The Sonos Disaster, Act Like a Founder, MMA for Brothers, These Guys Have Exits
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we're doing a deep dive on Sonos. We're trying to get back into the technology side of the brotherhood. We, are still displaced. We're still in Santa Barbara.
Speaker 1:We've upgraded our chairs today. Hopefully, it's a little bit better for you guys. But you know it's bad at Sonos when they bring out Mark Gurman. Are you familiar with, Mark Gurman?
Speaker 2:Tell me about Mark.
Speaker 1:So he's, like, the Apple correspondent. He gets all the best leaks. Like, when you hear, like, oh, new iPhone's coming out. Like, he's the guy you go to at Bloomberg. So there's been 2 articles previously.
Speaker 1:I'll give you one of these too. 2 articles previously on Sonos and the chaos of the company, started in August 20 2 August 22, 2024. Sonos app leaves company racing to save its reputation, and this was by Dave Lee. I'm sure he's a great journalist at Bloomberg. Everyone at journal Bloomberg is great, but he's not Mark Gurman big.
Speaker 1:And, and then on September 23rd, Dave Lee follows up with how botched how Sonos botched an app and infuriated its customers. And so, you know, this is, this is, like, you know, some some rough reporting, but then they bring out the big guns, Mark Gurman, because the CEO was fired. And so let's start with, what happened. Then we'll take you through a little bit of the history of Sonos and explain how they got here because there are some cool things about this company. We both use the product.
Speaker 1:I both I've loved it at times, and more recently, I've hated it. So,
Speaker 2:it's, it's it's really cool in the off chance that it's working. We'll get into that later.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's kind of like a lightning striking twice situation when SONOs worked properly. It's been so bad recently. Yeah. Just degree to degree.
Speaker 1:And and, yeah, it's a fascinating story. So, let's read through a little bit of this first report from Dave Lee in Bloomberg. He says, Sonos has a lower loyal user base for its high end audio speakers. Unfortunately, a disastrous software launch has angered customers and jeopardized the company's reputation, and the window to fix the problem is closing rapidly. The release in May of a new app that controls the speakers was meant to have been the company's the culmination of chief executive officer Patrick Spence's grand plan to refresh the company's infrastructure and expand into a greater share of the $100,000,000,000 audio market, of which it estimates it controls less than 2%.
Speaker 1:The existing Sonos app was struggling to handle all all the demands of the modern day audiophile who wants to listen to sound from various sources, both local and in the cloud across multiple devices and rooms. Spence said performance and reliability issues had crept in over time. The new app was flawed, though. Over time. Drops in and out.
Speaker 1:Devices disappear. My push for speed backfired, Spence said. In a business like specialist audio trust can be extremely hard to win back. Case in point, Jordy will never buy another Sennhe speaker in his life, probably won't either. On Tuesday, the former Blackberry executive threw himself in
Speaker 2:This just turns into an MKBHD, just scathing Oh, yeah. Scathing review. Yeah. I mean, I I'll I'll go out. I'll preface some of this by saying because, you know, the only few words I've gotten in so far were were dunking.
Speaker 2:We don't like to dunk. I in this situation, I felt like it was fair because I've some of my worst experiences with consumer electronics have been with with, my dear. Sonos. Yep. But at the same time, Santa Barbara company, I went to school in Santa Barbara.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I I know they're doing their best. Yep. There are some great moments with Sonos. They do sound good Yep. When they're running.
Speaker 2:It's really the setup Yep. That is so, so devastatingly difficult.
Speaker 1:It was it was magical at first. Like, my first Sonos setup was I had a TV and an Apple TV plugged into it. And are you familiar with HDMI CEC? No. It's a specific protocol over the HDMI cable that allows you to control the device.
Speaker 1:Like, you can control a TV from the Apple TV. So
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I was able to wire it so that the Sonos went into the to the TV, and the Apple TV controlled the actual TV. Yeah. And so with just one Apple TV remote, I could push a button and it would turn it on and the audio would work and it'd be surround sound.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was just, like, flawless. It was amazing. And then and I think it added on to that, I could also, like, choose to play Spotify over it and that was great.
Speaker 2:I think I think they almost could have taken the route as being more, like, encouraging people to hire a Sonos expert to set up the product. Yep. Because when I think about it, every single time I'd be setting up a Sonos device, I'm thinking, I just wish I could pay somebody
Speaker 1:To do it. 200. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, and there are people who will do it. Yeah. People that do smart home stuff, but it's not they make it seem like, hey, you can just set up this app. It's super easy. And it's crazy because I don't know.
Speaker 2:The last time I did it was, Arly was, opening up their new, their new showroom in Beverly Hills, and I, you know, I go over there. I'm trying to be helpful. I'm like, okay. Like, I'll I'll set up I'll get the audio working in the Sonos. And it ended up being, like, you know, this 90 minute, you know, sort of setup where I'm
Speaker 1:It has this thing where you
Speaker 2:really wanting to slam the Sonos to get to the wall. And I I I'm a pretty patient Yeah. Person.
Speaker 1:So During the setup, they have this thing where, like, you put in pairing mode and it's supposed to show up on the Wi Fi and it talks. And sometimes it gets it perfect. And when it works perfectly, it's amazing. And then other times, it'll just be like, hey. Like, we're not finding it on the Wi Fi.
Speaker 1:Like, would you mind, like, connecting it to the main Sonos via an Ethernet cable? And it's like, no. I don't have a 20 foot Ethernet cable on me right now, bro. Like, this is so unacceptable. And the main thing is just, like, the app got so slow.
Speaker 1:But the crazy thing is that, like, I heard about this, obviously, like, this all started this in 2024 last year, and the saga was kind of, like, a very bad last year. But even just a few years ago, they had such a bad app launch that they needed to deprecate their first app. Like, most of the time, it's like, oh, Instagram launches reels. Like, you don't you don't have, like, 2 Instagram apps on your phone.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Instagram just updates. Right? And that wasn't what Sonos did. They literally have the s one app and then the Sonos app, and the s one app is for older systems. And so
Speaker 2:here's the thing. Sonos should have gone through YC
Speaker 1:as a public company. They'd be like, look. Like, we we really haven't figured
Speaker 2:that we don't have this figured out. We don't know what people want.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We need we need we need help simplifying.
