welcome to technology Brothers the number one live show in Tech today is Thursday February 6th 2025 Jordy we got some breaking news a a te a technology Brothers exclusive really yeah X the everything app is now profitable let's go there we go there we go uh yeah we we uh we didn't scoop this but we scooped it from the timeline scy has a fantastic
post here uh I'll get into it Julian had shared earlier he says X also reported to investors 2024 adjusted earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization of about 1.25 billion in annual revenue of 2.7 billion investors said that was a better picture than they had expected and that X's finances hit an inflection point a few months before the November election in 2021 Twitter
reported adjusted evida evida of about 682 million and about 5 billion in Revenue that was the last full year before musk took the company private um so scy basically calls out X is worth around the purchase price right now which is 44 billion if Revenue keeps growing hundred billion valuation is not unreasonable crazy turnaround uh so many people you know were trying to uh at
some point stance on X's grave said that Elon was running it into the ground uh they did face you know the turnaround of of Twitter was always going to be a challenge it got exponentially more challenging as every major Advertiser left the platform and so uh they are coming back in a big way we're gonna cover that on the show yeah we'll cover that soon uh a lot of Heavy Hitters are
are bringing their ad dollars to the platform again which we love to see because it's more money in every Poster's pocket yeah and overall we love this app uh you know we we built our careers on it and it's great to see it win uh it provides an exceptional amount of joy and value to us here on the show and many of our listeners so uh I love to see this I they had marked down uh
you know the major investors had sort of marked down their positions at some point last year to around $20 billion and now looking at this if you have a business that's doing 1.25 billion in evida that's like the place that the most important conversations in the world are happening live every single day it's easy to see how that business especially with its you know potential
having these advertisers come back to the platform launching a bunch of new features uh I agree with scr it's easy to see how it gets to a hundred billion dollar company and goes public again probably on the Texas Stock Exchange uh and uh I look forward to hopefully we can we can buy some some X shares you know prior to them but I look forward to
owning it in the in the um in the public.com portfolio baby yeah there we go yeah I mean when this news hit everyone was saying he overpaid which it was I mean unequivocally it was a rough time in the market because it he bought it right at the end of the Zer and it probably would have been cheaper if he' waited uh but he got the deal done and all that matters is that it's it's an
extremely important app with a really really strong Network effect and and he's an operator and Elon posted you know hey maybe I'm actually good with money which I love and and there was a question about you know unfortunately the previous team at Twitter it turned over there were multiple CEOs there were lots of people trying things but it clearly just needed a more aggressive
approach and a take private is like the this is the quintessential example of when you want to do a take private because this would never be allowed to happen in the public markets the stock would be all over the place so instead you take it private you do some crazy reimagining of the business even change the en business model people were saying
maybe they should just charge for apis or maybe they should just do subscription maybe they should subscription gate the entire app so you have to pay till even view there's so many proposals and they all uh and Elon got a chance to try them all and then see what works and clearly he's on to something here what do you got Jordan yeah yeah at at the end of the day he
bought what in many ways at that price was somewhat of a toxic asset right it's not making a lot of money uh but inside there was this nugget of potential and I think that I think that he found it and he's now uh you know giving it you know even more life and um yeah there's been a lot of complaints from certain posters over the last year because their reach has dropped but guess what's else has
dropped John the quality of their posts that's true you can't just uh you gotta work the algorithm will work for you but you got to work for the algorithm and uh I'm sick of of of um you know sloppy low effort posters thinking that have 100K followers that they deserve 100K Impressions on a post you got to earn it every day and uh you know the platform will work for you but you got to work
for it so uh congratulations to the X team I mean we had to cut the episode short yesterday because of Tyler and Jacoby uh but uh but we got a lot cooking with X that we're super excited about and we're very excited to take this live show to x uh hopefully starting next week I think we just want to be back in the studio for it so um so yeah best app ever uh worth worth a
trillion dollars in my heart and uh and now probably around 44 billion uh you know Mark to Market I agree uh well moving on let's talk about some breaking news Eric glan at ramp has bought an ad for the big game let's go the big game and tune in on Sunday the big game I'm not exactly sure what that is I I know the Super Bowl is on Sunday the big game
sounds like maybe related to the big game related to the Super Bowl but they're run an ad and they got saquan Barkley uh in the studio shooting uh a beautifully directed ad very funny uh go check it out uh Jordy can you break us down on what this means for ramp what this means for the future of advertising at the big game so I gotta be honest with you John we got a little in we got
the scoop on this uh last week and they said you know we're running an ad with with saquin Barkley I go amazing I love ads you got to tell me who that is and then they go on to say you know future MVP future Hall of Famer he's you know he's playing in the big game I said what's the big game they said the Super Bowl and I said I will be tuning in now
I'm excited to see this ad uh but um no I think it's I think it's amazing it's it's um you know there's Evolutions right you go from posting a couple posts on X then you maybe run some some you know meta ads and then maybe you you know do a little organic tick talk and then you do some out of home ads and then eventually you're running Super Bowl ads and so I think it's just the uh
evolution of the the ramp advertising engine um and uh I'm excited to see it I I I love the I love the constraint of Super Bowl ads you have so little time you have to deliver a message that uh is going out to all of America it's like it's the best Channel to to reach a truly diverse audience it's you know football shouldn't be politicized there's there's people from all walks of
life and industries from employees that'll be users of ramp to business owners that'll you know sign up for it themselves to CFOs that are already using ramp and I'm just excited to see uh ramp um you know uh running ads on the big game so great moment it it really hits the core value prop in just 10 seconds like you know everyone's everyone in business has been in the
position of fining expense reports it very clearly shows how much that sucks and how much of a distraction that is and it gets cross very quickly in the in the line you know basically would you pull saquon Barkley off the field to file expense reports Perfect Analogy for your team your team you're hiring you're paying all these amazing people to do work on your business you're going to
take them off the field doing the real work and have them file expense reports bad idea run on ramp time and it's awesome that he's an investor now in ramp and actually aligned with the future of the company really cool I see many more ramp ads in the future with with saquan so I'm excited to see how this plays out yeah and I'm I'm really excited uh obviously like ramp markets
to CFOs and I think this will be a very interesting case study for ramp to share with their audience of CFOs uh you know obviously this is a very top of funnel very broad brand marketing strategy here but the more interesting thing to me is I want to hear how much they spent did they get the ROI how' they track it because I think a lot of companies look
to ramp as a high- growth company and they say I want to you know be efficient I want to grow similarly and if ramp can put together a really great case study on hey we took this big swing and here's what happened here's how we here's how we tracked it here's how we think we did and yeah we think we got positive Roi this is a proper super Bowl ad you can go and spend six figures to get
slotted in in some tiny County in Nebraska and you got a Super Bowl ad and if you're tuning in at that moment people will see it yep but this is going to be a national ad everybody's going to be seeing it and uh you're going to be want to be locked in for this one uh might we might have to do a live stream during the show and just wait wait for the ad to go and then maybe a little
champagne you know it's a big moment I think of I I think of Sunday really just as a show of this ramp ad and then they're playing some football around it to help promote the ad yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the the Super Bowl is is really to promote the advertising exactly that is the intermission to me yeah yeah yeah yeah well said uh well let's move on to another seis gong
moment from none other than cursor they just hit a 100 million in ARR let's go I wish I was there to hit the gong for you John it's it's not the same but you know you can do a little self hit there it's a mess it's a mess we do working the size gong and the slides and the mic I'm doing the best I can usually usually we you know we hit the size gong for m&a
fundraises but this is even more special one to 100 million in AR and in uh I think it's like 1. Nish years fast crazy number um and uh developers really love this Tool uh they uh I feel like in many ways already say they can't can't live without it so um love to see it incredible progress this was a painful one for me when kerser started blowing up I click to the founders profile he
had been following me since like 2021 I didn't realize wasn't there to invest uh you know every once in a while you leave a hund bagger on the table so uh live and learn baby live and learn learn live and learn but the funny thing so the funny thing here uh somebody quote posted uh this and uh and said actually um pump do fun got to 500 million of of of actual net you know
Revenue in in a year so you know you have cursor whiz deal together cor weave open AI docy sign y all all taken a Victory lap and then pumped up fun uh America's you know favorite illegal online casino doing 500 million in a year with you know a fraction of the team really got to do a deep dive on Market map on the these new coding agents because I I don't know that this
is a win or take all Market at this point I know um there are a number of other companies that are doing really well cognition is growing a ton in a very different segment going for Enterprise the super up market and um it'll be interesting to see how these all play out there's you know um Devon is building agents cursor's building a code editor there's also what's that
other one is it is it called Tailwind Y no Tailwinds the CSS thing I I I it's wind surf wind surf wind surf you got poolside poolside yep I actually read a thread there was a whole breakdown on all these different ones and they're all slightly they're all good for slightly different things some of them are focused on designers front end some of them were focused on backend stuff um
