The Trump Bubble, TB's Unicorn Growth, Dom Perignon, Blood Boy Winner

48:01If you're not in the office at 12.04 a.m., chugging white monsters and popping zins you deserve to get your funding cut and this is this is interesting uh because great picture yeah i mean fantastic picture but i've always said that it's underrated that the gundo guys beat the allegations of being too twitter-brained and too addicted to posting and they very very elegantly switched from just constantly posting and needing to do all the work themselves to get attention in media to the media comes to them now and they just sit down. And I bet this got like a ton of reach. It's very valuable, very important for SEO.

48:44And it was probably like, you know, a one hour lunch. And they took some photos. High leverage. And Augusta, it's very high leverage. Exactly. It's way easier. And credit to them, they're some of the best posters of the generation. Fantastic. But they didn't get too into it where they were like, No, they post way less than the AI people, the accelerationist for sure they post way less um they're averaging yep and i think that's good because they they're actually able to go and build something real and and take time for the important things and then they can still pop up and post but it's very much like you know shower thoughts like it's really like slack time yeah they're not sitting there being like let me write a whole segment for augustus shower thoughts when he's when his drones are flying yeah He has a second to.

49:29Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's basically, yeah. I mean, like obviously they need to maintain attention. Oh, yeah. Promoted post quickly. We wanted to shout out that Augustus is at Rainmaker, who was featured in that article, is hiring, hiring, hiring, need more engineers. Please, sir, my tech development timelines are starving. So if you are an engineer, feel free to ping Augustus directly, apply for a job or DM us. And we're happy to give you our opinion on company and working with Augustus as he's a friend of the pod. So great, great opportunity for the right engineers out there and make haste.

50:13Yeah, I think it's rainmaker.com if you want to. Make rain.com. Make rain.com. There you go. If you want to learn more, we highly recommend it. I've made a whole video about the gundo. There's a great Jason Carman video about Rainmaker. Plenty of ways to learn more and find out if a job at Rainmaker is right for you. Let's go to Blake Robbins. Good, great investor. Just great guy all around. He says, the inevitable AI side hustle is to flood TikTok reels and shorts with AI edited Subway Surfer video plus top Reddit posts plus text to speech. is that inevitable or is that like already happening it's already i think it's already happening so blake is a good example a lot of people go say oh touch grass get offline go walk in the park blake's like no i'm gonna stay more online yeah i'm going to take uh pitches while he's the investor i i was pitching while talking while playing video games yeah yeah it was amazing and i was asking him he's an example of in our very online world i would uh anybody that tells you to get offline is maybe doesn't have your best interests at heart because Blake is a fantastic investor and found some great companies over the years very early.

51:27But yeah, we've seen this. A lot of people are saying you can make$10 ,000 a month making some AI influencers. Not sure about that, but the clipping strategy is very established as a way to at least generate a lot of attention. and you don't need to be uh particularly an expert in anything yourself to get great at clipping yeah and when we get into more of the uh the the vc trade deals the the the you know who's who's working where who's moving from one firm to the other we gotta analyze blake because he's that benchmark they let him go start another he was at that detroit fund yeah wow yeah yeah um you know He's moved around a bunch, tons to analyze there.

52:10Would have been a top draft pick for me if I was running one of the major venture firms. Holy trinity. We'll see. We'll see how he ends up. I like that he has his own fun, though. He's a master of his own destiny now. Santiago says, Wait, did you just say Dutch East India Company? Dude, they were the OG venture capitalists. VCs today are soft herd animals. These dudes were hardcore. They'd be like, there's an island that produces something we want and if we get it will 30 000 x our investment and it's i guess that's him yeah uh with the ovc ocv which is the the uh dutch east india trading company logo uh on rogan yeah which is funny well yeah it's funny what aaron slowed off right yeah with yeah aaron was talking about you know cornering the nutmeg market but um yeah yeah it's funny to think about the dutch east india company looking at you know a venture capitalist today is typically pretty happy with 100x yep 200x yeah that's kind of the range where you start to go okay so it's a good bet uh and you know they probably looked at something like that being like man with the risks that we're taking on like i need at least a 2000x like a lot of the growth equity funds are just like 20 irr deals no zeros yeah like imagine like it it's a good strategy like it's worked it's it's smart it's rational but private equity it doesn't feel like yeah it's private equity.

53:30It doesn't feel like venture. Venture needs to be, there's a 90%. There's a 5 % chance this is a trillion dollar company, 90 % chance it goes to zero, 5 % chance the founder goes to jail and I'm disgraced and I never work again. That's the venture model. Here's a company that practices front of the pod, Justin Mares and Lee, the team over at Long Journey. They practice this true venture today where they will back a founder who's still working in some university on some like crazy project or a poster that's like the most absurd thing you've ever heard. And they take, you know, they're making these bets where they'll invest very small six figure checks at very reasonable valuations given the risk profile.

54:16And I'm extremely bullish on the strategy. It makes me feel like an idiot for entering companies at 15 posts or 20 posts. I mean, I was talking to Lee the other day. He was the first investor in Crusoe. Yeah. Like fantastic company, like crushing. And also they, I was talking to Sayan about something. They, they invested in a diamond company. Yeah. Like where's that on any market map? Yeah. But they were, but they were like, yeah, we want to be investing off market. Yeah. Yeah. Off market maps for sure. I think the thesis was like, well, like lab grown diamonds are going to get cheaper. People will eventually switch over.

54:51But now it's like, oh, actually diamonds are important to like chip fabrication in some weird way. Here's somebody, I texted a market map to my friend Amar the other day and he goes, damn, that market map looks like the menu at a TGI Friday. And I was like, that is a good example of like, if the market map looks like a TGI Friday's menu, probably it passed. Stay away. Don't make your first bet because the game is the game's ever. Well, stay tuned for the Technology Brothers market map. We will be mapping out every poster that we mention on the show, and we're very excited to drop our first market map.

55:28Let's go to Ken. He says, by 2026, there will be two jobs, HVAC technician and YC founder. Everything else will be done by computers, and the HVAC technicians will have higher average annualized revenue. So here's the thing. I had, there's a guy, a guy I use for like random like handyman stuff around the house. And I were talking the other day, he's helping me with something. And he was like, dude, I've been taking these like engineering classes. I've been like learning to build websites. And I, I, I, I didn't try to dissuade him from doing that. Cause I think it's like, you should know how to build a website.