Speaker 1:You know what? One of the one of the narrative violation here with Sonos is is that everyone everyone says, like, hardware is hard. You can't build hardware as an American company. Like, DJI is crushing. But what did Sonos get right?
Speaker 1:Like, I'm not a super crazy audio file. I'm sure there's audio files that'll say, oh, Sonos doesn't actually sound that good. But to me, it sounds fine. It sounds nice. And an industrial design, I think it looks fine.
Speaker 1:I think it looks good. You put it on the wall or you put it in the house. I think it looks nice. I think it's high quality. The actual hardware's never broken on me.
Speaker 1:I've never had a speaker, like, actually just break or anything.
Speaker 2:No. And it is rely yeah. Physical hardware.
Speaker 1:It's reliable. Totally.
Speaker 2:It's funny because it's just the software. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and that's an area of normally, it's like America is great at software. We have great b to b software. We're on the frontier of AI software, but we're lagging in hardware. And with this, it's like Sonos delivered on the hardware side.
Speaker 1:They did the hard part, and then they just couldn't get the app to work, which is crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One one cool note, they were actually when they were incorporated, they incorporated as RingCon Audio.
Speaker 1:Oh, ring
Speaker 2:RingCon, I don't know if you know, is the is the most iconic surf spot in Santa Barbara.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Assuming, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Assuming these guys were spending more time surfing than developing the software once, especially in the later in the later in the later, period. It is interesting to compare this. So tying this to something like Anduril, which is making hardware and software Yep. For our military, it's hard enough to make speakers Yep.
Speaker 2:That you just plug into a wall, connect to your Wi Fi Yeah. And then just want to play music. That is difficult to do. Yep. And that puts into the context how difficult it is for Anduril to put hardware devices tied to their software into war zones that have electronic warfare happening, new environments Bullets flying.
Speaker 2:Bullets flying, bomb bombs going off, enemies, like, trying to kill you. And so and sure, you know, the the, every military contractor, you know, puts stuff in the field and and has issues with it and they try to improve it, but it just goes to show, you know, how hard a lot of these new defense tech founders that are coming in and saying, Sonos is a public company with 12 offices, bunch of retail stores, 100 of employees, 1,000,000,000 of dollars in revenue, and they can't even get their speakers to reliably work in their home, without pissing off consumers. Right? It's fine for us consumers where I'm like, well, I have dinner guests coming over and I just wanna play music. But if you're, like, trying to operate like an Android drone in the field, like, that soldier, like, doesn't have another life Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you fuck it up. Right?
Speaker 1:I would imagine the culture has just gotta be way different, though. You know, Andrew, it's like Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a different level of seriousness.
Speaker 1:Yeah. With this, it's like, hey, it's a 20 year old company. It's in Santa Barbara. A little bit more casual. Not no longer founder mode because the founder stepped down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And maybe that's part of the problem.
Speaker 2:Do we get Yeah.
Speaker 1:So early deep dives and we
Speaker 2:can Yeah. So credit credit to them, you know, the the areas where the the I think they've done well. They were early, 2,002. Yeah. Like, early to be doing a smart home audio system, and the design has always been great, and the heart and and the we talked about it, but the sort of physical reliability of of the actual devices.
Speaker 1:Do you know, the story of what the guy did before? So the founder is John MacFarlane, and now they do over $1,000,000,000 a year in business. And the company was founded back in 2002 when most people were listening to music on CDs. At that time, music streaming was barely a thing. There was Rhapsody, but very few people used it.
Speaker 1:If you wanted surround sound in your house, you had to wire it up and drill into your walls and connect the speakers. It was expensive. Like, getting a nice sound system in your house is just a 100 k. It was so so you could start building a collection with, like, a $300 speaker, a $1,000 soundbar, and for, like, 5 k all in, you'd have, like, a really solid setup. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But before he I I I don't know where it is, but before he started this, he owned software.com.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Isn't that a great domain? And that company had gone public in 1999, and they merged with phone.com.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Isn't that amazing? Let's to become Openware, the major early player in mobile email. When the dotcom crash hit, they left and decided to start something new. Their insight was that wireless networking was the next major wave. After dismissing an idea to do in flight wireless, they founded they focused on multi room audio seeing the rise of m p threes and Napster and Napster.
Speaker 1:People were starting to put Wi Fi in their homes, so the founders wanted to leverage that to play digital music seamlessly in every room.
Speaker 2:We gotta do a deep dive on the merger between phone.com and software.com.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Amazing.
Speaker 2:One of
Speaker 1:the most iconic Yeah. 2 of the most iconic domains of all time. Is is Which which which every time.com at the time.
Speaker 2:If I was investing in in in that in the in the combined company, I'd be looking at it and saying, alright. Well, software.com, $10,000,000 domain minimum. Phone.com, I give it almost 10. Yeah. So between the 2 of them, look.
Speaker 2:This is $20,000,000 company.
Speaker 1:I'm sure it was trading at, like, 2,000,000,000. Yes.
Speaker 2:Trade
Speaker 1:it's And they probably had nothing under the hood. It wouldn't be extremely hard to do the TB award for domain acquisition of the year during in, like, 1990 9.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because there was just
Speaker 1:We should be with Flashback.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the greatest domain acquisition of 1990
Speaker 2:We should dress up as, like, as your father's, you know, with wigs.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think we've talked about mp3.com. They went public with just the domain and the business plan. No software written.
Speaker 2:That's so crazy. $100,000,000. Crazy. One one iconic, jumping ahead a little bit, one iconic moment in Sonos history is when they decided to partner with IKEA Oh, really? The other consumer product company that makes people wanna kill themselves during setup.
