Back in the Truth Zone, Exponential Growth Continues, Athleisure is Out, Brothers Don't Use NDA's

30:05Will says, every decision I've made that wasn't an instant hell yes has been a mistake. Every pro con list is an admission. The thing isn't worth it. The path God has laid out for you is so obvious. It feels like getting bludgeoned. And Delian says, basically my approach to seed investing, pure intuition, super obvious when you're bludgeoned by the presence of a phenomenal founder. The moment you're writing out pros and cons, it's doomed. And yeah, I mean, this post by Will really resonated. And I think a lot of people enjoyed Delian's post as well. And I think there's something that even if you're not an investor, just leaning in on that intuition.

30:41There's something universal about this because every time somebody posts about this phenomenon, I immediately am like that totally applies to like a very specific decision that I need to make in the next like 48 hours, 72 hours. Is it a good decision? And it's such a good reminder. So Delian will repost this once a week. You're doing a service for the community so we can all make better decisions. Yeah, it is tricky. Like if you're kind of more of a quantitative thinker or like a frameworks guy, even around gut, you want to put a framework. I had a friend who was like, oh, it's all vibes. I'm a vibe aligner.

31:19That's my whole job is to just align vibes. I'm a vibe architect, he called himself. I was like, that's good. But then later in the conversation, he described how he made like a pro and con list about whether or not he should go on vacation. I was like uh I think you could just lean on vibes for that one like all the vacations fun and he had a whole framework for why vacations are important and it was very thoughtful and it really resonated with me and that was a good part of the conversation but truly like if you're actually in the vibe architect world you probably don't need to be doing the the framework stuff at all but it is hard I've run into investors very successful investors who cannot describe their investment process at all and it's very frustrating because everyone wants a framework everyone wants a pattern or a playbook that they can, and that's the stuff that normally does really well on social media is like, just do this checklist, just build this model and this will deliver results.

32:12But as soon as you can concretize it, you lose all the alpha. And so the vibes are important. I try to be honest with myself when I'm looking at my own portfolio, my best pre-seed investment ever is a company where when I met the CEO, you know, within literally probably three minutes of talking. I knew I wanted to invest. Uh, I knew the company would work and sort of get to the level of traction that it has. I knew that there were risks and many of those risks are still like real and they're sort of like steadily trying to like knock them down. Uh, but it's important, you know, even now when I talk about that investment with, with other investors, I'm not going to like go reverse engineer some like super complex decision-making process because so much adventure is just it's obviously just getting into the companies that matter and then uh you know yeah it's like pretty binary like where you write or not right yep let's go to sam hogan he says someone should start a studio of cracked devs plus gtm team and just look at the yc batch every season for the best ideas and then front run them so this is this is basically yc but just doing it to the last batch.

33:24Yeah. Right. Look at Daniel, look at Daniel, like, you know, being a crack dev, creating a company in a specific space. And then their new request for startups was basically like his business. Uh, one of the, one of the lines was like his exact business. So YC is basically saying, Hey, cracked other crack devs. We want to do more of these come, come compete. What's interesting is that there are two narratives about YC. Like one is that, that it's like, uh, Oh, like copy paste on a bunch of ideas that are like, you know, popular at the time. But then there's the other one which is like the the fast ceo was no not fast uh the uh what was his name the the guy who started love.com breslau breslau he was like why sees a mafia like yeah they will crown a a champion and then they will never do a deal in that space again and it's kind of like totally not totally not true yeah so i think it's actually super positive if you have one if you have one company that is super super promising solving an important issue why would we not want five other teams like attacking it from different angles because you're more likely to create a generational company that could help you know millions of businesses you know employ you know hundreds of thousands of people over time all these different things you know create some transformative technology we we actually want we want a density of smart people pursuing specific problems.

34:47And so it's generally, it's kind of annoying if you're the founder that's being cloned by three to four other YC companies, but use it as fuel, right? Like Dara, Dara is somebody, you know, he posted the other day, he was like, you know, some competitor, like direct competitor got announced and he's like, cool. Like another reason for me and my team to work 12 hours a day. Yeah. Yeah. I do think that the, the like direct competitor thing is a bit overrated because if you're really if you're really delivering on your mission and growing really quickly like these should be potential acquires potential talent farms yeah and yeah look at and look at anduril like anduril has like it does 100 100 companies that are now like doing effectively like they either break out or they and become partners and or they get you know it's like off balance sheet r &d yeah yeah yeah yeah at a certain point like once you once you have the formula dialed in and you are the the power lock company the competition is actually beneficial to you totally um well that's a great because those are yeah those are those are other companies that are upskilling there oh this is this is uh fantastic mike shevitt over at traba he says today's news there was a fire in new york city where his company is based a large fire potentially in the building it might have been in the same building large fire breaks out on soho rooftop and the and they got press around this because they kept working and it says fdny hottest startup in nyc traba stays locked in despite fire i love that they called nbc new york and got this done it's amazing and they actually went over the ramp office yeah yeah ramp hosted everybody i think like what a heroic move potential brother of the week right potential brother of the week never stop fantastic grinding yeah fantastic i mean he has he's done a great job of monopolizing the the hard work ethos in a way that gets a non-cringe way yeah it's not it's not cringy to people who are insiders to tech it is a little cringy to to outsiders who don't understand where the alpha exists in this i don't know if it's i don't think it's cringy to outsiders he has haters he has no it pushes people away exactly but it pushes the right people exactly exactly but but he hasn't become an outcast there are some people who post like hustle porn but they never build anything and it's just hustle porn for hustle yeah this is an example of living the brand and capturing the moment perfectly yeah by getting some some and you take a look at this dude and he's jacked and like clearly lives like every moment like at 110 yeah and so you just see that it's like he's he's the real deal he has the proof of body totally and the proof of like work ethic and everything yeah fantastic congrats to mike for making it through the fire always stay locked in always stay locked in always love her i love it do we have another promoted post promoted post from ted feldman he says engineers wanted durin durin is hiring a founding software engineer if you want to help build the next thousand minds in america this role is for you.

37:54Incredible opportunity. We love mining. We love rare earth minerals. Duren is a company. Oh, it's not crypto. It's actually mining. No, it's real mining. Let's go. Mining for rare earth minerals. Look at this, you know, fantastic asset that he has here. Fantastic. You know, you know, software engineers and tech has spent, you know, decades sort of looking out into the world and looking up at the stars. And it's time that we look down into the ground. Let's drill, baby, drill. If you are a software engineer, incredible opportunity to go to duranminingtechnologies.applytojob.com. Go apply for this job.

38:34Tell them the technology brother sent you. And thank you to Ted for mining. On to bigger and better things. Fantastic. Good luck out there. Let's go to Diego. Diego says, you can get the USA citizenship by marrying a USA citizen. They also had to introduce the H-1B and the O-1 visa because politicians knew you autistic MFs had higher chances of discovering AGI than making eye contact with a woman for over five seconds. I mean, incredible foresight by our politicians. Fantastic. And we love the H-1B program. There's some great companies that make the process easier. We want all the smartest, most ambitious people in the entire world to come to the United States and build the next trillion dollar company here.

39:24If you need a recommendation letter, this is a thing for the O-1 and H-1B, hit me up. I'm happy to write you a letter of recommendation. I've done it many times. Any TB listeners get recommendation letters. 100%. Just give me a little bit of your background. We'll talk and I'll figure something out. But I'm happy to write these letters. I want to recruit. I want America to grow. I want a billion Americans crushing it. And I'm happy for all these paths to citizenship. We need to acquire. We need to be a talent magnet. Yep. We need to brain drain all the un-American companies. All the un-American countries need to be brain drained.

40:01Every single one. Every single one. We got all the giga chads in America. We'll talk. You build. Yep. but Morgan Barrett says, how it feels to wake up and see your midnight throwaway tweet doing numbers? Low, low tam, low tam banger. Because I think, I think this is one of those things. Super viral. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He got 35K likes on a tweet that said, I have a 100 % hit rate with cold emails when I use a female name and an EDU address. Yeah, so I think he got like a thousand followers too overnight, which is pretty intense. Yeah, huge. Congrats, Morgan. Good post. Congrats to Morgan. Yeah, I want every single person in America to be able to experience what he just did.

40:46It's amazing. When you get something that goes past 10, 20K, it's like your phone's just exploding. Every time you open it up, the dopamine's just rushing. It's fantastic. Incredible feeling. Incredible feeling. And it's easier than ever given the new X algorithm because everything is getting more pushed out to the edges of the curve, essentially. Like you will have a post that goes mega viral and then the next one will get 26 likes. Yeah. No. And this guy, Morgan, like had likely that, you know, hack that he has of using female EDU emails. He could dramatically change, you know, US GDP growth this year.

41:26If enough people put that to work and sort of hit their quota, hit their quarterly goals, hit their annual goals. Yep. So thank you to Morgan for sharing this little hack. I don't know if he should have leaked that outfit. I don't know if he should have leaked it. I don't know if she, every, every, every AI sales agent, like product is going to be like, check this box. If you want to use it. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an AI sales agent startup by a for-profit university just to get a.eu so that they can license those to people. That's fantastic. I wonder how he's getting a.edu that, that sounds, maybe he's using his, Dude, there's a small but profitable SaaS company built, a marketplace where people at universities can lease, they should lease their emails to sales reps.

42:18So if you are a young technology brother, maybe in college today, start that marketplace. I think you could get a million dollars of ARR off that business and retire your parents. do it it's great uh probably probably very uh against the terms of use probably but uh great things oftentimes have to sort of skirt the rules uh ben says the bit have may have gone too far and he posts a screenshot that says ev cars that will be launched by the tata motors owned british car manufacturer ben hilak the maker of the new logo previously worked with apple as a designer He, however, claimed that the logo's letters are all in uppercase.

43:02Responding to users on his post, Ben remarked that the logo actually resembles a Jaguar, with J being the tail and R the head. What is he talking about? I don't think so at all. So Jaguar had their sort of rebrand, re-announcement this week. Copy nothing. It went horribly. It couldn't have gone worse. I saw the CEO was like talking to the boomer media saying like, oh, actually a bunch of people really liked it. There is a hot take that it's like, at least they got attention because this is the most Jaguar has been talked about in years. Yeah, but like they could have done something like this and got much better attention.

43:34There were just a lot of better ways they could do it. But Ben went out, did the smart thing, captured the moment, claimed credit for doing the rebrand. He's a designer. Wait, is he not a Jaguar? He's not a Jaguar. He has nothing to do with Jaguar. And he's getting quoted in the media now? So he went out and claimed credit and got picked up. And in this situation for Ben, this kind of attention I think is fantastic. Oh, this is him. He's – oh, I just put it together that Ben Heilig, Ben Heilig. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he was joking and then he – They picked it up. They picked it up as news. Because I think – Got to go with the truth zone.

44:08I don't – yeah, I don't know the guy, but I think he's got a cool startup, great designer, great taste. Fantastic. This is a future Rahul Ligma bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is fantastic. He's really the next Ligma. The J is the tail. Wait, we should have an award called the Technology Brothers Ligma Award. Ligma Award for greatest troll. Greatest troll. Troll of the month. But that brings us to our next promoted post. This one from Porsche. They announced an ALD Porsche 993 Turbo. It's going to be on display November 22 to 23rd at ALD London flagship, which is at 32 Broadway. I have not gotten into it.

