Back in the Truth Zone, Exponential Growth Continues, Athleisure is Out, Brothers Don't Use NDA's
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are putting my good friend, Teddy Schleifer, in the truth zone. If you don't know Teddy, he's a journalist. He hit me up and said, hey. I I I'm writing something about this secretive gathering of rising MAGA donors in Las Vegas.
John:I heard you're there. I ran into him there. I said, cool. Send me your website. I wanna check it out.
John:I love Substacks. He sends me this URL. I hadn't seen it before. Nytimes.com, And I went and checked it out. It's kind of like a kind of like a extreme left Packie McCormick.
John:Like, they do the news. It's kinda like a substack. Got it. You can subscribe, but it's all very techno pessimist instead of techno optimist, which is kinda cool. It's like very different.
John:It's like the opposite of Paki.
Jordi:They they had a big issue with their tech team sort of rebelling. Right? They wanted Yeah. That's right. That's right.
Jordi:A tep bereavement issue.
John:Yeah. Yeah. But what what is cool and I was on the fence about talking to him, because of kind of the vibe of the whole website. But then I saw on their website, you can pay them to print out the website and mail it to you.
Jordi:No way. Yeah. Yeah. And we love printing stuff.
John:I love printing stuff. So then I was like, I'm in. Teddy.
Jordi:No brainer at that point.
John:So I run into him. We we we we chat a little bit at the event, and he broke it down. He says, new from Vegas. I went to the Rockbridge Network Fall Summit last week. Fun times.
John:Featuring, it's funny because he he did go, but he didn't have a ticket, so he couldn't go inside.
Jordi:No way.
John:So he was just hanging out in the in, like, the bar area talking to people. Nice. It was very, Seymour Hersh, you know, know?
Jordi:Was it kind of like it was a kind of like a project Veritas approach?
John:Like No. No. No. No. No.
John:It wasn't like that. I would he he was very upfront with who with who he was, and he was, like, shaking hands and introducing himself. And it was it was very about board. But it was very Did he
Jordi:have, like you know you know when when journalists go into war zones
John:and they have, like, a helmet on and
Jordi:they have, like, a vest and it says, like, press or whatever? Yeah. No. Did he have that on?
John:He didn't have a press pass. He didn't have he could have been lying to people, but he was not. He was he was he was he was just hanging out and people were happy to talk to him, honestly. Like, I think that there was nothing that crazy going on. And, he's on the kind of the Elon Musk, the tech politics beat.
John:And so he wanted to talk to all the tech people who were at this event trying to crossover. So, it was featuring Rebecca Mercer, Donald Trump Junior, Susie Wiles, friends of Elon, me, sec, and an ascendant part of the Republican donor universe. I did not donate. I I did not donate, but I did get in, which was cool. But we gotta put him in the truth zone.
John:Truth zone. On on this show, we do not allow any any fibs, any clipping, any taking out of context. And so, Teddy, you're going in the truth
Jordi:zone, buddy. We at this show, we like to trust the experts. Yes. And those are people like Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman.
John:Yes. Patty
Jordi:McCormack. Patty Patty McCormack. Right?
John:Chris Williamson. Yep. Sean Curie. Sahil Bloom.
Jordi:Trust the experts. The experts aren't with us today Yes. But we'll try to, you know, sort of
John:We'll channel the experts.
Jordi:Channel the experts.
John:Channel the experts. And so, he writes the title of the article that he wrote was behind the scenes at a secret gather gathering of rising MAGA donors. Just 4 days after being named the next White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles was waiting patiently for an espresso drink at a 5 star hotel in Las Vegas. Overnight, she had become one of the most powerful people in America. The value of a minute of her time could not be higher during the presidential transition.
John:Republican strivers are hounding her for desirable gigs. And back at Mar a Lago, president-elect Donald j Trump has been courting controversy with his picks. Yet, here she was, 1,000 of miles away, flanked only by a security guard, alone in line at a Four Seasons coffee shop. She had just peeled so you notice how he's saying she's not at the actual event because he's at the coffee shop. Yeah.
John:He's hunting around. Yeah. I love he really he really did just
Jordi:show him. For him to say I ordered espresso martinis for 2 because it was past noon and we were ready for a power lunch.
John:Yeah. Love that.
Jordi:I don't know if he got there.
John:And so he he goes on to say the group, this is all for the Rockbridge Network. He said it was cofounded 5 years ago by JD Vance, sprouted an informal set of dinners into a powerful coalition of Republican donors who have given more than $100,000,000 to Rockbridge products, projects since 2019 according to a person close to the group. And so, this is just an interesting, just lesson for founders or anyone who's doing anything with the press. There are kind of 3 tiers of, like, talking to a reporter. Are you familiar with this?
Jordi:Yep.
John:So the base level is, like, is, like, off the record. Like, you can't quote me. You can't, you can't say a person familiar with the matter, but I'm giving you this information, and then, hopefully, you can go and use it to to Write a better story. Write a better story. Exactly.
John:And it's pretty safe to speak on background or off the record.
Jordi:Yeah. I think there's this general I think there's this general fear of journalists
John:Yep.
Jordi:Within tech. Yep. And But it it
John:it Tech is world wrestling now.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so we need heels, and that's where the journalists are filling in.
Jordi:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And then the thing I would say is is every every technology journalist, and I think we should call them technology journalists just because tech has broadly been used as a slur. Sure.
Jordi:But, technology journalists that I've spoken to have been incredibly respectful of the ground rules of journalism, which are Oh, the off the record, on background, on record, which which you
John:can get. So this is an example of someone talking on background. It says a person close to the group, gave them, or gave Teddy, you know, the information that they have raised more than a $100,000,000. And so they didn't wanna be named, but they were okay with that making it into the, into the article. And, and this is all in service of helping lead Silicon Valley's march to the right.
John:For Rockbridge, mister Vance's election as vice president was a crowning achievement and a tantalizing opportunity to wield new national influence. But Rockbridge has largely largely kept its activities stealthy, mindful of how groups of wealthy conservatives like the Koch network have drawn attacks from both liberal detractors and republican wannabes. This is the don't build in public thing. Yep. You know?
Jordi:Never build in public.
John:Never build in public, except so, as a caravan of black SUVs shuttled in the billionaires from their private jets last week, members of the Rockbridge roster could be spotted around the hotel. Rebecca Mercer, the Republican the scion of one of the most prolific Republican donor families, greed well wishers in the lobby. Ken Howrey and Luke Luke Nosek, shout out. Love those guys. Former, partners at Founders Fund, cofounders of the firm.
John:And they worked with, Elon Musk at PayPal, made them mega wealthy themselves. And, and we were actually Teddy and and the 3 of us were all hanging out. I did not get a chance to talk to Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, but they were there. And he describes them as the 6 foot 5 cryptocurrency investors and former Harvard heavyweight rowers made famous in the social network.
Jordi:They do not get enough credit for reinventing themselves Yes. And running it back Yes. In, like, a massive way. And it's honestly if if companies like Coinbase were not so dominant Yes. From a narrative standpoint, they would get even more credit.
Jordi:Exactly. Like, they they in many ways were were cucked again by Brian Armstrong.
John:To some degree. Yeah. And they did they did do a good job of, of just believing in in crypto, like, very early and Totally. A ton of it.
Jordi:Early and right.
John:Yep. Attendees with white and red gift bags and lanyards. I didn't get a gift bag. I had a lanyard. Brutal.
John:That's brutal. Knew how to be closed lipped when approached by hotel interlopers or by the Times reporter. He's like referencing himself. I love this. Who was not invited to a closed press festivities.
John:I like these. Give me this. But a copy of the agenda listed remarks by several tech billionaires, including Anuril cofounder, Palmer Lucky, and venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, who spoke about his support for deregulating technology and the mixed reaction in Silicon Valley to his endorsement of mister Trump according to attendees. There were tech up and comers too. Donald Trump junior announced at the welcome dinner that he was re he was entering venture capital.
John:And days before
Jordi:the president
John:elect elect chose Robert f Kennedy for health and human service secretary, mister Kennedy spoke extensively about his public health work to a standing ovation. It's the domestic Davos in the desert, said rock Rockbridge Bracker Backer, Omid Malik, referring to the annual business conference in Riyadh and Donald Trump's junior's new business partner. That's interesting because, yeah, Om Malik, ran GigaOm for a long time. Big media guy and then No. Big investor.
John:I'm pretty sure it might I I might be getting that wrong. But,
Jordi:it makes sense that the next Davos is in America and Las Vegas. Right?
John:I like it. I like it. Yeah. It's good. But the reason that I wanted to put Teddy in the truth zone is that I'm in this article and he quoted me.
John:And he cuts some very important stuff out. So let's let's read. He says, generally, this is a quote from me in the times. He says, generally or I say, generally, everyone at Rockbridge was very happy that technologists and politicians are working together directly again and not openly hostile toward each other. This is just kind of what I felt in the room, said John Coogan, who attended.
John:It's no longer a question of whether technology will drive the future, but how we guide its impact. So it makes sense that tech billionaires and the political elite are partying together, which I like. But that's not what I said, Ted. I I said something. I had another line in here.
John:I said, Rockbridge was a stark reminder that the march of techno capitalism is unrelenting, reshaping every aspect of our society. Is no longer a question of whether technology will drive the future, but how we guide its impact. So it makes sense that tech billionaires and the political elite are partying together. And he took out the techno capitalism is unrelenting part, and I don't know why.
Jordi:I do not know why.
John:But I know I, of course, gave him a bunch of different quotes and he chose whatever he wanted and that's fine. But I wanted to give you the full story here. Unfiltered in the truth zone. Stay tuned.
Jordi:Trust the experts.
John:But, Rockbridge has grown significantly. They used to let prospective members attend for just 5,000. Now it's 25,000. Although some people said privately that they had been able to get
Jordi:in for less. They're giving it away, basically.
John:The cost to be a limited partner is a 100 k and the cost to be a principal partner is a 1,000,000. Now that's a status symbol. We should do a promoted post for them. Get some people in there.
Jordi:Yep.
John:But in general, you know, we don't we never we actually never talk about politics on this show, but
Jordi:Or social issues.
John:Yeah. Or or or social issues. But I do I do think it's good that technologists and politicians are talking to each other again and figuring out how to reform the government, regulate, and do all sorts of stuff. So, as a technology brother, it's great to see the politics brothers doing good work and the technology brothers convening with them in Las Vegas. It's fantastic.
John:So, anyway, that wraps up the truth zone. We are moving on to our next segment. What do we have, Geordie?
Jordi:So today, big size gong moment. Fabian pin pink pink hairs.
John:Okay
Jordi:yeah pop in pink hairs, is announcing a 500,000,000 I was gonna say dollars, but then I caught the symbol here 500,000,000 euro investment in Udu at a €5,000,000,000 valuation which has been led by Capital G and Sequoia Capital along with top investors like Mubadala and BlackRock. He notes here that it is a secondary transaction. No money for the company as we don't need it. We grow organically. Statement.
Jordi:He says, I didn't sell, kept the majority. So at this point, we're not exactly clear if if he didn't if he means he didn't sell the company or if he didn't sell shares. But either way, a $500,000,000 investment, does that can we hit the size gong for euros or is that a
John:I would love to hit the size gong. Clearly, this is a huge deal, but I think I think we gotta keep the size gong.
Jordi:Would it be un American?
John:It would be un
Jordi:American. For euros.
John:But I I mean, I love, Andrew Reed at Sequoia, one of the holy trinity firms. No one loves Sequoia more than I do, and he's a fantastic investor. He's in Figma. He's in this company. And it's interesting because, I I hadn't really heard of them.
John:And then as soon as I saw this and we've discussed talking about this, I saw an I saw a billboard just driving around Los Angeles for this, company, and their tagline was, like, the only business software you'll ever need. And so I think that they've just really carved out a nice little niche for them, been very profitable, grown significantly, and now they get the luxury of doing a huge secondary transaction. And it's all part of this trend of companies staying private longer, doing more secondary transactions to get early employees.
Jordi:There were more secondary transactions in, like, 6 companies last year than there were IP proceeds. Wow. That's wild. And it's just, like, showing that.
John:But it makes sense.
Jordi:The best companies have almost infinite access to capital, especially when you're able to cater to asset managers like BlackRock, creators of, creators of Burning Man.
John:Yeah. I think, yeah, BlackRock City. They have their own city.
Jordi:They They have their own city. I mean Out in the desert.
John:We gotta go there. It's fine. Should do their
Jordi:own city.
John:But, yeah, fantastic news. Unfortunately, we can't ring the size gong on this one.
Jordi:Next time. Time it'll be in dollars. It in dollars. We'll make it happen. Yeah.
Jordi:If Fabian wants to reannounce it.
John:And then and then reshore to America, bring all the jobs here and, let Europe, languish and become a vacation destination for all the Americans.
Jordi:Couldn't have said it better myself.
John:Well, that's a good trans position as long as we're on, American jangoism. Let's let's move on to a a question that we got from a viewer. On YouTube, Kian Stack says, I'm so into the pod. Thank you. I appreciate that.
John:But I'm a Canadian living in China. Am I still a brother? And that's an interesting question. What do you think, Jordy?
Jordi:Man, I think we need a whole hour to kind of break this down. What does it mean to be a brother? Yep. But I think we've kind of come back to this notion that being a technology brother is very spiritual. I agree.
Jordi:As American as we are and as American as this podcast is, the idea of being a technology brother is something that almost knows no borders. Right? I agree.
John:I agree.
Jordi:It's a mindset. It's something that in many ways you're born with. It's genderless. Yeah. It's not limited by the constraints of nationalities, gender, even industry.
Jordi:Right? You can be a technology brother wherever you are in the world. Whatever you do for work, granted that your risk on and levered up. Yep. And It
John:would be helpful to
Jordi:know What you're doing in
John:the portfolio. What programming languages do you know?
Jordi:Have you ever convinced your parents to buy Bitcoin?
John:What's your astrological sign? These things all kind of come together to create the milieu of what what a technology brother really is.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. No. An example, you know, long before we started the show, I was able to convince my father, a retired math teacher, to buy Bitcoin at the market top in 20, I guess it was 2022.
John:For Thanksgiving.
Jordi:And, what really kind of crystallized that was getting him to hold until he made it made it all back this year. So, made my dad whole. Yeah. And if I wasn't so convicted in, you know, decentralized finance, there's no way I could have kept every Jordy, I think I wanna sell. Like, I'm down Yeah.
Jordi:You know, 60%. Just hold on, dad. So Yeah. My my big question for this this listener, maybe you can send us a DM, is what are you doing in China? I would hope that
John:Are they gonna be spying for America?
Jordi:Yep. Or That that would be our
John:And that and that you're a Canadian. You're saying you're Canadian to build your your your profile up there. Yeah. Build some credibility. So when when the CCP looks you up there, oh, he's a Yeah.
John:When really CIA.
Jordi:G has has put us on his, most wanted list. You know, we frequently we we're up in a high rise here in LA, and there's frequently DGI drones sort of, like, swarming outside the windows trying to figure out what we're gonna say next, try to try to hear what we're gonna, you know, say off air.
John:Yep.
Jordi:Truth is we're always on air. So there's there's literally nothing
John:that we can do. I would say that if, you know, on YouTube, please go subscribe, but we only have a few 100 subscribers right now. The videos don't get that many views. If you're getting these recommended to you, I would say that the YouTube algorithm has identified you as a technology brother and understands for whatever variety of reasons. Maybe you've been watching, you know, Doug DeMuro learning about cars, Teddy Baldessar learning about watches, Lex Fridman podcast, Dwarkash, and it's put all that together, and it's just dialed in, you are tech brother.
John:And so here you go. This is the perfect show for you. And you clicked and you watched and you commented. So I'm gonna go, yes. You are certified Brother.
John:Technology brother. The only thing is that the next comment, it's better be better be on
Jordi:x, but buddy. Better be on x and better be from
John:the United States. Get back.
Jordi:Here's the VPN. Yep.
John:Let's go to one more DM. We got this from an anonymous, person who seems pretty post economic. Hi, John and Jordy. I'm planning a renewal of vows ceremony with my family and 300 of my closest friends and business associates next summer. My plan is to do a buyout at an at an Amman property and charter planes to get everyone there.
John:I can't decide which property we should choose though. What do you think? And, you have a set up. But I I had to print out a list, so that I could I could run through some of these. But what would your top pick be?
Jordi:Look. You can't go wrong with Aman. You can go very wrong with just about every Four Seasons and every Ritz Carlton in the world now.
John:Yep.
Jordi:Those brands have gone downhill pretty dramatically.
John:Well, let's, you know, we were still open to them paying us to promote them.
Jordi:So Of course. Of course. But we would we would need to be part of a turnaround effort to elevate the properties back to their former
John:I think so.
Jordi:State. So here's the thing. If I'm, if I'm this listener, I'm thinking you gotta go world tour, at least 4 locations in 2 weeks. There's something about having novel experiences with with loved ones that is, like, really bonding.
John:Sure.
Jordi:And so if you can go to Tokyo, start there.