Speaker 2:Really an incredible Restoration Hardware. Since there's this, IKEA and Sonos announced a collaboration to build Sonos' technology into furniture sold IKEA. So you you after 4 hours, you've got you've got this, you know, like, desk set up. And then the and the real task begins. You're all warmed up, and now you gotta set up the smart speaker.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That thing's really funny. I didn't notice, but they they used this, like, super famous branding firm to come up with a name, Lexicon Branding, with and Lexicon had come up with the name Pentium Swiffer.
Speaker 2:We talked to them briefly You did? About naming the podcast.
Speaker 1:Oh. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We ended up with they wanted, like, a few hundred grand. We ended up going with someone more expensive. Yeah. But, it ended up being worth it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pentium, Swiffer, Blackberry, PowerBook, and Zune. Sonos is a palindrome and part of the logo design can be flipped or turned sideways. Still reading Sonos.
Speaker 2:Naming agencies have to be, like, the best the best business models. Incredible. Because after you get a couple bangers like Blackberry and stuff like that, it's just like, yeah. We'll name your company. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's, you know, it's a 100 yeah. And it's probably gonna be like $1,000,000. It's gonna be like $1,000,000. It's gonna take 12 months. And then it's just and then it's just a group like us being like
Speaker 1:You know that there's a there's, like, a whole separate industry of, like, naming firms just for, pharmaceuticals? You know, you always I bet. Because, like, you you always hear these names like Ozempic. It's like it sounds like a it sounds like a English word, but it doesn't trace its roots from anything. Like, where does it come from?
Speaker 1:And, I was I was trying to get LLMs to kinda, like, create more drug names, and it was really hard. Like, it is, like, somewhat of an intractable problem
Speaker 2:that, like,
Speaker 1:you need you need just some sort of human to
Speaker 2:come up with. Matter a lot.
Speaker 1:But but the Sonos name is incredible. And I remember first the first time I flipped the speaker over in the in the palindrome, like, it's the logo reads correctly whether you mount the speaker like this or like this upside down, which is actually an amazing feature for a speaker if you mounted.
Speaker 2:I wonder if it still reads correctly if you throw it off at 20 story building.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If it shatters into a 1000000 pieces, can you still read it? I think people know. Like, they're just like, oh, it's a smash speaker. It must be a Sona.
Speaker 1:So frustrated its owner. Yeah. You gotta you gotta calm down with all the robot abuse because when when the robots rise up, they're gonna be like, this guy's, like, a serial killer.
Speaker 2:No. I respect robots. I'm trying to give them guns. I'm trying to give them ARs. We're we're working on this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, I mean, I have a you have a call robot apocalypse, a solo speaker will be, like, the lowest cast.
Speaker 2:Have you seen the guy on on Instagram that I send you these? He's got chat gpt hooked up to his
Speaker 1:Go there, sir.
Speaker 2:I'm talking to him in, like, 2 hours.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:Good. You wanna jump on? It's gonna be great.
Speaker 1:That's great. Let's go through some other stuff. I mean, for a long time, they were doing really well. 93% of Sonos speakers that sold in the last 13 years are active today. So people just mount them, and then they just stay forever.
Speaker 1:But not for long with given how bad the app is. It's so bad. Active. And and and they're posting like, oh, we still we still do over the air updates for products even from 2005, and it's like, yeah. But those work with a different app, bro.
Speaker 1:Like, come on.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. Normally, when you when, hardware companies the real concern is that you ship, you ship hardware that ends up being malfunctional, and then you have all this hardware that needs to be replaced.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it's interesting that their problems seem to be just totally opposite of what the typical concern is for hardware founders. Software is always like, oh, that's easy. We'll just ship updates and fix it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But this is a fascinating little timeline. So, 2,002, they incorporate. They changed their name. They were Ring Con.
Speaker 1:They changed their name to Sonos in 2004. So these guys clearly made money in the dotcom boom because they're just like they haven't really raised that much money They're throwing cash back. Years. But then they they launched their first prototype, which is just it it actually links into existing speakers. So they weren't even making speakers.
Speaker 1:It was just an amp that then would connect to, like, whatever speakers you had.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:And and that still exists. And that and that's very cool. If you have a if you have a speaker system, can just plug in the Sonos thing or at least it used to be before the app went to shit. But, so it went pretty well. Walt Mossberg, called it easily the best music streaming product he had tested.
Speaker 1:It cost $1200. It was expensive. Sales were slow, but they kept iterating. In 2006, they added support for Rhapsody. 20 2007, the iPhone arrived.
Speaker 1:Before that, you had to have, like, a dedicated Sonos controller, which is, like, a really low budget iPad, basically. It was cool, but it was, like, really junk. It's like a universal remote. Like, it's gonna be crappy. The so they launched the iPhone controller app in 2008 instead of their hardware controller, much better Android app in 2011, 3 years later.
Speaker 1:Wow. Really disrespectful. I guess Android was pretty new. And then by 2012, they phased out their own controller altogether. In 2009, they released the Play 5, the s 5, which is their standalone wireless speaker.
Speaker 1:This was $400, and that was in the more mainstream market. And then by 2010, they raised 25,000,000 from Index, and they launched the Play 3 at 299. So they're really going down market, and this is when everyone started buying these things. They integrated Spotify, and, in 2012, KKR led a $135,000,000
Speaker 2:And Redpoint. Pound. Redpoint?
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. Okay. Shout out to Logan. I another streaming service they integrated with that that does make sense is they integrated with Mog, m o g.
Speaker 1:What's that? Is this real?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. It's real.
Speaker 1:It's real. It's real.
Speaker 2:It's partnered with over a 100 streaming services, but mog is interesting to me because the Sonos mogs that users so are in the set up that it's just a match. It's a match. It's a perfect match, so I can see why they would partner there.
Speaker 1:Okay. You you imagine you've gone mong and it's all just, like, sigma male theme songs. Yeah. Like that. Like, it's all, it's all funk and and and drift core.
Speaker 1:Everything was slow.
