Founders Guide to VC Holiday Parties, Dawgs of the Week, Zuck's Gold Chain, Trillion Dollar Potential

28:47I guess this is donated, but you know, the whole backstory, can you break it down and then tell us why we are awarding the brother of the week, not to Zuck, but to someone else? Yes. Uh, so, so anyway, so this auction was hosted by a friend of the podcast and friend of ours, Justin Mares. So Justin, uh, has his own company, TrueMed, made, made, made his money in bone broth, but more recently has been, um, you know, in the, in the, uh, uh, running TrueMed. Uh, he's also a venture partner at Long Journey Ventures, a famous venture capital firm. And Justin has created this thing called Inflection Grants, which is a program where if you're 25 and under and$2 ,000 would change your life, you can get a grant.

29:29So this could be getting a plane ticket somewhere. Let's say you're living in Tennessee and you want to get to Silicon Valley. They'll give you a grant that lets you fly out, meet somebody and potentially change the trajectory of your life. uh it could be a computer let's say kids in high school and they're like good at video editing and they want to get better at that they'll give them a grant to buy a computer and so this entire auction are tailor-made suits eligible yes so so if you're uh if you're a gen z founder you're going to y combinator you want to stand out and you want to get a tailored suit uh from fiorentino label uh two thousand dollars uh is not going to get you that but you could go down to suit supply and pick up a suit from there.

30:09And so, yeah, it's an amazing program, sort of adjacent to Teal Fellowship, more accessible, and just goes to show that it doesn't take that much money to change the trajectory of someone's life, right? So very cool program. And so this chain, they were able to secure Mark Zuckerberg's former daily driver chain and auction it off and able to raise$100 ,000 for inflection grants. And so, uh, that's 50 people that are going to get this grant. Um, and so if you're interested in the program, uh, go to inflectiongrants.com, I believe is the, uh, thing and congratulations to Justin, uh, one of the founding brothers of the week and, uh, nobody deserves it more than him this week.

30:57So thank you. Let's, uh, continue with potentially a future brother of the week, Luke Metro. He's been on the show before he says, it's kind of cool how raising a seven figure seed round is generally easier than getting a job as a VC associate. Interesting. Yeah. This was somewhat controversial in the group chats. Yeah. Theo was saying that this behavior needs to be shamed. And I think he was talking about the pattern of VC associates or something. What was he saying? No, no. I think he was saying it shouldn't be that easy to raise millions of dollars for your company. Got it. And I can see it both ways.

31:33Theo's point of view is is a lot of people their first few ideas that they work on are just not going to be that great right and uh sort of resources that are potentially wasted yep uh i can see that side uh the other side of this is that the vc associate job is just not at most firms is not that you're kind of like a bdr sdr like cold reaching out to companies the good companies don't want to talk to the associates and so it's just sort of like a role that has a bunch of busy work and maybe it's you know maybe it ends up being a pathway to joining the firm as partner or joining another firm as partner but i think in a lot of funds the the associate uh role is a is a it's almost like a death trap um but i i think it's generally good that that more young people will be better qualified to be investors later in life if they like build stuff i think it's generally good that But it's, and Luke is just identifying this, but it's pretty wild how for some people, it's easier for them to raise a seed round than get a job, which is actually probably an indicator of how strong our innovation economy is.

32:44Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, almost like a tax on large VC funds, if you raise a billion dollar fund and you put$100 million aside for million-dollar seed rounds, that's 100 companies. You're not going to hire 100 associates with a billion-dollar fund. And so the math just plays out much better. You get all these call options and then all these companies. It really does seem like it's a better job. That would be an interesting fund strategy, though. It's a$100 million fund with 100 associates, and they just fight. They just fight for the death. There's a leaderboard every single week. Who's talking to the most companies?

33:20Who's doing the most deals? There are some funds that track calls in the CRM. Like you got to be making 40 calls a week. And emails, I'm sure. Yeah, 40 calls a week. It's crazy. Oh, well, I agree with Luke on this. I think it is wild, but I think it's the correct model. Erroneous Input created a fantastic meme of us. I love this. This is reply guy of the month or week level posting. He's a candidate for sure. Yeah. Do not stop Erroneous Input. We love what you're doing. You're on the map. it's a beautiful photo found some great photos of us from the show photoshopped them in to this uh this sports car in the snow and uh really really good job with the cropping and the masking just this very intentional hack job this is this is class i like it um really really good probably could have blended in the tb logo into the hood a little bit more dusted a little snow over the hood in a couple months he'll be pulling out the 3d rendering software really baking it in using A sora, maybe.