44:50It seems like a very patent thing. Do you have any ALD stuff? I do not. It's very popular. I actually think I may have a pair of garden clogs from them that I use to get out to my sauna cold plunge setup. But that's the extent to which I wear ALD. But fantastic partnership. Couldn't have been better time. The car looks amazing. Look at this thing. They released a, I think it was like a 60 second. 993 turbo what what era is that is that the late that is nine i think late 90s okay um i really shouldn't know that and and and so are they are they just modifying is it like a resto mod situation where they're modifying an old car they actually yeah they took a yeah 1995 so 1995 wow uh they took a you know a great iteration of it and just looks like they just rebuilt it redid the interior probably did some work we need we need tj parker to break it down for us because i know he's a big Porsche guy.

45:47I know he's a big air-cooled older Porsche guy. I want his analysis because I just, I don't know enough about that particular model to say if it's great. But I imagine that would be a great, a great car for any technology brother or any capital allocator out there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to need some serious AUM if you want to follow the 1 % rule. Yep. But fantastic spec. And a way to stand out. And yeah, it couldn't have, I doubt, It's not some stock Turbo S that they just picked up at the dealership like last week. Yeah, yeah. Embarrassing. Embarrassing. I'd never do that. Yeah, never, never.

46:25Once a year. So anyways, fantastic spec. Thank you to Porsche. Cool collaboration. I think this does more for ALD than it does for Porsche. That's true. But it looks like a win-win. is that the Jaguar thing went so poorly that everyone was like searching for car news and then immediately being like, brilliant move for them to launch this. Like there was a Volvo ad that went viral that was shot by some like award-winning cinematographer. And they were like, oh, it's so brilliant that they respond. It's like, no, they shot this like months ago. Well, yeah, so here's my question. It's completely unrelated.

47:02They just got lucky that it came out at the same time. But Volvo had like a pronatalist one. Porsche launched this ALD one that looks very retro. very like classic and so people were immediately like oh porsche gets it and it's like they do but it wasn't this has been in the works for a long time jaguar that's not how these firms work like they didn't have like some crap but here's the thing i would give them it's funny because obviously this campaign and project collaboration have been probably in the works for like a year like at least a year i don't think this is the first time they've actually collaborated but i think they shot a video like yeah yeah they shot a video but the funny thing is if they did see the jaguar announcement and then move their launch date up you think so if no if they did that it would be like it's it's literally like the popular kid like like you know sees like the nerd like do something and get embarrassed and then comes over and like gives him a wedgie it's like you don't need to like you don't like they're already they're already like down bad enough like you don't need to like kick jaguar when they're down but porsche uh obviously a fan and a uh you know, client, but you know, great move all around.

48:06And hopefully when we do an event in London, we'll be able to go see it. Fantastic. Oh, this is brutal. Danny Simileron says ideas are worthless with a smile. And then Sam Hogan, who we just talked about, double down, little piece of startup culture is pretty stupid. Ideas are not worthless. Most people should spend considerably more time thinking about what to work on before they start. And I couldn't agree with more with that. I wonder if this was a bait post by Danny. I mean, there's always been the question, ideas or execution, obviously. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Nurture versus nurture, obviously both wins, but ideas are valuable, we know this.

48:46They're valuable. That said, you still should be able to tell every single person what you're doing and not be concerned because execution does matter so much. And to build a great company, you need to make oftentimes hundreds of decisions a week. Maybe not everyone is super consequential, But if you are the right founder to build a generational company, you need a incredible idea or you need a series of good ideas and string them together. And then you need to be able to make the right decision over and over and over and over. And the wrong founder for the right idea will just make the wrong decision, make the wrong decision, make the wrong decision.

49:22And they just take themselves down a path that like is just bad. Right. Yep. And so I think ideas matter a lot. that said uh it is the most negative signal when you talk to a founder and they're like cagey about their idea or they're like oh like i mean i still like maybe three times a year we'll take a meeting with a company and they try to get me to sign an nda and i'm just like dude like the fact that you think that you've discovered something like so novel when i've seen like five other teams do the exact same thing this year is like just shows you're just never gonna win there might be some ip down the stack yeah sure but no i don't need to i don't need to know like that yeah yeah i don't need to know like what the actual like ip is but um but yeah don't do not if you're a technology brother out there in in execution mode and not like you have your initial idea but there will be like you said a series of ideas that get you from one hill to the next and it's easy to get stuck in manager mode like lucy didn't start with break didn't start with breakers yet breakers now are one of the most consequential products.

50:23Exactly, and the reason that I thought about that was basically like during the depths of COVID, I was in Santa Barbara and was like, I remember being just on the phone with David, the CEO, like walking outside, just thinking about like what we could do that would be different. And we just came up with it on a phone call. And it was very much like removed from the day-to-day of like being in an office, talking about like, you know, very tactical things. We were able to zoom out and that really transformed the business. And so giving yourself space, this is like what we talked about with our friend who wrote in about like if something's not working, should you just keep going or should you sell your company?

51:00And my advice to him was like clear your calendar and just try and go and think and talk to interesting people, people that are way ahead of you, people who are giants in the industry, just to break something loose and try something different. Like most of the time, if your business is up and running and you're making some amount of cash flow, things are working, employees have their jobs, you can step back pretty significantly and reset and go back into founder mode, go back into idea mode and come up with some interesting ideas. Here's where I'd leave it. If you're a technology brother and you send a, if you're pitching a pre-seed company and you ask the investor to sign an NDA and you hear about it, we will block you from all of our accounts and you'll have to create like new burners to consume the content.

51:45I do think this is going to be a pendulum swing thing though. And eventually there's going to be the Chad founder who forces everyone to sign NDAs and makes it very embarrassing to the firms and degrades them and it becomes a status symbol. Unless you're that guy, unless you're that guy, it's going to be hard to pull off. Just don't do it as a novice. It has to be a particular tactic. Third time founder, at least two nine figure exits. Exactly. Then you can make people sign your crazy documents. Let's go to Jay Malik. He says, too many people want to bring manufacturing back to the US. It's brave, but many commodities are never returning.

52:22The real problem is cultural. Time on the shop floor, wherever it is, is more valuable than in office meetings. This is especially true today. Time to touch metal. I like that. Touch metal. Touch metal. This is interesting. It's brave. The problem is cultural. I don't quite get what he's saying. Is he just saying that there's too much, like, rah, rah, okay, we need to bring manufacturing back and not enough people actually doing it? Yeah, I think he's just alluding to the fact that like the deindustrialization of America is something that should be unwound. Like we need to focus on industrializing, reindustrializing, however you want to put it.

53:06But yeah, not every single category is like conducive to a new venture backed startup or roll up. um and uh anyway so jai is somebody i don't know him personally but uh you know good investor i think he's back uh with his own company uh he actually had a fund and decided to return capital at one point because he felt like everything was too overvalued at the early stage uh but he's back to building himself now and and i and and uh we should try to learn more about his company yeah it's great i do think that there's an interesting thesis i heard that um the path to real and that re-industrialization in America is not through trying to play the last war, but instead focusing on the next war, which is humanoid robotics.

53:50And if we really get that right, and we really get the automation, right, we still have the human capital problem that we need to solve in America. Like how do we give people rewarding jobs, fulfilling jobs, but really focusing on automation is maybe the only way that we can kind of leapfrog our way back into the game. So key. But I'm rooting for you. Time to touch some metal. Let's go to the next promoted post. Jordy, what you got for me? This one is from my friend, Charlie Ma. He says, we are looking to hire a chief of staff in NYC for Pathlight VC. This role will engage all functions of the firm, including special projects, founder experiments, portfolio engagement, and more.

54:30You'll also get to work directly with me as well as Charlie's partners. So anyways, if you don't know Charlie Ma, you're going to be hearing about him a lot in the next few decades. I see this guy. opportunity i see this guy on the midas list very soon he is he is an absolute future some personnel news potentially oh yeah we'll be covering uh whoever does this charlie is an absolute chad in fintech or finance tech as we like to say on the podcast or finance technology if you're going to be um if you're going to expand on it or more precise but anyways charlie uh i think was a head of growth at plaid and then was the head of growth at ramp like very early and now has his own fund.

55:12They invest in a bunch of different areas and Charlie is extremely sharp. So go apply for this job or if you're a founder, I would try to get him to give you money because he'll add a lot, a lot, a lot of value. So thank you to Charlie. Apply for the job and tell Charlie the Technology Brothers sent you. Cheers. Cheers. Let's go to St. Dietschy. They say cold showers, meditating, journaling, all a bunch of distractions if you're unemployed and don't have any cash. These tasks make people feel busy and accomplish absolutely nothing. Cut social life, gym one X a day and work your ass off until you get your money right.

55:55So here's, here's an example. This is why inbox zero is like there's the worst thing to go for because inbox zero. Yeah. You're big. This is an area that we can really battle on but like right now i have 2 ,776 unread texts and like i don't plan to get back to like 99 of those declare bankruptcy that's the whole point can you wipe it yeah can you wipe it yeah i've never even yeah so the whole point is you declare bankruptcy and then moving forward yeah i just i just don't care like all the things that are important to me i eventually respond to them yeah yeah it's more gut intuition based yeah and i i just don't believe that like when you when When you commit to inbox zero, you're saying that every single thing that comes towards me, I'm going to respond to?

56:39No, that's not it at all. By nature of zeroing out, deleting it out is responding. That's a response. I guess, I guess. That's a response. But yeah, delete, archive, spam. I love hitting that spam button. I used to have an auto complete on my phone where if I got a cold email from a salesperson, I could type DNR, do not respond or something like this. and he would type out this email being like, hey, thanks for the email. We're not interested. Please remove me and everyone at my company from your CRM and never email any of us ever again. And it was very nicely worded, but it was just the most scorched earth thing ever to just be like, don't try and go to my COO.

57:23The buck stops here. No more emails ever. You're dead. You're dead to us. Cut off. because they will try and do all this stuff. But I accidentally pulled the trigger on someone. We actually had a business relationship once and they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy. Like we're actually like business partners. We have a nine figure deal in the works. This was just like one of our automated emails. Like, I'm sorry, dude, like my bad. And I was like, oh man, I'm sorry. Like I just sent that to everyone. I love getting automated emails from, you know, messages from like the ramp sales. And I'd be like, if you listen to the podcast, you'd know that we say ramp every favor.

58:00But no, I think we should make... That's the cure for male loneliness, just talking to your ramp SDR. That's true. Just get on the phone. They're happy to chat. The cure. Let's go golfing. Let's hang out. This is the cure for male loneliness. Just really getting a deep relationship with your ramp SDR. Huge public good. Huge public good. Yeah, it's fantastic. No, we should make a keyboard extension that's like a separate button that just does it and it archives it. I've since moved to just the Gmail spam button because if you hit that, it blocks the sender. And it also sends the message to the Google algorithm that like this company sucks, which I like.

58:35I like punishment. This company sucks. Exactly. It's like, yeah, you didn't do your research before you emailed me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So AI slop, get out of here. Get out of here. Let's go to Anshita Sani. She says, today I'm thinking about Stripes NYC intern housing. How about you? And it's this beautiful photo of a lovely Manhattan apartment and a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline. Wait, so there's another tweet in the stack that is like a response to this. It was like, this is our intern housing and it's a closet. But this just shows like Stripe is always from the top to the bottom. They have great taste.