John:Venice.
Jordi:Bounce over. Yeah. Venice would be great. Bounce over to Courchevel. Sure.
Jordi:Maybe get a little skiing in, and then head over to Amannjiri for kind of a classic, sort of the classic Aman experience. It's been shared it's been overshared on on social, but it's, can't in in many ways can't be shared enough. It's dramatic. Yeah. It's inspiring, and it's exactly the place that you should be sort of having a moment like that.
John:I would disagree with you there. I would say keep everyone in the US. It's just gonna be easier and people are gonna have less excuses, the jet lag, even though you're paying
Jordi:for the
John:for the chartered chartered planes. Just, you know, pick from the the US locations. Umangani, Awangiri, Jackson Hole, Lake Powell. These are great options. And, you know, among New York, the problem there, you're gonna have a lot of friends who live in New York or they have Pied de Terres, and they're gonna go home after the festivities.
John:You want everyone staying on the property, locked in. And so you gotta get a little bit out of the the the main hustle and bustle of everyday life. And so I would probably go there and and and keep the international stuff to smaller groups. But you
Jordi:can't really go wrong. I think that's a good take. But, yeah, at the end of the day, if you're going them on, you can't go wrong.
John:Yeah. So there's no wrong answer. But let us know how it pans out and write in with results and some pictures.
Jordi:Let us know your dates if you're not doing a full buyout. There's a chance that one of us will be on the on the property at
John:this point. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Should we do a promoted post and then we'll go into the timeline?
Jordi:Yeah. Let's jump in. This promoted post is from Craig Lawrence. He says, have posted this before but worth repeating. You can literally get a quote for a 100 megawatt hour Tesla Mega Pack system online without speaking to a human.
Jordi:Love the efficiency. Most $1,000 a year b to b SaaS companies won't even do that. So Craig here is highlighting the Tesla Mega Pack, which comes in.
John:Tesla supporters here.
Jordi:At this point, if you order today, you can get a delivery in q 3 2025. So waiting, even less than for the new f eighty, and the estimated price is actually less than an f eighty. It's only $90,000,000. And you can order 1.
John:It's much more than an f eighty. But if you're building it, if you're building a compound in Wyoming or Colorado or Alaska, I think you got to go.
Jordi:Did I say did I say
John:You said it's less than an f eighty.
Jordi:Okay. Okay. Sorry. That's f eighty. The f eighty's yeah.
Jordi:Sorry.
John:But the down payment
Jordi:Quite a bit more than f eighty. What I meant is that, the down payment is is less than an f eighty.
John:How much is the down payment of this $90,000,000 battery pack?
Jordi:$90,000,000 battery pack, only $10,000 due today.
John:That's fantastic.
Jordi:And, like, you know, look at the efficiency here. The estimated annual maintenance is only half $1,000,000. Wow. So you can be running this thing if you're running you know, if you have, at your chalet in Wyoming, you could sort of leverage this to make sure that all the snow for for sort of 3 square miles around your property was melted. Right?
Jordi:So you have private golf course, tennis courts. Yep. You know, this is a perfect solution for that. So fantastic product by Tesla. We'll be we'll be getting for that.
Jordi:Yeah. You could run a data center. We'll likely look to get one of these, for our next studio
John:Yep.
Jordi:In New York, just to make sure that if if for some reason New York were to lose power, we would be able to keep podcasting.
John:There's the famous famous photo of, Goldman Sachs during Hurricane Sandy, where all of New York had gone dark. The Goldman Sachs. They did not. They had bad news.
Jordi:And that will be the same for our Manhattan studio. We will never stop podcasting. Yeah. Anyways, great product. Fantastic product from Tesla.
Jordi:Go buy 1.
John:Tell them the technology brothers sent you.
Jordi:Only $10,000 due today.
John:That's fantastic. Fantastic. Well, before we move on to the timeline, we have some breaking news, everyone. The technology brothers x account has just crossed crossed 2,000 followers. Let's go.
John:Let's go. So it is a tradition around here. Every we we we love and respect exponential growth. And every time we double, we open up a bottle of Dom Perignon.
Jordi:There we go. And
John:so let's do it. You know, Albert Einstein had an interesting, quote about, exponential growth and compound interest. I think he said, compound interest is fucking sick. Yeah. Isn't that what he said?
Jordi:That was word for word. I think I think
John:People misquote him.
Jordi:They misquote him. He said it's he said it was
John:fucking sick. He just said it's fucking sick, and it rocks, dude. Boom.
Jordi:There we go. Oh. Oh my god. There we go. Yeah.
John:I'm getting better.
Jordi:What an amazing tran tradition.
John:Thank you to l Bros Pod.
Jordi:Thank you to LVMH for making this possible.
John:Yeah. It's fantastic.
Jordi:And it's
John:important to celebrate wins. You know? We've been doing this pod for, what, 38 days. We've been on Axe for 18 days. Yep.
John:And, exponential growth is a hell of a drug.
Jordi:And none of this is possible without our community. Yep. And we wish you all were here savoring this 2013, and cheers to you, John.
John:Cheers to you, Jordy.
Jordi:And cheers to Ben. Thank you, Ben.
John:Cheers to our vice president.
Jordi:That's delicious. Delicious.
John:Let's fill these up a little bit more.
Jordi:And we both have, some type of flu from, I think, my son's preschool.
John:I think you gave
Jordi:it to me. So, this is gonna be sort of fantastic at
John:Taking the edge off.
Jordi:Taking the edge off.
John:You know, the other day after we recorded, I had a meeting with someone and, we we enjoyed, martinis together as we as chatted. And it was fantastic.
Jordi:And one thing about this tradition that I think is important to note is is we stay fasted prior to, opening, the bottle, which is key to just make sure you're you're getting the match maximum, level of of enjoyment out of each sip.
John:Absolutely. So Let's put that there.
Jordi:Cheers. Cheers.
John:Thank you everyone for following.
Jordi:Know family.
John:If you're already following, tell 10 friends to follow, turn it into a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. Yep. The economics will work out later. Don't worry about it. Yep.
John:But you wanna get in early. You wanna be following on x because that's where all the action happens.
Jordi:And, one of Ben's KPIs is to get to 4 k by next week. Next week. We can
John:see if we can do it.
Jordi:We gotta post it back. If we can pull this off Yeah. We will be back, you know, by next Friday's episode.
John:With another bottle of Dom Perignon. Yep. So thank you to LVMH. Let's go to the timeline. We are discussing Cava.
John:Kaba is quoting perplexity. Perplexity says, the tech bro starter pack courtesy of VC Bragg's shop on perplexity. This is a really cool feature from Perplexity. They're they launched, their competitor Google Shopping, and it's just much more AI native, much more driven by take a picture of it shows you. Less Exactly.
Jordi:Less pay to play.
John:Exactly. And so in the Tech Bro Starter Pack, I'm extremely confused about this because none of these are familiar to me at
Jordi:All? Yeah.
John:It's the Patagonia vest, the Allbirds sneakers, the Peloton bike, 0 to 1. That is a classic.
Jordi:Yep.
John:The Apple Vision Pro and the Cold Plunge. And then Cava asks, we need a refresh with loud opulence, cc Tech Bros Pod. And yeah. I mean, it's We are working on this. Yeah.
John:We are working on this. We will be dropping merch. We will be, building out the modern tech bro starter pack.
Jordi:Yeah. Loud loud opulence is a yeah. We went through behind loud opulence. Look. We went through a period where, you know, one tech, went through a deeply troubled period of Patagonia vest and and all birds and sort of, like, stretchy genes.
Jordi:You know, there was this
John:It was very apologetic.
Jordi:Yeah. It was
John:very apologetic.
Jordi:They were trying to dress down.
John:Beaten down by the media, demonized, villainized. And the and the reaction to that was to say, hey. Look. I might have a, you know, a $1,000,000,000 fund and be making $10,000,000 a year personally, but
Jordi:Yep. Yeah,
John:I'm just gonna throw on some, you know, what's it called? Like, athleisure. Yeah. Right? And it's brutal.
John:And it's a disgrace, really.
Jordi:Oh, and look. And and over the last decade, suits have been gathering dust. A lot of a lot of venture capitalists, you know, just left them in the closet. Yeah. Kind of forgot about them.
Jordi:But, you know, loud opulence is about bringing back a culture of dressing up, dressing for the job that you have Yep. And the job that you want, which is typically 1,000,000,000 more AUM. Yep. And, it's about building a relationship with, you know, your local authorized dealer. It's about, it's about having the sales associate at Hermes Yeah.
Jordi:On speed dial so that when Christmas is around the corner, you're not going and shopping online. Yeah. You're scheduling an appointment. So
John:And so instead of the Patagonia vest, befriend a tailor, get a custom suit, or call John Ferentino.
Jordi:Ferentino label
John:suit. That makes a ton of sense. Instead of Allbirds sneakers, how about a pair of Prada Loafers? Yep.
Jordi:Right? Yeah. And loud opulence again is is the 1% rule.
John:Everyone knows instead of a Peloton bike, you should be at a barbell gym.
Jordi:Yep.
John:Rogue.
Jordi:Yeah. No. Another example of loud opulence as well is is a 1% rule. Sure. We've talked about a lot, which is, if you're a venture capitalist, take 1% of your AUM and that is the budget that you should use for your daily driver.
Jordi:So we'll let you guys do the math. But, a lot of you guys, I know you're AUM and I see you in Teslas and it sort of paints me up. Step it up.
John:$50,000,000 fund. That's 500 k. That's a Hurcon. Easily.
Jordi:Easily. G t three
John:r s. You're right there. So make it happen.
Jordi:And if you're not sure what to get
John:I did a cold plunge today. It was great. But, yeah, I mean, nothing nothing substitutes for just, some Your
Jordi:cold plunge should be built into your house too.
John:Yes. And the Apple Vision Pro, I think, you know, if you're a real tech brother, you can you can afford a home theater Exactly. Which is kind of what the the Apple Vision
Jordi:Pro replaces. Except you can do it with friends
John:and family
Jordi:and Exactly. Pronatalist. Yeah. And, you can't fit a family of 4 in a vision.
John:I actually saw a wonderful home renovation show where, a house in LA, they they boosted the entire house up on blocks while they were renovating it and built a new basement for a wine cellar underneath. I didn't know that you could have
Jordi:a basement. Or just a wine cellar.
John:I think there was a home theater, but I don't I don't know if it was in the basement.
Jordi:Cellar just for bottles of Dom.
John:I think so. I think so. But yeah. So, little bit
Jordi:of a
John:mixed result at VC Braggs. I think you need to step it up, get into the new generation. But, yeah, but we're happy to provide you with a reason.
Jordi:Loud opulence starts at home.
John:Yep.
Jordi:In your home. Yep. It's q4. The holidays around the corner. Many of the brands that that most express loud opulence are not gonna be going on sale.
Jordi:So don't worry about Black Friday sales, but you got about a month to get those gifts in and, spend wisely.
John:Yep. Let's go to Delian. He's quoting Will Menitis. Will says, every decision I've made that wasn't an an instant hell yes has been a mistake. Every pro con list is an admission.
John:The thing isn't worth it. The path God has laid out for you is so obvious. It feels like getting bludgeoned. And Delian says, basically, my approach to seed investing, pure intuition, super obvious when you're bludgeoned by the presence of a phenomenal founder. The moment you're writing out pros and cons, it's doomed.
John:And, yeah, I mean, this the the this post by Will really resonated, and I think a lot of people, enjoyed Delian's post as well. And I think there's something that even if you're not an investor, just leaning in on that intuition trust
Jordi:There's something there's something universal about this because every time somebody posts about this phenomena, I immediately am, like, that totally applies to, like, a very specific decision that I need to make in the next, like, 48 hours, 72 hours.
John:This is a good decision.
Jordi:And it's such a good reminder. So Delian will repost this Yeah. Once a week. Yeah. You're doing a a service for the community so we can all make better decisions.
John:Yeah. It is it is tricky. Like, if you're kind of more of a a a quantitative thinker or like a frameworks guy
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Even around gut, you want to put a framework. I had a friend who was like, oh, it's all vibes. I'm a vibe aligner. That's my whole job is to just align vibes. I'm a vibe architect.
John:He called himself. I was like, that's good. But then later in the conversation, he described how he made, like, a pro and con list about whether or not he should go on vacation. I was like, I think you could just lean on vibes for that one. Like, all your vacation's fun, and he had a whole framework for why vacations are important.
John:And it was very thoughtful, and it really resonated with me, and that was a good part of the conversation. But, truly, like, if you're actually in the Vibe Architect world, you probably don't need to be doing the the the framework stuff at all. But it is hard. I I've run into investors, very successful investors, who cannot describe their investment process at all. And it's very frustrating because everyone wants a framework.
John:Everyone wants a a a a a a a pattern or a playbook that they can and that's the stuff that normally does really well in social media is, like, just just do this checklist. Just build this model, and this will deliver results. But as soon as you can concretize it, you lose all the alpha.
Jordi:Yeah. And so Yeah. And I I I try to be honest with myself when I'm looking my own portfolio. My my best pre seed investment ever
John:Yep.
Jordi:Is a company where when I met the CEO, you know, within literally probably 3 minutes of talking, I knew I wanted to invest. Yep. I knew the company would work and sort of get to the level of traction that it has. I knew that there were risks.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And many of those risks are still, like, real and they're sort of, like, steadily trying to, like, knock them down. But it's important, you know, even now when I talk about that investment with with other investors, I'm not gonna, like, go reverse engineer some, like, super complex decision making process because so much of venture is just it's obviously just getting into the companies that matter. And then, you know yeah. It's, like, pretty binary, like, where you write or not. Right?
Jordi:Yep.
John:Let's go to Sam Hogan. He says, someone should start a studio of cracked devs plus GTM team and just look at the YC batch every season for the best ideas and then front run them.
Jordi:So this is this is basically YC, but just doing it doing it to the last batch. Yeah. Look at Daniel. Look at Daniel. Like, you know, being a crack dev, creating a company in a specific space.
Jordi:And then their new request for startups was basically like his business. One of the one of the lines was like his exact business. So YC is basically saying, hey, crack other crack devs, we wanna do more of these. Come come compete.
John:What's interesting is that they're last batch. There are 2 narratives about YC. Like, one is that that it's like, oh, like copy paste on a bunch of ideas that are, like, you know, popular at the time. But then there's the other one, which is like the the fast CEO was no. Not fast.
John:The, don't what was his name? The the guy who started love.com
Jordi:Breslow.
John:Breslow. He was like, YC is a mafia. Like, they will crown a champion, and then they will never do a deal in that space again. And it's kind of like It's totally
Jordi:not. Totally not true. Yeah. So I think it's actually super positive. If you have one if you have one company that is super, super promising solving an important issue, why would we not want 5 other teams, like, attacking it from different angles?
Jordi:Because you're more likely to create a generational company that could help, you know, millions of businesses, you know, employ, you know, hundreds of thousands of people over time, all these different things, you know, create some transformative technology. We we actually want we want a density of smart people pursuing specific problems. And so it's generally it's kind of annoying if you're the founder that's being cloned by 3 to 4 other YC companies, but use it as fuel. Right? Like, Darra.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. Darra is somebody, you know, he posted the other day. He was like, you know, some competitor, like, direct competitor got announced and he's like, cool. Like, another reason for me and my team to work 12 hours a day.
John:Yeah. Yeah. I do think that the the, like, direct competitor thing is a bit overrated because if you're really if you're really delivering on your mission and growing really quickly, like, these should be potential acquires, potential talent farms. Yeah.
Jordi:And Yeah. Look at an look at Anduril. Like, Anduril has, like, a 100 a 100 companies that are now, like, doing effectively, like, they either break out or they and become partners to Anduril Yeah. Or they get you know, it's like off balance r and d.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At a certain point, like, once you once you have the formula dialed in and you are the the power law company, the competition is actually beneficial to you.
John:Totally. Well, that's a great post.
Jordi:Because those are yeah. Those are those are other companies that are upskilling there.
John:Oh, this is this is, fantastic. Mike Chabot over at Trauba. He says today's news. There was a fire in New York City where his company is based. A large fire breaks down.
John:In
Jordi:the building.
John:It might have been in the same building. Large fire breaks out on Soho rooftop. And the and they got press around this because they kept working. And it says FDNY, hottest startup in NYC, Trauba stays locked in despite fire. I love that they called NBC New York and got this done.
John:It's amazing. And and they actually went over the ramp office. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Ramp hosted everybody, I think.
John:Like, what a heroic move. Potential brother of the week right now.
Jordi:Potential brother of the week. Never stop. Fantastic. Grinding.
John:Yeah. Fantastic. I mean, he has he has done a great job of monopolizing the the hard work ethos in a way that gets In a non cringe way. Yeah. It's not it's not cringey to people who are insiders to tech.
John:It is a little cringey to to outsiders who don't understand where the alpha exists in this market.
Jordi:I don't think it's cringey to outsiders.
John:He has leaders.
