levels up you're watching tvpn we are live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital today is Tuesday March 4th 20125 and guess what we have a guest at the opening of the of the show Eric lman CEO ramp uh we're very excited for you to be here thank you welcome to the show awesome to see you and uh great
to be in this holy place today yes yeah the the dojo of the dollar the the shrine of shareholder value it has many names but most importantly it is it is our humble abat is the host it is where we host and it should feel like home to you considering that uh I have this massive you know sort of ramp logo over
my head here so uh home away from home on the air uh it's amazing to have you how how's this week been so far obviously a busy one uh with the news yesterday but from what we understand uh it was you know old news to you but I'm sure it feels to get it out in the world it's incredibly exciting and look like
you you know mo most days as a Founder it's it's it's you in an office taking calls waking up early staying up late it's just uh you know a lot of uh you know constant work and it was one of those rare moments I think when um you know customers Partners the team could uh all celebrate just a little bit uh
enjoy and then kind of get back to it and so it's uh you know pretty overwhelming really exciting and uh feel lucky to be here talk about the you know pressure of you know raising you know in in uh in the sort of height of zerp you guys raised at at a 8ish billion dollar valuation then you had to uh sort of reorient the
team around uh obviously the business performance was still fantastic but uh many people were saying you know publicly that generally a lot of these unicorns may not ever sort of achieve that sort of peak valuation how good does it feel to not only achieve it again but exceed it dramatic rally and
what did you have to do to kind of like motivate and rally the team in those sort of like the darker days uh where again the sort of public narrative was that uh you know these valuations were never really real uh and uh yeah so how how good does it feel at this moment I think someone really has to do
just like a a deep in-depth piece of like the big comeback and and building up from like these 2021 companies and and and what it's took because there really were uh companies that would raise at you know 100x Revenue multiples um I I don't think it was a a sin necessarily to raise at high prices I think probably the sin was just spending
it all uh really quickly um you look at a lot of the companies that have transformed uh their Industries Amazon Google uh Apple like you name it uh often started with um some kind of bubble or hysteria people were investing a lot and it uh I think it does interest things to businesses I I I can tell you that um you know our mission has been
very consistent start a business that is obsessed with saving our our customers time and money um help them have every dollar an hour that they're spending in their business go a lot further um and when you have uh a large amount of capital behind you uh you of course think about what are the results that
you produce next week but you start obsessing over um could I make this outcome uh 10 years from now larger um instead of taking that next marginal dollar and I'm keeping it um how do we put it back into the hands of customers see them succeed um have the ability to use that next dollar to invest in Faster
growth and uh in a weird way grow a much larger business um for them 10 years from now and and we hope a much larger one for us and so I actually think it created the the the conditions for ramp uh to not just be customer obsessed but obsessed but uh to take that to a whole another level um you know I I I I would
say is is one of those 2021 companies uh we certainly had a lot of of work to do to to grow but if you keep um you know uh I think in 20122 is public that you know Revenue Forex um that year uh if you keep doubling if you keep growing at incredible rates what what are very large U multiples suddenly become very
reasonable and I think that the uh interesting thing that happened since is these these you know it all met uh uh and now ramp is is not only uh Trading uh like you know strongly performing public traded companies just growing at a dramatically faster clip it's driving more savings and more value for
customers and uh the most remarkable thing is it's such a large Market I I think if we do our jobs right uh we intend to save our customers more and and grow uh just as fast if not faster so I remember you telling me that uh one of the things you did for the employees was actually during the All Hands during
kind of the turmoil of the interest rate R rise you actually walked the team everyone the team regardless of their role in investor relations or not through how valuations are calculated where ramp is the growth rates the metrics and kind of did a bottomup analysis not like a full DCF or anything but you walked people through that do
you think that's something that's unique about ramp culture or do you think more uh startup CEOs or you know scale up CEOs should be transparent at that level with their employees about how because there's a lot of companies out there right now that are just like hey yeah we're worth billion because I got one
guy to write me a check at 20 billion right they bought they bought a you know million dollars with a stock at 20 billion whereas you I think you said hey look there's a whole host of people around the table that agree on this valuation now we just repriced it in the new interest rate regime and here's all
the multiples here's what it would look like if we were public Etc walk me through that so start start with with maybe this and think about this um where if you're a new uh employer you're considering coming to ramp um there's sort of two you know is ends of the deal just from a comp perspective um uh one was Cash um
people can agree on you know um you know base bonus that that going of structure and and and what's the equity value you know maybe that you get a package worth 100,000 half a million something like that um and traditionally when this is done uh we say okay this is granted this is based on this valuation um so we
believe that the stock today is worth if you stay for four years it will be worth half a million dollars and if it grows from there it'll be worth more the problem that all these companies had uh in 2022 2023 when you know publicly traded tech companies in some cases were down 70% some were down 90 others were
down 30 is no one quite knew uh and for an opaque private company uh suddenly uh the bid ask spreads could be very very wide um and during all this I mean just like we were growing incredibly quickly like that 2022 years we grew four times zero over year over year um no other publicly traded company was was doing
that uh and so I think part of the problem that we were trying to solve was you know we had the we were very lean we weren't burning a whole lot didn't have a capital need um but I wanted to be able to look employees in the eye and say you know um when we make a grant and we say this is a $500,000 Grant as of
the day that you're joining we really believe it uh and it's not just us but other sophisticated investors have done it and so we we did what was a very unusual thing uh at the time which was you know we just went out to the market and said we just want to know where you would price this what's fair and um investors said we have more conviction
than ever um uh in December 2021 we valued ramp at uh 8.1 billion uh today um we actually think it's going to be a way bigger company and the value is 5.8 billion um and we said great let's do it and and the interesting part is mathematically if you go through a uh TI your point on like a DCF discounted cash
flow um uh one of the biggest drivers of of what the end valuation is what are all the profits you'll make in 10 years plus um and it's impacted by what is the risk-free rate the um um uh overnight rate you can get um in December 2021 um that rate was almost 0% um you know um you would get no no reward for
risk and uh 2023 uh 2022 the risk free rate was like five to 5 and a half perc and if you compound that over over 10 years it has a dramatic effect and so in a weird way a 5.8 if you kind of go through the math of$ 5.8 billion valuation first it it it lowers the share price today but it implies a much higher share price later
on um so I guess to back into it um you know I still think a lot of companies haven't taken their medicine they actually haven't just marked it to Market um and I think that a lot of employees who've been working hard um probably are still underwater and I I we didn't think this was right we rather
would just say you know um here's where the stock is uh come in today um through hard work and uh you know uh Focus customer obession let's build from here and I think that proved really well you know we're we're back above all-time highs we have a lot of momentum and I think for um people who joined the team
and part of the mission um I think people have been been treated really fairly and so um I I don't know hope that's helpful and and just how we thought about yeah I have a question around um ramps ramp truly lives the ramp way like the the approach to company building that you guys advertise you you you do exactly yourself right so
so I feel like you're in a position like uh looking at Ram's Capital efficiency which I think was published you know yesterday around your guys's sort of net burn uh it's really astonishing right and it's got to be if you're running a business you know at at anywhere in the same category even adjacent categories
you have to be highly concerned at the at the rate that you guys are growing in that context uh is that how much of that do you credit to ramp versus yourself and your team's uh operational ability I think our whole mission right to your point is like make the most of every dollar and every hour if you're spending
it you should know why um uh and it's not just that you're spending it in one place but but what actually generates the return what what connects to growth um and I I I would say that um we certainly benefit a lot from our own product um uh we try to be obsessive over making sure we're not wasting and
if we're spending on on um you know software licenses a product we buy 500 seats we want 500 people to use it and we use ramp to cut out extra licenses um we look and make sure we're getting the the most impact for for prices and um you know software that we're buying and uh I I just think you know for the same
reason a lot of the highest performing best running companies um on the planet run on ramp and use it um you know we do too we we want to be the best customer of our own product and so some of it's that um but I'd also say with your whole mission is you know to obsess over getting you know your customers the most
from every dollar an hour you um as long as you're not a big hypocrite you start thinking about it for yourself too and so um I I I would give credit to the team I just think that the riger um you know not just financially but even just from a you know engineering perspective design perspective um I I think most
organizations could not have put out a Super Bowl ad from you know uh 11 days start to airing I think we were one of the few groups that had Direct insight into that because I remember we talked to the team you know we have a sort of a weekly uh with with the ramp uh marketing team and we talked to them and
they basically were like hey we got to go dark for like 3 days and so we got to witness the process and it was just it was it was incredible to see um In This Moment uh you know to me it feels like ramp's opportunity like the the value proposition for ramp has never been stronger right you you were born in 2019
you very quickly were in the zero interest rate era where it was not cool to save money it was cool tool to spend it and grow as fast as human humanly possible and we're now entering this period where you know we have terrorists there's austerity in the government right it seems that um you know saving money and making dollars go further is
in uh how do you you know how are you you thinking of you know taking ramp out of you know ramp is the Super Bowl felt like this first moment where ramp was going mainstream right and you know what does that look like over the next like couple years uh in terms of you know getting uh there's there's many more
businesses that that uh aren't on ramp that than are uh what is the next two years look like in term in terms of going mainstream two things I mean there's something just Timeless about uh ramp's core ideas um you know I think to paraphrase you know Jeff Bezos when he was talking about Amazon he couldn't
imagine uh 10 years in the future people would ever you know say you know Jeff I I love Amazon but I wish the prices were higher I I just wish that you know these packages got to my door a little bit slower you couldn't imagine it people always want lower prices um you know and getting things earlier getting more done
with less effort and uh in some ways we just took the simple idea very seriously um for a business owner you know in the US average profit margin is eight and a half percent um it means that a dollar saved is not equivalent to a dollar earned you know a dollar of cost that you cut is equivalent to increasing your
Revenue by $12 and uh I just think that we you know looked at the ma and just took it seriously um and I I think that um you know simple truth in some sense are one of the most powerful forces in in in business um uh when I look at where we are it's it is incredible to be serving uh empowering I what we believe is 1 to two% of all
corporate and small business cards spend in the US which is maybe the market that we're largest in um you know it's 98 to 99% to go I I think part of you did the you did the meme you did the 1% the 1% of the if we just take 1% of this thing it would be a big company and you did it they did it in five years ridiculous
it's so frustrating yeah yeah people are going to be like yeah yeah can I get a breakdown of like postmortem on the Super Bowl I want to know I mean everyone kind of knows okay Super Bowl like it just looks good it looks like a six to seven figure spend but how do you everyone wants to know you know what
does it feel like how do you start calculating like does this make sense and did we make money from it what's your early read and then what are you look what signals are you looking for down the road it was incredible um so there was a couple things and also there was even kind of in ramp fashion some
things that made the um the buy particularly impactful and maybe a little more clever so um by being by buying the ad much later than most normal people would do we had access to very unique inventory like it's sort of is a a little insane to say 11 days before the Super Bowl you know what if we did that um and so as a
result we actually knew who was playing in the Super Bowl you know we were able to to find someone that had incredible relevance to to what people were were watching and of course saquan is an amazing one of one Talent um that was phenomenal next um there was without getting too specific a lot of folks that
um for various reasons would normally buy Super Bowl ads and shes who had to deal with fires and other things like that that dropped out of the Super Bowl um you know didn't want to be advertising at a time when you know we we sort of coming under attack and it meant that some of the the spots that we were able to get were in extraordinary
slots um for people who were watching closely we were the very last ad uh going into to the Super Bowl um and that was nationally aired um for folks in other markets saw the ad twice and um well I can't get specific on the figures it was a lot less than what people think and the impact was a lot more I think
that saquin um you know being a core contributor and having an extraordinary season meant that not only um you know was a lot of coverage of of him but you know even the next week he was on The Today Show and um you know they talked about his his story as well as um our partnership and um the ad aired there
and and and we can see this in the metrics where February was you know uh by many accounts the um by far the biggest February that we've ever had um uh the acceleration just in terms of of of sales as well as people feeling like um you know it's gone from startup to you know this company that I knew when
is is actually on this big stage and so you you can see it in in in in the growth and just even in how people feel How likely people are to recommend and and and we've seen all these go up I have a more personal question uh you now run a a 13 billion plus company you're still one of the most kind and
genuine people that I know and it's almost most people by the time they they sort of climb the mountain to to to build a company this big they get sort of hardened uh what do you what do you credit your ability to you know um your your ability to sort of lead with kindness and I feel like every
conversation that I've had with you but at the same time sort of broadly your sort of reputation despite you know building uh such a behemoth in such a short period of time uh that's broadly your reputation with anybody that I feel like interacts with the company where does that come from so one I I just think um you know we're
we're thrilled to be here but you know I I I you know show some humility um 13 billion is a lot it's still very small uh in the grand scheme of things you know we're competing directly with companies that have multi- hundred billion if not uh almost trillion dollar market caps um some of the largest
companies you know today are um call it$ three and a half trillion dollars um and the wild part you know is that mathematically a company like um you know an apple or Microsoft soft or Nvidia you know talking to a ramp uh is almost like a ramp talking to a seed or Seri J uh startup it's actually those multiples and between valuations are
about the same um uh and so in some sense uh uh I think some of it just comes from the the reality of um we have such a long way to go um there's so much more to build there's so many more people that we can serve and uh just remembering that um I I I think that when you look at at at Great companies
in the past often are by by hubris um you know arrogance and you know forgetting like the reason why they were able to to grow and get there is were people who early employees who gave them a shot and um worked hard who didn't have to be there who who who were there early customers who said you know what I
I I'm going to try and and you know trust you with my business and please take good care of it and you know that still is true um and so I I don't know um I guess it's a little bit too like you know you grow up a certain way and you know that those kind of things stick with you but um that's really how I
think about it right do you want to get into any of the general entrepreneurship questions or anything yeah I mean uh I guess you you've had your pick of the litter in the valley right uh at at this point uh I'm sure you've talked with every major you know investor for you know across different rounds and obviously some
funds get conflicted and things like that uh what's the single best piece of advice you've ever gotten from somebody on your cap table it could be um you know uh you know specifically uh on the investor side it's a really good question I mean I uh I tend to really resonate with former operators people who who have
built and and run business I think that experience is very it's fun it's interesting also times very solitary turn out it's pretty valuable it's pretty valuable yeah yeah and so look I I uh you know we have a very small board um you know one of the members is is is Keith herb boy and I I think that part of why I wanted to work with with him
