X is Absolutely Printing, The Tale of Temu, Promoted Reviews, Larp as a Size Lord

30:07Totally. From a market profile standpoint. Totally. Yeah. And massive revenue growth. Interestingly, I wanted to answer the question of like, is Timu actually putting pressure on Amazon? Has there been like a market change in Amazon's business because of the Timu threat? and what's interesting is that uh like something like 95 98 of timu shoppers also shop on amazon the team like the slop that they're buying is actually additive it's more like gambling money than actually shopping money because if you want just you know if you're actually in the market for like i want kleenex and i want it to be good and not fall apart and give me allergies or something like you're gonna go to amazon buy the name brand and you're gonna count on that but if you're just want like oh yeah some random thing that's like a funny joke like yeah i'll buy that on timo now i my biggest frustration with amazon is i wish that i could shop on amazon by sorting only for brands that have existed for more than oh that's good lindy filter the lindy yeah because one of my yeah the greatest annoyance on amazon is like i'm shopping and i want something as simple It's like a paper towel holder.

31:23And then I order it and I get it. And it's like the worst product that I've ever got. I'm like, this should just be a piece of metal into another piece of metal. And it should just be solid. And because of the hyper optimizations and all these sellers competing and things like that, you end up having to dig through pages. It might take you four pages to find a product that costs marginally more, but is going to last for 20 years versus the TEMU version, which will last for a year and not even function well dude so so amazon has has been forced to launch amazon hall which is their timu competitor and they have price caps for items that you list on amazon hall because they want to be competitive and the price caps are shocking like 13 is the max price you can charge for a guitar i think if a guitar is like a several hundred dollar purchase at least.

32:17Couches? Couches. I think if a couch is like, you know, to get in the game, it's like $1 ,000. Maybe you go to Ikea a couple hundred bucks. The max price for a couch at Amazon Hall is$20. $20. That's just like scarily low. I don't want to sit on a couch that's only$20. I know that there's people that are running Airbnbs right now that are like, this is amazing for my margins. Like I got to just buy this$20 couch. But it's like at that at that price it's like it feels dangerous like how can you possibly make a couch for 20 dollars like you're not even using wood at that point like what are you making it out yeah and the the dark side of this story is that many people have accused pdd and timu of using slave labor so if you strip out all the labor costs yep but even then it's still hard to kind of conceptualize how the actual material cost would be less than$20 for something as significant as a couch or a guitar being, you know,$13.

33:16So anyways, let's get back into the timeline. Yeah. So they raise, they raise a bunch of money really, really quickly. They incorporate in 2015 with that$8 million round 2016. They raised series A, series B, 110 million. Gaurang Capital, formerly Banyan does the seed stake. They get a 7 % stake. Now it's worth 10 billion. Nice. Tencent Holdings comes in and becomes a strategic investor. They get a 16 % stake. That's 20 billion bucks. Sequoia Capital China gets a 6 % stake pre-2022, multi-billion dollar value. And then there's a couple other founders and early executives that all made hundreds of millions of dollars you already know from listening to this but like this guy didn't come out of nowhere he was a went to college in the us yep goes and works at google actually leads an entire you know go to market into china while at google then has a couple smaller successes in mobile shopping then launches a successful mobile game studio and so by the time he's doing pdd he is very well set up to take on this much capital in this short of a time because he's a savage operator, right?

34:29And the actual performance really backs it up. And so they're raising all this money, but it's on the back of just taking a ton of market share with a product that was very early for its time, right? We didn't see, you remember in 2021, 2022, every Western VC was talking about social commerce and live streaming and all these things all of that was because that pdd was just dominating in china and they didn't really it's not that live streaming with with t uh tame it's tamu right uh that would be the respectful way to call it i i call it tamu tamu uh we'll stick with team who knows respect um what's crazy is i was actually so i was in um I was living in China during this era in 2016, and I was working at a startup accelerator and helping a company that was taking a bunch of international vendors, specifically in shopping and luxury goods, and trying to sell into China.

35:36and they had raised some funding. It was fine. But the CEO and the COO were based in Israel and they absolutely hated living in China. And their entire business was based around China. So they would come in for like two weeks and then like bounce. And I was like, guys, like this is... Unsustainable. I was just an intern, but I was like, yeah, this is, you shouldn't probably hate the country that you're trying to sell into. But anyways, meanwhile, while Timo is just focused, you know, just absolutely dominant. Yeah, they're just ripping. So established in September 2015, they've raised over$100 million by 2016.

36:15Series C comes in early 2017, less than a year and a half. They raised$213 million in a Series C round. And by late 2017, their gross merchandise volume, their GMV, reaches$15 billion just two years after launch. And so even with super slim margins, they're well over$100 million in ARR. And this is one of the fastest growing companies and businesses in history. And of course, that's going to rocket the stock. So they do a pre-IPO funding in April of 2018. They raised$1.2 billion Series D, led by major investors. They're valued around$15 to$20 billion. And then July 26, 2018, they go public on the NASDAQ, raising$1.6 billion.

37:01The IPO values the company at$24 billion and marks its rise to over 340 million active buyers in under three years. But then things get tricky. There's a counterfeit crackdown shortly after the IPO. PDD faces scrutiny over counterfeit and pirated goods. So you just go on there and you get some complete knockoff that was just made in a fake factory that wasn't actually made by that company. Of course, companies are going to be upset. But at one point, Amazon has a price match service where if you are selling on Amazon and then you open, you go over to Walmart and you undercut Amazon, Amazon will not give you the buy box.

37:44They won't let you win the top slot if you're not price matching on Amazon. But Temu or Temu was so aggressive and so sloppy that they couldn't basically implement this process. And they were like, look, we're not even gonna enforce it with Temu products because it's just, it's just slop. It's not even close. And so a lot of stuff was just, just absolute junk. And that was kind of the model. And also everyone kind of knew that. Those products were widely available when I was in Shanghai. Uh, you could go to, there were specific markets that where they would have retail stores. It'd be like the Nike store, the Adidas store, the Canada store, and everything in them was 95 % less than like the traditional retail value.

38:26And about 60 % is good. But the demand you can imagine for sort of name brands that are 95 % off effectively, it's insane. So the super funny thing here is that it's not just American companies versus PDD in China. There's actually Chinese companies that are like, hey, we're Foxconn. We make iPhones for Apple. Don't make fake iPhones here. This is screwing us and we're a Chinese company. And so Chinese companies are accusing PDD of counterfeiting and pirating goods that they're making and selling on Amazon. And so there's an investigation by China's market regulator, and this leads PDD to purge 4.3 million suspect listings and tighten its policies.

