I didn't know that you had North Korean investors in your first company that's wild is that hard uh welcome oh we're live welcome to technology Brothers the most profitable podcast in the world today we are doing a deep dive on a classic Peter teal talk at South by
Southwest back when South by Southwest rocked uh it's called you are not a lottery ticket and it's a big discussion of luck versus skill and hard work and a bunch of amazing Frameworks came out of this uh most people know this but I think even if you've seen it and you
haven't seen it in a while you're still going to get a lot out of this um because we're going to take it in a bunch of different directions give you the high level give you a bunch of analysis and see how all of his predictions played out a decade later so
let's start off with wait before we get into that yeah I just wanted to highlight one of our own posts we spend a lot of time highlighting other people other people's posts and and we wanted to highlight a post that's near and dear to our heart which is a simple post a
low Tam Banger where we said last week we [ __ ] love podcast and we're trying not to swear too much we want our children to be able to listen to this it's also just low class and uh swearing is low class and vulgar but every once in a while we slip up we
slipped up this post but uh we just wanted to say John and I really enjoy podcasting and uh we're we're glad that people listen to the show but we'd still be doing it even without any listeners we'd still be recording recording putting it out um so anyways we're we're
grateful to get to do this and uh thank you thank you to everybody that's actually um tuning in and participating in this uh cultural movement towards uh technological uh progress yeah so let's kick it off with you are not a lottery ticket the core question that Peter is
asking is to what extent is success in startups and life driven by Luck versus skill planning or effort the traditional perspective is luck can be overcome or influenced by hard work but there is a contemporary bias that success is often
seen as a function of random context the lucky sperm club or birth circumstances and Peter aims to debunk this and he has a whole host of great examples asking the question was it luck or not it's always hard to say when you go back and look at these uh these narratives Elon
Musk went from PayPal to start SpaceX and Tesla Jack dorsy with square and Twitter Steve Jobs with apple and Pixar uh Thomas Jefferson once said I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more of it I have suggesting that it is something that you
can overcome Samuel Goodwin said the harder I work the luckier I get and I think that uh no matter what you think about luck it's worth it's worth redefining it Y and thinking about it as a uh as as something that is a is a product of all the hard work my my
working definition of luck is something that it is the reward for incredible networking independent thinking and Relentless work ethic y um in contrast today's dominant view is that success stems from the whole context which is random maybe you were a member of the
lucky sperm Club the lucky egg Club maybe you're lucky where you were born and that's what drives everything there's a version of this that applies to startups the successful ones were accidental and it's pretty clear how big a role luck plays yeah it's funny being
born and raised in California I I from a young age had a sense of how lucky that was because I feel like I would travel and people globally would be would tell me oh I can't believe you're from California I've always wanted to visit there and then when they could they
would do whatever they could to go visit yep and the thing about tech that's interesting is is it doesn't matter like a lot of the most PE successful people in Tech were born far from the golden land of California made the effort to move here and so it
doesn't you know being born here maybe you have some level of Advantage but you can create luck by simply moving to California I always love the story of the founder of Discord Jason citen he grew up I think in Florida in not even a major city and then went to a college
that was like a trade school for video game development and then started one company and I don't think it went anywhere but there's this old video of him demoing it at Tech crunch disrupt finally figured it out with Discord and has just built a beast of a
business and was clearly just built differently um but uh Peter starts off by explaining that there's a difference between going from zero to one and going from one to n and so he has a two uh an X and Y AIS chart 0 to one is technology
doing new things it's vertical one to n is globalization it's copying existing things and it's horizontal and this will uh Echo through the rest of the presentation and there's a very interesting uh conversation in here where he says I agree with Paul Graham
on a lot of things but I think this is a place where we just automatically Channel our society's default bias and it's worth asking how much of this is true and how much of it is not and we we discussed on a previous show uh the this idea that maybe the advice of PG and the
advice of Peter teal are actually at odds in many ways they like talk to customers versus call your shot exactly yeah and uh and it and it and it goes into the way that they've tried the concentration strategies where Peter will try and be you know andal series C
A D I think they just put more money in the latest round which I don't even know what the letter is f or G and it's just concentration concentration concentration whereas YC has been Diversified diversify diversify um and you know they both worked but they're
very different strategies um and so there's been this you know shift in cultur attitude in the past luck uh would be um M was something to be mastered overcome by effort and vision but in the present success is seen as heavily dependent on un uncontrollable
external factors and that makes you very docile and it makes you very um just indeterminate which is something he'll go on to Define and there's a big there's a there's a line from from Peter something about failure is not valuable at all like it doesn't matter y that you
didn't don't like pat yourself on the back being like I learned a bunch because you could have failed in like 50 other ways you just happen to fail that one way Y and it matters a lot more of like how you actually won right no I love that one um and so uh Peter starts
breaking down the whole Crux of this urata lottery ticket uh Speech is about this 2 by two Matrix with four boxes and it defines two axes on the y axis we have optimistic versus pessimistic how do you feel the future will play out and then on the x-axis you have determinant
versus indeterminant and so he uses a number of different examples uh maybe we should start with the general category um so in the optimistic determinant category you have engineering and art you you believe that you can change the world you could believe you can do
something but you have to go and instantiate it yourself in the optimistic indeterminant category you have finance and law which are tracked and heavily Diversified in the determined pessimistic scenario you have wartime rationing and an indeterminant
pessimistic you have insurance something bad is going to happen and you're creating a safety net and uh and then he also Maps this to eras in geopolitics and so uh in the US in the United States between the 50s and 60s when we were going to the Moon we were very extremely
optimistic but extremely determinate we we realize you know JFK stands up and says why do we climb mountains because they're there um you know why why do we go to the Moon because we choose to go to the moon and we did and The indeterminant
Optimist has is what the US has fallen into currently where the government doesn't build anything anymore it's all just wealth transfers and Peter calls out this this fascinating concept of uh the government doesn't know what to do with the money so they just it to people
and then the people don't know what to do with the money so they put it in index funds and then the index funds don't know what to do with the money so they give it to compan they diversify and then the companies don't know what to do money a dividend my my favorite