34:19Yeah, maybe. But we love to see the user-generated content, where it's going, how it's growing. We appreciate what you do for the show. Great work. We wouldn't be who we are without you. Let's go through this three-post deep dive by Arfor Rock, funny name. And I think, did you want to start with the Steph post? Steph Mui? She says, a GP from a multi-stage VC firm is anonymously posting private revenue numbers and funding rounds of large companies that are apparently quite accurate. And they only have 450 followers and most of their tweets have almost no likes. And R4Rock is posting 11 labs, 90 million ARR, planning 100 million EOI, profitable, closed unannounced round at 3.2 billion from iconic growth in A16Z.

35:08And R4Rock also says, $20 million ARR in the first two months, fastest growing software company ever, raising 80 to 100 million at 1 billion, have a few term sheets first week in market. And then R4Rock closes with saying, my DMs are open if you have some tea. It ain't much, but it's honest work. So yeah, what's going on here? Break down. So you remember last bubble 2021, there was an account, I think it was called Genuine Info or something like that, that was just a similar approach that was basically leaking major deal making that was happening, you know, months or two months out before it was getting publicly announced.

35:48And so Arthur Rock, great name. Uh, I actually don't know what it's in a reference to Arthur Rock, Arthur Rock, the original GP or the original, uh, like BC. Wow. I just proved I'm a zoomer. Yeah. Um, the original GP himself. So, um, anyways, great venture capitalist, the first venture capitalist. So great, uh, great name and, And some interesting intel. I actually DMed with him a little bit last night. Oh, really? Nice guy. A technology brother himself, clearly. Fantastic. But yeah, it's an interesting strategy, Cotton. Because I think at some point, some schizo is going to just try to pinpoint all of this and put it all together.

36:30Because on one hand, I think it's a lot of this information by the time that... But he's not sharing anything that would be potentially damaging to companies. Yeah. but he's certainly front running the news cycle, which our friends at the misinformation like to do quite a lot. Yep. And so anyways, I'm interested. I think, I think I'm long this account. I'm investing sub 500 followers. Okay. He's got a bright future and it's, it's one, it's one to follow. It's funny. Cause I think it will whip GPs into this hysteria because they're going to see sometimes announcements get done and GPs are like punching the air because they just didn't see the company at all.

37:06And it just like happened. and how did this happen without us seeing it and now it's even earlier than that like the term sheets are basically already signed and they're seeing arthur rock announce it and they're just like sending arthur rocks posts to their principal being like how the fuck did you miss this i love how you say uh during the last bubble because it's just like you're always in a bubble we're always in one either in a crash or a bubble yeah there's no normal time yeah and this is true like When I got to Silicon Valley in 2012, 2013, everyone was talking about tax in the major bubble.

37:38And then that bubble went on for a decade. That was a great bubble. Great bubble. But I think we're in the best one yet. The America bubble. Yeah. Jacob Sandsbury says, having kids in the next five years might be a tragic mistake. Every smart bio founder slash scientist I've talked to seems to think that embryo editing for things like short sleeper, reduced cancer risk, et cetera, is possible on a near-term horizon. Imagine having two kids a couple years apart. One is a superhuman and the other isn't. Sorry, Jim, little Timmy won't get cancer. Only needs four hours of sleep. And you're normal.

38:08And you're normal. You were just born in the wrong order. 3K likes. Interesting. The problem with this is that like these innovations, like it's not going to be some binary step change. It's going to be very smooth. And so like, yes, every kid is going to be healthier. D-cell alert. D-cell alert. No, I'm kidding. I looked at this more like part of being human is being imperfect. Yep. And I plan to have many more children with my wife. Go watch Gattaca. The indomitable will of the human spirit. Yeah. And my children are perfect to me, even though I'm sure like one of them needs more sleep than the other, all these things.