56:08You should know how to make a, an application, right? Like those sort of things are like basic skills, like replacing a, you know, uh, you know, screw in your house almost. Right. Uh, you should know how to like paint a fence, maybe something like that. Um, but I told him, I was like, look, every single person out of the last 400 people that I've texted could make a website today and ship it. Like a tiny fraction of those people like know how to properly like clean a gutter and maintain the gutter in a home right and even smaller fraction are going to like you know service and HVac. unit so i told them i was like look you're already very skilled in these areas and if you really productize what you're doing and get smart about building a team and marketing i guarantee you that you already have momentum in this area like you're going to be making more money than the average web developer in uh in three years yeah it's like taste and like arcane knowledge that doesn't exist on the internet is like what's valuable like yeah i've seen what i've what i'm seeing in the creative market right now is the truly truly talented creatives that uh that have incredible impeccable taste and execution and have built great teams around them are busier than ever yep uh then the the bottom half of the market like the historical web developer like i'm gonna make 200k you're developing maintaining a website like almost like blown out like non-existent like not not a great uh career path anymore i'm gonna be an accredited investor for very long yeah yeah exactly if you want to be a credit investor do not become a uh website commoditized web developer maintainer let's go to trey stevens one of my colleagues at founders fund says what do we want an anduril merch store when do we want it now and he is uh commemorating the launch of the anduril merch store very cool cgi render they're going to be dropping something i don't think they've actually talked about what they are dropping but i i've heard it's a very unique and cool plan we'll have to do a live yeah we'll do unboxing i'll get yeah so here's here's the thing so the most hyped merch drops on on on x right now are andrel and palantir but the issue is they both stand for very similar things yes there's not a lot of like conflict it's hard to really pick a side yep yep we need we need a third uh player to come in the mix so that people can kind of like you know there needs to be conflict otherwise there's no opportunity And I mean, I just imagine when I see a lot of Anderil and Palantir gear, it's a lot of t-shirts.

58:41It's a lot of sweatshirts. It says quiet luxury. It says, hey, I might've written a seed check in this company. Now it's worth a hundred billion dollars. I'm wealthy, but that's not the future. The future is loud opulence, loud opulence. You need to be screaming. Yeah. So I think there's an opportunity for a defense tech firm to come out that's maybe competing with these guys and say we're going loud yes we support kipping pull-ups gold-plated drones we support you know palantir has been very clear they do not want you drinking or kipping pull-ups while wearing their merch exactly and so that creates an opportunity for a maybe pro crossfit pro drinking wait wait they said no drinking in the yeah yeah oh this is gonna be a huge problem no more than no more than two drinks no more than two drinks okay i wonder if we can get like a dom pairing on uh exception yeah i think that i think that's essential no more than five bottles of yeah i mean we're gonna finish this bottle of day there's no problem come on let's go uh matt turk says business trip to europe 6 30 a.m wake up check phone accept cookies i already see where this is going i didn't read this one uh 9 a.m meeting use laptop accept more cookies 12 p.m taxi to lunch accept cookies yes 4 p.m new checks news accept cookies 11 p.m netflix but first cookies 1 a.m restroom accept cookies this is a joke but somebody ran the numbers and they said something like europeans will spend billions of hours accepting cookies it's insane it's just like a constant it's so insane that there's no like opt-out this is like the worst thing like europe going down for being known for great pastries to being known for lots of even apple's doing this where it's just like every single app, I have to say, allow app to track or accept or deny.

1:00:28And you always do because you want to support advertising. I literally do because I'd rather have targeted advertisements than non-targeted advertisements. I want to see an ad for a Patek Philippe. I don't want to see an ad for some Hublot. They should know me by now. Exactly. So yeah, very disappointing Europe. I really hope we can push back against this in the United States because obviously I never go to Europe. I don't travel internationally. For Apple, it was a brand thing. They realized that they had an opportunity to be the privacy-focused big tech company. And put pressure on the direct competitors.

1:01:02Yeah, even though they know every single thing about us already and it doesn't matter. Big tech feels like being a user of big tech products, like when you're using Facebook or when you're using an iPhone, it feels like you have divorced parents. And it feels like Apple is actively in a fight with Meta. And it's like, I'm trying to use, I'm trying to log into my sunglasses. They work together. Like I'll drop the kids off. Exactly. And then they kind of bicker at each other. Like, oh, oh, oh, you want to use these meta glasses? Like, well, do you want to, are you sure you want to accept the terms?

1:01:33Do you want to do this? There's 20 different pop-ups. You said you were going to pack lunch for the kids. Exactly. And when I picked them up, they said that they didn't have any lunch. Exactly. It's so, it's so frustrating. And yeah, I'm getting close to burn it all to the ground, but we'll let them keep going. The Apple company is not happy with me, but I'll keep using that shit. Let's go to Ashley Vance. He says, my exclusive today is on the biggest investor in brain and longevity science that you've never heard of. James Fickle turned a crypto fortune into a research empire. I love this. You need better elites?

1:02:07This is an example of better elites. Is he sun gazing right now? I think he is. He looks like it. Face, face. Yeah, there you go. I sun gaze before the podcast. Yeah, I try and like tease it in. I try and go for a run outside. I don't raw dog it like some people that we know. I try and run outside and catch some rays in the early morning. I mean, if you can get to the gym or to whatever you're doing on the run and the sun's coming up, nothing's more inspiring than that. It's fantastic. But yeah, I don't know. Longevity and brain. Honestly, Ashley is, I think, a great journalist. She writes some great pieces.

1:02:45And I think that she is. Hey, hey, hey, easy, easy. I'm just saying certain journalists, you know, are friends of the pod, adjacent, adjacently friendly and other others are, you know, less friendly. But, you know, I think Bloomberg has been making moves. Credit to them. Right. They got Kate Clark. Yep. Last week. They've got Ashley. Emily Chang. Emily Chang. Big, big momentum over. And a lot of people. Yeah. It's great. Shout out to the journos. Let's go to Nick Milinovic. He says DREG expectations are creating a lot of upward movement for public fintechs. So I brought Nick up on the show before talking about how his strategy, it's very dangerous as a VC to just pick a single category and just make that your entire identity and focus.

