Why AMD lost to Intel/NVIDIA despite having a superior product, and How do you differentiate your agency?

0:00You want to know why AMD lost to Intel and Nvidia despite having a superior product? I thought AMD has a larger market cap than Intel now right now they do but before they did I have this chart over here it shows when AMD beat Intel AMD overtook Intel in 2022 so I'm looking at this chart you see the red one that's Nvidia and then AMD's in green and then you have Intel in blue but remember when we were growing up everything was about Intel that sounded like Intel inside so what Intel did back in the day AMD has a quad core, right? So what Intel did was they just combined two dual cores together and made it a quad core.

0:39When AMD is like, we have a dual core, it's like, okay, let's just combine two. And so Intel did a better job of marketing, and that's how Intel was ahead of AMD for the longest time. And Intel also had the stickers on laptop, Intel Inside. Everyone wanted an Intel. I wanted an Intel before. It was cool back in the day. So, okay, this tweet is from... Wait, how did AMD lose? They're double the size of Intel. I'm confused on this. This is back in the day. Now AMD is like, they're on top of it. By the way, you know Jensen's cousin who's the CEO of AMD? Is it really? It's this woman. She's super smart.

1:20She didn't found AMD. NVIDIA was founded by Jensen and then I forgot what her name is but she was a hired CEO and then she's like brought it up to what it is now. Yeah, she's amazing. It's Lisa Su. Yeah, Lisa Su. There you go. And what's funny is, is there was a video clip of her at a Formula One race and talking about like, oh, who are you? Should we be here? Yeah. And I think they were like sponsoring a car. She's like, oh, I'm the CEO of AMD. Oh, that's cool. And I was like, I'm pretty sure she is supposed to be there. Maybe the person interviewing isn't supposed to be there. But yeah, it was a funny clip.

1:55Okay, so this guy,

2:00Hamant Mohaptera. Anyway, sorry for butchering that. So he says, so now that NVIDIA has far outstripped the market cap of AMD and Intel, I thought this would be a fun story to tell. I spent six plus years at AMD engineering in mid to late 2000s to help, helping design the CPU, APU, GPUs that we see today. Back then, it was unimaginable for AMD to beat Intel and market cap. We did in 2020. And for NVIDIA to beat both. In fact, AMD almost bought NVIDIA, but Jensen wasn't ready to sell unless he replaced Hector Ruiz of AMD as the CEO of the joint company. The world would have looked very different had that happened.

2:36Here's the inside scoop of how and why AMD saw the GPU opportunity, lost it, and then won it back in the backdrop of NVIDIA's far more insane trajectory. And lessons I still carry. So this is a long tweet storm, but basically, let me just give you the point over here. So they were always on top of it when, to what I said earlier, they're very engineering led. They're always about the product. And they kept saying, they kept doing all these things. They kept building on top of engineering, but Intel just kept beating the crap out of them when it came to marketing. So your story matters, how you position things matters at the end of the day.

3:10It's not just all about your product. You need to have both. do you remember those old intel commercials where they had like that indian dude i'm indian by the way for anyone listening that indian dude who looked like nerdy but cool yeah they're like showcasing how life is that they did that and then microsoft then um then i think it became like uh like apple versus um pc thing right but they did this first is what you're saying i don't know if they did it first but either way they try to make really cool commercials and that cool indian dude wasn't actually a real intel engineer they were a paid actor yeah from my understanding yeah but um but yeah they did a lot of cool marketing campaigns i don't know if laptops put their sticker on there for free or if they paid for it either way it was great marketing but yeah intel was amazing at marketing where they failed was to keep up with the product yep i just want to call there's a couple more things so while i don't know what apu is um what while all this apu work was going on amd totally missed the iphone wave when we built chips for the pc world was moving to laptops.