Jordi:He has Yeah. No. It pushes people away. Exactly. But it pushes the right people away.
John:Exactly. Exactly. But but he hasn't become an outcast. There are some people who post, like, hustle porn, but they never build anything. And it and it's just hustle porn for hustle porn.
Jordi:This is an example of living the brand. Right? And capturing the moment perfectly Yeah. By getting some some
John:And you take a look at this dude and he's jacked and, like, clearly lives, like, every moment, like, at a 110%. Yeah. And so you you just see that it's like he's he's the real deal. He has the proof of body Totally. And the proof of, like, work ethic and everything.
John:Yeah. Fantastic. Congrats to Mike for making it through the fire.
Jordi:Always stay locked in.
John:Always stay locked in.
Jordi:Always love her.
John:I love it. Do we have
Jordi:another promoted post? Promoted post from Ted Feldman. He says engineers wanted during during is hiring a founding software engineer. If you wanna help build the next 1,000 mines in America, this role is for you. Incredible opportunity.
Jordi:We love mining. We love rare earth minerals. Durn is a company It's not crypto.
John:It's it's actually
Jordi:mining. Real mining. Let's go. Mining for rare earth minerals. Look at this, you know, fantastic asset that he has here.
Jordi:Fantastic. You know, you know, software engineers and tech has has spent, you know, decades sort of looking out into the world and looking up at the stars and it's time that we look down into the ground. Let's drill, baby, drill. Go. If you are a software engineer, incredible opportunity.
Jordi:Go to Duren Mining Technologies dot apply to job dot com. Go apply for this job.
John:Tell them the technology brother sent
Jordi:you. And And, thank you to Ted for for for mining.
John:On to bigger and better things. Fantastic. Good luck out there. Let's go to Diego. Diego says, you can get the USA citizenship by marrying a USA citizen.
John:They also had to do introduce the h one b and the o one visa because politicians knew you autistic MFs had higher chances of discovering AGI than making eye contact with a woman for over 5 seconds.
Jordi:I mean, incredible foresight by by our politicians.
John:Fantastic.
Jordi:And we love the h one b program. There's some great companies that make the process easier. We want all the smartest, most ambitious people in the entire world to come to the United States and build the next $1,000,000 company here.
John:You need a, a recommendation letter. This is a thing for the for the o one and h one b, hit me up. I'm happy to write you a a letter recommendation. I've done many times.
Jordi:TB listeners get recommendation 100%.
John:Just give me a little bit of your background. We'll talk and I'll figure something out. But I'm I'm happy to write these letters. I wanna recruit. I want America to grow.
John:I want a 1000000000 Americans crushing it. And I'm I'm happy for both all these paths to citizenship. We need to Multiple. Require.
Jordi:We need
John:to be a talent magnet. Yep. We need to brain drain all the un American countries. All the un American countries need to be brain drained.
Jordi:Every single one?
John:Every single one. We got all the all the all the all the Come
Jordi:here and build.
John:All gigachads in America.
Jordi:We'll talk. You build.
John:Yep. Morgan Barrett says, how it feels to wake up and see your midnight throwaway tweet doing numbers? Low low tam banger.
Jordi:Fan banger. Fan banger. Because I think I think this is one of the things.
John:Super viral. Yeah. Yeah. 35 5 k likes on a tweet that said, I have a 100% hit rate with cold emails when I use a female name and an e d u address.
Jordi:Yeah. So I think you got, like, a 1000 followers too overnight, which is which is pretty intense. Yeah. Huge. And Congrats, Morgan.
John:Good post.
Jordi:Congrats to Morgan. Yeah. No. I I I want every single person in America to be able to experience what he just did.
John:It's amazing. When you when you get something that goes past 10, 20 k, it's like your phone's just exploding. Every time you open it up, the dopamine is just rushing. It's it's Incredible feeling.
Jordi:Incredible feeling.
John:And it's easier than ever given the new x algorithm because everything is getting more pushed out to the to the the edges of the curve, essentially. Like, you will have a post that goes mega viral and then the next one will get 26 likes.
Jordi:Yeah. No. And and this guy
John:more this
Jordi:guy, Morgan, like, had likely the, you know, hack that he has of using female e d u emails, he could dramatically change, you know, US GDP growth this year if enough people put that to work
John:Yep.
Jordi:And sort of hit their quota, hit their quarterly goals, hit their annual goals. Yep. So thank you to Morgan for sharing, this little hack.
John:I don't know if he should have leaked that out for
Jordi:you today. Leaked it. I don't know if she every every every AI sales agent, like, product is gonna be like
John:dot e d u.
Jordi:Check this box if you wanna use it dot e d u.
John:I wouldn't be surprised if we see an AI sales agent startup by a for profit university just to get a dot e d u Oh, yeah. So that they can license those to people. That's fantastic.
Jordi:Alpha.
John:I wonder how he's getting a dot e d u that that sound. Maybe he's using his like.
Jordi:Do this is there's a whole there's a whole there's a whole there's a there's a small but profitable SaaS company built a marketplace where, people at universities can lease they should lease their emails to sales reps. So if you are a young, passive technology brother, you know, maybe in college today, start that marketplace. I think you could get to $1,000,000 of air off that business and retire your parents. So do it. It's great.
John:Ben says Probably probably
Jordi:very, against the terms of use. Probably. But, great things oftentimes have to sort of skirt the law.
John:Ben says the bit have may have gone too far. And he posts a screenshot that says EV cars that will be launched by the Tata Motors owned British car manufacturer. Ben Hylock, the maker of the new logo, previously worked with Apple as a designer. He, however, claimed that the logo's letters are all in upper case. Responding to users on his post, Ben remarked that the logo actually resembles a jaguar with j being the tail and r the head.
John:What is he talking about? I don't
Jordi:think so. So jaguar had their Rebrand. Rebrand Yeah.
John:Reannouncements. Copy nothing.
Jordi:It went it went Horribly. Couldn't have been couldn't have gone worse. I saw the CEO was, like, talking to the boomer media saying, like, oh, actually, a bunch of people really liked it.
John:There is a hot take that it's, like, at least they got attention because this is the most jaguar has been talked about in
Jordi:years. Yeah. But, like, they could have done something like this and got much better attention. There there were just a lot of better ways he could do it. But Ben went out, did the smart thing, captured the moment, claimed credit for doing the rebrand.
Jordi:He's a designer. With
John:is he not? He's a jaguar?
Jordi:He's not a jaguar. He has nothing to do with jaguar. And he's getting put in
John:the media now.
Jordi:So he went out and claimed credit, and That's amazing. You know, got picked up. And and in this situation for Ben, this kind of attention, I think, is fantastic.
John:Him. He's he's oh, my I just put it together that Ben Highlake Ben Highlake.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Yeah. He was joking, and then he They
Jordi:picked it up. They picked it up. Yeah. Yeah. Because, yeah, I I think I don't know.
Jordi:I don't. Yeah. I don't I don't know the guy, but I think he's got a cool startup, great designer, great taste.
John:Fantastic. Is it could have been Rahul Ligma bit?
Jordi:Yeah. He's he's he's really the the next Ligma.
John:Jay is the tail.
Jordi:Wait. We should we should have an award called the the Technology Brothers Ligma Award for Ligma Award for Greatest Troll. Greatest Troll.
John:Troll of the Month.
Jordi:But Fantastic. That brings us to
John:Promoted post.
Jordi:Next promoted post. This one from Porsche. They announced an ALD Porsche 993 Turbo. It's gonna be on display November 22 to 23rd
John:Glass over here.
Jordi:At, ALD London Flagship.
John:I I know
Jordi:some of the 32 Broadway.
John:I I have not gotten into it. It's it seems
Jordi:like a very
John:patent thing. Do you
Jordi:have ALD? I do not. It's very popular. I actually think I may have a pair of, garden clogs from them Okay. That I used to get out to my sauna cold punch setup, but that's the extent to which I I wear ALD.
Jordi:But fantastic partnership. Couldn't have been better time. The car looks amazing. Fantastic. Look at this thing.
Jordi:They released a I think it was like a 60
John:993 turbo. What what era is that? Is that the late
Jordi:That is 9 I think late nineties. Okay. I really should know that.
John:And and and so are they are they just modifying is it like a restomod situation where they're modifying an old car? Or they
Jordi:actually They took a yeah. 19 95. So 19 95. Wow. They took a, you know, a great iteration of it and just looks like they just rebuilt it, redid the interior, probably did some work.
Jordi:We need we need to engineer Parker
John:to break it down for us because I know he's a big Porsche guy. I know he's a big air cooled older Porsche guy. I want his analysis because I just I don't know enough about that particular model to say if it's great. But I imagine that would be a great a great car for any technology brother or any capital allocator out there.
Jordi:Yep. Yep. So you're gonna need some serious AUM if you wanna follow the 1% rule.
John:Yep.
Jordi:But, fantastic spec.
John:And a way to stand out.
Jordi:And yeah. It's not something like couldn't have I I doubt I doubt this was
John:stock turbo s that they just picked up at the dealership, like, last week.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Embarrassing. Embarrassing. I'd never do that.
John:Yeah. Never. Never.
Jordi:Once a year. No. So, anyways, fantastic spec. Thank you to Porsche. You know, cool collaboration.
Jordi:I think this does more for ALD than it does for Porsche.
John:That's true.
Jordi:But, you know, it's a it looks like a win win.
John:Is that the Jaguar thing went so poorly that everyone was, like, searching for car news and then immediately being, like, brilliant move for them to launch this. Like, there was a Volvo ad that went viral that was shot by some some, like, award winning cinematographer. And they were like, oh, it's so brilliant that they respond. It's like, no. They shot this, like, months ago.
Jordi:Well, yes. So here's my here's my question.
John:Completely unrelated. They just got lucky that it came out at the same time. But Volvo had, like, a pronatalist one. Porsche launched this ALD one that looks very retro, very, like, classic. And so people were immediately like, oh, Porsche gets it.
John:And it's like, they do, but it wasn't This
Jordi:has been in the works.
John:Answer to Jaguar. That's that's not how these firms work. Like, they didn't have, like, some crap. No.
Jordi:But here's the thing. I would give them it's funny because obviously this campaign and and project collaboration had been probably in the works for, like, a year.
John:A year. Yeah.
Jordi:Like, at least a year. Yeah. I don't think this is the first time they've actually collaborated, but
John:I think they shot the video. Like, even Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. They shot a video. But the funny thing is if they did see the Jaguar announcement and then move their launch date up
John:You think so?
Jordi:If no. If they did that, it would be, like it's it's literally like the popular kid, like, like, you know, sees, like, the nerd, like, do something and get embarrassed and then comes over and, like, gives him a wedgie. It's like you don't need to, like, you don't need like, they're already they're already, like, down bad enough. Like, you don't need to, like, kick jaguar it's brutal. Porsche, obviously a fan and a, you know, client, but, you know, great move all around.
Jordi:And, hopefully, when we do an event in London, we'll be able to go see it.
John:Fantastic. Oh, this is brutal. Danny Samilleron says ideas are worthless with a smile. And then Sam Hogan, who we just talked about,
Jordi:says Double double down.
John:Little piece of startup culture is pretty stupid. Ideas are not worthless. Most people should spend considerably more time thinking about what to work on before they start, and I couldn't agree with more more with that. I wonder if this is a bait post by Danny. I mean, there there's always been the question.
John:Ideas or execution, obviously.
Jordi:Here's the thing. Here's the thing.
John:Nature versus nurture, obviously, both wins. But, you know, ideas are valuable. We know this.
Jordi:They're valuable. That said, you still should be able to tell every single person what you're doing and not be concerned execution does matter so much. And to build a great company, you need to make oftentimes hundreds of decisions a week. You know, maybe not everyone is super consequential, but if you are the right founder to build a generational company, you need a incredible idea or you need a series of good ideas and string them together. And then you need to be able to make the right decision over and over and over and over.
Jordi:And the wrong founder for the right idea will just make the wrong decision, make the wrong decision, make the wrong decisions, and they just take themselves down a path that, like, is just bad. Right? Yep. And so I think ideas matter a lot. That said, it is the most negative signal when you talk to a founder and they're like cagey about their idea or they're, like, oh, like I mean, I still, like, maybe 3 times a year will take a meeting with a company and they try to get me to sign an NDA.
John:And I'm
Jordi:just, like, dude, like, the fact that you think that you've discovered something, like, so novel when I've seen, like, 5 other teams do the exact same thing this year is, like, just shows
John:your idea is a novel. There might be some IP down the stack.
Jordi:Yeah. Sure. But, no, I don't need it. I don't need to know, like, that. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. I don't need to know, like, what the actual, like, IP is. But but, yeah, don't do not if you're a technology brother
John:out there stuck in, in execution mode and not like, you have your initial idea, but there will be, like you said, a series of ideas that get you from one hill to the next. And it's easy to get stuck in manager mode.
Jordi:Like, Lucy didn't start with break didn't start with Breakers. Exactly. Breaker is now one of the most consequential. Exactly.
John:And the reason that I thought about that was basically, like, during the depths of COVID, I was in Santa Barbara and was, like, I remember being just on the phone with David, the CEO, like, walking outside, just thinking about, like, what we could do that would be different. And we just came up with it on a phone call. Yeah. And it was very much, like, removed from the day to day of, like, being in an office, talking about, like, you know, very tactical things. We were able to zoom out and that really transformed the business.
John:Yeah. And so having giving yourself space, this is like what we talked about with our with our friend who wrote in about, like, if something's not working, should you just keep going or should you sell your company? And my advice to him was, like, clear your calendar and just try and go and and think and talk to interesting people, people that are way ahead of you, people who are are giants in the industry just to break something loose and try something different. Like Yeah. Most of the time, if your business is up and running and you're making some amount of cash flow, things are working, employees have their jobs, you can step back pretty significantly and reset and go back into founder mode, go back into idea mode, and come up with some interesting ideas.
Jordi:So Here's where I'd leave it. If you're a technology brother and you, send a if you're pitching your pre seed company and you ask the investor to sign an NDA and you hear about it, we will block you from all of our accounts. You know, we'll have to create, like, new burners to consume the content.
John:I do think this is gonna be a pendulum swing thing, though. And, eventually, there's gonna be the Chad founder who forces everyone to sign NDAs and makes it very embarrassing to the firms and and degrades them. And and and and it becomes a status symbol.
Jordi:So unless you're that guy Yep.
John:Unless you're him. Unless you're that guy, you gotta Don't
Jordi:do it. It's gonna
John:be hard to pull off. Yep. Just don't do it as a novice. It has to be has to be a particular tact.
Jordi:3rd time founder, at least 2 9 figure exits
John:in your belt. Then then you can make people sign your crazy documents. Let's go to John Mette. He says too many people want to bring manufacturing back to the US. It's brave, but many commodities are never returning.
John:The real problem is cultural. Time on the shop floor, wherever it is, is more valuable than in office meetings. This is especially true today. Time to touch metal. I like that touch metal.
John:Touch metal. This is interesting. It's brave. The problem is cultural. I I I I don't quite get what he's saying with is he just saying that, like, there's too much, like, rah rah.
John:Okay. We need to bring manufacturing back and not enough people actually doing it.
Jordi:Yeah. I think he's just alluding to the fact that, like, the deindustrialization of America is something that should be unwound. Yeah. Like, we need to focus on industrializing, reindustrial re industrializing, however you wanna put it.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:But, yeah. Not every single category is, like, conducive to a new venture backed startup or roll up. Yeah. And, anyway, so Jai Jai is somebody I I don't know him personally, but, you know, good investor. I think he's back, with his own company.
Jordi:He actually had a fund and and decided to return capital at one point because he felt like everything was too overvalued at the early stage. But he's back to building himself now and and I and and, we should try to learn more about his company.
John:Yep. It's great. I do think that there's an interesting thesis I heard that, the path to real and reindustrialization in America is not through trying to play the last war, but instead focusing on the next war which is humanoid robotics. And if we really get that right and we really get the automation, right, we still have the human capital problem that we need to solve in America. Like, how do we give people rewarding jobs, fulfilling jobs?
John:But, really focusing on automation is maybe the only way that we can kind of leapfrog our way back into
Jordi:the game.
John:But I'm rooting for you. Time to touch some metal. Let's go to the next promoted post. Jordy, what you got for me?
Jordi:This one is from my friend, Charlie Ma. He says, we are looking to hire a chief of staff in NYC for Pathlight VC. This role will engage all functions of the firm, including special projects, founder experiments, portfolio engagement, and more. You'll also get to work directly with me as well as Charlie's partners. So, anyways, if you don't know Charlie Ma, you're going to be hearing about him a lot in the next few decades.
Jordi:I see this guy opportunity. I see this guy on the Midas list very soon. He is an absolute future.
John:Some personnel news. Potentially.
Jordi:Oh, yeah. We'll be covering, whoever does this. Charlie is an absolute Chad in Fintech or finance tech as we like to say on the podcast or finance technology if you're gonna be, if you're gonna expand on it or more precise. But anyways, Charlie, I think was ahead of growth at Plaid and then was the head of growth at Ramp, like, very early and now has his own fund. They they invest, you know, in a bunch of different areas, and Charlie is extremely sharp.