1:03:33And Nick's strategy to date has been to have smaller funds and make sure that he's actually generating real carry. Yep. Phenomenal investor. I think he's had a community and a media platform forever and really has done a good job of making sure that I think anybody that is building in fintech that's worth backing is probably aware of him at this point. And he kind of, as much as there was a crypto bear market, there was also a huge fintech bear market. Look at Dave.com. Dave.com. Lesson book value. And it's up 40%. Yeah, a bunch of others. um so uh wait is this the last seven days oh my god like i'm looking at this and it's like sizzles up 103 i think it's the last seven days like i'm not sure but yeah maybe nick should open a uh public he needs to yeah start a hedge fund man yeah but yeah i mean i know i know a decent amount of these companies but there there's a ton on here it's uh yeah it's good to be back it's good to be good to be back matt freed writes i don't know i feel like waymo can solve most of their problems by adding just one additional seat so waymo is counteracting the bird turret on top remember we've talked about the bird how bird really suffered in la because it became the new hot thing to vandalize to throw a bird off of a 10-story skyscraper so we've seen waymos uh get into similar situations where they're alone in a street and maybe a bunch of people decide to start doing donuts around the waymo and maybe jumping on it lighting it on fire um so anyways i think i think waymo would be smart to i would look at potentially partnering with anduril and getting some of their fpv drones that just sort of like follow the waymo flock safety protect it flock safety works but i want like something kinetic right like you need you need that kinetic potential didn't they acquire some of the drone company but it's no non-kinetic non-kinetic so now waymo needs you know suicide drones trailing it and there needs to be laws to protect AI right because I think humans are a bigger threat to AI right at this moment than AI is a threat to humans so to make sure we don't piss the AI off too much we should allow AI rights yeah self-defense is a important principle yeah I mean everything about this the decision to start in San Francisco just feels better and better because it's like an extremely chaotic city where I mean they obviously did the the pilot in arizona which was like a super safe like super wide open streets like always like dry no hills so and then once they got that going they went straight to the hardest mode like yeah level 1000 going into san francisco like crazy streets tons of pedestrians like shoddy streets like all sorts of weather fog and also people that will vandalize you so if they can solve that it's going to be a breeze to go to chicago or la here's here's going to be the big unlock for Waymo.

1:06:28So when Waymo, instead of doing Uber black, because all Waymo cars are like clean and fairly spacious and it's nice inside. So maybe black doesn't matter, but they should have a Waymo turbo S functionality, right? Where you can call a 992 turbo S and just say like, Hey, look, drive however you want, but just try to keep it 15 over the speed limit, which is maybe like where police aren't going to bother you, but just stay under that. And let me really enjoy the car while I'm in it, right? So Waymo, please roll out Turbo S's. We will pilot them around Los Angeles. Yeah, this is correct. Elon says, use Grok for answers that are based on up-to-date info.

1:07:09ChatGPT has no idea on whom Donald Trump has assigned new responsibility of enforcing our borders. Grok is real-time. ChatGPT is outdated. Interesting. I mean, there is something great about Grok being integrated with the timeline. I love that. But I actually haven't used it that much i've used it for a couple like generative images yeah because i feel like it's a lot less restrained there so if you want to do something fun for like a kid and you want to do like oh it's going to be mickey mouse and paw patrol together boom boom go to grok yeah i think i haven't been going for just like the the the news the the default llm it's not in my home row in that yeah that way yeah i think we should go on record and say that we we support ai we we are excited about all the foundation models um and uh but we are excited about ways that these foundation models can differentiate right and this is one of them yep uh not only as xai have sort of an interesting distribution hack yep uh through x but uh they uh certainly have found ways to resonate with a broader audience outside of the college students that are using chat gpt to to solve their homework problem or write an essay for them yeah that's great so gotta mix that in more i use perplexity i use chat gpt claude every once in a while really kind of go back and forth on it i kind of subscribe subscribe because every once in a while you see the meme of like oh claude's doing really well like the responses are really good and it has been good but the ui honestly is really it's great for me so yeah i back off but i think if you're programming claude has been has become like the default integration for cursor.

1:08:48So yeah, I think, you know, we could be seeing some bifurcation, some specialization. Well, let's go to the other AI founder. Sam Altman says, more generally, I am feeling good about a bright future for cryptocurrency. Here we go. Risk on. Risk on. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the interesting things. A lot of the AI people have been very, very bearish on crypto because they see it as this like zero sum rivalry. Like either the VCs are in AI or crypto. They're going back and forth. And that's somewhat true. Same thing with talent. Like developing for crypto is hard. Developing for AI is hard. So you need the best talent.

1:09:26You want to be sucked away by some person that's like, oh, I'm getting so rich working at a crypto company. But it's good that he has this perspective at the top end of saying, this isn't zero sum. We actually probably need both. Especially as we go to like, you know, more global payments, the stable coins, the prediction markets, the speculation, the digital goal. Yeah, I think part of it is there's real competition in the capital markets. Sometimes the capital feels infinite, which is an incredible feeling. But more often than not, these bigger allocators are looking at, you know, all right, we should be deploying into crypto this year.

1:10:00We should be deploying into AI this year. And both industries in a perfect world would want to take all of that, right? And so, but we've talked about this before with Sam. One of the, I honestly haven't followed WorldCoin closely enough. It does feel like they're building some pretty crazy momentum from like a talent standpoint. I've been super bullish on WorldCoin from day one just because Sam's involved. Yeah, and you've said like Sam just makes money. Yes. Period. So. Let's go to the bear case for crypto currently, or maybe just some cautious optimism from Robert Leshner. He says a cheat sheet of things that could blow up at 200 K BTC crazy volatility spot exchanges missing missing coins I think that's like maybe like a Robin Hood thing Is that what spot exchange missing coins mean like if you're trading like yes Essentially synthetic Bitcoin and you don't actually necessarily own the under the underlying asset derivative exchanging Exchanges miners that overwrote call options D5 borrowing markets hedge funds high leverage traders including you plan according It's all the lessons from the last bubble, basically.

