but that's what he did instead he funded rivan and rivan is kind of his Tesla and that Stock's been up and down
but Amazon built a position and Bezos like helped with that a little bit but he wasn't able to just do it inside if Zuck needs trucks he's going to build them in meta you know he's not going to start a second company and same thing with blue origin like like if Zuck wants
to build Rockets it'll probably happen within meta because he has so much control and so much voting power there and he's and he's been very good at uh convincing the shareholders so it'll be interesting to see I mean I would be most I would I I would honestly probably
be more excited about blue origin and rivan if they lived within the Amazon holding structure and Bezos was at the top of that and could really choose how to allocate Capital because this this business even though you know it's down a couple percent it's throwing off so
much money that they are going to invest a hundred billion dollar in capital expenditure next year like that's probably way less than rivan needs or blue origin needs these could think about think about how good that would be for users if you could be driving in your rivan and for to do an Amazon haul
and buy a $13 uh guitar or $13 couch right $20 couch yeah yeah ex that's what that's what users want right they want slop products while they're in their you know slop EV yeah yeah I mean at the same time it it makes sense why shareholders are like wait like I wanted
to like Zuck I I'm here as a shareholder I just want like ad dividends like why are you open sourcing llms like I don't care about that um and Zuck has to make the argument that oh well it'll with talent and it helps with our it's commoditizing our compliments and oh we'll be able to stuff this and
everything and we'll have a you know stake in Ai and it's obviously gone very well um but even as a CEO who controls a massive public company you do still have to make your case to shareholders you can't just say I have a wild idea I have no idea how it connects and I'm going to
do it anyway people have to say hey it's going to make money for the Core Business um but Amazon I mean it really is interesting your point about them not being like leading the AI narrative because they are leading the AI narrative they're spending a hundred
billion dollar in capex this year uh as part of a push to build generative AI Services they're they're leading the investment in capex they're not they're not they're not leading the narrative yeah and I think that narrative just matters so much for a company you know
that that you know every company is in the game of we want our you know P the for the average you know retail investor that owns Amazon they want the you know they want the pr everybody wants the price to go up and so I think that they're not getting um credit for that
capex from a you know market cap standpoint 100% And so uh let's just break down how Amazon compares to the other hyperscalers uh it really is fascinating uh you know sat has that quote I'm good for my 80 billion well now that has actually increased Amazon uh Microsoft is expected to top 90
billion in capex this calendar year uh Google is spending 75 billion and meta is spending 65 billion and so you add all that up you're in some huge huge territory 350 billion something like that um pretty pretty crazy numbers uh but you know it's a lot of data centers
I'm excited to see it and and it's the meme another trillion to one another trillion to Nvidia woohoo yeah uh we we need to do a a data we need to do a data center uh you know for sure for sure uh and so US tech stocks tumbled last week after the surprise success of a new
generative AI model from China That's of course deep seek the freeo use model was built at a fraction of the cost although very debatable at this point the latest number I saw was like they spent 1.5 billion which is like more than it cost to train GPT 4 and so now we're in like
weird territory yeah they spent 1.5 billion while horrifically uh stealing uh from from open AI uh in order to and then and then you know lying about it I'm actually very confused about the real number here because it started as six million then people said well they
have other stuff and it doesn't include R&D and even deep seek admitted like we didn't include all the cost and so people were like okay maybe it's 50 million maybe it's 100 million it's still impressive they clearly did a bunch of optimizations to make the code run faster and there's just no question
that inference is cheaper like that is true we know that uh but now we're getting these crazy estimates like actually deep SE has invested 1.5 billion in AI as a whole project but then on the other end you're hearing like oh couple kids in Stanford rebuilt it for 50 bucks and so we're now like in
the bands of like deep seek spent a billion but Stanford can do it for 50 bucks I don't know what to believe anymore it's crazy I love I love how they just inspired America to grind harder everybody everybody was like oh it's possible to train a model like this
for you know very very uh little comparable cost uh we should just do it and then they do it so I love it I love it well uh and so uh obviously that shook markets Amazon CEO jasse wants to make Amazon an AI leader as the world he needs to do more podcasts though he
needs to start setting the narrative call Lulu go direct they live uh as the world's largest cloud service provider the company is in a good position to profit from AI Amazon cre created special teams uh created special teams to uh uh let's see uh created special teams to drive generative AI Innovation
and has released a fury flurry of services including an AI shopping assistant first time I'm learning of that I've heard that they have an AI chatbot that you can chat with it's so funny their shopping assistant for the consumer is yeah we're just going to find you the products that you really
want and then on the back end they're just telling all the retailers yeah you're going to have to give up 90% of your margin to get this customer and you're going to love it yeah otherwise you know somebody else will pay for that slot so and and so the The Wall Street
Journal highlights uh Amazon's competitiveness in the e-commerce business with new Rivals such as teu and shien uh both of these companies offer low prices to Source Products extensively from China uh president Trump suspended a trade exemption known as the day Minimus provision that Sheen
and teu and other Amazon competitors have used to avoid import duties on low value packages from China we've covered this before um and we and honestly we never thought that it was putting a dent in Amazon's uh revenues because a lot of the slop products that were bought on
timu and Chen were incremental and it was seen more as gambling dollars than really replacing or displacing Amazon as as a staple of the American Consumer uh uh consumer habits so uh unclear how big of an issue timu and Shen have been historically they're certainly on their
back foot now and it seems like Amazon's even even better positioned I mean a lot of this although the stock traded down it there's a lot of bullish stuff in here like they've they've they they they like there's no more FTC risk with lenina KH out uh they they're they're
potentially killing off teimo and Sheen and and they're spending the most on AI data centers so if you believe that having a lot of data centers lot of gpus is valuable they're in the best position now not by a lot they're only spending 10% more than than Microsoft uh but it's
still a lot and they got a lot of stuff out of it's great and and to be clear the stock is not under performing by any means they were down on earnings but I'm on public and they are up 5% is in the last month so not not a bad spot to be in but I think they're up 40% last year
which is crazy for a company that big yeah they were not a they were not a trillion dollar company in 2020 they were um in yeah so right at yeah if you bought if you bought Amazon the day that the NBA uh you know basically went offline it was like a $900 billion doll company
right wow um so anyways still doing well despite Bezos not at the helm but uh imagine imagine the move if Bezos did join the company the the the pop would be uh biblical for sure for sure uh and so separately during the important holiday quarter Amazon grappled with threats from one of the largest US labor
unions uh and I love their name although I'm not a fan of them personally the International Brotherhood of teamsters I I know the teamers union I didn't know that was their full name we should start an International Brotherhood of technologists uh they tried to disrupt
holiday deliveries to pressure Amazon to negotiate with its warehouse workers at the time the company said those attempts had uh fallen short I I guess um and so Amazon got through that I also wanted to go back and look at a little bit of uh older uh earnings analysis from Ben
Thompson um this is from 2023 talking about Amazon and Ai and uh and Ben Thompson is highlighting the the the lack of clear narrative and so uh Jassie uh at the time back in 2023 he says generative AI has captured people's imagination but most people are talking about the application layer specifically
what open AI has done with chat GPT it's important to remember that we're in the very early days of adoption and the success of generative Ai and that consumer applications are only one layer of opportunity and so three of the five big tech companies have a clear AI story
at this point Microsoft has its partnership with open aai Google has its own AI models and Google Cloud platform and meta is pursuing open source strategy in conjunction with seeking Partnerships with large Cloud providers starting with Microsoft that leaves apple and Amazon who have way
underperformed on the narrative front yeah and so here's the thing so Amazon made its bet on anthropic and anthropic is built a great model people love Claude but is kind of irrelevant on the consumer side they have you know a fraction of the downloads and the
engagement that open aai does yep and they don't have a reasoning model right now they do it's just internal they haven't launched it that's what I'm saying I don't I don't care they don't have a cons they don't have a you don't get credit for oh yeah we we got we got a we got a great like the
whole thing with with all these you know Foundation model you know companies is they're launching products oftentimes before they're really ready for production right they launch deep research and you didn't even have access to it right so everybody's sort of
running I believe that anthropics model was actually competitive they would have launched it already yeah yeah it is clearly a very diff and the other thing is they made anthropic made a clear bet around AI safety and a lot of other firms ignored that deep seek one of them and so uh
that seems to be in the short term the wrong bet to make and so that was that was Amazon's real you know player in the race and and I think that um or at least consumer narrative and it's turning out that anthropic doesn't seem to have a strong consumer narrative right now even
though people love the product yeah is I haven't personally used Claude in in weeks so um yeah I mean it seems like it has popularity amongst the developer Community but beyond that it hasn't really broken through and it's fascinating to see how aggressive Sam
has been at open AI about responding to just any developments you know every time Google has a keynote open AI has a keynote two days before and deep uh deep seek comes out what what what's the name of the product he launches deep research like he wants the Google autofill uh AI
deep something oh yeah deep research go over here and you can tell that deep research I mean I I've been enjoying the product and I think it's getting a lot better um but you can tell that they're not ready to scale that for a few reasons first it's not available on mobile so the the button is just not