Speaker 2:Honestly, though, but it's it they they you know, in 2012, they set up, this was around around the same time they did the KKR round. They set up, like an entire Sonos studio, which was like pretty cool and groundbreaking for a consumer electronics company. They had an art gallery, they would host different artists, Solange, Lonely Island, Beck, things like that. Mhmm. But to me it's way cooler that they work with such an iconic private equity firm like KKR.
Speaker 2:I mean Yeah. To to have KKR buy your equity is the kind of thing that every young man of one dream what, you know, dreams of.
Speaker 1:That might have been where the idea came from to cut costs and stop developing software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. Totally. I could see them coming in being like, okay. Where are your costs?
Speaker 2:Well, why don't you cut the CTO, the VP of engineering, the senior Every developer. And every developer. Take it offshore. Yep. No more h one b's.
Speaker 2:We're just cutting everything. Totally.
Speaker 1:This is a hilarious, anecdote. So, when they launched it, all things d, they, this is, what, 2,000 2005? 2,000 yeah. 2005, they launched, the all thing d d conference. This was before Apple had announced the iPhone, before Apple had those, like, major keynotes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They were so early. You gotta get them early though. Even though they're not in they haven't been early to getting their net income positive.
Speaker 1:You they've been a little late on that.
Speaker 2:Well, what's on that front? But,
Speaker 1:but so so so Steve Jobs is at the all things d conference, and he introduced the Apple Airport Express, which is the Wi Fi router that Apple
Speaker 2:then. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They got the Apple TV the Apple TV, the Apple TV Plus, Apple TV Plus app on Apple TV. They did Apple TV Plus shows within Apple TV.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. So bad. But, at that conference, so Steve Jobs is, is announcing the Wi Fi router. And then, John, John MacFarlane is announcing the Sonos amplifier, and it's like a match made in heaven. Like, you should just go buy both of those because they're both gonna work really well.
Speaker 1:And but Steve Jobs is super pissed, and he goes up to John at the conference. He walked up, pounded on my chest, and said they'd sue us out of existence. I pushed because,
Speaker 2:Wait.
Speaker 1:So Steve Jobs goes up to John, the founder of Sonos, John MacFarlane, the founder of Sonos. And, basically, Sonos, the control, app to control, like, what music was playing where once you hook up the amplifier, it had a scroll wheel that was, like, derivative from the iPhone or from from the iPad. Remember the iPad scroll wheel?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 1:So so they'd use that same design element, and Steve was like, you stole that from us. And so he walks up to him, pounds him on the chest, and says, I'll sue you out of existence. And John pushes back, pointing out that we had no overlap with their patents. He checked. Steve Jobs checked, realized we were in the clear, and the relationship improved after that.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:But I like that Steve Jobs just walks up to him. He's just like, I haven't checked the patents, but you're wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny. It's funny because it would have been great for consumers in so many ways if Apple had acquired Sena because Apple is the best in the world at making it seamless to set up a device.
Speaker 1:And and software integration.
Speaker 2:Gotten so, so, so Yeah. Good. Yeah. I need to go buy a new iPhone at some point this week, and I'm not even worried about it. I'm gonna get in in and out of the Apple Store and Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you know I mean, they eventually launched a competitor. So they launched AirPlay 2, which which had Sonos like functionality, and then they've launched the, the HomePod and the HomePod 2.
Speaker 2:It is an mess. Right. It's such an interesting mess because they had so much legacy as a company in music. Yep. So many iconic campaigns.
Speaker 2:It would have been it would have made sense for Apple to like, I wish I could have Apple speakers on my desk, like, next to my Of course. Monitor.
Speaker 1:Used to be able to.
Speaker 2:And, it does seem again, it wouldn't have been a huge business line for them, but they probably it's a $100,000,000,000 annual revenue Yeah. Opportunity, and Apple could have probably gotten 20% of that or 10 10% of that at least. So it wouldn't have been as big as AirPods. So Patrick said when did all the like, we should get into the let's get into the drama.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You know, the stuff with Google, and there there was quite a bit with Amazon as well. Was there not?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I'm not sure. So Patrick Spence, the CEO who was just fired, he joined from BlackBerry in 2012. I know. I know.
Speaker 1:It really writes a song. But he was there for over a decade and I guess did pretty well, until
Speaker 2:What's he bought? What's the status of BlackBerry? Right?
Speaker 1:And so yeah. I mean, the I I think the drama you're alluding to is that, Amazon, Google, and Apple all realized that, well, kind of dumb speakers were not particularly critical to their core business strategy and, like, their value chain. Once you put the AI assistant in them and you connect them to the Internet, then they become an important Yeah.
Speaker 2:Point. And I and I we it'd be interesting to understand. I think that Amazon, what what needed to be in the market because they assume that people would just be walking around their home and be like, hey, Alexa, order more paper towels. Yeah. And I I I had an Alexa, and I actually never I don't have any visceral angry moments with my Alexa, so they did a good job and and they did did well.
Speaker 2:The sound quality was never as good Yep. As Sonos, but they did well in terms of setup and usability. But I think they were thinking, okay, this is like a new ordering mechanism where the place that consumers go to purchase Yep. Like, we need to be here. Maybe didn't really turn out to be the case, and voice, I feel like, has just continued to take l after l.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Even even air chat shut down. I don't know if you Oh,
Speaker 1:they did. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's see that. And and people were saying, like, okay. If if this didn't make it, this was the best shot on goal for audio. Like, it maybe just isn't the thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, but they also had run ins with Google.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So so so, basically, the set of stage, like, 2012, they raised that round from KKR. They launched a a $200 speaker, so it's much easier to get into the Sonos ecosystem. And from from late 2013 to late 2014, the revenue grew by 75%.