1:11:05I first heard that as miners, as in like people under the age of 18. I mean, so many literal miners were huge in crypto, especially NFTs, especially in the ICOs. Lots of young kids. Can you imagine the NFT boom during, like if you were in middle school and you had like a crypto wallet? Yeah, yeah. And you get like a hundred bucks and you run it up to 50K. Yeah, but the thing that's interesting about here is people always think about like like systemic risk and crypto as being prices dropping a ton. But the meteoric rise and I think this is a great call out can and I think I've talked to Robert like one time years ago, but like very early and right with crypto.

1:11:45um but uh but yeah people aren't sort of prepared for the systemic risk that comes from just the market crap of crypto potentially doubling in the next few months right do we have any more promoted posts today good question actually uh on the note of uh financial markets we have a promoted post from blackrock blackrock says our chairman and ceo larry fink highlights in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, which we love, that the most realistic path to reducing America's debt burden is through growth. He discusses the opportunity for U.S. capital markets to drive growth by building hashtag infrastructure, particularly in data centers and hashtag AI technology.

1:12:27Larry says, any realistic path out of debt has to rely mainly on growth. We need to increase the size of our economy so that what we owe becomes smaller relative to what we make. So incredible. We should consider printing this out and just kind of putting it on the wall because it's worth coming back to. Hey, this is fascinating. I heard this interesting take from Ben Thompson that if you're a government and you're in debt, there are two ways out of it. One is to kind of unstagnate yourself and bring about economic growth, which is what Larry is arguing for, which I strongly support. It's a very hard problem.

1:13:05there's a piece of deregulation there's a piece of innovation there's a whole bunch of things that need to go right to actually get gdp above two percent to like the three four or five percent range that would be yeah we talked about this on the podcast going from two percent annual gdp growth to four percent would solve like pretty much pretty much everything exactly so yeah but the other but the other way that governments are tempted to solve a debt crisis is always inflation but democracy has this like built in kind of escape valve for inflation because inflation hurts the average voter the average consumer so much because even though right now like inflation has declined that's the rate of inflation the prices didn't go back to before the inflation look at the tech yeah and so a lot of people are still hurting even though yeah the prices aren't going up anymore they're they're still high relative to what people perceive you know a banana should cost or gallon of gasoline should cost and so there's a lot of pressure and most of the u.s elections are like referendums on the economy referendums on the right track wrong track how is the country doing and so there's this hopefully over time there's this forcing function to like do not inflate the debt away instead let's focus on growth let's focus on and and going back to the trump pump the sort of virtuous cycle of saying let's get government spending in control.

1:14:25Let's spend more efficiently. Let's spend in the right places. Let's accelerate. And let's focus on growing the economy, which I think is a core tenets of the new administration, regardless of your political beliefs. Yeah. Let's go to Buko Capital Bloke. He says, private company SaaS employees hearing that the IPO window is closed with markets at all-time highs, Dogecoin mooning, and Carvana up 800 % year to date. And it's a picture of Shane Gillis. so a great sketch so i think with a gun in his mouth this guy's very sharp on uh sass broadly i don't know i have no idea where he works or whatever but he's clearly uh an insider within that world and i think what he's actually speaking to is all of the if you're in the top 20 private companies right now every single one of those companies is looking at we are going to go public within the next two years it just takes time like the IPO window is open there's thousands starting here's the issue though there's thousands of other private unicorns that are backlogged that that are no that just don't have the traction of momentum okay and so he's talking about these employees that are maybe at the number 49 oh yeah yeah uh unicorn fast company who's like yeah we have 30 million of arr but we're only growing 40 a year and yes the ipo window is closed for you right just because you shouldn't probably go public that makes sense i i just think like generally they shouldn't be hearing the ipo window is closed in that scenario they should be hearing the IPO window is about to open up in a big way we are good enough we need to double down we need to grind we need to yeah we need to get into gear because this is the opportunity if they want to go or i think you know some of those companies maybe they maybe they you know end up merging with others and creating enough revenue and and let's go to adam singer with a related post uh he says dogecoin is up 170 percent in the last month and it's a picture of someone throwing the intelligent investor by benjamin graham in the trash that photo i feel like is is very lindy over the last few years almost every single year you could use it in some capacity uh almost every single day or month a friend who bought dogecoin dogecoin right before the election dogecoin dogecoin i wonder if it's related to like literally like the doge the department of government industry or i think it ends up i mean it doge obviously is always traded uh to some degree based on elon's attention towards it right hilarious because the founder like completely distanced himself from this you know the history of doge no so the the founder of dogecoin created it as a as a joke because he was anti-cryptocurrency and thought that all cryptocurrency was a scam and a fraud and so he created the dumbest possible thing the dumbest possible token dogecoin based on he effectively kicked off meme coins meme coin it's the first meme coin yeah he's the reason that pumped up fun has done like 200 million of net he created an entire industry yeah and he sold all his doge and he's been very against it and he's put out these like long posts saying that like this is everything wrong tears with a hundred dollars i think he sold too early i don't know maybe he still has some did you hear did you hear about the um the the best trade of the last week was a trader that turned 17 dollars into about three million with peanut peanut and that i've never heard but i heard so and that made me think meme coins are the new american lottery yep for the terminally online yep right and anybody like just that one trade will probably inspire a billion dollars of new investment in meme coins totally right yeah so i mean i remember during the last dogecoin pump there was this guy who was like the dogecoin millionaire and he was doing podcasts about how he put his life savings in dogecoin ran it up to a couple million it completely tanked.

1:18:05He had like 10 K was broke. And then he was like, I'm not selling. I'm not selling. So I hope he didn't sell it. I hope he's back up because, uh, you know, we'd love to see that. I want to put the word out that we're back up. Let's go to, uh, Sikhi Chen, Blader. Is that how you pronounce it? We'll see. Um, next year feels like it will be the best year in the history, in history to be in tech as a founder, employer, employee, investor, anything. You got one K likes. it has that vibe right building winter never felt so real and so good i love siki i've actually never met him in person but just he runs runway online interact uh runs runway he started that company i think he was an early company yeah he started um yeah i'm gonna blank on the name of it but it's the irl playground vr yeah no not playground um yeah i forget what it is ben what's the name of the vr company that siki started it's in yeah it but they had a really tough time in yeah exactly because it was in-person vr experiences but now he's got this amazing company called runway yeah i think gary tanger investor yeah gary invested in andreason's in it cool anish my friend over there i think cool did led one of their rounds um but uh siki's uh always been uh just extremely i would say like tech positive yeah he's obviously um and uh His company Runway is doing something really interesting.