available there so you have to if you're on your phone you have to open up a web browser and go to chat gp.com and then click the Deep research thing to do a query on mobile so they're clearly cutting the amount of uh deep research queries that way and then also it always
asks you a clarifying question to slow you down and I'm sure there's some sort of churn rate between oh I was about to kick off this deep research thing but it asked me a bunch of clarifying questions maybe I'm not going to do it and if that saves them 50% of the of the queries
that's a lot of compute because clearly it's very very expensive but it it shows that that they're they're willing to push it out and get the DAT that they can and do as much scaling as they can even though they're not ready for this to be free for everyone ad supported and
billions of of inferences uh that are just burning up uh data centers every single day propic all the stuff deep seek coming out and and people responding to it and and you know it's kind of showing that uh we may be at least a few models away from from the sort of asym asymmetric
risk that anthropic has been um you know focused on and so it seems to have been so far at least for these early reasoning models that that aren't fully you know agentic uh it does seem that uh they kind of made the wrong bet there yeah it'll be it'll be interesting to
see how it plays out uh maybe Bezos gets in there and puts some pressure on them and puts their feet to the fire and says give me the models they're going out today uh but let's close with uh Ben Thompson's analysis this is again from two years ago talking about Amazon's
play in Ai and he has some he has an anecdote uh Ben writes I'm wrapping up my usual summer stint in the US uh in a metro area that started receiving Same Day deliveries earlier this year speaking personally I absolutely agree with jass's characterization of consumer
Behavior I both found Amazon's delivery speed to be astounding and also recognized a significant shift in my own behavior because of that speed the truth is that buying something locally in person still requires a trip of some sort with that with the risk that what you want may not be in stock is in
almost all cases it was actually faster particularly once you incorporate the realities of life where you can't actually go to the store this very minute because things come up to Simply order from Amazon because you'll receive your item in a matter of hours not days
indeed uh felt I felt this summer marked the largest shift in my purchasing Behavior since the launch of prime when I needed something like say a mic cable which happened last Sunday I simply bought it on Amazon the moment the need arose the cable arrived 4 hours later
what I find so fascinating about this though is jass's argument that this actually results in lower unit costs because there are fewer touch points for the delivery this does not make intuitive sense in that it is a classic Tech trade-off between marginal cost and fixed cost it is also a tangible
expression of why I thought it was so important for Amazon to push for this level of delivery speed in the first place Amazon is at its best when it's realizing advantages that no one else can match because of its willingness to invest in the real world this is what
Amazon does best focus on long-term Moes and uh and uh and instead of instead of short-term profitability that's what leads to increased profitability in the long run if you're patient enough and confident in your position with consumers uh will will endure Amazon's renewed interest in its Logistics is a
perfect example and an encouraging sign that the company will will retain its greatness without its earnings call skipping founder because Bezos didn't go to the earnings call which I think is funny anyway Jordy what you got uh yeah I would just kind of close this out by
saying Amazon generally seem is very well positioned for a lot of the trends that we're seeing right now some of these other you know companies that are more PurePlay software companies that aren't existing in the real world there's some real threats there right software development timelines are
changing so dramatically it's becoming so much faster and cheaper to make software that threatens a company like Salesforce in a way that Amazon which is selling physical products selling content selling you know they have their Logistics Network they have their Data
Center business they they should be people should be tremendously excited about Amazon's positioning for the next 10 years and yeah they're somehow not getting that through so anyways excited to keep covering it yeah it's it's an interesting story seems mostly uh narrative and Communications based but
we'll see fortunately you know stocks up 40% over the last year uh minor minor bump in the road with this earnings little bit of scared on the capex little bit of deep seek threat but we'll see where it goes uh let's move on to our next top story we have a technology
Brothers exclusive where the for the first time in technology Brothers history we're covering an Eric newcomer exclusive on General catalysts fundraising and so we have slides here from Eric newcomer uh uh showing how General Catalyst has performed how they've scaled and Eric
newcomer has the firm's Q3 2023 fundraising documents and general catalyst is on a tear they are just going big ultimate size Lords let's hit the size gong a couple times for them they're just yeah and they even I don't think this article would have caught it but they came out yesterday announcing
they have a new fund of funds platform to fund other emerging managers so they're just going I love uh we love when people get aggressive and they are certainly doing that yeah I mean the narrative around uh uh around General Catalyst has been uh it was a VC firm
then it was a growth stage firm then it was a private Equity Firm uh now it's just an asset manager in every sense of the word I think they also launched a a wealth management product right yeah did you see that yeah and so uh they have a hospital consumer value financing a
wealth manager under the leadership of CEO hamont tanaga The Firm has Grand Ambitions uh newcomer got his hands on documents that show how General Catalyst has presented itself to prospective investors documents uh he obtained are ad are admittedly a little dated from
2023 that's a bit old newcomer got to step it up got to be hanging out at the Sand Hill uh the sandill Rosewood a little bit more yeah or the noou r hanging out you I want to see I want to see I want to see a tech journalist go to Japan study how to make sushi for 10
years and then go get a job at noou and just sit at the sushi bar you're just making sushi everybody thinks you're just you know making a nice handroll turns out you're listening for Scoops you're picking up every single thing that they say you're yelling aashim but then you're really you got
your ears both ears here because you got a bunch of allocators right in front of you you know picking up this round's happening that round's happening maybe a faster way to do that would just be to go pay off the individual you know the the weight staff the sushi the sushi
chefs Etc um but there's Alpha everywhere folks and there's certainly Alpha in the Palo Alto noou yeah newcomer become a janitor at Aman and then just go around and just sweep up all the slide Decks that are laying around the pool and the jacuzzi and the spa and just uh scan them throw them up
on the newsletter you're going to Triple subscriptions you're going to be printing five million next year in IA it's gonna you're playing small ball right now yeah yeah and so uh the investment memo provides a detailed look at General Catalyst strategy and performance as it was Raising its last
Suite of venture funds and so let's go through some of these uh they are absolute dos General Catalyst uh billions raised in October 2024 The Firm announced $8 billion of new funds for its fund 12 been around for a long time uh including 4.5 billion for the firm's
core VC funds 1.5 billion for its creation strategy and two billion for separately managed accounts one and a half billion for I'm reading that as incubations is that correct one and a half billion for incubations is insane that's just an insane number given given how uh Capital efficient
incubations can be because you know sometimes firm will put you know a founder as an e so they have a bit of an income and benefits while they figure out what to build um I I have no idea how it's actually structured but um well their latest incubation was a rollup and
so they wound up buying a lot of existing firms and so you could imagine if you're if you're buying uh like a midsized business dropping AI on top of it yeah it's going to be a 100 million Equity check and then a couple million 100 million in debt maybe uh that's going to go pretty quickly that's 15
deals if you're doing h100 million checks to kick off these like incubation rollup type things uh I have no idea how they're how they're sizing their bets but I'm sure we'll find out more um let's go to uh the evolution in 20 in in two in the year 2000 The Firm started in
Boston founded by serial entrepreneurs David Falco and Joel cutter during the do com bubble it General Catalyst established uh credibility uh uh let's see uh uh they hatched winning companies resulting in kayak demand wear and vertu uh fund five in 2007 was $722 Million already pretty big during
the global financial crisis they expanded to Silicon Valley in 2010 and New York in 2012 uh they did a fund six of $500 million fund 7 was 676 million every uh every fund is just getting bigger and bigger uh Ken shol who I've actually interviewed ramp investor uh
former CEO of AMX he joins as the chairman uh and then in 2018 General Catalyst solidifies a full stack platform by raising multiple funds segmented by stage this is the fund 10 group fund 10 cems in at 2.9 billion General Catalyst raises its first sector specific fund
the health Assurance fund uh hamont becomes CEO they open a London office in 2021 postco and fund 11 clocks in at 5.4 billion baby and so there's a little bit of a breakdown here for fund 12 they have their creation uh fund which hatches companies transforming companies
with a catalyst advisor and exec and executing Venture buyouts so that's so that's interesting so it's their creation fund but it's a venture buyout yep strategy so that makes and they're trying to own 25% of the business when they do trying to deploy one and a half billion when
you're creating you know preed companies uh and presumably making room for other investors too yeah impossible difficult but they're going to buy the're they're going to buy companies like their private Equity Firm but where they think there is VC like opportunity and Venture
scale and so they have the ignition fund uh this is where they do their core early stage work another 1.5 billion there they focus on seed series a series B and of course they focus in and 10 to 25% ownership Target there they have their health Assurance fund which is
targeted digital transformation of the healthcare industry uh 750 million uh early stage seed series a series B and Healthcare 10 to 25% ownership targets and then they have their endurance fund that's their growth in later stage Investments 2.25 billion and this is all
out of fund 12 and so uh they've taken this full stack approach you can look at some of their leadership here they focus on basically everything Healthcare fintech global resilience technology consumer and Enterprise uh and we can go through more of uh the slides but you
might just want to subscribe to newcomer the guy gets Scoops even if they're a year and a half old it's always scooping scooping yeah an absolute dog is there anything else we should talk about with regard to General Catalyst we got some boys over there some absolute dogs