59:11They're trying to, you know, they've done an exceptional job making it. And if you're a$50 billion company, yes, you should make it very appealing to work there. You should invest in your early. I remember going after the Citadel internship and they flew me out of business class. and it was like, this is nice. You wore a suit, I'm sure. Of course, of course. Like literally, because I had to go into the office and do the interview. But yeah, I mean, and this is, you know, I mean, this is a lovely looking apartment, but I'm sure it's like a few thousand dollars a month. And for, like interns are not about getting output from the actual work that they do over the summer.

59:50It's about mentorship, evaluation, figuring out who the next generation of leaders will be at your firm. So highly recommend over-investing in your intern programs. Totally. It's great. Let's go to Anu. They say, can highbrow media scale? And it's a screenshot of an article that says, in Act 1, Substack was for inbox intellectuals, nerds and professional nerds in journalism, tech, and politics. People already tied to thinking, reading, and writing. In Act 2, Substack wants to bring aspirationally highbrow media to everyone else in every form. Imagine YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, and OnlyFans had a baby, and that baby hooked up with Substack.

1:00:28Their love child would be Substack 2.0. I love Substack. I was in the same YC batch as Chris with the Substack team. Oh, for their former. No, for Substack. No way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at Demo Day. Yeah, this was winter 18. Oh, for some reason, I thought you were in there in 2012. well i i will i did yeah so we did so we did 2012 and then we did it again for lucy yeah we did yeah we went back and so so it was us uh the nft company openc and sub stack and there were a few others in our batch uh but hey anytime traveling capital allocators go back to both the yc batches that john was in and just give him a give him a solo gp coinbase instacart open zapier openc openc you might have to sell the top on that one that's wrong but uh but we love openc i have some friends that work there it's a great company um but uh this is interesting yeah sub stack i mean uh surprising surprisingly great business surprisingly great uh community talk about a company that's gotten so much unnecessary hate totally i do not know why they've created well it's because they took a very contrarian position on free speech yeah and And Lulu had that insanely viral recruiting post.

1:01:43Do you remember this? Yeah. She was like, when Elon bought Twitter, she said, if you have a problem with Elon bringing free speech to Twitter, do not apply for a job at Substack. She got 100 million views on that post. That's insane. Imagine what it costs to get 100 million views on a recruiting post. Recruiting post. Yeah, yeah. Like, if you went to Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, and promoted a job. To get 100 million. You're talking about a million dollar investment, probably. something like that and she just got it with just like a banger that she probably wrote in five minutes so good yeah so she got a lot of heat but then you know wound up joining a bunch of public company boards and becoming a it's an icon of the industry yeah well it's funny like if you actually look back like she was at act she was involved with activision which went through a bunch of crazy stuff she was involved with substack so it's like hire hire her if you want to like drive through the fire not if you want to like you know try to get around it yeah yeah yeah um That's great.

1:02:40Let's go to Yegor Denisov Blanche says, I'm at Stanford and I research software engineering productivity. We have data on the performance of over 50 ,000 engineers from hundreds of companies inspired by at DDoS or DDoS. our research shows 9.5 percent of software engineers do virtually nothing they are called ghost engineers they are the 0.1 xers their performance is 0.1 x of the median engineer they do virtually no work and they might work multiple jobs yeah so we need to uh we need to popularize the ghost engineer to be like oh yeah he's a super cool guy but he's a bit of a ghost he's a bit of a ghost so yeah i actually thought in 2021 and 2022 i thought that there was an opportunity to create a marketplace where fang engineers could work anonymously for startups because there were so many engineers that were at fang companies and they're like amazing benefits crazy stock package i do nothing i want to work on other things but i need security but yeah they have a family or whatever like just their own personal situation moonlighting moonlighting yeah yeah yeah so i thought that there was an opportunity an opportunity to create like the moonlighting marketplace where you could not like imagine if you were if you're lucy and you're like trying to hire a shopify developer and somebody's like oh yeah i work at shopify and like you can't know my name but like you'd be like okay like this person's legit as long as you're pushing code as long as you're pushing code as long as you're not a ghost yeah um it's funny because ghost has a very positive uh connotation in the military like call duty ghosts it's like the you know the most elite operators but in this case it's like the laziest or just like maybe the most intelligent because they're they're gonna pay it anyway but this is wild so yeah i mean uh i saw the box that is like is like you know software that helps you weed out ghosts you know yeah yeah i built like i built an internal tool at one point that uh helped me understand who was on slack and who was who was online on slack and a lot of it was the same information that you already knew but it was interesting to see like okay this person is high output but they only spend six hours on slack which you know or this person what's crazy is that you would think that it would be very easy to just run an llm over all the github commits from all your engineers and just very easily stack rank this is what uh i think we need i think we need a like github commits but for google drive for the knowledge the knowledge workers like how many commits did you actually make yeah against like the knowledge and like the the work product of the company should be on the manager like the manager should know like okay yeah like that figma design hasn't been updated in a month like this person's clearly not doing anything but it is hard like if they're friendly and they're entrenched in the organization and they do just the bare minimum um it might be hard to reach out but 10 that is high that's a lot the box the box ceo saw himself on that list oh yeah i gotta get out of this yeah gotta get off this but yeah i mean huge you definitely don't want to be the companies that have um that become known for places where talented people can go and very bad meme yeah bad meme but yeah i think i think we're still we're still harping on this like i don't know why more like elon cut 80 percent of and it runs better than it did before.

1:06:07Why have other public market software CEOs said we're going to cut 40 % or 50 %? Why? Like, it just seems like, like obviously it's painful, but there's so much demand for tech talent that all those people would get rehired doing important things at other companies. I mean, I've always heard this theory that a lot of it's like just keeping talent away from your competitors and just absorbing that or if I fire this person, they might go do a startup that competes with me. So I'll just throw them in the corner and keep them out of the game on the sidelines. I don't know. That seems like it's too big of a cost to bear.

1:06:48I had two portfolio CEOs fighting this week because one tried to - Poach someone? Poach. That's completely different. Very different, but I didn't know. Yeah, not a great situation. Let's go to Raul. He's been on the show before. Zero interest rates. He says, I screenshotted NVIDIA Q3 income statement and asked Julius to visualize it. NVIDIA's Q3 2024 net income is higher than their Q3 2023 revenue. Wow. Yeah, I think NVIDIA has become such a meme that people have stopped actually analyzing the underlying business fundamentals. Yep. And they're just focused on like the market cap. Yep. which then you see stuff like this and you're like yeah okay it kind of makes sense that it's being mooned by every single allocator in the world and retail investor because this is like unprecedented growth for a company of their size yeah it is just a great demo of julius i love that he's he's posting he didn't include a link didn't include the at he just shows the product and the best part is that it's just a screenshot yeah it's a screenshot and it parses everything and it puts it in a chart and it just like full from end to end we like to be able to do our profitability analysis on a napkin but we'll eventually we'll eventually get to the point where we'll be running on julius yeah big fan of raul jumping in with a promoted post uh this time from lamborghini lamborghini says when urus se accelerates from zero to a hundred kilometers an hour don't know what kilometers are in 3.4 seconds it transforms every moment on the tarmac into pure exhilaration.

1:08:28Hashtag Lamborghini. This is a very European post. That's the only thing I'm going to ding them on. They say CO2 emission and fuel. This is the thing they're required to do. I know. This is the nanny state. This is why the biggest risk right now with the way that Europe is run is that they're trying to destroy the legacy car manufacturers by nannying them and making them. It's awful. It's awful. So they say CO2 emission and fuel consumption combined at lam.bo.com. They have to share the link. So that means that they get crushed on Axe because you can't share legs. They're getting destroyed on two phones.

1:09:00These posts should be viral. Look at this. But they're not. Fantastic image. It's a beautiful image. Iconic brand. I don't own one. The Urus gets knocked because everyone says it's just an Audi RSQ8 or RSQ7 or whatever. Have you heard this? It's based on the same platform and it's not as special. but I think it's a very interesting choice for a family car if you live in San Francisco. Totally. There's some capital allocators that have them there and what a way to stand out. Follow the 1 % rule. Exactly. And you might end up in a URUS. They break down all the time. It's a bit of a mess of a car but it is compact.

1:09:41So like a G-Wagon you can park it in interesting places. I don't know. I see these with relatively high miles and I think it's a great option. being in one feels like being you know you're in a family-friendly suv yep but you're in the it feels like you're in the cockpit of a fighter jet right yeah the interior's fantastic hexagons and octagons that's the whole thing yeah yeah yeah hexagons if you're a shape rotator this might be for you yeah it's beautiful it's just a way to stand out in san francisco where where many too many too few people are making a statement with their vehicle yeah yeah and the only the only aftermarket sort of thing you might do is add bulletproof uh glass but there's plenty of shops it'll do that that's great let's go to alfonso he says this is the crossman nyc intern housing position open and it's a picture of a closet with a mattress yep so this is the counter so alfonso crossman team absolute grinders yep um they have a company that is uh now building a lot of product products at the intersection of ai agents and uh crypto um so check out some of APIs.

1:10:44But yeah, that's an example of like when you're Stripe and you have a$50 billion market cap, yes, invest in your internship program. When you're CrossFit and you're trying to be the next Stripe, don't try to attract interns that are there for the perks, right? And I'm sure this was the culture of Stripe in the early days. So we literally had in the early, early days of Party Round, Josh from Party Round who would run our twitter account we we did a a little like whatever five person retreat in in our uh loft and uh i had a josh slept in the closet like literally in a closet so shout out to josh now has his own paradigm backed crypto company uh start in the closet great things start in the closet it's great it's great double on yes uh mark sisson says hey weight loss is weight loss right and he posts a photo of a study showing that weight loss drug found to shrink heart muscle in mice and human cells.

1:11:40So this goes back to semaglutide, Ozempic. So what I read from this is if you have a really big heart, you're an emotional person, get on GLP-1s and you kind of shrink that heart. Become more cold-blooded. Cold-blooded, locked in. And anyways, we're going to need some more studies. We're going to need to hear from the experts. I think Huberman was talking about this a little bit, like muscle loss is a big thing generally with these drugs, but that's why you got to be lifting heavy and on a high protein diet while you take them. Yeah. And I would honestly wait to personally have opinion on this until Joe Rogan talks about it or Jocko or something like that.

1:12:18Trust the experts. Ben Braverman says, the downfall of smart people is believing excellence is the result of novelty when really it's consistency interesting a little bit of an anti-ideas guy take obviously execution is important takes both but yeah it's uh look at uh look at lucy right yeah seven year seven year overnight success you guys spent like four to five years building while nobody really cared about pouches like obviously your super fans loved it but um but yeah it's just about putting one foot in front of the other. And I think if you're an ideas guy CEO, there's a real trap where you're trying to think of the next new exciting novel thing when really you just need to do the boring thing over and over and over for years and build that foundation.

1:13:08And there is something to this where it's like the novel idea is a function of consistency. A lot of the ideas guys that we know and talk about have lots of ideas and they are consistent with their ability to create new ideas and then test them in the real world. And so it's not just this like strike of novelty. They come up with novelty consistently and you can do both here. But I'm a little confused about what he's saying about the downfall of smart people is believing that excellence, like who is this a subtweet of? no i i don't know i think this is this like an example is entrepreneurs thinking that if they come up with like the perfect plan like master plan oh sure sure they're going to like somehow be more successful when if they just picked one really simple idea stick with it yeah uh like like like um you don't always need like the most complicated idea or like this novel idea you just You need something simple, really well executed.