38:52So I think it's pretty human. And a lot of these gene editing technologies will be possible once you're alive. There'll be medications. there'll be all sorts of different hacks. Yeah, it's also, do you want to be in the first generation of fully gene edited children where you're like, oh, I want to make sure, I want to allow them to only sleep three hours so they can grind harder. Yeah, probably no side effects. And then it creates this like insane side effect. And it's like, yeah, maybe you want a cycle, a 20 year cycle. All of them became serial killers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just want to edit for not being one-shotted by ayahuasca.

39:22Yes, yeah. In case, in the downside that my children were to rebel against me. Yeah, also if you talk to a parent and you said, hey, there's this new experimental gene editing technology that will let your kids sleep for four hours. I don't know, a single parent would take that. Every parent would be like, where's the 12 hour sleep? Yeah, every night you're basically optimizing for how to make sure this light is on. Yeah, longer sleep, blackout curtains, noise machine. Two, let's do two noise machines. Yeah, two second machines. Clearly doesn't have kids. Have you done the overlapping noise machines?

39:52No, I haven't done it. It works. There's levels to the noise machine. I love it. Okay, Cora says, today was the day I finally broke. I was accidentally not disassociated enough on the streets of San Francisco and projectile vomited from the yucky sites. This is interesting because I looked at Cora's profile and she's like a very normal tech person. She's not some like raging right-wing lunatic who's like agitating for culture war. But 10 years ago, there was this guy, Greg Gottman, who posted something very similar talking about the homeless problem in uh in san francisco and he was canceled harder than like anyone ever like could not get a job for years for years and then he kind of bounced around i think he's doing okay now but it was really really rough he wrote a post about how like san francisco has a lot of homeless problem and like we need to do something about this and everyone was canceled for that incredibly canceled like terrible he got hired at twitter for a little bit there was an error you're basically i'm i basically missed this era because I was basically in high school.

40:56But you said Dustin Curtis got canceled for liking nice things. This guy got canceled for - Identifying the homeless problem. Yeah. It was rough. And yeah, the tech industry hadn't learned to like circle the wagons at all. And so there was just - No nuance. It was just complete scapegoating and then just ostracization. You just became an apostate very quickly for doing anything like this. Yeah. It was crazy. And yeah, Greg was a little too early on that one. but it's interesting to see like just you know from what i can tell just like a completely normal person intact like not not raging like oh some culture war like clickbait you know trying to like rile people yeah it's not a contrarian thing i mean i that's my some of my core memories of san francisco unfortunately are being a kid and like walking around and being stunned at some sort of very traumatizing yeah situation basically i mean i i lived in the tenderloin in 2012 2013 and it was rough, but I mean, I'm a tall guy.

41:56Most times people would just be like, oh, do you play basketball? They get kind of distracted. And once you're like a local, people just kind of clock you as a local. And you'd carry a basketball, right? Exactly. In a jersey. Or you'd leave the house. Place for the Warriors. It wasn't that bad for me, but I went back after COVID and I'd seen everyone on Twitter in San Francisco talk about how bad it was. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try and be objective here. Like how can I quantifiably say if it's actually worse or if that's just some psyop from tech people. And the thing that I, I landed on as being like something that I noticed that was physically different was the number of barbecues that were on the street, like more permanent encampments because you're actually like living and cooking and like sometimes even hooking up gas lines and stuff.

42:39Like it's like very, very permanent installations. And I was like, I don't remember that happening. And so you can never really tell if it's like, Oh, you're, you see a street and there's a lot of homeless people, it could just be like, well, they moved from five streets to one street. So there's not actually a gain in the number of homeless people. But the barbecue thing really, really stuck out to me. So I do think there's an issue and I really hope they solve it soon. And apparently the best way to solve it is to have Xi Jinping come and visit. You saw that? Gary Tan. Yeah, Gary Tan's leading the serious charge.

43:07But anytime there's Dreamforce, Mark Benioff is just like, clean up this entire city. It's great. Let's go to Will Quist. He says, that sound you hear is tech investment bankers everywhere canceling their holiday plans and breathing a sign of relief. And it says, this post is unavailable. Should we even cover this? No, that was something about Service Titan. Oh, okay. Because it was Service Titan. They priced it at like 70 and then it went out at like over 100. And for a long time, the tech IPOs would dip right after. It was rough. And then SPACs were like aggressively bad. And so, so many VCs were like, let's just stay private longer.