Julius uh Rahul ligma company uh Rahul sunwalker is building uh kind of a cursor for uh data science right in lives right in an python notebook uh obviously there's things that you can do right within chat GPT and so th this Market's evolving really fast but it's it's super clear that if you're paying a developer six figures getting them the best possible tools to amplify them and
make their work go harder uh faster and just more enjoyable like everyone everyone's always raving about oh like it's so nice not to have to write boilerplate code because I have the agents now and you're getting to that Andre karpathy mindset of vibe coding just kind of steering the AI it's beautiful and I think this is going to be a trend not just in code development
we're going to see these ai ai agents roll out for everything we saw this with open AI deep research we're going to see this in docs and spreadsheets and all sorts of financial modeling tools and I'm just super excited to to finally have some some uh some software that just has a really tangible impact so congrats to the cursor team get out there the one thing you got to give docy
sign some credit here out of these companies I they're the first company to 300,000 employees and so every time you mention doign you add another 50k employ I add a zero I add a zero add a zero add a zero every time doign has has amazing Milestone cross 10 million employees today 10 million employees it's so good okay well let's move on to our Deep dive for today Teemu
we got cut off earlier but we got a solid hour to break down Teemu for you it's a fascinating story and it's one of the sloppiest ABS out there right now it's the cream of the crop it's the slop of the slop it's the slop of the slop we'll get into why it's the slop of the slop let's start uh let's go back in time first and talk about the founders uh incredible you know sort of History
getting getting to this point because he's really he's really an absolute dog even though he's making slop he's a dog dog right he's a dog um so you want you have a somewhere you want to start or you want me to dive in yeah I I mean I wanted to start with these tweets just to kind of set the table uh the first one is from uh L L3 tweet engineer Mega
based Chad I think he's been on the show before he said just downloaded Teemu new users can sign up with Twitter you're immediately greeted by a $250 coupon scam likely the homepage is showing me fake sneakers BDSM stuff and a gun I love it all this is from 2023 he was early so teu is a spin-off of pinoo PDD uh which will break down the whole history here but uh Teemu was brand new
they launched in 2022 and then they rocketed to to massive numbers very quickly but uh I I had the exact same experience where I I opened up Teemu to look at something and it was like you just won everything in the store for free and it's just prices are suspiciously low to put this into perspective I think a lot of people started to Teemu hit their Consciousness
when they ran a Super Bowl ad that's true early 2023 they ran this terrible ad that just said shop like a billionaire and then it's just all these like slop products yep and so um so yeah uh I think he posted this because around so this is you know probably 10 months after the initial Super Bowl ad but they had gone event gone number one in the
app store again so a lot of people signing up for the for the product when when this was shared yeah so did uh we we'll we'll go through the full the full history but uh the Teemu explosion is crazy so they launched Teemu and it's it is a subsidiary so the business was already going but they launched it in September of 20122 I think the headquarters was in Boston interestingly
enough um and then they run a Super Bowl ad and they're just spending billions of dollars advertising teu uh and by uh August of 23 so less than one year they had reached $18 billion in Gross merchandise sales for the full year isn't that users we are gonna absolutely um we're gonna be dunking on the slop for the next hour but slop I'm not here to take away from the
execution what they've done they're they're selling absolute garbage but what they've done is extremely impressive you got to hand it to them the the founder is an absolute dog and if if he were in America still we would be popping Don peran for him this guy is one of us he just happened to be playing for the wrong team so get back over here and we'll break it down because this guy
was in America for a while and should have stayed here should should have built the slop apps for us send him over there uh so uh the reason this is at the top of everyone's Newsfeed right now is because uh uh recently there was a change in tariff structure that could put timu and Sheen and these uh Chinese drop shippers effectively out of business they've been exploding a
loophole uh let's breing it down from Melissa Chen who is quote tweeting Ryan Peterson Ryan says day Minimus entries from China shut down effectively Tuesday Melissa Chen says winning this is huge timu Sheen and all these tacky fast fashion companies that sell mostly crap have long relied on an unfair and unwarranted trade advantage they have long been beneficiaries of What's called
the Minimus loophole this loophole allows Goods to be shipped directly from overseas to American consumers so long as the value of each package is under $800 without any customs declaration it's cheap direct untaxed and unregulated it's a law that existed since the 1930s long before the internet and the existence of e-commerce retailers last year the US received a
billion packages from China through this loophole CBP cannot possibly inspect items at this scale so things do slip through the crack unsafe items knockoffs products with forced labor from Shin Jong and yes chemicals that can be used to make fentanyl wow uh to put things in context in 2022 Gap paid 700 million while H&M paid 200 million in import taxes teu paid zero free trade once
again is not free it's flooding our markets with cheap crappy potentially toxic Goods gutting our own retail markets and allowing unsavory foreign competitors to exploit loopholes and gain unfair unfair competitive advantage over retailers who have to play by the rules because of geography now we have closed this loophole for goods coming into China and Shan Maguire's there to
say great tweet uh so we love we love to see breakdowns like that but let's move on to the history of pendoo PDD uh and uh and timu and how we got here so 2015 uh Colin Wang who was working at Google establishes pin and and let's give a little bit more backstory because he wasn't just working at Google he he went to college in the US yep joins Google the year that they IPO yep
so he he he literally joins at at an incredible time probably one of the the best the best pre-ipo company probably to join in history incredible timing right out of school and um and yeah so he he benefits right away he gets he basically immediately gets a a bag from that which ends up helping him start his entrepreneurial Journey um he then goes on to actually
launch uh launch Google in China and so this was from you look back at my notes from 2006 to 2010 his he's the lead on launching Google in China and it absolutely goes terribly uh it doesn't really get adoption they I'm sure they're fighting a lot of sort of uh uh sort of regulatory stuff internally in China China didn't want us Tech products to get real market share in China and so
by the end he basically in 2010 they just give up Google polls out of China and he uh and and and so in many ways I'm sure he did well uh personally from that but it wasn't exactly a huge win um but it did give him you know I'm sure high quality experience in terms of building the most scaled consumer products you know of all time I mean the
guy seems like a great engineer Master networker uh somebody said you know that Jeremy geffon tweet that's like uh if you're you can basically post your way onto a private plane if you're a good poster like the most elite in the society like the absolute aristoc aristocracy will just pluck you out of obscurity and it seems like that's what happened he he was posting something or
or cold emailing or something and gets linked up to the effectively the Warren Buffett of China and that guy becomes his mentor and then and then that guy pays like 250k to have dinner with the actual Warren Buffett and so there's a picture of Colin this uh Warr buff brings Colin brings Colin the Teemu founder yeah to this dinner yeah and so and so very quickly Colin is uh moved
out of you know Rank and file at Google obviously early obviously doing very well but it's a huge organization he he's not really going to be able to steer that that giant cruise ship to networking with both the Warren Buffett of America and the Warren Buffett of China and uh and that sets himself up just to immediately raise tons of money and just do you know amazing things yeah
and so around this time he had built this is prior to actually incorporating PDD in in 2015 he had built uh he had built some mobile shopping apps so his time at Google had got him excited about shopping he did all right from those he had a couple exits and then he starts a gaming studio which is sort of foreshadowing for all the gamification
of of Teemu and PDD that comes later um and the gaming studio is just throwing absolute slop too so if you ever remember being a kid and getting ads for like Mafia city that was a game that his game Studio created which was like an early version of one of these games that was meant to be highly addictive that you were meant to come in a lot of people would just come in and pay play
for free briefly and then they'd get certain whales that would end up spending a ton of money and he also had some less uh less uh Savory apps on there where you could build a herum of girlfriends that you could then go around and fight other people with so you could build it was like an app that you'd build your herum and then you you'd take him out and go on the attack
so uh Colin Colin's an absolute dog for that one oh yeah and but I'm sure he found some some users uh and that that company ended up getting um Acquired and then changed hands a couple times and Mafia city is actually still a game that you can download in the App Store and and use yeah so go check it out yeah everything about this story is just unbelievable evidence that Colin plays
hardnose Smashmouth football on the business grid iron he's a he's a saakin Barkley of business in China 100% and you don't become the richest man in China even for a small amount of time without being absolutely the most aggressive you can be and just maxing out every single loophole there there's a whole bunch of things in here about uh about like
importing like gambling style mechanics and gamification and and uh financialization and it's just like let's do all of the most extreme business practices uh what's the Tariff loophole how low quality can we go on the goods let's add gambling and and and uh pay buy now pay later it's just all the most extreme like Dynamics to absolutely squeeze out every penny of performance
from the business yeah uh so let's go through the timeline here uh we'll we'll f just on PDD uh so uh former Google engineer Colin Wang uh establishes pend in Shanghai as a social e-commerce platform focused on agriculture and group buying deals uh early Angel funding of approximately $8 million is provided by Wang and other investors and so um uh the the idea here was you you
if you're in China and you're in like the middle or lower class you want to buy a whole bunch of mangoes they would focus on just hey you're going to buy 12 mangoes two of them might be rotten but it's going to be so cheap that we're basically not going to invest in quality control at all and also they're they're bringing in this like social mechanic where group buying basically you you