writing huge checks making plays you know some every time a venture fund comes out and announces multiple billion dollars of new uh AUM there's always uh naysayers haters saying oh this is not uh you know this is not real venture capital or you know how are you going to actually put up returns like
this but you have to just give people a little bit of credit if somebody's raising $8 billion unless they're Masa done they have probably planned things out pretty precisely they've probably have a very coherent strategy because that kind of money doesn't change hands
and get invested without um you know the people that are investing those dollars um are sophisticated and um yeah they're taking a portfolio approach they don't need every fund they invest in to to outperform but uh yeah got to give uh credit and I and I like to see that
General catalyst is getting aggressive and evolving Venture it's not a cottage industry anymore uh I think that the super super early stage stuff will continue to be um somewhat Boutique and there's always going to be opportunities for new managers but you know the bifurcation uh Venture from the sort of
small 10 to 50 million funds all the way to these like five to20 billion funds or five to1 billion funds that is seemingly The New Normal and I think it's overall healthy it's important for early stage investors to know that you know if I invest in a company at at A5 to10
million valuation that if they do well there's going to be you know $50 billion do of Downstream Capital that somebody like a GC or an andren or a Founders fund um or a sequoia can can deploy into that so overall I think it's healthy um I think there's going to be you know an
entirely it's going to be cool to see that the generation of uh of investors allocators that come out of firms like General catalyst that were there during the transformation and then can continue to innovate down the road so yeah um overall very cool and you know look they're probably doing a few hundred
million AR just on the fee side yeah so the the the old model of 2 and20 is gone uh VC firms used to take 2% annual management fees and 20% carry but not a general Catalyst baby The Firm share of profits on it Investments starts at 25% and climbs to 30% if the profits are
above 133% in aggregate contributions and so a lot of these a lot of these uh different funds have different uh management fee structures the creation fund gets 2.5% management fee the ignition fund gets 2.25 endurance is their growth fund so a little bit lower 1.75% management fee
and the health Assurance fund gets 2.5% management fees so Eric newcomer clocks it at $120 million a year just from fund 12 and remember they're raising these new funds every couple years and so that's going to fund a lot of employees a lot of office space and a
lot of ski trips to Tahoe and Sun Valley yeah and one one thing to note yesterday we we'll probably talk about this later in the show but yesterday some news broke I think from Bloomberg that Trump was exploring uh eliminating what what has been called the carried interest tax
loophole yep and uh I think that loophole is a sort of not the best way to characterize it because the what they're referring to is the fact that uh investors uh that are you know uh people that manage and deploy money that's not necessarily their own uh they get when
they you know if you have a $10 million fund and it does well and you're in carry that carry gets you know has has historically been treated and today gets treated as capital gains um what they're trying to do is make it treated uh more like ordinary income so instead of paying a you know 15 20ish percent tax
rate whatever it is you might be paying uh closer to to 50% tax rate on that and so for someone like GC who's deploying billions of dollars and presumably wants to make a great return on that that's billions of dollars that they would be giving to the federal government uh or
the state government depending um you know on their performance so uh pretty uh would be pretty brutal for the industry in many ways but it's coming from somebody like Trump who runs his own money so uh as a real estate guy he's using his money I'm sure he has
co-investors uh and and using a lot of debt but to him it it you know maybe is not so important how carried interest is is treated but if you're a fund manager raising um you know billions or if you're a fund manager that's raising 10 mil and really making money on on the
carry piece versus the Fe side uh would be pretty devastating so yeah the uh the carried interest uh loophole closure this whole discussion that came up during the last Administration didn't go anywhere uh you said that if it goes through VCS will make January 6th look
like a baby shower I think we can see lots of VC and private Equity Associates protesting on on the National Mall if this happens it'd be uh who else interesting I forget who it was Dan primac Dan primac says a source on the phone just now on the carried interest tax situation it's like the Red
Wedding Trump collected all the VCS at the White House so he could more easily murder them and so uh yeah and and uh to be clear it's it's not going to be the end of the world but it does meaningfully impact um you know when I look at is like you know
from time to time I'll do an SPV into a company that I'm excited about and now I have to if they do change the law and and the tax treatment right now you know if I invest you know a million dollars VI an SPV I take 20% carry on it uh maybe there's other partners in the deal so I'm not
actually getting the full 20% carry after it's taxed 50% it might not have even been worth my time to do the deal I might have been better off just putting in you know 50 Grand myself letting it ride and knowing that it's going to be treated like um because because putting
together money like that being an SPV it's a lot of work it's super time intensive and so um you know you're basically looking at the way that I've always looked at it is you're investing in the deal with your time and so from that lens it's saying okay maybe it should be treated um like ordinary
income but the payoff is so unclear and it takes so long to see a payout and you only see a payoff a payout if you know there's a meaningful return and so um I see a good argument to keep it as is I don't think it should be framed as a loophole but uh sure we'll see how it
plays out and so uh manifold markets I don't know how up to date this is but they are running a market on carried interest repeal by the end of 2026 it's at yes 40% no 60% I imagine that's pretty low liquidity uh Med Faber here Meb Faber here who actually follows me
says uh we need a poly Market on the chances of carried interest lol uh close the carried interest tax deduction loophole so everyone wants to know whether or not this will happen it could just be one of those things where like Trump is doing with Canada oh we're going to make Canada State this and that
he Canada uh Trump loves to open with a C proposal and then back it off and and get something in trade and so I could imagine this saying look I'm going to close the carried interest loophole blow up your entire industry but as this gets now that I brought everyone to the
negotiating table and people realize how serious I am uh Trump will say well actually I'm going to close the carried interest loophole on investments that are made outside of the United States or and and and really his goal the whole time has been I just want VCS to invest
in American companies that make products in America and you could see that being more aligned and that's actually what he's going for but how does he get there well he's got to come in with a hammer and get everyone Wok waking up and saying look it's going to be the red
weding there's going to be a blood bath unless you play ball and then you know he set the bar here and so when he backs down he gets exactly what he wants and so I could see that happening and maybe that maybe that would be good for America it's possible L art of the deal L art of the
deal um okay let's go through some timelines uh and uh Ben if there's any questions or reviews you want us to read send those to the chat and I'll cut over to Jordy uh as we go through but first we got a promoted post from one of the favorite companies on the channel I'll
let you take this those that don't know uh my co-founder of rora rora makes beautiful easy to use highly effective water filters uh I just thought this was a cool shot um Brian CEO posted this yesterday it's just showing the same exact tap water coming out of NYC pipes one on the left going through Aurora one
on the right just sitting there and you can just see the difference you can see the contamination of the water uh so if you're drinking tap water you've got uh heavy metals Pharmaceuticals tons of stuff in it that you just don't want to be drinking it's absolutely insane to
drink tap water uh I uh simply uh I I haven't I I drank uh tap water once in literally the last like 5 years and it was actually at David sra's event not to throw David under the bus or anything but uh I got back to my room and it was at a you know it was at this really cool
retreat center and I was like probably like a 20 minute walk from where I could get water and I didn't even know if it was open so I drank tap water and I was like it was it was in Austin which has notoriously bad tap water and I was like this is egregiously bad uh spit it out
and just ended up uh you know going to bed th um but uh but anyways uh filter your water Roar makes good filters uh highly recommend you check them out and feel free to uh DM me if you have any questions on it fantastic and one I've had multiple calls now with technology
Brothers listeners where I popped into the call and they already had their rora in the background so very very awesome uh moment thank you for the support you'd love to see it well we got some uh major Personnel news in the world of AI open AI co-founder John Schulman is
joining Miram Mora's startup after a BRI brief stint at anthropic the trade deal NFL the Holy Trinity right here yeah the Holy Trinity it really is like the NFL I mean these these guys are bouncing around like crazy and you never know if it's like oh it's AI safety it was too
dangerous they were just too Reckless or it was just like I just didn't like working with those people or I wasn't getting comped right or uh you know some deal fell through I wanted a different thing or I wanted to be more product focused or more research focused but everyone's excited about Mira uh for I
mean look at the look at the pressure that Sam is under elon's attacking him two uh two of his former co-founders Ilia and Meera both have competing startups he's competing with anthropic deep seek it's it's not so often that I mean it happens right where you have a group
of co-founders that build a big company and then one leaves and starts a competitor but not in a while and I certainly not in my memory can I think of a time when a relatively new company that was already a multi-billion dollar company had two co-founders leave that
each now have their own billion doll companies that are generally competing for the same opportunities I think Ilia was in the news today this morning that he's raised potentially raising new money at a 20 billion valuation and so people are clearly bullish on the open
AI founding team and this is a big win for meor because you could imagine that John could have gone to to Ilia um to's company as well and uh so anyways it's this is just a great time to be in the technology Temple that is our studio and my remote Studio I love it's fantastically dramatic the the the weird
thing that I never understood was like these departures are always framed as like indictments of open Ai and yet it's like okay so you guys all don't like open AI but you also don't like each other because otherwise you'd all just start a company together and you all
