OpenAI Just Made a Desperate $200M Investment

0:00Eric Siu:How Open and I paid$200 million for an 18-month-old podcast. So TBPN, which people thought it was Tech Bros Podcast Network. I thought it was that the whole time, but apparently it's called something else. So they paid$200 million for this podcast. And I'm opening up the post right now on Instagram. I didn't know it was$200 million.

0:18Neil Patel:I saw the post because the post I saw when they did the announcement, they didn't disclose the price. What did you think it was? I had no idea.

0:25Eric Siu:Yeah. So anyway, the key thing here is I'm not going to pull it up. So$200 million. And the thinking here is that we can talk about this. OpenAI, they get a lot of press written about them, right? Not all of it's good press right now, especially that New York Times article, right? So the thinking here is like Andreessen Horowitz has said that they want to own the media. They want to own what's being said about them. So I think this is what OpenAI is trying to do. And for Sam Altman, it's probably like, okay, it's$200 million. It's probably a drop in the bucket versus all the other stuff that they have going on.

0:53Eric Siu:So he probably let the transaction through. Now, so they have to turn off all their ads now. This podcast last year did$5 million with the 11 employees. This year it has like a$30 million run rate. That being said, so now it's going to be their distribution channel or whatever. You know, you can argue it's a distraction, but maybe they have someone like a VP that's managing it. What do you think about this transaction?

1:16Neil Patel:So they already have so many eyeballs. I think it's a waste, but that's just my two cents. Also owned by them, I think your guests are going to end up changing too. And who's going to want to be on it and not be on it. For example, why would Zuck want to continue to be on a podcast owned by OpenAI? That's just my two cents. Maybe I'm wrong. You and I are both media companies in and of ourselves, right? Because we have audiences. I find that media, having eyeballs is really valuable, but owning the properties isn't always the best. and you know like you know we we throw conferences all throughout the world and our own events so we just came uh back from canada and i was doing an event in toronto and i think our event is called

2:03Eric Siu:full circle i should know this but i don't know unbelievable i showed up i didn't even know we

2:08Neil Patel:were having an event but dude i'm speaking sometimes like four times a week where it's just so hard to keep track. It's just like, all right. You went from no speaking to full speaking. More than last year. It's just ridiculous.

2:20Eric Siu:I think this week alone, I gave five speeches. Wow. Including online?

2:26Neil Patel:No, not including online. All in person. All in person. It's becoming so much that I didn't even know we were throwing our own event. I know we throw our own event, but it's usually partnered with the Canadian Marketing Association. and this time they're just like we want to throw our own event like an np digital event so what our team did which i thought was really smart there's a conference a social media conference that i was speaking at the next day called social next and i spoke at their calgary event i spoke at their toronto event yesterday they had really good ratings and feedback from me um the founder of it said he's just like hey guess what his name is mike he's like did you know you were a highest rated speaker he's like of you know pretty much for the whole event people are ecstatic for you right or the is the whole event or the whole year for all their events so he's ecstatic and i didn't know that we partnered with him to throw our own event and uh they sold tickets to it i think they sold 180 tickets at 500 bucks a pop we also put money out of our uh pockets because we normally spend, call it$20 ,000,$25 ,000.

3:32Neil Patel:This is in Canadian dollars, by the way, on both end, ticket prices and how much we spend. So let's call it, I don't know how much the event did in profit, but my guess is it broke even based on everything I can see with the food and everything.

3:46Eric Siu:Which they usually do, by the way.

3:47Neil Patel:Yeah. So I was talking to my team, how we ended up doing this. I'm like, don't tell me we're getting in the conference business. And they said, no, we're not getting in conference business. Social Next runs it for us. It's our branded event. and they handle everything. It's for them to make profit or for them to lose money. We, of course, help them because we don't want them to lose money. And for the leads to go to you. Exactly. And for events, usually you end up losing money for the first few years. And most people don't realize that. But if you do a really good job, you can eventually make money.