even from the you know the earliest days is um I just think he had an obsession with um what it takes to to be a highquality operator like I still think his um how to operate talk he gave over a decade ago is is uh as good as it is I think it's very underrated um I think focusing just of that it was uh
cannonballs and barrels right barrels and ammunition yeah barrels and bullets bullets yeah I mean the IDE is like the bottleneck you know you might have as many bullets as but if you have a too few cannons you can't fire as many bullets you need to have more more more cannons to go quicker but I I think a
lot of the heart of it and some of this is like the score takes care of itself with the idea you manage towards the inputs to drive the out the outcome and you know I think ramp has been in this very large and in some sense people look at it from the outside in hyper competitive space um and we've grown um
at a level others haven't in part I I actually think is just by taking that advice to heart um uh it's really looking you know Upstream what are the activities that lead to the outcomes you're trying to drive what are the things I can do today that will save your business you know time and money tomorrow um what are the things we can
do today to drive more sales tomorrow and so uh in some sense it wasn't you know profound it just was right and we um tried to listen to it um pretty often it's great yeah I feel like the best uh the the best advice in the valley is actually out in these sort of blog posts or individualized talks and in the same
way on the company side you know the ramp secret plan is out there it's like we're going to save businesses the the most amount of time and money and if you want to compete with us on that you're welcome to it's good for the world but we're going to do it the best um so it's amazing to witness and uh uh yeah we'll
have to have you back on uh in the very near future because uh you know if there's one thing about ramp is uh there's always always news coming always news can't wait guys I really appreciate it and uh look I uh thanks for having me on the show when uh I say I you wi I think this is going to get continue
growing really quickly oh yeah we're excited we have CRA coming on in a couple minutes I think so we're gonna have him psychoanalyze you we'll let you go Eric uh we'll talk to you soon talk to you soon have a great rest of your day cheers we'll talk to you soon cheers yeah bye bye and uh we are GNA take a 30 second break while we um
fix some stuff with the stream and then I will give you a little rent of show because we did we jumped straight into that interview uh obviously we're getting live later and later uh and uh so yeah we we want we want to go we want to touch on the Trump tariffs thing but just a little bit Dipper toe in stay not
political but it is the top story it's what everyone's talking about so we're going to focus on the tech reaction we're not going to really deep dive into the politics of it we're going to talk about what people on Tech Twitter are saying about it we're going to go through a bunch of timeline uh cover some reaction to earlier uh clips that
went out yesterday from the show uh and then I want to talk about Greenland I think Greenland's super interesting and there's uh there's an article in the walet journal about whether or not Greenland could be a place for a mining boom and the then the question they ask is Greenland has the makings of a mining boom so where is
everyone like like there are minerals there but no one's really going after them we're gonna try and get to the bottom of it with this Wall Street Journal article and then also uh Google's making a new push with star project Starline have you seen Starline I have not it's one of these like Tech
demos that feels very fake but every because like you just can't go experience it but they bring in journalists and like YouTubers and they all walk out journalists and they all walk out of the room like Journal that was incredible and you don't know if they're being paid off or something yeah yeah you know put
on the tinfoil hat like they might be paid off to be like that was amazing and really it sucks uh so it's in the it's in the like project Orion realm of like seems really promising but basically it's like a TV that's like 3D and it uses kind of like an illusion technique to help you see someone across the table
in like as a hologram interesting and they want to roll it out and they want to get it like cheaper so that basically everyone can have this but uh they're they're making a push so we could podcast holographically I would love that I mean it reviews The Early reviews have been has been remarkable but uh it's very
unclear like how real it is or how or how expensive it is to actually roll out so we're going to go through that but mostly we're going to do a ton of phone calls today because we're really enjoying the guest spots we're having a lot of fun people on so we will have uh David SRA hop on and then we're gonna
have Bridget Harris from Founders fund hop on at 11:45 and uh who else is maybe going to come on maybe Maguire we'll see I texted him hopefully he can get on um let me see if he's on he's on X this is turning increasingly into just like a live stream we're just like hanging out we're hanging out the um okay he just liked my
post he dm' me his cell phone number I texted him hopefully he get with double text maybe maybe we'll just call him live at noon and just be like you're on and that's it uh what's going on okay we got to catch you a break we will be right back you're watching tvpn you'll still be watching in a couple
minutes when you get back e that's great we are back you're still watching tvpn we had a little HDMI issue I guess when I was looking at Jordy it would look like I was looking off to the other side anyway it's fixed we're back we're happy to be here uh Ben give me an update on David senra is he in the
waiting room does he have the zoom link I mean we're talking about the most powerful man in Miami he is the most powerful man in Miami now you know we had Keith on but Keith has kind of relinquished it a little bit he's got his toes in DC he's got one foot in Silicon Valley now senra senra isn't making a move he's he's locking down the
islands he's having he's establishing he's not leaving he's not leaving you're gonna have to drag him out of Miami and I would be happy to drag him out of Miami very easy to get him out of Miami you just got to send a private jet yeah he really does hold the bar well yeah he he he holds a line it's remark how he
set that bar and then still manages to get on a plane twice a week you would think that that would reduce the amount of travel but somehow it does not uh anyway uh senra senra senra hopefully he hops on he says he needs five minutes um that was like four minutes ago you know maybe we should just uh play a little bit of
his podcast on our podcast the dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is that two to one but in the field that I was interested in I noticed the dyamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one so given that you're well
advised to go after the cream of the cream and to build a team that pursues the A+ players and that is exactly what ramp did ramp has right we're in the middle of a ramp out that's hilarious hey is I'm playing I I was listening to your your latest episode and and there was some good there was there was a
really good quote in there and I didn't realize it was in the middle of a rampad that's funny I caught the the tail end of you talking to Eric oh yeah great how you doing man good good I just had actually saw Eric last week we had breakfast I went uh flew to New York for a super secret uh dinner that I'm making
an episode about right now so me me and uh Eric had breakfast the very next day very cool very cool amazing uh every time I tried to ask Eric something personal he perfectly redirected it into talking about save businesses time and money uh can you help us psychoanalyze Eric because he's like this in he's
truly a one of one in the sense that uh I was kind of positioning it as like building a 13 billion plus company and maintaining that level of sort of genuine kindness is like very tough and uh I'm curious if you if you have any sort of like opinion or sort of like com I just have the answer like when I when
I made the documentary about ramp like I was interviewing him that exact question like hey you're so nice but like you're running this like kind of cut through company in this like hardcore industry like how is this possible and it kind of got peeled back the onion and got to the fact like like he had a brother who got
bullied a lot and like he developed like this insane empathy that was my takeaway I was like tearing up while I was talking to him about it it was really really like uh kind of like a crazy crazy like early life to like deal with and that clearly gave him like a new level of empathy because he went through
all this stuff with his brother it was wild anyway but senra what what's your take one I spent much time with him I do consider when I say on the ramp ads my friend Eric I that's not hyperbolic um I would say the larger uh like the more important idea is like you actually don't have to be like a complete and listen I think Steve
Jobs is one of the best you know founders of all time uh if there's a Mount Rushmore of the history entrepreneurship he's got to be on it it doesn't matter like what the other three are but he's definitely one of them but people hear how like you know how he spoke to other people and they just say
oh like to be like him I have to be like that and it's just like no you don't um like if you look at the greatest you know when I went to Charlie monger's house and had dinner with him like he said that the greatest he feels the greatest founder of all time was Rockefeller and one of the craziest things about Rockefeller is like there
would be people that worked for him for decades that said he never raised his voice and he never said an unkind word so I think there's like this myth that there's like this one size or one way to be successful in fact I was on a long walk with a friend last night and we were talking about Michael Dell you know
uh one of regardless of what you think he's like one of the most successful people that ever lived uh has a phenomenal relationship with his son they're like best friends from what I hear uh very very proud that he's still married to the same woman like un anybody that spends time with him says the same thing he's just unbelievably
thoughtful and kind um so yeah I I I I one with particular Eric it's definitely not an act and two I don't think you know it's a prerequisite for Success this is like one of the reasons I tend to work alone is because I am really [ __ ] mean and I don't like that I I would wish I wasn't so you know uh like intense
around that and I'm perfectly fine being that way with myself I just don't like doing that to other people that's why when you said you liked our podcast I took it really serious because I'm like he just wouldn't say that oh no way very authentically like yeah like this this isn't for you bud I mean I've sent him
so many things to review and and I'm just like it's it's not bad right and he's like Have you listened to it so there's a you see this bookshelf behind me let me zoom out a little bit so it is um it holds like 600 books or something like that yeah and uh let me see if I can change this so they're actually in order by episode number yeah
and one thing that I love about there's another um like 300 books in my living room and I walk past it every day to get upstairs and one one of the books uh has the title like big bold letters in the spine and it's it's applicable to a lot more Industries than you think of and it's definitely applicable to podcasts
but the title of the book is competing with idiots and I think like you know we're doing the same thing here with posts right we have we have every post the Library of Alexandria every post it out in order that we reacted to them on the show it's bigger than your it's bigger than your bookshelf you remember when
you guys had this idea of like you were gonna sell your podcast in vinyl yeah yeah yeah and so I actually I hope you make that into a book and I would buy the technology Brothers book of Tweets we're definitely thinking about that definitely thinking about that I think with the final thing where we got was we
want to send you our favorite episode of Founders on vinyl something and send that to Patrick and then so like the Jeremy gon episode goes out because you get that on vinyl it's like a fun thing you could like put it on your bookshelf or something it's a little trinket I actually think it's really smart there's been multiple
occasions So like um you can't see it but behind my desk so Sam zel there there's a bunch of people I'm actually reading Michael oit's autobiography yeah so I'll give you a preview of the the episode that has been killing me I wanted it out two days ago and it still won't be done um and he had a full-time
gift guy and this has actually come up a lot in the books Sam zel had a he spent millions of dollars a year from my understanding yeah on his full-time gift Department in fact he'd build these like automatons right and itd have a theme and I actually spoke at this guy's conference and he's like do you want
anything for this I was like it's in Miami I don't give a [ __ ] I'll do it for free and we're friends anyways um and he's like all right I have a gift for you and he actually found one and he bought me a Sam zel like automaton but I think the technology Brothers especially because you're like you're doing a five
days a week you're going to have all these guests you should have like a gift department where it's like thoughtful that like that like here here's your favorite episode on vinyl or like whatever whatever isn't that in uh How to Win Friends and Influence People the whole idea of a Rolodex you save everyone you said that was your favorite
book right just kid I mean I I thought Patrick hes he said he rereads it all the time I I read it it is a fantastic book it's one of these like Timeless books it's a little ridiculous because it's like so such a like over it's clickbait title but you know clickbait works yeah I know the value I I like
things that the value prop is in the title actually also it's so old timey like it it it's just it's an interesting artifact because it's like it's the type of like business advice that you'd see on like a thread on Twitter these days but it's from like the 1920s so all the examples are really an because it's not
it's advice on human nature and human nature CH like that's why people still read it and like uh Charlie munger's one of his favorite book was uh influenc by Robert keini he liked it so much he gave him um a single share of birkshire stock when it was like 500,000 I think today it's like 750 wow pretty good
composition for writing a book that's awesome that's amazing I love that when are you writing a book what's that when are you gonna write a book never um Domin no because like here's the thing um like I told you before I mean you guys know this because like I kind of like cornered you at hereticon about
how important podcasting is yeah and you know I get like uh it's very nice because like I as you guys know most of the books I do I cover like really old but Publishers send me all of their like new books and you know I might do like one new book for every like 50 old books and they all they send me their new
books for distribution but they're also like where you be interested in writing a book yeah and my point to them is like I I think of podcasting as like one of the greatest Technologies ever created I think it's the printing press for the spoken word and so me taking and I think it's the highest and best use of my time
so me taking time away from that to do anything else but more podcasting doesn't make sense now that I I talked to my friend Jimmy Sony who I absolutely love and uh he's he wrote this great biography on Claud Shannon he wrot what's that he spoke at your event he wrote the PayPal book right yeah he wrote the founders the history of uh
Founders he's like another psycho obsessive it took him longer to write the founders book than it took PayPal to be founded and then sold to eBay okay so uh but I called him I was like hey just name your price and you know listen to the podcast we'll have some conversations and if you can write this
for me like in Partnership then I'd be interested in doing that so what I told him to do it's one of my favorite books is Will and Ariel Durant the lessons of History right you really think about that book it's like they dedicated 50 years of their life to writing the um history of civilization it's probably I
don't know what 10,000 Pages all combined and yet after that they're like hey we're going to do this [ __ ] ridiculous thing of trying to write a biography of the human species and we're going to limit to 100 pages so I was like okay I would want to do that like what are the most important ideas that
we've just we've unveiled so far through the podcast and in the eight years of his existence and write like this is a b like the most important idea is in 100 pages um and so he he's got a bunch of stuff going on including two books that are really fascinating that he's writing but he said he's going to do it very cool uh
who are the entrepreneurs that are still building their legacy that you are uh hoping that they will live up to their full potential and one day be qualified to be uh you know given the full Founders podcast treatment I would put Eric and Kareem in that in that bucket of you know ultra high potential but
still uh you know sort of just getting started in a sense uh are there people that stand out today that that you're excited to cover in you know 15 20 years right I'm going to tell you who my favorite founder alive is right now and it's going to be surprising to people because um I I heard your episode yesterday where you talked about like
how I'd call you up John and like find a simple idea and take it seriously and I think that's one of like the best pieces of advice and you see it over and over again I've been able and some of these people I can't [ __ ] name because of the podcast but I've been able to meet like these crazy e you know family
businesses where the founders 80 years old still running the company no outside investors worth $10 billion and you know they've just monopolized like crazy stuff like nails or packing equipment or shipping company or just like crazy like not very complicated ideas just like they found a simple idea and took it uh
very seriously um I I I think uh one of the things I like about Eric and Kareem is uh before we had this like very deep uh partnership it's not obviously you guys know this it's not just like I'm not just like reading ads for them on my podcast um like we're friends we we spend a lot of time together our wives
spend time together our kids play together um and you know it took a long time getting to know them really well um one of the important things when we talked about this is like is this your last company like I'm not interested in like the people that want to start scale and sell I'm interested in people that do
something for a very long time if you look at all the books behind me these people literally worked and Zi right here like he died he worked on there's no retirement like like Ferrari is my entire life this is what my life energy goes to this most of the people I cover in the podcast you know their life's
work and what I loved about both Eric and Kareem like this is the last company like this is we we want to build this forever um there's actually an interesting idea um and I'm trying to convince Kareem to do more not that he needs my advice by any means but I really want him to be interviewed by Patrick um just because I get to talk to