4:08When we moved to laptops, world moved to tablets. When we moved there, world moved to cell phones. We also missed the GPU wave trying to introduce a fundamentally better, but also fundamentally new architecture, APUs. So CPU plus GPU on the same die. We love same die, everything, I guess. Category creation is hell, but if you're going through hell, keep going. We hesitated, 2008 crisis happened, and we were totally caught with our pants down. After that, AMD basically lost the market to pretty much everyone. Intel, ARM, NVIDIA, I learned it the hard way how superior products lose to superior distribution lock-ins and GTM.

4:41So go-to-market, it's obviously, we're just talking about, you know, the market, marketing and all that, but superior distribution lock-in, you talk about all the partnerships, right? So they're saying the superior partnerships and distribution beats out superior marketing. Yeah. And also with NVIDIA, like, I don't know if you know this, but to use the GPS, you have to use our software too. So that's lock-in too. I did not know that. Yeah. Their software, we're not technical here, but from the interviews I've seen with Jensen, that software is required to power everything. And when I was in the UAE, I was in Dubai, and I met someone.

5:16He was telling me how his son wanted a chip, an NVIDIA chip for one of their computers or something like that. He's a big gaming guy. Yeah. And I don't know why you would need an NVIDIA chip, but let's just go with it. I used to buy NVIDIA video cards for my games, just specifically for games. When I was like nine years old. And he was saying that they're not allowed in the UAE, as in the US doesn't let them ship it out to other countries. Now it's like a national security thing. Yeah, and this guy is really well connected and rich. I'm not saying like he's worth a million dollars or a hundred million.

5:48I'm talking about like billion plus. So I'm like 99 % sure he has his hands on that chip for his kid. And he used to live in the States anyways. But, you know, yeah, these chips are hard to get a hold of. Imagine if everyone can buy these NVIDIA chips and they could actually produce the amount that people want. Because there's still a shortage of them. Yeah, I think this has a lot of room to run for the next 5, 10 years or so. We're not giving investment advice. But the final thing I'll say here is this is what kept AMD together. I think we can both learn from this. AMD was a tribe. For so many, it was their first job out of college in the late 80s and 90s and 2000s.

6:25And they are still there after 30 to 40 years. My first manager at AMD retired there after 30 plus years. My second manager is still there. My super manager has spent 40 years there by now. This is how they survived multiple near deaths. And this is why when it comes to AMD, I still say we as if I'm still a fan boy as if I was a college student. So I think the lesson here is a lot of business is just about surviving at the end of the day. And I don't think we talk about that enough. I don't think enough people talk about that. It is just about survival. If you survive long enough, good things will happen.

6:57I had a great lunch today at my normal spot. Yeah, Alvarez. And I met this dude who was in the marketing experience space. Good dude. I won't name his name, but I'll share some numbers. You're talking about a little bit more than 100, 120-ish in revenue, good profit. And he's been doing this for, I don't want to give away the exact amount of years, but more than 10 years, less than 20. Okay. So it was a good amount of years. And he did this straight up right out of college. And people were just like, man, you know, it's hard to build a big company and you know, it's, it's tough. What's helped him succeed was just doing something for a very long period of time.

7:44And people forget that just being persistent, not giving up and keep pushing in a big enough market. You can make money if you're patient and you're willing to just play the long game. But most people are not willing to put 10 years into one company because most entrepreneurs have this ADD approach was like, Oh yeah, this is starting to work. Let me go do five other things. Well, if it's starting to work, why would you go do five other things? Just focus on the thing that is working. And it's funny. We'll say that, but like we had to go through it to actually accept it. Right. Like, like I read all the books in the world saying, focus, focus, focus.

8:15Right. But I still went and did all these other things. Right. It wasn't until I got punched in the face. You've been punched in the face before we realized that, okay, fine, focus yes yeah and it was funny what i think made eric and i really focus is when we both focus unintentionally right maybe we didn't have things to do or during covid we didn't have a ton of uh possibilities when we both focus we saw our numbers go up and we're like huh yeah maybe we should focus more it's really hard to focus by the way but it's it is the way yeah even right now i don't just focus on my business i actually spend most of my time on mna like i'm really laser focus just like on one aspect of it.