39:13But of course, like how long would that last? And so in January of 2019, there's the security incident where hackers exploit systems, a systems loophole to steal tens of millions of yuan and discount vouchers. This always happens whenever there's like some referral program or some discount program. I remember there was some guy on Twitter who's bragging about basically defrauding Uber Eats with like all these referral tokens, just getting people on Mechanical Turk to sign up and get him money. And he was like, I have free Uber Eats forever. And I was like, you shouldn't publish about this. This is a violation of the terms.

39:46it's just wrong also just it's also just morally wrong to steal like how have we gotten so lost here um and so pdd cooperates with authorities to apprehend the perpetrators and patch its systems uh they continue to expand their markets in 2019 the gamified team purchase model drives explosive growth uh marking making pd pdd is china's third largest e-commerce site by gmv and active buyers So it's Alibaba and then JD.com, which I don't think is related to JD Vance, but it's certainly a big beast over there. By the end of the year, the platform approaches over 500 million active buyers. So they are on a tear.

40:26Then early 2020, the agriculture focus and COVID response amid the pandemic. PDD doubles down on its agricultural roots by launching programs to help rural farmers sell produce online. This is huge because China had insane lockdowns. Everyone is ordering online more than ever, especially produce, especially groceries. People need to get food more than anything else. And so it's another explosive growth period for PDD. They just can't miss. Then in 2020, Colin Wang steps down as CEO, appointing Chen Li as the new chief executive while remaining chairman to focus on long-term strategy and research.

41:05And I think there's something going on where the pressure is starting to build. PGD is becoming a more controversial company. And Colin's like, yeah, I'm going to dip before I get Jack Maude, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like, yeah, when you scrape the heavens in China and you become the richest man, you get a little bit of a target on your back. So you got to just pivot into, you know, teaching English somewhere and resting on your laurels. A little bit, a little bit. It's a dangerous, dangerous position. It's a dangerous game. Over there, you become the richest man. You don't exactly get to be the right-hand man of the person who runs the country, unfortunately.

41:42America's just built different. Over here, you get a.gov email address. Yes. And so economic challenges in late 2020 drive more consumers to PDD for affordable essentials with annual active buyers reaching$585 million by year end. Yeah, they have this interesting demand dynamic where if the economy is doing well, then people have like a bunch of extra cash that they're willing to just blow on. Basically, PDD is like slop, you know, gambling on consumer goods. Hey, I'm buying this product for$3. Maybe it's good. Maybe it's actually fine. You don't know. And then simultaneously, if the economy is not doing well, there's also an increased demand because people are saying, I don't want to, you know, it'd be like saying, I don't want to go.

42:33shop at Target, I'm going to go to this like discount store and, and because I can spend $50 and get a lot more for my money. So same dynamic as somebody might be saying, I'm not going to go on Alibaba or, or some, or the Chinese, you know, target equivalent, I'm going to go on PDD and just get more for my money. Yeah. And so in January, 2021, there's this work culture controversy. This is terrifying and very sad. The deaths of two employees within a short span spark public outcry over the brutal 996 overtime culture in China's tech industry. And I believe someone affiliated with the company made some callous comment being like, yeah, like we work hard, people are going to die, which is obviously way too far, way over the line.

43:17And the founder eventually steps down. Colin Wang resigns as chairman and leaves the board to pursue research in food and life sciences, while CEO Chen Li or Lei assumes the chairman role after Wang relinquishes super voting rights. That's the Chinese equivalent of I'm going to go spend time, you know, long overdue time with my family is I'm going to do research and life sciences. Yeah, it is. It is crazy to work people to death. That's unacceptable and something that only happens in China, unfortunately. I mean, that's not that's not true. We just had that. We just had that issue. I forget which bank it wasn't.

43:54Yeah, I did see that. Jeffrey. No, I've been seeing that. But no, there was. you know, a investment banker, a young investment banker that was being worked, you know, basically 20 hours a day for a long period of time and was telling his friends like that he wasn't doing well and then just died from basically overworking. And anyways, yeah. And in that case, the investment bank had slides that said that were basically promoting the fact that their associates were available around the clock. Yeah. And so that, again, it's not, it's not just a China thing, but, um, but yeah, work, uh, it's possible to work too much.

44:36Oh yeah. I mean, it's like, we always say, you gotta, like Naval says, work like a lion. There are days when you should be working 20 hours a day, but if it's 20 hours a day for years straight with no days off, you're going to burn out. That's not good. You're even ready for weeks in a row. Right. It's not sustainable at a certain point. Sprints here and there, super important. We are working up to 140 hours of content a week. Our goal is to get there. So thank you, everybody, for your patience, for trying to just ramp up to it. Yeah. And so in May of 2021, Shanghai's Consumer Council criticized PDD for issuing fake products, false advertising, and poor after-sales service.

45:18Regulators order the company to rectify consumer rights problems, prompting PDD to pledge stronger merchant oversight. In late August of 2021, PDD posted its first ever profitable quarter. So from 2015 to 2021, just six years, now they're profitable. 2 billion yuan operating profit and an 89 % year-on-year revenue jump. So they're still basically doubling six years into the business. Just fantastic growth. Instead of taking the profits as cash, the company announces a 10 billion yuan agriculture initiative to reinvest in agritech, farmer support, and rural development. And so in 2022... Yeah, because one thing that might sound strange to some people, but we think of Timu as just like slop consumer goods.

46:09In China, people are still using it very actively to buy produce and things like that. So they want to invest in the actual agriculture industry in China because PDDs, China business specifically, is a grocery store alternative. It's not just these, you know, ultra low cost consumer goods. Yeah. And so they're continuing to grow. The platform is now handling 4.9 trillion yuan, about 590 billion in GMV and generating annual revenue of roughly 14.7 billion US dollars, solidifying its profitability. And with all this money, they come to the United States and they launch timu uh the parent company now pdd holdings launches timu a discount shopping app targeting overseas markets because it's specifically taking advantage of that tariff loophole uh timu goes live in the united states offering ultra low priced goods shipped directly from china and quickly climbs the download charts and i think this is so interesting because it like i've been in e-commerce for you know 15 years or something now and uh and and the and the the the the wisdom has always been, you got to get on prime.

47:23You got to be faster with shipping. Everyone cares about page load speed and shipping time and Americans are willing to pay for that. And Colin just realized that there is a contrarian position here, which is, Hey, maybe there's certain products and certain segments of the American market where people are more than happy to trade fast shipping for lower prices. And so no one is really looking at it. It comes down to a value exchange thing. I'm happy to pay slightly more to get a product tomorrow with zero effort on my side. And then on the other end, there's people that are happy to wait a week to get something if they're going to get 10 items for the cost of two items, right?