started separate companies and so clearly like the infighting at these companies is just crazy in in many ways that we like the internal politics are much more complex than just like oh there's two sides to this issue because like why why aren't Mera and Ilia working together why did John Schulman
leave anthropic like like you would think that there would just be like the O the open Ai and anti-open AI but instead it's like there's the anti-open AI and then there's a different one and then this one's more about safety and this one's more about this and product
and stuff but either way it's going to mean a lot of great AI products and I'm excited to try them all and let's see what happens yeah it's really a crazy time I mean when the the pitch with AI right now the reason to invest in a pre-revenue company at a 20 billion
valuation is presumably because there's trillions of dollars on the line yep and so that's causing you know IND idual to say hey I could go join this company I could go on a vacation or I could raise a one on5 billion preed round and that's that's pretty sweet let's go uh and so I
think there's actually somebody else that's joining mirror's company I know Dylan Patel was tweeting about this saying that he was very excited about the startup and uh and and thought that the talent aggregation was very impressive still uh I'm I'm mostly excited to see like how is the product
going to take shape shape or be different uh obviously there's a lot of difference there's already fragmentation at the model layer obviously we see that within open AI model dropdowns there's reasoning models there's web searching models there's AI models code models and
so I using open using open AI right now is is like opening up you know a drawer in your desk that you just use to just Jam you know Jam a bunch of old papers in and you're trying to look for one and you're like just sometimes you want to just give up and you know slam the door
back shut but uh that's easier to figure out how to name your products than I was thinking about how messy the naming scheme is and I was like this is bad but at the same time I think it could be worse honestly if they tried to give them all like cutesy branded names
like imagine if it was just like apple pear banana like like uh sprinkles like ice cream you be like which one's which at least I know like 013 like 03 is a bigger number therefore it's better and I can at least like click on that one sure open AI plan internally is you
won't pick the model yourself you'll ask what you you'll tell it to to help you with something and it will just route it to the best model yep based on the ask and so yeah maybe it's like you know very temporary yeah it seems very solvable that doesn't seem like an intractable problem whatsoever uh anyway
all right we got some questions in the chat I just want let's go through them what you got for me uh Eliot asks can you guys go over caterpillar earnings uh that's a good question I know nothing about cater caterpillar's business but I love uh I love uh I love the products
that they make every time I I drive by one with my son he he he calls it out so maybe we should do caterpillar earnings yeah yeah I love that idea Ben can you drop that in in the group chat for uh for deep Dives actually I would love to figure out how caterpillar is benefiting
from all the AI capex because you could imagine if you have you know hundreds of billions of new data centers that need to get built like that's potentially you know a big growth ch so great call out Elliot we'll look into it and and if it's relevant definitely cover it Amit says
when's the andal IPO uh I don't think we can they said not this year publicly I think they said not 2025 um but I'm sure there'll be plenty of exciting news uh between now and then stay tuned and we promoted andal job posting yesterday so you know if you want exposure pre-ipo you got to put in
the work you got to just go to work there the underrated way to get allocation into these companies is just go in and exercise your options immediately yeah yeah no it is probably easier right now to get a job at andil than buy andil secondary I was scrolling
their jobs page they have like a thousand jobs up it's it's crazy how many jobs they had I thought it would be like oh like a quick scroll it was like pages and pages and pages of jobs so uh get on your grind polish up that LinkedIn polish up that resume start uh
you know being reply guy to every in your cover letter tell them the technology Brothers sent you exactly uh another question from FS FS ffrf which I presumably was he just slammed it in there to try to get a username going he says is this live and the answer is yes
we're speaking to you live now there's maybe a 5-second delay but very live uh we got another question from 5523 what are your thoughts on the UK's prospects for the future Tech wise um that's a better question for Harry stebbings he's on a mission to to make uh to make Europe great again so I'm
wearing a shirt that that looked uh that that had that on it um and um yeah I I I can't really like speak too clearly I mean I think that Europe has a lot of issues around Tech regulation right now I think part of the reason that the figma deal didn't go through was they
were facing pressure from European Regulators even though Adobe and figma are both us companies uh they seem to have a number of issues you know looking at the data there's maybe only a small handful of companies that have been started in Europe in the last like 50 years that
are in the top hundred biggest companies in Europe and so that just tells you that it's a tough environment to innovate in and create companies from zero to one and so there's been some successes the standout successes are are the Neo Banks uh I forget the name of the one that that has done well over
there um but overall uh you know and and the other thing is in dreon actually had made a big push into London around crypto because London was historically a finance a global sort of financial center still is uh and they the the UK government was making a push to create
more friendly regulations around crypto and andreon open an office over there for that uh but overall I would say that if you want to build a high growth tech company and have the best chances of success you're still better off you know moving to America or the bay yeah if you
look at the if you look at some historical data I think from the top 20 largest companies by market cap 100% of them have been created in us and China yeah I think it's like I think it's like 820 us um and so uh unfortunately Europe's just it's just not in the conversation um you can
certainly do entrepreneur there and start companies but in terms of these generational world changing power law companies they just aren't coming from anywhere but the US and China yeah uh even China is making it difficult by um in in many investment structures the uh
Founders have to like basically put their house on the line where if the company doesn't work out you know that the investors can can claw back their I mean you can actually just go to Silicon Valley and start a company raise money and grow and and become an American
citizen this is a thing you can do you just can't do that in China like there's never been a Chinese company that was not founded by a Chinese National yeah just impossible uh last question for now and then I got a question for you John also from fsfs is technology Brothers a VC firm
great question we are not we are the number one Daily Show in Tech John and I do invest uh though I've invested in 50 plus private companies they're they're on my website plus a number that that haven't been listed yet and and John's done a lot and John also is uh an
employee of found fund which is a small boutique Venture Capital firm based in here in the United States so um uh last question this is for you John what's your sleep score heard heard you had a rough night but I gotta put you I gotta put you in the spotlight I don't have my
eight sleep right now and uh and it's a it's a real tragedy got to start traveling with it just take it on the road but what do you got so Thursday was fantastic I was at 96 100% quality little low on the on the routine but last night was rough uh 90% quality for a final sleep score of 84 it's good but
it could be better I'm trying to get to 100% every single day it's it's good it's probably uh probably better than the Doge team which probably put up like three hours last night and uh you know that on the pods but but probably still not putting up big numbers on the Sleep
score side but the experience has been fantastic I've been super enjoy my wife's been loving it it's just been amazing overall and I can't say enough good things about it really been loving it awesome all right well let's back to the timeline get back into the timeline we had a post
from will manius friend of the show underrated how much of the success of early stage companies are determined by Vibes and not fundamentals better Vibes mean people will give you cheaper Capital work harder for less money give your product the benefit of the doubts
once The Vibes go negative I'm not sure we actually have the full quote I'm ass says um you are done and then lul it this um this is timely because uh uh so yesterday uh AI uh from friend hosted a space because one of his competitors had a co-founder leave and usually when a co-founder
leaves early uh people don't tend to jump off rocket ships uh and so uh a lot of people were looking at at that overall and saying you know hey there's probably problems internally or maybe the product's not doing as well as I hoped and so Avi uh knows how to get
attention he immediately jumped on and hosted uh basically a space to kind of uh I didn't I I listen for like two seconds but imagine it was a little bit of uh dancing on on on their grave but um yeah I think uh Lulu's been like this is a part of her whole strategy with her
firm is um and so she's adding to this she said people think the purpose of comps is to release news and it is but primarily it's for setting The Vibes and so um I think that's very well said uh it's really difficult to do that a lot of people associate Vibes with taste
because you have to have good taste to be able to consistently put out ideas and visuals and product releases and know how to leverage news and and sort of make the story about yourself in some way and so it's very difficult to do but it does give you a massive Advantage you
know I experienced this with my last company I would have people DM me that were incredibly talented and um like Dylan is a good example um who who led our our marketing and Partnerships effort uh he was at a bunch of great companies he was very early at hqtv to help blow them up then was at um
Postmates and uh he reached out to me and said hey I want to talk I haven't seen Vibes like this since ear HQ trivia days and then I immediately pretty much immediately you know gave him an offer to join and and he's still like a super close friend and went on to build uh
crypto company called crypto the game and and sold it and so somebody like that is he explicitly came because he was just like The Vibes are good I want to be a part of this and so uh that it's uh both Lulu and Will are very correct here yeah and also I mean the important
thing here is the early stage companies in the late stage compan companies once you've established the Monopoly in the business and you're kind of Lindy uh The Vibes can go out the window and the profits can still print yeah yeah but but you know we just talked about Amazon
earnings I would argue that Amazon doesn't have great Vibes right now the sellers hate Amazon uh users aren't excited about it you know like stock up 40% is what I'm saying like yeah but I'm saying I agree with you but it just it just matters a lot less like matters less yeah it matters less it matters it