the optimism of the California uh government that we're just going to build this like High-Speed Rail line and then spend billions of dollars barely going a mile that's sort of the um and that's that's one of the greatest segments I mean Peter is always good at
like keeping a very highlevel theoretical framework that he's breaking down but then grounding it in a bunch of historical examples and I love these he talks about uh to illustrate what determinant optimism looks like we can we can consider
historical examples the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 19th century was a radically different future connecting the entire country by today's standards no one would do it people would say it cost too much but at the time it was a self-fulfilling
prophecy another example is Robert Moses in the mid 20th century New York who built Parks roads and infrastructure there were many specific plans for for a bigger better future it stopped in the mid 1960s when people questioned whether building another Highway was really
better one once there was no longer a definite view of the future no one could build anything new nothing major has been built in New York City since then in any meaningful scale and the last one is crazy because it's in California in
the San Francisco Bay Area it never happened but the Weber plan in the late 40s U building dams freshwater lakes and a 32 Lane Highway it was a radically definite view of the future such a plan is unimaginable today he was a school teacher he wasn't even some Chad yeah
and uh he was an amateur theater producer and he could propose such a grand plan and it was taken seriously enough for Congressional hearings today these sorts of grand definite Visions don't exist so another example here that's interesting so there's there's
some terraforming projects happening in the Middle East and and and potentially happening in parts of Africa where they're basically trying to divert large swaths of of um or basically turn like desert land into uh lakes and rivers and things of that nature and so this guy
gave this great talk on it and one of the areas that he identified was potentially able to be terraformed was the um there was this uh place called the salt and sea outside of Palm Springs that used to be a lake and um uh I believe it was the Colorado River was
change was diverted at one point and um it it ceased uh to basically um and it just evaporated over time and um I asked the guy who gave the talk how would you actually make this happen and he's like I have no idea yeah and it would take an extremely determinant plus optimistic
view to actually get something like this done because if you just say oh we should terraform the salt and sea and return it to being this Lake because it'll create all this agricultural land surrounding it just you're not going to it's not going to happen unless there's
like this very very intentional um approach from a large number of people to say like this is really hard we're going to do it like we're not going to just like hope that it happens we're going to make it happen yeah the terraforming stuff is
fascinating because there are entrepreneurs who are talking about this like Augustus I went out to the sultan sea with him and oh really oh yeah and we filmed a whole video and he's talked about that and Mike salana wrote a piece about it a long time ago but it's just
not culturally taken seriously at all and all of those projects are laughed at if you look at top YouTube results for Elon musk's tunnel project the boring company it's all photos of Elon with a red clown nose on and it's just somebody who is not a
scientist at all just a YouTuber just laughing at how Preposterous this is how it will never work how there are better Solutions and it gets Millions for every for every 100 feet of tunnel he could put 20 kids through school just shuffling the it's just shuffling the
chips around the board endlessly and it's like okay like people always say oh well like we should just build bike Lanes it's like okay like yes and let's also do the tunnels and let's do the bike lanes and let's also do bus lanes and let's also do planes that are super
sonic let's do it all yeah and and that's not the that's not the vision of a lot of people that are pessimistic and a lot of people that are indeterminate and so uh it's the same thing with the Dubai projects I mean I find myself even like laughing at like the idea of the
line and like how crazy that is or Dubai building like these incredibly like insane like islands that are man-made um all of that it's it's hard to resist the urge because there's such a cultural pull from just like isn't it interesting
though in many ways the gulf uh the the GCC yeah um countries are very determinant and optimistic they're like not only are we going to buy the PGA but we're going to terraform this part of our country and we're going to build this city City on a line that like looks
like it's pulled out of the future and so it in many ways it's playing out over the world it almost takes a monarchy to to to bring that approach to governance today or very very very strong leadership yeah I love this uh framework I mean obviously like the quadrant model
is very important and uh Peter breaks it down in a bunch of different ways he shows the different philosophers that fit into these coordinates so Hegel and Marx are in the determined Optimist uh quadrant determined pessimists are Plato and Aristotle in indeterminate Optimist
are rs and nosic and then pessimistic indeterminant is Epicurious and lucretius and I remember when I first got on Twitter there was a guy the epicurian dealmaker who wrote about Wall Street and and and and seeing this I'm it's kind of like it's all clicking
about his world view yeah and and he was like a little bit pessimistic in finance and that's why his account grew because he was always pouring cold water on things but he was also very much like you know the broad the broad Diversified
investor not saying I mean even Michael B is pessimistic but determinate Michael burer is saying we need to short this exact thing right now and he's wrong a lot but you know every once in a while what's the phrase uh uh pessimist sound smart optimists make money or something
like thatting yeah it's clout versus wealth yeah um and I and I love this other frame just simplifying it just to what's the difference between determinant and indeterminant so you can really put your finger on it determinant is substantive and indeterminant is
process based so when you hear someone talking about what their business is or what they're doing and they're talking about the process that they're working on that's a signal that they don't have a concrete vision and they're running a Playbook instead of actually thinking
independently and building something specific uh and so Peter goes on to break it down in a bunch of different Realms in finance terms the determinant optimistic is investing concrete projects and engineering and this is like a lot of his a lot of his
Investments andal SpaceX Airbnb stripe Rippling ramp all these companies are very concrete changes in the worldview how will the world work after this gets built heavy on engineering The indeterminant Optimist is low savings low investment rely on indexes and
diversification the whole efficient market theory is very much propagating that idea and then indeterminate pessimistic is high savings fearful no plan insurance-based mindset and that goes to uh to China where uh you know they they they do operate very aggressively but towards a a scarcity
mindset for sure uh so there's implications for society and business in indeterminate optimism you do nothing specific you have minimal savings Min minimal targeted investment without a vision money becomes an end itself accumulated but not invested in Big
Ideas nothing changes it's zero sum and feter with ER at Google saying you are out of ideas you don't know how to innovate you have $50 billion on your balance sheet you should easily be able to invest that in something productive but the fact that you can't just the
fact that it's on your balance sheet tells me that I've already won this debate and it's like one of the most like famous debates in Silicon Valley in my opinion because he just had he and and Eric was so used to arguing like the Ted Talk Like philosophy way of