43:42But now the game's back on. M &A is back on the menu. Lena Khan's out. ipos are back on the menu start titan start underwriting your seed investments to decacorn outcomes it's okay to invest at 50 posts pre-revenue pre-idea pre-team yep just do it 50 post 50 50 million going into the seed round yeah yeah yeah 200 250 right yeah exactly sorry sorry we're building the ai here man we need some cloud credits um oh this is a good one but we're a little bit too deep in the post. Gary Tan says, I want this. I would fund this too. And it's Andre Carpathie talking about building a tool to help you read along with a book.

44:26We talked about this last time, but Krish then says, I love you, Gary, but you guys literally rejected me. And he posted, he posts his, his company, but the beauty of YC, you can apply again. Gary wants it again. DM him. And if you want an AI reading companion, go to getmeaning.xyz. Getmeaning.xyz slash home. Do you really need to slash home, bro? Yeah, and go getmeaning.com. And, I mean, what a real poster. He included a link, 2.5K likes. Real posters built different. Yeah, built different. Broke through. Respect. Yeah, so, you know, never too late to apply to YC. You can always get in. Get Go Bioworks went through at like 200 million valuation.

45:08Promoted post. Not a promoted post. I'm just going to jump in because this one is near and dear to my heart. I got a post from Druva Rohendra, a close friend of mine. Yesterday, Druva and myself and the deterrence team announced Deterrence, which is a new company leveraging robotics to manufacture energetics. energetics. So for anybody that's not heavy, heavy in defense, a lot of the high profile defense tech companies like Andrel have been going after these sort of very sexy programs like drones and autonomous submarines. And there hasn't been a player yet that's come out and made a made an effort to rebuild the sort of high volume manufacturing base.

45:54So for anything like, you know munitions in the case of deterrence deterrence his first product uh is manufacturing primer which is the explosive um sort of like thing that that starts the uh reaction in a in a in a bullet in a round in a bullet yeah um and so yeah deterrence has been in the works for let's see some uh you know uh druva and brian the um the founders had been working on this for since last year at this point. But the company got out and running earlier this year, built a fantastic team. And yeah, this is a company that I was fortunate enough to be involved with since probably six months prior to incorporation.

46:39So personally got a front row seat. And the team now is stacked. Tesla, Palantir, Rivian, a bunch of incredible engineers and operators. and ridiculous customer backlog. Like we were able to identify something that has a shocking amount of demand. And so if you're looking for a job, check us out, deterrence.com. I got a number of positions open and this was a fun round for me because my good friend, Will Cofield, who's here in LA, led the round,$10 million in total financing and a bunch of friends of the podcast participated as well. Heston, Berkman, Jack Dreyfus, people like that. So very exciting.

47:26And it was good to finally get this out. It's always a strange thing when you've been working on something in silence for oftentimes more than a year. And so to finally get out there and see the reaction is great. So good work to the deterrence team. And yeah, this is one to follow. Fantastic. Let's go to Avi Schiffman. he says there's nothing more nauseating than a than a tesla uber and you had some comments on this what's wrong with tesla ubers break it down so uh so being in malibu like uber is super unreliable so i always have to like i have a driver that will take me to the airport and uh i had to tell him like stop picking me up in your tesla because yes it's like you know maybe environmentally friendly and this convenient modern features or whatever but it's just so nauseating sitting in the back and a lot of people don't have been slow to sort of realize why this is the obvious one is the acceleration teslas have like the acceleration of like a turbo s but like too much even like throughout like the full like it's just like way too much acceleration for the average person uh it's like driving an f1 car on the street um the regenerative braking so that the car automatically braking creates this to sort of recharge the battery creates this effect where it's this fast acceleration and then you take your foot off the gas and it sort of um breaks aggressively more so than than if you just let it sort of coast and then the big one that that um the i should put on my tinfoil hat on to maybe protect me from some emfs but um teslas just emit like a ridiculous amount of emf um which is you know sort of low level radiation a lot of people say that it doesn't have any negative effects.