matters so much in the early stage that's sales get right Salesforce has terrible Vibes for our corner of X but people like to go to their conferences and like listen to uh pop music you know uh let's go to Grant he says as a rule of thumb you should spend more time
writing the prompt than it takes the llm agent to do it I think that's a really good tip and I think uh I I I got so burnt out on the here 10 sick hack and amazing prompts and amazing tricks to get something out of mid Journey or open AI or gpt3 uh that I I kind of got bored of
all that and sto paying attention but with deep research I've noticed that getting the prompt right really really matters but it's not just the actual instantiation of the words it's the idea like what thesis are you bringing what question are you trying to answer what
would require the agent actually to go and do a bunch of work and pull a bunch of data and then setting it up for success there as opposed to just oh if you use this word you'll get a better result like for a long time the prompting was like think step by step or ignore previous instructions and they
were like these hacks and I think we're kind of we're kind of post that era and now into an era of okay you actually need to think critically bring an interesting thesis and and the AI agent deep research or the reasoning model will help you substantiate that and support that with
data yeah I think I look at this and I draw a connection to when you're working with with Junior uh junior level employees it's ends up paying dividends if you spend 10 minutes or a thoughtfully crafted email explaining exactly what you want how you want it done what success looks like and things
like that and so you're just going to get a lot of better results out of that and so I think what Grant is saying here is is a good rule of thumb I I I also think that this will continue to change as the models understand you better and they just get faster right yeah totally
because eventually it'll be like nearly instant where um you know yeah you're going to want to spend a minute prompt you know writing the proper prompt and then it'll do something that's like you know completely instant so yeah I mean d Patel was talking about this too he was
he he was saying that you know we don't spend we we'll spend hours training a junior employee but we refuse to spend 15 minutes really working on a fantastic llm prompt and then he shared a prompt that was really robust all for Gemini to help revise his show transcripts and it
gives bulleted lists of what he wants what he doesn't want it even includes an example of before and after exactly how to transform the data and he really set the lmma for success and now he has a a template that he can use for every single show drop it in there and get a
perfect transcript every single time and that's just not going to happen if you just go in there and say hey clean this up because it doesn't really know what you want and so yeah spend the time to to write a great prompt and you'll get great results uh let's move on this is
some drama in the hardtech world hos the world the West's largest CNC machine tool provider was found and charg for using shell companies to sell machines parts and services to China and Russia and Cody James says surprised not to to not see much news covering this in Chris
power over at hadrien gives it the throw up emoji hit him with a throw up emoji I mean so one I saw this news and my first thought was so this is why the hos F1 team is absolute trash it all comes back to Karma right you know they they were trying to be we're the American team you know cheer
cheer for us you know support you know support American F1 and meanwhile you're selling CN CNC machines out the back door to our uh enemies and I don't appre appreciate that and so I will um you know the next time I'm I'm watching a race when they're getting you know uh
19th and 20th Place and maybe not even finishing dnf I won't feel so bad maybe it's maybe it's uh but hey I'm going Cadillac Cadillac F1 team it's it's happening I'd like to see I'd like to see Chris power come in and um you know albo has and and uh you know make make H
great again yep it'd be great to see uh yeah we got to dig into this I mean it's pretty pretty crazy to actually go and and set up all these shell companies uh usually when this happen it's kind of uh like we we were more or less Bamboozled by a shell company that was set up by a
foreign adversary we do our homework this is them proactively trying to sneak stuff out the back door so bad so bad so bad yeah and uh you know if if they keep doing stuff like this I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now somebody makes a Hos uh you know cryptocurrency yeah rough who knows I
wonder how big the fine was I wonder what the punishment will be uh we'll have to dig into this more maybe do a full history of hos that would be a very interesting Deep dive uh I mean at one point certainly a fantastic hard tech company probably lots of lessons to
learn uh just got to keep the moral compass at True North yeah let's move on uh we have a promoted post from Jeff Huber over at chroma he's hiring a chief of staff to work directly with him uh highly recommend working with Jeff great guy uh they make a uh they're launching
chroma cloud and they're looking for chief of staff to help them build and scale the business you'll work directly with Jeff the CEO this is chroma's first dedicated go to market hire your scope and responsibilities will reflect this this is an exceptionally demanding High
Velocity role he's looking for 5 years of experience in technical product business operations or strategy roles strong and understanding of product-led growth principles data driven mindset technical AP aptitude excellent verbal and written communication and a great
taste for design bit of a corporate athlete role really love to see it Jeff's also a smart guy look at him linking his uh put putting his Link in the second po numbers that's the kind of guy you want to work for you don't want to be working for somebody that's putting hashtags and links in their in
their primary post bad news uh not a lot of alpha there um but anyways great opportunity and uh great company yeah so chroma is a a vector database uh very useful tool in terms of AI and AI applications that maybe people uh don't often think of uh the really cool application that I was hearing about uh
was the ability to just stuff a huge transcript or huge document into chroma and then run Vector similarity with other documents so you could imagine uh like uh there was a Founder that was using this in a dating app they have a huge intake form where they ask you all
sorts of questions about what you're looking for and then they can actually search over all that text for someone across the network who might be a good match instead of just trying to match you based on height and you know whatever other you know hardcoded metrics you you code in they can
actually look really understand the responses who you are as a person what you're interested in your writing style and then match you across that and that's something that can that that can happen in a uh in in a rag retrieval augmented generation context very easily
and so uh chroma's been on a tear they raised a bunch of money and Jeff's an absolute dog so I recommend uh hitting him up if you're interested uh let's go into some debate about deep seek I love this post uh bojan asks do people still use deep seek and Nikita beer trimes in
with some evidence he says yeah my cousin Jimbo beer in West Virginia can really see the quality improvement over GPT he heard about deep See's performance from the town sheriff during Appalachia AI happy hour yeah and I love it and pant there says can confirm I host the Appalachian AI
happy hour and of course Nikita ising John John you normally leave me to to botch words uh Appalachia oh yeah Appalachia um uh but uh but yeah this is what we were saying the whole time the chart was clearly not not fully real you know I'm sure there was real I'm sure there was
people coming from Tik Tok but uh I don't uh I haven't heard anybody outside of of teapot using deep seek excited about it I haven't seen on Instagram haven't seen a single post about it or or any any type of content at all really yeah and and Nikita broke it down really
well Tik tok's been warming the trend they're doing a ton of promotion for this they're trying to get more people to install the app but they don't really have any viral Loops yet and uh it doesn't make sense that there would be a massive uptake that would be durable or sustain
when you're going to be able to get similar results in WhatsApp and Instagram like you go to the Instagram search bar and you're talking to to a pretty solid llm in the form of llama and it's gonna get better the other thing that's interesting is I don't think the average chat GPT user cares
about reasoning or would even really know how to really put it to use yeah so for them if you say well I have chat GPT on my phone I'm on the free plan I get some value out of it oh there's also a Chinese app that has Chinese characters as the developer name in the App Store
that I can't even read oh yeah I'll just stick with Chad GPT please uh it's it's not a really good sell at the moment yeah and as much as we make fun of the chat PT app as being confusing with all the models like it is a more robust and better app than deep seek just in terms
of functionality so image generation baked in and charts and all these different uh PDF uploads we we we we joke about but it really is a more full featured app just because they've been developing it for several more years and so uh the deeps is kind of like a a
rough clone and there's a free version of the chat GPT app that it's going to be hard to get people to uninstall that and then there's also Google AI summaries and AI is popping up in all these different places where there's already distribution so um not super bullish on deep seek sticking around and
breaking through in the way Tik Tok did yeah especially with all the pressure um here's an interesting post from Cody James he says we should bring back how it's made this show did more for America's skilled Workforce than anything else post clearly resonated 1.5k likes and uh uh did you watch How
It's Made ever trying to remember it sounds really familiar but it might be slightly before my time as as an almost Jen's year it was on uh I think Discovery or one of those kind of the mythb ingredients going in goes into this machine gets extruded uh really nice
cameras really uh like lots of slow motion just uh really nice voiceover and some really cool music and it was just really relaxing really fun to watch I loved watching this and it actually came in in in super handy when we were building the first uh uh when we were uh
planning to build the first uh manufacturing line for Lucy gum nicotine gum I literally watched how it's made on how to make gum and and I was like okay taking notes like okay it goes in this machine goes in this machine and it's remarkably like making pasta like you
you have a bunch of ingredients you knead it into a dough then you extrude it then you need to cool it and kind of bake it down and then you coat it and so and and it's just like it's really just like four or five machines each machine has a couple buttons and yeah you can
hook it up to a computer but really it's just like if you know how to turn it on you know the right settings you know that oh if you put this uh you know this flavoring in you're going to run it uh for a little bit longer or you're going to need something else in there and and
this is how like pretty much every product in the world is made and uh yeah and I completely agree that we're getting a light version of this with the Jason Carman documentaries I I got a chance to do a version of How It's Made with George Hots because he has brought