oh well like you know we you know shareholders and we want to be prudent with this stuff and like you know there's a bunch of good reasons for why we're doing this and we're waiting maybe but you know it was like it was like the sign of a pattern I think I think I
think he clocked it correctly and uh it's one of the greatest greatest moments if you're ever hanging out with Peter bring that up he loves it he loves it I I I tried to make it happen again I wanted a round two debate because I think Eric has evolved a lot and I think
that they would have a great maybe we should have a a TV debates product where we get CU we're pretty neutral party we we we try to tell it how it is and we're we're conflicted in many ways due to our investments but uh we try to keep keep
things um you know uh generally aligned but uh having having a debate stage and being able to run back version 2.0 of that would be would be great yeah he even he even pulls it to literature we've moved from definite science fiction futures like 2001 of Space
Odyssey to ones that are static or unchanging like Neuromancer Blade Runner 1984 uh it's it's it's fascinating seeing like the the yeah how how the Sci-Fi has instantiated these different ideas of like you know what the world looks like whether it's like an
optimistic scenario or negative in the future like we need positive sci-fi that's that's clear like I mean hilariously that that Stallone movie uh uh what's it called I'm blanking with uh with Wesley Snipes It's called uh I'm I'm completely blanking on it we it came
up on a previous show but uh but it's fascinating they they predicted like all the self-driving cars all the also Demolition Man Demolition Man uh yeah great movie um and so uh he starts to close it out with uh talking about startups and Innovation the official
religion of today is that everything is statistical luck driven and incremental you need to AB test your way to success you need short-term Horizon and I'm sure you've seen that with like brand development and marketing campaigns is that AB testing is like the very last
segment of this and in general like you need a unique idea it's the era of the ideas guy John Foo is not AB testing his way to um to to coming up with a new idea the only thing he does is is is use the Instagram polls product oh he does
that he does collect data that way I love it um if you're building consumer products copy Foo and and leverage Instagram polls to to gather feedback it's it works well yeah and he tells this great example I mean he highlights that Apple under Steve Jobs they had a
multi-year vision very definite optimism yeah the the smartphone will be the dominant platform let's put an immense amount of R&D resources towards this spend years getting it perfect don't release it until the screen can be glass because I don't want my phone scratched
by my keys and Steve apparently just came in one day and was like my My Demo phone is getting scratched it has be glass go figure it out right and and that's something that you probably could have run some study and found that oh well like the customers will still buy
it so we don't need to do it and it's more expensive but he had a vision and then uh the best example which I still love so much and such a great bull signal uh if you can pull this out of a founder and they're not lying to you uh is Facebook's refusal to sell to Yahoo
for $1 billion in 2006 which is like literally a year after the company started uh they walk into a into a board meeting and it's Peter and Zach and I believe Jim Brier over at Exel and Mark's just like well this will be a quick board meeting like obviously we
have to formally discuss this but we're obviously not taking this deal and uh and Peter and Jim are like uh we should probably talk about it right like you know it's probably probably this is a lot of money at least five minutes you own 2 for five% of the company uh
there's a lot that you could do with $250 million like this is the this is a reasonable thing and uh and Mark was like but I don't I know what I would do with the money I would just start another social network and I kind of like the one I have like why would I do
this and So eventually you know they talk about it and they pass and uh looking backwards uh Peter realized that it it'd be somewhat unscientific to do this analysis but if you if you looked backwards at all the companies every time someone refused a billion dollar
offer offer eBay Google it it had turned out to be right U more importantly Facebook's refus interesting yeah that's interesting because there's a lot of companies that don't take the100 million op you know uh option to sell and then end up regretting it y I do feel like
there's a ton of we don't need to say them on the on the show but you'll meet you'll meet guys that still kick themselves for not selling when they had a deal on the table because the next year like things soured or whatever but for some reason if somebody's willing to
pay a billion dollars for something there's probably some real also quality of the acquirer you're talking about if if a if a Founder mode company is try is making you a billion doll offer a significant portion of their of their market cap it's a signal that you're
onto something really really serious as opposed to oh yeah some strategic like you know like public company was going to write us aund billion dollar check but they're a hundred billion dollar company and I didn't even talk to the CEO because it was such a small deal for
them like yeah you should probably take that because they're not evaluating it properly whereas if Zuck is taking you on a walk and being like hey like here's a bill like you know you should really come work with us like you might be really
putting the screws to them in a few years and I think we kind of saw the counter of that play out with Instagram which could have been huge um and uh Nikita's company too yeah zck was yeah was worried yeah yeah exactly um and so there's a bunch of takeaways here purely
luck driven or incremental approaches may not yield breakthrough Innovation having a definite idea of the future can guide bold investments in enduring companies the best future a determinant optimistic approach where big Visions drive real progress and transcend mere
luck concluding thought overcome luck by defining and working towards a radically better definite future and he quotes with not just a static future like a dead channel on TV but a definite future that's radically better yeah and I one I
mean one of my favorite parts of this actually is is not even Peter's thinking it's just Thomas Jefferson quote the I'm a great believer in luck I find the harder I work the more have of it and I think that having that definite Vision but understanding it's not enough to
just have the vision right look at Augustus like he's got a very clear vision of what he wants to execute towards but he's also putting in 14 15 hour days every single day so it's like that balance of you can overcome luck but you also want it to work in your
favor so just work harder yeah the reason I actually pulled this up the reason this resurf was because I had a friend who is uh considering joining the government and was doing kind of an informational interview with uh one of the partners at Founders fund and uh and
was like what should uh how should I go into this interview and and get advice and I was like the most important thing is figure out what you want in life where you want to be it's the classic question of like what do where do you see yourself in 10 years and that's such
a silly played out question that we didn't we stopped asking it but it's actually incredibly important to ask that question and so go do some thinking and I often find it's useful to go back to what did you want to do as a child yeah because maybe after you get past
astronaut there might be something serious there astronaut influencer what's the next thing what's the next one and there's probably a moment when you were like yeah I actually wasn't dreaming of being a lawyer I was dreaming of being you know a business
person or something else or building something or doing something and uh and I remember uh when I interviewed at Founders fund I got a call with Trey and towards the end he was like yeah like what do you want to do and I was like kind of giving him wish actually answer
