GitHub’s Trust Problem Just Got Worse

0:00Eric Siu:Neil, have you heard of the fake GitHub economy? No. Okay, so check this out. So basically, on GitHub, you can buy stars. So we've shared GitHub repos before. Like my GitHub repo now, the marketing skills one, has like 2 ,200 stars. Wait, GitHub lets you buy the stars? No, it's a fake star economy. So you basically hire spammers to spam your GitHub repo for stars.

0:22Neil Patel:Oh, that makes more sense. I thought you were saying GitHub's selling it. I'm like, why would GitHub sell that? That would just screw up GitHub.

0:27Eric Siu:That would totally screw their business. like the integrity of their business.

0:31Neil Patel:So this is like people selling fake Yelp reviews and Google reviews.

0:35Eric Siu:Exactly, it's no different. Like everyone wants it. We're fake Amazon reviews back in the day, right? So for$85 to$285 in budget stars, a startup can manufacture the 2850 star seed median. For$990 to$4500, it can reach series A territory. Against typical seed rounds of$1 to$10 million, the ROI ranges from 3 ,500X to 117 ,000X. So at least seven open source tools on GitHub, fake GitHub history, commit bot committers exist specifically to fabricate GitHub contribution graphs, prebuilt GitHub profiles with five year commit histories and Arctic cold vault contributor badges sell for approximately$5 ,000 on Telegram.

1:15Eric Siu:Isn't it funny how this works? Remember, Neil, I told you about I had them. Remember, I had that Marriott hotel program and I was able to get like it would allow you to stay at like really nice hotels for very cheap. So there's always these underground economies of these things. I'm not part of that thing anymore. So that's why I'm open to talk about it.

1:33Neil Patel:Dude, it's just all these shortcuts don't end up working. I remember when people used to buy Amazon reviews back in the day. I'm like, but if you have a crap product, you're going to get sales by buying the reviews and the stars. They've gotten better at catching people. but you end up shooting up in the systems, especially if you're also, you know, you're getting purchases, you're cheating the system is what these people are doing. But when they have a crappy product or service or more so product on Amazon, eventually you start getting into crappy reviews. And for every one star review, you need so many five star reviews to make it up.

2:09Neil Patel:I'm like, the model doesn't work. It's just better to spend the time creating something that's amazing.

2:13Eric Siu:Dude, this is so funny. So, okay, well, I'm looking at the screen right now. So here's the marketplace. So if you want to buy premium stars, so aged accounts, it's basically like 80 cents to 90 cents. So gradual, natural delivery, years old profiles with repos and contributions. This is no different than back in the day when people used to sell links on these forums. Mid-range, 20 cents to 50 cents, one to two weeks, some activity history. And then if you want to buy disposable accounts, 3 cents to 10 cents and new empty profiles. And so they basically do a comparison here, Neil, where if you look at an organic, like LangChain, A lot of people know LinkedIn.

2:48Eric Siu:So the median account age for people posting is like 3000 days. And then the number of zero public repos, 6%. So when you compare it to all these other ones over here, like manipulated blockchain repos, this one over here, free domain, it has 28 % public, zero public repos and then 81 % are zero followers. So you can tell what is spam or not. But for GitHub, like, you know, they have other stuff to manage. And by the way, GitHub's owned by Microsoft, right? So I don't know how much time they have to allocate to this.

3:19Neil Patel:You know, Microsoft looked at buying Cursor, right? They decided not to.

3:22Eric Siu:You know who got Cursor?

3:23Neil Patel:Yeah, SpaceX. But SpaceX, I'm assuming the reason the deal is structured that way is they're waiting for themselves to go public and then do the transaction because they'll have more liquidity. I actually, so the bull case for doing this deal

3:38Eric Siu:is because Cursor, who is doing, I think,$6 billion a year or something like that, right? $6 billion a year?

3:43Neil Patel:I don't know. The last numbers I saw, I think were four or five, but they're growing so fast on a monthly basis that it's too hard to keep up.

3:49Eric Siu:So the problem for Cursor is at the$6 billion, because they're limited on compute, for example, but XAI has a ton of compute, but they don't have revenue. So you combine the two together and then XAI or SpaceX, if they're valued at$2 trillion or something like that, they can justify doing it. Because this$60 billion is still a drop in the bucket based on their market cap.

4:12Neil Patel:Yeah, and then Google just put in$40 billion into Anthropic today. Did they? Uh-huh. Dude, this is crazy.

4:20Eric Siu:Yeah. Everyone wants to buy Anthropic right now.

4:22Neil Patel:You know, it's the number one most valued private company in the world right now. Sorry, not valued. That I don't know. But it's the number one most wanted private stock right now. As in companies are trying to buy more or investors are trying to buy Anthropic shares more than any other company. Number two is SpaceX. I believe there's a girl named Zoe Talks who's a VC on Instagram. She breaks down the list. I don't think OpenAI was even in the top five.