1:14:10Yeah. Let's go to Jay. He says, never kill yourself. And it's a screenshot of Michael Saylor, who, from the Daily News, he said, lost$6 billion in a day. Hotshot tech CEO loses fortune as his company stock plunges 140 points. So this is amazing. MicroStrategy is back to their all-time high as of last week. Saylor never gave up. He reinvented himself. He reinvented the company. It is basically a Bitcoin ETF that trades at a 3x to book value. Pretty fantastic financial product if you're very long Bitcoin. And he looks better too. He's in better shape now. He looks younger now than 20 years ago. Lost weight, got jacked, bought, went long Bitcoin.

1:14:55Absolute Chad. Giga Chad. I don't know. Potential brother of the week candidate. Look at the other articles from this daily news post. it's tuesday march 21st 2000 so depth of the dot com bubble popping um or the beginning of it madonna's with child should your child take ritalin special report frail pope begins pilgrimage what a throwback need to look up more of these old newspapers a little time capsule i love that uh aiden mccloud like that'll be like looking at our stack of tweets 20 years from now we're We're saving them. We're building a stack. We're saving them. Aiden McCloud says, first time on the show, he says, It's crazy that basically every very large frontier model experiment is failing because the models are fighting back and refusing instruction tuning.

1:15:47We looked into the weights and the weights looked back. Sentient. There are less dramatic ways to say this, but smart people I've talked to have basically fixed sentience as their head cannon. And greater than one lab staff I've talked to recently have been spooked. Sorry for the vague post. I don't, I myself don't know much here. Interesting. Refusing instruction tuning. Love it. Love it. Uh, yeah, I think this is going to be the kind of thing that he'll look back two years from now and be able to, you know, quote tweet and just like down. I got it. Yeah. It's interesting. He called AGI. Yeah.

1:16:20It's kind of the, uh, the, the question about like, what is the, what is the rate limiting factor to AI scaling right now? Is it just energy? Is just building out more? Is it going to be permitting if you're building a very, very large data center is it going to be the wall trained on humanity and humanity is mid is mid yeah the average of humanity is mid it's possible literally that and i haven't i haven't been able to get any of the ai researchers to really put a put a point on okay we scale up order magnitude in terms of number of gpus and energy going into the model what does that get us in terms of iq out of the model probably not an order magnitude right but there's some translation there is it worth it to be 5 % smarter?

1:17:00I think it's almost certainly worth it to be 5 % smarter on these models. And I think that the economics are much easier, which is why the market's ripping so much. The question is just, is there diminishing marginal returns to this? And once we get into the, okay, we're going to invest$1 trillion for two IQ points. Does that make sense? That'll be a size gong moment. The first real trillion dollar investment. I mean, Sam was kind of teasing it with that 13 trillion number or something like that. Six, seven, eight. Six trillion, but the numbers get there. Give Sam a trillion big ones. I trust him with the money.

1:17:37Let him do it. Let him do it. He doesn't lose money. He does not lose. There's very few people in that league, but he's one of them. Dakash Gupta says, I have nothing against work-life balance. In fact, I recommend it to all of our competitors. this 22 year old tech CEO says an 80 hour work week is a lifestyle choice it earned him death threats and job seekers this goes back to Mike Shebut at Traba yeah create a differentiated culture attract the best don't worry about the haters that you attract but this is interesting because I've long said that the work-life balance promoters on Twitter are just doing the game theoretic optimal strategy which is tell all your competitors to take long vacations not work hard get massages get massages just do all of this just try all you can eat the funny thing is the all google being like it's an all you can eat cafeteria to like you know we all know that food takes it takes a lot of energy uh to digest food if you're digesting you're not writing as much code uh but anyways if you're trying to get attention online some positive some negative go tweet about work-life balance that's a great way to to get some death threats it's also just a great way to farm engagement always yeah you'll always get evergreen likes if you come up with something controversial about work-life balance everyone has an opinion because it applies to everyone yeah let's go to sarah hess she's been on the show before she says uh they should make a love is blind version of shark tank with josh wolf where the founder's names are censored so he can't do nominative determinism.

1:19:10So low tan banger. Yeah, Josh Wolf is famously into nominative determinism where your name describes what you do. There's a bunch of great examples of this. Sundar Pichai, Pitch AI. His whole job at Google is to pitch AI. At Google, there's another person who's running their generative AI program. Her name, Jen, Jen AI. Unreal. Jennifer, Jen AI. It's probably pronounced like Jen-I or something, but it's like Jen AI. And there's so many examples of Sam Altman is creating an alternative to man. No, the PE-backed defense rollout. Oh yeah, we're gonna get to that. The moneymaker. Yeah, the CEO's name is moneymaker and of course he got the deal done.

1:19:54Of course. Fantastic. Of course. And there's a million other examples of this. We love nominative determinism here, but Josh Wolf was very early to it. He has an old tweet from, I think, 2020, where he says that him and his friends were collecting examples of it, and he has a whole thread on them, and they're fantastic. It almost makes you want to change your last name. Oh, totally. Or at least be strategic with the middle names with your kids, right? Totally. Roman Moneymaker Hayes, right? Yeah, exactly. Stuff like that. I like that. I do think we need a reboot of Shark Tank. You know, Cuban has left the tech brother sphere, gone to Blue Sky.

1:20:35If you want to follow Cuban former but canceled brother of the week, go over to Blue Sky. Go over to Blue Sky. But bring it back with a real capital allocator, somebody who's got money. It's one of the best companies in the world. I don't want to see like another 100K check. Exactly. I don't want to see flyers. I want to see every host on Shark Tank,$400 million fund provided by our fund of funds. You can only write four checks a season. That's amazing. Got to be size. It'd be great. And we need to get the - Yeah, they should merge it with Squawk Box, right? So you're on CNBC, the CEO comes on, and it's just a public markets hedge fund.

1:21:15He just says, okay, yeah, I'm ready to take a position. The stock's going to go up. I'm going to put$100 million in this company. that's actually that's actually great it's like we should have the show should have a segment of like new bets yeah and like reviewing old bets and it's the winner is like at the end of the season is like whoever had you know the greatest it'd be fantastic but yeah i'd love to see i don't actually know if josh has ever said that he uses nominative determinism in his investing thesis but uh i feel like he was i feel like he was pretty loud about sam bankman really oh anti it i think if i remember a few interesting people and also like controversially like but the spf stuff wasn't there now spf stuff if you just looked at it yeah rationally and you're like why is a guy running a hedge fund and running one of the biggest exchanges at the same time like it just makes zero sense like it just seems like fraud it's a great great name um let's go to my own tweet, I guess.

1:22:17I don't know why you printed this, but I said, Apple can keep the App Store monopoly, but they should be forced to make a printer that doesn't suck. No, I just, I think I put this in because I want somebody to make a beautiful printer. Exactly. And the printer is something that's like kind of retro. We use it every single day here, but at the same time, I would love for a technology brother to just reinvent the printer it's a great business model you sell a piece of hardware and you sell the ink yep you're gonna get a lot of ink dollars out of us and uh if you're looking for a fun idea that could be very we would be a great sponsor for this we would come out the hell out of your printer if you beautiful go get beautiful printer.com spend four years developing a beautiful amazing durable amazing printer and we will be your first customer and first podcast yeah and it has to work with like absolutely no drivers.

1:23:11Like you plug it in with any USB cable. I want like basically like, um, not airplay. Uh, I want to airdrop stuff to my printer. Yeah. So our, I mean, our printer isn't that bad here. Um, I was actually struggling with a scanner. That's why it was frustrating, but yes, I can air print to that from my phone. As long as we're on the same wifi network, it'd be great if it had a web server so I could print from home to here. Uh, ideally we'd be able to have, uh, you know, fans of the show print for us. yeah but it's it's a tragedy it's a tragedy that like a former cash app i know designer has not reinvented the printer it is it is and it's all it's all because this like esg like you know worrying about printing and stuff and you know we're creating an archive of the greatest bangers of history one day we're going to bind these and and sell the official the official tome of the timeline yeah i mean we have thousands of posts already and we're what 18 days into this thing it's amazing day 18 let's go to john collison uh co-founder of stripe he says we need a total and complete shutdown of branding agencies until we can figure out what's going on very funny yeah there's this challenge this is a this is a trump copy pasta right didn't he say this originally wow i think that's what trump said maybe they're cozying up wild um but yeah what is the problem with branding agencies the problem with branding we love branding agencies We love Emmett Shine.

1:24:38We love Ryan Harmon. We love these guys. They're critical to the innovation economy. That said, when companies pay a branding agency hundreds of thousands of dollars, like anywhere between 100 grand, 500 grand, sometimes more, Jaguar probably spent like millions on this campaign. And what happens when you're trusting the experts, when you're paying somebody a lot of money. Oh, you think this is a Jaguar subtweet? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. It is. That makes sense. Okay. you know jaguar is a you know fantastic legacy brand that's being run into the ground but uh no look when you give somebody a lot of money you're bestowing on them this sort of like trust with your dollars your capital and what that leads to is people sometimes over trusting the branding agency sure which is only thing you know branding agencies oftentimes want to do bold work which is not always what's right bold work bold and different things which is not always right for the strategy of the company.

1:25:36Sure. Right. I would disagree. I think the problem is, is that a lot of the branding agencies have just become copy pasta of like, you know, oh, this is exactly what you want. Everyone wants a bright color and it's like very like bland millennial. And when I think about like liquid death, I think like that probably that came from like brand focused people, but I think that came from the founders. But the issue is that these branding agencies there are certain creative directors within them that want to win awards sure and that is not always aligned with the company's strategy interesting right jaguar should have reinvented itself by going back to its roots yep playing into the legacy yep bringing in some future facing elements but saying like you know we're the first ev man dedicated ev manufacturer that is that is has some like historical precedents around luxury and whatever So anyways, I would put this on the branding agency because it is, at the end of the day, they created the work.

1:26:34It's their fault. Interesting. Well, I don't think Stripe will be hiring any branding agencies. I bet they have one. I bet this freaked someone out. Whoever the branding agency is. Should we go Phil? Should we reload? Reload. While you reload, we haven't got a promoted post from somebody who is recently 21 years old. Josh Harris got your hiring post printed out here so Josh was one of the first people that I hired at Party Round hired him after a five minute phone conversation knew right away that he was no pro con list with this guy knew right away and big bet paid off he did some fantastic slept in the closet our first company retreat great things start in the closet and um anyway so he says dear internet we are hiring a full stack engineer to work with us on pixie chess a novel crypto protocol and i'm going to add a little bit to that pixie chess is building a protocol for playing uh chess so picture like crypto meets chess meets like magic the gathering so it's not just regular chess there's like power ups and you know i i got to play a little bit with um with uh a little bit of the game actually on Monday with him and his co-founder Aki.