and he was like you can just tell me like and it was like very informative it was like he kind of like beat me over the head with like I want to be the number one technology podcaster in the world yeah yeah yeah and and and just uh and I mean honestly I hadn't really
figured it out at the time yeah um but it was but but it's a very very good framework and I think people need permission to to just say out loud what they have deep so many so many questions like where do you see yourself in 10 years years that got kind of cancelled
for some reason yeah I don't know why because it was like oh well some people just want a job or whatever and then the question it got you got in trouble for asking people what do you do at parties okay because it's like you remember this like it was like have something more
interesting to say then what do you do and for me for me asking somebody what's your story what do you do yeah that is the if I'm meeting somebody for the first time and I'm trying to understand who they are that's probably the best information I can get yeah they're going
to choose what they want to share and then that will say something by itself yeah I mean asking someone like tell me your life story feels like kind of cringe but it's that's cringe but but I think that I think that if you can pull that out of someone like that's the most
interesting thing that they have to say yeah and and if you if they can actually a lot of people will just kind of give you the resume but if you can actually get like the highs and lows and like all the problems that they solve throughout
their life like that's that's very interesting and and a good way to get to know someone um and I feel like we got there like in our like first meeting it was like we were very open and like actually telling the truth about like the full Arc of our careers which I
think was totally um but yeah I remember remember when I actually remember the when we first met I was like wait so do you want to be like president or something I didn't really I don't you know we're all figuring it out at the time but I was like is this guy G to be
like the mayor of Pasadena governor of California president I mean podcast have run for Content before content clear play now it's a clear Playbook Reagan was an actor yeah Trump had a reality TV show the next president will be a podcaster why not yeah the bodybuilder
to Governor pipeline to Fantastic also movie star yeah yeah got to be able to communicate um but yeah think think really hard I know even even outside of the terse uh this guy uh who runs Strauss zelnick he runs uh take two interactive they make GTA and
of video G and he takes like an IMM amount ofing calls from people He makes himself very available he he wrote a book just called success it's it's it's private it's yeah I wrote the book on I wrote the book success yeah yeah the and he wrote it when he was young too it's
crazy and he I mean this guy has a badass career but uh he you can only get it by emailing him and he sends you a copy it's not published like you can't get it anywhere it's amazing and and in there he will always just start with like what do you want because if you
don't want to be the CEO like you'll never get there if you don't want to be a Founder you'll never be there like what and figuring that out and being honest with yourself uh so the exercise is usually like that I a guy thing like what what are you good at what makes
money what do you love doing find the intersection of that then be honest with yourself about what that is because if you're the best dentist in the world you're going to wind up building a massive Dental Empire if you're the best pottery artist in the world like you
will but you have to Excel instead of just being okay yeah I to like you know dentistry and I'm just going to do it to pay the bills and I never have any ambition like become an entrepreneur still in whatever field you're excelling
in yeah I love that I love that talk it's one of the best good one go watch it if you haven't watched it it's fantastic it goes way deeper than we went welcome back to technology Brothers still the most profitable podcast in the world we have some DMS some Q&A from the
fans let's go to Pete Campbell he says Dear Tech Bros pod not the fans the brothers the brothers let's go to the brothers Pete Campbell says Dear Tech Bros pod can you think of anyone more accomplished or deserving to deliver next year's Stanford commencement speech
than Gary tan I can't that's a fantastic idea and I don't know if you thought of this yourself Pete but uh we should definitely get this trending we love Gary Gary Gary went on a campaign to save San Francisco Pete is going on a campaign to get Gary to do the Stanford
Gary's too humble he would he would never Lobby for himself for this but that this would be a fantastic fit I think and pretty good marketing for why combinator for sure event marketing moment you know talking to a bunch of Stanford grads hey by the way I run a
small accelerator call by combinator you know a few times a year we give a number of startups yeah a little bit of money that was the thing when I got to Silicon Valley every big shot would come in and they loved being like well I got to
Silicon Valley and I started working for a little company called Yahoo and we and we started like hearing it again and again we were like this is such a played out like meme like every VC loves saying like yeah I went to a little company called Microsoft it's
like saying like I was one of the first 100 employees but it sounds cooler to be like yeah I work for a little company and then and then they're all you're all like you were just like some product manager then you go to their house and it's like a $50 million mansion in Meno
Park or something you're like okay yeah it's real the Yahoo money was wild those guys made a lot of money early it's great anyway let's move on we got question from Tyler he says help Tech Bros pod I'm looking for a book that covers the intersection of brand history
technical Innovation and collecting watches give your take I'll make a specific recommendation and we'll go from there uh so you don't need to read books on brand history you can list just listen to Founders podcast true so you can go listen to like you know 50 100
episodes back to back just block off like a few weeks and do that and then the other categories I would just say I think one of the most underrated things that you can do is if you're interested in a topic read parts of a few different books in the category like you don't
even need to the whole trap of having to read the entire book like it's totally fine to just read some number of pages and if you get bored just like go on to the next thing skip around yeah or skip around um but yeah just like read read the top you know five books on on watch
watches and that's good and I have a specific recommendation for you uh it's a book on the history of Rolex and there is a fantastic episode of Founders uh 351 I'll just play you the intro here the book I'm going to talk to you about today is nearly impossible to find it
was first published in 1946 there's only a thousand copies ever made it's called Rolex Jubilee and then the subtitle is actually in Latin but when you translate it from Latin into English it literally means go with me and so it's a tiny four
volume like history of rolexx volume one was written by Hans wilsdorf who is the founder of Rolex so go listen to episode 351 of Founders maybe pick up the book try and get a copy I think that will probably hit all three of these and lastly just keep listening to the
podcast man we're going to covering all three of these every single day we're trying to give uh a proper analysis of every business ever because we love business so in a in the total history of Technology Brothers we hope to cover every business bu at least once even if
it's just one promoted post yeah exactly uh let's go to based Baron he says yeah I'm pully paully gonna beat the [ __ ] out of some EA teapot post rat Godless virgin if they get up in my grill on this app one more time and uh yeah very funny post got him getting in
fights getting in fights uh we wanted to highlight Bas Baron because he claims to be an analyst at Tech Bros pod he's not officially affiliated with us but we're always open to support reporters um but as we reviewed your timeline based Baron