4:51Eric Siu:You know the thing though? OpenAI, they have a lot more compute. And so now like they're back in the game now, you know, 2.0. Like every week something changes, right? It's like, oh, I don't use chat GPT anymore. Now it's like 5.5 is out. They have this out. They have the agents out. And then they have a lot more compute. Like you just don't know. The good thing is Neil and I, we're not part of these companies so we can be promiscuous and jump around whenever we want.

5:11Neil Patel:And I heard the CFO of OpenAI talk today and she was breaking down how roughly their split is 50-50 now from enterprise versus just general consumers.

5:20Eric Siu:I think both companies will be fine. Are you going to, let me ask you this, Neil, are you going to buy the IPOs for any of these?

5:25Neil Patel:No.

5:26Eric Siu:You know what I will buy? I'll wait for them to drop when there's a correction, when there's a big correction.

5:32Neil Patel:Because, Eric, and this is not financial advice and people who got in early probably made a killing. Definitely. But it's more so like they're so expensive that the ROI for Eric and I to put in our money is not going to be that high. It's just easier for us to play the game with our own companies. But what's funny enough is on TV, the guy who's been being brought up a lot is Sam Bakeman Free. I was going to say that. Because he invested in Cursor. They're like his Cursor shares would have been now worth$3 billion. He invested in Anthropic really early on. And they were breaking down on TV. he didn't have the funds at the time and he should have never stole from customers.

6:13Neil Patel:But on CNBC, they're talking about like he actually may be one of the best VCs of our time when it comes to picking companies before they're actually hot.

6:23Eric Siu:You know what they say, Neil? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, and he got too greedy. If you just played your main business and then continue to do what you're doing without having to go too far, everything would have been fine.

6:36Neil Patel:well he shouldn't have been using other people's money without their permission that's what I'm saying hogs get slaughtered yeah yeah so yeah

6:43Eric Siu:okay so and the sad thing is I think he came in at what like two what was it you looked at this right the valuation

6:53Neil Patel:his cloud shares would have been I mean cursor shares would have been worth 3 billion that's what CNBC reported

6:59Eric Siu:crazy all you needed to do

7:01Neil Patel:like he made a killing now knowing him because in Eric's analogy he's describing as a hog even though the guy was a vegetarian um but i get the the what is it called uh hogs can be vegetarian analogy yeah the analogy there you go i was blanking on it uh because i think that's a warren buffett phrase right uh warren buffett or charlie munger one of those one or the other but um yeah he he would have probably doubled down and continually gave him more money per funding round dude even robin hood he ended up buying i believe it was around nine percent when their stock was at all-time lows that thing went up almost 10x right that would have been another i think he bought like around 900 million dollars worth that would have turned to 9 billion the real problem is is one he stole money and should have never done that two the people who ran the liquidation the lawyers or whoever liquidated all this stuff at the wrong time like they undersold it even when it came to solana they were selling it for what 15 bucks or something like that

7:59Eric Siu:solana at that point during that period remember solana dropped on the one dollar i think something

8:05Neil Patel:like that or nine dollars no i think the cheapest was yeah like around nine but when they sold it it wasn't anywhere near there was climbing up to like 80 or 100 or 200 like you know it's not their

8:14Eric Siu:job it's okay their job's to liquidate so um neil one thing that we should talk about too i don't know if you guys are doing this i i think it's smart i just you know i don't have the time for Hopefully someone can take this and do this for us. But the rise of employee-generated content. Have you seen this?

8:32Neil Patel:No, I'm curious on that one. Are you talking about employee-generated social content? Yeah.

8:38Eric Siu:So let's just look at this for fun. So Clay, okay, so we know the company Clay, right? They do, you know, let's just say like data for sales or for outreach, for example. So let's see what we have going on with Clay. Let me share my screen with you all. so employee generated content is basically when you have your team creating content everyone's promoting each other which this is to me this has been done in the past but more and more people are doing it now um i think to build a pot like build company pods where people are just posting and so let's just look at this so clay has posts okay over here i don't know if they show employees these are all clay but a lot of clay employees will okay look so i think this does this guy work at Clay?

9:19Eric Siu:I don't know. I have no idea. But yeah, like growth at Clay over here. So Gabrielle's like, okay, this is happening over here. Okay. This one gets 116 likes. Okay. Varun posted this co-founder 433 likes on it. So they're just, they have employees posting, they're cross-posting each other. And that's a flywheel that works for them. And then I ended up finding this company over here. I'm going to talk to them on next week, I think, Vireo employee engagement, employee content. Here, let's look at this over here. Okay, so I, disclaimer guys, I'm going to talk to them. This was shared with me by Ryan at lunch.

9:56Eric Siu:So this is content that drives pipeline, a done-for-you service for vertical SaaS companies to turn LinkedIn into their number one channel. So basically, they make your entire team content engineers, agentic deep research, human taste. I'll let you know how it goes, but I've seen some companies do this really well. EGC is the new UGC. Make every employee generate pipeline in their sleep. So again, we'll see how this goes, Neil. I'll be the guinea pig for this one. And we'll come back to this later.

10:22Neil Patel:Yes, please report. By the way, remember you were doing a marketing experiment months ago and we followed up on it maybe a month ago where you're giving away, it was either AirPods or gift cards or something like that to set up calls with people with B2B companies.