1:19:26They're basically applying some of the same kind of mechanics that you have in Figma to P &Ls and Proformas and helping everybody at a company better understand the numbers in their business. Yep. Do we have another promoted post? Yep. This promoted post is from Cartier. uh they say in steel rose gold or paved with diamonds the tank americana celebrates the casual chic spirit of a continent on american time hashtag cartier tank so anyways uh if you are a technology brother and looking for a nice gift uh for a significant other yep the cartier tank is a great option fantastic it's certainly an investment but it's something that has stood the test of time are you familiar with the history of the cartier tank i don't know the tank i know the santos oh yeah no the tank is like fabulous so of course i know the tank yeah but but it was worn by jackie kennedy yeah it was worn by muhammad ali yeah and uh andy warhol yeah and so it's this interesting blend where it's it is sent is seen in some ways as like a feminine watch but it's been worn by arguably like the most masculine guy in history muhammad ali and also this like interesting artist in andy warhol and so it's cut across it's cut across all of the cultural barriers in a really fascinating way.

1:20:46And it's just a really striking design. It's beautiful. The Tank American is a little bit more rectangular, a little bit more accented. Rectangular, this one is. But it's a fantastic watch and I highly recommend it to anyone who's in the market. Well, and thanks to Cartier. Let's go to Mary Gunnarate Atne. She says, genius bar employees asked me what I do for work and I didn't lie. We're so back. What does she do? So Mary has a crypto protocol. I invested. Oh yeah. So the last couple of years were rough. Yeah. They, her and her co-founder Luke have just weathered the absolute storm focused on fundamentals and actually building products that, that their users love.

1:21:36They've iterated multiple times they've stayed focused um i i love the team over there they didn't listen to jason calicanis who told them pivot to ai yeah they had a lot of people like jcal telling them pivot to ai pivot to ai pivot to defense tech refused anyways brilliant team and i'm happy to see that mary's no longer embarrassed to say what she does for a living because she is a phenomenal founder and uh cheers to mary cheers to mary potential future brother of the week yep let's go to zach the founder of bridge sold his company to stripe recently he says in the last week i've heard that a dozen developers building with bridge are raising rounds slash have term sheets makes me so incredibly happy we're entirely focused on empowering these builders supporting their success is all that matters so it's funny when when bridge got acquired for 1.1 billion about a month ago uh everybody was just like oh stable coins bridge yep stripe that makes sense yep i don't think it was talked about enough that stripe likely made that acquisition because they saw that the brightest most exciting companies building in stable coins were using bridge sure which was exactly what what stripe built their entire business on was making sure all the best new founders in the bay area were using stripe so uh anyways people that felt like that was a crazy price to pay or they were like they only have 15 million of revenue or they're paying this crazy multiple on revenue to acquire the business uh stripe was basically i imagine making a venture style bet into a company that they saw themselves in so excited to see uh what comes out of uh developers building on bridge and and congrats to zach again yep uh reggie james says the cost for lack of vision a crowded market yep underrated tweet 63 likes deserve 6k low tam banger banger uh really good point really good point this is the market map thing if it's on the market map so you don't have vision here's an example so world coin yep clearly has vision it's had a lot of critics over the years oh why do you have this orb why are you scanning everybody's vision yeah Yeah, they're scanning eyeballs like all over the world.

1:23:53And in one of the world's most competitive industries where people switch between products very rapidly, you know, they'll cycle through multiple protocols in the same day, crossing across different L2s to L1s to L3s, not caring. They've carved out a lane and have a vision. And you could maybe argue that they don't have competition in what they're doing. So, you know, Reggie is a very unique entrepreneur. And I think historically has always tried to do the same, right? like have that unique point of view and focus. Yeah, he also just always focuses on like taste and design and like these interesting things that always get forgotten by the core Silicon Valley folks.

1:24:33The YC crowd. Yeah, well, it's not just the YC crowd. It's like you can dismiss design and taste if you're just a developer and you only care about like what is the programmatic truth? What is the mathematical proof of this thing? And maybe design takes a backseat to that. or if you're just the business guy and you're just like whatever makes money maybe this taste thing or having good design or having a strong opinion or a vision that doesn't make sense this quarter but reggie has always been good about like looking further into the future and i think that calls back to like an earlier era of silicon valley which i really respect let's go to gabby goldberg she says the hawk to a girl ships faster than most of us on this app and it's a quote to a of TechCrunch saying, the Hawk to a Girl launches Pookie Tool, an AI-powered dating advice app and it's fine?

1:25:20Yeah. And I love this. You had a good take about this because there's been a lot of doubt in AI recently. Yeah. My thing, I was happy to see she wasn't discouraged by the recent potentially scaling sort of wall within AI. There's a lot of fear in AI. She's not, she's just shipping, she's building. That's what everybody should basically be doing. You can't be afraid. You just got to ship. And here's the thing. And there's a lot of hate on rappers right now. There's a lot, oh, you shouldn't build a ChatGPT wrapper. Well, what does she have? She has a cornered resource in her audience. She's got attention.

1:25:49Where, yes, who knows if this is that much better than just asking vanilla ChatGPT, but if she can drive people to this app, she can monetize that. She's effectively acting as like an affiliate of OpenAI. And sure, it's not going to be a trillion dollar company. It's not going to disrupt OpenAI, but it's going to create a lot of value. And that's what matters. So here's a potential thing with the internet. So historically, people would have their 15 minutes of fame. right hawk to a girl you know her website no 16 minutes that's great fantastic i assume she's been she's she's really good she's smart she clearly has a smart team around her actually no she does her podcast with joey joey yeah i know better um better but um but look historically you'd have your 15 minutes of fame and then the traditional media would move on because you were no longer you wouldn't have captured any of that you couldn't capture anything in that moment she has millions now you can get 15 minutes of fame get your five million followers however many it is and then continue to monetize that and ship against it and iterate.