click on the item you want and then and then you send that link to everyone else in your social network on WeChat and the more people that buy the lower price the the the lower the price goes and this makes sense I mean in America there's plenty of times where you buy one t shirt it's $30 you buy 10 t-shirts it's $20 if you're buying a, t-shirts you can
get the price down to 10 bucks um but it's like what if you could do this for anything on Amazon immediately just with your social network and that creates insane growth it's like this insane viral growth mechanism shopping has historically and in the west it still is primarily this single player experience you go on you buy the product he turned it into this multiplayer experience that
had this crazy viral Loop of just building out these networks where one person wants mangoes and suddenly 20 people are buying mangoes and one thing that um one thing that they did you can think of what PDD early on is is similar to what Amazon did with books Amazon picked books for very specific reasons they onboarded sellers which were bookstores and individuals that had
books they wanted to sell and what PDD did was was you know at the time in China there were ton super the sort sort of agricultural production in China was super fragmented and so you had tons of individuals and small farms that would be producing goods and they had to sell through Distributors uh which would then go into actual like retail stores and other
markets that you could purchase them and what PDD did was similar to Amazon where they said hey why don't you just come on and list your product for sale and we'll find you the customers and you're going to make more money than you would if you were selling through this distributor and and they were basically like cutting out the historical middleman that was
there was two middlemen basically there was the distributor the sort of rep and then the actual retail store and so PDD took over both the those roles in terms of bridging uh the farmers and producers and the end consumer the other thing that PDD benefited from is that uh there was uh mobile devices had penetrated into the agricultural regions of China and so farmers would start selling their
products on social media using like videos and I remember during this time some of these videos would start going viral it'd be like you'd be scrolling and you just it just be some guys like you know like showing his mangoes off or whatever you'd be like I'm in the wrong wrong side of the internet um but uh but anyway so this was like basically benefiting from social commerce uh the
influencer explosion the explosion of of um you know mobile device usage all across China not just in um in cities and so the timing here he really you know benefited from yeah yeah it's fantastic like product Le growth Innovation like a lot of Trends coming together and just wedging more and more things and then just like rolling them out in the app super super fast like
when when there's an exploit he capitalizes and that's uh and that's what's fueled the growth so quickly and another thing they did they they basically sold the product at cost and so they raised eight million bucks to get this thing off the ground and they were fine if they didn't make any money on the on the direct sale they just wanted market share yep and they also
took a more sort of asset light approach than some of the other players that actually owned Logistics they owned Warehouse and stuff like that and so PDD was was fully focused on like enabling the sort of direct consumer model where you know producer would put would list product on the platform they had their own social presence they had these group
buying experiences but then thirdparty Logistics and warehouses would actually do all of the Fulfillment and so PDD could afford to basically sell products at cost without taking massive massive losses that for example Amazon had to take you know really aggressive losses for for quite a long time yeah I mean the the the Amazon versus teu or PDD comparison is crazy uh uh take a look at
this so uh you can think about Amazon right now versus PDD Amazon's almost 20 times the size but in terms of net income in 2023 Amazon produced 30 billion PDD produced 8 and a half billion and so the margins are just the net profit margins at at Amazon 5% versus 25% and and a lot of that comes down to just super asset like U looks more like a software business and Amazon
looks more like a grocery store right from a mar profile standpoint totally yeah uh and and massive Revenue growth interestingly I wanted to answer the question of like is teu actually putting pressure on Amazon has there been uh a a like a market change in Amazon's business because of the teu threat and what's interesting is that uh like I something like 95% 98% of Teemu Shoppers
also shop on Amazon the Teemu like the slop that they're buying is actually additive it's more like gambling money than actually shopping money because if you want just you know if you're actually in the market for like I want Kleenex and I want it to be good and not fall apart and give like give me allergies or something like you're going to go to Amazon buy the name brand and
you count on that but if you're just want like oh yeah some random thing that's like a funny joke like yeah I'll buy that on Teemu no I my biggest frustration with Amazon is I wish that I could shop on Amazon by sorting only for brands that have existed for more than Lindy filter the Lindy filter because one of my yeah the greatest annoyance on Amazon is like I'm shopping
and I want something as simple as like a paper towel holder and then I order it and I get it and it's like the worst product that I've ever got like this should just be a piece of metal into another piece of metal and it should be solid and because of the hyper optimizations and all these sellers competing and things like that you end up having to dig through pages you might
might take you four pages to find a product that cost marginally more but is going to last for 20 years versus you know the teu version which will last for a year and not even function well dude so so Amazon has has been forced to launch Amazon Hall which is the teu competitor and they have price caps for items that you list on Amazon hall because they want to be competitive and
the price caps are shocking like $13 is the max price you can charge for a guitar I think of a guitar is like a several hundred purchase at least couches couches I think of a couch is like you know to get in the game it's like $1,000 maybe you go to IKEA a couple hundred bucks the max price for a couch at Amazon Hall is $20 $20 that's just like scarily low I
don't want to sit on a couch that's only $20 I know that there's people that are running airbnbs right now that are like this is amazing for my margins like I got to just buy this $20 couch but it's like at that at that price it's like it feels dangerous like how can you possibly make a couch for $20 like you're not even using wood at that point
like what are you making it out of yeah and the the dark side of the story is that many people have accused PDD and Teemu of using slave labor so if strip out all the labor costs yep even then it's still hard to kind of conceptualize how the actual um material cost would be less than $20 for something as significant as a couch or a guitar being you know $13 so anyways let's get back
into the timeline yeah so they raise uh they raise a bunch of money really really quickly they Incorporated in 2015 with that $8 million round 2016 uh they raised series a series B 110 million uh gon Capital formerly banion does the seed stake uh they get a 7% stake now it's worth 10 billion nice uh 10cent Holdings comes in and becomes a strategic investor they get a 16% stake
that's 20 billion bucks uh Sequoia capital China gets a 6% stake pre 2022 multi-billion dollar value uh and then there's a couple uh Founders and early Executives all made hundreds of millions of dollars you already know from listening to this but like this guy didn't come out of nowhere he was a went to college in the US yep goes and works at Google actually leads
an entire you know go to market into China while at Google then has a couple smaller successes in mobile shopping then launches a successful mobile game studio and so by the time he's doing PDD he is very well set up to take on this much capital in this short of a time because he's a Savage operator right and the actual performance really backs it up and so they're raising all this money
but it's on the back of just taking a ton of market share with a product that was very early for its time right we didn't see you remember in 2021 2022 every Western VC was talking about social commerce and live streaming and all these things y all that was because that PDD was just dominating in China yeah and they didn't really it's not that live streaming with with t uh T
it's t right uh that would be the respectful way to call it I I call it teu Teemu uh we'll stick with Teemu um who knows your disrespect um what's crazy is I was actually so I was in um I was living in China like during this era uh in 2016 uh and I was working at a startup accelerator that was and helping a company that was taking uh a bunch of international vendors uh specifically in
shopping and and sort of luxury goods and trying to sell into China yep and um they had raised some funding it it was fine but um uh the the CEO and the C CTO and the COO were were based in Israel and they absolutely hated living in China and their entire business was based around China so they would come in for like two weeks and then like bounce
and I was like guys like this is I was just an turn but I was like yeah this is if you shouldn't probably hate the country that you're trying to sell into um but uh but anyways meanwhile teimo is just focused you know just absolutely dominant yeah they're just ripping so uh established in September 2015 they've raised over a hundred million by 2016 series C comes in early 2017 less than a
year and a half they they raised uh 213 million in a series C round and by late 2017 they're gross merchandise volume their gmv reaches $15 billion just two years after launch and so even with super slim margins they're well over a 100 million in ARR and this is one of the fastest growing companies and businesses in history and and of course that's going to ro rock at the stock so
they do a pre-ipo funding in April of 2018 they raised $1.2 billion do series d uh led by Major investors they're valued around $ 15 to20 billion and then July 26th 2018 they go public on the NASDAQ raising $1.6 billion the IPO values the company at 24 billion and marks its rise to over 340 million active buyers in under three years but then things get tricky there's uh
counterfeit Crackdown shortly after the IPO PDD faces scrutiny over counterfeit and pirated Goods so You' just go on there and and you'd get so some complete knockoff that was just made in a fake fact that wasn't actually made by that company of course companies are going to be upset at one point Amazon Amazon has a price match uh like service where if
you are selling on Amazon and then you and then you open you go over to Walmart and you undercut Amazon Amazon will not give you the buy box they won't let you win the top slot if you're not price matching on Amazon but TAMU or timu was so aggressive and so sloppy that they couldn't they couldn't basically implement this process and they were like look we're not even going to
enforce it with teu teu products because it's just it's just slop it's not even close and so a lot of stuff was just just absolute junk and that was kind of the model and also everyone kind of knew that those products were widely available when I was in Shanghai uh you could go there were specific markets that where they would have retail stores it' be like the Nike store the Adidas