49:11But there's quite a lot of evidence that it might. And you can actually go on YouTube and just search like Tesla EMF reading. And in most Teslas, the EMF levels are much higher in the backseat. So when you're sitting in the backseat, you're getting like, you're basically getting microwaved. And then the car is like, you know, accelerating, decelerating. It's not a very, not a very amazing experience. So it's probably something people don't notice if they're in the front seat because they're look eyes on the roads acceleration is it's like you you rarely get car sick when you're driving yeah exactly so if you're driving and you're the one on the gas and and then also a lot of the uber drivers are just trying to get there as fast as possible so they're going to be really pushing the acceleration and braking to get there faster because they want to do the next ride whereas if you're driving yourself you might be a little bit more legally but i want to see i i know that there's stuff tesla can do to mitigate emf some other car manufacturers have made efforts on this so i'd like to see them prioritize it because i don't have anything against tesla as a manufacturer i think it's great let's go to dudes posting their w's he says buddy is the most condescending word in dude culture and there's a meme that shows a hierarchy guys that say big dog are at the top guys that say bro and man are after that and then sir bruh chief dude son and fella and buddy are at the bottom um so bud and buddy are just so much farther than chief i don't i don't think chief is derogatory but yeah well it's about the it's about the hierarchy like are you like when you say big dog that's like a sign of respect sir chief these are boss these are these are your you're paying respects upward then there's brother which is equivalent man equivalent dude sir even but then when you go son that's younger and buddy is like what you call your dog and so it's like are you talking down to people are you talking up to them or showing a sign of respect son can also be used in the right context can be um you know positive damn son like that no more like here come on son i'll teach that's still very negative yeah but it can be but it's more familial like yeah it's got a more positive connotation but that's why technology brothers we're all equal here yeah we're all equal i do think that if a vc calls their portfolio founder bud they should be diluted to zero like there should be like some type of new round with structure done to just dilute them to zero because it's so condescending and uh should should be taken out of the vocabulary entirely that's great well this is interesting word grammar says most of peter teal and paul graham's advice is directly contradict each other you have to pick a side trying to follow both is a good way to make sure you end up following neither word grammar i'd never seen him until this post him or her um but at great post and perfectly controversial yeah which is why the engagement seems strong yeah i mean i think that the i mean the funds are set up wildly differently what yeah i was gonna say you're perfectly qualified for this i've been through yc twice work with either work at founders fund uh yeah so i mean the funds are set up wildly differently like YC invests in thousands of companies.

52:25Founders Fund is extremely picky and they're trying to teach you two different things. I think YC is effectively just, can you start a business? And by the end of YC, most of those founders, unless they mess something up, they will have a company, like a business. I talked to a YC founder that went through, they tried to build some SaaS product and then they wound up, they didn't really have traction and they wound up just being a software consultancy. And so the guy makes a great living as a software consultancy and it's just like a lifestyle business essentially. It's great. Whereas the Founders Fund Teal model is very, very narrowly selected for monopoly power, are there modes or power law outcomes?

53:09Can this be a trillion dollar company? Yeah, it's not underwriting. Oh, we think this can be, they can IPO and have a$10 billion market cap. It's, are we going to still want to invest in this company at a$200 billion valuation. Exactly, exactly. So that's just a wildly different question. And you would never get that in a YC interview. Like, oh, let's make sure that you can, that it's plausible that this could be a trillion dollar company. No, it's like, are you an interesting hacker? Are you building something? Do you want to build a business? Yeah, and the cool thing is that YC generates a number of power lock companies, right?

53:41Coinbase, Lucy, Airbnb, right? So they still generate these Thielian companies. Yes. And Founders Fund will back those companies. Yeah. But it's just a much different method. Let's just continue with word grammar because this one's great. God cursed Peter Thiel by making him Silicon Valley's biggest tech guru. Now the minute he says something, millions of tech bros listen and agree with him. Because of his curse, he will never be able to be a contrarian ever again. So this is interesting and this is somewhat true. but there are plenty of things that he doesn't say publicly. Yeah, it's a timing mismatch.

54:19Yeah, exactly. He's going to say, he's going to make everyone believe what he wants them to believe when it is convenient. Yeah, it's a timing mismatch more just in the sense of like, there's clearly ideas that he's talking about with his inner circle, then workshopping and private events, then there's private dinners where these ideas go out, and then maybe like six months to a year later, it's on a podcast. Yeah, it's a very intentional. intentional he i would say he's understanding the weight of his words yeah and being very intentional with how he rolls out that messaging yep to not come out and be too dogmatic about one thing yep yep yeah too early i mean we yeah we heard up we heard a talk by him recently in miami and um it was very clear that that was something that was still being workshopped no and we've talked about this offline but the it's still contrarian to actually follow zero to one's approach to a T where most, it's very hard.