Jordi:So go apply for this job. Or if you're a founder, I would, try to get him to give you money because he'll add a lot a lot a lot of value. So thank you to Charlie.
John:Apply for the job and tell Charlie the technology brothers sent you.
Jordi:Cheers.
John:Cheers. Let's go to Saint Dietschy. They say cold showers, meditating, journaling, all a bunch of distractions if you're unemployed and don't have any cash. These tasks make people feel busy and accomplish absolutely nothing. Cut social life, gym 1 x a day, and work your ass off until you get your money
Jordi:right. So here's here's an example. This is why inbox 0 is, like, there's the worst thing to go for because
John:Inbox 0. You won't Yeah.
Jordi:You're big. This is an area that we can really battle on. But, like, right now, I have 2,776 unread text. And, like, I don't plan to get back to, like, 99% of those.
John:Declare bankruptcy. That's the whole point of Can you wipe it?
Jordi:Yeah. Can you wipe it? Yeah. Never even
John:Yeah. So is that the whole point of like, there's you do you declare bankruptcy and then moving forward.
Jordi:Yeah. I just I just don't care. Like, all the things that are important to me, I eventually respond to them.
John:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's more gut intuition based.
Jordi:Yeah. I I just don't believe that, like, when you when you commit to inbox 0, you're saying that every single thing that comes towards me, I'm gonna respond to?
John:No. That's not it at all.
Jordi:You by by nature of 0ing at deleting it out is responding. That's a response. I get it. Response.
John:But, yeah, delete archive spam. I love hitting that spam button. I used to have a an auto complete on my phone where if I got a cold email from, like, a salesperson, I could type, like, DNR, like, do not respond or something like this, and it would type out this email being like, hey. Thanks for the email. We're not interested.
John:Please remove me and everyone at my company from your CRM and never email any of us ever again. And it was very nicely worded, but it was just the most scorched earth thing ever to just be like, don't don't try and go to my COO.
Jordi:That's like so so
John:The buck stops here. No more emails ever. Ever. You're dead.
Jordi:You're dead to us. Cut off because they will try to call you.
John:You should try and do all this stuff.
Jordi:I love getting automated emails from, you know, messages from, like, the ramp sales team. And I'd be like, if you listen to the podcast, you'd know that we were already on board. Say ramp every. Yeah. But no, I
John:think we should make sure we. For male loneliness, just talking to your ramp SDR.
Jordi:That's true.
John:Just get on the phone. They're having a chat. Sure. Let's go golfing. Let's hang out.
John:This is the cure for male loneliness. Just really getting a deep relationship with your Huge
Jordi:public good. Huge public good.
John:That's fantastic.
Jordi:Now we should make a keyboard extension that's like a separate,
John:button that does
Jordi:it and it it archives it or, like, spam
John:it sends like moved to just the the the Gmail spam button because if you tap that, it blocks the sender, and it also sends the message to the Google algorithm that, like, this company sucks, which I like. I like punishing it.
Jordi:Sucks. Exactly.
John:It's like, yeah, you you didn't do your research before you emailed me. This is so AI slop. Get out of here.
Jordi:Get out of here.
John:Let's go to Anshita Sani. She says, today, I'm thinking about Stripes n y t NYC Intern Housing. How about you? And it's this beautiful photo of a lovely Manhattan apartment and a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline.
Jordi:Wait. So there's another there's another tweet in the stack Yeah. That is like a response to this. It was like, this is our intern housing, and it's a closet. But this just shows, like, Stripe is always from the top to the bottom, they have great taste.
Jordi:Yeah. They're trying to they're you know, they they've done an exceptional job making it. And if you're a $50,000,000,000 company
John:Yep.
Jordi:Yes. You should make it very appealing to work there.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:You should invest in your early
John:I remember going out for your Citadel internship and they flew me out business class and it was like, this is nice.
Jordi:You wore a suit, I'm sure. Of course. Of course.
John:Like, literally, because I had to go into the office and do the interview. But, yeah. I mean and and this is this is, you know, I mean, this is a lovely looking apartment, but I'm sure it's like a few $1,000 a month. And for like, interns are not about getting output from the actual work that they do over the summer. It's about mentorship, evaluation, figuring out who the next generation of leaders will be at your firm.
John:So, highly recommend over investing in your intern programs. Totally. It's great. Let's go to Anu. They say, can Highbrow Media Scale?
John:And it's, a screenshot of a article that says, in act 1, substack was for inbox intellectuals, nerds, and professional nerds in journalism, tech, and politics. People already tried to tied to thinking, reading, and writing. In act 2, Substack wants to bring aspirationally highbrow media to everyone else in every form. Imagine YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, and OnlyFans had a baby and that baby hooked up with Substack. Their love child would be Substack 2 point o.
John:I love Substack. I was in the same y c batch as Chris, with the Substack team. And, the the founder For their
Jordi:former for their former No.
John:For their for for Substack. No way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
John:And at demo, did they? Yeah. This was, winter 18.
Jordi:Oh, for some reason, I thought you were in there in, like, 2012.
John:I I we did we yes. We did. So we did 2012.
Jordi:And then we Oh, you did it again for Lucy?
John:Yeah. We did. Yeah. We went back.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
John:And so so it was us, the NFT company, OpenSea, and SubStack, and there were a few others in our batch.
Jordi:But Hey. Any time traveling capital allocators, go back to both the YC batches that John was in and just give them a give them a solo GP.
John:Coinbase, Instacart, Zapier. OpenStack. OpenSea, you might have to sell the top on that one. I was wrong. But, but we love OpenSea.
John:I have some friends that work there. It's a great company. But, this is interesting. Yeah. Substack, I mean, surprising surprisingly great business, surprisingly great,
Jordi:community. Talk about a company that's gotten so much unnecessary hate.
John:Totally.
Jordi:I do not know why. They've created
John:Well, it's because they took a very, contrarian position on free speech. Political. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
John:And and Lulu had that insanely viral recruiting post. Do you remember this? Yeah. She was, like, when when Elon bought Twitter, she said, if you have a problem with Elon bringing free speech to to Twitter, do not apply for a job at Substack. She got a 100,000,000 views on that post.
Jordi:That's insane.
John:Imagine what it costs to get a 100,000,000 views on a recruiting post. Recruiting post.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Like, if you went to Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, and promoted, like, a job
Jordi:So you get a 1000000
John:talking about a $1,000,000 investment, probably. Yeah. Something like that. And she just got it with just, like, a banger that she probably wrote in 5 minutes. So good.
John:Yeah. So she got a lot of heat, but then, you know, wound up joining a bunch of public company boards and becoming a It's it's icon of the industry.
Jordi:Yeah. Well, it's funny.
John:So it worked
Jordi:out, like, if you actually look back, like, she was at act she was involved with Activision, which went through a bunch of crazy stuff. She was involved with substack. So it's like, hire hire her if you wanna, like, drive through the fire. Yep. Not if you wanna, like, you know, try to get around it.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
John:It's great. Let's go to Yegor Denisov Blanch says, I'm at Stanford, and I research software engineering productivity. We have data on the performance of over 50,000 engineers from 100 of companies inspired by at DDoS or d DDoS. Our research shows 9 point 5% of software engineers do virtually nothing. They are called ghost engineers.
John:They are the point one xers. Their performance is point one x of the media engineer. They do virtually no work, and they might work multiple jobs.
Jordi:Yeah. So we need to, we need to popularize the ghost engineer. Ghost engineer. Ghost. Be like, oh, yeah.
Jordi:He's super cool guy, but he's a bit of a ghost. He's a bit of a ghost. So, yeah, I actually thought in 2021 and 2022, I thought that there was an opportunity to create a marketplace where FAANG engineers could work anonymously for startups because there were so many engineers that were at FAANG companies and they're like, amazing benefits, crazy stock package. I do nothing. I want to work on other things.
Jordi:But in nature but the yeah. They have a family or whatever. Like, they're just their own personal situation.
John:But they're like moonlighting.
Jordi:Moonlighting.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. So I thought that it was an opportunity an opportunity to create, like, the moonlighting marketplace where you could not like imagine if you're if you're Lucy and you're, like, trying to hire a shop if I develop. Yeah. And somebody's like, oh, yeah, I work at Shopify and, like, you can't know my name, but, like, you'd be like, okay, like, this person's legit.
John:As long as you're pushing code.
Jordi:As long as you're pushing code. As long as you're not a ghost.
John:Yeah. It's funny because ghost is a very positive, connotation in the military. Like Call of Duty ghosts. It's like the, you know, the the most elite operators. But in this case, it's like the laziest or just, like, maybe the most intelligent because they're they're getting paid anyway.
John:But this is wild. So yeah. I mean, I saw
Jordi:the Fox. Opportunity here
John:is like is like, you know, software that helps you weed out ghosts.
Jordi:You know what? Yeah. Yeah. I built, like, I built an internal tool at one point that, helped me understand who
John:He was on Slack.
Jordi:Who was who was online on Slack, and a lot of it was the same information that you already knew. But it was interesting to see, like, okay. This person is high output, but they only spend 6 hours on Slack, which, you know, or this person
John:What's crazy is that you would think that it would be very easy to just run an LLM over all the GitHub commits from all your engineers and just very easily stack rank. This is what, Microsoft does.
Jordi:I think we need a a a, like, GitHub commits, but for Google Drive, for the knowledge the knowledge workers.
John:Like, how
Jordi:many commits did you actually make Yeah. Against, like, the knowledge you do. Like, the the the work product for the company?
John:Should be on the manager. Like, the manager should know. Like, okay. Yeah. Like, that Figma design hasn't been updated in a month.
John:Like, this person's clearly not doing anything. But it is hard. Like, if they're friendly and they're entrenched in the organization and they do just the bare minimum, it might be harder to reach out. But 10%, that is high.
Jordi:That's a lot. The box the box CEO saw himself on that list. Oh, yeah. I gotta get out
John:of this.
Jordi:Yeah. Gotta get off this. But
John:yeah. I mean, huge
Jordi:huge definitely don't wanna be the companies that have that become known for places where talented people can go and.
John:Very bad meme. Very bad meme.
Jordi:Yeah. I think I think we're still we're still harping on this. Like, I don't know why more like Elon cut 80% of x and it runs better than it did before. Yep. Why have other public market software CEOs said we're gonna cut 40% or 50%.
Jordi:Yeah. Why? Like, it just seems like like, obviously, it's painful, but there's so much demand for tech talent that all those people would get rehired doing important things at other companies and, like I
John:mean, if I start this theory that a lot of it's, like, just keeping talent away from your competitors and just absorbing that. Or if if I fire this person, they might go do a startup that competes with me. So I'll just throw them in the corner and keep them out of the game on the sidelines. I don't know. That seems like it's too big of a cost to bear, but
Jordi:I had 2 portfolio CEOs fighting this week because one tried to
John:Poach someone. Poach. That's completely different.
Jordi:Very different, but it was terrible. I didn't know. Yeah. Not a great situation.
John:Let's go to Raul. He's been on the show before. 0 interest rates. He says, I screenshot it in Nvidia q3 income statement and asked Julius to visualize it. Nvidia's q3 2024 net income is higher than their q3 2023 revenue.
Jordi:Wow. Yeah. I think I think Nvidia has become such a meme that people have stopped to actually analyzing the underlying business fundamentals. Yep. And they're just focused on, like, the the market cap.
John:Yep.
Jordi:Which then you see stuff like this and you're like, yeah. Okay. It kinda makes sense that it's being mooned by every single allocator in the world and and retail investor because this is, like, unprecedented growth for a company of their size.
John:Yeah. It is just a great demo of Julius. I love that he's he's posting it. Yeah. We need to get include a link, didn't include the app.
John:He just shows the product, and the best part is that it's just a screenshot. Yeah. It's a screenshot and it parses everything and it puts it in a chart and it just, like, full from end to end.
Jordi:We like to be able to do our profitability analysis on a napkin, but we'll eventually we'll eventually get to the point where we'll be running
John:on Julius. Yeah. Big fan of Rahul.
Jordi:Jumping in with the promoted post. This time from Lamborghini. Lamborghini says when Uris accelerates from 0 to a 100 kilometers an hour, don't know what kilometers are in 3.4 seconds, it transforms every moment on the tarmac into pure exhilaration. Hashtag Lamborghini. This is a very European post.
Jordi:That's the only thing I'm gonna ding them on. They say c o two emission and fuel.
John:This is the thing they're required to do.
Jordi:I know.
John:This is the nanny state.
Jordi:This is why this the the biggest risk right now with the way that Europe is run is that they're trying to destroy the legacy car manufacturers by nannying them and making
John:it It's awful.
Jordi:It's awful. C o two emission and fuel consumption combined
John:at l m. To share the link.
Jordi:POs
John:slash key. So that means that they get crushed on Axies. You can't share links. They're getting destroyed on 2 phones. These posts should be viral.
Jordi:Look at this. But they're not. Fantastic image. Beautiful image. Iconic brand.
Jordi:I don't own one.
John:The Urus gets knocked because everyone says it's just an Audi RSQ 8 or RSQ 7 or whatever. Have you heard of this? It's, like, based on the same platform, and it's not, like, as special. But I think it's a very interesting choice for a family car if you live in San Francisco. Totally.
John:Capital allocators that have them there, and what a way to stand out.
Jordi:Follow the 1% rule. Exactly. And you'll you might end up in a in a Uris. Uris.
John:They break down all the time. It's a bit of a mess of a car, but it is compact. So like a G Wagon, you can park it in interesting places. I don't know.
Jordi:I see these with relatively high miles, and I think I think it's a great option. Being in one feels like being, you know, you're in a family friendly SUV. Yep. But you're in the feels like you're in the cockpit of a fighter jet. Right?
Jordi:Yep. Yep. Interiors
John:fantastic. Hexagons and octagons. That's the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah.
John:Yeah. It's hexagons. If you're
Jordi:a shape rotator, this might be for you.
John:Yeah. It's beautiful. It's just a way to stand out in San Francisco where where many too too few people are making a statement with their vehicle.
Jordi:Yeah. And the only the only aftermarket sort of thing you might do is add bulletproof, glass, but there's plenty of shops that'll do that.
John:That's great. Let's go to Alfonso. He says, this is the Cross Mint NYC intern housing the counter.
Jordi:So Alfonso Crossman team, absolute grinders. Yep. They have a company that is, now building a lot of product products at the intersection of AI agents and, crypto. So check out some of their APIs. But, but, yeah, that that's an example of, like, when you're Stripe and you have a $50,000,000,000 market cap, yes, invest in your internship program when you're Crossman and you're trying to be the next Stripe.
Jordi:Yep. Don't
John:try to attract
Jordi:interns that are
John:there for the perks.
Jordi:Yep. Yep. And I'm sure this was a little bit of Stripe in the early days. So I I
John:we'd literally had,
Jordi:in the early early days of Party Round, Josh from Party Round, who would run our Twitter account, we we did a little, like, whatever, 5 person retreat in in our, loft. And, I had Josh slept in the closet, like, literally in a closet. So shout out to Josh, now has his own paradigm backed crypto company. Fantastic. Start in the cloth.
Jordi:Great things start in the closet. It's great. It's great. Double on. Yes.
John:Mark Sisson says, hey. Weight loss is weight loss. Right? And he posts a photo of a study showing that weight loss drug found to shrink heart muscle in mice and human cells. So this goes back to semaglutide, Ozempic.
Jordi:So if what I read from this is if you have a really big heart, you're an emotional person. Get on GLP ones and you kind of shrink that heart.
John:More cold blooded.
Jordi:Cold blooded, locked in. And anyways, we're gonna need some more studies. We're gonna need to hear from the experts.
John:I think Lieberman was talking about this a little bit. Like like, muscle loss is a big thing generally with, these drugs, but that's why you gotta be lifting heavy and on a high protein diet while you take them.
Jordi:Yeah. And I would I I would honestly wait to personally have opinion on this until Joe Rogan talks about it
John:or Trust the experts.
Jordi:Jocko or something like that.
John:Trust the experts. Ben Braverman says the downfall of smart people is believing excellence is the result of novelty when really it's consistency. Interesting. A little bit of an anti ideas guy take. Obviously, execution
Jordi:is important.
John:Takes both. But yeah. It's,
Jordi:Look at, look at Lucy. Right?
John:Yeah.
Jordi:7 year 7 year overnight success. You guys spent, like, 4 to 5 years building while nobody really cared about
John:Yep.
Jordi:Pouches. Yep. Like obviously your super fans loved it, but, but yeah, it's just about putting one foot in front of the other, and and I think if you're an ideas guy CEO, this can be there's a real trap where you're trying to, like, think of the next new exciting novel thing when really you just need to do the boring thing over and over and over for years
John:Yep.
Jordi:And build that foundation.