store the canadao store and everything in them was fake 95% less than like the traditional retail value yeah and about 60% is good yeah but the demand you can imagine for sort of name brands that are 95% off effectively was insane so they're just so the super funny thing here is that it's not just American companies versus Chinese versus PDD in China there's actually Chinese companies
that are like Hey we're foxcon we make iPhones for Apple like don't make fake iPhones here like like this is this is screwing us and we're a Chinese company and so uh Chinese companies are accusing PDD of counterfeiting and pirating Goods that they're making and selling on Amazon and so uh there's an investigation by China's Market regulator and this leads PDD to purge
4.3 million suspect listings and tighten its policies but of course like how long would that last and so in January of 2019 there's this security incident where hackers uh exploit systems uh a systems loophole to steal tens of millions of Yuan and discount voucher this always happens whenever there's like some referral program or some discount program I remember there was
some guy on Twitter who's bragging about basically defrauding Uber Eats with like all these referral tokens just getting uh people on Mechanical Turk to sign up and get him money and he was like I have free Uber Eats forever and I was like you shouldn't publish about this this is a violation of also it's just wrong also just wrong it's also just morally wrong
to steal like how have we gotten so lost here um and so PDD cooperates with authorities to apprehend the perpetrators and systems uh they continue to expand their markets in 2019 the gamified team purchase model drives explosive growth uh marking uh making PD pdds China's third largest e-commerce site by gmv and active buyers so it's Alibaba and then jd.com uh which I don't
think is related to JD Vance but um it's certainly a big beast over there uh by the end of the year the platform approaches over 500 million active buyers so they are on a tear then early 2020 the agriculture focus and covid response among amid the pandemic PDD doubles down on its agricultural Roots by launching programs to help rural Farmers sell produce online this is huge
because China had insane lockdowns everyone is ordering online more than ever especially produce especially groceries people need to get food more than anything else and so it's another explosive growth period for PDD uh they just can't miss uh then in 2020 Colin Wang steps down as CEO appointing Chen Lee as the new chief executive while remaining chairman to focus on long-term
strategy and research and I think there's something going on where the pressure is starting to build PDD is becoming a more controversial company and Colin's like yeah I'm gonna dip before I get Jack mod you know because like yeah when when you when you scrape the heavens in in China and you become the richest man you get a little bit of a Target on your back so
yeah you got to just uh pivot into you know teaching English somewhere and resting on your laurels little bit little bit it's a dangerous dangerous position it's a dangerous game over there you become the richest man you don't exactly get to be the right-hand man of the person who runs the country unfortunately America's just built different you know yeah uh over here you
get a you get a.gov email address yes uh and so economic challenges in late 2020 drive more consumers to p to PDD for affordable Essentials with annual active buyers reaching 585 Million by year end yeah they have this they have this interesting demand Dynamic where if the econom is doing well then people have like a bunch of extra cash that they're willing to just
blow on basically slop pdds like slop you know gambling on consumer goods hey I'm buying this product for $3 maybe it's maybe it's good maybe it's actually fine you don't know um and then simultaneously if the economy is not doing well there's also an increased demand because people are saying I don't want to you know it be like saying I don't want to go shop at Target I'm
going to go to this like discount store and and because I can spend $50 and get a lot more for my money so same Dynamic somebody might be saying I'm not going to go on Alibaba or or some or the Chinese you know Target equivalent I'm going to go on PDD and just and get more for my money yeah and so in January 2021 there's this work culture controversy uh this is terrifying and very sad the
deaths of two employees within a short span spark public outcry over the brutal 996 overtime culture in China's tech industry and I believe someone affiliated with the company made some callous comment being like yeah like we work hard people are going to die which is obviously way too far way over the line and uh and and the founder eventually steps down Colin Wang resigns
as chairman and leaves the board to pursue research in food and life sciences is while CEO Chen Lee or Lei assumes the chairman role after Wang relinquishes super voting that's the Chinese equivalent of I'm going to go spend time you know long overdue time with my family is I'm gonna pursue research in life sciences yeah it is it is crazy to work people to death that's
unacceptable and something that only happens in China unfortunately I mean that's not that's not true we just had that we just had that issue I forget which bank it wasn't uh true yeah I did see that Jeffrey it wasn't Jeff um no I've been seeing that but no there there was you know a investment banker a young investment banker that was being worked you know basically 20 hours a day for a
long period of time and was telling his friends like that he wasn't doing well and then just died from basically overworking um and anyways yeah and in that case the Investment Bank had slides that said that were basically promoting the fact that their Associates were ail able Around the Clock yeah and so that again it's not it's not just a China thing but
um but yeah work uh it's possible to work too much yeah I mean it's like we always say you gotta like nval says work like a lion there are days when you should be working 20 hours a day but if it's 20 hours a day for year straight with no days off you're going to burn out that's not good you even four weeks in a row right it's not sustainable at a point Sprints here and there super
important we are working up to we are working up to 140 hours of content a week though yes our goal is to get there so thank you thank you everybody for your patience for trying to just ramp up to it yeah and so in uh May of 2021 shanghai's consumer Council criticized P PDD for issuing fake products false advertising and poor after sales service Regulators order the company to rectify
consumer rights problems prompting PDD to pledge stronger Merchant oversight uh in late August of 2021 PDD posts its first ever profitable quarter so from 2015 to 2021 just six years now they're profitable uh two billion yuan operating profit and an 89% year-on-year Revenue jump so they're still basically doubling six years into the business uh just fantastic growth instead of taking the
profits as cash the company announces A1 billion uh 10 billion yuan agriculture initiative to reinvest in Agri Tech farmer support and rural development and so in 2022 yeah because one thing that that might sound strange to some people but we think of of of of Teemu as just like slop consumer goods in China people are still using it very actively to buy
produce and things like that so they're invest they want to invest in the actual agriculture industry in China because pdds China business specifically uh is he is is a grocery store alternative it's not just these you know Ultra lowcost consumer goods yeah and so they are continuing to grow uh the platform uh is now handling 4.9 trillion Yuan about 590 billion in gmv uh and gen
generating annual revenue of roughly 14.7 billion US solidifying its profitability and with all this money they come to the United States and they launch teu uh the parent company now D Holdings launches teu a discount shopping app targeting overseas markets because it's specifically taking advantage of that tariff loophole uh timu goes live in the United States
offering ultra low priced Goods shipped directly from China and quickly climbs the download charts and I think this is so interesting because it like we I've been in e-commerce for you know 15 years or something now and uh and and the and the the the the wisdom has always been you got to get on Prime you got to be faster with shipping everyone cares
about page load speed and shipping time and Americans are willing to pay for that and Colin just realized that there is a contrarian position here which is hey maybe there's certain products and certain segments of the American Market where people are more than happy to trade fast shipping for lower prices com down down to a value it comes down to a value exchange thing I'm happy to pay
slightly more to get a product tomorrow with zero effort on my side and then on the other end there's people that are happy to wait a week to get something if they're going to get 10 items for the cost of two items right exactly so it's just a value exchange thing yeah yeah but it was really really overlooked in the e-commerce market and so uh with the launch of teu the company reorganizes
under PDD Holdings a new holding structure encompassing both PDD and teu uh in December fast fashion rival Sheen initiates legal AC against uh teu marking the start of a high-profile legal tussle and I didn't know this do you know where the name Sheen comes from it's she in and it's like she's in she's in yeah like like like she's they were they were sitting in Shanghai being
like yeah we got the name this is it this is so cool and this also by the way just to reference an earlier point so this is around this is like right around the time that they La they launched the super ad that we mentioned yesterday and I do remember the uh not yesterday sorry earlier in the show um I do remember when that ad dropped and I remember
seeing it live thinking to myself this is the worst ad I've ever seen it's like very it's not westernized at all this is obviously Western audience it has this tagline that says shop like a billionaire which felt felt super out of touch yep um but ultimately I wasn't the target audience for it I've never purchased anything on on on teu and um and if you think about that that that
concept of shop like a billionaire some people are thinking okay billionaires are just buying like you know infinite amount of goods at all points and not caring about the price and that is the experience that they provide right you can go on there and buy 30 items and it'll cost you you know the same price as I don't know a small like grocery you know the funny thing is
if you ever go over to Billionaire's house like it's always is like the most sparsely populated house like it's not just junk everywhere like yeah it's because their items are spread across like at least five homes I guess but even then it's like you know most most super rich people are pretty pretty Discerning with like do I really need another Kitchen Aid no like no it's it's
the Kanye it's the Kanye thing of of of I was sleeping on the plane and I woke up next to this water bottle and it's like great now I have to look after this water bottle what do I do with this water bottle exactly exactly yeah and and and and and really it's like we talked about this before but like the thing with the billionaires is like when you're uh when you're like middle class
like you have an item and you do it yourself like you cook for yourself when you're become a little bit wealthier you have an app that you know door Dash brings you the food and when you're a billionaire you have a guy and it's your chef and so no a billionaire does not buy any kitchen cooking equipment ever because the cook handles that and they