48:06Exactly. So it's a value exchange thing. Yeah. Yeah. But it was really, really overlooked in the e-commerce market. And so with the launch of Timu, the company reorganizes under PDD Holdings, a new holding structure encompassing both PDD and Timu. In December, fast fashion rival Sheen initiates legal action against Timu, marking the start of a high profile legal tussle. And I didn't know this. Do you know where the name Sheen comes from? It's She In. And it's like, she's in. She's in. yeah like like she's they were they were sitting in shanghai being like yeah we got the name this is it this is so cool and this also by the way just to reference an earlier point so this is around this is like right around the time that they launched they launched the super bowl ad that we mentioned yesterday and i do remember the uh not yesterday sorry earlier in the show um i do remember when that ad dropped and i remember seeing it live thinking to myself this is the worst ad I've ever seen.

49:10It's not westernized at all. This is obviously a western audience. It has this tagline that says shop like a billionaire, which felt super out of touch. But ultimately, I wasn't the target audience for it. I've never purchased anything on Timu. And if you think about that concept of shop like a billionaire, some people are thinking, okay, billionaires are just buying like, you know, infinite amount of goods at all points and not caring about the price. And that is the experience that they provide, right? You can go on there and buy 30 items and it'll cost you, you know, the same price as, I don't know, a small like grocery.

49:51The funny thing is if you ever go over to billionaire's house, like it's always like the most sparsely populated house. Like it's not just junk everywhere. Like, yeah, it's because their items are spread across like at least five homes. I guess. But even then it's like, you know, most, most super rich people are pretty, pretty discerning with like, do I really need another KitchenAid? No, like, no, it's, it's the Kanye, it's the Kanye thing of, of, I was sleeping on the plane and I woke up next to this water bottle and it's like, great. Now I have to look after this water bottle. What do I do with this water bottle?

50:24Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and really it's like, we talked about this before, but like the thing with the billionaires is like, when you're, uh, when you're like middle class, like you have an item and you do it yourself. Like you cook for yourself. When you're become a little bit wealthier, you have an app that, you know, DoorDash brings you the food. And when you're a billionaire, you have a guy and it's your chef. And so, you know, a billionaire does not buy any kitchen cooking equipment ever because the cook handles that. And they don't even think about any of those items.

50:54And there's that for every single item in their life. You have a personal shopper who brings you 50 items. You try them on, you keep seven of them. You know my size, just make sure that there's clothes in my closet in every house. Yeah. And that's the lifestyle. And so did you see the SNL spoof of the Super Bowl ad? We got to stay on the Super Bowl ad because one interesting fact is that Super Bowl ad was not shot for the Super Bowl. That was the ad that they had been promoting on YouTube to millions of people. That ad before it aired on the super bowl had millions of ads so in one way like they'd kind of ab tested it and knew that that ad worked but at the other way it's like super it's still just super lean culture they're like oh yeah we got a super bowl slot we're paying millions of dollars like we don't need to shoot something special for this or get a celebrity let's just run the the ad that we've been posting on facebook for the last like yeah in many ways it's very counter to the approach again that that many many of their competitors which would take which is hey amazon is going has spent is probably planning their 2027 super bowl ad now and it's this multi-year thing and they want to try to win awards and timu is just like shop like a billionaire baby yep yep bud weiser is going to shoot a new clydesdale ad probably three of them for this for this super bowl and it's going to tell a story and it's going to be heritage and it's going to be very cinematic and timu is just like yeah like what's working on uh google right now oh okay like just just throw oh it's new ad slot throw it up yeah no problem uh again kind of beautiful i don't know i think it kind of worked for them i bet they got good roi on that um but the uh the snl spoof is hilarious uh they they call it uh uh uh uh it's like some some portmanteau between timu and sheen it's like it's like shimu or something like that yeah yeah and and it's like dress ten dollars shoes five dollars working conditions fine don't ask about it and they're just like how is it so cheap it is like now with no lead and they're like that makes me feel like there might be lead in here like the whole idea of like suspiciously low prices is so funny to me i just can't get enough of it it's like yeah at a certain point like 20 couch raises more questions than it answers yeah and to be honest there's a very real scenario where colin realized that he was going to be the fall guy for china would say actually there's so much evidence that china uses slave labor and they have labor camps and and you know it's very dark but colin would have been the perfect guy to pin it all on for the ccp to be like oh yeah actually this was happening and like here's the guy he was the guy selling all these cheap products and like it was on him even if they had fully endorsed it And so I think, yeah, he so far seems like he properly avoided being Jack Maude.

53:52But I haven't seen him on any podcasts lately. So, you know, let's get him on 20 minute VC. Colin, Colin, come on X, go on 20 VC. Let's do it. I'll have you on the show. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get to the bottom of this. He might be a little contentious, but. So they launch in September of 2022. by February of 2023, six months later, Super Bowl ad, number one shopping app in the US, massive growth. They expand their market presence. They launch in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in March. Then they launch in all of Europe. And they also relocate their headquarters, I think, to Dublin, Ireland. And then in March of 2023, shortly after the Super ad, they get suspended from the Google Play Store due to malware found in off-store versions.

54:49Although Timu is unaffected, the incident raises security concerns and the app is later reinstated after necessary fixes. And so they were doing some sort of exploit with the APIs and the app and everyone's like, man, these guys are playing dirty. Nikita Beer would be proud. Across the board, this is a company that undoubtedly does not care about anything other than flooding the market, gaining market share and growing. Right. Of course, many American companies at the end of the day are like that, too. But they're a little bit less blatant about this. Like the entire history of PDD and Timu is issues around counterfeiting, supply chain practices, labor practices, data privacy.

55:38like this is a company that probably is battling like a thousand to 10 ,000 lawsuits at once continuously. So, um, while they, they're not making us ad agencies, uh, money on Superbowl ads, I'm sure their legal bills back home are, are steep and I'm sure they're good. I'm sure they're a good client to some us law firms. And again, they're fighting other Chinese companies. So Timu and Sheen are in a legal battle in July of 2023. Timu filed an antitrust lawsuit in the U.S. accusing Sheen of market abuse, while Sheen secures a temporary restraining order against Timu over alleged copyright infringements.

56:18Legal actions assume across multiple jurisdictions. What do they call this? You know what they call this, John? Slop on slop violence. Slop on slop violence. I love it. And it's so funny because - The great - Yeah. The great slop wars of the 2020s. The great slop wars. It's so funny to me because like, even though like we're looking at this through a business context, through a geopolitical lens. And obviously we have, we have the take that, you know, this is exploitative. This is a loophole. It's destroying American businesses, et cetera. But there are tens of millions of Americans that to them, Timu is just, oh, cool.

56:57I get stuff for cheap. Like I like it. And no, I don't run a competitive company. I don't have an e-commerce business, so it doesn't affect me. And the number of people, the number of constituents in the American democracy that are being negatively affected by Timu is in absolute terms much lower. Because if you're like the number of people that are competing and getting their lunch ate by Timu is probably a million e-commerce people that work in e-commerce or drop shipping or something like that. But the number of people that benefit is in the tens of millions. And so it is the same thing. But it's more thing.