Speaker 1:So, like, they're really taking off at this time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But then simultaneously, in 2014, Amazon announced the Echo and Alexa at $99 for Prime subscribers. Sonos had never considered building its own voice assistant, and the smart speaker era took them by surprise. Mcfarland later admitted that they were late to recognize the impact of voice in mid 2016. Sonos finally missed
Speaker 2:Blackberry goes, nobody's ever gonna wanna type on on a a glass. It's just not gonna happen. Boom. But notice this guy, nobody wants their speaker speakers to be smart. Our users like that it takes 45 minutes to set up one of your 6 speakers.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think just this is another case of, like, slop being massively underrated. Like Yeah. I think that, you know, I'm not a crazy audiophile, but I can tell the difference between, like, a nice surround sound sort of setup Yeah. Like an Amazon Echo.
Speaker 2:So But I think many care. I wasn't I had never I've never I enjoy music. Yeah. I don't enjoy live music typically just because the crowds and stuff like that. I I rarely go to concerts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, the my neighbor is the biggest audiophile that I've ever met. This guy is Stefan Simkiewicz. He's a pretty high profile art collector, and, he if you go in his house, there's just speakers everywhere. Like, every surface.
Speaker 2:And it is truly incredible, but all the stuff he does is is he's like, this amp is made from this guy in Denmark, and he makes 10 of these a year. And he's been doing it, and it's like watchmaking in a way. So I think we should eventually get
Speaker 1:Yeah. You gotta come around on live music. I'll take you to the LA Phil. We'll see Didymel.
Speaker 2:The Phil is the Phil is different. I don't I don't like being in I don't like being in places where there's sweaty strangers.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm imagining, like, a box. Yeah. Yeah. Some champagne.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Phil Phil
Speaker 1:How how do people do live music in a different way?
Speaker 2:Don't act like you've never been to Hard Summer.
Speaker 1:EDC. EDC. Yeah. You didn't
Speaker 2:you went to the first EDC. Right?
Speaker 1:No. Not the first one. This is a long time ago.
Speaker 2:Long time ago. I was not born yet.
Speaker 1:Was this born? It was it was, 2003. Yeah. Okay. It was
Speaker 2:I was yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, oh, yeah. The the other thing is that, car speakers. Are you familiar with this stuff? So, basically, there's a there's this guy that designed the perfect arrangement of speakers. He, like, ripped out the dash and custom, like, 3 d printed a mold for perfectly placed speakers in a car that where the audio quality is just 10 times better than anything you'd get, even like a Bentley or a Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mercedes or Rolls Royce. But what they found was that when they actually tried to market that technology, no one cared. They all just wanted a headline number number of speakers, number of
Speaker 2:Or Bose.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or Bose. Exactly.
Speaker 2:By the
Speaker 1:way, sir yeah.
Speaker 2:I blew out one of the subwoofers in my in my turbo. Yeah. It's so annoying. I I I I kept having to turn down the bass. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I was, like, that just doesn't sound that good. It's rattling. And then I real and then I actually made it worse because, like, I was
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:So I have to take it in, but it hasn't been a priority.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's brutal. I'm so sorry, man. That's, like, the roughest thing I've ever heard. I mean Alright. There's people whose houses burned down, but, I mean, you're right out there with them.
Speaker 1:God. Yeah. So, yeah, send Jordy a comment. Tell him thoughts and prayers for his, broken speaker and his turbo. But yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, lots of competition. Obviously, the I I I I think the success of the Alexa and and the Google Home is just, like, check the boxes on features and make it super, super cheap, and you'll just get crazy distribution. And people will put up with some of the other other junk because
Speaker 2:it's Yeah. I don't and it's interesting if you think about how there was a phase where it seemed like people cared about audio, and Beats by Dre was part of this, but I don't think that people that was still a status symbol. Right? Like, people just wanted to wear the Beats by Dre. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then, AirPods are the same thing. People clear the average consumer clearly does not care about audio quality. Yeah. Right? They're not optimizing for that.
Speaker 1:It's about signaling to people that you're
Speaker 2:not afraid of EMF. Exactly. You're not afraid to Not afraid. Microwave your head.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I I don't live in fear.
Speaker 2:Do not live in fear. Yeah. The EMFs have a positive effect.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:But yeah. So so this is interesting. So in January 2020, Sonos, sued Google over copyright infringement
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:Relating to several patents, including the ability to sync audio over multiple devices. In August 2021, a judge ruled in favor of Sonos. The International Trade Commission also ruled in favor of Sonos. As a result, Google was ordered to remove certain features from its devices, including group volume control. That's gotta be so annoying to get ordered by the ITC to make your product worse, basically.
Speaker 2:Google was ordered to pay Sonos 32,000,000 in damages, which is literally nothing. So I'm sure Google was like, okay. Like Yeah. Whatever. However, a a judge tossed out the verdict in October and criticized Sonos for abusing the patent system.
Speaker 2:Wow. Following the verdict, Google redeployed the features it had previously removed.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And, anyways, so Yeah. So not not the first Everyone
Speaker 1:wants to
Speaker 2:or the last Sonos app.
Speaker 1:UI or UX innovations that you're just like, I get that you could patent this, but it'd be much nicer if this is just in every app. Like, pull to refresh was one of those. That was actually developed by, I think a company that Twitter bought. And then Twitter said, hey, we're not gonna defend the patent. Like, anyone So now you have Instagram.
Speaker 1:Everyone has it. Everybody has it basically. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I I it doesn't and and this this is this is
Speaker 1:know his dark pattern.
Speaker 2:This is the kind of stuff, like, founders will join YC. They've never built a company before, and they'll go into their first partner meeting, whatever. And they're like, yeah. We're filing our patents for this, and YC will give you the good advice of being like, you should absolutely not do that. That is total waste of time and money.
Speaker 2:Doesn't really matter. You can't, and patent stuff is is weird. Interestingly enough, the rich guys have just dealt with so much of this, because they actually have designed patents around a physical hardware device. And even that, they spend, like, a1000000 a year or more, like, just, like, going after people that are just ripping it off directly. Patents on Aurora?
Speaker 2:Or just A final on a patent.
Speaker 1:On a patent yet?
Speaker 2:I don't I don't actually think
Speaker 1:so. I got my first patent approved.
Speaker 2:On what?
Speaker 1:Breakers.
Speaker 2:Breakers.