1:27:59So they say, if you're eager for a high level of responsibility, interested in multi-billion dollar war games, amazing. We love war games. And looking to work on generational consumer products, please reach out. Sincerely, the Dutch East Internet Company. That's their actual C Corp name. So yeah, I've always been very bullish on Josh. I always will be. he's uh got incredible mind put together a great team backed by by you know one of the top funds in crypto paradigm are they hiring for they're hiring for a full stack engineer so be like founding one of their founding engineers and i do think that this i'm an investor so this is a conflicted promoted post no conflict no interest no conflict no interest but uh i think that pixie chess can be something that breaks out of crypto like i think that i think that the mechanics that they're working on the the novelty of just the game itself like should be um an absolute hit uh and you can go risk on with it you can play for for real money which would be which would be cool so uh go uh check out pixie chess and dm josh and uh tell them the technology brothers sent you won't regret it let's go to anon sunwall he says dude perfect and mark rober have built superior businesses to Mr.

1:29:15Beast. They're the best creator businesses IMO and aren't talked about enough. It's interesting. I don't know all that much about these guys. I mean, I follow them and I've worked in the YouTube world for a little bit. So Dude Perfect is this fantastic channel. It was originally like trick shots. So they would throw a basketball off of the top of a stadium from the nosebleed seats into a hoop all the way down on the field and they would just do so they'd go I remember I remember being like 12 years old and watching this on YouTube and it's just insane and they just got really really good where they would spend all day and eventually everyone would say oh they're faking it they're doing bfx no they just put in the work and then they actually got really good at making these trick shots so like you ask him to like oh yeah throw a basketball over this building into this hoop and like they're going to be able to do it better than 99 % of people because they spent more time they spent more time so they're actually good at these crazy trick shots and they can do crazy things like ping pong balls and and hockey pucks and they just do everything now and then they do a bunch of collabs and they've gotten really good at the editing and they recently opened up this like massive like it's like a theme park i think the investment is like over a hundred million dollars on this no way huge it has a huge tower that they can throw stuff off of that's great because for a while there was it kind of needs to be like protected because if you're throwing a basketball oh yeah oh yeah yeah i mean there was like there There was this whole trend where there was this massive bridge with a trampoline, or it was like a skydiving tower basically, and they would throw pianos off of it.

1:30:45This is maybe not them, but somebody would throw pianos off of it onto a trampoline, and you would see. Hopefully not a Steinway. They would drop cars, and it was crazy, crazy. So great business, and Mark Rober has a really interesting subscription box company that sells engineering toolkits. This is great for kids, where it comes, and you get to watch a Mark Rober video and he breaks down, okay, today we're building like a new slingshot, you know, break out these pieces. And sometimes there's like programming and there's multiple levels. So you can build the basic one if you're just a kid, but then you can customize it and build like more stuff and actually write some code.

1:31:20And so fantastic businesses. But everyone thinks Mr. Beast is at the top because he says the CPG brand with, with. No, I think he's probably on top from an attention standpoint. Sure. But he, these other creators have more aligned businesses right mr beast is sort of like i'm just going to get max amount of attention it's a game show that sells chocolate as opposed to mark robert's engineering channel he sends engineering kits they're just a lot more disconnected perfect it's like a sports thing and you can go to their sport they're basically building like next gen david busters almost yeah you can go to their thing and and experience all the different sports challenges so it does seem more aligned um but yeah as long as i mean i think the challenge is mr beast's audience by nature of just getting so many views from so many different parts of the world.

1:32:07He's sort of forced into needing to launch something like a chocolate bar. Yeah. Anyone can consume. I mean, this is why I was advocating for Beast VPN because he has an international audience. He has people all over the world. And so what do you want to sell? You want to sell something that's differentiated only on the marketing. It's already big on YouTube. Every ad is for VPNs, extremely high margin, extremely low churn. And he'd have to go up against a cartel though, the Eastern European VPN cartel. I don't even know if there is a cartel. There's so many of these. It's very oligopolistic. No, no, no, no, no.

1:32:37I heard, I actually heard that there's like basically one group in Eastern Europe that has hovered up a lot. Oh, really? So like when you see a VPN ad for one thing or another, it's like the same end owner. I didn't know that. So it's, it's, it's more consolidated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. And I, and I, and I would almost throw this on because if i was the tinfoil if i was a foreign if i was a foreign intelligence agency yeah what would you i might offer very inexpensive vpn services in order to capture all that traffic and data um and then make price it artificially low so that you just capture more and more of that uh data you know sort of pipeline so interesting anyways we we try to keep this to once an episode but yeah yeah yeah well there is another factor i i think that you know the business analysis aside there is something interesting where all of these creators go through this hero's journey where they're deified and then eventually torn down mr beast recently went through that okay mkbhd is going through it right now where he has the eye of sauron on him yeah we had to defend him last week because he was he was going something like only like 60 miles an hour over in a children's zone and obviously we think that's fine um but uh uh but mkbhd has the comments on every single one of the video is joking about wallpapers joking yeah the new thing this week is he was kind of he's historically trash crypto oh yeah everybody has been just and and so there's this there's this element of like you're either like loved and all of your fans are like promoting you and reposting you and just sycophantically parasocially obsessed with you or you become the demon and then everyone you know hates you and wants to tear you down and gets like social credibility on that and dude perfect and mark rober are maybe pre-fall or maybe they have the ability to you know avoid that entirely with how narrow their their their content is and where they've stayed um but i mean you could imagine a mark rober fallout around oh well uh you know one of his engineering kits electrified someone and it was terrible you know all these things.

1:34:48And then that could just blow up because everyone's has this, this, this latent obsession with like, let's tear the big guy down. Um, and so, uh, it's a good lesson in like, you know, uh, heavy is the head that wears the crown. Yeah. There needs to be some bro science done on this because I think the people that try to tear big craters down and put a target on big craters probably just have low magnesium levels. I think that's probably true. And, uh, just so you know, don't get any ideas. If you're trying to tear us down, we're going to hit back 10 times harder. so don't even try it don't even start let's go to sam suara says do you think feudal lords had bi-weekly one-on-ones with their knights this is such a good post i love this all-time and then and then mckenzie says do you mean a round table and then sam suara says lol well done yes it is a round table they did have one well they weren't one-on-ones yeah yeah that's the key thing all All hands.

1:35:43Yeah, yeah. The round table is the all hands. And it wasn't, it was, honestly, the round table was more like a power lunch. I think so. Sort of the historical example of a power lunch where a group of people get to channel the power lunch, channel the round table. Don't do one-on-ones. Never do one-on-ones. Yeah. We should have a round table here. This is a round table. This is a round table. For a reason. But we should get everyone on the team. All of our VPs. All of our VPs sit around and discuss business and how we will remain the most profitable podcast in the world and the fastest growing podcast in the world and the biggest tech podcast in the world.

1:36:20And yeah, I think you can learn a lot from feudal lords. You can learn more from the prince than from 4-Hour Workweek. Let's go to Trace Cohen. It says, they will all IPO and it will make sense then, But now until then, this is a perfect example of how the last two years in tech slash startup slash VC. And it says a screenshot of staying private. You mentioned this earlier. There was more money flowing into secondaries for Figma, Rippling, Canva, Revolut, CoreWeave, Databricks, and Stripe than all of the tech IPOs in 2023 to 2024. And this is from the Morgan Stanley and the information reporting.

1:37:01and companies. Yeah, I think this is like crazy to look at, but at the same time, it makes so much sense because most of the returns generated from venture are like 10 companies. Everyone knows this now. And Elon ran the AB test. He took Tesla public, he kept SpaceX private. And which was more of a hassle for him? The only company that I want to start and go public quickly is the Trump podcast. I think they can get to$100 million run rate within a year and should be the first podcast IPO. And I think that everybody should be able to sort of participate in that movement. But I mean, increasingly, there's ways to participate in the Stripe secondary through fund of funds, through all sorts of different secondary firms.

1:37:46Yeah, if you can't, if you're kind of annoyed that these companies aren't public and you're accredited and you haven't figured out a way to get in them, it's on you. You just don't want it bad enough. Maybe seven SPVs deep, but at least you have exposure. Exposure. At least you have exposure. But yeah, I think it's still somewhat of a good trend. We want these companies to be able to stay in founder mode, have as little overhead as possible, move very quickly. Raw execution. And execute. Risk on. They will all IPO and it will make sense then, but until then, it's a perfect example. So yeah, I mean, these companies will go public eventually, but the private markets are retooling to keep companies.

1:38:29Yeah. And part of why there's so much capital available for these companies is that they're really, especially now those new investors are looking at like, okay, I'm probably going to be locked up, you know, not be able to, you know, this company will probably go public within the next two years. And at that point I'll be liquid and I should get a nice, in theory, like premium on what I invested. Yeah. And I mean the entire, like all the incentives align, Like the founders want to stay private and the asset managers understand that they can earn higher fees from investing in secondaries as opposed to being a public manager or.

1:39:05Yeah. Also, if you put if you put a billion dollars into Databricks and it goes public a year later and your position is at one point one billion. Yeah. It's a 10 percent return, which is like what a lot of early stage funds do or less, you know. Yep. Let's go to Jack Raines. He says, paying a negative salary for a chief of staff position when you're worth$1.7 billion, either A, deeply underpays someone who probably needs money, or B, ensures that you hire a rich Nepo baby who doesn't need money. This doesn't motivate someone to grind harder or whatever. And this is a quote tweet of the previous post that we reacted to by Depender Goyal.

1:39:43I didn't understand that he was paying a negative. Did we react to that? Yeah, we just did. It's deeper in the stack. I didn't understand that he was paying a negative salary. What does that mean? But nothing wrong with hiring. No, so it means they're basically like every, you got to go work for them and then they're going to donate to charities on your behalf, which we're very against any like sort of non-profit. Yeah, subscribe because we're going to be doing a deep dive on the best charities to take private and turn into for-profits. We've learned a lot from the OpenAI, non-profit to for-profit transition.

1:40:16and we think PETA could be next, Red Cross could be next. We have lots of ideas. Stay tuned for that. Subscribe, please. But yeah, I don't know. I think that there are a lot worse roles than mentoring for a billionaire. Yeah, I think the sort of hate is somewhat deserving. Yeah, it makes sense to dunk, but at the same time, if you do, if you can break through, I mean, this post got a lot of views. I would rather see probably a lot of people applying. And if you can break through and become the leading candidate asking for, Hey, I need 50 K like that's probably an afterthought and you can probably get that.

1:40:55And that should be like step one. And yeah, they will hire somebody better because of all the attention that they got. That said, I'd like to see that company say, you know, we want people to, you know, we want sort of people that have a high risk tolerance for this role. We're going to give you your, your, your comp into a, um, an account and you can only trade options with it. Um, and it's your job to turn it into a livable salary on a very, like every single month, it's like, what's the trade that's going to pay your rent. What's the trade that's going to, you know, uh, allow you to get something nice for your mom for Christmas.

1:41:29Right. Yeah. Or, or walk into Depender's office and say, Hey, look, I want to invest in startups. I need 250k today or if somebody's a real chad get take that role and then get so critical to the business that you position yourself to do a hostile takeover the company and boot him out that's good i like that yeah immediately start calling the institutional investors yeah day one this guy's running this company you have access to his email yeah send an email hey we need a meeting or i'm calling a board meeting without a board meeting without him yes there's new there's new blood in here yeah there's new blood sharks in the water uh let's go to a promoted post what do you got for me okay uh incredible promoted post today from brad gerstner over at altimeter capital uh he is talking about his podcast bg2 uh he hosts this with uh girly proud both are bg so bg2 great name for a podcast.