John:And there is something to this where it's like the, like, the novel idea is a function of consistency. Like, a lot of the ideas guys that we know and talk about have lots of ideas, and they are consistent with their ability to create new ideas and then and then test them in the real world. And so it's not just a, you you know, this, like, strike of novelty. They come up with they come up with novelty consistently.
Jordi:Yep. And you
John:can do both here. But I'm I'm a little confused about what he's saying about the downfall of smart people is believing that excellence. Like, who who is this a sub tweet of?
Jordi:No. I I don't know. I think this is this, like, an example is entrepreneurs thinking that if they come up with, like, the perfect plan, like, master plan
John:Oh, sure. Sure.
Jordi:They're going to, like, somehow be more successful. Yeah. If they just pick one really simple idea
John:Stick with it. Yeah.
Jordi:Like like like, you don't always need, like, the most complicated idea Yeah. Or, like, this novel idea. You just need, like, something simple, really well executed.
John:Yeah. Let's go to Jay. He says never kill yourself, and it's a screenshot of Michael Saylor who from the Daily News, he said lost $6,000,000,000 in a day. Hot Shot Tech CEO loses fortune as his company stock plunges a 140 points.
Jordi:So this is amazing. MicroStrategy is back to their all time high as of, like, last week. Yep. Sailor never gave up. Yep.
Jordi:He reinvented himself. He reinvented the company. Yep. It is basically a Bitcoin ETF that trades at a 3 x to book value. Pretty pretty fantastic financial product if you're very long Bitcoin.
Jordi:Yep. But, yeah, never
John:better too. He's in better
Jordi:shape now. Yeah.
John:He looks He looks younger now.
Jordi:Last week got Jack. Years ago. Bought went long Bitcoin. Absolute Chad. Gigachad.
Jordi:I don't know. Potential brother of the week candidate.
John:Look at the other look at the other articles from this daily news post. It's Tuesday, March 21, 2000. So depth of the dotcom bubble popping, or the beginning of it. Madonna's with child. Should your child take Ritalin, special report.
John:Frail pope begins pilgrimage. What a throwback. Need to look up more of these old newspapers. A little time capsule. I love that.
John:Aidan MacLeod.
Jordi:Like that'll be like looking at our stack of tweets 20 years from now.
John:We're we're saving them.
Jordi:We're building a stack.
John:We're saving them. Aidan MacLeod says, first time on the show, he says, it's crazy that basically every very large frontier model experiment is failing because the models are fighting back and refusing instruction tuning. We looked into the weights and the weights looked back.
Jordi:Sentient.
John:There are less dramatic ways to say this but smart people I've talked to have basically fixed Sentience as their head canon and greater than one lab staff I've talked to recently have been spooked. Sorry for the vague post. I don't I myself don't know much here. Interesting. Refusing instruction tuning.
Jordi:Love it. Love it. Yeah. I think this is gonna be the kind of thing that he'll look back 2 years from now and be able to, you know, quote tweet and just, like, dunk on people.
John:Yeah. It's interesting.
Jordi:He called AGI.
John:Yeah. It's kind of the, the the question about, like, what is the what is the rate limiting factor to AI scaling right now? Is it just energy? Is just building out more? Is it gonna be permitting if you're building a very, very large data center?
John:Or is it Is it getting the wall?
Jordi:Trained on humanity and humanity is mid. Is mid. Yeah.
John:The average of humanity is mid. It's possible.
Jordi:Literally that.
John:And I haven't I haven't been able to get any of the AI researchers to really put a put a point on, okay, we scale up order of magnitude in terms of number of GPUs and energy going into the model. What does that get us in terms of IQ out of the model? Probably not an order of magnitude. Right? But there's some translation there.
Jordi:Is it worth it to be 5% smarter?
John:I think it's almost certainly worth it to be to be to to be 5% smarter on these models. And I think that the economics are much easier, which is why the market's ripping so much. The the question is just, is there diminishing marginal returns to this? And and once we get into the okay. We're gonna invest $1,000,000,000,000 for 2 IQ points.
John:Does that
Jordi:That'll be a size gong moment. The first real $1,000,000,000,000 investment.
John:I mean, Sam was kinda teasing it with that 13,000,000,000,000 number or something like that. 67 6 trillion, but the numbers numbers get there.
Jordi:Give Sam a trillion big ones.
John:I trust him with the money. Let him
Jordi:do it. Let him do it. He doesn't lose money. He does not lose.
John:There's very few people in that league, but he's one of them. Dikash Gupta says, I have nothing against work life balance. In fact, I recommend it to all of our competitors. This 22 year old c tech CEO says an 80 hour work week is a lifestyle choice. It earned him death threats and job seekers.
John:This goes back to Mike Shebet at Traba. Yeah. Create a differentiated culture. Attract the best. Don't worry about the haters that you attract.
John:But this is interesting because I've long said that the work life balance promoters on Twitter are just doing the game theoretic optimal strategy, which is tell all your competitors to take long vacations, not work hard.
Jordi:Get massages.
John:Get massages. Just do all of this. Just try all you can eat.
Jordi:The funny thing is that all Google being like it's an all you can eat cafeteria to, like, you know, we all know that food takes it takes a lot of energy, to digest food. If you're digesting, you're not writing as much code. But anyways, if you're trying to get attention online, some positive, some negative, go tweet about work life balance. That's a great way to to get some death threats.
John:It's also just a great way to farm engagement always. You'll always get evergreens and likes if you come up with something controversial about work life balance. Everyone has an opinion because it applies to everyone.
Jordi:Yep.
John:So Sarah Hess, she's been on the show before. She says, they should make a love is blind version of Shark Tank with Josh Wolf, where the founders names are censored so he can't do nominative determinism. So low tang banger.
Jordi:Low tang banger.
John:Yeah. Josh Wolf is is famously into nominator determinism where your name describes what you do. There's a bunch of great examples of this. Sundar Pichai, Pitch AI. His whole job at Google is to pitch AI.
John:At at at at Google, there's another person who's running their generative AI program. Her name, Jen Jen AI. Unreal. Jennifer Jen AI. I it's probably pronounced, like, Geni or something, but it's, like, Gen AI.
John:And there's so many examples of Sam Altman and
Jordi:his creative intelligence man. The p backed, like, defense rollout.
John:Oh, yeah. We're gonna get to that.
Jordi:The the moneymaker?
John:Yeah. The CEO's name is moneymaker, and, of course, he got the deal done.
Jordi:Of course.
John:Fantastic. Of course. And there's a million other examples of this. We love nominative determinism here, but Josh Wolf was very early to it. He has an old tweet from, I think, 2020 where he says that him and his friends were collecting examples of it, and he has a whole thread on them, and they're fantastic.
John:And so
Jordi:It almost makes you wanna change your last name.
John:Oh, totally.
Jordi:Or at least, like, be strategic with the middle names with your kids. Yeah. Right? Totally. Roman moneymaker Hayes.
Jordi:Yeah. Exactly. Stuff like that.
John:I like that. I, I do think we need a we we need a a a reboot of Shark Tank. You You know, Cuban has lost the the tech brother sphere, gone to Blue Sky.
Jordi:If you wanna follow Cuban, former but canceled brother of the week, go over to Blue Sky.
John:Go over to Blue Sky.
Jordi:To act there.
John:Bring it back with a real capital allocator. Somebody who's got my
Jordi:size of
John:the best companies in the world.
Jordi:I don't wanna see, like, another I
John:wanna see Josh 100 k check. Exactly.
Jordi:I don't wanna see flyers. No. I wanna see, you know, I wanna see every host on Shark Tank $400,000,000 fund Yep. You know, provided by our fund of funds. Yep.
Jordi:You can only write 4 checks a season.
John:That's that's
Jordi:Gotta be size.
John:It'd be great.
Jordi:And we need to get the you know?
John:They should merge it with, like, Squawk Box. Right? So you're on CNBC. The CEO comes on, and it's just a public markets hedge fund. He just says, okay.
John:Yeah. I'm ready to take a position. The stock's gonna go up. I'm I'm gonna put a 100,000,000 in this company.
Jordi:That's actually that's actually great. It's like we should have the show should have a segment of, like, new bets
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And, like, reviewing old bets. Yep. And it's the winner is, like, at the end of the season is, like, whoever had, you know, the the greatest.
John:It'd be fantastic. But, yeah, I'd love to see I don't actually know if Josh has ever said that he uses nominated determinism in his investing thesis. But,
Jordi:I feel like he was I feel like he was pretty loud about Sam Bankman. Really?
John:Oh, anti?
Jordi:I think if I remember Anti
John:a few interesting people and also, like, controversially, like
Jordi:But the SPF the SPF stuff was prothera. S for a while. SPF stuff, if you just looked at it
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Rationally, and you're, like, why is a guy running a hedge fund and running one of the biggest exchanges at the same time? Like, it just makes zero sense. Yeah. Like, it seems Scam
John:bank fraud. It's a great great name. Let's go to my own tweet, I guess. I don't know why you printed this, but, I said, Apple can keep the App Store monopoly, but they should be forced to make a printer that doesn't suck.
Jordi:Now, I just I think I put this in because I want somebody to make a beautiful printer.
John:Exactly.
Jordi:And the printer is something that's like kind of retro. We use it every single day here. But at the same time, I would love for a technology brother to just reinvent the printer. It's a great business model. You sell a piece of hardware and Yep.
Jordi:You sell the ink.
John:Yep.
Jordi:You're gonna get a lot of ink dollars out of us. And, if you're looking for a fun idea that be very And
John:we would be a great sponsor for this. We would promote the hell out of your printer if you build it.
Jordi:Beautiful. Go get beautiful printer.com. Spend 4 years developing a beautiful
John:Amazing printer.
Jordi:Amazing printer. And we will be your first customer and first podcast.
John:And it has to work with, like, absolutely no drivers. Like, you plug it in with any USB cable.
Jordi:I want, like, basically, like, not airplay. Air I wanna air drop stuff to my printer.
John:Yeah. So our I mean, our printer isn't that bad here. I was actually struggling with a scanner.
Jordi:Doesn't look good.
John:Frustrating, but, yes, I can air print to that from my phone as long as we're on the same Wi Fi network. It'd be great if it had a web server so I could print from home too here.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Ideally, we'd be able to have, you know, fans of the show print for us.
Jordi:Yeah. But it's it's a tragedy it's a tragedy that, like, a former Cash App I know. Designer has not reinvented the printer.
John:It is. It is. So if you work with Cash App It's all because of this, like, ESG, like, you know, worrying about printing and stuff and, you know, the We're
Jordi:creating an archive of the greatest bangers of
John:of history. One one day we're gonna bind these and and and sell the official the official tome of the timeline.
Jordi:Yeah. I
John:mean, we have thousands of posts already and we're, what, 18 days into this thing. It's amazing.
Jordi:Day 18.
John:Let's go to John Collison, cofounder of Stripe. He says, we need a total and complete shutdown of branding agencies until we can figure out what's going on. Very funny.
Jordi:Yeah. There's this challenge.
John:There's this This is a this is a Trump copypasta. Right? Didn't he say this originally? Wow. I think that's what Trump said.
Jordi:Maybe they're cozying up.
John:He's wild. Cozying up. But, yeah, what what what is the problem with branding agencies?
Jordi:The problem with branding no. We love branding agencies. We love Emmett Shine. We love Ryan Harmon. Yeah.
Jordi:We love these guys. They're critical to the innovation economy. That said, when when companies pay a branding agency 100 of 1,000 of dollars like anywhere between a 100 grand 500 grand sometimes more Jack Jaguar probably spent like 1,000,000 on this campaign. And what happens when you're when you're trusting the experts, when you're paying somebody a
John:lot of money jaguar subtweet? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is.
Jordi:It is.
John:That makes sense. Okay. You
Jordi:know, jaguar is, you know, fantastic legacy brand that's being run into the ground. But, now, look, when you give somebody a lot of money, you're bestowing on them the sort of, like, trust with your dollars, your capital. And what that leads to is people sometimes over trusting the branding agency Sure. Which is only thing, know, branding agencies oftentimes want to do bold work, which is not always what's right. Bold work bold and different things, which is not always right for the strategy of the company.
Jordi:Sure. Right?
John:I would disagree. I I I think the problem is is that a lot of the branding agencies have just become copy pasta of, like, you know, oh, this is exactly what you want. Everyone wants a service style. Everyone wants a bright color, and it's, like, very, like, bland millennial. And when I think about, like, liquid death, I think, like, that probably that came from, like, brand focused people.
Jordi:But I think that came from the fact that issue but the issue is that these branding agencies, there are certain creative directors within them that want to win awards. Sure. And that is not always aligned with the company strategy. Interesting. Interesting.
Jordi:Jaguar should have reinvented itself by going back to its roots Yep. Playing into the legacy Yep. Bringing in some future facing elements, but saying, like, you know, we're the first EV manuf dedicated EV manufacturer that is that is has some, like, historical precedents around luxury and whatever. So anyways, this I I would put this on the branding agency because it is at the end of the day, they created the work. It's their fault.
John:Interesting. Well, I don't think Stripe will be hiring any branding agencies. I bet they have one. I bet this freaked someone out. Whoever the brand is is.
John:Yeah. Should we reload?
Jordi:Reload. While you hours on facts. While you reload, while you reload, we have got a promoted post from somebody who is recently 21 years old. Josh Harris, got, your hiring post printed out here. So Josh, was one of the first people that I hired at Party Round, hired him after a 5 minute phone conversation, knew right away that he was
John:a pro con list.
Jordi:No pro con list with this guy. Knew right away. And, big bet paid off. He he did did, you know, some fantastic
John:He slept in the closet.
Jordi:Slept in the closet. Our first company retreat. Great things start in the closet. And, anyways, so he says, dear Internet, we are hiring a full stack engineer to work with us on pixie chess, a novel crypto protocol. And I'm gonna add a little bit to that.
Jordi:Pixie chess is building a protocol for playing, chess. So picture, like, crypto meets chess. It's like magic the gatherings. Sure. It's not just regular chess.
Jordi:There's, like, power ups and Yeah. Yeah. You know, I I got to play a little bit with, with, a little bit of the game actually on Monday with him and his, cofounder Aki. So they say if you're eager for a high level of responsibility interested in multibillion dollar war games
John:Let's go.
Jordi:Amazing. We love war games and looking to work on generational consumer project products, please reach out. Sincerely, the Dutch East Internet Company. That's their actual Really? That's their actual
John:I love it. That's hilarious.
Jordi:C corp name. So, yeah, I I'm I've always been very bullish on Josh. I always will be. He's, got incredible mind, put together a great team backed by by, you know, one of the top funds in crypto paradigm.
John:Are they hiring for?
Jordi:They're hiring for a full stack engineer. So they'll be, like, founding one of their founding engineers. And I do think that this I'm an investor, so this is a conflicted promoted post.
John:No conflict. No interest, babe.
Jordi:No conflict. No interest. But, I think that pixie chess can be something that breaks out of crypto. Like, I think that it I think that the mechanics that they're working on, the the novelty of just the game itself, like, should be, an absolute hit, and you can go risk on with it. You can play for for real money, which should be which should be cool.
Jordi:So, go check out pixie chess and d m Josh and, you know, the greatest brothers sent you. Regret it.
John:Let's go to Anand Sunwall. He says, Dude Perfect and Mark Rober have built superior businesses to mister beast. They're the best creator businesses IMO and aren't talked to talk talked about enough. It's interesting. I don't know all that much about these guys.
John:I mean, I follow them and I've worked in the YouTube world. I completely understand. So Dude Perfect, is, this fantastic channel. It was originally like trick shots. So they would throw a basketball off of the top of a stadium from the nosebleed seats into a hoop all the way down on the field.
John:And they would just do so they go
Jordi:I remember I remember being, like, 12 years
John:old. And and watching this on YouTube, and it's just insane. And they just got really, really good where they would spend all day. And eventually, everyone would say, oh, they're faking it. They're doing VFX.
John:No. They just put in the work, and then they actually got really good at making these trick shots.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:So, like, you ask him to, like, oh, yeah. Throw a basketball over this building into this hoop, and, like, they're gonna be able to do it better than 99% of people because they just practice it. They just spend more time. So they're actually good at these crazy trick shots, and they can do crazy things like ping pong balls and and hockey pucks. And they just do everything now, And they do a bunch of collabs, and they've gotten really good at the editing.
John:And they recently opened up this, like, massive, like it's like a theme park. I think the investment is, like, over a $100,000,000 on this huge dude, it has a huge tower that they can throw stuff off of. That's great. Because for a while, there was
Jordi:because it kinda needs to be, like, protected because if you're throwing a basketball off of the flagstick
John:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was, like, there was this whole trend where there was this massive, like, bridge with a trampoline or, like, a it was, like, a skydiving tower, basically. And they would throw, like, pianos off of it to, like and this is, like, maybe not them, but somebody would throw pianos off of it onto, like, a trampoline, and
Jordi:you would see not a style.
John:Like, drop cars and stuff. It was crazy. Crazy. So great business, and Mark Rober has a, a really interesting subscription box company that sells engineering tool kits. This is great for kids where it comes and you get to watch a Mark Rober video and he breaks down, okay.