maybe a little bit too based little bit too negative we want to keep the keep the momentum up keep the optimism don't want to be the definite pessimist on this show you want to be optimistic and a lot of the things you're saying a lot of the [ __ ] you're talking not
unreasonable but where's it going to get you yeah pessimists get clout optimists get rich the key the key so base Baron in seem seemingly in group emerging poster it's got some got some good takes got some takes that are kind of trying to take down some of our
buddies things like that but um here's what I'd say based Baron you want to get to the point where uh two years from now when you got 100,000 followers PE you're you're allowed to share who you really are without burning a bunch of bridges
because like at the trajectory that he's posting he's going there sure go to 100K for sure that said you got to make sure to not make too many enemies along the way so that you when you do that big face reveal y it's like you're sort of confident in doing that and not um you
know uh attacking too many people people have uh you know two levels of reaction to an account like this the first one is like haha like dunking on all the you know the lull cows of TAC uh and are you familiar with l l cow no it's a it's a person that is uh milked for
LOLs because they're they're they're so downtrodden that you that the whole like it's from four chance the 4chan Community will pick someone who they just like laugh at endlessly and they just like anything that they do they're just like getting dunked on and then it
creates this really vicious cycle but it's all related to the bucket of crabs Theory are you familiar with this yeah so yeah the crabs they pull each other down and and as soon as one is about to escape the bucket they the rest of them get pulled down if they were just
working together they could lift each other up and so level one is like okay yeah this guy's funny he's got some good dunks he's talking trash he's naming names he's unhinged that's great but level two is like you're revealing that your financials are not intertwined with
25,000 different startups enough not enough conflicts of interest yep not enough conflicts of interest uh call us once you've lped into 25 different funds and uh can't talk [ __ ] about anyone anymore because uh you're bag holder on even the worst companies so you wouldn't
say a word right future based Baron and we uh you'll definitely uh we'll we'll ship you the when we open up the the analyst role fantastic fantastic uh let's go to Dan Gray he says why are so many startups pitching the same ideas this is the result of
startup catering where Founders work on the problems they believe VC's care about rather than problems they are connected to it occurs Whenever there is a strong and vocal consensus among investors on the opportunity of the day EG agents vertical AI gaming Etc
obviously this is a negative influence on Innovation the purpose of starting startups is to build novel Solutions which others are unable to anticipate consequently the best VCS focus at most on Broad problem areas rather than Solutions yeah interesting this is
something where like it's always like the it's always like the bare case for like the YC request for startups it's like are the best Founders do they need that or should are they already building it I've built two companies that like didn't fit into any trends at all and
that's been good but also extremely painful because I haven't been able to just flip them to meta for $100 million in a year um but extremely painful extremely painful but it's all worked out and uh yeah you got to have the the definite Optimist view of the world and
often times that also con coincides with the contrarian vision and seeing something different and having everyone tell you that you're wrong for years and this was the case with coinbase and Airbnb and stripe uh why are you doing this something already exists it's
unnecessary this isn't trendy the one positive the positive about the YC requests for startups is if you're working at a Fang and you see that and you're like oh that's interesting and then you that catalyze you catalyzes you into starting a
company and then you start that company and maybe you end up pivoting to something else like at least it made you it provided that initial activation energy to get you to go and do it but yeah I've seen this i' I've seen this so so much just as an angel investor seeing
people come pitch me an idea and I'm like you're hitting all the right buzzwords but yeah it's not an original idea I've seen a bunch of other P pitches for it and then there's no reason you're not like there's no reason why that you
should win versus anyone else that's doing this in fact it's usually the opposite it's like well you picked this idea because you thought you could raise a $2 million seed Dr and and and like basically play founder yeah and a lot of times you're a year too late or there's
some company that's more well funded in stealth mode or you're just like you're just behind the ball yeah let's do a promoted post promoted post I'm excited for this one we love promoting uh the Fantastic inventory over at duPont Registry today we're talking
about a 2017 Lamborghini centenario Roadster one of only 20 produced it has an ask a very modest asking price of only 2.9 Million uh great spec uh things in white on black it's got a nice wing on it killer and just like you can tell when something's been specked properly
and this is very intentional not over the top um and uh it's got a nice like Arrow kit on it and um I don't you know they're just not making Lamborghinis like this anymore and this is one of 20 so yeah pick this up this looks like crypto VC great for the gpet park in San
Francisco make a statement yeah and don't buy this if you live in Miami buy this if you live in SF this is a great daily if if you're going to be stuck in front of a behind a a wh yeah and you get your sandwich by Whos you want to be in a white Lamborghini cenario Roadster
uh just to MOG the the people yeah that are filming the steering wheel being like Oho look it's turning by itself and you're like yeah it turns you know when I do it so yeah yeah yeah yeah I want to hear some noise complaints in Meno Park
and Los Altos yeah yeah and uh inclin Village let's tear it up out there and if you need some driving lessons MKBHD oh yeah uh fantastic his videos aren't explicitly driving lessons but he certainly knows how to drive read between the lines and when you head to
your Lamborghini deal dealership tell them the technology brother sent you uh let's go to Lulu she says it's very hard for public company CEOs to State their unfiltered beliefs and principles the pressures are immense among public CES it's basically Toby ly Brian Armstrong
and Elon Musk holding the Overton window open yeah we talked about this with the the [ __ ] you money post from Mark andri like you get so entrenched that saying any unfiltered belief or principle could slice your customer base or your employee base or your investor base like
you have like thousands of it's more so they're hovering over they draft a post they're hovering over the post button theight and then they're thinking oh this you know pension fund or Institutional Investor owns 4% of my company and I'm going to immediately get
an email saying hi Mark let me know if you can talk yeah yeah and you're like okay great but I think the key here so so the interesting thing about the examples that Lulu gave yeah is the approaches are dramatically different Elon very clearly seems to just say
whatever he's thinking emis he posts are opinions my companies it's like no the his posts are the opinions of his companies and then Toby Toby is the opposite approach of like seemingly very intentional like sort of using his megaphone it's like you know
it's very curated it's not it's not on the Fly yep and so both ways work and Brian too Brian writes a long post very thoughtful he puts a lot of work to it but it but he's not afraid to be um unfiltered and controversial and controversial yeah I don't even know if
unfiltered is the right like the best thing is to be is to be is to be you can be controversial but be filtered and tasteful in the delivery of of that and I do wonder if there if this is going to change as more companies go public because you know public company CEOs