57:31I got to push back there. It is more complicated than that. If somebody is shopping for, they decide, hey, I want a water filter. And they look at, they go to Aurora.com. They're like, this looks great. They've got all the certifications. And then they look on Timu and they see a similar water filter. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but it's 90 % less. and then they buy that, that is dollars that could have gone to an American company that supports, you know, a bunch of other American businesses and manufacturers that supports, you know, a team here in the US. And so it is very complicated. And so we have no idea how many billions of dollars of Tmoo's GMV would have just gone to America, you know, it would have bought in less products.

58:18I completely agree. It has a bunch of downstream effects. Yeah, I completely agree. I'm merely making the statement that, that for a lot of Americans, they are addicted to consumerism, they're addicted to shopping, and they don't think about the second and third order effects of, hey, if I'm really supporting this app and buying, yeah, yes, I am getting these really cheap products, but maybe it'll make it harder for me to find a job. Or maybe my town will be hollowed out because just the economy is not there anymore in the US because we're just purely an import-based society. So I think that's the the tariff renegotiation is is this a fair deal for america yeah what were you saying i was gonna say well if we eliminate timu and sheen and we just get every american addicted to buying cheap stocks there we go potential there massive massive buying early yeah awesome and so in 2024 24.

59:15They're in 50 countries in 16 months. On January 17th, Timu officially launches in South Africa, marking its 49th country since debuting in the US. Its footprint now expands over North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and parts of Latin America and the Middle East. So they are willing to ship anywhere. And the reason they can do this is because it's so asset light. All they need to do is just allow... They're just a software platform that allows factories in China to ship as soon as they can get those packages to the ports, they can really go anywhere. So they just need to localize the website and they're good.

59:50It's not like Amazon where they have to set up a local distribution center, hire local drivers. There's really nothing. And it's not really building up the local economies. It's actually hollowing it out. And so in February of 2024, they do another Super Bowl and they hit user records again. They offer$15 million of giveaways at the Super Bowl. And early in 2024, the platform announces it has surpassed 100 million active users in the United States and over 130 million app downloads globally. So yeah, 100 million people in the US have shopped on Timu. And that is a big constituency. What I'm getting at is like, it's similar to TikTok, where the number of people that are negatively affected by TikTok are the people that are thinking about, you know, security, cybersecurity, geopolitics, thinking about competitive dynamics with American companies.

1:00:38But there are still 100 million people that are just like, TikTok is where I go for entertainment. Don't turn off my TV channel. And so it is this complicated, there is a constituency there. They're not highly politically active. They don't donate to politics in that way. But if you just polled the American people, should you ban Timu? A lot of people would say, no, I like cheap stuff. It's fine. It's where I spin a wheel and get free stuff. Like, why are you banning my fun thing? And that's it. it's it's in the same way that um pump fun is a is a digital casino you could see you know pdd or timo is like a carnival right where it's just like yeah i'm spinning the wheel i'm winning it's entertainment it's social it's you know yep and so uh uh the company refines its logistics model to manage scale while pdd holdings faces increased regulatory scrutiny over counterfeiting supply chain practices and data privacy.

1:01:34And the legal battles between Timu and Xi 'an have continued into 2024. Today, in less than a decade, PDD's parent company has become a global e-commerce powerhouse, which includes Pinduoduo in China and Timu abroad, reported$34.7 billion in revenue and $8.5 billion in net income in 2023. I'm sure it's higher in 2024. I don't know if they've done earnings yet though. PDD remains one of China's top online shopping destinations with over 800 million users. That is staggering. That's what it's a billion person country. So that's like massive market penetration. While Timu's low prices and viral marketing have captured significant international market share.

1:02:15The company continues to navigate rapid growth, fierce competition and regulatory challenges as it looks to the future. And so we will be staying on top of that. One thing that's interesting, so they have the benefit of, so TEMU at some point, do you have the specifics, but I believe they rolled back in TEMU, which was independently listed into the main PDD holdings. And so the original TEMU that went public on the NASDAQ is now just a part of PDD holdings, correct? Yeah, that's right. And so the benefit of that is like, even under all this scrutiny, lawsuits, all this stuff, you're gonna be shocked.

1:02:56I'm on public right now. The stock, the stock is up.

1:03:04How much is it up? Give me the data. Give me the public. So they're sitting at the PDD holdings is sitting at$111 right now. Wow. And it was in March of 2022, it was sitting at like$40 a share. So they're still like a juggernaut and have done tremendously well, just again, under fire from all of these lawsuits and things like that. But they just steamrolling the market. And I think that's really, in many ways, because of that, you know, they truly are a software company. They're not a retailer. 100%. Let's go through who got rich off of this. I think that's always an interesting question to ask.

1:03:49Obviously, the early team made a ton of money. There was an interesting transaction where the, as in 2020, Colin Wang transferred$7.7 billion worth of shares to the partners, effectively giving slices of his fortune to the top lieutenants. I thought that was very interesting that he did that after the fact. Like they'd already grown, obviously they had stock grants early on, but he was just like, I've made so much money, I'm just going to hook up the boys. He's either an absolute, you know, brother, Chinese brother, the weak potential, or, or they were all going to throw him under the bus so hard that they said, if you don't give me, if you don't, if you don't give us billions of dollars, like you're going to be the fall guy for all of this.

1:04:40And we're going to, you know, drag you through the streets. Yeah. Jack Ma style. Yeah. The dynamics over there are very, very hard to, hard to get right. So Gaurang Capital, formerly Banyan Capital, was an early VC investor. It's a Beijing-based VC firm. They led the Series A round and Zhen Zhang, Gaurang's founding partner, first backed Colin by leading an$8 million investment round when PDD was just an idea. This gave them an 8 % stake pre-IPO. It was probably a higher round and then got diluted down a little bit. Tencent came in and they were able to leverage WeChat to fuel PDD's growth. Tencent joined in the Series B and later led a huge$1.4 billion Series D in early 2018.

1:05:30And so they had 16 % at IPO. Sequoia Capital China, led by Neil Shen, they've since rebranded to Hongshan. By the time of the IPO, Sequoia was principal shareholder, even agreeing to purchase 150 million shares at IPO to support the listing. Sequoia's stake post IPO was on the order of six to 7%. In March of 2021, Sequoia Capital still held 6.4 % of PDD. And so they are just printing over there. Sequoia Capital, Sequoia China is really the Sequoia of China. You can't make it up. IDG Capital is one of China's oldest VC firms. They were investors during the growth phase. They participated in the Series C round.