55:16Most investors will say, oh, we're contrarian. We're only investing in power law, monopoly companies, but then they'll do like a run of the mill, like B2B SaaS companies still. And so they're not actually like fully embodying that approach. Yeah. And I, I, my, my, my takeaway from zero to one is always like, if you read the book and you really apply it to your business, like what you're meant to do, what you're enjoying building. the answer might not be don't start a company it might just be don't raise venture capital yeah and there and yc is not that check yeah but there are plenty of companies that get through yc and then they don't need to raise because they're not building in that zero to one playbook sense and that's okay yeah um but but it just it wouldn't it wouldn't count in that metric uh let's go to dd dd says just learned that whatsapp has not 10 not 20 but 150 designers all working tirelessly to make sure the app looks exactly the same as it did in 2014 92k likes yeah so this is crazy because the x design team yeah which now includes my dear friend brandon jacoby who you've covered on the show before the x design team i think is under five people like it's some like tiny tiny much more complicated product i would say in many ways to run a social app yep than a messaging app even though whatsapp has plenty of social features so anyways this goes back to what we've talked about before why haven't more companies done the elon and just cut like 80 of people but i guess whatsapp being part of meta now maybe it doesn't have the same incentive yeah i also wonder if like a lot of those designers are working on like little new small like like like ad integrations because the core product does look the same but there's a lot of like design every simple product is deeply complex yeah all the different onboarding flows and like little screens that you don't see and you never really interact with but yeah 150 is a lot of designers for an app that's pretty basic it feels basic but yeah i mean facebook has a long history of stuffing features in these apps like yeah instagram used to just be photos now there's like 25 different tabs i do do you have to give them credit for keeping instagram instagram like they've like 100x the features and it's still the core functionality of going there to see what's likely the most interesting posts for me at that moment in time.

57:32Profile still fairly clean. So credit to them for that. Let's go to Lee Jacobs. He says, when Chase Lockmiller first told me about Crusoe, I said, wait, you are turning large fireballs from the ground into Bitcoin in North Dakota. What started as that absurd idea is now the leading full stack AI inference company, excited for the new fuel from our friends at Founders Fund. That is crazy. Do you know the story of Crusoe, like how they started? I don't know. I don't know the full, I only know that Lee was the first investor. And so Crusoe, they, the whole play was like finding stranded energy and then using that for compute to power supercomputers.

58:13And so what they did was they found natural gas plants where they have to flare the gas. And so there's excess gas that comes off, they can't capture it. It's just going to burn and that's bad for emissions. So instead they burn it and they turn it into energy that then they can use to power the computers. And at the time, the most valuable use for cheap energy was mining Bitcoin. So they started there. And then obviously AI came up and the Bitcoin mining business has kind of taken a backseat to the AI infrastructure now. That's very cool. So yeah, it's crazy like second and third act for that company that was only possible because they took the path they did.

58:48And for a long time, people were kind of like, oh, you're like a Bitcoin mining company. Like this isn't interesting during the downturn and now that the ai booms here it's like we got it all the all the vcs that probably passed when they were you know doing something that was less on narrative but we we joked about this earlier but like you said the crusoe founder said they some of these foundation models would burn whale blubber if they could yeah yeah totally so desperate for energy so desperate for energy this goes back to just energy being one of the kind of core yeah foundational layers of the AI value chain.

59:21Just today I saw Satya Nadella was doing some sort of interview. Wailing? Press conference for Microsoft. And he said that they're no longer GPU poor, like GPU bound. Yeah. And everyone's like, oh, bear case for NVIDIA. Like they have all that they need. I don't think it's that. I think that they're buying the maximum and now they've hit a different bottleneck, which is probably energy. Yeah. Which is crazy. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friend Delian over at Varda. He says, if you want to come work for me, the teams I work with most at Varda is expanding. If you've worked in Gov and love policy, come help us make space factories a reality.

59:57It takes legislation as much as it takes nuts and bolts to make this crazy thing a reality. He puts a link in the next tweet. They have a fantastic role available, government affairs manager. You're going to be based in Washington, D.C. So if you have experience in working the government and they go over some of the requirements here. but Varda has just been taking a crazy idea and then just ruthlessly executing against it, getting contracts, proving out that this is very real and happening. So awesome opportunity for the right person. The only downside is if you take that job, Delian will probably refer to you as a swamp creature.