his entire manufacturing uh workflow inhouse for comma AI the aftermarket self-driving kit and so he has a a machine that prints circuit boards and then a machine that puts transistors on the boards and assembles them and then he takes it over to another place George to get into the Drone market for sure
that would be amazing I yeah I mean these there's so many companies that need to be built and and uh unfortunately it feels like far too few uh entrepreneurs that have the and the ability to actually go and execute at scale and and really get addicted to the Grind of okay we're going to sell more
and more and more and grow grow grow uh we keep coming back to like oh there's a problem like can Elon build a company around this if not we're screwed like Intel oh it's got to be an Elon project or no one and uh as much as I love Elon that's like it's kind of sad that we
don't have like a deep roster of eons that can go and transform companies um but hopefully the next generation is it hopefully they get inspired by how it's our listeners uh ironically are yeah it's true yeah um awesome let's move on uh this is fantastic news paler has officially
reached mega mega cap status today surpassing a $250 billion market cap the stock is absolutely ripping it's massive and Gary tan quote tweets it and says I designed the logo for a mega cap 19 years ago overnight success sometimes takes two decades that is so crazy
insane GT GT GT the absolute absolute dog and uh leg Ty Morse down there says time to update this thumbnail it's uh it's a vlog of Gary saying that he I believe he didn't stay at palen long enough to get all of his shares and he says it's the decision that cost him 200
million pretty sure paler was worth like 10 billion back then and so you might need to add another zero to that uh but uh you know Gary's obviously gone on to do incredible things and uh you know make it all back make it all back make it all back in the in the capital
markets game and uh it's and it's still just like a fantastic story and a really inspiring story for early employees uh and and and a tale about joining a rocket ship identifying the right company getting in and and just riding it all the way to the top and so uh
Gary's been super super generous sharing his insights on his YouTube channel now he's over at YC sharing more of those uh I'm sure he feels like he hasn't told these stories enough but I'm glad that he's uh uh resurfacing some of these stories because they are fantastic insane uh oh this is some amazing
breaking news uh Saudi Arabia has asked the Oscar winning composer Hans Zimmer to work on a new version of its national anthem I am so excited about this this is this is just incredible it only happens in Saudi Arabia uh and I love that they're just like yeah we need a V2
like no one we should be so this this we should all we should commission new versions of the national anthem you don't actually have to be the actual country to commission a new version of your national anthem we could do we could do a you know we could create a dow to make a new uh you know national
anthem right let's get those crypto guys to uh to put their you know dollars to work and create you know a hard asset like a like a banger version of the national anthem but I love it I love I love that Hans is is uh partnering up with uh the kingdom uh it it's gonna I
cannot wait to hear this track we'll do a live um we we'll play it live on the show react to it um maybe you know we're gonna be in the Middle East later this month maybe we could pop over and do a little listening party yeah but uh it's great to see yeah I mean it it makes sense like like
there are plenty of national anthems that are iconic uh you know people obviously know the American national anthem but most people also know O Canada and uh and there's a few others that stick out in people's mind Saudi Arabia hasn't charted top hasn't topped charts in a while most people can't sing
it from heart and so get Han Zimmer in there he did Inception he did The Dark Knight he did uh Oppenheimer I think maybe no that was somebody else um black Blackhawk Down too oh he did that there's some crazy tracks on that uh soundtrack yeah I I wanted to sound like
Inception really dramatic Saudi Arabia welcome to Saudi Arabia Han Zimmer I hope they play this the air just on repeat what do you think the actual cost to get an okay track from Hans where he kind of looks in the back catalog he takes out some stuff that never quite
got published y because it'd be kind of cool to get the technology Temple Anthem you know a track that we could play while we're prepping the show and the studio yeah I think it's probably seven figs it's probably up there but it's doable for the right price um Hans are
also I mean people uh uh or John Williams has gotten a lot of criticism for kind of like remixing Gustaf Holtz into Star Wars and so you know a lot of it's just what what you know you're standing on the shoulder of giants what what building blocks are you using to create the next classical Banger um but
Hans Zimmer's great he I think he did Dunkirk and uh he's done a lot of interesting stuff with like burying the theme of the movie within the song and so I I'm genuinely very interested to see how he brings out the uh the spirit of Saudi Arabia through in the track I'm
excited one one thing that's interesting so in UFC when the the when the UFC goes to the UK yep they fight on uh like basically like e Eastern Standard Time yep and so the fighters have to fight at like 5 six am so they have to stay up the entire imagine pulling an all
nighter and then having to fight a title fight like it's the most brutal thing ever when they go to uh and there's a lot of English fans and so people have complained about that and said hey we have a lot of fans here you're making the fans and the fighters stay up the
entire night to watch these fights and um when they fight in Saudi Arabia and the UAE they fight perfectly at Prime Time in the uh locally Saudi time wow Saudi time so so there was a a UFC card I think it was last Saturday yeah it was Saturday and uh started at 9:00 A.M
Pacific it was actually kind of nice for me I was watch it's like F1 F1 you're always up early and if you're in California but the Saudis absolutely MOG the the the British fans by being like no when you have enough leverage they'll do it at whatever time you want it's a
bad day to be a s uh to be a sports fan if you're not Saudi line didn't they take all the golfers to the to the sa yeah that was I guess I guess the PGA and and Trump are are in conversations now bring it back we'll see yeah uh well let's move on to a promoted post from
Christy's real estate uh there's a breathtaking country chatau near brantome on set on 134 Acres of tranquil Parkland and Forest this would be a great pickup for anyone in the audience who's looking for a chateau I I really liked it CU it has a lot of Versatility uh you can see uh massive turrets
multiple stories looks like a castle and great turrets on this one I mean not enough people take into account how many turrets they have when they're shopping for a home and it's just such a amazing feature one concern I have now even talking about this is that our friends
over at wander Kyle and John uh they listen to the show and I'm guessing that that they're listening live and I'm guessing that they're bidding already and so if you're not listening to the show live good luck uh picking this thing up because the wander guys are on a mission to get the the best
vacation rentals across the entire world in every single market so yeah so let's move through to the next slide uh we got some closeups of the turrets we got the pool and you go inside and it's just loud opulence everywhere you look amazing it looks like it could use a
little bit of AEP a little bit of a maybe not a remodel but a a sort of refurbishment but I think you throw an eight sleep on the floor and you're good what else do you need yeah in your there you go all you need is an eight sleep and a dream in your Renaissance Castle uh great
place for offsites great place to have the whole crew while you're building the startup uh get a chateau the country Chateau so yeah uh if you're looking for a chateau go to Christy's real estate tell him the technology Brothers sent you and then you know while you're not
there throw it on wander make a little couple extra bucks there you go that's that's the real play yeah all right I threw this in okay I'm tearing up right now okay break it oh yeah this is rough so um anyways so the news is that uh every Quicksilver bong and vcam store in the United States will
close and it's very sad uh we had a we had a quicksilver in Malibu that shut down and if you're a surf apparel store and you can't stay in business on PCH in Malibu that just says that there's so little demand for surf apparel now and so to give some backstory uh because I
don't think I've talked about it on the show I like grew up an Avid surfer in California uh went to UCSB because the surf was good to be on the surf team and so I competed on the team and uh and I actually worked at a surf store in high school and even then I could tell that
surf culture was fading uh quickly from relevancy it used to be that you know young kids in Ohio wanted to wear surf apparel because like surfing was cool and then skateboarding really uh rug pulled surfing that became more of the sort of dominant uh culture at least in
apparel and then Street Wear was really the death Nowell for uh surf the surf apparel industry because kids now want to wear Bape and uh uh you know Supreme and you know Nike and things like that and so anyways the surf the surf apparel industry is in a rough spot I mean I'm
sure the brands Will Will Survive it's just more so uh athleisure is the other big Trend right so dad's dads might have been you know wearing Quicksilver shorts and shirts and now they're wearing blue lemon or um what's the other one that um I don't wear athleisure so I can't even think of
it but um v v v v is the other one yeah those those those Brands like just really dominate that that I mean there's a beautiful Hawaiian shirt right there in that image Palmer lucky should pick this up it can be his next mod retro yeah he should pick up Quicksilver
ball and V Volcom turn them around just you know start printing make it great yeah I'd love to see yeah and it's this I've talked about this on the show before my my um roommate in uh in in College Pierce incredible Surfer easily could have gone pro but his parents forced him to get an education and go to
go to high school in college um but I I swear he he has he now uh H is able he's in real estate he's able to work all over the world so he's like constantly surfing in different places while having a real career and so he's getting the last laugh as a sort of surf industry
collapses and a lot of the you know salaries that were paid to Surfers historically for endorsement deals have dried up and um so anyways sad sad moment but I think a lot people saw it one out uh art plub says pouring one out for my seventh grade wardrobe and Josh
Steinman says jenko uh let's go to Katherine Bole she says it's crazy how good the internet is right now best season ever and Carter says X is the movie theater couldn't agree more having tons of fun on the timeline uh never a dull moment and never a lack of content for our show
yeah I I swear we've had consistently a new current thing every 48 hours this year and it's fantastic I mean part of that is the Trump effect yep uh in 2016 I I kind of I was in college I had was like working my business I just kind of like tuned out a lot of that stuff um
but this is exactly what happened back then where every single day he just sort of dominates M share in the news cycle and it's interesting now having JD there and Doge and some of these like bigger initiatives that um and having that that you have um the AI uh activity as well