1:06:16New Horizon Capital was a PE fund that went in the Series B. And then Lightspeed China also got a bite of the Series B, which was$110 million. And there's a couple other investors here. So massive wealth creation event for Chinese VCs and American VCs that had Chinese arms at the time. So it's a very fascinating story. Yeah. Completely crazy story. Incredible execution. Yep. They will talk about the slop wars of the 2020s for, you know, decades to come. And open invite Colin, come on the show anytime. We'll put you in the truth zone a little bit on the data privacy, labor, supply chain crises, things like that.

1:07:02but if you're ready for that yeah you want to take some heat yeah but we will also sing your praises for massive wealth creation we'll pop a bottle of creation on with you we'll hit the size gong it'll be mixed you'll come out it'll come out positive yeah yeah it won't be a puff piece it'll be hard nose but we will we will ask you about the uyghurs yeah we got to know we'll also ask you what kind of car you drive and and what and what kind of watch What kind of mansion you're building. And how many watches you bought on bezel. Yeah, it'll probably be the best interview you'll ever do. It'll be great.

1:07:36Come on. Well, let's move on to the timeline. Thanks everyone for sticking around for our TEMU deep dive. We got another, oh, we got a solid 40 minutes of timeline today. This is great. Very excited. Let's kick it off with this post from Restructuring. Day in the life of an investor at US Sovereign Wealth Fund. Hate to admit it, but sometimes Wall Street Oasis has some hilarious content. Jordy, you threw this in the feed. Why'd you like it? Well, so backstory, they did an executive order to create a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. So Trump signed this, I think, a couple of days ago at this point. A lot of people are speculating on what's going to go in it.

1:08:15A lot of people, you know, a friend of this show, Jack Raines, said we already have a sovereign wealth fund. It's called Spy. but anyways I just thought this was hilarious so I'll read it so this is somebody who's an analyst in private credit he says at 7 a.m I wake up in my Georgetown apartment to a text from my MD need a deck on strategic lithium reserves by noon use the DoD template I have no idea what that means but I nod sip my government subsidized coffee and I get to work by 8 30 a.m I'm at my desk in the Eisenhower executive office building surrounded by former golden guys who rebranded as patriotic investors.

1:08:50Our mandate deploy 1 trillion of taxpayer money into high priority national interests. In reality, we're LARPing as PE bros while writing checks to companies with more lobbyists than revenue. By 10am, I have an IC meeting the Secretary of Commerce dials in asking why we aren't buying up more farmland. The MD replies, sir, we already own 15 % of Iowa. And then I get cut off there. But we nod solemnly America first. I'll keep reading. Lunch is catered from the White House mess hall. I sit next to a guy from the Pentagon's AI readiness task force. He assures me that investing$500 million into a surveillance drone startup run by a 24-year-old Stanford dropout is critical for national security.

1:09:30I write synergies in my notes and take a bite of my taxpayer-funded steak. By 3 p.m., we're structuring a bailout for a failing EV battery company. Treasury wants it to be a loan, but the MD insists on pref equity with board seats. We're not just capital. We're strategic. Everyone nods, except for the one career bureaucrat who still thinks this is about fiscal responsibility. At 6 p.m., I'm working on a term sheet for an emergency lithium mining JV with some guys in Wyoming. The deal terms, equity upside, mineral rights, and a direct line to the Fed for liquidity. Somewhere, Larry Fink sheds a single tear of pride.

1:10:03By 9 p.m., the interns are arguing whether we should issue high-yield bonds backed by military surplus. Someone jokes about tokenizing Social Security. Everyone laughs, but someone writes it down. At 11.30 p.m., I close my laptop and stare at the framed photo of Teddy Roosevelt in my office. I realize I'm no longer just a finance guy. I'm a statesman. This is the most prestigious exit. This is paradise. This is paradise. Yeah, so anyways, this would be a client. If tech is Doge, the Sovereign Wealth Fund is going to be all the PE brothers just having a heyday. I think it's cool to think about.

1:10:39We'll see how it plays out. Obviously, the BTC maxis say that the Sovereign Wealth Fund should just be a trillion dollars of Bitcoin. um and uh i would wouldn't be surprised if that kind of stuff got in but it is funny how these these if there was a sovereign wealth fund i imagine that it would ultimately be trump as playing masa where people come and pitch him crazier and crazier bigger and bigger ideas and then because that's what happens in many ways that's what happens in um if you're going to try to raise you know a billion dollars from from saudi arabia for some project mbs will at that ticket price mbs probably has to like verbally sign off on the deal right maybe he's not taking the pitch meeting but you know these anytime you're raising money from what's effectively a kingdom the king's got to sign off or he's got a guy who is you know responsible for making sure that they don't do anything silly but then when you're playing with dollars of that size you end up doing, you know, he's jokes about giving a 24 year old$500 million, but you know, it's only, um, 50 basis points of the fund, you know, why not just, uh, or no, even, even less, even less crazy.

1:11:55This is so funny to me because like the idea, I I'm very pro the idea of a U S sovereign wealth fund, but our country is in massive debt. Like we don't have a surplus right now. We don't have money to put into a sovereign wealth fund, I think. I don't know where it would come from. We need to pay down our debt first, right? I think that's how it works. On leverage. Yeah, I don't know. All the rules have been thrown out. It's a new day. Anything is possible. But good to see some analysts having fun on Wall Street Oasis. Let's move on to Lulu. Lulu writes, a good slogan is critical for starting a movement.

1:12:33Make America great again. Yes, we can, time to build, no taxation without representation, keep calm and carry on, move fast and break things, just do it. Workers of the world unite, think different. The best slogan is one that gets stuck in people's heads and represents one central idea. And this is quote tweeting Emmett, former CEO of Twitch, says the way you influence large language models or a bunch of humans is not by writing persuasive prose, but by coining new words or phrases, which are useful and also make it easier to think certain thoughts over others. And she actually tagged me in this.

1:13:06She said, this is Coogan's Law. And I was super excited to see Coogan's Law going viral on the timeline once again. I'm very proud of that coinage. I stand by it. I think it's extremely valuable. I need to coin some more. Jordy, give me your take on this and then I'll riff a little bit more. I don't have much more to add here. I think we're just big proponents of coining, you know, coining constantly, iterating, you know, attempt to coin things. You're not always going to be successful, but, um, you know, when you hit something, when you hit it like Cougars law, I mean, that's a, that's a billion dollar coinage right there.

1:13:41And, uh, I was actually giving this, I was giving this advice to, uh, a GP who reached out to me and said they were writing a piece on the intersection of these three trends. And my primary advice was you need to condense it down into five to six words max so that you can, if that, if these trends play out in the way that you think they will, that you will get credit for sort of creating that, uh, and, and sort of, uh, encapsulating that trend and something that is memorable and something that can sort of live on. And so, uh, Brody here says, um, you know, calls this out. Well, Brian Johnson has done this incredibly well with don't die two words that um that sort of encapsulate his movement and everything that that he's he stands for so uh always be coining always be coining um i mean peter teal did this with zero to one but also he popularized the idea of the power law which was really uh like it's obviously he didn't create that but he popularized that in the venture term uh and and uh owning a coinage and popularizing a coin is just super valuable i actually looked up all the different ways you can coin a phrase around your name.