1:00:36I was out in D.C. once with him and he was like, oh, yeah, I'll introduce you to our swamp creature, our head of government affairs. Our head of swamp. Our head of swamp. He's like, he's so swampy. He's been in the swamp for years. He's the best. it's a term of endearment but it's very silly uh let's go to mark sisson he says uh when i heard the new york times was suing open ai for using its archives as training data i knew relying on llms as arbiters of truth was fucked beyond all recognition so real so real uh i mean yeah i i think you have to models do a good job of processing broad i i don't know you could argue maybe they don't do a good job but they're they're aware of bias and trying to piece together what what they imagine is the truth but it's the same thing same end thing that an individual is doing of like looking at multiple sources and trying to piece together the truth uh the truth is is um it's hard to nail down oftentimes in the world that we're in but um but yeah you certainly this this goes back to there's a company out there called dexa that i think is interesting and it they basically uh scrape all the binger podcasts and so you can ask what does mark huberman think about uh this you know gluten right and then and so this goes back to in the era of models yeah uh you're still going to go back to individuals so i'm going to trust the experts i'm going to trust the experts no but like like yeah obviously joking but like mark is a good example where I want to know what Mark Sisson thinks about, about, um, seed oils, right?

1:02:14I don't want to know what, what open AI thinks about it. Cause they're probably going to say, well, popular science says that there's no issue with. Yeah. And he's calling out New York times and there's been some crazy, crazy quotes in the New York times recently about health. Like I really would trust Huberman way more than the New York times. Uh, didn't they say like ultra processed foods aren't bad for you? It's like, yeah. So I can just eat Oreos all day long. Like this is nutrition 101. You shouldn't be eating Cheetos all the time. This is not like some contrarian crazy idea. This is like pretty basic.

1:02:46Anyway, we have some breaking news, folks. Lucy Guo has broken her silence. She has not posted in hours, but she just dropped a banger pod with Molly O'Shea. The queen of LA is talking about the creator economy. She's the founder of Passes. and we encourage you to go check out the podcast. And Lucy was also posting yesterday that she has millions of dollars in short-term capital gains and she's looking to marry somebody who has millions of dollars in losses that's ideally local to LA. And the two of you would be able to split the savings and presumably get divorced soon afterwards. But anyways, if you have millions of dollars in short-term losses, go hit up Lucy.

1:03:29yeah she's got a solution uh for you to make some of that back fantastic let's move on to uh daniel tenriro i need to learn how to pronounce his last name he says the robin hood foundation is running a stock picking contest for donors and the leaderboard is truly a work of art put it in the louvre and the leaderboard is bill ackman at the top with a total return of over a hundred 100%. His long pick was Fannie Mae and his short sector was financials. Wait, so this is put on by Robinhood? No, the Robinhood Foundation with a space. And the funny thing here is that - Wow, that's very confusing. Number two is Mark Gallant and his long pick was Robinhood the company.

1:04:09Wow. And his short pick was communications. And then MicroStrategy was the long pick for Mark Gallant again. And David Einhorn picked Peloton. Wait, do you have back? I'm actually not familiar with the Robinhood Foundation. I'm not familiar either. I think it's just a charity. This is why you come to the Technology Brothers. Get the facts and the deep analysis and backstory. So if you know what the Robin Hood Foundation is, let us know in the YouTube comments. It's probably literally in the second post here in Thread, but I didn't study for this one. We phoned it in, folks. This is an interesting one.

1:04:46Zach Coelius says, Coelius? Is that how you pronounce it? I don't know. I wish I knew. Zach says, played credit card roulette for the dinner bill last night with a bunch of VCs, and it was surprising how uncomfortable a bunch of them were. What happened to the DGEN gambler mentality of our asset class for a neutral EV bet? It is such a no-brainer. Such a no-brainer. I love playing that game. Well, it's not always neutral EV, because what if you're the one that drank the most wine, ordered the most steak, housed all the appetizers? It could be extremely positive for you. So maybe the people that were sheepish, they just had a little salad on the side and they're like, ah, I'm going to get burned here.