8:54And that's the highest leverage activity that you have. For me, I believe so. Yes. And I really love spending time on it. It's like, how do we get a deal done? How do we grow faster? How do we expand into more regions? And it's like a puzzle too, because you have to come up with different deal structures and there's like, people have different incentives. People want different things. So it's all like a puzzle that you have to put together. Dude, totally agree with that. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners think YPO or EO but for agency owners and I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials so this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her what do you like most about the group she said having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas the leads are great too yes we share leads in this group as well this one from Alian he says the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds great experienced members getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric getting advice from others as well.

9:48And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Speaking of agencies and growing, someone actually asked me this question yesterday, and I was curious your thoughts on it. How do you differentiate your agency? So for us right now, so our mission, I'll read the mission statement first, and then how kind of we're thinking about things and how I've been planting that seed internally, right?

10:26So our mission is to be the most innovative marketing company that drives customers. So the last sentence is very important, but what does that word innovative mean? It means we have to be on top of trends. We have to be trying the newest things. We actually have to be getting customers for them, right? We have to be experimenting quite a bit. So there's a lot that goes into that innovation. The thing I tell my team behind the scenes is like, look guys, like we can only afford to hire the top 5 % of talent the way I see things. I have a little uneasiness about M &A right now because one, you can buy the customers, but two, if you need to cut a bunch of staff, that kind of sucks.

10:58My point of saying this is someone like you, let's say you understand AI. If you have an army, you have no shortage of ideas. I have no shortage of ideas too. It's all about execution at the end of the day. We're both constrained by what? Resources right now. Once we have 500 to 1 ,000 people that are resource, like these are drop-in agents. We've talked about agents, right? But drop-in remote workers that can just get quickly onboarded to your company. Then you have 500 to 1 ,000 people actually helping you maybe in the next five to 10 years, right? Especially when artificial general intelligence comes out.

11:32So the way we see things right now, I'll give you an example of this, is we have something that is going to come out in two to three weeks where we can hook in with all your ads. Am I making you tired? No, keep going. So you can tell me he's about to hit it I was about to yawn. So, okay. So let's say we hook in with all your ads. Would you say if you're running 500 ads right now, what percent of your ads are aligned with your landing pages? If we're running 500 ads? Probably 450 of them at least. Are aligned. Yes. Okay. That's not the case for most people, right? But we also have a big team. Yeah.

12:06But for most people, you would say, what would you say the percentage is pretty low, right? It's usually less than 10%. but that's a, it's, it's a biased question to ask me because as marketers and a marketing agency, or people practice what we preach. Yeah. But right now I'm saying, okay, let's say the normal person. No, no, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying we're, we're not the average. I would say we're rare. I would say most people from what we see are less than 10%. My point is, so we have, we're going to have something we're going to hook in with, with your ads and basically align your landing pages with your creatives.

12:37Right. But, and then we just want to give it away for free. Right. So we want to do a lot of things like that, where it's, um, it's led by technology because I've always seen marketing as like, if we're not leveraging technology, then what are we doing? So I'd say that's, that's our edge, right? I don't want to say we're an AI enhanced agency. I'm just going to say innovation. So you, your turn. Yeah. So if I could say that, you know, we're independent performance shop that really tries to over-service customers because in our industry a lot of the big competitors that we go against are run by accounts that's good but i would actually have to say if when i look at differentiation what we get hit up the most from and what people perceive us as even though we're full service and we'll do paid ads and social and email and conversion optimization etc our biggest rfps yeah seo specifically what kind of seo uh i don't know global seo i was gonna say enterprise seo so it is enterprise you are right because most people want global seo are big large corporations the biggest thing that we get hit up for not percentage wise but revenue wise from new inquiries like potential revenue is companies who are like we are this clothing company we operate and 50, 60 countries, we need you to help us with our SEO in all of them.