don't even think about any of those items and there's that for s in you have a personal shopper who brings you 50 items you try them on you keep seven of them you know my size just make sure that there's clothes in my uh in my closet in every house yeah and that's the lifestyle um and so uh did you see the SNL spoof of the Super Bowl ad we got to stay on the Super Bowl ad because
uh one interesting fact is um that Super Bowl ad was not shot for the Super Bowl that was the ad that they had been promoting on YouTube to millions of people that ad before it aired on the Super Bowl had millions of ads so in one way like they kind of ab tested it and knew that that ad worked but at the other way it's like super it's still just super lean culture they're like oh
yeah we got a super W slot we're paying millions of dollars like we don't need to shoot something special for this or get a celebrity let's just run the the ad that we've been posting on Facebook for the last like like in many ways it's very counter to the approach again that that many many of their competitors which would take which is hey Amazon is
going to spend is probably planning their 2027 Super Bowl ad now and it's this multi-year thing and they want to try to win Awards and teimo is just like shop like a billionaire baby yep like a billionaire Budweiser is going to shoot a new Clydesdale ad probably three of them for this for for this Super Bowl and it's going to tell a story and it's going to be Heritage and it's going to
be very cinematic and te teim is just like yeah like what's working on uh Google right now oh okay like just just throw that oh it's new new throw it up yeah no problem uh again kind of beautiful I don't know I think it kind of worked for them I bet they got good Roi on that um but the uh the SNL spoof is hilarious uh they they call it uh uh uh uh uh it's like some some portmanto
between timu and shien it's like it's like shimu or something like that and and and and it's like dress $10 shoes $5 working conditions fine don't ask about it and they're just like how is it so cheap and he like now with no lead and they're like that makes me feel like there might be lead in here like the whole idea of like suspiciously low prices is so funny to me I just can't
get enough of it it's like yeah at a certain at a certain point like $20 couch raises more questions than it answers yeah and to be honest there's a very real scenario where Colin realized that he was going to be the Fall Guy for China would say actually there's so much evidence that China uses is slave labor and they have labor camps and and you know it's very dark but Colin would have
been the perfect guy to pin it all on for the CCP to be like oh yeah actually this was happening and like here's the guy he was the guy selling all these cheap products and like it was on him even if they had fully endorsed it and so I think uh yeah he he so far it seems like he properly avoided being Jack mod but um I haven't seen him on any podast
lately so you know let's get him on 20 minute VC Colin Colin come on X go on 20 VC let's do it we'll have you on the show yeah yeah we'll we'll get to the might be a little contentious but so they so they launch in September of 2022 by February of 2023 six six months later Super Bowl ad number one shopping app in the in the US uh massive growth they expand their Market presence they
launch in Canada Australia and New Zealand in March uh then they launch in all of Europe and uh they also relocate their uh their headquarters I think to to Dublin um Ireland and then in March of 2023 shortly after the Super Bowl ad they get suspended from the Google Play Store due to malware found in off store versions although Teemu is unaffected
the incident raises cons security concerns and the app is reinstalled after reinstated after necessary fixes uh and so they were they were doing some sort of exploit with like you know the apis and the app and uh everyone's like man these guys are playing dirty using would board across the board this is a company that undoubtedly does not care about anything
other than flooding the market gaining market share and growing right um of course many American companies at the end of the day are like that too but they're a little bit less blat about this like the entire history of PDD and teu is issues around counterfeiting supply chain practices labor practices data privacy like this is a company that probably is battling like a thousand to
to 10,000 lawsuits at once continuously so um while they they're not making us ad agencies uh money on Super Bowl ads I'm sure their legal bills back home are are Steep and I'm sure they're I'm sure they're a good client to some US law firms that and again they're fighting other Chinese companies so timu and Sheen are in a legal battle in July of 2023 uh Teemu filed an antitrust lawsuit
in the US accusing Sheen of Market abuse while Sheen secures a temporary restraining order against teu over alleged uh copyright infringements legal actions a sue multiple jurisdictions what what do they call they call this slop on slop violence slence I love it and it's so funny because great yeah the great slop Wars of the 2020s the great slop Wars uh it's
so funny to me because uh like even though like we are looking at this through a business context through geopolitical lens um and obviously we have we have the take that you know this is exploitative this is a loophole it's destroying American businesses Etc um but there are tens of millions of Americans that where to them Teemu is just oh cool I get stuff for cheap like
I like it and uh no I don't run a competitive company I don't I don't have an e-commerce business so it doesn't affect me and the number of people the number of constituents in the American democracy that are being negatively affected by Teemu is in in absolute terms much lower because if you're like the number of people that are competing and getting their lunch eight by teamu
is probably a million e-commerce people that work in e-commerce or you know Drop Shipping or something like that but the number of people that benefit is in the tens of millions and so it it is popular thing I got to I got to push back there it is more complicated than that uh if somebody you know is shopping for they they decide hey I want a water filter and they they look at at they go to
r.com they're like this looks great they've got all the certifications and then uh they look on Teemu and they see you know a similar water filter maybe it work maybe it doesn't but it's it's 90% less and then they buy that that is dollars that could have gone to an American company that supports you know a bunch of other American businesses and manufacturers it
supports you know a team here in the US and so it is very complicated and so we have no idea how many billions of dollars of teemu's gmv would have just gone to America you know it would have boughten less products I completely agree has a bunch of Downstream effects yeah I completely agree I'm I'm I'm merely making the statement that that
for a lot of Americans they are addicted to consumerism they're addicted to shopping and and they don't think about the second and third order effects of hey if I'm if I'm really supporting this app and buying yeah yes I mean I am getting these really cheap products but maybe it'll make it harder for me to find a job or maybe my town will be hollowed out because there because the
bit just the economy is not there anymore in the US because we're just purely an import based society uh so I think that's the backbone of the Tariff renegotiation is is this fair deal for America yeah what were you saying I was going to say well if we eliminate teu and Sheen and we just get every American addicted to buying cheap stocks there we go imagine the potential there massive
massive buying early awesome and so in 2024 uh they're in 50 countries in 16 months on January 17th teu uh officially launches in South Africa marking its 49th country since debuting in the US its footprint now expands over North America Europe Asia Oceania and parts of Latin America in the Middle East so they are willing to ship anywhere and it and
the reason they can do this is because it's so asset light they all they need to do is just allow they're just a software platform that allows factories in China to ship as as soon as they can get those packages to the ports they can really go anywhere so they just need to localize the website and they're good it's not like Amazon where they have to set up a local Distribution Center hire
local drivers there's there's really nothing and and it's it's uh you know it's not really building up the local economies it's actually hollowing it out and so in February of 2024 they do another Super Bowl and they hit user records again they offer $15 million of giveaways at the Super Bowl and early in 20124 the platform announces it has surpassed 100 million active users in
the United States and over 130 million app downloads globally so yeah 100 million people in the US have shopped on Teemu and that is a big constituency what what I'm getting at is like it's similar to Tik Tok where the number of people that are negatively affected by Tik Tok are the people that are thinking about you know uh security cyber security geopolitics thinking about uh D
competitive Dynamics with American companies but there are still a 100 million people that are just like Tik Tok is where I go for entertainment don't turn off my TV channel and so it is this complicated uh there is a constituency there they're not highly politically active they don't donate to politics in that way but uh if you just if you just the AMU a lot of people would say no I like
I like cheap it's fine it's where iin a wheel and get free like why are you Banning my fun thing and that's it yeah it's it's in the same way that um pump fun is a is a digital Casino you could see you know PDD or Teemo as like a carnival right where it's just like oh I'm spinning the wheel I'm winning it's entertainment it's social it's you know
yep and so uh uh the company refines its Logistics model to manage scale while PDD Holdings faces increased regulatory scrutiny over counterfeiting supply chain practices and data privacy and the legal battles between timu and shien have continued into 2024 today in less than a decade PD's parent company has become a global e-commerce Powerhouse uh which includes pin pendo in China and
teu abroad reported $ 34.7 billion in revenue and 8.5 billion in netting in come in 2023 I'm sure it's higher in 2024 I don't know if they've done earnings yet though uh PDD remains one of China's top online shopping destinations with over 800 million users that is staggering that's what it's a billion person country so uh that's like massive Market penetration while teemu's
low prices and viral marketing have captured significant international market share the company continues to navigate rapid growth Fierce competition and Regulatory challenges as it looks to the Future and so we will one thing that's interesting so they have the benefit of uh so teu at some point do you have the the specifics but I believe they rolled back in Teemu which was
independently listed into the main PDD Holdings and so the original Teemu that went public on the NASDAQ is now just a part of PDD Holdings correct yeah that's right um and so the the benefit of that is like even under all the scrutiny lawsuits all the stuff you're going to be shocked I'm on public right now the stock the stock is up um how much is it up give me the data
give me the public dat so they're sitting at a the PDD Holdings is sitting at $111 right now wow and it was in March of 2022 it was sitting at like $40 a share so yep they there's still like a juggernaut and have done tremendously well just again Under Fire from all these lawsuits and things like that and and being but they're just steamrolling the market and I think that's really in