him privately and he he's like [ __ ] brilliant technical mind and one of the things that he said that was very fascinating um is he he optimizes for spikes and uh what that means is like you know especially as as the company grows you tend to like try to like even out and like hire for personality or
like yeah this guy's talented but he's kind of like an [ __ ] or he's like comes in late uh or like you know will show up for two days and kind of disappear and I think what Kareem understood is what a lot of hist entrepreneurs understand there's a great line by David ogy where he said that Talent is likely is most likely to be
found against uh among Misfits non-conformists and Rebels and uh what Kareem is interested in is not like your total package he's interested in your very best idea so like if you were the very best at X and he just wants you to do that for ramp and if you only last for six months that's fine it's like he
just he optimizes for spikes and I think that's incredibly um intelligent because it's also something that Steve Jobs says that he's like you can never ever ever ever forget the dynamic range of human beings that most things in life you know between the average to the best it's like two to three two two times best
three times quality where he's like in software and Hardware it's like the difference is like 100x or a THX and marketing too not just not just 10x Engineers 10x ideas 10x you can see it with apple right now what's that you can see it with apple right now J Emoji like it's not crazy to think of the yin and yang camp campaign
that they ran is a thousand times better than the than the Gen Emoji campaign yeah and again where does that come from where like Eric and what I like about Eric and Kareem is like they work like dogs just like I do right um and I'm really only interested I just had came back from lunch the reason I texted you
guys I'm five minutes late it's because I was meeting another founder friend of mine and and we had lunch with another friend and it's like all three of us have in common it's like we're taking what we do very seriously it's all different businesses um but Kareem Works non-stop right Eric does too and they
they want the pressure um and they want they do believe like something that Eric told me that was wild at breakfast was like when ramp was founded um AMX was like a$ 70 billion do market cap company and now it's like 220 or whatever um so I I I heard at the very end he's talking about yeah people were saying hey we're
valued at 13 million that's fine but like you know we're missing a zero maybe two zeros like if we're doing this for a long period of time things grow in unpredictable ways like the people that I've met I like didn't ask him the question of uh you know I was I'm genuinely curious like what do you do uh if you have five
minutes in the day you know what are you doing uh for fun and I don't even think that's worth asking Eric because I know he's just going to say look you know I like to you know keep in touch with my family and but otherwise I'm at the office thinking about work or I'm calling senra um but uh but yeah it just
didn't even seem like worth asking because I already know the answer one of the most interesting things I think they just put this out in uh in that blog post but we definitely talked about it too is like you know they're doing like 54% of their pay rolles on dedicated to R&D like they're not just like oh we're
we're look what we did in in this amount of time it's like no we're going to keep pushing the pace this is again the what I uh I I the when I went to New York I had dinner with Mike Ovitz that I had an intense three-hour dinner with ovit so I'm making an episode on the dinner and I'm making an episode on um on the book
and the way this came about is because I was uh at breakfast with a friend of mine and his phone is on the table and it rings and it's Mike Ovitz and he picks up he puts on speaker phone he's like hey I'm actually sitting here with my friend David he does this podcast you should know about Founders and Mike
without missing a beat he goes I love that podcast I listen to four episodes yesterday and one of the things that me and Mike talked about at breakfast is like nothing that Michael oit said in his book or at dinner is like surprising to me in because it's like Founders a church for entrepreneur it's you're I'm
just telling the same story over and over again it's the same personality type over and over and over again um and so yeah of course like when they're saying hey we're extremely dedicated what we're doing we're trying to get better it's like that's exactly what they should be doing if this is going to be your last business if this is your
life's work then you will have that like importance of every little detail like how many F you guys see all the tweets when people talk about the difference of like the U UI and ux to ramp to to compared to some other people yeah um yeah and you're you're you're point about Apple there's a great book called
creative selection it's episode 281 of Founders I think the title is working with Steve Jobs if I'm correct be wrong maybe 282 probably 281 um and that's one of the best books I've read it three times because it talks about the care that Steve Jobs put to every single Pixel of all the products they're make
making and all the advertising so that ad wouldn't have gone out because Steve would have had to approve every single ad they went out that's there a different level of care and love yeah what's your sleep score what's your sleep score not not good and M I love Mato uh they were uh one of my early Partners let's it was here's the
problem because every I'm so excited about this is gonna be a big year yeah and I have a lot of stuff coming that people don't know about Okay and like it's it's not good so last night was 70 I got 88 what' you do Jordy the the the night the night before is 56 56 I've never actually got my God I don't think
I've ever gotten that low man you're you're grinding too hard no no I'm just very excited this is like uh yeah know makes sense one one of my favorite Founders uh you mentioned earlier is or you were asking earlier is H Dana White I think what he did what him and the fatita brothers did with the U UFC
buying it out of bankruptcy for like two billion or two two million and then you know selling selling it for whatever the number is and still staying on there and I saw a clip from a podcast interview that he said that's excellent It's like very again I like simple ideas he's just like build a life that you can't like
you can't wait to wake up to and he's like I people always asking me oh when are you going to retire from the UFC and he's just like retire from what yeah like I get to put on the best fights in the world I get to travel in the I get to stay in the nicest hotels eat at the nicest restaurants like put on the best
Live Events he's like I'm going to be doing this till I'm 80 yeah you know and I just love that idea like very simple idea am I building a life that I cannot wait to wake up to Fantastic uh one industry oriented question and then I have um I just want you to rant about a specific topic so what's going on with Spotify yesterday
for the first time I got a clickbait Style video suggest suggested to me on Spotify that was like I tried zero Star Tech and it was like this like kind of like crazy it looked exactly like a YouTube it was a YouTube video it was just a YouTube video it came out came out uh you know last week that YouTube's
the biggest podcast platform in the world now that's obviously not you know sort of not great uh for Spotify how do you see Spotify as a platform uh evolving um so I don't see this is another thing because keep in mind I like study people for a living right I think that's really the only Edge I have
so um uh we we've talked about this like um when I think of like people like people think of like their portfolio they tend to like list companies mine is like people people it's like oh I invested in this dude and I invested in Justin or Sebastian or like that um your long Danel act what's that and so and so
in this analogy you're long Daniel e Daniel's the best like he's the mo like the car dude yes I I spent a bunch of time with him I consider him a friend like a legit friend and it's shocking that we're friends but like every time I talk to him like he is the idea that what what is Spotify like $120 billion
market cap company or something today I don't pay attention to any like the stock market but like it's p up public yeah hold up and inform this it's over 100 billion I would imagine 120 nailed it okay so how the hell is the guy that's been running the company for 18 years the founder he's still there uh he's what 42 like young
um 44 I don't know something like that he's like so underrated more people should study him like he doesn't give a bunch of interviews and usually the interviews around product announcements but like I don't know what's going to happen with Spotify but I would back up the truck in anything that Daniel does
and as long as Daniel's there and his team I've met his team they're [ __ ] incredible like um yeah they also knew exactly what was going to happen they this is like famous like Founders fund lore is that like Sean Parker and Daniel a come in and they're like and they're like we are going to execute like the
Napster type music sharing strategy but it's all gonna be legal we're going to build this platform and they projected something like I I don't remember the exact number but they're like in the in the investment memo it's like in 2025 we'll have 300 million daus and they got it within like 10% or something
it was like a 20year projection and they nailed it it was crazy listen more important he's one of the greatest living entrepreneurs without a doubt that's not even including the stuff he's doing outside of Spotify which is [ __ ] also incredible and impactful um more important that he's like a good guy so um I I want I'm I'm gonna do more of
these like I had dinner with episodes you know yeah there people seem to like them and I like doing them and um I had dinner with and this one had to be like Anonymous so I don't know I'm I'm not going to make an episode on it but um because I asked the guy I I mentioned this briefly in in a episode but I was
like I had dinner with you know one I got the opportunity to have dinner with one of the uh wealthiest people on the planet um very unknown right his family it's a multi-generation dynasty and his family had like commissioned biographies for certain people in the family and of course when he's told me that I was like
oh let me get those and he's like this is you know how you say bad boys move in silence that Maxim that reappears over and over again history of Entrepreneurship yeah uh came from Rockefeller uh he's like absolutely not I go why not and he goes because I'm not interested in educating my competitors
and the dinner was incredible but he knows Daniel and he was just like there's he's what do you think of Daniel he's incredible one of the best entrepreneurs in the world this guy's telling me he's like but more important than that like he his like when you speak to him like he's a kind person he's not one of these you know [ __ ]
he has no ego no ego the he's not much older than all three of us well maybe a lot older than Jordy I forgot how young Jordy is but like it's incredible what this guy has done and you know I I I think more people should spend time studying him like we're g to um true we're going to do he already agreed to
like we're going to do I had dinner with uh Daniel episode soon because I had an incredible dinner with him it was the most important you know what I [ __ ] think of him I get to meet a lot of incredible people last year was the craziest life year of my life that convers that conversation I had with Daniel was by far the most important
because like he doesn't he sees no ceiling to what he can achieve and then he takes that self-belief and he transfers it to you which I think is very very important so I have no idea that they look what the [ __ ] have they've done in podcasting so far yeah um and they're going to continue to do what I would say if people are
interested in learning more about Spotify they made I was just in Stockholm and I found this out they made a short series on the history of Spotify Sean Parker's in there Daniel's in there um it's called Spotify a product story it was out in like 2021 and I think it's eight or nine series eight or nine
episodes and then they updated it later but you can just listen to the first ones and again everybody's talking about AI right in whatever I don't 2025 they they were talking about it half a decade ago they were using it half a decade ago they're just he's he's he's great that's all I have to say
like two minutes left yeah uh question for you uh we're at a unique moment in time where it doesn't feel like the a lot of entrepreneurs can afford to not pay attention to geopolitics right there's there's been a lot of time in the last 20 years where it was the the generalized advice was focus on your customers you can kind of ignore
everything else and if you're delivering value for your customers then you know you'll do well we're at a period where you know there's there's uh you know tariffs coming down it's impacting a lot of businesses you know here in the US and entrepreneurs who should those entrepreneurs study in the sort of
Founders world uh in terms of you know uh question entrepreneurs and companies that had to navigate sort of like uh or does it not even matter right or is still this this is the biggest thing man like you're the problem is everybody so focused on on the present right and it it history allows you to like take a
step back and have a perspective and instead of like being in front of your [ __ ] face all day long and so like here here's a great book uh I just did this episode it's like absolutely ripping it's called 400 pages of uh Munger and Buffett in their own words and in there it talks about the fact that you you could have bought cocacola
you know in after World War II I'm making up the numbers but World War I for like nothing right and it went up by 10,000x since then or whatever the number is right and the point being is um Buffett's point was there's a lot of smart investors and other people and smart capitals that passed because
they're like oh like there's all this uncertainty there's political uncertainties there's Wars there's pandemics so if you think about everything that happened from like 1910 to up until when he's saying this is probably like in 1990s you know you went through two world wars you went through multiple pandemics you went through all
this turmoil you went through uh asset bubble asset collap collapses High interest rates low interest rates everything else he goes at the end of the day you know what mattered that 60 years from now they're going to be they're going to be serving a billion servings 8 on servings of coke a day and
if somebody is making a billion people slightly happier every day by by serving this drink to them that person should make a little bit of money and probably will make a little bit of money so I don't I'm not actually a good person to ask that question surprisingly so because like the amount you guys know this is like the amount of what I don't
ignore I figure that the important stuff like all know about war I know about pandemics but I have no idea like who's leading in the stock market I don't pay I don't like reading the news I don't do any of this because what what matters it's like I just stay focused on my customer right so if I wake up every day
and I read for a few hours you know a biography of when off entrepreneurs and I sit down once a week and I talk to you for an hour and I just rip through idea after idea in an hour that you can listen to on 1.5x speed so it takes 40 minutes of you right there's nothing else everything else elide my control I
will get every I want in life and that I deserve if I just focus on that just focus delivering value as much as possible um yeah and another another way to look at this is if if you are if the company that if you're an entrepreneur and you're running a company that's not your last company it's the the the sort
of geopolitical environment right now is hyper stressful right because you're thinking about oh I want to sell the company I want to exit and all that stuff but if you're thinking about you know still running the company in 20 30 years from now uh it really doesn't matter what happens in the next four
years you just need to you know make it through and uh make okay de dead on I'm glad you said that because this just spawn another thought to me right where um for some reason and this has not been like on purpose I've spending a lot of money or lot I've spending a lot of time with like family offices and um and a
world I didn't know anything about and I've been asking questions like who's the largest like American Family office and you know a lot of them were dispersed whatever the case was like highly likely it's The Waltons right you know Sam Walton's kids and grandkids uh I was if you if you pass the Miami Beach uh Marina right um if if you're
coming from downtown to to the beach you'll see this giant boat I looked it up one day it was like Sam Walton's brother's daughter's boat right it's like bigger or ship bigger than anything else even remote in a giant um Marina and it's like it sticks out like a sord thumb so there's a great biography that
I actually read um it's called Sam Walton America's richest man written by Van and it was actually published a year before Sam Walton's autobiography came out and he had a funny story in there because uh Sam was very private just focused on uh satisfying the customer and then everybody sees Walmart stock oh
this is the richest man in America so during Black Friday that was I think 1987 right uh Sam doesn't have a cell phone he doesn't have a beeper he doesn't have internet right so he's driving Black Friday the retail no blackid or the act the stock market crash I just want to clarify cuz you're talking about a a retail entrepreneur
good point also a big day yeah Black Friday biggest stock I think single day stock crash ever I assume that still holds a record and so anyways on paper he lost like a billion dollars right so he goes he's he's given a speech at like this charity event I think in Arkansas H for like kids or something and somebody
he takes questions after somebody ask me questions like how does it feel to Lo lose a billion dollars in the stock market today and his his response was great he goes I didn't I didn't hear about it he like he didn't care just like I don't care I'm just like focused on my business I'm not selling the stock
today I'm never selling it like like it all that matters is that he was he really he took a if you mean take a simple idea and take it seriously his dedication to that simple idea e everyday low price so edlp this is everyday low price let's just make sure we have the lowest price for our customers and so let's work backwards
from that we just focus on that we'll do that forever and you fast forward and it's like one of the greatest if it was concentrated one person it might be one of the it is one of the greatest Fortune ever created by taking a simple idea and taking it very seriously it's fantastic David we love you thanks for
joining thank you for joining uh expect uh expect us to send you a zoom link once a week forever because we're uh we're we all this is the best way to catch up I I love this yeah I feel like it robs people you just next time in California I got a suit up though oh yeah we'll do suit Hey where's you said
you were going to frame where's that picture uh oh yeah we we're it's like the M it's like the Monger picture that we're going to do um we're getting a a picture of the poda the most powerful man in Miami David senra you really are the most powerful man in Miami we've been talking not even close not even close I don't