1:14:53So Coogan's Law is out there already. We're working on Hayes Law, Jordy's Law. The Hayes Paradox. Hayes Paradox is coming soon, dropping soon. That's when you find something so funny. It's so funny that you're literally laughing at your own joke and then no one else finds it funny. Yeah. You got to post that. I think that's good. I think that can live on. But you have multiple shots on goal. So we can get Hayes Law, Hayes Paradox, Hayes Effect, Hayes Principle, Hayes Razor, the Hayes Trap, the Hayes Critique, the Hayes Syndrome, the Hayes Equation, and the Hayes Wager. Because Lulu didn't put Going Direct on here, which is her...

1:15:36Yeah. Well, she didn't coin that. Really? She popularized it. And this is another thing about the Coogan's Law. There's also Coogan's Paradox, which is that oftentimes the person that popularizes the coinage accrues more value than the person who actually does the coining. Yeah, that's funny. I always thought she created it. No, no, I think it might've come from Bology or someone else. She also gets credit because she helps so many companies now do the thing, which is going direct. Totally. Yeah, and coining truly is not, coining is not just coming up with the phrase. is also doing the work to popularize it and beat that drum.

1:16:13And I can tell that people are circling around Coogan's Law ideas. And if I don't stake my claim with a banger every week or every month, reasserting my ownership over that meme, it will get twisted and repopularized and I will lose it. And I've been talking to Solana about this with Moon Should Be a State. He has a great phrase. And you can see that as this gets bigger and bigger, this movement could move beyond him. and someone else could take it. And all of a sudden he's no longer the moon state guy. And that would be a huge loss. I want to keep it in the salon. The risk, the risk for him is that, is that there's two people that could really take that Elon and Trump.

1:16:55Yep. Positive thing is if you get your, your phrase taken from one of those people, you still, you still get to be infamous for, you know, creating, creating a movement. So totally, totally. And so did you see this mattress drama? We have to cover it. Mattress drama on the timeline. To me, the drama here was that it was an air mattress and not an eight sleep. She wouldn't have caught this kind of shade if she was shown off her pod four ultra on the floor. But I think San Francisco's so normalized to the fact that high performers sleep on eight sleeps that you can't really be taken seriously in San Francisco if you're not on an eight sleep yep um i'm very excited to launch uh officially launch our eight sleep partnership very soon uh but on that note uh i thought it was funny because she clearly um i think it was like one person that just like dunked on her and then like kicked off this entire firestorm i thought her original post was totally fine she said funny she's clearly joking yeah she's she's joking and like she's having fun and she's like playing into the culture but um But I think people saw it a little bit as stolen valor.

1:18:06You know, it's like you're a VC. The mattress on the floor has been reserved for, you know, the struggling founder, the John Coogan in 2010, you know, sleeping on a mattress with 200 bucks a month to spend on, you know, food. So anyways, she says day two learnings, VCs are hated in SF and people think that their junior VC job is a lot more glamorous than it is. It's not, LOL. well. Another great reminder to focus on what you love versus being concerned with external validation. I don't think the second point, I think she kind of missed the point. I don't think VCs are hated. I think that, I don't think, I don't think anybody thinks that junior VCs are so glamorous.

1:18:48It's more so that unless you're working for the world's smallest micro fund, like you're probably making an okay income and you don't have any risk of, am I going to run out of money you know in three months yeah and so uh anyways megan megan dunks on her again and says vcs hated sf lmao you guys this is a this is a call to action for i don't know exactly what firm monica works for but uh if you're the gp of that fund uh get monica and eight sleep immediately uh and then also maybe get her a cartier crash to show off in when she's at a partner yeah you know yeah a loaner cartier crash would go a long way to establish and why not a company car while we're at it i mean uh you you know something nice that she can take you know maybe a mclaren f1 it has two seats you can take the cto and the ceo on a little drive don't want to save some money go with the i8 the doors still go up you'll still be respected yeah don't don't LARP as a bootstrap founder, LARP as a size Lord GP, get her, get her, get her a Bentley, get her a crash, get her a sleep, get her a$50 ,000 a month.

1:20:03Let's put those management fees to work. It's not meant to be just pure net income for the partners. It's about moving the firm forward. Yeah. And you have the, you have the proof on the timeline. I think this is an indictment of austerity at VC firms. We need GPs kidding their associates out and their principals out and their junior VCs out with the absolute best, the creme de la creme. Let's move on to promoted post. Wait, what you got? After we do this, I got some promoted reviews. So let's jump in with. Let's do this promoted post. I'll read through this. This is the job I expect is a dream come true for many software engineers.

1:20:44We're hiring for engineers to join the internal AI team here at Anduril Tech, where you will build agentic tools that power damn near every work stream across the company. If you want to have access to the biggest foundational AI labs as your partners and work on enabling everything from sales to marketing, to internal comms, to manufacturing, to hardware design, to field sustainment, while being part of the leader in defense technology, apply. And so go to Anderil's job website on Greenhouse. Check out the job that Cy has posted. He is in a massive war with Luke Metro over at Anderil to be the top poster at Anderil.

1:21:25And so give him a follow. Go apply for this job. Seems like a dream job, honestly. Company's ripping. and it's an exciting place to be. Thank you for the tag, Cy. Go apply. Go DM, Cy. This is an insane opportunity. You'd be stupid not to take it. Go work for America. Work for Anderle. Fantastic. And defend our national interest. Let's go to some promoted reviews because we've been getting five-star after five-star review on this podcast. They don't stop coming. And as a reminder, if you leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, we will read your review live on the show and we encourage you to include an ad in your review it's free real estate folks take it jordy what you got for me this uh this block of promoted reviews is sponsored by adquick adquick is another one way to buy out of home ads for your startup they make it programmatic they make it super easy we're planning some of our own out of home campaigns on adquick right now for tb as well as pmf or die so they're amazing uh you can just go to adquick.com and sign up.

1:22:32They've got some great sales reps over there that'll walk you through it. Or if you need some campaign ideas, hit us up. We're happy to support there. And I'm going to jump into some ads now. This is from Dr. Brian. He says, Technology Brothers is a wonderful podcast. Just like my 2020 vision, I don't take a single episode for granted. This five-star review is brought to you by Greatalk Family Vision Care. For over 30 years, Dr. Mark Greatalk has been dedicated to providing exceptional eye care to families in Western Pennsylvania with locations in Greensburg, Legionnaire and Harrison city. And now with the recent addition of his son, Dr.