4:20Neil Patel:They're really happy. They want to work with us more. And I was like, yeah, we should roll this out on the West Coast of Canada too because this conference organizer does both the East and the West Coast. And then I was like, we should do this in a lot of countries. So instead of us owning the conference, we don't want to own the conference. And I think my team made the right decision. But we're getting access to the media and the eyeballs. And it's kind of like ours because we're... You're co-branded. It's co-branded. But we don't have to deal with the logistics, the food or anything. And yes, eventually they'll make great profit from it.

4:52Neil Patel:We don't care for the profit because that's not our core business.

4:54Eric Siu:I don't think the money is in running media companies. That's so smart. that's actually something a lot of people should do. Because there's a lot of these conference businesses that are hungry for distribution audience and they just want to make money. Whereas you just wants the lead. Yeah, we just want the lead. To make more money, to be honest. Correct. Because we believe our business model

5:12Neil Patel:is better than running a conference.

5:13Eric Siu:Yeah, which is true. Okay, so I actually pulled up the deal here. So you got Zuck's face, Alex Karp's face from Palantir and you got Satya Nadella, right? So deal valued at 200 million. I'm sure there's some, maybe there's some stock, I don't know. And only 11 employees. and then$5 million ad revenue in 2025, on track for$30 million. Revenue per employee, assuming$30 million in sales is greater than Apple's. I think that's a stupid comparison to even talk about that.

5:38Neil Patel:$30 million versus... Do you want to know what Apple's revenue is? Billions and billions. I think... Is Apple getting close to$400? Oh, dude. Oh, wow. What is it? Yeah, I was right. $416 billion in revenue.

5:52Eric Siu:Yeah, I'll take the other one. Yeah. So, okay. Here's the thing. So, look at this. they achieve four to ten thousand views per episode which is not a lot 257 000 average views per clip on x the clips aren't marketing the clips are the product okay so average views on youtube 4k which is not much average live viewership 7k so the clips do really well for them which is cool because x has a lot of you know tech folks hanging out there so they are very much like in the middle of the the the culture or you can call it the zeitgeist i guess uh tech by media is an old playbook microsoft plus mbc plus msnbc equals msnbc's bloomberg's Bloomberg sells terminals, Robinhood acquired market snacks.

6:28Eric Siu:I don't think a lot of these go anywhere. And I think in this case, sure, maybe it's a drop in the bucket. But OpenAI had just said, because it's code red right now, because Anthropics is whooping their butt. They said, we got to focus right now. They said they're going to move it over to the enterprise. I had talked to someone yesterday. This is a salesperson because we're talking about working with their company. And he said, we're on ChatGPT Enterprise right now. We were going to switch to Anthropic, which would have been like$5 million switch. but ChatGPD was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

6:57Eric Siu:We have something coming out that's gonna crush co-work in the next month, which they probably aren't, but you can see they're losing a lot of deals left and right.

7:04Neil Patel:I believe they really are losing a ton of deals right now.

7:07Eric Siu:Yep. So anyway, on the topic of X, Neil, I did something.

7:12Neil Patel:Wait, let's go back really quickly to OpenAI. Did you see their marketing move that they just pulled off? What'd they do? They already have the eyeballs. They're losing a lot of people to Claude. So what did they just announce? cheaper pricing and integration with cloud yes yeah yeah the integration with uh with um

7:30Eric Siu:was it cloud code i think it's integration the cloud code yeah yeah yeah which is smart because

7:34Neil Patel:you're you're being the pipes right and in marketing if you can't win the mind share you can win a lot of people just on price like if your offer is just half the price or a third a lot

7:45Eric Siu:of people will just switch over and so with open claw right now by the way cloud uh anthropic had shut down the just to use the um the oauth which means that you can just use like a 200 subscription instead of paying like 7500 like i did last month um that so they shut down they shut off the loophole now so now a lot of people are switching over to using uh codex um or uh chat to be 5.4 sorry

8:07Neil Patel:from wait can you break down what are you talking about with the 7500 so what was happening with

8:13Eric Siu:open claw was people were using claude for it because claude is the still the best model to use OpenClaw with. Okay. So, but there was a loophole. You could actually tie in OpenClaw with your cloud subscription, which is only$20 or$200 a month. And Anthropic will subsidize your$200. It's like five to six grand worth of tokens. Okay. So people were abusing it that way, but that was costing Anthropic too much money. So they're like, we got to shut that down.