1:05:26I'm going to get burned, yeah. No, I just go into that. You want to be going to dinners where you would happily pay for everybody and still feel like it was a good just exchange, right? Because you're going for the company. It's not about the food. It's not about how much you ate. It's not about how much you drank. It's about who you were there with and what deals you got done. It's great. Do we have any more promoted posts? I got a promoted post from the number one business podcast in the world. Oh, this is fantastic. David Senra with Founders Podcast. He gave a great summary of the book, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, which we've talked about before on the show.

1:06:03Brad Jacobs. He did a whole interview with Brad Jacobs. You called this out last time, but some of the most iconic founders now are actually living and breathing. And so David can just hang out with them and hear it straight from the horse's, from the thoroughbred's mouth. From the stallion's mouth. From the stallion's mouth. From the eventing horse's mouth. From the dressage horse's mouth. If you haven't seen our gift guide, go check it out. We talk about the different horses that you should be gifting your friends. But a couple highlights out here. Narrow your focus to the most important dreams and tune out everything else.

1:06:39two the most important thing a ceo does is recruit superlative people three an empty seat is less damaging than a poor fit four resist the urge to flood communications with non-essential information and five if you want to make money in the business world you need to get used to problems because that what that's what business is solving problems uh our the problem we're solving on this podcast is tech one didn't have a podcast. And the tech adjacent podcast all in wasn't monetizing, right? So you couldn't get in front of that audience. This is how you're getting in front of a similar audience.

1:07:15So there's five or sorry, five more that I'm not going to say here, but go listen to Founders Podcast. It is the number one business podcast. And thank you to David Senra for being on our board and supporting our show. Godfather podcasting. Let's stay on podcasts and close with some news from Dextero. They say BuzzFeed has sold the show Hot Ones for$82.5 million. So, I mean, that would be a down round for us if we sold for 82. We wouldn't even clear the pref on that. Yeah, I know. That'd be rough. But good for them. I hope they did okay. Wasn't that, that feels, I feel like it was originally reported that they were trying to sell it for like 30 or something like that.

1:07:59Oh, really? So it seemed that that's coming in a lot higher. Because I think a lot of people just looked at that and they said, the show was so reliant on the host that how do you really attach enterprise value unless you're locking them up for a pretty extreme time period. So maybe they figured out a way to do that. But it's funny because BuzzFeed, I think, weren't they trading at - Less than that or something? They were trading. I thought they were trading at like$20 million. Well, that's the equity value. And so I think BuzzFeed has debt. And so even if they sold this for 82, they might still be under one on the equity.

1:08:29Yeah, they were using BuzzFeed to, or they were using the sales to reduce their debt. Yeah, makes sense. I do wonder about - Yeah, so they're trading at 126 now, but they were - Yeah. I do wonder about if there is asset value beyond Sean Evans because his, I mean, he obviously is a great host, but his style is very much like ask the question and then kind of get out of the way. and there have been talk shows in the past that have had asset value beyond the core host. I think the best example is probably Late Night, which traded hands from Jay Leno to Conan O 'Brien in this very dramatic situation where then Conan got pulled and Leno came back.

1:09:09You heard of this whole story. It's like the Late Night Wars. And so, but that's very tied to, there are only 24 hours in the day. There's gonna be a Late Night show that's on Monday through Friday and there's only three spots for late night. It's like 10 p.m., 11 p.m., midnight. And then you get into the late, late show that has no value. And if you go earlier, you're in prime time and you want to be showing like scripted stuff. And so there's only, for a while, it was like there were only four channels, like NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS or whatever. And so there were really only like 10 slots for late night shows that would do interviews for adults after the kids go to bed, that type of stuff.

1:09:48But with the internet, obviously there can be unlimited interview shows, unlimited podcasts. And so BuzzFeed, like Hot Ones has obviously built like this incredible brand. It was originally with Complex, then sold to BuzzFeed. It's traded hands a few times now. Will be interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it doesn't seem like Sean Evans is stopping anytime soon. And it seems like they must've gotten him a great deal. And I bet part of that 82 was, you know, built into his contract and predicated on a great contract there. So always interesting to see what's going on in the podcast world.

1:10:19but we got to wrap up. We got a lot to do. Got to get on with Taipei, I think. That's right. That's right. So thanks for listening. Subscribe, follow us on X and we'll see you next time. See you on the timeline. See you on the timeline.