1:23:07Brian, I love it. Keeping it in the family. Our commitment to your vision is stronger than ever. As a father son team, we believe that eye care means we care because your vision deserves the best. We offer comprehensive eye services, including dry eye treatments for the 10 X engineers who are glued to their screens all day, creating shareholder value and products such as blue light blocking glasses for terminally online ex-posters who seek banger archive acclaim don't let's go vision prevent you from seeing the next big trend in tech call now our book online gray talk family vision care where i care means we care that's a fantastic review fantastic thank you for sharing that we got to love promoting family to go to the eye doctor in a long time thankfully um but uh but i would i would love to actually be treated by them.

1:23:57They sound amazing. Thank you for the review guys and for listening. I can read the next one if you want. Okay, yeah, hit it. It sounds funny. It says, it's mewing for the brain, a five-star review. Creatine and raw eggs, castles equals calcium cannons. Blueprint slash Brian Johnson equals YB stiffs. I don't know what that means. Oh, I think I know what that means actually. Technology Brothers equals a fully rocked up brain. If you want to beef up the brain matter, All you need to do is take some creatine and put on these two citizens of the world. Current events, deep takes, and a style sense that would make the ice queen and a winter quiver.

1:24:34Babe, wake up. Just found some good old-fashioned ear candy. Everyone that matters. Stu. Stu, thank you. Dude, absolute dog. What about no ad in there? I would have liked to promote something for you. Yeah, but you always get a second chance because you can review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You get two shots on goal, guys. Should I read the next one too? Next one. Next one. I got one from SC. He says, and this is from Blaine Davis. He says, business thrives on deals and deal makers thrive on technology brothers podcasts. Those who love, who love leverage and luxury listen daily. Take it from us.

1:25:11A pair of passionate listeners who like you love business and decided to do something about it. We're building a platform to pay homage to deal makers like Emil Michael and Michael Ovitz. So today before allocating capital, allocate your network, make a new connection for a new company to help them land a customer and we'll wire you capital the same day. We want to build a business platform of the future where connections you trust could be the new customers for the companies we trust. We are superconnector.com and we approve this message. Superconnector is an amazing company. I would think of it as like almost like an expert network, but for helping you find customers.

1:25:45So if you're trying to sell into healthcare, they have healthcare executives and people that are hyper-connected in that industry that you can basically hire and just pay on a per lead basis. And so super cool platform. Love the domain to superconnector.com. Just ripping through these. You want to hit the next one? Yeah. Tech bros for the win. If you've ever wondered what happens when two angel investors with LinkedIn level enthusiasm and Chad like confidence get behind a microphone, look no further than technology brothers, a world where AI isn't just a tool, but a co-host and blockchain is the answer to every question.

1:26:19even the ones you didn't ask. Five stars. This review is sponsored by J. Kramer Corp. Transform your dream home into reality with J. Kramer Corp, Southern California's premier general contractor. This is extremely relevant for us. Let's go. With over 30 years of experience, we specialize in luxury new constructions, intricate remodels, and innovative designs. Our award-winning projects have been featured in Architectural Digest and Dwell, showcasing our commitment to excellence, whether it's navigating tight coastal spaces or building on challenging terrains we handle it all with precision and care visit jcramercorp.com and let's build your future together i mean we we got to build a manor for tv uh yeah our new studio will be looking like louis the 14th jay kramer we were gonna just lease a studio but i feel like now we got to build one ground up to be honest john nothing like reading these reviews literally makes my heart sing it's amazing one of the it's just so fun everybody gets into character i absolutely love it um thank you guys for the support and for listening and it's the least that we can do to um to add uh you know to run ads for your incredible businesses so absolutely love it let's get back into this timeline okay so connor says number of early stage founders I know who are not struggling to hire zero.

1:27:43And Monica from an earlier post says, what's the bottleneck is it's an employer's market, isn't it? And Connor says the best talent have many options to choose from very hard to find the right cultural skill and expectation fit. You can hire people more easily by lowering your standard in some capacity, but there's no free lunch. And this is real. Everyone says, Oh, AI is going to kill all the jobs and everything, but it hasn't happened yet. There's still a very tight labor market. and with cursor and Devin and all these extra tools, it's gotten a lot more fun to work at a startup. It's gotten a lot more productive.

1:28:15And so great engineers and great product builders have the pick of the litter. What do you got for me? Yeah, I mean, to me, this is playing out. A lot of people said that have been saying, you know, that the job of the software engineer is going away and we've got another year maybe, but it's, you know, it's going to be gone. And who knows really what's going to happen, But one thing is clear as these engineers, as engineers get more efficient with tools like Devon and Cursor and Windsurf and Poolside and the whole list goes on. It seems like there's just an even bigger and bigger and bigger demand for engineering talent because then companies say, OK, we're more efficient now.

1:28:55Let's build even faster. Right. And so you see these companies that are hitting these incredible revenue milestones and building these really full featured products in record time. um and so so yeah it's it's it's a great time to be talented and looking for opportunities it's a tough time to be hiring and every single one of the company you know we talk every company that we talk about on the show is actively hiring right and even they're they're hiring um and and open ai themselves is hiring engineers right and i'm sure they they are frustrated with with with how competitive the market is right now so totally an awesome time to be joint you know in the market to join a startup.

1:29:32Yeah. I always think about that Pavel post about, oh, software engineers are cooked. No, everyone is going to be competing with software engineers because the tooling is so advanced now that, I mean, you see this at Ramp, their marketing organization has tons of technologists in it. And there's every problem that you have, whatever your business is, whether it's sales, like having programming skills or being able to think like a programmer, it's just steroids. So deep research is, does PhD level research now. And that is software engineers building that to compete with not other software engineers, but people that would have just been manually putting together that data and information and summarizing sources and things like that.

1:30:20So you know, look, even even Tyler Cohen, which who's been, he certainly hasn't been an AI bear, but he's been more so, you know, he was on DoorCash and basically talking about how, yes, it's going to be transformative, but it's not going to eliminate all jobs in 10 years, right? Like these trends are going to take quite a long time. So why don't you get into this? Yeah. So Alex Stapp says, buckle up folks. And he's sharing a screenshot from Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen writes, I have had deep research write a number of 10 page papers for me, each of them outstanding. I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD level research assistant and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, maybe more, except deep research does the work in five or six minutes and it does not seem to make errors due to the quality of the embedded O3 model.

1:31:13And what I've realized is that I've gotten better at prompting deep research and now I'm having fun with it. I asked it when we did the deep dive on Temu, Timu, I specifically asked it, who made money from Timu? And it was very good about citing very specific articles to figure out who the investors were. And then I also asked it, write an analysis of Timu's effect on Amazon. And it was able to look at the financials of PDD and the financials of Amazon and really compare those. It was a little bit boring when I asked it, just like, tell me the whole story of Timu, because it doesn't really know what I want.