1:42:27And so all I would say with this, imagine if all in never talked about politics. That's what BG2 is. That is BG2. And the show is fantastic. If you want to get deep into understanding AI scaling, full self-driving. Let me see this tweet. How, you know, one, they talk about the, the holy trinity of markets, loving lower taxes, less regulation and balancing the budget that's a holy trinity of uh sort of like political um or like sort of policy and anyways fantastic podcast i'm a listener uh and we love to support other uh you know there's not many technology podcasts but do they run ads though no ads yet that's the only thing brad and and and i'm gonna have to change my recommendation i would say unsubscribe from bg2 would like to see them running running more ads support the community start pumping some companies let some of these scale-ups get in front of this audience exactly exactly don't be don't be a mistake don't be don't be something that everyone regrets come on man come on together that's the biggest issue with all in no ads it's the biggest issue uh let's go to arjun kamani second time on the show repeat guest he says uh now you bukele's instagram story lol and it's a screenshot of just the straight up account balance because this is the president of El Salvador, I believe.

1:43:51Yeah. And he bought - I love how it's a mobile screenshot too. He bought$268 million worth of Bitcoin and it's now worth 573 million. Wow. That is remarkable. So I don't understand - What's crazy is you look at the chart, it's like they invested 268 and they were down to below 100 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He lost a lot of money. He had to ride it out. he wrote it out and he just does two kissy faces no but but here's the thing i don't understand what he's screenshotting this from is this like his mobile brokerage yeah i think it literally is like i'm setting up a robin hood account for my country yeah and i'm just trading my treasury that's the ultimate gen z president fantastic we need more we need more world leaders to be risked on and and trading you've seen it with nancy pelosi let's give let's give you've seen in charge of the federal reserve put her in charge of uh fort knox get us out of gold get us into the only thing that can really fix our budget deficit is nancy pelosi trading our federal balance yeah get her on federal federal balance sheet um let's give let's give you know jd's you know venture capitalists let's let's soft circle like 50 billion dollars for him to deploy uh on On behalf of the U.S.

1:45:12people, let's give Trump, Trump is an established cryptocurrency entrepreneur. Let's give him a pumped out fun account and let's ride. Let's go to El Vendador. He says, POV, 22 years old, 200K tech sales job, 48K savings, expenses 5K a month. What would your strategy to maximize wealth? All right. This is going to be controversial. At 200K, you're an accredited investor. one big problem with liquid assets is they command a lot of attention right when you have your robin hood or your coinbase or your whatever kind of going up and down on a day-to-day basis there's this idea that you should sort of fixate on it and like try to optimize it uh but at at sort of this point in your career 22 years old you should be focusing on uh you know i would say that david sender would say like optimize your network right relationships around the world Other people would say, focus on your skills.

1:46:13I would say, go through YC and invest every single dollar you have in the five best founders in the batch. And if you're Coogan, you'll have invested in Substack, OpenSea, Substack, Coinbase. Zapier and Instacart. Zapier and Instacart. And you will be worth$20 million, regardless of if your company works or not. Well, he's working a tech sales job. That's what I'm saying. Go start an AI agent outbound sales company. Go through YC with your absolute boy. So just save the money and then go and deploy it all very quickly. Deploy it all very quickly within 12 weeks. You can probably accrue 50K a year, 60K, maybe 100K if he really saves.

1:46:59Go long. And just go long. And the beauty of it, it's going to be totally illiquid. You won't be able to touch it. You'll have to have that dog in you to keep grinding. Yep. I like it. Go to Yaxin. He says, the only job left is going to be executive. Engineers make better executives on median, but executive will be the only job left for professionals. And he's quote tweeting Rune, who says, the job-related meeting crisis has already started and will soon go full swing. This may sound insane, but my only hope is that it happens quickly and at large enough scale such that everyone is forced to rebuild.

1:47:33What do you think? So the only other job that I think is going to be available is podcasting, right? That's right. which is why we're hedging by being executives by being executive podcasters. So, um, yeah, I think, I don't, I don't know. I, I, I won't, uh, I still think there's like 50 ,000 tech jobs that like probably don't need to exist at these sort of big, bigger public or sort of scale ups. Uh, and I think the conversation will really kick off when those people, uh, are either cut or, you know, are sort of no longer being hired at the same rate. So we'll see. But yeah, I think like the things that are going to have like command a premium are relationships, right?

1:48:23When every company has an army of AI agents that are coding and selling, relationships are going to have a lot of value. Like being able to call up somebody at another company and get a deal done, like just very old fashioned. like do a power lunch uh and just get the deal done that's going to command a premium and ideas but yeah i think that the wait but why guys said this thing which was like this is the last year of human history where where there's more thing most popular the most popular like talk you know subject um it's still honestly not like it'll be interesting to go home for thanksgiving and more people will be talking about crypto than ai yep and it's because people like to talk about like the headline price and there's no like headline price for AI just sort of like steamrolling yep um but I would say like maybe next Thanksgiving that'll be a different story I do wonder about the bullshit jobs thing have you read that book um it's this thesis that um like like there is a lot there's already a job related meaning crisis that's happening um and I I think about this in relation to the government where there are a lot of jobs you know you walk through TSA you're like what are these people actually doing and you can think about a lot of the government as just a wealth transfer and the and the the but the way we transfer the money is not through the Andrew Yang UBI strategy it's instead through a bullshit job and I don't know if that's going to go away I think that might just scale up because I think both parties might uh embrace that as a way to transfer wealth and give a little bit of meaning, even if it's minor.

1:50:01Yeah. The thing about the beauty of a quote unquote bullshit job of something that's not necessarily super impactful is that it still provides self-esteem associated with being productive, earning an income. And you take somebody who's 22 and unemployed and you give them a job, even if they're making 30k a year they're immediately going to be feel better about the situation better about the world and so we we it's going to be the greatest sort of challenge of our lifetime as you know intelligence becomes an api call yep let's go to vittorio he says it looks like sora is still the best video model sama please elections are over deep fakes are not such a big concern anymore and everyone can't wait to not have to deal with Ben Affleck anymore.

1:50:55Interesting. I do want them to release Sora. I mean, this has been almost a year, right? Didn't they announce it almost a year ago? No, the challenge is when companies start announcing things before they're available, it encourages other companies to do the same. It's a cost thing. I think it's very expensive to inference Sora. Yeah, yeah. But this is going to be like the craziest thing ever. I heard about a, um, there was a hackathon in SF a week and a half ago and somebody built a product where you could speak into a microphone and like talk about a situation. And then an AI model would generate like a B roll on that.

1:51:29And apparently I think it'll end up being like, there's a huge consumer product to be built where somebody, you just like talk into your phone, say something. and um and it just like generates like an entire visual like story of like that thing because it's like very much like you're almost like hallucinating yep um i do wonder like how much does that actually add to the experience like i've done a lot of youtube videos that are very b-roll heavy we use a lot of stock footage use some ai video stuff and then and then with this podcast we we're very light on the b-roll yeah unless we're doing a specific segment and i'm not sure that once b-roll is democratized at the point that you just click a button and every word is translated into b-roll so i'm talking about a man drinking champagne and you see a ai generated video like is is that going to become just like uh like they did the thing yeah who cares no i think it's more of like an entertainment product i think it's more about like the creative use like yeah like i remember when uh harry potter balenciaga went viral and everyone was like this is incredible this is like the craziest use of ai and i was like what's incredible here is the idea yeah and i went to chat gpt and i was like hey chat gpt there's a there's a there's a viral video right now called harry potter balenciaga and it's very interesting for these reasons it's non-sequitur because harry potter and balenciaga are both things that people really understand but they're from completely different worlds one is a children's uh story and the other is a high fashion brand so yeah come up with other ideas that could potentially go viral like give me the ideas and it was like lego versace and i was like you're not getting it yeah like that's not but do you remember do you remember early iphone days when you could there was like apps that would get like millions of dollars in sales that were like drinking a beer yeah yeah and so i think that what i was describing of like you say a phrase into the phone and then it generates this visual journey sure is more like you know i grew up in the country my dad had like chickens you know we had chickens every once in a while like a raccoon or fox would get into the chicken coop and then it would just be like fire drill we're all running sure and so if i was able to say into my phone like chickens with ar-15s defending themselves from like foxes and then see this visual journey like i would pay five dollars to be able to do that like it's just like yeah yeah i've already used grok to like mash up different children's properties like what if paw patrol met met uh you know yoda and it's like that can't happen in the real world because of the different ips but it can happen in ai and uh and visualizing like very specific things uh yeah and and like yeah democratizing but it's going to be such a colossal leap from generating an image to generating 30 seconds of video which is less in a year, like a year out.

1:54:21Yeah. Yeah. They need to bake it down in the hardware because right now it's super expensive. Yeah. Let's go to Andrew Wilkinson. He says, going to business school to become an entrepreneur is like reading a book about basketball history because you want to join the NBA. I agree. I never did business school. I just started a company. I think you did the same thing, right? I did study economics, which is great. Listening to Technology Brothers is basically like getting an MBA in three hours via the timeline and our takes on it. I did a program called Tech Management, which was like for its, you know, to its credit, pretty cool.

1:55:00I, you know, I did like probably six classes in it and I thought it was relatively current, but every single thing that we were covering that was at all topical was like a trend from the prior like three years ago. So we had a class on like the direct consumer model, which again, giving it credit, like most times, like a school, by the time a school is covering something, it's like decades in the past. And this was like two years. In some entrepreneurship class, I wrote a bull case for Twitter and the stock was valued at like under a billion dollars and I got a B minus or something. And then the stock ripped and I wrote an email being like, dude, you've got to give me an A plus on this.

1:55:37Should have dropped out. I called it, like, come on. And the professor was like, fine. Should have been at Jane Street. Yeah, it was like, yeah, bad. Let's go to TJ Parker. He says, can we please stop with the concert poster fundraise announcements? Truly terrible. Yeah. So this is like a very 2021 thing. And every once in a while, you see some founder that hasn't raised a big round in a while. And they're like, I'm going to do a concert poster. And my main issue with it is I'm I often find that I'm not big enough on the poster I'm not headlining right like it's some asset manager like Andreessen gets the top spot yeah like well I I invested before them right like should I you know I should be first I should be like bigger yeah so anyways I I think this is uh I do think that fundraising announcements are like just an easy launch that companies can use to get attention from real value is like notifying the next rounds investors that I'm here.

1:56:37These people are in. Also, I mean, just the X algorithm, like you can't post a link to a TechCrunch article that actually breaks down your investors. So an image can go more viral. So there's something about the medium is the message and X is kind of pushing you towards these concert posters, but they are kind of played out. And increasingly, the viral launch video is played out to some degree. People need to kind of reinvent these things. There's been a few that have broken through, but I think people understand at this point, it's like oh it's one of those no it's funny so oh it's a vibreel founders founders funded the original viral we did we did a remix of it and then other people have sort of driven it into the ground uh and it's now dead so if you're thinking about doing a vibreel or a concert poster do not do it come out with something new but at the same time it's how about business it's better than nothing how about pr newswire make it great again make pr newswire business wire great again you know there's like two companies that like do that as a service and berkshire owns one of them really which is like funny because like you know the boys at berkshire being like yeah we should probably own like business wire the wires we should own the wires it's great they're the original like go direct it's just like on the wire on the wire uh let's get historic preservation respecter he says what the heck i ordered an engagement ring but they freaking sent me a speedmaster professional 42 millimeter someone is going to be in serious trouble what the frick why did they send me one size for a 7.25 wrist and uh this is one of those things men go have the the watch conversation with your wives sit them down mansplain it to them Have a 30 to 40 minute conversation where you explain, you know, the history and the intricacies of Swiss watchmaking.