many ways because of that you know they truly are a software company they're not a they're not a retail 100% let's go through uh who got rich off of this I think that's always an interesting question to ask obviously the early team made a ton of money there was an interesting transaction where the uh where the uh uh uh as in 2020 Colin Wang transferred
$7.7 billion doll worth of shares to the partners effectively giving slices of his fortune to the top lieutenants I thought it was very interesting that he did that after the fact like they'd already grown obviously they had stock grants early on but he was just like I've made so much money I'm just gonna hook up the board either either an absolute you know brother of the Chinese
brother of the weak potential or Chinese brother or they were all gonna throw him under the bus so hard that they said if you don't give me if you don't if you don't give us billions of dollars like you're going to be the Fall Guy for all of this and we're gonna you know drag you through the streets yeah Jack m style yeah the Dynamics over there are very very hard to hard to get uh get
right so uh gang Capital former formerly Banyan capital uh was an early VC uh investor it's a Beijing based VC firm they led the series a round and Jen Jong gang's founding partner first back Colin by Leading an $8 million investment round when PDD was just an idea this gave uh them an 8% stake pre IO it was probably a a higher round and then got diluted down a little bit uh 10cent came
in and uh they were able to leverage WeChat uh as to fuel PD's growth 10cent joined in the series B and later led a huge $1.4 billion series D in early 2018 and so they had 16% at IPO uh Sequoia capital China led by Neil Shen uh they've since rebranded to uh Hong Shan uh By the time of the IPO seoa was principal shareholder even agreeing to purchase 150 million shares at IPO to
support the listing sequoia's stake post IPO was on the order of 7 6 to 7% uh in March of 21 seoa Capital still held 6.4% of PDD and so they are just printing over there seoa Capital Sequoia China is really the Sequoia of China you can't make it up uh ID idg capital is one of China's oldest VC firms they were investors during the growth phase uh
they participated in the series C round uh New Horizon Capital was a PE fund that went in the series B um and then light speed China also got a bite of the series B which was 110 million uh and there's a couple other investors here uh so massive wealth creation event for Chinese VCS and American VCS that had Chinese arms at the time so it's a very fascinating
story yeah completely crazy story incredible ex execution yep they will talk about the slop Wars of the 2020s for you know decades to come uh and uh open invite Colin come on the show anytime we'll put we'll put you in the truth Zone a little bit on the data privacy labor supply chain crises things like that but if you're ready for that yeah you want to take some heat yeah but we will also
sing your Praises for massive wealth creation we'll pop a botle we'll hit the size gong it'll be mix you'll come out it'll come out positive yeah yeah it won't be a puff piece it'll be hard NOS but we will we will ask you about the Wagers we got to know also ask what kind of car you drive and and what and what what kind of watch kind of mansion you're building and and
uh how many watches you bought on bezel yeah it'll probably be uh the best interview you'll ever do it'll be great come on well let's move on to the timeline thanks everyone for sticking around for our Teemu Deep dive uh we got another oh we got a solid 40 minutes of timeline today this is great very excited let's kick it off with this post from restructuring Day in the Life an
investor at us Sovereign wealth fund hate to admit it but sometimes Wall Street Oasis has some hilarious content uh Jordy you threw this in the feed why' you like it well so backstory they they they did an executive order to create a US Sovereign wealth fund so Trump signed this I think a couple days ago at this point A lot of people are speculating on
what's going to go in it a lot of people you know a friend of this show Jack Reigns said uh we already have a sovereign wealth fund it's called spy um but um but anyways I I I just thought this was hilarious so I'll read it so this is somebody who's an analyst in private credit he says it's 7: am I wake up in my Georgetown apartment to a text for my MD need a deck on strategic lithium
reserves by noon use the dod template I have no idea what that means but I nod sit my government subsidized coffee and I get to work by 8:30 a.m. I'm at my desk in the Eisenhower executive office building surrounded by former Goldman guys who rebranded as patriotic investors our mandate deploy one trillion of taxpayer money into high priority national interests in reality
we're laring as PE Bros while writing checks to companies with more lobbyists than Revenue by 10 a.m. I have an IC meeting the Secretary of Commerce dials in asking why we aren't buying up more Farmland the MD replies sir we already own 15% of of Iowa um and then I get cut off there but um we nod solemnly America first I I'll keep reading uh lunch is
Catered from the White House mess hall I sit next to a guy from the pentagon's AI Readiness task force he assur me that investing $500 million into a surveillance drone startup run by a 24-year-old Stanford Dropout is critical for National Security I write synergies in my notes and take a bite of my taxpayer funded stake by 3 pm we're structuring a bailout for a failing EV
battery company treasury wants it to be alone but the MD insists on pref Equity with board seats we're not just Capital we're strategic everyone nods except for the one career bureaucrat who still thinks this is about fiscal responsibility at 6 p.m I'm working on a term sheet for an emergency lithium mining J with some guys in Wyoming the deal terms Equity upside Minal mineral
rights and a direct line to the FED for liquidity somewhere Larry fin sheds a single tier of Pride by 900 P PM the interns are arguing whether we should issue high yield bonds backed by military surplus uh someone jokes about tokenizing social security everyone laughs but someone writes it down at 11:30 p.m. I close my laptop and stare at the framed photo of Teddy Roosevelt
in my office I realize I'm no longer just a finance guy I'm a Statesman this is the most prestigious exit this is Paradise I love this is Paradise uh yeah so anyways this would be applying you know uh if tech is Doge The Sovereign wealth fund is going to be all the all the PE Brothers just just having a Heyday um I think it's cool I think it's cool to think about we'll see how it plays out
obviously the the BTC Maxis say that the Sovereign wealth fund should just be a trillion dollars of Bitcoin um and uh I would wouldn't be surprised if that kind of stuff got in but it is funny how these these if there was a sovereign wealth fund I imagine that it would ultimately be Trump as playing MSA where people come and Pitch him crazier and crazier bigger and bigger ideas and then
because that's what happens in many ways that's what happens in um if you're going to try to raise you know a billion dollars from from Saudi Arabia for some project NBS will at that ticket price NBS probably has to like verbally sign off on the deal right he's not taking the pitch meeting but you know these anytime you're raising money from what's
effectively a kingdom the king's got to sign off or he's got a guy who is you know responsible for making sure that they don't do anything silly but then when you're playing with dollars of that size you end up doing you know he jokes about giving a 24 year old $500 million but you know it's only um 50 basis points of the fund you know why not just
uh or no even even less yeah even less crazy this is so funny to me because like the idea I I'm very Pro the idea of a US Sovereign wealth fund but our country is in massive debt like we don't have a surplus right now we don't have money like to to put into a sovereign wealth fund I think like I don't know where it would come from we need to pay down our debt first right how it works
on Leverage so yeah I I don't know all the rules have been thrown out it's a new day anything is possible uh but good to see some analysts having fun on Wall Street Oasis uh let's move on to Lulu uh Lulu writes a good slogan is critical for starting a movement make America great again yes we can time to build no taxation without representation Keep Calm and Carry On move fast and break
things just do it workers of the World Unite think different the best slogan is one that gets stuck in people's heads and represents one central idea and this is quot tweeting EMT uh former CEO of twitch says the way you influence large language models or a bunch of humans is not by writing persuasive Pros but by coining new words or phrases which are
useful and also make it easier to think certain thoughts over others and uh she actually tagged me in this she said this is cougan Law and I was super excited to see kugan law going viral on the timeline once again uh I'm very I'm very proud of that coinage I stand by it I think it's extremely valuable I need to coin some more um Jordy give me your take on this and then I'll I'll rff a
little bit more I don't have much more to add here I think uh you know we're we're just big proponents of of coining you know coining constantly iterating you know attempt to coin things you're not always going to be successful but um you know when you hit something when you hit it like cougan law I mean that's a that's a billion dollar coinage right
there it is and uh I was actually giving this I was giving this advice to uh a GP who reached out to me and said they were writing a piece on the intersection of these three Trends and my Prim primary advice was you need to condense it down into five to six words Max so that you can if that if these Trends play out in the way that you think they will that you will get credit
for sort of creating that uh and and sort of uh encapsulating that Trend and something that is memorable and something that can sort of live on and so uh Brody here says um you know calls us out well Brian Johnson has done this incredibly well with don't die two words that um that sort of encapsulate his movement and everything that that he he stands for so uh always be coining
always be coining um I mean Peter teal did this with zero to one but also he popularized the idea of the power law which was really uh like it's obviously he didn't create that but he popularized that in the Venture term uh and and uh owning a coinage and popularizing a coinage is super valuable I actually looked up all the different ways you can coin a phrase around your name so so
kougan law is out there already we're working on Hay law jordy's law the ha the hay Paradox ha Paradox is coming soon you that's when you find something so funny it's so funny that you're you're literally laughing at at your own joke and then no one else finds it funny yeah you gotta you gotta post that I think that's good I think that can live on uh but there's but you have multiple
shots on goal so we can get Hayes law Hayes Paradox Hayes effect Hayes principle Hayes Razer uh hey Haze trap the hay critique the hay hay syndrome the haze equation and the haze wager because Lulu didn't put going Direct on here which is her yeah her her uh Co chea didn't coin that really she popularized it and this is another thing about the cougan Cogan's law there's
also Cogan's Paradox which is that oftentimes the person that popularizes the coinage Acres more value than the person who actually coining yeah that's funny I always thought she created it no no I I I think it might have come from bology or someone else she also gets credit because she helps so many companies now do the thing which is going direct which is totally yeah and