8:36Neil Patel:So they closed the loophole.

8:37Eric Siu:We got to shut that down. And when they shut that down, all of the entire OpenClaw community got mad. And so a lot of them are moving over to OpenAI's and they're just using their subscription, which OpenEye is okay with because they own OpenClaw, right? So, but this week, Claude, this is a misstep, I think. They launched their own version of Managed Agents, which is like an OpenClaw competitor. It's a piece of crap right now. It'll probably get better, but, you know, it's kind of trash. So, yeah, yeah. But NetNet, I think Anthropics is doing a really good job of shipping. Their high-velocity shipping is a way of marketing because they have all of these like clips that they're sharing on X and they're doing well.

9:14Eric Siu:Google does a really good job too. Google makes like a Gemma account. They have like a Nano Banana account. They have all these accounts and they all like cross promote each other and they get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.

9:23Neil Patel:It's funny, no one really talks about Nano Banana anymore, but it's so great. I love it. It's great. Yeah. If you're not using it and you're a marketer, you're making a big mistake. Quick break.

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10:05Neil Patel:All right, back to it.

10:06Eric Siu:Yeah. So something I want to talk about. So Jack Jack Dorsey wrote something about world intelligence. Okay. So I was reading this post and I was like, as I was reading this post, he talks about this concept of world intelligence where you have this one AI that's trained and integrated with all of your software. And then your entire team can query this. And I'm reading it. I'm like, dude, we have this already. So then I write a post on how you can deploy world intelligence to X. That post gets about 500 ,000 views on it. And what I realized, and I don't know what you're seeing, Neil, but a lot of companies have reached out to us after that, right?

10:38Eric Siu:They're like, and we already have, we have single brain, right? Single brain is this world intelligence. And, you know, vibe coded website or not, it drives leads. I'll tell you that much. So a couple, a couple of publicly traded multi-billion dollar companies reached out this week. And what I've learned from the AI needs from people is everyone wants AI. Two, they have no idea what they want. Okay. But number three, they want it now. Okay. So, but, so everyone, to your point, like as you were saying earlier, so one company is like, we want to do, we're working with a large agency holding company.

11:08Eric Siu:right now, you know, we want to do a thousand ads a month. They're too slow. We want this for ads. Okay. Another company is like, oh, we want the cold outbound piece of what you do with single brain because it does end to end workflows, builds out cold emails, everything, right? Deal Resurrector. And so I've just realized that one, everyone needs a single brain and that's kind of our wedge into everything. But I think we're going to see a lot more of this because Ramp, you know, the credit card company. So they do this too. They have something called Glass, I think and it's like their world intelligence for their their internal team where they can query whatever they want And then they have this thing called sensei.

11:43Eric Siu:It's like a big like japanese like arc and sensei Will coach people and say oh you need these skills over here as you're adding this and then everyone has their own agent, right? So we're already doing that internally and my team is saying one person said i'm 40 % faster One person onboarded himself using one of these agents He's like it's a nine out of ten and someone else yesterday was complaining. I say hey, hey, how do we fix this? I like I think i'm dependent on this thing now So I think this is where the world's going. And I think the fact that I understand more now why Jack Dorsey was confident cutting 40 % of people.

12:15Neil Patel:I also think, and you're seeing this, he cut 40 % of people because they just weren't growing. So they had kind of no choice.