Speaker 1:1st capsule nicotine pouch.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was a big moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like I was See, that's like that's IT. That's IP that that you can defend. It's important. Because if Philip Morris Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tries to come after it, you're gonna be able to come after them for, like, 100 of millions of sandwiches if they are selling a lot of
Speaker 1:yeah. But it's fine. I still gotta get the tombstone made of, like, the the plaque when you get, like, a patent. You can go and say, like, okay. I wanna buy, like, a, like, a trophy for Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that'd be cool. For the office. I I I don't think of myself as, like, an inventor, but, it it's cool to, like, have my name on a on a, technically, an invention. Yes.
Speaker 1:It's fun.
Speaker 2:A lot of designers in big tech will have gotten on patents at some point.
Speaker 1:Engineers. I know a guy who developed a Google Cloud Platform, like their AWS competitor, and he has a ton of patents around, like, how cloud computing works. It's, like, really cool. And, like, I think they get a
Speaker 2:An interesting thing where you don't yeah. You don't you don't own anything related to it, but you get a little
Speaker 1:bit of from Google, and then he went to another start up, and then another one made tons of money. Like, he he's all good. He's okay.
Speaker 2:Anyways, where are they where are they today?
Speaker 1:Struggling. Stocks down.
Speaker 2:In 2020 in May 2023, their their revenue they had a 24% drop in revenue. Yep. They've had a bunch of layoffs, which is unfortunate because it is a big employer in Santa Barbara. And there's not a ton of, technology companies here.
Speaker 1:I wonder where they should go. Like, should they get acquired by Apple or someone? Like, would that even get through? Like, Alina Khan's out, maybe the antitrust stuff is a little bit looser.
Speaker 2:I don't think Apple too late. I don't think Apple Would you would actually buy them now because think about it. Hey. We could spend we already have AirPods. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have audio devices that do crazy numbers. Really We have the best You
Speaker 1:you know Sonos launched headphones? They launched a headphone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They were, like it's, like, why would I want buggier headphones? Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because they're I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I think they're they're not gonna get bought by Apple because Apple could be, like, well, why don't we spend a $1,000,000,000 developing a better speaker and sell it through our thousands of stores.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I mean, they've been doing that and it hasn't really been working, like, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But also clearly, known as it isn't working. One thing one thing is that the phone the phone kills speakers in so many ways. One of them is that I will often just put, like, the the as the phone speakers gotten louder Oh, yeah. My need for speakers
Speaker 1:You just listen to it.
Speaker 2:Because, like, what what's the song we use for the Ashley Vance piece that's dropped yet?
Speaker 1:The, right above it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the
Speaker 2:the the the the all you needed is it
Speaker 1:Often in the morning, I would go into the kitchen and make my son breakfast, and I used to go to Sonos and try and put on some music. And it got too hard, and so I'll just play for my phone. Seriously, like, it's just like it was phone speaker's fine. Like, he doesn't care. I don't care.
Speaker 1:Whatever. I'm just putting on some
Speaker 2:Honestly, take your Sonos, hang out with your kids, take it apart. I used to really I used to really my dad used to see that with with, old electronics with me and my brother. He would just say, like, let's take this apart. He'd be like, this is this.
Speaker 1:I mean, honestly, like, turning it into a dumb speaker is, like, pretty good. Because, like, this is fine.
Speaker 2:Wire them up. Wire them up. Well, apparently, you know, when you put 2 cans in a string, you know, something like needs to be that dumb. Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 2:Anyways, I I hope they turn it around. I think I think if they just make smarter smart speakers, continue to focus on design, actually get their software right, there's definitely, there's definitely a $1,000,000,000 revenue business here, they've done damage to their brand, but I hope that, I hope, I hope one of these founders comes back and says, you know what? I'm gonna come I'm gonna buy speaker.com, form a new company, merge it with Sonos, do a reverse take private, and, you know, come out speaker.com. Yeah. You know, run it back because, yeah, the founder does, if SPACs are back, speaker.com, SPAC it, acquire Sonos, fresh start.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the real lesson here is, like, if you're frustrated with being a Sonos customer, like, you'd be better being, like, a seed seed investor in Sonos and have sold at the top. Yeah. Just make the money. Just be on the be on the capital side instead of the consumer side.
Speaker 2:This is like your your word of advice to those, the ski patrollers. It was just like, try out, you know, instead of being a ski patroller, be you know, get into private equity, you know, launch your own $1,000,000,000 fund and just buy a place in
Speaker 1:the parks. Guys are all doing well enough that they can just have a, a full time audio engineer on staff and then they ever
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or just a live string quartet.
Speaker 2:Hey. That's probably the better.
Speaker 1:Just have a string quartet in your house.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Be a patron of the arts. You know? Have a guitarist
Speaker 1:that
Speaker 2:you use in certain ways.
Speaker 1:Someone that plays the harp.
Speaker 2:A drummer. Good morning. A drummer.
Speaker 1:A drummer.
Speaker 2:You know, the the, you know, the, like, Peruvian style drum.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That'd be great. Having somebody play mute you know, the Apple alarm clock app, I really complained about it. Yeah. It's terrible. I'm, like, dragging this thing around.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It'd be it. It's very it's very confusing where you're like, woah. Is the alarm on?
Speaker 2:You don't really Okay. Is the volume right? Like, there's a lot of stuff about it that I don't think is great, but I really should just stop complaining, hire, you know, somebody to play the violin for a $120 a year. Yeah. And all they have to do is just show up and play start playing the violin out of my window at 4.
Speaker 1:So you can get to the gym.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's good. Anyways, interesting company. Go, if you're looking to, for a challenge, go buy Sonos. It's a it's a great American company.
Speaker 2:And,
Speaker 1:do you say buy a Sonos or buy Sonos? Both. Both. Take a private. Turn them around.
Speaker 2:Turn them around.
Speaker 1:I think for our audience, the the latter will be more relevant.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right. That was great.
Speaker 1:Cool. Let's move on to the timeline. Let's go to Moses Kagan. He says, if you didn't get much from those before you financially, morally, or whatever, you have the opportunity to be a very specific type of hero, the founder of your family.