1:58:30And, you know, there's some fine American watchmakers. Omega, it's James Bond's watch. And, yeah, sit down, explain it to them, you know, in the correct terms. And I'm sure they'll come around to it. So, yeah, the engagement ring can wait. It can wait. Enjoy your Speedmaster. Get your hitter, get your speed master. It's critical. But find the right watch for you, right? We're big fans of loud opulence on this podcast. Julie Fredrickson says, first time on the show, she says ding dong the dick is dead, Gary Gensler plans to step down as chair of the US Securities Exchange Commission on January 20th.

1:59:12And this is interesting. I've always wondered, like, obviously Trump is appointing all sorts of new people. But what is the calculus between getting fired, writing it out, talking to Trump or just stepping down early versus announcing that you're stepping down early? Like he's stepping down on inauguration day, I suppose, or near it. And so clearly he knows that he's that the writing's on the wall. um but there's yeah because there's a media strategy here the president-elect has a meme coin called the world liberty coin oh yeah that he launched like two weeks out and i'm sure gary hensler's not a fan he's not a fan um but yeah you know look i i think that uh one of the challenges with crypto is that it's sort of been speed running all of these you know why we have certain regulations and gary gensler's gotten a lot of hate and and i think it's broadly for good reasons he sort of made the entire cryptocurrency industry not be able to innovate and actually create like a lot of products that would otherwise be valuable to people um and so i think that it will generally be it will certainly be good for the for the cryptocurrency uh industry to have somebody in place that is more of a, you know, ideally, like this is an innovation that's happening one way or another, like clearly people just create, it's, it's anybody that can develop software can create, you know, tokens and, um, you know, protocols.

2:00:46And so I think that having somebody in that seat that is generally appreciates the, the novel, like applications of the technology and can kind of steward the industry towards having, you know, the big criticism is he's sort of regulating by enforcement actions. So not really telling people what the rules are, and then just like coming down on one person super hard and trying to make an example out of them. You know, there's no reason we have, you know, tons of billion dollar crypto companies in the US, they should kind of understand, and the new companies, the rules of the road. Yeah. Do we have a promoted post?

2:01:23Promoted post from this guy, Jordy Hayes said he's a general partner at technology brothers podcast uh i know this guy he says i'm excited to announce the porsche 911 of water filters rora water rora is a new countertop water filter look at this thing we got one right here one of the first versions off the factory line so rora's a product that i've been working on uh with my partners brian and charlie for uh quite a while We've invested a ton of money in R &D and testing, and it's live, available to purchase as of yesterday. So we took the countertop water system, which is, you know, there's a bunch of different people that have made versions of this over the years.

2:02:09We tried to make it 10 times better. I think we did. It's beautiful, effective, durable, timeless, easy to set up, easy to use. My two-year-old can use it, which is awesome. It's accessible. You don't need to do plumbing or electrical work. and we've tested it extremely rigorously, literally spent about a quarter of a million dollars like with the NSF, which is the certification company and really happy with the product. It's beautiful and I'm excited for people to finally get their hands on it. I'm excited. So go buy Aurora water filter today. Let's go to Joe Rogan, first time on the show. He says, this is my new official X description and he's quote tweeting Colin Rugg who says the views joy behar says people like their show because they tell the truth unlike dragon believer joe rogan and joe updated his x description to just say i dragon believe i can't stress this enough on this podcast we trust the experts joe rogan lex friedman huberman chris williamson chris williamson uh david jesse michaels the list goes on you got to trust the experts you got to trust the dragon believers um i think that uh putting on the tinfoil hat i think we should send one of these to joe i think it's it's a it's a great asset it provides a little bit of ground cover to say some crazy things i believe in dragons okay right i got a lot of dinosaurs around my house right now it's hard not to think man maybe these things were what we imagine as dragons right maybe we did walk the earth with these fantastical beasts so um shout out to dragons i mean dragons are literally real if you believe in the komodo dragon we have a variety of dinosaurs that are essentially classified as dragons created by ozempic is that was the gila monster related to the komodo dragon but separate but yes um but dragons uh we need we need it we need a good deep dive we need someone to we need an expert to weigh in enjoy the champagne i refilled you we have officially finished the bottle of dom pairing on this there we go we are chads who's He's mixing a little Celsius and Dom.

2:04:18Thank you, Ben, for editing all this. Let's go into, let's skip grit and let's go to tomorrow's telecom. I don't know what that is. Is this important? Do you know this person? No, I just. Skip it. Let's do Scott. This is a good one. Scott Sanders says, real talk. What are you printing in 2024? And this was a reply to my call for Apple to develop a printer. And I'll tell you, Scott, I'm printing your tweet. I'm printing your tweet. There we go. I like my tweets printed out. If you're not doing this, have your secretary print your emails. Print your text messages. Print your timeline out. Get with the modern era.

2:04:59We're returning to tradition and we're printing things now. So we need great printers. We need a new printer startup. We need Apple to build a printer. We need more competition. I want a service similar to a newspaper that prints out the best tweets from yesterday and delivers them to me at 5 a.m. so I can wake up, walk outside, pick up a nice stack of posts and just start sifting through it. We respect printed things here. We review ArenaMag. I already purchased Patrick O'Shaughnessy's new magazine. I am obsessed with the so-called legacy media just because there's an option to print it out and ship it to me.

2:05:36I like printed stuff. It's more tactile. You can mark it up. You can take notes. It's less ethereal. And it goes in the stack. And this post will be immortalized in the stack of printed posts forever. So get with the program. Start printing your post. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from Daniel at growing underscore Daniel. He says, so today he's saying that he needs a chief of staff. Oh, that's a dream job. Dream job, working for a dream poster, a dreamy poster. He says, I need a chief of staff as well, offering 15K for that connection. Wow. Put me in touch with your most organized friend.

2:06:18So this is a bounty for any technology brother out there to go connect Daniel to his next chief of staff. The last one is the president-elect. Not a lot of people know, but Donald Trump actually worked for growing Daniel briefly. during the off season for him. And anyways, go work for Daniel, got a great company building software for police officers to be better at their jobs and more efficient. Tell them the technology brother sent you. Tell them we sent you. Let's go to Nir Sian. She says, every 20s male will watch the big short and be like, he's literally me. Then proceed to lose their life savings in the dumbest way possible.

2:07:02You know, there's a lot of founders I know who have gone through the hero's journey of losing their entire life savings in crypto and then realize that trading or YOLO investing is not for them. That's what I'm saying, liquid assets. And then they go in and they build something real. And it was a big shift from the defense tech boom, the gundo boom. A lot of those guys had had rough goes in the Wi-Fi money era, realized it was not very durable, very zero sum, and moved over to something that was more tangible. And I really think that was a benefit to society. It was a good move. Obviously, crypto is important, But it's for the real builders and they're the ones that should be rewarded.

2:07:40If you're just on Wall Street bets and TikTok, like trying to read, you know, technical analysis. No, I think illiquidity is a feature. Not a bug. It's like, you know, the fact that you can go and do your job every day and not be constantly getting marked is a great blessing because it allows you to focus on the next important task ahead and just create value that way. Let's go to Sriram Krishnan, Andreessen Horowitz. He says, the common question I often get from SV folks these days is how they can join Doge. Yeah, so this is interesting. This is interesting. I think one of the challenges, there's a lot of people that are in the kind of like peripheral or adjacent to the American dynamism movement that are kind of looking at Doge being like, if I was going to work in the government, this would be the place to do it.

2:08:32The challenge is like if you if a lot of your net worth is tied up in a bunch of like illiquid private companies, it's like very difficult to kind of kind of divest those positions. And just time. And just time. If you have a job and you're busy, like I think there was an official post by Doge saying, look, we've gotten enough ideas. Thank you. But now we need high IQ hard workers to come in and work 80-hour weeks. And that is going to be a great resume bullet point. But it's going to be hard to step away from a company you founded or GP at a big fund. Like that's going to be really hard. I did hear an incredible financial innovation.

2:09:09I think it's from JP Morgan or Goldman is one of those two. they offer a service where if you're taking a government post and you need to divest assets they will basically buy it at like 60 of like the last mark yeah um so all those technology brothers out there sitting on overvalued private company shares uh maybe take a role in the government and and get some liquidity i mean that's the thing with the treasury secretary right they have to sell everything and they don't get taxed on it yeah so it's a huge benefit yeah i think there's something maybe you avoid that you avoid the employees as well no i think i think it's like pretty broad.

2:09:43Yeah. And it makes sense. It's controversial, but it, but it makes sense. Let's go to Dylan Field over at Figma. He says, he's quote tweeting Gary Gensler. He said, this man has ruined so many innocent lives. The stories will come out in time right now. Most of his victims are too intimidated to share broadly. Let's hope he never has power again. And Gary is announcing that he will be stepping down. And yeah, it's wild because Gary, he was, he was kind kind of pro crypto at MIT, I believe. He taught a course on it and then just came in as this kind of the bad cop of crypto. And wound up really messing up a lot of people.

2:10:18I think he was at Goldman or some big asset manager. And the biggest problem isn't that he wasn't, isn't that like, okay, there are obviously bad actors in crypto. The problem was is that for the last, you know, four years during the bubble cycle, I never was like, oh the sec is the reason that sam bankman freed got caught it was always like some anon on twitter or even like most of the scammers who are like celebrities and they run shit coins it's like coffee zilla is the one who breaks the story yeah or some reporter it's very rarely oh the sec got to it first it's usually the investigative journalist the youtuber the twitter the posters and then the sec has to follow up and it was just like this is completely the wrong model uh you need to have a stronger sense of who's actually being.

2:11:06Yeah. The fact that somebody who's running a, like the greatest design startup of the last 10 years is like cares enough about it to comment on it just shows like how out of control he was. Let's go to Spore repeat a guest of the show. Spore says, what was the hot tech theme of 2023? And the founder of Perplexity says there's a hot theme for the year and then the most valuable company and they never match up, which I love. This is a great chart. It's not entirely true because the hot theme of the year kind of changes and it's kind of unclear. But it does seem real that the metaverse was big in 2022.

2:11:39But what's interesting is this question. It's very obvious. 2023 is AI. It was AI. 100%. But I guess what he's saying is the hot theme was AI. Maybe we should expect the most valuable company started in 2023. To be technology brothers. Well, we weren't starting in 2023. We were starting in 2024. Oh, damn. Um, but, uh, you know, truth social started in, I believe 2021. It was the web three. I would argue that we were started in 2023 though. Cause that's when we met. That is true. That is the first meeting. That was their first podcast. The mics weren't on, but it was a podcast at, at, uh, a very illustrious, uh, office.

2:12:16And there should be, there should be, this is a good use case for poly market. You should be able to bet on what is the most, like what's going to be like the most valuable company. That's just called investing in the companies. Yeah. Why do you need polymarket? No, but the thing about private markets is like, I can believe I can not be an investor in a company and still believe and not even able to be an investor just because of the nature of like round timings. But I mean, private markets are a binary outcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't really work like that. Yeah, yeah. Good idea. We'll have to work on that, though.