okay well what happens when Ang roll goes public or what happens when there are a lot of founder-led companies right now that just aren't public yet but will May it'll be probably be easier for them maintain their unfiltered nature than retrain an era a generation of public
company CEOs it's interesting to think about the X long post and how that's kind of changed the the platform from a communication standpoint because if you historically you wanted to share a lot you had to post a thread but then somebody could screenshot one tweet and
be like look this guy hates this type of people but then now on a long post it's like it would be disingenuous to not show the full context based on one thing that they said so it actually opens it up yeah it's great uh Santiago been on the show before he says you can just not
do psychedelics LOL bold statement cotton and very true we we uh we support this message just because just because psychedelics are popular in Silicon Valley does not mean you have to do them doesn't even mean that you're going to benefit from them I
think we've maybe talked about this on the show but but psychedelics can provide this novel experience that makes people feel like it's super Monumental and maybe that they just hadn't put their phone down for a while it's like a lot of people the only time they go for
a long hike is when they're taking LSD so they're like oh this is amazing but you could just like take the hike uh the best metaphor was that post we read about uh I took so many psychedelics that at a certain point had a meta Epiphany that the drug was just leaning
on the Epiphany key in my brain and it was just making me think I'm having an epiphany I'm having an epiphany I'm having Epiphany and that's actually not having an epiphany and that same thing happens with a lot of cannabis where it's like oh everything was so funny
last night oh tell me the jokes that you were laughing at not funny at all only funny in the moment because it was completely synthetic yeah and so yeah you want to stay away from that yeah and I I've talked about this before but when
I was in college when I was in college Tim Ferris was directly or indirectly massively promoting psychedelic like basically as like a lifestyle to the one of the biggest podcast in the world just telling everybody like how great psychedelics are and I think that that's
irresponsible I think it's I think it's something that can be done you know in small circles uh but doesn't need to be on a megaphone it's degenerate I agree let's go to Bryce he says we're in multiple golden ages ages at once quoting Jeff Bezos from uh this
fantastic interview that Bezos did that uh there's a great breakdown on David sra's uh X page um and uh he did whole deep dive on it got rehar by Ivanka Trump I believe and uh or or no no it got rehar by uh Jeff Jeff wife that's right Lauren Lauren Sanchez um but I I
agree with this multiple Golden Ages as once we're we're doing space travel we're doing AI we're doing bio um there are a ton of things Doge Doge making the government government it is it is a fantastic time to be alive I I just like that he put this quote out there it's
great thank you Bryce thank you let's go to Andrew Reid that's over at seoa he says although he doesn't have the the tag anymore I got to check that he's still there um he says never make the same mistake twice make it at least three or four times so you're absolutely
sure you're wrong then change your approach I like it so I've had this with people like early in my career not even that not even that long ago I would start talking with somebody maybe about investing or partnering in some capacity or a high
and I would have like a little something in my in the back of my head that wasn't a really strong intense uh sort of intuition but there was some intuition that I shouldn't that there was some red flag and and over the last like two years I've really tried to be
intentional intentional about listening to that yep and I had to make the mistake of not listening to it four or five times totally and so now when it happens I'm very I know what kind of comes after making that mistakes I'm just like yeah I'm just not GNA even
start you know yeah yeah it's almost it's almost hard to make the mistake once and fully learn the lesson yeah you need multiple data points to prove to prove out to you know real thesis there yeah I remember a friend of mine in in high school uh I I I think we were I
think we were in college and one of his younger brothers came out with everyone partying and uh his younger brother was like drinking like trying to keep up with the college guys and one of our friends uh you know the older brother is like hey take it easy like we are
college guys like you're just not going to be able to keep up with us our tolerance is like way higher you got to go easy and one of our other friends just like grabs his the older brother's hand and says like look some lessons have to be learned the hard way yeah and
to this day he refer to this as like Dez lessons because like that's the type of like lesson learn the hard way alcohol is a very positive feedback loop it is a poison that people consume it they feel good but then they feel really bad it
creates less desire to do it again even though you might feel good for a little bit yeah hopefully so so yeah some things you got to learn the hard way let's go to Justin May's brother of the week this week he says the FDA literally
has a 10-sec rule if a company fries something in oil for less than 10 seconds there's no requirement to add the oil to the ingredient label reform can't come soon enough fascinating yeah the FDA has a bunch of these weird rules just like little archaic things that get
you've dealt with exploited tons of weird stuff that just like this this this has to be on this can't be on I mean there's a ton of stuff in the tobacco industry where you like like because because the cigarette companies were making claims about like low tar
now you can't even make a claim about any tobacco product including a tobacco free product that it's sugar-free or it doesn't contain seed oils or it doesn't contain microplastics like you legally cannot make those claims even if it's true and it's just like super hard is
that regulatory capture basically yeah for the cigarette companies every every law you can't Market again you can't Market product benefits against us oh yeah I mean like the whole backlash against the tobacco companies was just like a master class in like Jiu-Jitsu
and getting getting a good outcome everything was like oh yeah you'll totally tie our hands on this and also create the strongest Monopoly in American history oh yeah yeah no one will be able to advertise who would that benefit the entrenched incumbents
absolutely with crazy distribution yeah oh yeah like and durable brand value exactly exactly so every decision that they made was just like very long-term focused for the it was a long-term win for the tobacco companies and a short-term win for the you know the
health reg regulators and so they got to say hey there's no more cigarette ads it's like okay well you know let's see how this plays out will people still be smoking in 40 years absolutely yeah my my take with with uh with I I had no idea about this Rule and it's crazy but
I think you basically if you're not consuming foods that you watched being made or you just assembled the ingredients and made them yourself it is just default going to be less good for you than than that right like there's no amount of oh it's gluten free
or it's seed oil free or it was made with beef tow like all that stuff like sort of matters but then oh there was lead in the in the process and you know now now you know it has whatever so anyways if you're really optimizing for health it's got to be Whole Foods let's
go to boring business uh he's quoting someone who says is there a job where they just pay you for being a chill guy with good intuition about stuff and boring business says Venture Capital great post I uh I had the post today about like everybody wants to be a
VC why wouldn't you want to just be an LP yeah you know you just that that's also a chill job to meet VCS hang out yep ski resorts go cat skiing hel skiing you know deploy a little Capital sit back watch it watch it work um but uh but yeah I do I do think if you're if