John:Today, we're building, like, a new slingshot. You know, break out these pieces, And sometimes there's, like, programming and there's multiple levels. So you can build the basic one if you're just a kid, but then you can customize it and build, like, more stuff and actually write some code. And so, fantastic businesses. But everyone thinks mister Beast is at the top because he says the CPG brand with, with No.
Jordi:I think he's probably on top from an attention standpoint. Sure. Sure. But he these other creators have more aligned businesses. Right?
Jordi:Mister Beast is sort of like, I'm just gonna get max amount of attention in there.
John:Show that sells chocolate as opposed to Mark Roberge's engineering channel. He sells engineering kits.
Jordi:They're just a lot more disconnected.
John:Perfect. It's like a sports thing, and you can go to their sport. They're basically building, like, next gen Dave and Buster's almost.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Yeah. You can go to their thing and and experience all the different sports challenges. So it does seem more aligned. But Yeah.
Jordi:As long as I mean, I think the challenge is mister Beast's audience by nature of just getting so many views from so many different parts of the world. Yep. He's sort of forced into Lowest
John:common denominator.
Jordi:Needing to launch something like a chocolate bar.
John:Yeah. Anyone can consume it. I mean, this is why I was advocating for Beast VPN because he has an international audience. He has people all over the world. And so
Jordi:what
John:do you wanna sell? You wanna sell something that's differentiated only on the marketing. It's already big on YouTube. Every ad is for VPNs, extremely high margin, extremely low churn. And You'd have to go
Jordi:up against the cartel, though, the Eastern European VPN cartel.
John:I don't even know if there is a cartel. There's so many of these. It's very oligopolistic. No. No.
John:No.
Jordi:No. No. I I heard I actually heard that there's, like, basically one group in Eastern Europe that has covered
John:up a lot of that.
Jordi:So, like, when you see it, a VPN address for one thing or another, it's like the same end owner. I didn't know that. So it's it's it's more consolidated. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. And I and I and I would almost throw this on because Throw
John:on the throw on the the the tinfoil hat.
Jordi:If I was a foreign conspiracies. If I was a foreign intelligence agency Yeah.
John:What would you?
Jordi:I might offer very inexpensive VPN services in order to capture all that traffic and data, and then make price it artificially low so that you just capture more and more of that, data, you know, sort of pipeline. So anyways, we we try to keep this to once an episode.
John:But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there is another factor. I I I think that, you know, the business analysis aside, there is something interesting where all of these creators go through this hero's journey where they're deified and then eventually torn down.
John:Mister Beast recently went through that.
Jordi:MKBHD.
John:MKBHD is going through it right now where he has the eye of Sauron on him. Him. Yeah. We had to defend him last week because he was he was going something like only, like, 60 miles an hour over in a in a children's zone. And, obviously, we think that's fine.
John:But, but MKBHD has the comments on every single one of the video is joking about wallpapers, joking about
Jordi:The new thing this week is he was kinda he's historically trash crypto.
John:So, yeah, everybody has been just, like, going after him. And and so there's this there's this element of, like, you're either, like, loved and all of your fans are, like, promoting you and reposting you and just sycophantically parasocially obsessed with you, or you become the demon and then everyone, you know, hates you and wanna wants to tear you down and gets, like, social credibility on that. And Dude Perfect and Mark Rober are maybe pre fall, or maybe they have the ability to, you know, avoid that entirely with how narrow their their their content is and and where they've stayed. But, I mean, you could imagine a Mark Rober fallout around, oh, well, you know, one of his engineering kits electrified someone, and it was terrible. You know, all these things, and then that could just blow up because everyone's has this this this latent obsession with, like, let's tear the big guy down.
John:And so, it's a good lesson in, like, you know, heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Jordi:Yeah. There needs to be some bro science done on this because I think the people that try to tear big creators down and put a target on big creators probably just have low magnesium levels.
John:I think that's probably true. And, just so you know, don't get any ideas. If you're trying to tear us down, we're gonna hit back 10 times harder. So don't even try it.
Jordi:Don't even start. Let's go
John:to Sam Swara, says, do you think feudal lords had biweekly 1 on ones with their knights? This is such a good post. I love this.
Jordi:All time post.
John:And then and then Mackenzie says, do you mean a round table? And then Sam Swartz says, Lowell, well done. Yes. It is a round table. It did have one.
John:Well, we weren't one on ones. Yeah. Yeah. You're all all hands.
Jordi:That's the key thing. All hands. Yeah.
John:Yeah. The round table is the all hands. But And
Jordi:it wasn't it was it was the honestly, the round table was more like a power lunch. I think so. The the historical example of a power lunch where And so you should channel get to channel the power lunch, channel the round table.
John:Yes.
Jordi:Don't do 1 on ones. Never do 1 on ones.
John:Yep. We should have a roundtable here, and we should
Jordi:This is a roundtable.
John:This is a roundtable for a reason. We should get everyone on the team.
Jordi:All of
John:our VPs. Sit around and and discuss business and how we will remain the most profitable podcast in the world. And the biggest. Fastest growing podcast in the world and the biggest tech podcast.
Jordi:Tech podcast.
John:And, yeah, I think you can learn a lot from feudal lords. You can learn more from the prince than from 4 hour work week. Let's go. Trace Cohen Says they will all IPO and it will make sense then, but now until then, this is a perfect example of how the last 2 years in tech slash startup slash v c, and it says a screenshot of staying private. You mentioned this earlier.
John:There was more money flowing into secondaries for Figma, Rippling, Canva, Revolut, CoreWeave, Databricks, and Stripe than all of the tech IPOs in 2023 to 2024. And this is from the Morgan Stanley and the information reporting
Jordi:and company. I think this is, like, crazy to look at, but at the same time, it is it makes so much sense because most of the returns generated from It's such a venture are, like, 10 companies.
John:Everyone knows this now, and Elon ran the AB test. Yeah. Took Tesla public. He kept SpaceX private, and which was more of a hassle for him.
Jordi:The only company that I want to start and go public quickly is the Trump podcast.
John:Oh, yes. Of course.
Jordi:I think they get to a $100,000,000 run rate within a year Yes. And should be the 1st podcast IPO.
John:Yes.
Jordi:And I think that everybody should be able to sort of participate in that Yes.
John:In that Yeah. That makes sense. Movement.
Jordi:But
John:I mean, increasingly, there's ways to participate in the Stripe secondary through fund to funds, through all sorts of different secondary firms. And
Jordi:Yeah. If you can't if you're kind of annoyed that these companies aren't public and you're accredited and you haven't figured out a way to get in them, it's on you. You just don't want it bad enough.
John:Be 7 SPVs deep, but at least you have exposure.
Jordi:Exposure.
John:At least you have exposure. But, yeah, we I I I think it's it's still somewhat of a good trend. We, you know, we want these companies to be able to stay in founder mode, have as little overhead as possible, move very quickly Raw execution. And and execute.
Jordi:Risk on.
John:They will all IPO and it will make sense then. But until then, it's a perfect example. So, yeah, I mean, these companies will go public eventually, but, the the private markets are retooling to keep companies private.
Jordi:Part of why there's so much capital available for these companies is that they're really, especially now, those new investors are looking at, like, okay. I'm probably gonna be locked up, you know, not be able you know, this company will probably go public within the next 2 years. And at that point, I'll be liquid, and I should get a nice Yeah. In theory, like, premium on what I invested.
John:Yeah. And I mean, the entire like like, all the incentives align. Like, the founders wanna stay private Yeah. And the asset managers understand that they can earn higher fees from investing in secondaries as opposed to being a public manager or
Jordi:Yeah. Also, if you put if you put a $1,000,000,000 into Databricks and it goes public a year later and your position is at 1,100,000,000
John:Yep.
Jordi:It's a 10% return, which is, like, what a lot of early stage funds do Yep. Or less. You know? Yep.
John:So Let's go to Jack Raines. He says, paying a negative salary for a chief of staff position when you're worth $1,700,000,000 either, a, deeply underpays someone who probably needs money or, b, ensures that you hire a rich Nepo baby who doesn't need money. This doesn't motivate someone to grind harder or whatever. And this is, this is a quote tweet of the previous post that we reacted to by Depinder Goyal. I didn't understand that he was paying a negative salary.
John:React to that? Yeah. We just did. It's deeper in the stack. I didn't understand that he was paying a negative salary.
John:What does that mean? But, nothing wrong with hiring.
Jordi:No. So it means they're basically, like, every, you gotta go work for them and then they're gonna donate to charities on your behalf, which, we're very against any, like, sort of non
John:Yeah. Subscribers is gonna be doing a deep dive on the best charities to take private and turn into for profits. We've learned a lot from the OpenAI nonprofit to for profit transition, and we think PETA could be next, Red Cross could be next. We have lots of ideas. Stay tuned for that.
John:Subscribe, please. But, yeah. I don't know. I I I think that, you know, there are a lot worse roles than mentoring for a billionaire.
Jordi:Yeah. I think I I I think that the the sort of hate is somewhat deserving.
John:Yeah. It makes sense to down, but at the same time, if you do if you can break through I mean, this post got a lot of views.
Jordi:I would rather see.
John:A lot of people applying. And if you can break through and become the leading candidate asking for, hey. I need 50 k. Like, that's probably an afterthought, and you can probably get that. Yeah.
John:Yeah. And and that should be, like, step 1.
Jordi:And Yeah. They will hire somebody better because of all the attention that they got. That said, I'd like to see that company say, you know, we want people to, you know, we want sort of people that are have a high risk tolerance for this role. We're gonna give you your your your comp into a an account, and you can only trade options with it.
John:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Jordi:And it's your job to turn it into a livable salary.
John:There you go.
Jordi:On a very, like every single month, it's like, what's the trade that's gonna pay your rent?
John:There you go.
Jordi:What's the trade that's gonna, you know, allow you to get something nice for your mom for Christmas. Right?
John:Yeah. Or or walk into Depinder's office and say, hey, look, I wanna invest in startups. I need 2.50 k today.
Jordi:Or if somebody's a real Chad, get take that role and then get so critical to the business that you position yourself to do a hostile takeover
John:of the
Jordi:company and boot him out.
John:Yeah. Boot him out. That's good. I like that. Yeah.
John:Immediately start calling the institutional investors. Yeah. Day 1. This
Jordi:guy's running this company.
John:Do you have access to his email?
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Send an email. Hey. We need a meeting. Or I'm calling a board meeting.
Jordi:Call a board meeting.
John:Without him. Yes. There's new there's new blood in here.
Jordi:Yeah. There's
John:new blood in the water. Let's go to a promoted post. What do you got for me?
Jordi:Okay. Incredible promoted post today from Brad Gerstner over at Altimeter Capital. He is talking about his podcast, BG 2.
John:Mhmm.
Jordi:He hosts this with, Girly. Both are b g to b g 2. Great name for a podcast. And so all I would say with this, imagine if all in never talked about politics.
John:That's what BG2.
Jordi:That is BG2. And the show is fantastic. If you want to get deep into understanding AI scaling, full self driving.
John:Let me see this tweet.
Jordi:How, you know, one, they talk about the the holy trinity of markets loving lower taxes, less regulation, and balancing sort of, like, political, or, like, sort of policy. And, anyways, fantastic podcast. I'm
John:a
Jordi:listener, and we'd love to support other, you know, there's not many technology podcasts.
John:But Do they run ads though?
Jordi:No ads yet. That's the only thing Brad and and and both BG two.
John:I would say unsubscribe from BG 2.
Jordi:We'd like to see them running running more ads.
John:Ads, support the community, start pumping some companies. Let some
Jordi:of these scale ups get in front of this audience. Exactly. Exactly.
John:Don't be don't be a a mistake. Don't be don't be something that everyone regrets. Come on, man. Get it together.
Jordi:That's the biggest issue with All In. No ads.
John:It's the biggest issue. Let's go to Arjun Khemani. 2nd time on the show. Repeat guest. He says, Nayib Bukele's Instagram story, LOL.
John:And it's a screenshot of just the straight up account balance because this is the president of El Salvador, I believe. Yeah. And he bought I love how it's a mobile
Jordi:screenshot too.
John:He he bought $268,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, and it's now worth 573,000,000. Wow. That
Jordi:So so I I don't understand.
John:Crazy as you look at the chart, it's like they invested 268, and they were down to below a 100,000,000.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. He lost it. He had to he had to ride it out. He had to
John:ride it out. Wrote it out.
Jordi:Chad. He
John:just does 2 kissy faces.
Jordi:No. But but here's the thing. I don't understand what he's screenshotting this from. Is this like his mobile brokerage?
John:Yeah. I think he literally is like, I'm setting up a Robinhood account for my country.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Yeah. Yeah. And I'm just trading my treasury.
Jordi:That's the ultimate Gen z president.
John:Fantastic. We need more we need more world leaders to be risk on and and trading. You've seen it with Nancy Pelosi.
Jordi:Let's give let's give
John:You've seen Pelosi tracker. Put her in charge of the Federal Reserve. Put her in charge of, Fort Knox. Get us out of gold. Get us into crypto.
Jordi:The only thing that can really fix our budget deficit is Nancy Pelosi trading our federal balance. Yeah.
John:Get her on pump federal fund.
Jordi:Federal balance sheet. Let's give let's give, you know, JD's, you know, venture capitalists. Let's let's soft circle, like, $50,000,000,000 for him to deploy, on behalf of the US people. Let's give Trump, Trump is a a established crypto currency entrepreneur. Let's give him, you know, pumped out fund account, and, let's ride.
John:Let's go to elvendador. He says, POV, 22 years old, 200 k tech sales job, 48 k savings, expenses 5 k a month. What would your strategy
Jordi:to maximize wealth? Alright. This is gonna be controversial. At 200 k, you're an accredited investor. One big problem with liquid assets is they command a lot of attention.
Jordi:Right? When you have your Robinhood or your Coinbase or your whatever kinda going up and down on a day to day basis. There's this idea that you should sort of fixate on it and, like, try to optimize it. But at at sort of this point in your career, 22 years old, you should be focusing on, you know, I would say that David Center would say, like, optimize your network, right, relationships around the world. Other people would say focus on your skills.
Jordi:I would say, find go through YC and invest in the 5, invest every single dollar you have in the 5 best founders in the batch. And, you know, if you're Coogan, you'll have invested in substack, Open Sea, Substack, Coinbase.
John:Zapier and Instacart.
Jordi:Zapier and Instacart. And you will be worth, 20,000,000 regardless of if your company works or not.
John:Well, he's working a tech sales job.
Jordi:That's what I'm saying. Go go start an agent outbound sales company. Go through y c with your absolute.
John:Just save the money and then go and deploy it all very.
Jordi:Deploy it all very quickly. Within 1st 5. Within 12 weeks.
John:You can probably accrue 50 k a year, 60 k, maybe 100 k if he really saves.
Jordi:Go long. Just go. And the beauty of it, they're going to it's going to be totally liquid. You won't be able to touch it. You'll have to, you know, have that dog in you to keep grinding.
John:Yep.
Jordi:So I like it.
John:Go to Yacine. He says the only job job left is gonna be executive. Engineers make better executives on median, but executive will be the only job left for professionals. And he's quote tweeting Rune who says, the job related meeting crisis has already started and will soon go full swing. This may sound insane, but my only hope is that it happens quickly and at large enough scale such that everyone is forced to rebuild.
John:What do you think?
Jordi:So the only other job that I think is gonna be available is podcasting. Right. Which is why we're we're hedging by being executives by being executive podcasters. So, yeah, I think I don't I don't know. I I won't, I still think there's, like, 50,000 tech jobs that, like, probably don't need to exist at these sort of big, bigger public or sort of scale ups.
Jordi:And I think the conversation will really kick off when those people, are either cut or, you know, are sort of no longer being hired at the at the same rate. Yeah. So we'll see. But, yeah, I think, like, the things that are gonna have, like, command a premium are are relationships. Right?
Jordi:When every company has an army of AI agents that are coding and selling, relate relationships are gonna have a lot of value, like, being able to call up somebody at another company and get a deal done, like, just very old fashioned, like, do a power lunch, and just get the deal done. Yep. That's gonna command a premium.
John:And I
Jordi:but, yeah, I think that the the wait but why guys said this thing, which was, like, this is the last year of human history where where Yeah.
John:I mean, I'd be
Jordi:the most popular. The most popular, like, talk, you know, subject. It's still honestly not, like, it'll be interesting to go home for Thanksgiving and more people will be talking about crypto than AI. Yep. And it's because people like to talk about, like, the headline price and there's no, like, headline price for AI.
Jordi:Sure. Just sort of like steamrolling.
John:Yep.
Jordi:But I would say, like, maybe next Thanksgiving that'll be a different story.
John:I do wonder about the bullshit jobs thing. Have you read that book? It's this thesis that, like like, there is a lot there's already a job related meaning crisis that's happening. And I I think about this in relation to the government where there are a lot of jobs. You know, you walk through TSA.