Speaker 2:I I I put this in because, I feel like you've been you've been, you know, tooting this horn, beating that drum for a while around creating new traditions, traditions. And, yeah. I think it's important. I don't wanna I don't wanna go out and say that this I this resonated with me, but I because I think it's a mentality that everyone can have. I think it's the same thing.
Speaker 2:If you're an employee, act like a founder. Right? Like, how would you
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, what would what would your founder do in that situation?
Speaker 1:Doing agentic. Just
Speaker 2:Yeah. That you can do. So, yeah, I don't wanna you know, my parents had had good traditions, and there's a lot that that I, you know, carry on. But at the same time, you can creating that family is more than just creating the humans and getting married. It's more but it's more than about having kids.
Speaker 2:It's about creating
Speaker 1:The culture.
Speaker 2:The culture of the family. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the financials, obviously.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The generation as well. Yeah. Yeah. And and, the the trust funds.
Speaker 1:The trust funds. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Speaking of Deliver nepotism.
Speaker 1:You need to be delivering. 100%. Nick Saint Pierre says, someone should start a weekend man school that teaches men how to be men. Proposed curriculum, grappling, carpentry, fire starting, cooking meat, fixing flat tires, public speaking, power tools 101, knife sharpening, conflict resolution, barbecue mastery, basic survival skills, basic electrical work, fitness fundamentals, sourcing healthy food, emergency preparedness, electronic troubleshooting, how to shake a hand like a man, fixes for common household problems.
Speaker 2:So I'll take this one step further. I think this would be great as a, parent kid class. Right? Where because I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't do this solo.
Speaker 1:I agree. I agree. I'm not gonna go on
Speaker 2:a Saturday and be like It's weird. Tell your wife, hey. I'm gonna go hang out for 8 hours and learn barbecue mastery. But it'd be like, why don't you just barbecue for us? You know?
Speaker 2:But if I said, hey. I'm gonna take the kids, and we're gonna go how to pick lock. Yep. Learn how to pick locks. That's cool.
Speaker 2:We're gonna learn how to start a car
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, without a key. Now I'm just going after the the the ones that are, really disastrous situations.
Speaker 1:Mozart didn't have to ask people how to rate concertos, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:there's a little bit of, like, if you're the type of person that needs this, like, man school, like, you're maybe not No.
Speaker 2:Again again, this is kind of stuff that you know, my my dad taught me how to tie knots and widdle and start a fire and stuff like that. But there's also other stuff on that list that he
Speaker 1:Man school is just hanging out with your dad, maybe. Yeah. Like, there's a little bit of, like, what you've just described is, like, maybe
Speaker 2:it's not people's
Speaker 1:own thing. Maybe it's just, like, actively being a part of their family.
Speaker 2:Recreating life. This is like with PMF or Die. We're recreating life. Right? For recreating, locking in.
Speaker 2:We're productizing locking in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There is this relentless pursuit of of productization here where it's like, do you need a course for this, or can you just go do it? Like, a lot of these things, it's like, go watch a YouTube video, buy a book on it, and you'll just know how to do it, or just practice and learn from first principles. Like, you can just barbecue, and the first steak you make will be burnt, and then the 4th one will be delicious. Like, it's not it's not that insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, let's go to Jordan Schneider. He says, real talk, and he's quoting Rune. He says, the thing about America is that it's clearly always functioning at, like, 10% of its power level due to the cost of freedom and yet manages to win anyway due to the incredible benefits of freedom. Counterexample is like China, which can reorient the entire ocean liner of its economy in a new direction if they want to go to war against COVID or whatever, and yet managed to fuck it up.
Speaker 1:So old this is a throwback post. Good resurface from January 16, 2023.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think so I think there's an entire, an opportunity for a poster to get 100 of thousands of followers, and their entire job is just re resurfacing icon. Bangers. Yeah. Because right now, the algorithm actually much prefers a screenshot like that than a quote tweet.
Speaker 2:Totally. And so your job is to be the archivist of x. Yeah. Just go back, find Steinman Bangers from from 2017 Yep. When he's or, you know, 2017, he's in the trenches in Washington Yeah.
Speaker 2:Saying the same stuff that he's saying now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go find, you know, Rune's, like, first true banger.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:know? Yeah. Resurface it. Yeah. So resurface that.
Speaker 1:That's that's curator.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Curator. It's good. But, yeah, you could easily get a 100,000 followers doing that.
Speaker 1:But I I like the core point there because you see like, it is very easy to, like, lean into authoritarianism because you're just like, wow. Things are so dysfunctional over here right now. Like, wouldn't it be amazing if, like, the government could just come in and, like, build high speed rail in, like, 2 seconds? And it's like, that would be good, but what would it cost? Like, the cost would be freedom, potentially, and, it's often just like this hidden cost that just, like, sits there in the background.
Speaker 1:You don't really take it for advantage take take it for granted. It's easy to take it for granted. So good post. We should go to a promoted post. It's been
Speaker 2:I'm following. So I'm jumping into a promoted post. I don't have it printed out today, but it is a cool one. So we recently acquired an iconic four letter domain, from, our, domain broker, Rob Schutz. No.
Speaker 2:Rob. Rob. Rob. Cool background. He was, he was one of the founders of Roman and also Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Bark. Bark.
Speaker 1:Box. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bark. Let me confirm.
Speaker 1:You're just Bark company. I yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know if he's here, but
Speaker 2:he's Yeah. So, anyways, started some really big companies and just got obsessed with domains. And so as he phased out from Roe, he decided to launch Snag. It's at snagged on x or snag.com. And he was able to help us get this amazing 4letter.com.
Speaker 2:I sent him the domain that we wanted at, like, 6 AM. He had secured it by and done an entire deal to secure it at a ridiculously low price by, I think, like, 9 AM. It was, like, the fastest turnaround, so he's he's amazing. But I wanted to, I wanted to highlight. So, back in 90 this is a post from from the Snagd County.