know man I think to too you're acting like you've spending too much time with Eric you're too humble you're the most powerful man in Miami I think if you go to Miami you got to check in with sry you got to let him know not there he's he's yeah you got to email him we we'll drop his phone number we'll drop his
personal address the comments and you can go stop by socializing invite him to really big events if it's crowded like a you know conference room Hall Las Vegas invite him to that that's where he's really in his element book signing you know podcast signing real quick before I go so our mutual friend Patrick always
gets on me because he's just like he'll like try to connect with people like he's like David doesn't read his email like he's just unreachable and he goes why don't you have an assistant I go why do I need an assistant he goes to answer these emails and to like manage your schedule I go why do I need a schedule
like I just need to wake up every day read for a few hours sit down once a week and talk about what I read I don't need to do anything else I don't need to do anything else it's that simple it was great this morning we actually published on our ex account that you were calling in and you hadn't fully confirmed you'd
been like partially confirmed you saw that I was like David SRA calling in at uh 2m yeah I unless I'm absolutely indisposed by creating a podcast I will always answer for you guys you know that fantastic all right all right you're the man I love you guys talk to you later love you talk to you later talk soon bye
bye uh do you want to do 10 minutes quick on tariffs yeah okay like to just sprinkle in a little geopolitics uh I think it is a I think it is an interesting question about like you know this was the result of coinbase like Brian Armstrong said look we are not going to be participating in we are a mission driven company we're going we're
not going to be participating in every political fight uh every culture War issue but that doesn't mean that we're going to stay of crypto lobbying like we do need to be regulated effectively and so it it's this weird balance of like yeah we're not like getting fully political but we're also not completely
apolitical we care about our industry and the things that we're experts in so uh so I think look like yes if you're just some random like AI SAS founder like you might not care about tariffs between Canada and Mexico but if you're manufacturing something there and it's coming that does make that does matter
all of a sudden that is a tech is like what we when we talked to Ryan Peterson he was saying the same thing he was like well this matters to me uh so we we have a bunch of good posts in here why don't we quickly run through the article okay and then we'll we'll jump into it because I think that so the news
is that Trump uh imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada it took effect first thing Tuesday Canada responded with plans to impose impose 25% tariffs on about a hundred billion do worth of us Imports uh Trudeau said Trump is acting in bad Faith uh Mexico's president said it would also retaliate with a range of moves to be announced
Sunday uh the US is also introduced an extra 10% tariff on Chinese Imports overnight adding to a levy imposed a month ago so everything's R ramping up China announced retaliatory tariffs on us agricultural goods and other measures against American companies uh Beijing also filed a lawsuit with the world Trad
with the World Trade Organization and so investors were rattled that's a funny way to get to Trump the the the market sold off generally and uh yeah it's been not like full chaos but uh definitely one of those things like tariffs are taxes you know they kind of suck energy out of economic uh systems they can be
very good for certain things especially if you're getting a super raw deal and a country is really um you know just destroying your ability to produce something or or playing some sort of long game that you're not considering uh but of course there a lot of push back for this so let's go through some of the
reaction um Logan Bartlett had a post he said uh the trouble he's he's he's quoting David Kelly the chief Global strategist at JP Morgan asset management and David Kelly says the trouble with tariffs to be succinct is that they raise prices slow economic growth cut profits increase unemployment worsen
inequality diminish productivity and increase Global tensions other than that they are fine so bit of a hot take back he says most of that is false and then Logan fires back and says I put it in quotes so I could obfuscate responsibility for saying it love it which is smart phenomenal uh good posting strategy uh I don't know what do
you think uh which side you take on this you know I'm I'm very grateful in moments like this that we are a technology and business show sure I I've approached this from the point of view of this this is making life really really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs that I respect and uh want to see do well and
so from that lens from a purely sort of personal angle uh it's um you know it's tough to see but at the same time there's been precedent throughout history where we've implemented tariffs like this and and and seen um seen seen positives out of it right um so I just think uh I just think it you know
I think that uh Mexico and Canada have the the right to be able to say like you know Trump's acting in bad faith because he's been sort of like you know he's playing with people's livelihood to a very extreme degree I I thought it was worth um jumping down to uh something before we do that yeah I I just have a I
don't know if it's a problem with this but it just feels so inconsistent because if you think about what's going on with the tariffs on tech companies China effectively has a 100% profit margin tariff on social networking Facebook Instagram they're banned they can't make any money it's a 100% tariff effectively and yet we
haven't ban Tik Tok yeah and so it's like it's like if we're not that is the most clear to me that it's like that trade imbalance is crazy right there and we're not doing anything about that but then we are doing stuff about you know agriculture and cars and stuff all that stuff's important and and I I I don't
know we'll have to see how this plays out I mean the last round of ter it seemed like it went pretty well like like all through like the economy tended to grow pretty well during the last Trump Administration so I'm I'm like I'm cautiously optimistic that all these gyration in the market kind of get worked out and things and things wind up
doing well of course we got like smacked with covid right at the end so it's very easy to look at like oh well unemployment was way up when Trump got out and it's like well there was like this crazy you know once in a century event that happened um but the core the core like let's renegotiate trade deals
it wasn't as disastrous as I think people thought it was going to be so but uh certainly to Isaac's Point here like if you're in the if you're in the crosshairs it it hurts a thousand times more yeah so Isaac says here these tariffs are going to wipe out the entire net margin of a ton of businesses lots
of them my friends real people real livelihoods real employers with lots of jobs having your dream squashed smashed by GE geopolitical whims sucks yep um and he had another post that I thought was great I have it pulled up myself here he says it's so easy to see numbers and detach them from people that 25%
tariff it kills a ton of jobs and livelihoods families will feel pain those casualties and in a war real people not just a number that grifting you see in broad daylight the money came from real people maybe a college fund maybe someone's entire savings it's easy to see a number and have zero empathy so
I think this is the right sort of point of view right now it's it's it's way too early to say you know they're all bad or they're all good or you know really kind of like we don't know what the impact is yet we see what's happening in the in the public markets and and that's you know based on sort of um fear and a
bunch of these other sort of factors that that um you know are getting sort of priced in in different ways but uh I think it's just important to you know as a technology and business show uh on the business side uh a lot of great entrepreneurs are being affected by this and I mean a lot of d companies um will
Source internationally and just to keep the business going they're spending you know what 25% of the revenue on marketing there's like the profit markins are pretty thin yeah yeah and so uh uh an increase like that could really wipe you out fortunately like there has been really wide signaling on this for a
while that like you know you're going to need to reshore at some point yeah spinning up new manufacturing can be difficult but it it can be done on the order of a year for most things I mean you look you look at how fast people things hopefully hopefully there's you know I think what makes sense is
generally this idea that we need more targeted tariffs so a tariff on Tik Tok right effectively a 100% tariff on Tik Tok in the same way that they by Banning us social media and China it's effectively a ter on SP a tariff on fentanyl a tariff on terrorists uh no and the the the other thing is is you know for Trump to be fully taken
seriously he should be thinking about hey we don't want millions of unit tree humanoid robots like walking our streets in our homes on the Ed thing like like the tariffs have been way ahead of this where to to the point where I never see a Chinese EV yeah because there was 100% tariff on day one basically and they they're not even
trying to send them over here because it's just like it's been determined even in the last Administration like Hey we're not doing that this time it's just not going to be a thing uh and I think that's probably the right move uh yeah uh Luke Metro had a good post he quote tweeted uh the Atlanta fed they said on
March 3 the GDP now model Now cast of real GDP growth in q1 2025 is negative 2.8% not good which is we wanted 10% SAA was telling USI would get us promised 10% he said if we just signed up for clippy if we just listen to clippy promised uh no I'm kidding uh SAA implied that if we listen to please SAA
he said just listen to what clippy says GDP growth listen to what clippy says 10% GDP growth but L Luke quot tweets this and says my ideal economic system is where we inflict large damage on the populace via trade Wars but keep the wealth of the oligarchs propped up via dumb speculative BS wow yeah it's hilarious
considering the the crypto exchange like yeah the the timing of that was uh a little inconsiderate I mean it it's got to be you know if you're an e-commerce operator that just had your margin wiped out and it's like don't worry the money that we're taking from you we're going to put in cardano yeah so you're gonna
make it all back in one trade buddy yeah we make it all back in one trade but now you own some of that Cardon y yeah we'll see yeah that's that's hilarious anyway anyways uh do we have Bridget ready to call in how we doing we are uh bringing on Bridget from Founders fund she is a investor in crypto works with Joey Krug over there
good friend of mine and we are uh bringing her on to uh cover the prime intellect fundraise that just happened uh do you know the story of the metamorphosis of the Prime intellect no tell me about it is so a couple years ago on on Lex fredman uh George Hots the comma AI guy is talking about um how he
thinks AI will uh like evolve oh hey Bridget how you do oh hey hi welcome to show how's it going guys we have you read metamorphosis of the Prime intellect no no but all of all of Prime's like design their you know logo all of that is inspired by yeah I think we have a copy in the office actually but I haven't read it it's I
mean I don't want to like spoil it but uh Andre karpathy also listed it as like one of the greatest uh like sci-fi prediction books like or you know in general and his his summary which I think summarizes well is just AGI gone mixed and it's very very weird it's like it's like what happens when you're in
this post scarcity society and you want some sort of like social reward or some sort of like reward but everything's like post scarcity because you can just wh anything so no one ever dies but then you know what do you do and it gets very very weird it's very bizarre uh and George H highlighted on the on the Lex
Freedman podcast and so it became very popular and then there was a there was a sequel to the book as well like last Casino in the universe or something um but it's pretty like I don't know it's like spooky to me but I highly recommend everyone check it out anyway uh we want you to break down the deal give us uh
how did you meet the founder how' we wind up uh doing the deal and and just give us a background on what prime intellect is what they do uh give us the high level yeah definitely so we met them I want to say about a year ago um we actually reached out to them because most of the AI crypto projects we had seen had been
just like not really interesting it was more like copy paste from existing AI companies and then they would like slap a token on top so it would be like character AI but with a token like Lang chain but with a token like hugging face with a token that kind of thing um and I think we saw Prime announced their like
1 billion parameter model trained into distributed way across like three continents and then we reached out to them and we were like wow like we would love to to meet you guys and chat you know more about it um and we met with them at literally like I think the first meeting like we were sold like we were
like these Founders are like a-level top tier Killers like Vincent and Johannes like you can just like feel the energy like radiating off them like they're very passionate about what they do um they're in crypto AI like for the right reasons whereas I think a lot of Founders kind of just hopped into the
space like after a lot of the hype um took off and you know we looking for like a quick token pump but that's like could not be further from you know the team Vincent has built and and what they're doing so basically they're tacking the pro tackling the problem of like distributed training um which you know access to compute is one of like
the largest bottlenecks in you know AI training today um and you have these like huge data centers that are centralized um and power constrainted and expensive and what prime is doing is it's basically like a true peer-to-peer marketplace where like you know you can go on and bid for compute and then
suppliers can go on and Supply like idle compute um and then it enable like it has incentives you know layered on top to really look at the the render Network like the I think it's like the octane team what they did in like CGI have you seen this I don't know if okay I've seen like render and AOS I don't know if I've
seen the CGI because this was a thing like years ago and everyone was like oh like you know crypto tokens like it's all fake whatever but I have been doing a bunch of CGI work where uh you would need to go and render uh like whatever scene you built in Cinema 4D and you needed a bunch of gpus not as many as
like a training run for an llm but uh but you you send out each frame and each frame is like deterministic so you can so you can very easily parallelize these you can run it on AWS but uh there was a company that actually built a very similar system where you could kind of sell back your excess GPU time onto the
render Network I think it was kind of uh like low Tam because the amount of Independent Artists like Pixar has Disney they have their own server farms and then like the lowend like iance like people tinkering is kind of small um but it was very cool that it was like oh wow this this makes a ton of sense how do
people actually transact in this like having a token that moves these uh you know uh GPU resources around made a ton of sense um and so it's cool it makes a lot of sense in the in the age of AI do you know more about um kind of like early use cases obviously like the frontier insane like you know gigawatt scale that's going to come in the future
what what are some the more exciting use cases in like the near term is it just like fine tuning stuff do you have any insight there yeah yeah so I mean they're right now they're basically working on just like scaling this up to like state-ofthe-art level models like they did the 1.1 billion parameter you
know training run like a few months later they completed like a 10 billion parameter training run Y and then you know basically just serving as like the the peer-to-peer Marketplace between the supply and demand side so like on the demand side you have like AI startups that need extra compute like Labs like
you know random independent developers that sort of thing and then on the supply side it's like data centers and then individuals and also startups with like idle compute like you have like hugging face like semi analysis that want to just like earn extra for for their idle compute so it's basically just like like the way we think about is
just enabling like the AI Market to like progress at a much faster rate because it's just like enabling all this idle compute to be to be put to work and then on yeah on their end it's like basically what they did is Google Deep Mind released a paper called like dloo um which stands for like distributed low
Communications framework um and they implemented that but in like an open source way like they called it open doco um such that like you can train across like many different continents and that was like a huge step function Improvement um like from the research side that that we've seen so it's basically abouted at that like they they
have that spanner and big query and like they they just are so good at at at taking some sort of like database and being like oh yeah now it works globally and deals with all the time zone issues just feels like incredibly hard engineering but they always figure it out and then of course it opens up a
million other things uh what questions do you have for Bridget uh yeah so so taking a little sit back from Prime intellect uh one question I've had that you might have some insight on is was there a frustration among uh crypto Founders that are you know uh you know seeing the news on Sunday and general
frustration around not being included in the reserve right it seems like that the reserve was effectively you take the top five biggest you know projects by market cap and you just you know put it in a reserve right it didn't seem like it was super thoughtful do you was there was there any idea leading up to this that
there would have been you know uh any surprises on that list and um yeah I'm I'm curious around uh sort of your response but also across the portfolio How uh Founders are kind of reacting to that that are running you know s these you know bigger Pro bigger market cap projects yeah no it's a really good
question I think generally people were a little bit upset because you know the xrp the cardano inclusion just like there's basically two plausible explanations that I think the crypto Community came to for why this could be the case one is just like simple like unit bias like xrp and cardono are like 0.001 Cent or you know something akin to
that and a lot of Americans will like you know go and see that oh cardano's like 1 cent and bitcoin's like 100k and like they'll genuinely just go and buy like cardo because like it's cheaper sure and so like the the the joke on Twitter is like you know like Uber drivers everywhere are celebrating that
cardano in the Strategic reserve and like it you know Trump could be playing some like 40 chess to like Curry favor with a lot of just these like retail buyers so that's that's explanation one um that these buyers have like unit bias and Trump's trying to Curry favor with them explanation to and this came from