John:You're like, what are these people actually doing? And you can think about a lot of the government as just a wealth transfer. And the and the the but the way we transfer the money is not through the Andrew Yang UBI strategy. It's instead through a bullshit job.
Jordi:TSA.
John:And I don't know if that's gonna go away. I think that might just scale up because I think both parties might, embrace that as a way to transfer wealth and and and give a little bit of meaning even if it's even if it's minor.
Jordi:Yeah. The thing about the thing about a a the the beauty of a quote unquote bullshit job of something that's not necessarily super impactful is that it's still, it still provides, self esteem associated with being productive, earning an income. And you take somebody who's, you know, 22 and unemployed and you give them a job, even if they're making 30 k a year Mhmm. They're immediately gonna be feel better about the situation, better about the world. And so we we it's gonna be the greatest sort of challenge of our Yeah.
Jordi:Lifetime as, you know, intelligence becomes an API call.
John:Yep. Let's go to Vittorio. He says, it looks like Sora is still the best video model. Sam, please, elections are over. Deepfakes are not such a big concern anymore, and everyone can't wait to not have to deal with Ben Affleck anymore.
Jordi:Yeah. So we we did
John:want them to release sort of I mean, this has been almost a year. Right? Didn't they didn't they announce it almost a year ago?
Jordi:No. The challenge is when companies start announcing things before they're available, it encourages other companies to do the same.
John:It's a costing.
Jordi:I think
John:it's very expensive to inference or
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. But this is gonna be, like, the craziest thing ever. I I heard about a, there was a hackathon in SF Mhmm. A week and a half ago, and somebody built a product where you could speak into a microphone and, like, talk about a situation, and then an AI model would generate, like, b roll on that.
Jordi:And apparently, I think it'll end up being, like, there's a huge consumer product to be built where somebody you just, like, talk into your phone, say something, and, and it just, like, generates, like, an entire visual, like, story of, like, that thing because it's, like, very much, like, you're almost, like, hallucinating. Yep.
John:I do wonder, like, how much does that actually add to the experience? Like, I've done a lot of YouTube videos that are very b roll heavy. We use a lot of stock footage, use some AI video stuff. And then and then with this podcast, we we are very light on the b roll Yeah. Unless we're doing a specific segment.
John:And I'm not sure that once b roll is democratized to the point that you just click a button and every word is translated into b roll. So I'm talking about a man drinking champagne and you see a AI generated video. Like, is is that gonna become just like, like, they did the thing.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Who cares?
Jordi:No. I think it's more of like an entertainment product
John:where it's more about, like, the creative use. Like Yeah. Like, I remember when, Harry Potter Balenciaga went viral and everyone was like, this is incredible. This is, like, the craziest use of AI. And I was like, what's incredible here is the idea.
John:Yeah. And I went to ChatChippity, and I was like, hey, ChatChippity. There's a there's a there's a viral video right now called Harry Potter Balenciaga. And it's very interesting for these reasons. It's non sequitur because Harry Potter and Balenciaga are both things that people really understand, but they're from completely different worlds.
John:1 is a children's, story, and the other is a high fashion brand. So Yeah. Come up with other ideas that could potentially go viral. Like, give me the ideas. And it was, like, Lego, Versace, and I was, like, you're not getting it.
John:Yeah. Like, that's not No. But do you remember
Jordi:do you remember early iPhone days when you could there was, like, apps that would get, like, 1,000,000 of dollars in sales that were, like, drinking a beer?
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:Yeah. And so I think that what I was describing of, like, you say a phrase into the phone and then it generates this visual journey
John:Sure.
Jordi:Is more like, you know, I grew up in the country. My dad had, like, chickens. You know, we had chickens every once in a while, like a raccoon or a fox would get into the chicken coop, and then it would just be like fire drill or running.
John:Sure.
Jordi:And so if I was able to say to my phone, like, chickens with a r 15s defending themselves from, like, foxes and then see this visual journey. Like, I would pay $5 to be able to do that. Like, it's just like Yeah.
John:Yeah. I've already used Grock to, like, mash up different children's property.
Jordi:But there's video
John:of Paw Patrol met met, you know, Yoda? And it's like, that can't happen in the real world because of different IPs, but it can happen in AI and, and visualizing, like, very specific things. Yeah. And and, like, yeah, democratizing But
Jordi:it's gonna be such a colossal colossal leap from generating an image to generating 30 seconds of video Yep. Which is less than a year, like, a year out till
John:it's, like, very big. Bake it down in the hardware because right now, it's super expensive.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Let's go to Andrew Wilkinson. He says, going to business school to become an entrepreneur is like reading a book about basketball history because you want to join the NBA. I agree. I never did business school. I just started a company.
John:I think you did the same thing. Right? I did study economics, which is great. But
Jordi:Listening to Technology Brothers is basically like getting an an MBA in 3 hours
John:Sure.
Jordi:Via the timeline and and our takes on it. Yep. I I did a program called, tech management Yep. Which was like for its, you know, to its credit pretty cool. I, you know, I did, like, probably 6 classes in it, and I thought it was relatively current.
Jordi:But every single thing that we were covering that was at all topical was like a trend from the prior, like, like, 3 years ago. So we had a class on, like, the direct consumer model, which, again, giving it credit, like, most times, like, a school by the time a school is covering something, it's like decades in the past. And this is, like, 2 years.
John:In my in in some entrepreneurship class, I wrote a bull case for Twitter, and the stock was valued at, like, under a $1,000,000,000. And I got a b minus or something, and then the stock ripped. And I wrote an email being, like,
Jordi:dude, you gotta
John:give me an a plus on this. Should have dropped out. I called it, like, come on. And the professor was, like, fine. Should have
Jordi:been at Jane Street.
John:Yeah. Yeah. It was, like, yeah, bad. Let's go to TJ Parker. He says, can we please stop with the concert poster fundraise announcements?
John:Truly terrible.
Jordi:Yeah. So this is like a very 2021 thing. And and every once in a while, you see some founder that hasn't raised a big round in a while, and they're like, I'm gonna do a concert poster. And my main issue with it is I'm I often find that I'm not big enough on the poster. Yeah.
Jordi:I'm not headlining. Right? Sure. I think some asset manager like Andreessen gets the top spot. Yeah.
Jordi:Like, well, I I invested before them. Right? Like, should I,
John:you know I should be
Jordi:first telling. I should be, like, bigger. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, I think this is, I do think that fundraising announcements are, like, just an easy launch that companies can use to get attention from real value is, like, notifying the next round's investors.
John:Also, I mean, just the x algorithm, like, you can't post a link to a TechCrunch article that actually breaks down your investors. So an image can go more viral.
Jordi:So there's
John:something about the medium is the message and, you know, x is kinda pushing you towards these concert posters, but they are kind of played out. And increasingly, the, the the the viral launch video is played out to some degree.
Jordi:Totally.
John:People need to kind of reinvent these things. There's been a few that have broken through, but I think people understand at this point. It's like, oh, it's one of those.
Jordi:Oh, it's funny. So, oh,
John:it's a Vibreel. Founders
Jordi:Founders Fund did the original Vibreel.
John:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Jordi:We did we did a remix of it and then other people have sort of driven it into the ground. Yep. And it's now dead. So if you're thinking about doing a vibe reel or a concert poster, do not do it.
John:Come out with something new. But at the same time, it's
Jordi:How about business wire?
John:Better than nothing.
Jordi:How about PR Newswire?
John:Make it great again?
Jordi:Make PR Newswire. Business Wire great again. You know, there's, like, 2 companies that, like, do that as a service Sure. And Berkshire owns one of them. Really?
Jordi:Which is, like, funny because, like, you know, the the boys at Berkshire are being, like, yeah, we should probably own, like, business wires.
John:The wires.
Jordi:We should own the wires. Great. Yeah. The the original, like, Go Direct is just, like, own the wire.
John:Own the wire. Let's get historic preservation respecter. He says, what the heck? I ordered an engagement ring, but they freaking sent me a Speedmaster Professional 42 millimeter. Someone is gonna be in serious trouble.
John:What the frick? Why did they send me one size for a 7.25 wrist?
Jordi:And, this is one of those things. Men, go have the the watch conversation with your wives. Sit them down, mansplain it to them, have a 30 to 40 minute conversation where you explain, you know, the his history and the intricacies of Swiss watchmaking and, you know, there's some fine American watchmakers.
John:Omega is James Bond's watch.
Jordi:And, and yet sit down, explain it to him, you know, in in, you know, you know, in, the correct terms, and I'm sure they'll come around to it. So,
John:yeah, the engagement ring can wait.
Jordi:It can wait. Enjoy your speed master. Get get your hitter, get your speed master. But find the right watch for you. Right.
Jordi:We're we're big fans of loud opulence on this podcast.
John:Julie Fredrickson says first time on the show, she says, ding dong, the dick is dead. Gary Gensler plans to step down as chair of the US Securities Exchange Commission on January 20th. And this is interesting. I I've always wondered, like, obviously, Trump is appointing all sorts of new people, but what is the calculus between getting fired, writing it out, talking to Trump, or just stepping down early versus announcing you're that you're stepping down early? Like, he's stepping down on inauguration day, I suppose, or near it.
John:And so, clearly, he knows that he's that the writing's on the wall. But there's Yeah.
Jordi:Because the there's a media strategy here. The president-elect has a meme coin called the World Liberty coin
John:Oh, yeah.
Jordi:That he launched, like, 2 weeks out.
John:And I'm sure Gary Hensel is not a fan.
Jordi:He's not a fan. But, yeah, you know, look, I think that, one of the challenges with crypto is that it's sort of been speed running all of these you know, why we have certain regulations. And Gary Gensler has gotten a lot of hate, and and I think it's broadly for good reasons. He sort of made the entire cryptocurrency industry not be able to innovate and actually create, like, a lot of products that would otherwise be valuable to people. Mhmm.
Jordi:And so I think that it will generally be it will certainly be good for the for the cryptocurrency, industry to have somebody in place that is more of a, you know, ideally, like, this is an innovation that's happening one way or another. Like, clearly people just create it's anybody that can develop software can create, you know, tokens and, you know, protocols. And so I think that having somebody in that seat that is generally appreciates the the novel, like, applications of the technology and can kind of steward the industry towards having, you know, the big criticism is he's sort of regulating by enforcement actions. Yeah. So not really telling people what the rules are and then just, like, coming down on one person super hard and trying to make an example out of them.
Jordi:You know, there's no reason we have, you know, tons of $1,000,000,000 crypto companies in the US. They should kind of understand, and and the new companies the rules of the road.
John:Yeah. Do we have promoted post?
Jordi:Promoted post from, this guy, Jordy Hayes, said he's a general partner at Technology Brothers Podcast. I know this guy. He says, I'm excited to announce the Porsche 911 of water filters, RORA water. RORA is a new countertop water filter. Look at this thing.
Jordi:We got one right here. One of the first versions off the factory line. So Rora's a product that I've been working on, with my partners, Brian and Charlie, for, quite a while. We've invested a ton of money in r and d and and testing, and it's live available to purchase as of yesterday. So we, you know, we took the countertop water system, which is, you know, there's a bunch of different people that have made versions to this over the years.
Jordi:We tried to make it 10 times better. I think we did. It's beautiful, effective, durable, timeless, easy to set up, easy to use. My 2 year old can use it, which is awesome. It's accessible.
Jordi:You don't need to do plumbing or electrical work. And we've tested it extremely, rigorously, literally spent about a quarter of a $1,000,000, like with the NSF, which is the certification company. And, really happy with the product. It's beautiful, and I'm excited for people to finally get their hands on it.
John:I'm excited. So go buy Aurora Water Filter today. Let's go to Joe Rogan. First time on the show. He says, this is my new official x description, and he's quote tweeting Colin Rugg who says the views Joy Behar says people like their show because they tell the truth, unlike dragon believer Joe Rogan.
John:And Joe updated his x description to just say I Dragon believer.
Jordi:I can't stress this enough. On this podcast, we trust the experts, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman Yep. Huberman. Huberman. Chris Williamson.
Jordi:Chris Williamson, David Jensen. Michaels. The list goes on. You gotta trust the experts. You gotta trust the dragon believers.
Jordi:Yep. I think that,
John:putting on the tinfoil hat again.
Jordi:I think we should send one of these to Joe. I think it's it's a it's a great asset. It it provides a little bit of ground cover to say some Sure. Crazy things. I believe in dragons right I got a lot of dinosaurs around my house right now it's hard not to think maybe these things
John:were
Jordi:what we imagine as dragons right maybe we did walk the earth with these fantastical beasts so shout out to dragons
John:I mean dragons are literally real if you believe in the Komodo dragon. We have a variety of dinosaurs that
Jordi:are Yeah.
John:Ozempic is dragon. Created
Jordi:by Ozempic is dragon.
John:That was the helo monster related to the Komodo dragon, but separate. But yes. But dragons, we need we we need a we need a good deep dive. We need someone to we need an expert to weigh in. Enjoy the champagne.
John:I refilled you. We have officially
Jordi:Thank you.
John:Finished the bottle of Dom Perignon this time.
Jordi:Here we go.
John:We are Chads.
Jordi:Who's mixing,
John:the Celsius
Jordi:and Dom? Mixing a little Celsius and Dom.
John:Thank you, Ben, for editing all this. Let's go in to, let's skip grit and let's go to, tomorrow's telecom. I don't know what that is. Is this important? Do you know this person?
Jordi:No. I just, skip it.
John:Expa let's do Scott. This is a good one. Scott Sanders says, real talk. What are you printing in 2024? And this was a reply to my call for Apple to develop a printer.
John:And I'll tell you, Scott, I'm printing your tweet. I'm printing your tweet.
Jordi:There we go.
John:I like my tweets printed out. If you're not doing this, have your secretary print your emails.
Jordi:Print your timeline out.
John:Print your timeline out. Get with the modern era. We're returning to tradition and we're printing things now. Yep. So we need great printers.
John:We need a new printer start up. We need Apple to build a printer. We need more
Jordi:I want a service similar to a newspaper that that that prints out the best tweets from yesterday Yeah. And delivers them to me at 5 AM so I can wake up, walk outside, pick up a nice stack of posts Yes. And just
John:We respect printed things here.
Jordi:Shifting through it.
John:We review Arena Mag. We are I already purchased, Patrick O'Shaughnessy's new magazine. I am obsessed with the so called legacy media just because there's an option to print it out and ship it to me.
Jordi:Yep.
John:I like printed stuff. It's more tactile. You can mark it up. You can take notes. It's less ethereal, and it goes in the stack.
John:And this this post will be immortalized in the stack of printed posts forever. So, get with the program. Start printing your post. Do we have a promoted post?
Jordi:Promoted post from Daniel at growing underscore Daniel.
John:He says
Jordi:today? So today, he's saying that he needs a chief of staff.
John:Oh, that's a dream job.
Jordi:Dream job working for a dream poster, a dreamy poster. He says, I need a chief of staff as well offering 15 k for that connection.
John:Wow.
Jordi:Put me in touch with your most organized friends. So this is a bounty for any technology brother out there to go connect Daniel, to his next chief of staff. The last one, is is the president-elect. Not not a lot of people know, but Donald Trump actually worked for growing Daniel briefly, during the off season for him. And, anyways, go, work for Daniel.
Jordi:Got a great company building software for police officers to be better at their jobs and more efficient.
John:Tell them the technology brother sent you.
Jordi:Tell them we sent you.
John:Let's go to near cyan. She says, every twenties male will watch The Big Short and be like, he's literally me, then proceed to lose their life savings in the dumbest way possible. You know, there's a lot of founders I know who have gone through the hero's journey of losing their entire life savings in crypto and then realized that trading or, you know, YOLO investing is not for liquid assets. And then they go in and they build something real. And it was a big shift from, like, the defense tech boom, the Gundo boom.
John:A lot of those guys had had rough goes in, like, the Wi Fi money era, realized it was not very durable, very zero sum, and moved over to something that was more tangible. And I I I really think that was a benefit, to society. It was it was it was a good move. Obviously, crypto is important, but it's for the real builders and they're the ones that should be, rewarded, if you're just on Wall Street Bets and TikTok, like, trying to read, you know, technical analysis. Like Yeah.
Jordi:No. Do you think illiquidity is a feature
John:Not about it.
Jordi:Like, you know, the fact that you can go and do your job every day
John:and
Jordi:not be constantly getting marked, is is a great blessing because it allows you to focus on the next important task ahead
John:Yep.
Jordi:And just create value that way.
John:Let's go to Shriram Krishnan, Andreessen Horowitz. He says the common question I often get from SV folks these days is how they can join Doge.
Jordi:Yeah. So this is this is interesting. I think one of the one of the challenges, there's a lot of people that are in the kind of, like, peripheral or adjacent to the American dynamism movement that are kind of looking at Doge being, like, if I was gonna work in the government, this would be the place to do it. The challenge is, like, if you if a lot of your, net worth is tied up in a bunch of, like, illiquid private companies, it's, like, very difficult to kind of kinda divest those positions.