1:26:46And so I think that's underrated. More people should be trying to get their 15 minutes of fame because it can actually convert into a very, very meaningful career for her. I'm sure she's having the time of her life. Yeah, it seems great. So classic American story of making a sex joke or having some sex-related video and then turning it into a career like the Kardashians. Yep, fantastic. Let's go to Chris and Frank. he says some are calling Elon the George Soros of the right that's not really accurate he's more like 44 George Soros is of the right because Elon Musk has 320 billion dollars and George Soros has seven here's the thing okay put on the tinfoil hat we're in we're in the conspiracy zone the conspiracy scientists are out of the room it's bro scientists now yep let's hear it experts take a step take a step back so here's the thing i'm fully in favor of this i like that we're rebuilding the deep state we're making the deep state great again great that said i do have to imagine that george soros who has uh done some of the most heinous uh political acts in the history of the country is the kind of billionaire that would want his uh sort of a net worth to be under uh like under projected right okay the real billionaire class is saying i don't want to be on the forbes list yep uh if i have to be put me down at this much i don't want people to know that i have 200 billion dollars like i'd rather people just think that i'm like you know a broky bean air yeah with you know seven billion dollars sure sure like he at a certain point once you're a billionaire like any sort of adding numbers to it doesn't do much you're a bean air and soros is harder to clock because it's all in this fund and stuff it's not like yeah with elon it's very easy to just say, okay, he owns 20 % of this big company.

1:28:31And I have to imagine he's very pro taxation just across the board. You have to imagine that he does some creative things with his accounts, including offshore activity that would mitigate that. So shout out to the new Soros, Elon Musk. Fantastic. Let's go to Zeke at Zeke'd Up. He says, I can't wait to pump my system full of niche tech Twitter influencer John Coogan's proprietary lock-in chemicals. And then he quote tweets and says, My mom told me not to smoke cigarettes. She didn't say shit about online chewy chemical brain boost pouches sold by a handsome conservative investor with a podcast about combining technology and frat bros.

1:29:15Incredible. Put it on the wall. Frame it. Frame it right now. I don't even think I could reply to this because I didn't know where to start. It was just like thumbs up. Wait, when we posted about the Blood Boy giveaway, somebody said RIP. Oh, yeah, Zeke is RIP. He's going to be the Blood Boy. I don't know. Does he have Blood Boy physiogamy or something? Yeah, we're going to have to do kind of a deeper analysis there. Okay, yeah. But before we get into the next tweet. Oh, yeah, yeah. We got a promoted post. Let's go. Promoted post from Langchain. We asked, you answered. Our state of AI agents report is here.

1:29:46We surveyed 1 ,300 industry professionals from developers to business leaders on how they're using AI agents today, and the results are in. What are the top use cases for agents? What are the biggest challenges when building agents? Who's finding success after deploying their agents to production? Go to langchain.com slash state of AI agents to get the full report. And thank you to Langchain. Yeah, thank you to Langchain. Let's go to Gabby Goldberg. She says, coffee shops. Yeah, Gabby's in here twice. She's crushing it this week. Coffee shops opening at 10 a.m. is the sign of a crumbling society.

1:30:25that's always been my issue with new york yep you ever go to new york and you wake up i thought it was the city that never sleeps you can always get coffee no seriously i'll wake up in new york i gotta wait like three hours what three is that real yeah their coffee shops open up super late weird you gotta find like these random i feel like in la like starbucks opens at six like that's the thing everybody's like oh the city that never sleeps no new yorkers are not getting coffee at 6 a.m interesting maybe it's because the people that are actually getting up at 6 a.m are just getting coffee at their office or they're doing cocaine that's always been my yeah that's always been my frustration with New York.

1:30:55New York's got to get it together. It literally is hurting the economy that people can't get more cups of Joe around the city at earlier hours. So figure it out. Let's go to Gary Tan. This is great because we see the follow back icon. That means he already follows us, but this is the first time on the show because we haven't followed him after we post, we're going to follow him and then he will be an honorary technology brother. Yep. Potential brother of the week, maybe. Yeah, he might deserve brother of the week for the recent SF election. I mean, so many wins with this guy. It's just W's every single week.

1:31:30It's going to be hard. He's going to be in the running a lot. I can feel it. Yeah. Many plaques. So Gary says designed for super early startups. Seems like it has become increasingly a lost art. This is kind of what Reggie was talking about. Great, simple UX that has clear call to actions, obvious nav good use of contrast and no distracting ornamentation sadly waning how you do anything is how you do everything what a great post and it makes sense because gary's a designer like he designed the palantir logo you know this i did not it's crazy yeah he was like one of the earliest employees of the coinbase designed the logo i don't know if he did coinbase's logo but i mean coinbase was in my yc batch summer 12 gary was around there i'm sure he's super close with them and then i think initialized did like one of the major rounds or something made a ton of money on that wait so you were in wise coinbase yeah with brian so you how much did you invest i didn't have any money we're gonna have to cut that we're gonna have to cut this out but but you know what it's crazy in in our yc badge the referral bonus for going on coinbase at the time was one bitcoin that's wild it was like dude if you sign up i'll give you five bucks in the form of one bitcoin that's amazing uh yeah i would say like small example here is the reason that more startup there's no excuse not to have great design as an early stage company is all it takes is one person with good taste yes and even one person with a freelancer that has good taste yes yes that's uh that's that's all it takes right it doesn't you simply have to care about it a tiny little bit yep and you can make it happen yep and more people just like hire the designer that they know yeah or they go online or the one who's like really hot and has already yeah there's this weird like trend where you know there's someone who has a lot of taste yeah and then they start scaling their operation and they start delegating and you're still paying three hundred thousand dollars for like b tier c tier talent because the real tastemaker is working with like the fortune 500 clients now and you're out of the game yeah and i i uh you know party round had great design early because the first hire that we made was brandon jacoby he was the first person to join the team He had been at Cash App for four years.

1:33:37He was still like 23, 24 at the time. So it wasn't like we had, you know, it wasn't like he was like, no, I need to make 350K a year base. So I think that investors should be extremely judgmental of companies that have poor design because it's basically you should figure out a way to get it done for almost zero dollars. I agree. And then all it takes from that point on is hiring one person who's a great designer and you should be able to attract that person. otherwise you're not compelling as a founder or if you don't care about design great designers will not want to join your company. I agree.