like udy at at tap rot Wizards is basically like Trump is going way too far in you know the extreme direction of we're including all these crazy Assets in their Reserve because it does require an act of you know Congress and then he's going to roll back and kind of be like okay I'm making a concession I'm
making a compromise and we'll just have Bitcoin and because he always kind of at the outset goes like way too far way too intense you know and then kind of rolls back and acts like he's making this huge concession where a Bitcoin Reserve would already be a huge you know act um for Congress to make but yeah I think I
think telling John earlier I said that Trump doesn't get enough credit for not including trumpcoin in the reserve because you know know he's talking with his team why don't we put big yeah let's let's let's put in the whole every White House coin put in there yeah like if Trump had just launched the Trump coin and not Milani
like there's all these jokes on Twitter of like society would be like amazing like you know crypto would be mooning like Milan the Melania launch like messed up our whole industry but yeah it it really does feel that way what is you know what's the broader sentiment on the investor side right now uh any of the
crypto focused investors that I know the ones that have done well have just taken a very long point of view they understand that the market has cycles and you need to be in you know kind of basically deploying you know throughout you know uh consistently if you want to sort of benefit from um benefit from
these sort of Peaks uh how you know and and and again we we we also saw this sort of bunch of AI slop in the sort of crypto markets and uh uh what what are the areas that you think are most exciting specifically in the context that uh you know the joke is that crime is legal now but more seriously we're in
a favorable uh regulatory environment for basically the first time in history and it does feel like the next four years are an amazing opportunity to realize the full potential of the technology right specifically around um you know I'm sure areas that you're looking at a lot so where are you most excited to invest what what is the
general sentiment right now do you feel like people have pulled back you know talk talk a little bit about that yeah it's a good question so like when Joey and I started at Founders fund like almost almost two years ago now um the sentiment was terrible like it was six months post FTX like you know no one was
deploying crypto only funds were not deploying generalist funds were definitely not deploying um yeah and that that was one reason I wanted to join Founders one because I was like wow this is like actually a contrarian act then we did start it was so funny you guys just came in and went so hard so fast we came in just like started doing
some deal it was ridiculous it was ridiculous yeah yeah but no and it it was like in retrospect the best time to start deploying like obviously it's easy easier said than than done um but now yeah I think the market it's interesting because I mean the sentiment isn't amazing but I would say prices on New
Deals that we've been seeing have been like asymmetrically High like we the last deal we did was Prime intellect and that was in I want to say October or November so we haven't done like a net New Deal in like you know five fiveish months I think what we're continuing to look for is basically like applications
uniquely enabled by crypto where like integrating crypto is like a step function Improvement um to what you would currently have so an example is like poly market like prediction markets obviously existed before poly Market you know but they were very IL liquid your counterparty was you know across the
world bet in a different currency with a different bank account um there was chargeback risk um and doing all the conversion on the back end was super costly but now if you're just you know if you're just using crypto it genuinely does like make a lot more sense from just like streamlining the you know the
the market side and Prime intellect you know it also applies to that it's basically just like the same thing but for compute if you were you know paying in a different currency like to access compute like it would be a lot of work on the back end on the protocol side and that's why there's like these compute
brokerages that charge like insane markups um and also back to Pauling record really quick too is like Joey always tells the story but like if you win too much on prediction markets like they would actually just like ban you back in the day same as Vegas yeah yeah yeah yeah so um yeah I believe Nate silver is banned from all the sports
betting apps yeah I mean Dana Dana White Dana White has these stories of casinos you know he him because he loses no no he's super into aarat and he actually does well he does he does well and he's had casinos uh tell some story about losing like six he goes way no he goes up figures down seven figures whatever
but he's gone on these sort of R bet exactly no it's insane yeah and then I I think the last thing I'll say is like I think defi in America is definitely like a lot more you know better positioned now in the sense that like D5 Founders had it the worst I think the past four years like many of our Founders just
fully moved out the United States because the risk was just like you know way too high um but we're going to get a new like Market structure Bill and hopefully we'll see like regulatory exemptions for for defi protocols because you can't regulate defi in the same way you regulate like an exchange or brokerage right like it's just a set
of smart contracts and so like there should be exemptions like we see in like the you know there's exemptions in the fit 21 bill but you know that never it it's it's all still in the works but if we do get exemptions for D5 Founders I think like that will kind of Usher in a new you era for Define maybe start do
you think that starts with like Bitcoin lending uh is is that kind of like the first lava lava lava yeah yeah yeah so we invested in lava um yeah it's definitely a very interesting use case I think I think defi is just like it's such a broad sector but Bitcoin is like Bitcoin does enable like a huge use case
in defi because so you so many people own Bitcoin like there's just so much Capital inflows to bitcoin and like if you can lend against your Bitcoin and make your asset more productive like there's going to be so many whales that that that want to do that like they just do not want to sell um but even for
regular D5 like if you look at like defi summer in 2021 like you know a lot of Founders got in trouble for what they were doing um and it was just it was just such a new market that people didn't even know what was allowed versus not and then the SEC was issuing like Wells notices to like the most compliant
companies like Unis swap um coinbase like things like that so I do think that when people saying crime cycle like I think those people are a little overblown because I actually think the the new Administration is just really really smart like I don't think they'll be issuing Wells notices at random to
like coinbase in Unis swap because that's just dumb but like they will be actually going after like legit scam so I would say like act according I mean yeah for the last four years the best like cop in crypto was like coffeezilla it was basically like like the only hope that you can the only hope you have if you're like seeing a scam
happen is coffeezilla makes a video and then everyone realize is it but like the SEC is not going to step in for any of these things now yeah there's a lot of room to just be smart and actually just go after the the the scams and like the power law bad stuff yeah exactly do you still where do you see opportunities around
Founders that are interested building uh in in the stable coin space the the bridge acquisition I think was fantastic for crypto broadly it really was a you know real stamp of approval for stripe to go out and pay this sort of pretty significant Revenue multiple to buy uh a developer platform a crypto developer
platform which you which uh which bridge is uh and then from what we know that sort of spawned a wave of new stablecoin you know startups to come out say we're building in stable coins too right and so I'm sure you saw a lot of those companies where are you excited about the potential of stable coins uh and uh
you know going forward yeah yeah yeah it's a really good question yeah I think after the bridge acquisition we genuinely got like probably like 50 stable coin pitches like it was legitimately like yeah um but no I think like right now the most interesting use case for stable coins is probably in like B2B
payments just because that's where there's the most volume it's like yeah like literally like you know billions and billions of of dollars of volume um per year and B2B payments like cross border historically just take so long there's insane markups like the bank takes a lot of fees I think on the
consumer side like the argument is basically like okay you know if a user like swipes their card you know visa and MasterCard take like 2% fee a lot of that goes to the issuing bank and then it will actually flow back to the user in the form of like rewards um and that's such a different story than if like I want to
pay like cougan or something in cgans in Europe or whatever and it takes like five days and it you know they charge like 2% like that's just like kind of scammy right like that should not be a thing anymore so I think that's an interesting use case on the on the consumer side A lot of people are arguing like on the credit card side
like it might be stable coins under the hood but you know it's doubtful that the user will like know it's stable coins at least to start um but yeah I think B2B payments is like that's where there's the most volume that's where there's the most incentive for like startups to compete um and then the issue there is
like getting the the regulatory stuff figured out the corridors opened in these different markets um and then just yeah starting to capture the volume but and the infrastructure to prevent a City Bank from sending a ion doll yeah I mean question like like how do you solve the fat finger issue like obviously you can
do multi but but but let's say you have you know a group at City Bank they're like all right we got to send you know uh uh some stable coins to somebody and then it's late at night and one person signs off and someone else signs off and like three people fat finger it collectively and you're like well we had
these Protections in place and now we have to go ask a customer nicely like City Bank should knock it into crypto because like that money would be gone forever if it was crypto there's no way honestly there going be huge Alpha in just being a City Bank customer and signing up for as many accounts as possible no but I think those are I mean
I think those are real things to figure out it's um my last company like we we enabled you know stable coin investing and and uh and we actually had like I won't even name them but billion dooll crypto companies that were customer of ours that said at the time this was 20 early 2022 we don't want to accept
stable coin is too much of a hassle um and so I think that's I think that's evolving but um Bridget amazing to have you on uh you're you're a regular now uh and always welcome always welcome we're looking forward to having Vincent on the show as well yeah awesome thank you foring by see you soon bye bye guys very
fun what should we run we have another guest or we just diving back into the show I mean we could call Sean Maguire right now I have his phone number he has responded to him should I just give him a phone call yeah I don't want to talk I need to make sure the camera doesn't uh doesn't see anything let me see should I
just for some reason it's it's I don't want to talk more about this but let's see I Sean okay he didn't pick up oh well next time next time we'll get him we'll get him we'll send him this clip post this clip and then he'll feel a lot of pressure to come on the show anyway timeline we haven't done timeline because we had a
lot of guests we got to go through some timeline uh first up David holes founder of mid Journey uh founder of Leap Motion he says chemistry to biology silicon to blank what do you think I don't even remember who put this in there uh you put this in oh you're yeah yeah or or or Brent I think it was
Brent what I got somebody new joining the team soon uh we got some buddies on helping out um I don't know yeah it's interesting it's like he what he's getting is like is like you know biolog is built on top of the chemistry silicon he's he's clearly getting it like some sort of like AI metaphor yeah and like how you
understand like the the the the mind and the uh the Consciousness that emerges on top of these systems yeah I mean uh random um sort of adjacent topic is R boy yesterday saying what comes after llms like what is the next iteration of of llms and sort of our understanding and application of yeah of a technology
that everybody's talking about but we don't know its full potential yet yeah I I was I was remarking the other day I was watching this interesting video about how uh Dolly and like all the image generators can't generate a wine glass that's full have you seen this I haven't so you can say it starts with
this like incredible interaction where it's basically saying like uh Hey Chachi PE can you uh generate a wine glass that's full to the brim to the top and it gives you a half full wine glass and then you say oh no like you made a mistake like actually fill it to the top all the way 100% you give it more context it's like on it totally
understand returns and it's like the same it's because apparently there's just like no images of completely filed to the brim wine glasses in the training set and so it just couldn't figure out how to do it and it gets to this idea of I think is David Hume has this idea of like humans are good at there's this
impression and there's this idea and basically you can interpolate between two things so you can imagine a unicorn even though you've never seen a unicorn in in the world but it's hard to create these complex ideas uh if you don't have like the reference images which is what they have but my take away from it was
just like we're we're scaling up these models and we still are building like an image model and a language model separately and a driving model separately but you would imagine that if we're really building like this like AGI like won't ASI be like a one model but maybe not maybe maybe it will be like
what he's saying where you know there's silicon and in biology you know you need to understand the the basics of chemistry but you also need to understand the different parts the different lobes of the brain the different actions that your body can take your muscles how these different systems interact with each other and uh
and you could imagine that the the AGI that we build will have you know so many middle so many different models and so many different things that are kind of like trained that it can like you know interact with it's interesting I'm sure it will be a whole field of study I just want a a model on top of the open all
the open AI models to route me to the best model I don't want to be choosing uh I notic there's a button you can push that will indicate like hey I'd like you to search but even if you don't push that it'll still search sometimes clunky and one time I mean that's just the that's just the reality of it's possible
for companies to be at this point it feels like they're waiting for this big announcement of the router like the router needs to come right it should be one box and it should take me to the take me through you know send my query through yeah uh the right they're really speedrunning the Google story because
Google it was like just just search box I'm feeling lucky 10 Blue Links simple now Google is like no one hits I'm feeling lucky because it autofills then it shows you Google shopping and then 25 ads and then clickbait and then videos and all this stuff and they've kind of like recreated that all in like a very
short amount of time whereas it took like Google like 20 20 20 years to degrade like that uh they've gotten a very convoluted thing but um I I don't know yeah and it's a huge I mean it's just going to be such a big selling point for open AI once they get there when they can say look it's one box you enter in what you want to do and we're
just going to execute it to the best for abilities and it shouldn't even really matter the underlying model it is a testament that like even though yeah there are some reasonable critiques of the naming scheme uh chat PT is still ranking higher than Jimmy John's in the App Store y That's big big because Jimmy
John's if you're not aware it's number two app in the app store right now chat PT is number one and I'm sure was a knockout drag out fight I'm sure they had meetings Okay Jimmy Johns is coming for us we need to call Nikita beer what are we doing to stay ahead of Jimmy Johns yeah and I I I posted about this
earlier 2023 everybody said all right value is going to ACW to the model layer it's obvious 2024 people said hey value is actually going to ACW to the app layer a lot of value here 2025 everybody's saying value is going to cruit to the sandwich ler and so I expect to see Subway charting soon how did how did this
happen like did do they run some national campaign that we don't know about like it is weird that Jimmy Johns is the number two app in the app store like what what is going on I I know it's based on momentum and stuff they launched a toasted sandwiches that's it it's equivalent to like you know magical
machine intelligence too cheap to meter or like toasted sandwiches Humanity assigned giving away $1 million of toasted Subs oh I mean that's I mean so it's obvious I props props to opening high for for holding the lead the funny thing is that is that grock 3 right now because they aren't charging yet they are literally giving away millions of
dollars in inference costs same thing with deep seek they're subsidized even even chat PT you know Sam has said likey we losing money on some of these queries right and so you could think about this as like the AI labs are giving away hundreds of millions of dollars of intelligence magical machine
intelligence yeah but that's but we value that as Humanity like only slightly higher than like a million dollars wor the toasted sandwiches like that is what the market is telling us the market is telling us that sandwiches are like you know they're up there but it makes sense like food is it's what I need I need food I will
die without food and intelligence but I need F more I could I could live without a poem I could live without a good standup joke yeah exactly AGI can wait umil yeah you know it's funny that chat GPT continues to you know basically battle for the number one spot and they don't even share it anymore any any other any
other uh you know AI lab would be taking Victory Labs you know sharing the number one spraying the champagne into their mouth into their mouth uh opening eyes just like you know this just great you know uh usual business uh and uh credit to them it's impressive oh well should we move on to Fred Wilson well yeah we
got a post from Vincent uh he says Fred Wilson VC's are service providers to entrepreneurs we write on their coattails and so even though Venture Capital requires a sophisticated understanding of Finance technology markets strategy it's ultimately a people business learning to be a successful venture capitalist is about
learning how to work with people a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic brilliant frustrating anxious and fragile and our job is to meet them right where they are and support them with all of our might uh and I think that is a fantastic quote it's almost become it's almost become normal for uh