John:And just I did hear
Jordi:I just hear though that you
John:have a job and you're busy, like, I think there was an official post by Doge saying, look. We've gotten enough ideas. Thank you.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:But now we need high IQ hard workers to come in and work 8 hour weeks. And that is going to be a great resume bullet point, but it's gonna be hard to step away from a company you founded or GP at a big fund. Like, that's gonna be really hard.
Jordi:I did hear, incredible financial innovation. I think it's from JPMorgan or Goldman is one of those 2. They offer a service where if you're taking a government post and you need to divest assets, they will basically buy it at, like, 60% of, like, the last mark.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:So all those technology brothers out there sitting on overvalued private shares, maybe take a role in the government and and get some liquidity.
John:I mean, that's the thing with the treasury secretary. Right? They have to sell everything and they don't get taxed on it. Yeah. So it's a huge benefit.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:I think there's something
John:But maybe you said you avoid that.
Jordi:You avoid the
John:employees as well.
Jordi:No. I think I think it's, like, pretty broad.
John:Yeah. And it makes sense. It's it's controversial, but it but it makes sense. Let's go to Dylan Field over at Figma. He says, he's quote tweeting Gary Gensler.
John:He said, this man has ruined so many innocent lives. The stories will come out in time. Right now, most of his victims are too intimidated to share broadly. Let's hope he never has power again. And Gary is announcing that he will be stepping down.
John:And, yeah, it's wild because Gary, he was he was kind of pro crypto at MIT, I believe. He he taught a course on it and then just came in as this, kind of the bad cop of crypto. And and
Jordi:Well, he had a finance background. I think he was at
John:a lot of people.
Jordi:I think he was at gold I think he was at Goldman or some some big, asset.
John:And the biggest problem isn't that he wasn't isn't that, like, okay. There are obviously bad actors in crypto. The problem was is that for the last, you know, 4 years during the bubble cycle, I never was like, oh, the SCC is the reason that Sam Bankman Fried got caught. It was always like some on Twitter or even, like, most of the scammers who are, like, celebrities and they rent shit coins. It's like Coffeezilla is the one who breaks the story Yeah.
John:Or some reporter. It's very rarely, oh, the SCC got to it first. It's usually the the investigative journalist, the YouTuber, the Twitter, the posters, and then the SEC has to follow-up. And it was just like, this is completely the wrong model. You you need to have a stronger a stronger sense of of of who's actually being called.
Jordi:The fact that somebody who's running, like, the greatest design startup of the last 10 years is, like, cares enough about it to comment on it just shows, like, how out of control he was.
John:Let's go to Spore. Repeat, guest of the show. Spore says, what was the hot tech theme of 2023? And, the founder of Herplexity says there's a hot theme for the year and then the most valuable company and they never match up, which I love. This is a great chart.
John:It's not entirely true because the hot theme of the year kind of changes, and it's kind of unclear. But I it does seem real that the metaverse was big in 2022 and the hot but what's interesting is, like, this question, it's very obvious. 2023 is AI. Yep. It was AI.
John:100%. But I guess what he's saying is, like, the hot theme was AI. Maybe we should expect the most valuable company started in 2023
Jordi:To be Technology Brothers.
John:Technology well, we aren't starting in 2023. We're starting in 2024. Oh. But, you know, Truth Social started in, I believe, 2021. It was the web 3 I
Jordi:would argue that we were started in 2023, though, because that's when we met.
John:That is true.
Jordi:That is the first meeting.
John:That was their first podcast. The mics weren't on, but it was the podcast at at, a very illustrious, office and No.
Jordi:There should be there should be this is a good use case for Poly Market. You should be able to bet on what is the most, like, what's gonna be, like, the most valuable company.
John:That's just called investing in the companies.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why do
John:you think the Poly Market
Jordi:is But the thing about private markets is, like, I can believe I cannot be an investor in a company and still believe not even able to be an investor because of the nature of, like, round timings.
John:But following records binary outcome. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it doesn't really work like that.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:You know, good idea. We'll have to work on that, though. We need some more shopping. Let's go to Dexter Massaro. Elon Musk is now technically the top Diablo 4 player in the world after a record clear time of 152 in the game's toughest challenge.
John:That is incredible.
Jordi:Firing on all cylinders. I
John:love it.
Jordi:We need to get him streaming on Twitch. Right? He
John:streams every once in a while. Yeah. More streams on
Jordi:so, like, a daily stream would be good.
John:I would love it. And he takes calls while he's doing it. He's does everything. And more importantly, he's actually excellent at the game.
Jordi:Unlike a certain SBF. Bank man.
John:Do we have another promoted post?
Jordi:Promoted post from our friend over at Pirate Wires, Mike Solana. He is looking for a full time editor for the pirate wires daily. You'll be responsible for sourcing stores each morning, managing assignments, editing each take, writing some of your own, must be terminally online and funny Solana at pirate wires go apply for this job email him don't put anything in the subject line just say no subject don't even put anything in the body of the email just put your x username a link to make it easy for Solana Your resume is your profile. If you're not posting bangers, even even low 10 bangers,
John:you've
Jordi:got to have bangers. You're not going to get this job without it. The job is to, curate and cultivate bangers.
John:I mean, that's it.
Jordi:And I can't dream job.
John:The dream job. I mean, the 3 morning takes, if you're not subscribed, you gotta go subscribe. It's the it's the best newsletter, best daily newsletter by far. Fantastic product. Just very bite sized, very digestible, very funny, great format.
John:I've written 1. I need to write more because every once in a while, I think, oh, I have this idea. It's not good for a tweet. It's not good for an essay. The the the the the Pirate Wires take is like a format of its own.
John:This is what we talk about. Like, format is so important in content, and Solana has been innovative there in a way that many, many other newsletter writers haven't been.
Jordi:Yep.
John:Let's go to Michael. He says a quick personal update. After three and a half amazing years at Notion and some time off, I've started a company that's at the intersection of everything I learned at Stripe, Notion, and Google, AI, Fintech, Productivity, and Search. Our small team is growing, and we're looking for founding engineers and designers. Please reach out if you or someone you know might be interested in something early stage and in person in San Francisco.
John:Let's go.
Jordi:There we go.
John:Talent move. Hitting all the right buzzwords. Entering free agency, building a new franchise, could be a generational company. Hit up Michael if you're interested. I love it.
Jordi:Potential size Gong candidate if he Yeah. Gets the round announced.
John:Michael, let us know when the round closes. Hopefully, it's really big. Hopefully, everyone's,
Jordi:10 on 50.
John:Dumping a bunch of FUD on, oh, this is overvalued and but we'll be here ringing the size Gong
Jordi:for you.
John:Make it happen. Let's go to Erica. She says, an LP shared, they expect 5 to 10% GP commit for a first fund. That means 500 k to 1,000,000 for a $10,000,000 fund. 50 to 100 k of that has to be cash.
John:Most emerging GPS go 2 years with no salary plus spend, 25 k in upfront cost. So expecting more just seems wrong. What are your thoughts? And Nicole Wiskoff says, have never heard this and have met with a few 100 LPs. So a little bit of a controversial post.
John:What do you think? I mean, this is somewhat related to I think you can basically write off the GP commit if the GP shows up in a car that follows the 1% rule. Or is wearing a suit. Or is wearing a suit.
Jordi:Yeah. So, this is one of those things. Anytime you're fundraising, you know, you could go out fundraise and talk to an angel investor that's like, I'll give you 50 ks at a $250,000 valuation.
John:Yep. And
Jordi:like, that's good. There's always going to be the outliers that are just expecting or like making kind of like crazy offers and, got to learn which ones to ignore, which ones to take advice from. The other thing, though, is like if you're a GP, you can effectively commit, part of the what would be your management fee back to the fund, which can kind of make up for for, you know, if you're not super liquid and and and don't have whatever that 5 to 10% to invest back into the fund can leverage the fee, to kind of get closer to that mark. So lots of ways to do it. I don't think you should start a fund if you, you know, get some get some big wins under your belt.
John:Yeah. We have a good friend who says you don't you shouldn't need to raise because you should just go out and find a 1,
Jordi:one asset. Simply get a 100
John:x, scale up, and then just invest your own capital. Yeah. Be ready to make your own capital commit. Chad Capital. Let's go to Jesse.
John:Jesse says on chain isn't for you until it is, and it's an ad from Coinbase. A fantastic I really like this. It was really good.
Jordi:Because it it really, like exemplified, like, the value of stable coins and why the average person will start to use them in different capacities. So, like, the wire transfers like a pretty, pretty good innovation, right? You can walk down to the banks, and a big wire. The other person, you know, assuming you don't miss the wire cut off, you know, you're going to have a pretty good, likelihood of that wire landing very quickly. That said, if this ad, you know, showed a guy selling, you know, an old truck and taking the bus home afterwards, if you're trying to, you know, make any type of major transaction peer to peer after hours and want to do so in a trustless way, stable coins are a fantastic way to do that.
Jordi:And I like that Coinbase is taking this moment where they're, you know, number 1 in the charts or close to that and starting to advertise some of the applications of of, you know, crypto that that the average person would really care about, which is I'm making a big purchase or a big transaction.
John:I just wanted to go through fast.
Jordi:And I just wanted to go through fast and know that it's there. And, yeah. So I can see I can actually the ad made sense because I can actually see that happening where somebody's first time, like, really using crypto other than to speculate is like making a big purchase like a car.
John:It's great. Let's go to Ryan Harmon, good friend of the show. He says, we did a new brand with our friends at a 24, and they introduced movie chocolate, milk chocolate to eat during movies. And it just has a fantastic brand, fantastic text, and you could see this being really huge. And it's cool to see a 24 branching out into consumer packaged goods in a really interesting way.
John:And
Jordi:Super aligned with the product. The the flavors of the new chocolate brand are, like, super fun and funky. Yep. And
John:And they're partnering with AMC.
Jordi:So these will be cool. And they partnered with, you know, a lot of people like to to call Ryan's agency, the day job, the a 24 of creative agencies. Right?
John:Yeah.
Jordi:They're bold. They're dramatic. Yeah. They're original.
John:I mean, the main problem with Ryan and Day Job is that he hasn't done the blood sucking scale up that most other brand agencies have where Yeah. He's just producing slop but charging 500 k
Jordi:a
John:project for basically just copy paste of the Figma file. So get your money up, Ryan. Start doing shitier projects and maybe you'll make a lot more.
Jordi:Yeah. One one small note on Ryan. He's also a little bit of a real estate developer. Oh, really? Taking a lot of the profits from the agency and
John:sort of,
Jordi:they've been building a office ground up. So if I was a designer or copywriter or creative director and I was in LA, I'd be wanting to go work for them. Yeah. Their new office is gonna be fantastic.
John:It's a fantastic business.
Jordi:And, brand. Yeah. You know, they help us
John:with Excel.
Jordi:You know what they say? Good. Good times create Jaguar rebrand. Jaguar rebrands create. Hard times.
Jordi:Hard times. Hard times create day jobs. Day jobs. Great. Jagwire.
John:Great. Good times. Yeah. It's great. Let's go to Phil Ehrenstein.
John:He is the founder of Duroc. We got his name wrong on the last podcast, and he's very upset. He said, just gonna leave this one here, and it's Jordy grasping for his name, failing. 2 seconds later, he clipped this so short, 5 seconds. At 6 seconds, I say your name is Phil.
John:Credit. I know your name.
Jordi:Phil is a Chad, future Bean Air.
John:Gigachad.
Jordi:Gigachad, future brother
John:that we incredible bench press. This guy is an incredible bench presser.
Jordi:He's an analyst.
John:So he says, changing my morning alarm tone from the Founders Fund opening song to this audio to begin my winter arc. So he's fueling
Jordi:So the only thing I'd say I'm sorry, Phil. You're incredible.
John:Yeah. We love you, Phil.
Jordi:On you and, Dirac. Dirac, I pronounced
John:I think it's pronounced rock Dirac. Dirac. Yeah. Dirac. I automatically forgot
Jordi:his name off. I've I've missed that company.
John:Some scientist. Some nerd.
Jordi:Phil, you're an animal. You, are I know your future brother of the week, and we cannot wait to hang, you know, at the next,
John:get on the bandwagon because we've been talking about this for weeks.
Jordi:The technology brother version of a Rolex is a Patek Philippe.
John:Yes. But which one?
Jordi:I mean, you can't go wrong in the range.
John:Yes.
Jordi:That could be a Aquanaut, a Nautilus, a Colatrava, if you're just kind of getting into the range Sure. Starting to build that relationship.
John:Sure.
Jordi:But, but, yeah, you could also argue it. You know, I know, you know, praying for x is popular meme account. He'll he'll he'll often be fine wearing, you know, timeless Submariner. Sure. It's a great watch.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And, so one could argue the technology brother version of a Rolex is a Rolex. Yeah.
John:But also you go up upmarket to the giga tech bro, Zuck. He wears an FP Jorn. And so, Richard Mille. We have a promoted we have a promoted post from Richard Mille actually today.
Jordi:We do. We
John:do. Richard Mille.
Jordi:Richard Mille.
John:It's a racing machine on the wrist.
Jordi:And it Skeletonized. Skeletonized. It looks like one. This is a head turner. This is a fun piece.
John:Can you read me the the love language there?
Jordi:The love language says a racing machine on the wrist, skeletonized manual winding, 70 hour power reserve, base plate and bridges in grade 5 titanium power reserve and function indicators, case in grade 5 titanium torque limiting crown. So, like, this is the kind of thing that, you know, you're gonna see Nadal on the wrist while he's playing.
John:I think I think the lesson here is that is that tech bros are anti mimetic. Like, we do not want to have a one size fits all. We don't want every tech bro wearing Allbirds. We don't want every tech bro wearing the exact same Nautilus. We want a a piece, a hitter on the wrist that speaks to what you're doing.
John:Are you in hard tech? Are you in AI? Are you in b to b software? These are different paths for the tech. Are you a capital allocator?
John:That means something different, and that means a different piece on the wrist. So you want something that speaks to who you are and what you do.
Jordi:So if you're if you're a technology brother and you're creating, autonomous, you know, drones for the sea
John:Maybe it's a screenshot.
Jordi:Or a Submariner.
John:Right? Submariner. Yeah.
Jordi:Literally, it's
John:got a watch potentially. You're not gonna be wearing a dress watch in that sense. Exactly.
Jordi:You're certainly not gonna be wearing
John:a capitol hill hobby watch. Maybe it's a dress watch. Maybe you're in a bow tie. Maybe you're in a tux. Yep.
John:And and you need Calatrava.
Jordi:Absolutely.
John:Let's go to Omar Waseem. He says the best ideas start as intersections. Huge alpha in exploring combinations of whatever you're obsessively interested in. Tech Bros Pod is the best recent example of this. American dynamism, x venture, x niche Twitter bubble.
John:And as soon as he said bubble, I was in.
Jordi:I was in.
John:I love bubbles.
Jordi:Bubbles on the show.
John:I love Omar.
Jordi:We promote bubbles.
John:I've been on his podcast.
Jordi:We participate in bubbles. And I and the only thing I had to say in response to this was there's this huge alpha and wearing simply wearing a suit.
John:Right? I agree.
Jordi:If you're in technology, take off the Allbirds, throw on some loafers. Yep. Get a tailored suit. Yep. Wear it to work.
Jordi:I guarantee you'll stand out. Yep. And, you're making a statement I like it. Every step.
John:And let's close with Andrew Huberman who talking about podcast. He says, wondering if it's still a good idea to start a podcast? Yes. Especially if you have expertise in a particular area that you focus on or weave into your content. I'm excited the next generation of health, science, and tech podcasters.
John:It's fertile soil. I mean, clearly clearly subtweeting us.
Jordi:Absolutely.
John:Obviously. But does it apply outside of us?
Jordi:Absolutely.
John:I think so. Absolutely. I think
Jordi:there's plenty of options. Of this is is you you could say, you know, in the consumer brand industry. Right? There's a brand for almost anything.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And, you know, once a week, you see a brand launch and you're like, that makes sense for this moment. Yep. You know, we were, you know, the whole sort of market was ready for it. And the same thing with podcasts. There's still I forget the stat, but there's, like, 300,000 ish podcasts that have published at all in the last month.
Jordi:Yep. And so while there's a lot of podcasts that take a shot on goal and then, like, don't quite see it through or continue, there's far fewer podcasts that are just consistent.
John:There really aren't that many podcasts that fully send it. It's a lot of side hustle. Oh, I do something on Zoom. I interview my friends, and they don't really think through, like, what are the sources of alpha? How can I combine different ideas?
John:How can I really prioritize this and make this the best thing? That's what I noticed on YouTube was, like, at a certain point, it's like, pick a big topic and make the best video about that topic, and it would always go viral.
Jordi:Later, you have half a 1000000
John:Yep. Subscribers. Yep. So That's a great place to go.
Jordi:Accident.
John:Thanks for watching. Subscribe today or be relegated to a life of net jets for the rest of your life.
Jordi:Rest of your life.
John:Just do it. Do it now. Thank you.
Jordi:Thank you.
John:For watching.