it's funny ideas guys you know monetize well through uh through just building companies um but uh there's a lot of VCS that are ideas guys and they basically just sit on this Buck you know this like basket of really good ideas for years and wait for the right entrepreneur to
come to them and say hey uh I'm going to build this thing and they're like oh I've thought about this for a long time this is great now I'll give you money to do it and I get to watch my uh your vision kind of play out yeah ah let's do a promoted post let's
do a promoted post uh from our friends over at Monclair uh we've talked about this at length ski season is in full effect uh and Monclair says Diamond run extraordinary layers for every angle of mountain life explore groby fallwinter 2024 at
montclair.com uh so mon CL proving that they are excellent posters here they're putting a link in even though they know it's going to hurt them in the algorithm uh but this jacket that they're showing off is so fantastic that I'm sure it'll still do numbers uh it's great great
post uh from Monclair and uh if you get invited to go cat skiing heli skiing or um have a more humble you know if a VC says hey do you want to come up to Aspen and you know we'll ski at the resort um if you get more modest VC like that um gr your teeth go anyway any of those
environments Monclair would be a good fit so thank you to Monclair it's fantastic let's go to vorio let's stay on the topic of things with pockets he says a lawyer in your pocket and he's showing that with grock 3 court cases are being added to the training set
aiming to provide grock with the ability to offer compelling legal verdicts pretty exciting a lot of companies away from this yeah so this is going to be already when people talk about what what's wrong with America it's it's the law fair that's just constantly being
waged y it's good business for um good uh one reason why it's great to be a lawyer in this country for the most part but it's going to be really insane when the sort of consumer a AI products and do not pay was an early version of this
but it was less like I'm going to sue somebody and more like we're giving you the tools to kind of fight back against different laws that maybe you don't or like work with laws and there's a world in future where where grock can launch a
lawsuit for you against one of your Ops and like and it's just 10 times like most of what stops people from launching lawsuits is the cost of the lawsuit you know if you have some type of dispute let's say you're disputing over $10,000 it doesn't make sense to enter into a
lawsuit because it's going to cost you $100,000 to even get to any type of conclusion or maybe more so when that cost goes to zero what happens I do wonder where the Nash equilibrium will be for all this because yes there's a world where it gets a lot easier to sue
people but then the AI should also be used to defend people and so you'll have all of these lawsuits that are kind of being fought by Ai and don't really Bubble Up well this this is a real thing is we should create a data center just for the [ __ ] lawsuits and just put
them out put them out in like you know there's this has already been happening for years in legal billing so there is uh there's software that companies use to read through bills from law firms to determine um what was a billable hour and what wasn't so they can effectively
Redline the invoices when they come through and say oh this was just like an associate reading case law that's their homework that's not something that's billable so we want to pay you 25% less and if you save 25% on your bills with your massive law firm in your fortune
500 like that's a huge amount of money but then the law firms got the software too and then when they submit their bills it goes through a review and says okay what's what's going to get thrown back at us let's not put that on the bill and so it just became this like you
know equilibrium fight of like the AIS essentially and the result is that like I think just as many hours get build but now there's a there's a tax from the AI from the tech companies on both sides love that that'll probably continue anyway let's go to isaia Taylor
he says guys I've had enough I'm leaving X and heading to the other app I'll still post occasionally and like and RT my friends content to be supportive of them reply to a few comments a scroll here and there perhaps a rare DM but trust me my heart will be in the other
app boom Banger shots fired atban such a good such a good oh oh this a Cuban I was thinkon but it just general it's applicable to many many different types of people who are no the conversation still happen on X baby not going anywhere greatest app of all time I I I
to log into blue sky to see like okay is anyone actually moved over and it was pretty minimal over there pretty sparse but we'll see yeah it's it's funny that um if you're building any products that are that you want to get in front of the
sort of tech uh audience Tech Elite whatever you want to call it uh you still got to be on X to promote it yeah let's go to Zach Weinberg he says the trend that confuses me most as a tech angel investor is the Jos of a incredibly cool new AI driven seed stage
ideas with B early stage valuations that do not make economic sense given C increasing competition from everywhere great time to be a customer though and then he goes on to say it's become so easy to be a seed stage software founder
with all the incredible tools out there top of funnel ideas is huge prototypes are increasingly easy and cheap to build we'll be interesting to see how VC returns work in environment like this huh yeah this is this is the bull case for y combinator right now because they
have a set structure to their Investments can't negotiate it and so they've they are able to buy into companies effectively artificially low because of their program and brand and then everybody else has to pay a premium once they are a part of that program um
so big big bull case for YC I did see recently I had a I I was pitched by a company that that was started by some guys that had started a big uh consumer tech company in the like sort of like early like Facebook era they were coming back for a new AI infrastructure product
they told me like oh we're you know it's going to be down at like 60 post like we're just waiting on terms and then I just heard yesterday it got done at 12 post so there is there is some okay there is some um push back on that there's some push back but still like
the super cracked teams are still getting these egregious valuations out the gates yeah I mean 60 post that's like going to be a $10 million round that's like you're just a 50 person company on day one like it's almost like working against you because they're just
burning a hole in your pocket and you're gonna have a overly large team for hunting for that product Market fit but those rounds I mean they're happening yeah unless you really have capex that you need whether it's R&D or some sort of you know data center buildout like
you really got to think through that does your business need that much to get to from zero to one it's a big question no but I think it's some some weird thing it's even like second time Founders are drawn more because they're used to measuring themselves by numbers
like if you if you start a company and you get to $50 million run rate and sell it y then when you go back to square one you're like oh yeah it'd be pretty nice to have 10 million in the bank like I've I've spent this much money before effectively but it's much different to
go and spend it from Zer to one yeah to do that versus spending your series A your last company it's also just extremely jolting to go from a company that you're building where you have teams for everything and then you go into you know seed stage and you're like
wait I have to do this stuff myself or I have to I only have a person instead of a team everything's like feels like it's maybe kind of moving slower yeah uh it well I had I had one I mean part of what happens is I just think this is like
pretty relevant part of what happens is you get a really smart team that goes out and they have a good idea good team and they go yeah we're going to raise $4 million and then one of these bigger multi-stage funds just goes okay well like we really want to lead you around