coining truly is not coining is not just coming up with the phrase It's also doing the work to popularize it and beat that drum and I can tell that people are people are circling around cougan law ideas and if I don't stake my claim with a a banger every week or every month re asserting my ownership over that Meme it will get twisted and reped and I will
lose it uh and I've been talking to salana about this with moon should be a state he has a great phrase uh and you can see that as this gets bigger and bigger this movement could move Beyond him and someone else could take it and all of a sudden he's no longer the moon State guy and that would be a huge loss I I want to keep it in the Sal yeah the risk the risk for him is that is that
there's two people that could really take that Elon and Trump yep positive thing is if you get your your phrase taken from one of those people you still you still get to be Infamous for you know creating creating a movement so totally totally uh and so did you see this mattress drama we have to cover it mattress drama on the timeline mattress drama on the to me the drama here was
that it was an air mattress and not a eight sleep she wouldn't have caught this kind of shade if she was showing off her her pod four Ultra on the floor but I think San Francisco is so normalized to the fact that high performers sleep on eight sleeps that you can't really be taken seriously in San Francisco if you're not on an eight sleep yep um I'm very excited to launch
officially launch our eight sleep partnership very soon uh but on that note uh I thought it was funny because she clearly um I think it was like one person that just like dunked on her and then like kicked off this entire firestorm thought her original post was totally fine she said funny she's clearly joking yeah she's she's joking and like she's having fun and she's like
playing into the culture but um but I think people saw it a little bit as Stolen Valor you know it's like you're a VC the mattress on the floor has been reserved for you know the the struggling founder the John cougan in 2010 you know sleeping on a mattress with 200 bucks a month to spend on you know food uh so anyways day she says day two learnings VCS are hated in SF and people think
that their junior VC job is a lot more glamorous than it is it's not lol another great reminder to focus on what you love versus being concerned with external validation uh I don't think the second point I think she kind of missed the point I don't think VC's are hated um I think that uh I don't think I don't think anybody thinks that Junior VCS are So Glamorous it's more so that um unless
you're working for the world's smallest micr fund like uh you're probably making an okay income and you don't have any risk of am I going to run out of money you know in three months yeah and so uh anyways Megan Megan dunks on her again and says VC SFO you guys this is a this is a call to action for I don't know exactly what firm Monica works for but uh if you're
the GP of that fund uh get Monica and a sleep immediately uh and then also maybe get her a cier crash to show off in when she's at a partner you know yeah a laner cardier crash would go a long way to to sort of establish and why not a company car while we're at it I mean uh you know something nice that she can take you know maybe a McLaren F one it has two
seats you can take the CTO and the CEO on a little drive you want to save some money go with the I8 the doors still go up you'll still be respected yeah don't don't lar as a bootstrap founder lar as a Siz Lord GP exact you know get her get her get her a Bentley uh get her a crash get her an a sleep get her a $50,000 a month you know let's put those management fees to work you know it's
not meant to be just pure net income for the partners it's about exactly moving the firm forward yeah and you have the you have the proof on the timeline I think this is an indictment of of uh of austerity at VC firms we need GPS uh their Associates out and their principles out and their junior VCS out with the absolute best the crema crem let's move on to uh promoted post wait
what you got after we do this I got some promoted reviews so let's jump in with let's do this promoted post I'll read through this uh this is the job I expect is a dream come true for many software Engineers we're hiring for engineers to join the internal AI team here at andal Tech uh where you will build agentic tools that power damn near every work
stream across the company if you want to have access to the biggest foundational AI Labs as your partners and work on enabling everything from sales to marketing to internal coms to manufacturing to Hardware design to field sustainment while being part of the leader in defense technology apply and so go to uh andral's uh job website on Greenhouse check out the job that Sai
has posted he is in a he's in a a massive war with Luke Metro over at Android to be the top poster at andal and so give him a follow go apply for this job seems like a dream job honestly company's ripping it's exciting place to be thank you for the tag Sai uh go apply go DM Sai this is an insane opportunity you'd be stupid not to take it go work for America work for Ander
Ral and defend our national interest let's go to some promoted reviews because we've been getting five star after five star review on this podcast they don't stop coming and as a reminder if you leave us a Fest star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify we will read your review live on the show and we encourage you to include an ad in your review it's free real estate folks take
it what you got for me this uh this block of promoted reviews is sponsored by adquick ad Qui the number one way to buy out of home ads for your startup they make it programmatic they make it super easy we're planning some of our own own ad a home campaigns on adquick right now for TB as well as pmf or die so they're amazing uh you can just go to adi.com and sign up uh they've got some
great uh sales reps over there that'll walk you through it uh or if you need some campaign ideas hit us up we're happy to support there and I'm going to jump into some ads now this is from Dr Brian he says technology Brothers is a wonderful podcast just like my 2020 Vision I don't take a single episode for granted this five-star review is brought to you by great talk Family Vision Care
for over 30 years Dr Mark gry talk has been dedicated to providing exceptional Eye Care to families in Western Pennsylvania with locations in Greensburg legioner and Harrison City and now with the recent addition of his son Dr Brian I love it keeping it in the family our commitment to your vision is stronger than ever as a fatherson team we believe that I care means we care
because your vision deserves the best we offer comprehensive eye services including dry eyye treatments for the 10x Engineers who are glued to their screens all day creating shareholder value in products such as blue light blocking glasses for terminally online exp posters who seek Banger archive Acclaim don't let Vision prevent you from seeing the next big Trend in Tech
call now or book online gry talk Family Vision Care where I care means we care that's a fantastic review fantastic fantastic thank you for sharing that got love promoting family to go to the eye doctor in a long time thankfully um but uh but I would I would love to actually be treated by them they sound amazing thank you for the review guys and for listening I can read the next
one if you want okay uh this one's funny it says it's me for the brain five star review creatine and raw eggs Cal equals calcium cannons blueprint Brian Johnson equals YB stiffs I don't know what that means oh I think I know what that means actually uh technology Brothers equals a fully rocked up brain if you want to beef up the brain matter all you need to
do is take some creatine and put on these two citizens of the world current events deep takes and a style sense that would make the Ice Queen Anna winter quiver babe wake up just found some good oldfashioned ear candy everyone that matters stew thank you dude absolute dog what a post no ad in there I would have liked to promote something for you yeah but you always get a second chance
because you can review us on Apple podcast and Spotify you get two shots on goal guys uh should I read the next one too next one next one I got one from SC he says and this is from Blaine Davis he says business thrives on deals and dealmakers thrive on technology Brothers podcasts those who love who love leverage and luxury listen daily take it from us a pair of passionate listeners
who like you love business and decided to do something about it we're building a platform to pay homage to deal makers like Emil Michael and Michael Ovitz so today before allocating Capital allocate your network make a new con connection for a new company to help them land a customer and we'll wire you Capital the same day we want to build the business
platform of the future where connections you trust could be the new customers for the companies We Trust we are superc connector.com and we approve this message uh great Ador is an amazing company I would think of it as like almost like an expert network but for helping you find customers so if you're trying to sell into Healthcare they have Healthcare Executives and people that
are hyperconnected in that industry that you can basically hire and just pay on a per lead basis and so super cool platform love the domain to superc connector.com uh just ripping through these you want to hit the next one yeah Tech Bros for the win uh if you've ever wondered what happens when two Angel Investors with LinkedIn level enthusiasm and Chad likee confidence get behind a
microphone look no further than technology Brothers a world where AI isn't just a tool but a co-host and blockchain is the answer to every question even the ones you didn't ask five stars this review is sponsored by J Kramer Corp transform your dream home into reality with J Kramer Corp Southern California's Premier general contractor this is extremely relevant for us let's
go uh with over 30 years of experience we specialize in luxury new constructions intricate remodels and Innovative designs our award-winning projects have been featured in architectural digest and dwell showcasing our commitment to Excellence whether it's navigating tight Coastal spaces or building on challenging terrains we handle it all with precision
and care visit jamer corp.com and let's build your future together I mean we got to build a Manor for TB uh our studio we be looking like Louis the 14th Jay Kramer we were gonna just lease a studio but I feel like now we got to build one Ground Up To Be Honest John nothing like reading these reviews literally makes my heart sing It's amazing one of the it's
just so fun everybody gets into character I absolutely love it um thank you guys for the support and for listening it's the least that we can do to um to add uh you know to run ads for your incredible businesses so absolutely love it let's get back into this timeline okay so Connor says number of early stage Founders I know who are not struggling to hire zero and Monica from
an earlier post says what's the bottleneck is it's an employer Market isn't it and Connor says the best talent have many options to choose from very hard to find the right cultural skill and expectation fit you can hire people more easily by lowering your standard in some capacity but there's no free lunch and this is real everyone says oh AI is going to kill all the jobs and
everything but hasn't happened yet there's still a very tight labor market and with cursor and and Devon and all these extra tools it's gotten a lot more fun to work at a startup it's gotten a lot more productive and so great engineers and great product Builders have the pick of the litter what do you got for me yeah I um I mean to me this playing out a lot of people said that