1:34:11Bifrost Orbital says the youngest teenagers to have built satellites at the age of 16 have made it to Y Combinator. Ankar CEO now 19 and Geffen CTO now 23. So one incredible accomplishment. Yes congrats. Congrats on YC. Great. Pretty good traction on this post. That said I wanted to invite these guys to send us a note and we will help you learn to post because this could have been way way more viral if it was from the actual founders account and it was a deep dive into tell me more not in the third person yeah yeah yeah tell me more like what were you doing at 16 i would want to show me a picture of the satellite i want to see like first line we built our first satellite at 16 now we're in yc here's the story boom exactly so anyways we yeah we don't do this often but pro bono consulting pro bono consulting will help you guys learn this will pop for sure and i imagine these guys you know within the next 10 years we'll get brother of the week yeah i agree i couldn't agree more so hit us up we will help you thanks moving on dennis says a gpt rapper of chat gpt itself yeah it's five million dollars a month and you know you know that is crazy there was there was a time where you could search chat gpt in the app oh yeah and not crazy stuff yeah because it was all just like iterations on the name, like the same exact name, like a bunch of trademarks.

1:35:30That's why they bought chat.com. And OpenAI doesn't actually have to do anything really because they're all just paying OpenAI. It's all just front end. I would say like a lot of that revenue is probably just going back to OpenAI. I do wonder what the margins are on this. Like, are they able to market up enough and kind of fool enough people? I'm sure they're making money. It's a very cynical job. You only need one, probably two engineers to build that product. The one thing that I really hope is that I hope this is a kid. I hope this is some really, really young founder who will learn from this and wind up making some money, putting something away, and then winding up and going and doing something much more ambitious soon.

1:36:03Because just seeing$5 million a month show up in your Stripe account, moving it around, hiring people, stuff like that. We're going to claim credit for this. Ten years ago, it was trading sneakers. It was like the Hustler thing. Today it's a chat GPT wrapper. For sure. The Riz app, all these different things. Tarot card readers. I want to see the Rizzler drop a... Hawk to a girl. i want to see she's gonna build something real uh the chicken fry girl do a chat app that you can talk to abusive zach brian on wow that would have some numbers here we go uh do we have another promoted post yep this one is from akash who is over at ramp he says the tri-ramp uh and web engineering team is hiring let's cook and he chose this tweet because so this is a promoted post specifically for ramp as a employer employer place to go work yeah so if you're an engineer go go check out the jobs they have is there a link and the reason that we chose this one is that adam over at rep view oh yeah ranked a bunch of potential 2025 ipo candidates and whiz was just a hair above ramp ramp was almost the number one uh ipo candidate oh by 0.07 wow yeah so very um we would honestly could be we kind of need to yeah let the experts dig in i think we need to put that in the truth zone yeah we have to put this in the truth zone yeah but uh go dm akash if you're interested in joining ramp or apply on uh ramps uh ashby job yeah dream job uh let's go to sharif shareem he says nobody gives a damn about your roadmaps or strategy decks just show them a demo so insanely great it feels like you stole it from five years in the future 1k likes I love that.

1:37:49Yeah, I agree. I am pro roadmap and I'm pro deck. I don't know about pro strategy decks are the funniest thing because you don't necessarily show them to people other than, you know, investors need to see a deck, but I think there's still something valuable about investors don't need to see a deck. If you have a banger demo and you are super compelling. Yep. It helps if you're an insider, it's helps if you speak the language, it helps if you've maybe interned at a venture fund or whatever it is, but build a phenomenal demo, get some users, show people that you can ship and ship quickly, and then still make a great deck because it'll help you get that, you know, maybe two extra valuation if you do it right.

1:38:28Yep. Michael Miraflor says the Patek Philippe Generations campaign, obviously we're a big fan of this here, has been running for years and years now. One of the best of all time in my honest opinion, and I couldn't agree more. It's the famous tagline. You probably know this. You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. And it's a side-by-side of an old ad and a new ad. And it's essentially the same campaign. And it really speaks to the value of getting your marketing message correct early, building that brand essence, something that you can live on for, live and die by for generations.

1:39:07I remember talking to the guy who did Warby Parker's early brand development. And he said that Warby Parker, they landed on this idea of, quote, the literary life. Are you familiar with this? So you've never seen it in a Warby Parker ad. It's never been on a billboard. It's not a catchphrase that they use anywhere on their website. It's merely just the brand essence that they keep in mind when they're doing other stuff. What is Warby Parker? It's the literary life. So that answers the question of what do their pop-up shops look like? They look like libraries because that's the literally like, what, what does the website look like?

1:39:44Well, it looks bookish. It looks like something that, you know, someone who's reads in a coffee shop would enjoy. What about the colors, the tones, the music, the fonts, everything comes from that essence and getting that right early. It's just like once the arrow has left the bow, it just sails. And so the tech Philippe is a fantastic, fantastic representation of that. And even though it's a watch brand, you can apply that. to your tech startup. Absolutely. Absolutely. We see it with Ramp. Let's go to Dye Workwear, Derek Guy. He says, uh-oh, I'm going to jail because Donald Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz as the eternal general for the United States.

1:40:20And - Yeah, so these guys have an amazing history. Basically, Derek creates a lot of beef with powerful people. Yes. Powerful people tend to wear suits. Yes. And Derek has a lot of opinions and knowledge about suits. I'm sure when he sees this video, uh hopefully we don't get dunked on too hard uh derek if you're watching this uh go easy go you know you can you can dunk but then give us some pointers in the dms all right uh but anyways uh derek has historically you know called out matt for having some actually absolutely horrendous fits over the years like truly some some like worst fit ever worn in the white house type stuff and so that created some beef okay uh and you know this new administration is ambitious right there's a lot of people in washington and uh some some some posters that have been living out that are a little bit uh worried yeah could be could be rough but uh you know we stand with posters generally so as long as he doesn't go to blue sky or threads as long as derek you stay on x you're safe you're one of the good ones uh let's go to calci there's a bunch of drama Rajveer says the Kelsey founder has to be trying to get himself arrested right now.