13:59Or we're a payment processing company. Please help us optimize our rankings. And all the tier one countries in North America, Europe, and Asia, right? And then from there we land and expand and try to get into more. But that differentiation, we didn't necessarily try to push, but that is what people see us as. And that's what, you know, I would say there's not too many other competitors that I can think of that really do SEO on a global scale that are well known for it. I mean, that makes the most sense to me because one, it is a lot of people when we talk about SEO and like there's definitely a leg up because your background is SEO, my background is SEO.

14:40But so when we talk about it internally, it's just like levels above other people. And so that gets you the deal, right? And then you talk about expanding. So I think it is good to be known for one thing. I think the way you crafted your one-liner was really good, but I think it is, like, we do get a lot of wins on the SEO side. Yes. Because you've actually done stuff with SEO, right? And so have I. I am baffled by the number of SEOs in the world that just haven't really done much. Exactly. And what's funny is what you may think is your differentiation may not be what other people see. and my advice to agencies is a make sure you check out marketing school.io slash agency yep uh to join our agency there you go so then that way we can help you grow your agency but the big thing that would be one and we talk about differentiation in there but b would be if you think it's one thing and everyone else perceives it something else and that something else is working for you, lean into it.

15:40You don't have to create a new narrative, lean into what's working in the market. Another differentiation that could work is either verticalization or service line, but the service has to be unique. Like for example, doing just marketing for Gen Z or something like that, especially if that's not as common within the country that you're operating in. Or another differentiation is adapting before changes are happening. So in marketing, everyone's talking about the cookie list world that should eventually end up happening sometime next year with the Google change. We'll see if they delay it or not.

16:16But when you look at that cookie list world, you'd be like, oh, we're an agency that has our own cookie list attribution software. And we can end up figuring out how to end up maximizing your revenue and where to attribute your revenue to. and it does MMM. So then that way we can maximize your overall revenue with all your spend. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well.

16:53They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. and now back to the episode dude you know what it is it's uh for agencies you need a service hook you need one service to hook them in it's no different than marketing you need a hook yes you're spot on you get one service to hook them in and then you upsell from there but what's funny is in europe we've been seeing more rfps for multiple services i mean i thought that's the standard base case for you now uh yeah but usually when people like want to work with the agency at least of our size because we're still small right like we don't have a hundred thousand employees i'd say you're mid-sized oh we're small let's see let's you're probably right let's just look at this are you considering about a company size for based on smb of the united states i'm just overall company size we're considered a large enterprise based on u.s definitions of what's a large corporation i think that's mid no it's large whoa okay okay ah see 100 okay okay you you you win this one.

17:57So$100 to$999 is medium-sized businesses, and then over$1 ,000 is enterprise. Yeah, but they also base it off of revenue, but we beat that on both aspects. And it's also done by industry as well. The reason I know this is because for certain types of contracts, like governments and stuff like that, certain ones go to different sizes. So I was hoping that we would be a SMB. Yeah. Well, if that's the case in those cases, can you just say, hey, I have this company over at MPXL that only has 200 or whatever employees. It doesn't work that way. I wish it did. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested.

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19:08This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this black Friday one to remember. Yeah. But yeah, so with differentiation, you got to figure out what makes you unique and you got to lean into it. And you better ride that wave before other people are. Just like we were talking about AMD, right? With that example you gave, they kept missing the wave. If you keep missing a wave, these waves are great ways to differentiate.

19:44It's why a lot of agencies are like, oh, wow, Amazon marketing is hot. You manage Amazon ad spend? Boom. Oh, TikTok's hot. They just release ads. You manage TikTok ads? Boom. Acquired, right? People are looking for what's the next hot thing that we can cross out into all our existing customers. And that's what the holding companies do. Well, I think that's it. Make sure you guys all go to marketingschool.io slash agency to join the Agency Owners Association. You got it. and leave a rating review and subscribe too because we haven't gotten one for a while. So give us one. All right, goodbye guys.