that uh have been saying you know that the job of the software engineer is going away and uh we've got another year maybe but it's you know it's going to be gone uh and who who knows really what's going to happen but um one thing is clear as these Engineers as engineers get more efficient with tools like Devon and cursor and and wind Surf and poolside and the whole list goes on uh
it seems like there's just an even bigger and bigger and bigger demand for enging talent because then companies say okay we're more efficient now let's build even faster right and so you see these companies that are hitting these incredible Revenue milestones and building these really full-featured products in in record time um and so so yeah it's it's a great time to be
talented and looking for opportunities it's a tough time to be hiring and every single one of the you know we talk every company that we talk about on the show is actively hiring right and even they're they're hiring um and and open AI is hiring Engineers right and I'm sure they they are frustrated with with with how competitive the market is right
now sot an awesome time to be join you know in the market to join a startup yeah I always think about that pavle uh post about uh oh software Engineers are cooked no everyone is going to be competing with software Engineers because the tooling is so Advanced now that I mean you see this at ramp uh their marketing organization has tons of technologists in it and there's every
problem that you have whatever your business whether it's sales like having programming skills or being able to think like a programmer just steroids so deep research is does PHD level research now yep and that is software Engineers building that to compete with not other software Engineers but people that would have just been manually putting together that data and information and
summarizing sources and things like that so um you know look even even Tyler Cohen which who's been he he certainly hasn't been an AI bear but he's been more so I you know he was on dores and basically talking about how yes it's going to be transformative but it's not going to eliminate all jobs and 10 years right like these Trends are going to take quite a long time so why don't you
get into this yeah so Alex stab says buckle up folks and he's sharing a screenshot from marginal Revolution Tyler Cowan writes I have had deep research right number of 10-page papers for me each of them outstanding I think of the quality as comparable to a having a good PhD level research assistant and sending that person away with a task for a week or two maybe more except deep
research does the work in five or six minutes and it does not seem to make errors due to the quality of the embedded 03 model and what I've realized is that uh I've gotten better at prompting deep research and now I'm having fun with it I asked it when we did the Deep dive on temu teu I specifically asked it who made money from Teemu and it was very good about
citing very specific articles to figure out who the investors were and then I also asked it uh right an analysis of teemu's effect on Amazon and it was able to look at the financials of PDD and the financials of Amazon and really compare those it it was a little bit it was a little bit boring when I asked it just like tell me the whole story of Teemu
because it doesn't really know what I want but when I ask it very specific questions uh and and questions that I don't know the answer to or I can't just Google and actually requires some analysis and some piecing together that's where it really shines and and that's where it would take a long time to pull up the financials get maybe get them into Excel compare them uh so I am
loving it and I think it's a big advancement what do you got yeah one other note uh I saw Michael mcnano from light speed posted uh he's been on the show before we covered his blog post uh I think on Monday or Tuesday he said deep research marks the first time I've been convinced that AGI is already here the discussion is over um I I agree I think that people are realizing that uh
we we've talked about this on the show before right everybody was saying you know we're building AGI you know it's almost here and then everybody kind of looked around and said hey what we already got you can already sort of say is artificial general intelligence and so the goalpost just got shifted out to artificial super intelligence and agentic systems and you know well it's
that is that AEI concept the artificial economic intelligence in my mind it's like at a certain point these evals mean less than just how much money are these AI systems making and that's a real that's almost a measure of the UN hobbling like the PDF upload we like to joke about but really the the question is can deep research integrate into a
system where it's creating real value and and is that measurable and then really it's just it's just what's the revenue of the application layer and is a metric and once that gets really really high well yeah we've crossed some sort of quantitative threshold and these and these questions about like is the system human level intelligent or not that's almost less relevant than is GDP
moving up are we at 5% GDP growth instead of 2% that would be amazing that's what Tyler Cowan's a little bit worried about because he thinks that there's a lot of jobs and a lot of roles that are just completely uh like hardened against AI at least in the short term um be but but the certain certainly the ideal is that is that all these all these systems get better they
create more value value is captured by the shareholders by the consumer by the user by everyone and it's just you know a a new a new American boom which I would love to see uh let's stay on this topic move forward a few slides Ben to uh Jawan over at ramp he says frontend Engineers equipped with AI ml skills will be the most desirable employees by the end of 2025 thought this was an
interesting post because a lot of the a lot of the backend and the actual instantiation of the idea of software is uh becoming commoditized and becoming easier to do with these AI tools but you still got to know what to build how to design a product and how to make it usable to a human at the end of the day and so that's why I think he's saying
that frontend Engineers designers people with product sense might be uh uniquely poised to benefit from uh advances in AI but what do you think I just got to do a a golf clap for Jan because it feels like just yesterday he came out started asking for raises on the timeline been on a tear at this point I think he's Beyond earned it the guy's been on a tear he's getting millions of
Impressions a month putting ramp on the map making them a target for super smart young ENT uh Engineers to go and join ramp so um I think he deserves a raise I'll go on record and say it maybe I'll even text uh Eric and Kareem uh but uh anyways congrats on the Run we got a promoted post from EMT EMT shine uh he is looking for a designer to collaborate on Pro branding and product design in
this style metallic Chrome grain detailing Americana if interested DM EMT on X or email him at emtl plains. and we're big fans on the show if you're not familiar with him he was uh what Jin Lane yeah quick summary so EMT started Jin Lane like probably 15 years ago one of the most impactful branding agencies that led the charge on D Toc so they worked with all these
different companies from like Warby Parker to um I think they did Harry's to Sweet green things like that um so absolutely incredible human and creative mind uh he's also a coach for pmf or die we got a big announcement for pfer die coming tomorrow uh so he'll be on that show and just a pleasure to work with he did The rora Branding you can see it in the back left corner there John so we
work with him there but incredible opportunity for the right designer to go in there and uh get to work with the goat well let's go to another promoted post uh not from bezel but for someone that should be shopping on bezel because Brody fan of the show uh asked the question what should I put in these empty watch slots uh he has three watches he's got 10 slots seven to fill
or eight to fill or actually that's 12 that's a 12 watch case so he's got plenty of options what would you put there one more he should have circled that Apple watch and you can get that out you're not gonna see apple watches on bezel I think that watches are are such a considered purchase that I highly recommend if you're interested in getting one not impulse buying anything
because a watch that you think is cool today and if you just start watching YouTubes on uh YouTube videos on watches for just 30 minutes a night for a watch while by a month in you you'll all the watches you thought were cool in the fir you know the first week suddenly or you know you're beyond them and so I think it's a journey there's no rush to fill
it up um and uh and anyways I would say like work on building up your wish list on bezel before you do uh before you make any you know specific purchase yeah also Brody Brody launched a cool um he launched a Marketplace yesterday that's a Marketplace for startups to offload their um startups to offload like you know if you're moving offices and you have extra chairs or you bought monitors
that you don't need um I don't think I don't know if we have it listed here but um but uh either way check it out I think it's VC subsidized domcom um and uh you know potentially get some Herman Miller for 90% off yeah and uh there's a lot of options so download the bezel app start scrolling and watch some YouTube videos and watches uh let's move over to
another somewhat promoted post and then we'll wrap up the show uh Patrick o shanesy posted today his uh fabulous conversation with graham Duncan and we wanted to highlight this because we covered this on the show because the interview with graham Duncan was on the cover story of the first Colossus review which we High highly recommend going and subscribing to it's a fantastic uh
publication we have it somewhere here in in the in the studio but um we wanted to highlight this because previously this conversation was only available on the paid Colossus RSS feed but now in a great turn of events it's available in an ad sponsored format and so ramp has has has partnered with uh invest like the best they are the presenting sponsor and you can go and listen to uh
Patrick's conversation with graham Duncan for free on the ad supported invest like the best RSS feed and so go check it out he breaks down uh starting an investment platform sourcing compulsion grip and levels of investing of the investing game and evaluating people so if you don't know Graham Duncan he is the guy who picks the guy he seeds new investment and asset managers and so if
you're if you're starting a new hedge fund or a new a new investing firm you go to Graham if he like you're going to get a lot of money for your fund and he's done very very well and he breaks down how he thinks about Talent the guy spends three hours a day onast it's it's very broadly applicable to just everything from picking you know Founders that you want to Angel invest
in to picking you know friends and business partners and anyways his his lessons are are tremendous so definitely check it out yeah so thanks everyone for tuning in that's our show for today we'll be back back tomorrow we have tons more stories tons more news and I'm sure we'll be breaking stories and getting exclusives like we always do on here every time so don't forget to leave us a
festar review on Apple podcast and Spotify leave an ad in your review Send us any questions DM us submit Banger archive posts just engage with us everywhere on the timeline we'll be on X all day long all day long we'll see you on the timeline we'll see you on the massively profitable X the app the everything app there we go thanks for watch day bye