it's just kind of creating this sort of Vortex this attention Vortex and uh yeah I think I think many people are saying it's just gonna keep accelerating I completely agree I completely agree let's go to Brandon jacobe over at X jacobe he's on the timeline he says I can't say why exactly but I need you to
like this post and it's a banger he got almost 5,000 likes Jobe you know the Steelman here is that oh he's a designer at X he's testing the algorithm he's testing some feature in prod no I think he's just farming he's just farming likes trying to grow his account trying
to you know get that uh greater monetization check going print some Elon bucks yeah this is this is uh this looks like insider trading on the on the Creator payouts you know like I'm going to use my I'm totally joking it's funny I asked I asked Tyler and jacobe uh if
if I could record live from the X Studios or the X office in New York on uh on Tuesday they've yet to get back to me they said they um they said that it's pretty tight security-wise over there so can't have they can't have newscasters just strolling the Halls recording you
know live shows but we'll see maybe we make it yep well whatever he did it worked and if you're ever in need of a pickup and a banger just just copy paste this throw it in the queue your notifications will be popping off and uh you know I think this is a tried and true format almost
like uh he was so real for this with a screenshot of a banger works every time uh let's go to link link says day two of my 1K to 50K Challenge and the portfolio is down 99.75% and Link which started with 1K has $55.98 and so you know you just need you just need a a thousand bagger now
originally you need a 50 bagger now you need a thousand bagger uh you know dust yourself off get back on the horse I believe in you link I want to see what happens I know whatever's going on I don't even know this app but I know it's dgen just from looking at the UI design
I know trading some of coin that's Phantom okay yeah there you go and uh and you know that this is not uh that this is not that this happened very quickly and this is his 10th account to be clear oh yeah you can see he's got a bunch of bunch of wallets gone so I mean
yeah most people would say oh I'm down 99.75% uh you know it's hopeless I should just give up now but 99% of people actually quit right now and so take your 55 bucks write it back up hit the hit the timeline and run it run it back up to 50K I posted I hadn't actually seen this
until you shared it but um I posted today uh we need a McDonald's challenge in crypto where a bunch of contestants they each get 25k they've got some amount of time to turn it into a million uh and if they're successful uh you know great if they if they lose the money they have to go get
a job at McDonald's and just use those paychecks to pay back the 25k which I imagine would would take unless you got a nice a cushy management role it probably take you a year just putting the fries in the back bro yeah I like that it's a good one hopefully that pops
off uh well let's go to another promoted post from NASDAQ good friend of the show Good Friend of ramp uh run that wonderful billboard that partner with adquick adquick talks to NASDAQ they own that beautiful billboard in Time Square they'll throw your brand up there so call AD Qui if you're looking for some
promotion out in the real world it's the way to make an impact online you go you throw your brand on the on the big billboard you take a selfie with it Elon retweets it next thing you know you got 10K likes what you got Jordy I will I'll put a little H note out there if you
want to run an ad quick billboard in Time Square at any point in the next year DM me I'll spend 30 minutes with you on zoom and work on the creative I love doing out of home ads uh and so a little free marketing support for you and it's completely power law driven
like the difference between just a what a few words on a billboard say completely change it from being oh there's a billboard there to I need to take a picture of that put that on social media and it goes viral and so you really can't under underappreciate and undercount how important dialing in
the copy and dialing in the messaging and the imagery and the design of that billboard because if your message is iconic and it resonates it's GNA go so far and you're G to get incredible Roi on that out of home spend and so highly recommend it but the reason we're
talking about this is because NASDAQ they went to the world economic Forum in 2025 in Davos we've said that we're going to make Davos great again as soon as they give us a call and let us host it uh Executives discuss the economic output output Outlook and cutting
through complexity with media and Industry leaders across BCG I and CNBC with special guest Simone biles and man united you're only going to get that type of lineup at at at Davos and NASDAQ is there to host it lowan Banger at least at the time of screenshot four likes few retweets um I
guess they're making it difficult to engage only accounts that NASDAQ follows or mentioned can reply but I know why that is yeah coins you know that you know that anytime they post someone was like let me put a pump. fun on here uh you know if you want exposure to NASDAQ WF get
this token not Financial advice do not buy anything ever uh but we love NASDAQ we love companies on the NASDAQ and we support the NASDAQ so thank you to NASDAQ let's move on to another ramp post this one just from a fan they say I would love to see ramp produce a Spotify esque wrapped
report some ideas your top reimburses for the year Simon spent X Dollar on his ramp card the engineers expensed X Dollar on Postmates I think this is a great idea not just to go viral but actually to understand how the money is Flowing around your business a lot of
times when you close the books what you're doing digging into below like different cost line items on the p&l it's to find weird things that are happening and a r a wrapped type product would be a great user experience to make it actually fun to dig into the different parts of your business and
understand oh like what's really driving Revenue growth where's our marketing spend going what where where are we spending too much on travel and entertainment or you know office supplies any of that stuff could be really well surfaced through AI through even just normal algorithms just
figuring out what's going on showing me a couple Trends but just surface this you know uh ramp is you know uh I like to think of it as machine God in your CFOs Chrome tab and uh we need more products that make it easy to understand what's going on in your business and
that's why we love ramp here ramp ramp on next on to the next one do that one uh should we talk about sahil lavena linga lavena let's do it he says no longer hiring junior or even midlevel software engineers and he breaks down how many tokens are in each of his code
bases gumroad is just 2 million tokens uh flexile is 800k helper is 500k iy is 200k and shortest is 100k both Claude 3.5 Sonet and 03 mini now have context Windows of 200k tokens meaning they can now write 100% of our iffy and shortest code if prompted well it won't be long
until AI will be writing all the code for helper file and gumroad my guess is by the end of 2026 when these models get bigger and their context windows bigger and so his new process step one he sits and chats about what he needs to build doing research with deep research as he
goes then he has AI record everything and turn it into a spec then he cleans up the spec adding any design requirements or other nuances then he has Devon coded up we're big good friends with cognition love that Devon's helping out here and then uh step five is QA merge and autod deoy to prod and
so he is just having a great time with AI tools and uh it's great to see a CEO of a company that has a couple different products couple different codebases actually break down the workflow one cool thing here you talked earlier about how a CEO like um Zuckerberg just says like this is my
company I have control I'm just going to do everything that I want to do Under This umbrella yep sahil is doing the exact same thing with gumroad uh he's basically built out um a number of different products or business lines under gumroad which is um yeah I'm I'm
sure everybody's familiar at this point but an easy way to sort of buy and sell digital products online um and so he's now building out these other products that help him build gumroad and then making those individual products available to everybody else so they have
um some type of like uh contractor payments product they have a help desk product that he's talking about here so I'm pretty sure he raised VC money very early he started the company very young he was I think an All-Star intern at Pinterest and then raised a bunch of
money and then uh and then I think he was able to buy out the VCS at one point and kind of get more control over the company or something and now he runs it kind of like a lifestyle business but that's not meant to be a pejorative he just has control and he's been building
exactly what he wants and growing the business in very interesting ways unfortunately documenting it all uh right in public he's not quite building in public but there's a lot of good stuff that comes out of his account yeah and he he did a very high-profile crowdfund I think in must have been 2022
that's right a very small very very small shareholder in that Co so anyway excited to see where Tes it well let's move on to Trey Stevens uh answering a very interesting question because Trey worked at paler with Alex karp and Chase asks Trey what was it like working
day-to-day with karp I'm so curious and Trey says well one time uh my buddy and I were who who uh who went to Notre Dame and Georgetown respectively were with Alex carp after a great customer meeting and during a moment of silence he said great job guys you think we should be
recruiting more people like you from second tier universities that's mostly what it was like I that's so funny uh karp just talking trash talking trash in the but it worked out he got great results from his crew yeah and he's still still talking smack this time from earnings calls we love to we love to
watch yeah and Tim Ron who was there says carp dm with a K and Trey says you remember this right I don't think I was hallucinating uh such a funny post and and just a great culture you know just guys guys being guys talking trash in the office uh I'm sure it makes everyone
grind harder way better than uh you know oh you know my boss can't make fun of me I I couldn't possibly withstand that no you know you got to have some sharp elbows you got to have some fun sometimes so we' love to see it uh let's go to Phil nson Phil Mickelson said I
would uh is this the actual Phil Mickelson I think so uh he says I would just like to say Sesame Street is an excellent show Iraqis deserve to have it and although production costs were under 500k shooting on site required $19.5 million to Ure this is from the refering
usid stuff right yeah there was a usaid uh payment for $20 million to produce a Sesame Street for Iraq yep um and so Phil's just backing him up he says Sesame Street's an excellent show and Iraqis deserved to have it uh so I think uh yeah standing up against I talked
about this on the pirate wies show uh yesterday and uh and it's a pretty hilarious story what's weird to me is like why did they need to shoot Sesame Street in Iraq like why not just take our Sesame Street translate it and then just broadcast it over the air or just send them the files and be like you can
distribute this now it's in your language uh instead they had to localize it and shoot it there on site which is crazy to me I like how he falls this up and says because sarcasm is just completely lost on X if you ever post something sarcastic you'll understand but Phil replies I'm curious how many