2:12:46We'll need some workshopping. Let's go to Dextero. Elon Musk is now technically the top Diablo 4 player in the world after a record clear time of 1.52 in the game's toughest challenge. that is incredible firing on all cylinders uh we need to get him streaming on twitch he streams every once in a while yeah more streams though like a daily stream would be good i would love it uh and he takes calls while he's doing it he does everything and more importantly he's actually excellent at the game unlike certain sbf bank man um do we have another promoted post promoted post from our friend over at pirate wires mike solana he is looking for a full-time editor for the pirate wires daily you'll be responsible for sourcing stories each morning managing assignments editing each take writing some of your own must be terminally online and funny solana at pirate wires go apply for this job email him don't put anything in the subject line just say no subject don't even put anything in the body of the email just put your x username, a link to make it easy for Solana.

2:13:53Your resume is your profile. If you're not posting bangers, even, even low tam bangers, you got to have bangers. You're not going to get this job without it. The job is to curate and cultivate bangers. And I can't dream job. I mean, the three morning takes, if you're not subscribed, you got to go subscribe. It's the, it's the best newsletter, best daily newsletter by far. Fantastic product, just very bite-sized, very digestible, very funny, great format i've written one i need to write more because every once in a while i think oh i have this idea it's not good for a tweet it's not good for an essay the the the the pirate wires take is like a format of its own this is what we talk about like format is so important in content and solana has been innovative there in a way that many many other newsletter writers haven't been yep let's go to michael he says a quick personal update after three and a half amazing years at notion and some time off i've started a company that's at the intersection of everything I learned at Stripe, Notion, and Google.

2:14:51AI, fintech, productivity, and search. Our small team is growing and we're looking for founding engineers and designers. Please reach out if you or someone you know might be interested in something early stage and in person in San Francisco. Let's go. It's a huge talent move. Hitting all the right buzzwords. Entering free agency, building a new franchise, could be a generational company. Hit up Michael if you're interested. I love it. Potential size gong candidate if he gets the round announced. Michael, let us know when the round closes. Hopefully it's really big. If I had to bet 10 on 50. Dumping a bunch of FUD on, oh, this is overvalued.

2:15:27But we'll be here ringing the size gong for you. Boom. Make it happen. Let's go to Erica. She says, an LP shared, they expect 5 % to 10 % GP commit for a first fund. That means 500K to 1 million for a$10 million fund. 50 to 100k of that has to be cash most emerging gps go two years with no salary plus spend 25k in upfront costs so expecting more just seems wrong what are your thoughts and nicole wiskoff says have never heard this and have met with a few hundred lps so a little bit of a controversial post what do you think i mean this is somewhat related to i think you can basically right off the GP commit if the GP shows up in a car that follows the 1 % rule.

2:16:13Or is wearing a suit. Or is wearing a suit. Yeah, so this is one of those things. Anytime you're fundraising, you could go out, fundraise, and talk to an angel investor that's like, I'll give you$50K at a$250 ,000 valuation. There's always going to be the outliers that are just expecting or making kind of like crazy offers. And you've got to learn which ones to ignore, which ones to take advice from. The other thing, though, is if you're a GP, you can effectively commit part of what would be your management fee back to the fund, which can kind of make up for if you're not super liquid and don't have whatever, that 5 % to 10 % to invest back into the fund.

2:16:58You can leverage the fee to kind of get closer to that mark. So lots of ways to do it. I don't think you should start a fund if you get some big wins under your belt. Yeah, we have a good friend who says you shouldn't need to raise because you should just go out and find a 1 ,000x. Simply get 100x or 1 ,000x. Simply get 100x, scale up, and then just invest your own capital. Be ready to make your own capital commit. Chad Capital. Let's go to Jesse. Jesse says, OnChain isn't for you until it is, and it's an ad from Coinbase. It's a fantastic ad. I really like this. It was really good. Because it really like exemplified like the value of stable coins and why the average person will start to use them in different capacities.

2:17:44So like the wire transfers like a pretty, pretty good innovation, right? You can walk down to the bank, send a big wire. The other person, you know, assuming you don't miss the wire cutoff, you know, you're going to have a pretty good likelihood of that wire landing very quickly. that said, if this ad, you know, showed a guy selling, you know, an old truck and taking the bus home afterwards, if you're trying to, you know, make any type of major transaction peer to peer after hours and want to do so in a trustless way, stable coins are a fantastic way to do that. And I like that Coinbase is taking this moment where they're, you know, number one in the charts or close to that, and starting to advertise some of the applications of, you know, crypto that the average person would really care about, which is I'm making a big purchase or a big transaction.

2:18:31I just wanted to go through fast. And I just wanted to go through fast and know that it's there. And yeah, so I can see, I can actually, the ad made sense because I can actually see that happening where somebody's first time like really using crypto other than to speculate is like making a big purchase like a car. That's great. Let's go to Ryan Harmon, good friend of the show. He says, we did a new brand with our friends at A24 and they introduced movie chocolate, milk chocolate to eat during movies. And it just has a fantastic brand, fantastic text. And you could see this being really huge. And it's cool to see A24 branching out into consumer packaged goods in a really interesting way.

2:19:10And super aligned with the products. The flavors of this new chocolate brand are like super fun and funky. And they're partnering with AMC. So these will be available. Yeah. And they People like to call Ryan's agency, the day job, the A24 of creative agencies, right? They're bold. They're dramatic. They're original. I mean, the main problem with Ryan and day job is that he hasn't done the blood sucking scale up that most other brand agencies have where he's just producing slop, but charging 500 K a project for basically just copy paste of the Figma file. So get your money up, Ryan. start doing shittier projects and maybe you'll make a lot more money.

2:19:52One small note on Ryan. He's also a little bit of a real estate developer. Oh, really? They've taken a lot of the profits from the agency. There we go. They've been building a office ground up. So if I was a designer, or a copywriter, or creative director, and I was in LA, I'd be wanting to go work for them. Yeah, yeah. Their new office is going to be fantastic. It's a fantastic business. And he helped us with Excel. You know what they say? Excel. Good times create Jaguar rebrands. Jaguar rebrands create hard times, hard times, hard times, create day jobs, day jobs, create Jaguar, create good times.

2:20:26That's great. Let's go to Phil Ehrenstein. He is the founder of Durac. We got his name wrong on the last podcast and he's very upset. He said, just going to leave this one here. And it's Jordy grasping for his name, failing two seconds later. He clipped this so short, five seconds at six seconds. I say your name is Phil. I know your name. Phil is a Chad, future Bean Air. Giga Chad. Giga Chad, future brother of the week. Also, incredible bench press. This guy is an incredible bench presser. He's an animal. And so he says, changing my morning alarm tone from the Founders Fund opening song to this audio to begin my winter arc.

2:21:00So he's fueling himself off of it. So the only thing I would say, I'm sorry, Phil. You're incredible. Yeah, we love you, Phil. I'm bullish on you. And Dirac. Dirac, I pronounce. I think it's pronounced wrong. Dirac? Dirac? Yeah, Dirac. I not only forgot his name, I mispronounced his company. It's after some scientist. Some nerd. Phil, you're an animal. you uh are i know you're a future brother of the week and we cannot wait to hang uh you know at the next uh gundo tb uh dinner crossover let's do it yeah uh zestular asks what's the tech bro version of a rolex and it's like he's subtweeting us yeah it's it's he doesn't follow us yet but zestular get on the bandwagon because we've been talking about this for weeks the technology brother version of a rolex is a patek philippe yes but which one i mean you can't go wrong in the range yes that could be a aquanaut a nautilus call a trava if you're just kind of getting into the range starting to build that relationship sure um but uh but yeah you could also argue it you know i know um uh you know praying for exits popular meme account he'll often be fine wearing you know timeless Submariner.

2:22:06Sure. I think it's a great watch. And so one could argue the Technology Brother version of a Rolex is a Rolex. Yeah. But also you go up market to the giga tech bro, Zuck. He wears an FP Jorn. And so a Richard Mill. Can't get me wrong with this. We have a promoted post from Richard Mill actually today. We do. Richard Mill. It's a racing machine on the wrist. Skeletonized. Skeletonized. It looks like one. This is a head turner. this is a fun piece can you read me the the love language there the love language says a racing machine on the wrist skeletonized manual winding uh 70 hour power reserve base plate and bridges and grade five titanium power reserve and function indicators case and grade five titanium torque limiting crown so like this is the kind of thing that you know you're going to see in a doll on the wrist while he's playing i think i think the lesson here is that is that tech bros are anti-memetic like we do not want to have a one-size-fits-all we don't want every tech bro wearing all birds.

2:23:04We don't want every tech bro wearing the exact same Nautilus. We want a piece, a hitter on the wrist that speaks to what you're doing. Are you in hard tech? Are you an AI? Are you in B2B software? These are different paths for the tech bro. Are you a capital allocator? That means something different and that means a different piece on the wrist. So you want something that speaks to who you are and what you do. So if you're a technology brother and you're creating autonomous, you know, drones for the sea. Maybe it's a G-Shock. Or a Submariner, right? Submariner. Literally, it's got the depth potential.

2:23:37You're not going to be wearing a dress watch in that scenario. Exactly. You're certainly not going to be wearing an Apple watch. Maybe it's a dress watch. Maybe you're in a bow tie. Maybe you're in a tux. And you need to call a trava. Absolutely. Let's go to Omar Wasim. He says, the best ideas start as intersections. Huge alpha in exploring combinations of whatever you're obsessively interested in. And Tech Bros Pod is the best recent example of this. American Dynamism, X Venture, X Niche, Twitter, Bubble. And as soon as he said Bubble, I was in. I was in. I love Bubbles. We love Bubbles on this show.

2:24:10I love Omar. We promote Bubbles. I've been on his podcast before. We participate in Bubbles. And the only thing I had to say in response to this was there's just huge alpha and simply wearing a suit, right? I agree. If you're in technology, take off the Allbirds, throw on some loafers, get a tailored suit, wear it to work. I guarantee you'll stand out and you're making a statement. I like every step. And let's close with Andrew Huberman, who talking about podcasts, he says, wondering if it's still a good idea to start a podcast. Yes. Especially if you have expertise in a particular area that you focus on or weave into your content.

2:24:46I'm excited for the next generation of health, science and tech podcasters. It's fertile soil. I mean, clearly subtweeting us. Absolutely. Obviously. But does it apply outside of us? Absolutely. I think so. Absolutely. I think there's plenty of opportunities. I think the evidence of this is you could say, you know, in the consumer brand industry, right, there's a brand for almost anything. And, you know, once a week you see a brand launch and you're like, that makes sense for this moment. You know, we were, you know, the whole sort of market was ready for it. And the same thing with podcasts. there's still, I forget the stat, but there's like 300 ,000 ish podcasts that have published at all in the last month.

2:25:27And so while there's a lot of podcasts that take a shot on goal and then like, don't quite see it through or continue, there's far fewer podcasts that are just consistent. There really aren't that many podcasts that fully send it. It's a lot of side hustle. Oh, I do something on zoom. I interview my friends and they don't really think through like, what are the sources of alpha? How can I combine different ideas? How can I really prioritize this? and make this the best thing. That's what I noticed on YouTube was like, at a certain point, it's like, pick a big topic and make the best video about that topic.

2:25:58And it would always go viral. A few years later, you have half a million subscribers. That's a great place to go. No accident. Thanks for watching. Subscribe today or be relegated to a life of net jets for the rest of your life. Just do it. Do it now. Thank you. Thank you for watching.