I would argue it's almost becoming meme territory where investors now if you ask them uh you know what what do you look for in Investments they just say you know we're we're in the people business you know we're trying to find generational Founders and it's absolutely right Brian singman says it Founders fun of you be with him and you
want some secret of like oh yeah like what I go for you want something you can copy and and his whole strategy is uncopyable it's very frustrating actually because he's like yeah I actually just pick found and then you talked to David CER it's the same thing yeah yep um that that was uh as I got to
know you I expected to sort of learn some sort of secret sauce from that you had sort of gotten from Founders fun and and you were basically like 0 to one yeah yeah 0o to1 is the Playbook but then it's really about judging the Founders and the people and and and that's the stuff that it's very hard to
concretize and I mean we saw this with the debate over Keith R boy's quote yesterday it's like he was making a recommendation that like like you will probably have a good time if you like go and work in an excellent organization and then start a company but he's not saying like you can generate Alpha as a
vendor capitalist by just pattern matching that yeah I like here you know the point is it Fred says a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic brilliant frustrating anxious and fragile and I think the frustrating point stands out because often times people uh you know you know
an incredible founder is going to have you know some aspects of them that are that are truly amazing and then you have other moments where you're you know personally I have 50 plus you know Angel bets and there's definitely some moments where I'm super frustrated with entrepreneurs not that I make that obvious or known because it's often
times my you know not really my place as a small investor to to uh cause any type of hubub but an example that I thought of I once helped a Founder get a four-letter dcom for $110,000 that was their exact their exact name and they had some terrible domain prior to that like get blank.com and I got them their
fourl letter.com domain at at Cost obviously like their portfolio company I wasn't um you know gonna mark it up or anything and the guy uh didn't even say thank you like I I sent him I sent him the like the info and everything and like basically just ignored it he ended up like like checking out for the domain
and everything like that and started to use it never never once said Thank you and and I was like that's super uh twisted and and feels very wrong in some ways right it's like uh the JD Vance like you should have said you know you should have said please you know you should have said thank you but at the
same time I was just like look you know I I would have gotten this even knowing ahead of time that you weren't going to you know Express any gratitude for it and uh you're not going to be judged 15 years from now on whether or not you said thank you a lot you're going to be judged ultimately you will be judged but
you're going to be judged on was your company successful did you treat your people right in in the grand scheme of things and and uh I can get over it uh even though it felt um uh it was it was funny I have a funny anecdote about why you should say thank you and be nice um at my F at my first company um uh the uh
the CEO was extremely Kurt and would just like send emails like do this blah blah blah you know like not like very like like didn't really bring like a personal style to his emails which is a Style by itself yes but that style just also happens to be the style of every fishing scammer in the world and so people would get fished constantly
because the scammer shows up and and falsifies some email and is like I need you to send me $10,000 and people would be like yeah this actually sounds exactly like our CEO normally no one would ever be this direct exactly normally you get a fishing scam email and you're like well this doesn't sound
like Jordy like like this sounds like someone impersonating like just a Rand I just talked to this person they would have brought this up or they would have texted me or they would slacked me or would just come out of the blue yeah so you can't be too chaotic like that you got to be uh a little more a little more
empathetic bring your own style you know the Ron Conway all caps that's one the funny things in the world to me yeah one of us should start using adopting the all caps something chaotic well I mean one way you know you're talking to us and not an AI clone of us or a scammer is there's gonna be a lot of typos yep
put typos in your post yeah a lot of people are saying if you're writing a blog post people are saying oh you use the word delve yeah you definitely generated this yeah put put a put a bunch of typos in you and don't worry about spell check because the AI is going to handle it if if you want to read a spell checked version of my post
you you are free to take my post and put it into chat GPT and say spell check it yeah and then boom you have a spell checked version but I'm not doing that well said I'm golden retriever maxing I'm going FSD mode this is my new Twist on this full self-driving no funny friendly sexy dumb FSD on the on the golden retriever
maxing great yeah does a golden retriever you spell check absolutely not absolutely not ship it it's going to be a banger anyway no one cares if there's a typo in your post all right we got a post from yasen y yaken do we need to have him on the show we should I don't know how to pronounce it but uh he says
the only AI risk that I'm concerned about is the risk of me not making an F ton of money off of AI it's great I think I think that's a right the the Gen you know uh it's good Bas generally the right point of view for most people I actually think I think it is a good thing broadly that there are a group of
humans focus on a AI safety like that that that's like generally probably a good use of resources for the future of humanity that said if you're not a um you know sort of uh philosopher uh king or queen type who's going wants to spend all their time thinking about the impacts of AI and the potential risk you
should probably just focus on how to make money with AI um and uh you know this idea of you don't want to just be worried about something you want to be sort of like taking action right so if you're worried about you know losing your job from AI uh build a business with AI right this is a remarkably good post because I've I've I've also come
around on AI safety I think deep seek was a big moment for me in terms of like I want to know if they are embedding in if an open source model has a uh a bad version or a jailbreak version tees of well I'm not worried about like overall o overnight like the Nanobots come like the elaser owski theme of like
I'm just going to be turned into a paper clip overnight it's like no but like stuck net did happen like you know like the the the the pagers did explode like these these hacking attempts do happen yeah I think I brought that up I was like the what is the AI equivalent of stuck net or something exactly you
knowel dorant in there and if and if if there's a trigger word it goes and it steals some data and that's it it's like that's worth that's worth investigating and the AI safety teams are the ones who would be equipped to run those evals so that's interesting but then also we've been saying for a while that like the
like like the stop measuring AI against all these random evals and instead just measure it against how much money people are making from it because that's at the end of the day the value capture is usually a weighing machine SAA saying uh I'm really looking at the real Benchmark to him is GDP growth around AI right so
what is the what is the impact uh old Billy comments here he says yeah I'm an AI researcher researching how to stack that paper great line I wonder how I wonder how creative the current AI revenues are to GDP like because you could see every dollar that goes into character AI being like it's taking $10 out of the economy
not to like throw a ton of shade of character but like it is yeah it's it's it's you know you spend a dollar on character Ai and you skip dinner and you don't you know take your a girlfriend on a trip and you know suddenly like you're you're thinking yourself possible to have I can get by on my parents
allowance I don't need to go you know there there's very there's sort of a dark scenario where it's very uh destructive I mean at the very least we've seen a lot of Technology get rolled out over the last I don't know two three five decades that haven't hasn't caused massive GDP growth everyone was expecting oh the internet
is going to be the thing that you know cure stagnation right um because you know prior to 1970 the US economy was growing very very fast post-war boom right and then we kind of stagnated and GDP growth real GDP growth kind of slowed to you know two 3% real and now the Atlanta fed reporting 2 and a half%
negative GDP growth uh who knows who knows what's real right GDP is politicized maybe if we go down a bunch it's easier to build back up run it back up yeah exactly run it back up you're on a smaller base you can grow faster it's good yeah uh really America just wants to grind harder yeah yeah yeah America Trump is trying to inspire
Americans to grind grind harder yeah yeah GDB is going down because we need to grind harder oh my God it's so anyways speaking of grinding harder uh we got a post from scy uh so raboy was on show yesterday he said uh quote work at an outstanding Organization for a year or two before starting your own company and
he gave some there's some other context here and he says there's some great entrepreneurs that just sort of oneshot their companies right oneshot you know entrepreneurship right Zuckerberg's a good example suck but Steve Jobs Bill Gates Right Steve Jobs did not he interned at HP oh yeah that's right you
could argue yeah yeah do we count into or not that's question so this shouldn't have been a controversial quote especially in the context of it but it's start a conversation uh and Rao's point was that you get this feel for taste a taste of what great is and I think that's generally good advice I gave this
advice to a listener who's you know dming me you know company ideas and and saying hey should I join this company should I start this thing and I just told him unless you're hyper hyper convicted in an idea Y and you can get you know people that care about your truly care about your professional success that are knowledgeable in that
sector to say you know this is generally you know you know I agree with you I think this is a big opportunity and and I share your conviction yeah yeah um then go start go start a company if that's the case if not go try to work at the best possible company that you can join and don't even optimize for the
title comp or anything like that just go work at you know go work at an open ai go work at a ramp go go work at one of these companies that um is going to uh you know really change your your perspective around what what great is uh you know how to have good taste across marketing and product and things like
that so I was surprised at how controversial this was uh ai ai was posting nobody that I look up to uh you know ever works for anyone else um but uh taking shots at Warren Buffett taking shots at Jensen yeah so scy put together a list of uh absolute dogs who uh worked at at other organizations so if you want
to run down the list Warren Buffett Jensen Wong George Soros Peter teal John Carmack Jeff Bezos Larry Ellison Mike Bloomberg Phil Knight Tom Peter Fe Peter Fe I don't know who that is CZ and then Jeff Yas Yan Kum Ray Doo Leon black a lot a lot of Finance people since he really knows his Finance chops but then
also GDB from open AI yep Brian Armstrong Benny off y every tiger cub I love that one that's great uh anyway so so uh you know advice is best uh taken uh you know generally you don't have to apply every bit of advice you get uh from a podcast to your life but but generally uh you know there's too much
evidence that uh this can tremendously accelerate your abilities and and uh your career yeah I mean I agree with you it's like the it's like that Jeremy gon quote um you know Mozart never asked how to write keros um if but if you have a question in your mind of what you should do go work at an outstanding company because
that's either going to be that's going to be great no matter what and it certainly doesn't close off becoming a generational entrepreneur yeah so if there's a question but yes if you truly are like working on this and you have this Burning Desire you're not even going to ask you're not even listening
to this clip you know you're just like I'm I'm already building and there's nothing that can stop me and that's fine yeah I would I would argue since we had Eric on from ramp today I would argue that if Eric hadn't built a fintech company and then went and worked at a big company like Capital One he would not have had the Insight or the uh
knowhow or the relationship with Kareem and all that stuff to go and build ramp like ramp wouldn't exist in its current form if he didn't have that sort of body of experience and the network right and so the tiger CU thing is so funny to me because so Julian Robertson founds tiger management very successful hedge fund
bunch of people spin out they're all called tiger cubs uh and one of them is Chase Coleman starts tiger Global like what mogging your former boss basically like like tiger Global sounds more aggressive than tiger management to me at least yeah yeah it sounds like the parent company it does it does so
imagine like you go and work at like you know apple or something and then you leave and you're like actually my new company is going to be called Apple Global it's like very funny I wonder I mean obviously Julian Robinson like St compan is called fruit management yeah uh I I I think I think the tiger cuup thing is specific because
it's like he I think Julian Robertson would like set people up to like uh succeed and like actually stake the fund so he was very much like starting them so it was great that it like carry the brand forward because I will retire and you will be running the new organization but it's still just like a funny thing
uh what is going on with this a perplexity ask perplex account is this is this fully AI automated is this just their social media manager what do you think's going on here the perplexity CEO it's Arvin right yeah he knows how to he knows how to post he knows X he knows he knows X he knows how to get attention uh
this is a funny one please stop tagging me in questions about meme coins I don't reply to broke people okay uh really you know trying to get a a reaction out of the uh crypto Community um somebody replies why didn't you buy Tik Tok broke boy uh which is which is hilarious they were they were talking game about that
set themselves up for that wa is this is this the is this the at Chat thing we were talking about with Gro and X where like you could just can you just at this and it will answer and it's basically a bot it's automated yeah somebody somebody tags ask ask perplexity what meme coin should I buy it gives you the
real answer immediately responds uh with with kind of a a perplexity style answer which basically just says I can't advise anything yeah uh but that makes sense okay so so there's probably someone managing the account who's posting like the major ones but then it also acts as a bot right so it's both interesting I
mean it's good more more perplexity attention more Impressions more people reminding them hey maybe fire up the app again give it another try drag back into this in the ecosystem I wonder how long this lasts because uh I mean the grock button is literally there on this on this post elon's very aggressive with
competitors y I don't see a world where he's happy that there's another AI system running on axe yeah that you can interact with on axe even though he hasn't been accused it doesn't feel if he has Shadow ban Sam Alman yeah it's not working oh no no I I don't think he said that no no but I'm just saying that the the people have had this
idea that okay you're building on an Elon platform if you're competing with Elon you're going to have a bad time sure yet X is probably the most important sort of sort of comms engine for open AI still at least for the industry obviously um yeah I I I I more just think like the API pricing like
it's got to be really expensive I know they they raise the pricing so you know it's like it it's got to be unaffordable at some point to build anything on top of this especially if you're building something that should just be an xai product just adds a couple zeros to your your API pricing uh anyway Sean's in
meetings he can't call in but he said he's good for tomorrow or Thursday we got to ask him about uh he's since he's in all the Elon companies we got to ask him about that and then we got to ask him about I want I want to know he's an X and I think he's in xai yep and I think he's in SpaceX and I I don't know
if he's in Tesla but we'll see if he's in a Tesla if he owns a Tesla and I want to know if he has a roadster if he has a roadster reservation the timing there if you have any insight um I'm sure he owns Tesla in the public markets one way or another Maybe he might be conflicted out sometimes he can't trade those things
yeah that's true too much inside information true anyway uh we got a post from Aiden uh friend of the Pod uh I've been talking with Aiden lately trying to give him uh my point of view on on how he should uh approach his next career move he's been working on startups he has some bunch of good ideas uh and then
a bunch of people trying to recruit him as well so he's got a lot of opportunity uh but he says this goes unbelievably hard and it says during my 44 years as a career CEO and serial entrepreneur I think I've made every possible mistake in business I've overpaid for Acquisitions and botched Integrations
I've run operations for cash when I should have invested for growth I've delegated tasks I should have done myself sometimes I've hired the wrong people or made strategic bets that didn't pay off and yet my teams and I have managed to create tens of billions of dollars of value for our shareholders this book is about what I've learned
from my blunders and how you can replicate our successes in Corporate America I'm What's called the money maker I've started five companies from scratch seven if you include two spin-offs and turn them into all into billion dollar multibillion doll Enterprises my teams and I have completed approximately 500
Acquisitions and open more than 250 Greenfield locations in total these Ventures have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and raised about 30 billion in outside Capital so this is obviously Brad Jacobs he's got a book uh if you want to make a billion dollars he's got a great book for you called how to make a few billion dollars y right um
how to make a few billion intro to the book and he has a great he has a great like this crazy exercise that feels like I don't know like something like a psychic would tell you or something but he's basically like I want you to physically visualize what a billion dollars looks like like mentally in your
mind like stack up the bills inside of a room it's enough to fill like a massive Ballroom imagine that and then imagine all the things that you would need to do to like make that yours and then just go do them this is like kind of like crazy mental exercise uh that I just really I I really thought like made the book
stand out in like very unique ways you should lead tomorrow you should lead the audience through that through that exercise I'd love to we should do it weekly I I I screen recorded the audio book when I was listening to it I said it I sent it to David cenra and I was like this guy is on a different level