1:41:35It's just an intention game. Because Shane got his phone raided by the FBI. We support Shane. We support Polymarket here. And then Sarah says leaked email shows Kelsey, growth executive, tried to plant a news story containing false claims about wash trading and money laundering on Polymarket. Kelsey appears to be spreading misinformation about Poly behind the scenes. And it is a crazy time. If that is a real. I don't know if this is true. I'm not going to say this is true. I don't think we can. We're not journalists. So we're not. We're experts. Yeah. In many things, but not journalism. And we do have a segment called The Truth Zone, but we're not journalists.

1:42:06Yeah. We're not fact checkers. But it is crazy how hot the fight between the prediction markets is. I mean, it feels like Uber and Lyft right now, where, you know, if you're not in polymarket, you got to get into Kelshi. Yeah, and Raj's big critique is - You got to battle it out. Is it going to be a power law winner? Is it going to be more oligopolistic? Like, people don't really know, so they're testing the waters. In many ways, the Kalshi versus Polymarket thing was a political battle of platforms, right? Polymarket stands for many of the principles that the new administration is for. Kalshi is for regulation.

1:42:38They've gone after being like, we are the regulated prediction market. And in many ways, the campaign's tracked, right? So Kalshi was spending a million dollars a day on Facebook just to get into the charts. Polymarket had a lot more organic adoption and organic media. So in many ways, there's parallels. Not surprised that the current administration is trying to come after Polymarket. Indeed. Let's go to, do we have another promoted post? Promoted post from the New York Philharmonic. Oh, I love the New York Phil. Sounds of the season, a festive holiday matinee featuring New York Phil musicians conducted by Jeff Tizek on December 14th and 15th.

1:43:21So learn more and buy tickets at nyphil.org slash soundsoftheseason. And I would say this could be something where we get the Technology Brothers community together. We all put on suits and let's go to the New York Phil together. I mean, we are recording this like blocks from the LA Phil. I'm a huge Gustavo Dudamel fan. My dog is named Gustavo Dudamel. Not a joke. I play classical piano for 40. Got a pretty big Instagram account. Yeah, he does. He's 20K. But yeah, I mean, I love classical music. It's a great way to, I find it just very meditative because you go and sit, listen to beautiful music.

1:43:55You're off your phone. It just clears your mind. And it's still an opportunity to dress up, meet interesting people. The class of clientele. And immerse yourself in truly loud opulence, right? Truly, truly, truly. Music is opulent. Yes, yes, absolutely. And so can't recommend the New York Philharmonic enough. please if you're in New York or you're stopping by go buy tickets and Google it NY Phil probably NewYorkPhilHarmonic.com and we're happy to support them on this show. Let's go to Michael Dubrovsky. He says that there's a beta testing opportunity. Hate pricking your finger but love biomarkers.

1:44:34We launched a new product at Cyfox, his company and I need five people to beta test and provide feedback. Use the link in comments to get 50 % off. Wait, is this the... We got to try this. I mean, I think you can I think you can literally test your testosterone on an hourly, like a minute to minute basis. It seems like a massive breakthrough. And this Michael is the man who studied the testosterone levels of YC founders at his offsite. And so now he's gone a step further. He's being proactive. Okay. We need to talk to this guy. We do. We should, we should get it. We should get this on our arm while we record and track our levels throughout the pod.

1:45:10Yeah. Yeah. Where does it spike? Is it during the average? is during the brother of the week. There's a lot of different places where you need to be maxing out. I mean, that's a big part of why we record at 11 a.m. every day because that's when your testosterone is peaking. Let's go to Eklat. Eklat says, if you're 20 to 30 and your main circle isn't discussing buying another country, terraforming, building a new city, lengthening winter days, creating rain, building a vast industrial base powered by nuclear, then it's time to find a new circle. Couldn't agree more. I am proud to say that our circle is.

1:45:43Yeah, it's like, okay, this is Praxis Dryden trying to buy Greenland. Terraforming, that's Thomas Poirot and Augustus. Creating rain, that's Augustus. Building a new city, there's a bunch of people in Prospera. Nuclear, we know a ton of nuclear people that are doing that. Doug Bernauer at Radiant just raised$100 million to do nuclear. It's fantastic. And then the industrial base obviously goes to Aaron Slodov and Chris Powers at Hadrian. Thank you to the absolute brothers. The boys. for the gang doing your part yeah shout out to all of them I wouldn't have my circle include any other way any other way any other way it's fantastic do we have one last promoted post one last promoted post let's do it Daniel Mason a close friend and Daniel says we've received 5 ,574 job applications in two weeks we've interviewed four people why we're looking for a very specific kind of engineer the kind who makes everyone else uncomfortable which i like that right oftentimes uh 10xers kind of freak everybody out a little bit they're like maybe their keyboard just has a one and a zero on it there you go yep makes sense uh anyway so daniel says know someone my dms are open so go to at dg mason on x uh if you're interested uh and there's more context on the role on his profile.

1:47:07Go check it out. And we're happy to promote that on this show. Let's close out with ex-gamers make great entrepreneurs, a post from Tom Beanham. We're used to locking in for fucking 13 hours straight sometimes. LMFAO. Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. Many, many cases. And we've talked about this before, but very interesting correlation between the great gamers elon one of the greatest diablo players of all time sbf one of the worst league of legends players of all time and look what happened to their companies clearly wasn't taking it seriously wasn't locked in was a fake gamer which is yeah the worst that you can possibly do the key is to figure out a way to find that early love for video games that many of us had and apply it to excel right yes you and i were up until god probably 3 30 last night yes in the technology brothers model.

1:47:58Yes. Make just tweaking, making sure the profit was maximized. Yeah. And, uh, in many ways, like it felt like being in a cod lobby, it felt like playing Starcraft too, right? Couldn't agree. Uh, those, those early days. So, uh, apply that same, uh, zealous, uh, for the game to the game of business and become a student and player of capitalism. Yes. Become a student of capitalism, a player of capitalism. And that's our show. Thanks for watching. subscribe give us five stars repost everything that we deliver on x start clipping us start clipping us become an andrew tate disciple for this show yeah take our content amplify it however you want i want to do a small challenge if you're a college student listening to this show figure out how to make ten thousand dollars a month clipping our content yes hosting it yes we will support you in that yes we'll probably try to hire you after you do it fantastic that's a challenge for today and cheers cheers let's uh finish off the dom pairing on there we go 1k and being the fastest growing podcast in tech delicious and the most profitable podcast in the world see you next time that's our show that's our show