people will think I'm serious and then he replies again turns out quite a few yep wild story but you love to see Phil Mickelson on the timeline dipping back in uh not not your typical teapot poster but still got it got some good humor fun waiting into it uh let's go to coin
Telegraph just in pump. Fun hit with a ceas and desist from Burwick law ordered to remove 200 plus IP infringing meme coins and you know I don't know we we could be a plaintive in this case someone made a a pump. fun meme coin all All About Us trying to steal our idea
and our branding well yeah that to be clear they made uh a coin we had talked about lvmh being a good proxy for TV because we think a lot of people in Tech are going to be big lvmh buyers in the future yep um and it was said purely for entertainment but somebody turned it
into a mem coin and then in the description on pumped up fun was saying that it was affiliated with us which it clearly was not um but the funny the funny thing about this post is that um you can't just remove tokens from the blockchain I guest pump fund could stop showing tokens that have IP
infringement tokens are still going to be there two layer but not at the web relayer yeah the tokens are still going to be there still able to be traded and um I yeah it's just one of those things that companies have to I mean the nft marketplaces went through the same thing
where there were you know really crazy IP infringing nfts and some were very offensive and there were a lot of NSFW uh nfts and a lot of spam fs and so uh openc and the other marketplaces created uh essentially views and filters on top of people's wallets to only show certain
products and then and then obviously highlight certain products in the store it seems like that's something that hump fund should do in the sense that there was a Tik Tock token and it had nothing to do with Tik Tok it was just and you had a guy from from Trump's team or some
organization funded you know I don't know part of that whole that whole world he was promoting it um so I think that there there is a real risk for consumers to you know think that it's somehow associated with Tik Tok and maybe they're buying it but that being said people need to do their own research and
think hey is a Chinese company that's under immense scrutiny right now in the US launching a crypto token even though they make billions of dollars a year probably not well thank you to Burwick for your service and uh we're happy to support you if you need extra evidence
of what's going on in the IP infringing meme token space we will be on the witness stand we call we'll call up uh we'll call up uh Bernard Arno it together you know yeah no I I I would be happy to stand on the take the stand next to Bernard in in defense of valuable intellectual
property uh let's go back to GT the man the myth the legend the president of white combinator Gary tan he says that is merely the average at YC these days thanks to AI he's quot tweeting Yuri who says overheard from a series C founder we are experiencing YC level growth
numbers 10% per week let's go I love it insane yeah I I posted um earlier this week that YC is is just such an obvious beneficiary of AI for a few reasons uh one you can just build things faster than than ever so the three-month period that YC typically takes place in they
can just make so you know these teams can make so much more progress two teams need to hire less people because they can use AI to just be way more efficient and then three uh these companies are um uh so I'm going to give you four actually but um one is that the the
potential applicant pool has exploded so much because people that didn't think of themselves as developers can now develop software and then the last being that uh now that it's cheaper to build software we're going to want more of it so I I talked to a team yesterday that's doing
something in sort of retail um more consumer packag goods and they're building software as part of their um business because it they now can do something with one engineer that would have taken them you know a pretty significant team historically so very cool to see that's great and Gary if
you're listening let the technology Brothers uh host a live stream for demo day we want to review all the all the startups pump them all yeah right now right now uh they work with tech crunch give us the press pass yeah all we need is a press pass and we will put the
companies on yeah it'll be great I think we make it very entertaining uh we'll stream it on a YouTube we'll we'll bring a lot of entertainment to YC demo day be great let's go to Zach he says if you're not coming close to peeing yourself at your desk you are not obsessed with what you
do and this really resonated for me because often times we'll finish recording and it's getting hairy you know it's getting close no I think this is just a sign that you're working on something that you're really excited about if you're working on something that bores you and you uh and you have
you feel like you need to go to the bathroom you'll just get up and do it if you're working on something that's stimulating yeah you know you probably let it go a little longer than you should so yeah here says dude so locked in he got a catheter and Zack said he'd consider it
dude is the definition of locked in yeah I I I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Doge boys got catheters in so they can just stay stay in front of the computer you know grind never SL stops Guy The Grind never slops either perfect fraan slip I suppose uh let's go to Josh
steinan friend of the show been many times you know him you love him he says this exactly and the bridge from the idea to results the Gap is being cool and the solution is being cringe and so you can't be afraid of being cringe to grind towards your results yeah they're
only going to be you're only going to be remembered by uh what you accomplish so if you need to be cringe to accomplish something that to me says that cringe is cool cring is bad I mean the fli like the flip on this like cringe is like uh it's such a Charged word but it's more
just like putting yourself out there like even just asking your first customer to go from a free trial to paid it kind of triggers that cringe feeling of like oh I'm putting myself out there I'm asking for something I'm asking for a favor I'm asking for something that I
might see I might there's there's like downside personal ego risk and so I think that's really the abstraction layer here of of even just telling your family I'm going to start a company and I've never started a company before that is in many ways in some circles like
cringe like why don't you go be a lawyer why don't you go be a doctor and and you have to be willing to put yourself out there and take that that ego risk and that's what cringe is it's not necessarily actually just like when people think cringe they think like posting slop threads on a uh that is
cringe but that's not what we're talking here I think you nailed it you have to be willing to be success F you have to take ego risk yes all long for years right and even a very small example is US transitioning from a recorded show to a live show it was a bit of a hurdle
suddenly everything we say is is immediately you know public um thankfully we never talk about politics or social issues just purely about business it makes it a little bit uh easier but um yeah you got to be willing to be cringe and styman even he's notorious for posting the same idea over
and over and over and a lot of people would say well it's cringe to say the same thing over and over but he made it part of his brand and I actually think it's cool now because he's just saying these ideas are important to me I'm just going to keep posting through it so yeah
he's gotten results the man has gotten results it's fantastic uh we got a couple more posts in the timeline we got five more minutes uh LM over at Kleiner Perkins one of the Holy Trinity firms in the valley says product exec at startup in response to code gen tools I told my
PMS we are done with specs or prds prototypes only and so you're on notice PMS if you're not building prototypes you're not going to be working for this product exact at this particular startup even though it's anonymized uh but interesting Mak sense yeah I saw TJ Parker post that the entire time they
were building uh uh it was what was his company again pillpack is that it yeah pill pack sorry I thought I was getting confused the entire time they were doing that they didn't have any M which just designers and Engineers um and so I think that there was at at some point
over the last 10 years it was very it was almost like controversial is to be like we're not going to have any product managers and I do think now um you know we still need people to um yeah it'll be interesting to see how it plays out maybe it's designers that code and then
you have like operations people or vice versa but anyway the flip side of this is what do you do with your PM who can't build prototypes can't design can't engineer and my idea is you send them to the pool and you get them making Tik toks they go viral because it's insane
rage bait and then everyone learns about your company and they're like wow this company's so dysfunctional you're playing 4D chess your PMS are now marketers for your company yeah your PMS just become your marketing budget so however much you're spending on PMS
that's what you would have spent on ads and if they baate people properly uh you'll get way more Impressions than y you know whatever you would and so PMS either you're in you're in Devin you're in cursor you're in Wind surf building prototypes or you're at the pool and you're opening up Tik Tok
so you're on PMS no in no in between no in between stop writing prds prototypes only and that concludes the timeline for today we are on schedule two minutes early this is a fantastic show leave us festar review on Apple podcast and Spotify please leave an ad in your review we will read it out on the show
and just thanks everyone who tuned in thanks for watching thanks for being a part of this community the Brotherhood the Brotherhood International technology Brotherhood uh and we will see you Monday we have five more days of content planned next week lots of Clips going
out follow us on X TBN on X subscribe to the YouTube channel add it to your Spotify Apple podcasts review us everywhere to your send it to your mother we specifically have eliminated swearing from the show so that you know your mother won't be you know embarrassed to hear you listening to
people with a potty mouth yeah so I do I do have a rant about the the the the free speech thing that's going on there's a lot of people that are saying more and more aggressive things and then there's a question about will there be accountability for this what's the free
speech thing and I just think going back I need to coin something around this cougan law but I've been calling it the the what would your mother think Rule and I think that in the age of truly free speech you're not going to be this is America this isn't Europe you're not
going to be put in prison for your speech and also the platforms are extremely forgiving there's very little censorship now you might get community noted but you can kind of say whatever you want and so it's incumbent upon you as an individual and as an upstanding
member of society to not police yourself but just act with honor and and theistic that I think serves Us best is what would your mother think what would your mother say and so um that that applies to the language that you use to the ideas that you espouse and just if
you're being a a nasty vitriolic person and your mother wouldn't approve of that um maybe you shouldn't do that at all maybe you should be going golden retriever mode and trying to be friendlier and so that's how I'll end the show well said thanks everyone for watching thank you we'll see you Monday cheers