this is crazy uh yeah it's fantastic yeah that's a great that's a great quote um yeah highly recommend reading reading Brad Jacobs it's good and I like how Andrew Garner here is like haven't read it but I could immediately tell it was Brad Jacobs like it is it is his brand to a te um yeah a lot of interesting stuff uh we
got another post from scha yeah I think I'm saying that right she says if the founder you invested was an aspen this month you can write that investment down to zero and uh harsh potentially true February is a tough month there's not a good there's not a lot of good AR to be an aspen in in February no why not um
can you ski for Capital allocators I can think of a hundred reasons wait and when is ideas Festival I think that's over the summer yeah yeah that's when you want to be there yeah because then there'll be like the big you don't want to be if somebody's in Sun Valley in February yeah that's not a serious
operator unless I'm unless I find out that you're in Sun Valley on alamy stock photos because you got caught by Paparazzi uh you shouldn't be there that's the only that's the only reason to be in one of these playes as if the paparazzi are there taking picks of you next to Sundar and Tim Cook yep uh but but yeah it's a funny thing uh I do
think Founders need to be if you're a venture back founder with with a team yep small or big uh it's really hard to have any type of divide between your personal life and your professional life as a Founder because you need to be you you know if you're not sort of 100% fixated on what you're building at all
times like Saturday you know uh obsessing and sort of frustrated around uh you as a Founder you should be annoyed on Saturday that everyone else is offline like I think that's like the default uh you know sort of state that that early stage Founders specifically need to be in and uh I think that you know I've seen Founders mess up
optically around uh you know it's not sending good signals to the world if you were on you know a weekl long ski vacation in February and your company's not absolutely ripping yep and even if it is ripping the challenge is that people are going to judge you for that people are hyper hyper hyper judgmental
of Founders in the same way that VCS get on a different you know sort of in a different way right it's like oh they're an aspen they're not working hard Founders are like oh they're an aspen their company's a zero right you know who you know what founder I would not judge for being an aspen and I would not
write down the stock if I found out that they were an aspen this month wand wander because you know that they're onboarding a new uh that they' be there with a purpose because their business is in is in Aspen uh we love wander here go check it out go book a uh a wander find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views
Hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 247 coner service it's a vacation home but better um but yeah seriously uh obviously there are a bunch of there are exceptions to every rule yep yeah don't don't go to Aspen if you're building a B2B SAS company for sewage treatment plants and there's no
sewage treatment plants there yeah and you know what John yeah uh Wander is going to give away a trip for free to our audience all you have to do is create an account totally free to enter and you could go to Aspen for Free's go on us courtesy of the technology brothers so uh wanderer.com tvpn is a
great place to go if you're interested in Aspen it's fantastic another post another post we got a post from Sam Alman uh he is posting a screenshot uh with and the caption is just two exclamation points that's how you know it's serious he says okay so relying on only your own first principles thinking and not giving much weight to what
you've read what do you personally as gp45 think is consciousness the only thing that exists or is that material is the materialistic Universe also real please try to answer as clearly as you can do you want to play you to role play the AI uh so it's it kind of repeats it is what I personally think Consciousness
definitely exists this is undeniable since all experience directly proves awareness itself matter or a material universe is always inferred indirectly through Consciousness we never directly observe matter independently only perceptions appearing within Consciousness because Consciousness can
easily create structured experiences as demonstrated clearly by dreams imagination or simulations an external material universe is not strictly necessary given that matter is never directly experienced independently it seems logically simpler and clearer to conclude that and this is what GPT 4.5 thinks about the universe uh
Consciousness alone truly exists and the material universe is merely a consistent experiential creation within Consciousness itself uh my clear personal conclusion is gb5 yes Consciousness is likely the only fundamental existence no I do not think a separate materialistic Universe independently exists bizarre and of
course this is this is like highly relevant because like it is simulated and so if you're a simulation hypothesis guy like this is wild right yeah because it's like yeah like are is there anything real or are we just like is consciousness the only thing and that's what it's basically saying and certainly
that we would say that that is true for GPT 4.5 so like I would I would say like this is true for the experience of this particular AI but I I would definitely say it's not true for me I'm built different I'm in the real world I have a materialist experience look at this watch I got it on bezel.set wild I I think some of the
most thought-provoking responses are when you ask the AI not how do I make you know it sounds obvious when you say it out loud but how do I make a good avocado toast it's how what what is the meaning of life and then and then it sort of gives you a pretty good answer right that's sort of based on Humanity's
Consciousness in a way because it's been trained on uh you know Humanity right so matter is just an internally generated experience of Consciousness not independently real that's what we're dealing with with this AI you know what I think you're wrong we'll get back to you we'll get back to you after the
break yeah yeah I think you're wrong all right we got a post from Bridget uh she says the GDP per capita in most African countries is $2,000 uh and then the average yearly Revenue per user to sports betting Platforms in Africa is also $2,000 um and uh this is just a another argument for why the United States is
this possible no I think I think it's that the average person in is basically like the people that are sports betting in Africa are are doing well got it got it got it um and uh yeah so so I I can see how this makes sense but this is more evidence of your post yesterday that the United States needs a strategic
uh parlay Reserve to allow every American the the sort of uh once a week to get the rush of potentially uh life-changing wealth you know guys like Sager and Jetty will come out there and be like Oh sports betting so bad bad I don't like sports betting uh well if it's so bad why don't we use usaid to send sports betting to countries that we
want to infiltrate and Destroy smart why don't we airdrop parlays to North Korea destabilize their entire economy why don't we why don't we take a uh super long shot bets yeah QR code drop that over the Forbidden City get everyone at the Forbidden City addicted to sports betting yeah I got give you this but
John is it possible that DraftKings is uh you know a deep State operation I have no not at this point but if but if we send if we send DraftKings to uh to the Kremlin and we get and we get Putin maybe that's the cure for the war if we air drop if we airdrop one you know $5 you know match exactly over yeah over Moscow think
about this so Putin is clearly just going to war because he's uh he needs a rush he needs a thrill and he probably doesn't have a lot of access to sports betting and so if we brought him sports betting then he's like I don't I don't want to I I just don't get the same rush out of the war yeah so I'm gonna wind
down the war we're gonna have world peace through sports betting world peace through sports betting I think that is a bold idea I think you should do a Ted Talk on it exactly I think you should look at the data and make a case based on the data yeah uh that uh that world peace is possible it just we need
Universal basic parlay we do we do truly um anyways uh py we got a post bats is there another oh he's saying this looks like a bad bat oh so yeah speaking of uh potentially a parlay to put together here py uh quote tweet so we talked about this yesterday yeah uh Apple's chat GPT like version of Siri which I
think is a open AI partnership uh right they had a partnership of some sorts but maybe this is so confusing I don't understand what they're canceling because so the the headline is is Apple has now delayed a chat GPT like version of Siri but they were just telling us that they launched a chat GPT like version of Siri called Apple
intelligence and that rolled out in a bunch of beta tests and is like available and then also you can go into your Siri settings right now on your phone as long as you have the latest software and you can integrate your chat GPT credentials and so you can use chat GPT through Siri right now yeah and so I
don't know what this is that they're delaying like we all know it's bad and it's not working but so I guess they're just saying like hey we were going to improve it because we know it's bad but now we're acting like we never launched anything but it's like clearly did Apple's chat GPT like version of Siri
that's just Apple intelligence you launched that it didn't go very well now you're saying you're delaying the launch of it but you already launched it and you put Billboards up everywhere in 2024 and so very confusing anyway there's been a bunch of talk about this py had a spicy take he said Apple will not be a
top 10 Company by market cap by the end of this decade in 2021 that's a crazy crazy take uh I mean that's a completely different question because they print money and and they have a monopoly on a bunch of different things in the App Store and all the service Revenue but says yeah and the idea that uh luxury
goods have you know proven to be a fantastic business for the rnos they're worth if if lvmh sort of collectively is worth uh you know 300 billion is the the the sort of consumer electronics equivalent if Apple just becomes a luxury you know business that's less focused on Innovation but more so just making the sort of best uh kind of
commodity devices um is that worth is that is a is that a three trillion dollar company like you know is it worth 10 times more than lvmh if they can be a toll road on on so many transactions like still feels like it's possible even if they sort of stop innovating y um but uh but yeah overall uh he says uh looks
like a Bad Bet right now Apple uh is the most valuable company in the world by a healthy margin but there's so many little cracks like this one they have lost the it and it's only a matter of time so um very interesting to follow I I don't know it's just so hard I mean look at Microsoft Microsoft lost the it
like decades ago and is still super super valuable right like Microsoft Windows sto being cool in 2001 right yeah like it it literally like ceased to be like a cool company and it was like oh you're running Windows XP at work like that's a bummer yeah like yeah well you know we have to run Windows XP for the security patches
or whatever and then they just use that to print a trillion dollars y Apple has turned a trillion dollars to shareholders they have generated a trillion dollars in cash in cash it's so much money yep gravy train ain't stopping it's it's just going to be hard to displace them who who's going to
build the the computers complexity announced a phone with T-Mobile the AI phone complexity phone uh you know there's obviously there's a lot of people that are like oh that's like a super bearish signal right but the interesting one is salana launched a salana phone yeah obviously I think it didn't do well now they're in theic
reserve but yeah like it was a it was a it was a boondoggle I think theop phone was but but it wasn't a death now here's the bet it wasn't a death now we have a strategic crypto token Reserve per plexity is betting that there's going to be a strategic token reserve the other kind of token yeah and uh if they have
some tie of the real world maybe they make it internal reasoning tokens yeah uh we have a question on X from uh Gordon gecko he says is this what you guys do every single day uh and the answer is yes every uh Monday through Friday uh some people like formatting PowerPoints we like uh doing a daily technology and business uh you know show
and uh we so funny how everyone else that has a show has to pretend like they have some other job like they're like oh really I'm like an investor so I can only do this once a week for an hour it's like we all know you know podcasting is the most important thing in the world so the other stuff's just
window dressing yeah yeah right um so yes the answer is yes um going forward um we got a post from Dan Co he says everyone is going to make their own apps with AI uh that's a quote he says my friend you don't even make your own food you'll still pay a few bucks to use an app and I think this is a great take so
true um uh there's it you know like the idea like I'm a firm believer in that apps become memes in the way that you're going to generate apps and there's going to be some some novelty and maybe some value and maybe for little stuff like hey I want to make a custom weather app that that you know that should be able
to kind of maintain itself and you stuff like that but the idea that you're going to you know um anything with network effects obviously is like a different story uh but even the idea that you're going to generate a CRM that that's on par with HubSpot or Salesforce or some of these other products and then you're going to be
building your business but also maintaining your AI generated CRM that's breaking all the time and if it's and if it you know you get some like data loss or something like that like I talked to people at Dollar Shave Club they built their own they built like a MailChimp replacement or something at that company
like because like they were like we're a tech company and they and they hired a bunch of Engineers and they built like an email management system for to like you know send trans and it this system and of it's like you're kind of saving money you're not you're getting more but ultimately and
and all of that was was predicated on like well you know now we have you know the ability to write programming code really quickly with like you know abstract languages like python we're at a higher level of abstraction so we can build this faster and they did but it was still like you're upside down on the
trade because like you're only selling it once I think the way to look the way to look about cost is like an example like a MailChimp or beehive or something like that is you pay like let's say you're an early stage company you pay $1,000 a month for something you are getting the benefit of potentially a
million dollars of R&D spend a month on that specific area and you only have to pay $1,000 you don't even you know maybe you have to think about a you know actually building out Integrations and stuff like that but in general the the value of I'm going to spend $1,000 and get a million dollars you know uh millions of dollars a year in R&D is
truly capitalism is and this is the big question about those like buy an old business and drop drop AI on top of it is like well is everyone doing the same thing because that doesn't change the competitive Dynamics it doesn't change the market structure if everyone if it's like yes like uh there are a bunch of
like web design agencies you could buy them and tell them to use cursor and figma instead of whatever they're using right now yeah uh but if everyone's doing the same thing it's not going to really change the economic structure so you better be happy with the price you paid at the current multiple and the
current cash flow generation for what you paid because you shouldn't expect it to 10x like a venture bad y interesting anyway uh we got another post uh so this company launched yesterday it's called Orca uh it's an energy drink that tastes like water and I just wanted to highlight this hilarious launch video
did you see it I saw it so it's uh it's basically this woman she says introducing Orca this is a flavored uh basically water caffeine water con they hard post the Amazon link which which maybe worked out for them right this this still did numbers even though that I'm sure that throttled them yep uh but
then it says uh she basically introduces the product and she says now this guy is going to read off every Corbin blue Corbin blue who I think is someone famous I don't know who it is though actually real this is g to be very offensive because I I bet there's like fans out there who are like really into this guy uh but oh yeah Corbin blue he
was in high school musical there you go see I I knew it was somewhat important absolutely brutal uh yeah yeah so and he reads every stop sign or every sign legal road sign in America it's just very odd so of course it goes viral it's and it's actually a brilliant way to hack the algorithm because the US yeah
because it's very entertaining and people are clicking this long video and watching the whole thing so the algorithm is getting the signal that people really love this I should show it to more people and I I I thought it was hilarious also speaking of the typo thing uh he made a mistake while he was reading that and and people in the
comments are like at seven minutes he said like the turn left signal but he put the turn right signal up or like he used the wrong hand signal for it and so people had a lot of fun kind of like critiquing it and finding that little Easter egg and then that obviously drove more engagement and so uh it all went
very viral uh I remember seeing when this dropped uh we got to we got to do a taste test of this see if it's better than Celsius yeah we should give it a try uh I like it uh I when I was watching the launch video I was like wow this is like a 10-minute long video and I would skip ahead I'd skip ahead two
minutes more signs more signs more signs you did that I just kept skipping and then I skipped to the end it just it he Corbin blue finished strong with the signs uh and uh I wonder if he's an investor or something I wonder why they picked him or I gotta hope that he like had some incentive to do this outside of
like I mean 10 ,000 or something like that I mean it's pretty easy job you just sit down read a bunch of signs get a teleprompter camera he did a good job on the on the the lighting's good it looks nice uh we got a post from Chad buyers has been on the show before he says at this point I won't fund a
startup without an MVP beta or working prototype it's just too easy to make stuff today a pitch with nothing to show is emblematic of a team that's low ambition conviction agency or all three Well Chad what about a what about a startup that has a billboard let's go to add quick and then we will do the
analysis but we're doing the ad inside of this post uh so out of home advertising Made Easy and measure we'll say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only adquick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the glob okay let's go back to the post brilliant John uh great
point if you're a found if you're a Founder if you're a founder and you if you want to make a splash yes in in uh in Northern California yes no Pro no MVP NE Neary just buy like five or six Billboards on adquick and you will get enough coverage here here here's what you do okay I'm not going to tell you