we love what you're doing we want we want to own at least 12% or whatever 14 15% and then they're like we'll give you eight on 40 and then the Founder's like I'm not it's objectively wrong for me to turn this money down in many ways if I
can get way more resources for the same level of dilution yep and then all the smaller investors and the angels like I've invested in multiple rounds over the last 12 months where I'm like this price doesn't make any sense but I want to be in the company because it's my
friend yep and it can be so hard because it's like okay so then you could push down the amount of dilution but then your valuation still high and you have to clear that hurdle for the next round or you push down the valuation and then you get diluted more and it's just like
all tension everywhere it's there it can be very very very fraught um but just got to go get the engine humming on the building and build something so let's go to Molly OA she's been on the show before she says coming off a week of holiday events and I couldn't feel more
optimistic and grateful for LA's unique Tech Community everyone is crushing it 2025 is going to be incredible I love it just an optimistic post to end on uh maybe we should do one more but uh we should do one more no I do love the
optimism LA's Tech ecosystem gets so much hate but it's great [ __ ] but one of the reason one of the reasons I'm grateful for it is we were connected because somebody was like you're the two people in LA's Tech world that I actually like really like and like you
guys should meet each other and that was like basically the whole reason we got connected yeah um yeah it's a small world out here and there I don't know there's there's some benefits like there's there's plenty of events we saw a ton of people people fly in it's close
to San Francisco people are happy to travel to La yeah exactly there a lot weather's always good um but it's not so and it is spread out enough that you're not getting like it's not the oh come to this partile every single day and like the fomo is not nearly as bad
here I get parti fall every week that I'm just like I'm not going to drive an hour yeah exactly exactly yeah uh no way no one in La has really understood that it's like Europe yeah it's like no I'm going to Germany of Los Angeles AKA Santa Monica fror that's Malibu something like
that yeah uh yeah I mean it's it's significant to get around here um well let's go to some boom news Blake scha has announced a new fundraising round as xb1 approaches Mach 1 I'm happy to share that boom Arrow has raised $100 million in new financing fully funding the First
Symphony engine prototype and Paul Graham says I invested more in boom than I've ever invested in a startup before but this company is important for America they'll also make a huge amount of money if they succeed no one else is anywhere near having a supersonic
airliner so I think we gotta raise uh hit the size gong a bit size gong for the $100 million round but this was very rough this was a Down Round this was a recap I believe it was 100 million on 100 million pre um so the new investors took about 50% of the
company um but you know it's sad for all the early investors and probably some of the employees that got diluted uh but it's great that Silicon Valley has kind of rallied the troops and said circle the wagons we want this to be a thing and we're keeping it in business and
we're keeping the story going it's better than just washing our hands with this it would be absolutely tragic like for example if if China had a company like this they just wouldn't let it fail like there' be like a government intervention say this technology is
critical enough that we're going to just make it work at whatever the cost that's literally the story of tsmc it's literally the story of tsmc could not fail because they had the backing of the Taiwan government they were like this is
critical yeah and so I I'm really glad to see it and that's like a beautiful it's created a beautiful moment out of an otherwise sort of unfortunate set of circumstances to see a bunch of the most you know successful influential people in the valley say this company's too
important to fail let's make it happen should we take a moment of silence for the early investors who got wiped out and crammed down yeah this moment of silence is brought to you by Bose quiet Comfort headphones find your moment of silence at bose.com
okay all right back to the show back to the show should we close with data bricks this is a realiz Gong moment realiz gong moment is on track to raise a $9.5 billion round at a $60 billion valuation famine baby this is amazing let's go we should do one gong
for every billion that you raise yeah we need nine we need nine nine gongs for this this is fantastic I don't know enough about data breaks we should do a deep dive on the company break it all down I know that they're doing very well everyone's excited and uh it's very very
cool and the uh the founder um is available and like does podcasts and and and I've seen him at conferences and stuff and uh he's probably under discussed because it's one of these B2B you know database companies that's a little bit uh not sexy or consumer but
uh I love that he's out there talking and they have some really cool investors and I'm really excited to see where this goes so should we close with one more promoted post I love ending on an ad yeah because if there's one thing Brothers Love It's ADS and I got a good
one for you today we have a 2021 mercedesbenz AMG Black Series I love this these are this is yeah this is a Grail car I mean this is like one of the last like truly great cars Mercedes has made oh me I I just drive a Mercedes I I just have a Mercedes you just have a
Mercedes yeah I I just I I I I you know I commute in in a Mercedes yeah just happens to be an AMG Black Series yeah yeah yeah you know it's probably got a sub seven minute nurur ring yeah sub seven uh and this mean AMG is finished in one of 16 uh graphite gray Magna over
black exclusive Napa leather and uh what a great spec I mean the the full um the Batman Black Series doesn't really get better than that and um yeah go pick this up if if you're still listening to the show you love ads which means you probably have an extra
$415,000 laying around go buy this car you know what you know what you need upgrade that metc metc black series yeah you they r63 which was the AMG minivan 6.3 L real dad like us that's a Grail that's a Grail there's only like 50 of them in
the US uh they're not that expensive but yeah yeah it's like they're so weird and and they don't even have the the sliding doors now I need to go now I need to go oh this is a Grail car as well but but go to Mercedes and say I'm C I'm you know equivalent to the sultan the brunai
I want a custom metc AMG Black Series put a V8 that thing wow they one just sold on bring a trailer r63 for 39,000 40K for a minivan I mean steal why would you get um a Honda Odyssey when you could have a a 6.3 L V8 what an insane car it's so insane when you hear the
engine note on that thing you pull up to the school dropping off the kids 0 16 sub four get it lowered it's great so yeah you know AMG GT Black Series for the weekends and the daily but when you're driving the kids the r63 we recommend them both we recommend them
both sometimes when you sponsor the podcast you know we'll promote the main thing but we'll we we'll promote your whole catalog yep you know yep multi we love multiproduct companies more more products to promote and that's a good place to end folks thank you for
listening uh it's been a great weeky Merry Christmas and uh thanks for listening sub subscribe on X subscribe on Apple podcast please leave us five stars add on Spotify we have video up there now YouTube uh there's short form there's long form any different thing
want all different forms and we're coming to LinkedIn soon folks it's a big bold move and uh everybody said oh you guys you guys don't have what it takes to hang on Linkin a different it's a different ball game over here come to the big leagues of professional
networking but we're going to go over there we're going to make a statement we are and we're going to bring those people back to X just the base ones we'll bring them back to X and uh we'll we'll sort of help them find their footing over here so stay tuned talk to you later thank you bye