1:31:48But when I ask at very specific questions and questions that I don't know the answer to, or I can't just Google and actually require some analysis and some piecing together, that's where it really shines. And that's where it would take a long time to pull up the financials, maybe get them in Excel, compare them. So I am loving it. And I think it's a big advancement. What do you got? Yeah. One other note, I saw Michael Magnano from Lightspeed posted. He's been on the show before we covered his blog post, I think on Monday or Tuesday. He said, deep research marks the first time I've been convinced that AGI is already here.

1:32:21The discussion is over. I agree. I think that people are realizing that we've talked about this on the show before, right? Everybody was saying, you know, we're building AGI, you know, it's almost here. And then everybody kind of looked around and said, hey, what we already got, you can already sort of say is artificial general intelligence. And so the goalposts just got shifted out to artificial superintelligence and agetic systems. Well, it's that AEI concept, the artificial economic intelligence in my mind. It's like at a certain point, these evals mean less than just how much money are these AI systems making.

1:33:02And that's almost a measure of the unhobblings, like the PDF upload we like to joke about. But really the question is, can deep research integrate into a system where it's creating real value? And is that measurable? And then really it's just, what's the revenue of the application layer? And that is a metric. And once that gets really, really high, well, yeah, we've crossed some sort of quantitative threshold. And these questions about like, is the system human level intelligent or not? It's almost less relevant than is GDP moving up? Are we at 5 % GDP growth instead of 2 %? That would be amazing.

1:33:41That's what Tyler Cowen's a little bit worried about because he thinks that there's a lot of jobs and a lot of roles that are just completely like hardened against AI, at least in the short term. But certainly the ideal is that all these systems get better. They create more value. Values captured by the shareholders, by the consumer, by the user, by everyone. and it's just a new American boom, which I would love to see. Let's stay on this topic, move forward a few slides, Ben, to Juwan over at Ramp. He says, front-end engineers equipped with AI slash ML skills will be the most desirable employees by the end of 2025.

1:34:22I thought this was an interesting post because a lot of the backend and the actual instantiation of the idea of software is becoming commoditized and becoming easier to do with these AI tools, but you still got to know what to build, how to design a product and how to make it usable to a human at the end of the day. And so that's why I think he's saying that front end engineers, designers, people with product sense might be uniquely poised to benefit from advances in AI. But what do you think? I just got to do a golf clap for Juwan because it feels like just yesterday he came out, started asking for raises on the timeline.

1:35:01Been on a tear. At this point, I think he's beyond earned it. The guy's been on a tear. He's getting millions of impressions a month, putting Ramp on the map, making them a target for super smart young engineers to go and join Ramp. So I think he deserves a raise. I'll go on record and say it. Maybe I'll even text Eric and Kareem. But anyways, congrats on the run. we got a promoted post from emmet emmet shine uh he is looking for a designer to collaborate on branding and product design in this style metallic chrome grain detailing americana if interested dm emmet on x or email him at emmet at littleplains.co and we're big fans of emmet on the show if you're not familiar with him he was uh what gin lane yeah quick summary so emmet started gin lane like probably 15 years ago one of the most impactful branding agencies that led the charge on d2c so they work with all these different companies from like warby parker to um i think they did harry's to sweet green things like that um so absolutely incredible human and creative mind uh he's also a coach for pmf for die we got a big announcement for pmf for die coming tomorrow uh so he'll be on that show and just a pleasure to work with he did the aurora branding you can see it in the back left corner there john so we work with him there but incredible opportunity for the right designer to go in there and uh get to work with the goat well let's go to another promoted post uh not from bezel but for someone that should be shopping on bezel because brody fan of the show uh asked the question what should i put in these empty watch slots uh he has three watches he's got 10 slots seven to fill or eight to fill or actually that's 12 that's a 12 watch case so he's got plenty of options what would you put in there jordy one more he should have circled that apple watch and you can get that out of it yeah you're not going to see apple watches on bezel i think that watches are are such a considered purchase that i highly recommend if you're interested in getting one not impulse buying anything because the watch that you think is cool today and if you just start watching youtube on uh youtube videos on watches for just 30 minutes a night for a while by a month and you'll you'll all the watches you thought were cool and the first you know the first uh week suddenly or or you know you're beyond them and so uh i think it's a journey there's no rush to fill it up um and uh and anyways i would say like work on building up your wish list on bezel before you do uh before you make any you know specific purchase Yeah.

1:37:44Also Brody, Brody launched a cool, um, he launched a marketplace yesterday. That's a marketplace for startups to offload their, um, startups to offload. Like, you know, if you're moving offices and you have extra chairs or you bought monitors that you don't need. Um, I don't think, I don't know if we have it listed here, but, um, but, uh, either way, check it out. I think it's vcsubsidized.com. Um, and, uh, you know, potentially get some Herman Miller. for 90 % off. Yeah, and there's a lot of options. So download the Bezel app, start scrolling, and watch some YouTube videos and watches. Let's move over to another somewhat promoted post, and then we'll wrap up the show.

1:38:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy posted today his fabulous conversation with Graham Duncan. And we wanted to highlight this because we covered this on the show because the interview with Graham Duncan was on the cover story of the first Colossus review, which we highly recommend going and subscribing to. It's a fantastic publication. We have it somewhere here in the studio. But we wanted to highlight this because previously this conversation was only available on the paid Colossus RSS feed. But now in a great turn of events, it's available in an ad sponsored format. And so Ramp has partnered with Invest Like the Best.

1:39:13They are the presenting sponsor. And you can go and listen to Patrick's conversation with Graham Duncan for free on the ad supported Invest Like the Best RSS feed. And so go check it out. He breaks down starting an investment platform, sourcing, compulsion, grip, and levels of investing, of the investing game and evaluating people. So if you don't know Graham Duncan, he is the guy who picks the guy. He seeds new investment and asset managers. And so if you're starting a new hedge fund or a new investing firm, you go to Graham. If he likes you, you're going to get a lot of money for your fund. And he's done very, very well.

1:39:55And he breaks down how he thinks about talent. The guy spends three hours a day on lockdown. He's an absolute beast. it's it's very broadly applicable to just everything from picking you know founders that you want to angel invest in to picking you know friends and business partners and anyways his his lessons are are tremendous so definitely check it out yeah so thanks everyone for tuning in that's our show for today we'll be back tomorrow we have tons more stories tons more news and i'm sure we'll be breaking stories and getting exclusives like we always do on here every time so don't forget to leave us a five-star review on apple podcasts and spotify leave an ad in your review send us any questions dm us submit banger archive posts just engage with us everywhere on the timeline we'll be on x all day long all day we'll see you on the timeline we'll see you on the massively profitable x the app the everything app there we go thanks for watching Thanks, folks.

1:40:53See you tomorrow. Have a good day. Bye.