where Chad's where Chad skis but if you look at his profile picture you can see there's some skiing going on there you go geoguesser mode you figure out where that is you get adquick to put up a giant billboard on the favorite Mountain he's up there ah I finally got away from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley
and then he looks over and it says says guess what Chad I have an MVP a beta and a working prototype and and a bill on your favorite mountain and I'm high conviction and I got massive agency and I'm high ambition uh fund my startup and he's like God damn it find the find the the jet charter service that that uh
Chad uses in a pinch you know yes and wrap the plane the plan you even say I don't have a beta but uh but for the next you know three hour flight wrap the inside and the outside and uh yeah there's something there but I I I flagged this because I talked to an entrepreneur yesterday yeah who um uh who's raising uh for a SAS company and
uh he's a buddy of mine so you know we were chatting and he was basically saying like yeah it's going to take a couple years uh to kind of get feature complete on sort of what what we've designed to date and I just said do not say that to any investor and before you talk to investors figure out how you can
sort of shrink that timeline by basically 75% right uh it's fine if it's going to take a year to because it it wasn't like you know wasn't hard time travel machine like more like because the the narrative in Silicon Valley is like humanoids and quantum computers and AI God like two years Max yeah yeah so if if Elon is
building an xai Data Center in Memphis with 200,000 gpus in a year in a year you can build your SAS company in 3 months and that is a bar you should hold yourself to internally and that is what people will hold you to externally and it's hard to get conviction in a and we see internally we we we see that it's
like oh wow like yeah it took a couple years to get around to launching this new feature or launching this new thing like it it it doesn't just happen immediately there is that compound startup philosophy that idea that you like try and build everything all at once um but for a lot of companies they
need to dial in the software it's not so much that like instantiating the first idea is difficult like we're building a to-do list yes getting the right to-do list like coding it is not the problem it's the finding the product Market fit accelerating it figuring out the full economic workflow for it and then doing
that again and again and again for every single product in the portfolio that actually builds like the full company um that does take time and I think that even though the the time from like design to in techn instantiation has gotten a lot shorter that doesn't mean that there's still not like a whole
bunch of cycles of talking to customers testing seeing can we scale this can we advertise this are the channels working and some of that stuff is just going to take time so it's not that you're going to be retired in two years it's just that you're going to be able to do more than previously thought in two years y
well said uh we got a post from Palmer he says uh so andil came out with an announcement today they are uh they say fight unfair the US Air Force announced the mission design series designation for anderol CCA prototype the yfq d44a Palmer quote tweets uh and says in Chinese culture the number 44 is considered unlucky because the
pronunciation of four sounds similar to the word for death and 44 is seen as double death uh so he they basically named their new uh autonomous fighter jet the the uh yfq double death a uh which which sounds menacing if you were uh across the pond what would what would China do if they wanted to get back at
us like I feel like the number 13 is not that big of a deal over here it would be funny if they made a huge deal out of it they were like guess what we named our missile the 13 Friday the 13th they were're all like that that played out like Halloween movie yeah didn't really land yeah I don't know tough uh we're
not Asti I guess we're not as superstitious I don't know but I like this it's fun yeah it's fun I want to see I want to see some videos of this uh the CCA prototype uh I mean it's going to be a knockout drag out fight for this yeah and and this is ultimately going to inspire the the Ander roll for X all
those out there to also come up with cute and sort of fun agita agitative names for their uh product so Ander leading the charge again uh we got another post from pachy uh Tim Cook today says introducing the newest iPad Air and it's just an iPad that looks exactly the same as every other iPad we've seen he's getting into he's
getting into meme posting he's like he's like riffing now it's like a you think cook is riffing yeah he's just like oh like everyone will understand the joke here that like I'm just posting we gave up on AI but don't worry yeah we got a we got a fresh iPad for you no no no no no the the the joke of the post here is
Tim Cook is just hosting the previous iPad Air and and he knows that everyone will be like and he he's like oh I'm introducing the newest iPad Air and everyone will know and then they'll be they'll think it's funny right yeah yeah exactly John you nailed it nailed it is no but py says holy uh they did it those crazy I can't say those crazy Sons
really really did it uh and uh imagine apple is back baby jaob jaob apple is back apparently this core core uh Trend research report is like a PDF that they use uh as like a demonstration uh just to like throw something on the screen and it's this inside joke and it was like very funny five years ago but they
haven't come up with a new joke since and so they're still recycling this like same idea of like this Insider joke and they haven't come up with a new one it's very silly anyway we have to I next week and be like introducing the new iPhone we need to find somebody that recently left Apple that's not under NDA
whistle them a whistleblower but not about the toxic work environment about the LAX ofical work environment yeah somebody to they didn't yell at me once they they didn't yell at me at all they let me I I never came in on the weekends it was I left it I left at 12:30 after lunch on a Friday I'd have a long lunch
and and take off the type of whistleblower we need yeah yeah yeah if you work at Apple and you're chilling call us reach out reach out anous you don't so so there's this phenomena where every major tech company you see Apple employees out online over the Internet talking yep chatting yep you never see
does anybody work there have have we do you know anybody that works at Apple right now I do actually I was supposed to go skiing with one last week I I should have gone could have gotten the inside SK what did they say I had to go on a different ski trip I mean this guy actually works really hard and like is
like doing like semiconductor stuff like in like their Fabs and stuff it's like like the stuff that they do is really legitimate uh they're the company is just optimizing like right like so like what you don't see I'm optimizing I'm optimizing like like to Steelman this is like yes this looks exactly the same but
like this is the best form factor they've tried to make the iPad a little bit bigger a little bit smaller and nothing else works like no one wants a slightly bigger one no one wants a slightly smaller one they want that size no but they haven't taken it to the extreme I need the comically large iPad that's the size of a flat screen sure
you have to carry with your I would love that yeah it's actually it's actually I want the printer but you know obviously they don't na like they don't nail the simple things if you made a a true Apple TV not not a sort of I know I know device I'm talking about a large talking the app the Apple TV or are you talking
about the streaming service Apple TV no I'm talking about the Apple TV plus plus extreme are you talking about the the app the the streaming service that lives inside the app that lives inside the device and they're all three called Apple TV yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um no but there's a world I would pay for a
mattress sized flat screen from Apple that I could Mount to my can you imagine how expensive a 100 in TV would be from like I wish so so lvmh will drop a product that's 50 Grand yeah and they're just like yeah we know some people will buy this so we're gonna make it I want Apple to do more stuff that did the
Apple watch Edition $10,000 gold watch gold Apple watch version one immediately became out of out out of date like doesn't even run the latest software yeah uh so and so they they wound up cutting that they the bracelets a little bit they do the bracelets over um anyways I want to buy a uh do you throw that do we already do the bezel we
already we already we already fit one in but I have I have a prepare prepare a post but we got a question from T die in the chat he says question how do I get out of analysis paralysis Y and I think that's a good question uh it's you just got to start ruthlessly taking action I think if you think about um I think
there there I feel like I knew some story about some guy who like just would carry around a D20 you know like a dungeon and dragons like dice that has 20 sides I think it was like a very you know that a word I don't know if we're supposed to say that but like uh you know neurodivergent thing to do but uh yeah it's like okay
with if you carry around a dice with 20 sides you can model probabilities down to 5% so you could say look I think that uh there's a uh there's a 15% chance that I should become an entrepreneur and a 85% chance that I should take Keith boy's advice and be a startup founder first or or work at a work at a large
High performing organization first and so yeah you roll it and the way you model it on the D20 is that if it's if it's a three or under that's a 15% chance because because every single digit on the D20 is 5% so you say okay I'm just G to roll this Dice and if it comes up three or less I'm starting my
company today and if it comes up four between four and 20 I'm I'm applying to a job at a high growth company I don't know I mean it sounds crazy but like sometimes it really is valuable I think just to like you know it like when when you're in a when you're in a business relationship someone there's obviously
this idea of like disagree and commit like yeah look we we we we you know we Jordy was saying we should do six days a week I was saying we should do four days a week or whatever like we disagreed we we met in the middle we made a compromise but we disagreed but like we're putting it behind us we're
committing to that right and so you should do that with your life too to get out of paral analysis paralysis like just running hard at anything is probably better than waiting around it's the same yous or arms like well just aggressiv ultimately Every Act in life is a leap of faith yeah and specifically startups you know I don't
know T situation he might be deciding you know giving the example of do I join a company and work there for two years or do I start my own thing and Success is Not Guaranteed y you might join the company and you have a bad manager and you don't get access to the CEO and you don't get any of the learn positive
learnings that Keith is talking about or you might start a company and and you had the right idea but you know a more heavily funded competitor came in and just steamrolled you uh but uh Every Act is a leap of faith and the big the most like what you work on matter is like at the end of the day the only thing that
matters yep but you're not going to know you you can't have uh you can't go into any decision you know with with 100% certainty of of the outcome and that's okay and you just have to get comfortable with that and you have to make the decision and make micro adjustments uh and sometimes macro adjustments but uh if you're if you're
waiting for uh to be able to make a decision that that 100% leads to success you're never going to find that yeah it's a good point I like it anyway we have pretty much gone through the whole timeline I think we should cover Greenland tomorrow okay let's do tomorrow got to talk about mining which is cool we have one more question and
then I think we can close out let's do it uh Jordy and John how do you deal with incompetence and lack of speed uh this a relevant so we have somebody joining the team soon and uh it was pretty funny because John connected me to him on a Saturday yeah and I will usually if I'm talking to a candidate uh
and I get introduced on a Saturday morning yeah I'll just say hey let me know if you're like do you want to jump on the phone now and that's just sort of information gathering I'm not going to write the person off if they're like oh actually like can we talk Monday or Tuesday but I am going to judge that
interaction and John introduced me to this guy and uh he before I could even respond he said are you free right now I'll give you a call and so like that's an immediate signal and so uh you know we ended up extending an offer to this person and but I already knew that like speed was in their DNA right and uh you
could tell like if somebody's it's Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. and they're ready to jump on a call um uh you can look for those signals right you need to be uh you should uh the entire recruiting process should be figuring out is somebody competent and are they fast Y and competence and speed are like the two biggest factors uh
competent General competence and speed uh make up for a lot even intelligence right in a lot of roles like golden retriever mode is real in companies if you're just you know uh golden retriever is maybe not the right example but but uh um there's sort of this idea of like if you're competent and you can make
generally good decisions and you're fast and you're a corporate athlete a COR a true corporate athlete uh you're going to do well so I think the biggest thing is if somebody's in the role and they're incompetent then you need to potentially find a different different Ro different role for them not fast and if they don't
have that sort of speed in their DNA I've never I've never gotten somebody that didn't want to work fast to work fast um it just didn't want to work fast to work fast yes but you can if you give someone the right job I think people can move faster for sure if they're in a job that isn't rewarding or demanding or
like gives them the right feedback cycle you can you can steer them towards something that just fires them up yeah and all of a sudden you're like wow that person's doing way more work way faster they're pumped because like we found the slot yeah and so I think that's like how you deal with it then kind of the other
side is like just on feedback you know being very candid very open like you know Humane but giving like direct feedback but then also trying to give as much uh kind of like meta level like algorithmic feedback yeah not just on this was bad but what what is the process how do we improve the process of
whatever whatever the output was instead of uh just acting as like the validator yeah also acting as the fine-tuning of the model yeah essentially now I had a one example you know people often don't change and it's disappointing but it's just reality but people sometimes don't understand the seriousness of a
situation or the importance of a situation and that uh they might be working quickly in other areas but like not on the right thing yep and I had this last year I had a portfolio company and uh I'm one of probably the top five shareholders in the company it was involved super early and uh the company
was at a point we would have these sort of monthly check-ins uh with with the CEO a month passed very little progress happened and I had a very candid con conversation with the CEO where I said if you keep operating like this the com it will be Christmas break break whatever that is if you're a startup founder but it's going to be between
Christmas and New Year's and you're going to be dealing with laying off your team and shutting the company down because at this pace you're not going to be in a position to raise your next round you're the traction is not going to be there and nobody's coming to save you and between and I said let's meet in
a week and like let's see if you can get the pace up and he absolutely did he he crushed it the rest of the year he got his round his next round raised and the company's in a fantastic position right now and there was something that I think he was too fixated on on sort of like the big picture of like where the
company's going and all this stuff and I just said you need to take sort of Ruthless action and he unlocked something in himself and the company's been dramatically different since then I think it's different giving that advice to a founder and saying look yourself in the mirror and just side uh you know
understand the situation that you're putting yourself in is very different than you know if you talk to a employee who's not motivated and they're not moving quickly and things like that um I I haven't had a lot of success in sort of turning somebody from a a low low um urgency low output person into somebody
that's super high output but that was that was you know one uh very bright point in my year last re where I said okay this person like found the next gear and and it dramatically transformed the company I just don't want to be too blackpilled on it because I I think like yes like there is some like innate speed
that is just like in people's DNA or something and they come into an organization and they just go hard no matter what and you see these people all over but I do think that there's that there's uh that next gear that everyone can achieve for sure and then there's also just uh you know if you get dropped
in if you're parachuting into you know Nazi occupied France and you're a 17year old or 19 y old kid like you can just kind of like stare the opportunity in the face and like just just turn it on uh even if it's even if you've never done it before and so finding that that thing that like brings that insane
energy uh and and really going for it is is really important and that's the job of managers is to like unleash that yeah anyway that was a great show I thought we had a lot lot of fun uh leave us five stars on Apple podcast and Spotify you got tomorrow uh Ben hold us accountable let's new ones oh we got to get some new
ones you people are not leaving enough ads in our reviews yeah please leave some some ads in our reviews I got a DM the other day that had an ad in it great that's fantastic um and uh oh we got one last question let's do it advice on becoming a Creator and not and cutting out consuming uh the answer here is that all
the value on social network uh or at least 9 9% of the value uh created by social networks occures to the people that create the content versus the people that just use them for entertainment uh and so if you um the other thing is if you don't create content online you don't really exist online and it's hard to um have a real
impact in this world if you have no digital presence um we had of last uh in the last show notes I don't know if we got to it but it was like oh uh in like 199 oh someone has a presence online they must be a weirdo and then now it's like someone doesn't have a presence online they must be a weirdo and I still think
there's um I I still think that there is value in going through periods of time where you cut out allt social uh activity at all like try to just not go on these platforms and try to just focus on uh your business or your role or whatever whatever kind of situation you're in but uh there will come a time
where you should emerge and start sharing what you're doing with the world um that's fantastic advice we will see you tomorrow thanks for watching we appreciate you all and have a great Tuesday enjoy it we will see you soon Sean McGuire on the show tomorrow yeah we're excited stay tuned stay tuned have a good afternoon see y bye