Speaker 2:It says back in 94, the Internet was a total free for all. You could grab almost any domain, and in many cases, domain registrations were free. At the time, Chris Clark was a 29 year old time, Chris Clark was a 29 year old consultant in Mary lamb Mer Maryland. On a whim, he registered pizza.com. Why?
Speaker 2:He thought maybe, just maybe, some pizza business would bite on his domain, but nobody did. So he slapped some ads on it, made a little cash, and left it to collect digital dust for 14 years. Fast forward to 2,008, Chris heard that vodka.com sold for 3,000,000. So he listed his domain with a starting bid of a $100. The next morning, it was at half a1000000, and by the end of the auction, it hit 2,600,000.
Speaker 2:What? The buyer, a shady company which ended up getting busted for money laundering. They couldn't handle their dough. Rob's a great writer. Wow.
Speaker 2:What a great story. Even though even though pizza.com is still out there, it's stuck in the early 2000 with his sites and aesthetics and info. No major pizza chain has ever bought it. Chris' one regret, not registering more domains back in the day. Opportunity knocks, but patience.
Speaker 2:That's how you win. So what's the next pizza.com? Only time will tell. So that's so insane. Imagine being 94.
Speaker 2:You're just, like, registering. And people were doing this a little bit with ETH addresses. Right? Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:And salon addresses. And I I knew I knew somebody who had, like, youtube.sol or something like that. And it's like, I just don't see Google, like, actually buying that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But,
Speaker 1:anyways some great ones out there if
Speaker 2:you read and see the future. Can't speak highly enough.
Speaker 1:But I love that because, you think about domain brokerage, and it's like a pretty boring behind the scenes job, but amazing content marketing. That sounds like a great account to follow just to get interesting tidbits of Internet history, and I just love that so much. So shout out to him. And if you're looking for a domain, hit him up and tell the tell him the Technology Brothers sent you. Let's move on to a bucket poll.
Speaker 1:Jordy, we got one from Ben. He says, yes, professor. Due to my brain rot diagnosis diagnosis, I need to have subway surfers playing during every lecture. Somehow, this got no likes when we printed it out. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Wait. So, Ben, so, Ben, this this is the guy
Speaker 2:who had just he was putting posting bangers all morning. I was like, we need to hire this guy.
Speaker 1:I love this guy. This is fantastic. Very funny. The subway surfers is, such a such a meme. I wonder how much the subway surfer trend is real or if, like, the Gen z kids are, like, in on it.
Speaker 1:Do you think that they're do you think that they're, like, aware of, like, the brain rot and it's, like, they're laughing with it? Or do you think there are some people that are actually, like, this is more engaging? Yeah. What do you think?
Speaker 2:I whenever I pull them up, I just look at it. I'm like, I'm so annoyed that this this
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This other video is playing. Yeah. But but it's partially because I was born like, I I I'm 5 days too old to be Gen z Sure. Or something like that. So it's like, I just think I'm not.
Speaker 2:It's just a different generation. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The other if you're sure things, like, if you look at, like, ESPN or CNBC, like, those have brain rot elements where there'll be tickers at the bottom, picture in picture. You go to Bloomberg, and it's like someone's talking while they're giving you the news facts on the side. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:This idea of having a feed of content that's that's sending you multiple pieces of information all at once, like, it's definitely a thing. Yeah. Okay. We got a Yeah.
Speaker 2:We do that on our we do that on our videos. Yeah. We do that. Don't realize that there's a lot of alpha in the ticker
Speaker 1:In the ticker.
Speaker 2:On when I repost videos on x.
Speaker 1:Yep. TBSPN. Let's go to Trey Stevens. He says the offer is still on the table, Jason. We We had over a quarter million raised for charity within just a couple hours.
Speaker 1:Maybe don't chicken out this time at scientist at Palmer Lucky. And so, this was a clip from the All In podcast where Jason Kalakanis and, Dave Friedberg were discussing J. Cal getting in the ring with Palmer Luckey and, Trey, who loves fighting sports, was offering to get in the ring. A lot of people were talking about this. This is during COVID when this first broke.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting that Jason Jason loves attention more than anyone. Yeah. That's that's very clear. He has leveraged it in a you know, and mostly, you know, he's built an accelerator.
Speaker 2:He's got his fund. He's got all this stuff. He's definitely played the his game well.
Speaker 1:And he understands that, like, you need attention is attention whether it's possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But he tip you know, he he is a bully.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting that as soon as soon as the bully is actually getting invited saying step into the ring Yep. He's saying, oh, you know, it's, I don't wanna do his excuse was that he that Palmer was, like, much younger or something like that. I thought
Speaker 1:it was that Trey was, like, the mountain, he said, or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but Jason could just get off Ozempic Yeah. And just get huge. Yeah. He's got he can train.
Speaker 2:He can hire Zach's MMA coach.
Speaker 1:Only thing I I think he said that Trey is younger than him.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is it I mean,
Speaker 1:Trey and Palmer are both younger than Jason.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but, I mean, Mike didn't stop Mike Tyson from stepping in the ring. 60 year old man.
Speaker 1:Yeah. See it. I mean, I I
Speaker 2:don't like the excuse. It's it's a duck. In in UFC, it's called ducking.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:Where a fight and Jon Jones has been doing this with, the the champ, I forget his name, the the, champion out of, the UK where he just is making up all these excuses saying, well, I need $50,000,000 if I wanna fight him. Or, it just doesn't make sense. That fight doesn't make sense for me right now. And Jason would clearly just rather keep antagonizing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, on the timeline.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't know for at this point, I'm I've been, like, fooled too many I've gotten my, my, like, excitement levels up too many times with the Zuck Elon fight.
Speaker 2:Why hasn't there been a
Speaker 1:high profile The highest profile one is literally Nick Carter, and that was, like, pretty tiny.
Speaker 2:But that was very crypto. That was Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it it I don't even think well, he was going to fight the bankless guys. Right? But then the bankless guy, got an injury and posted a photo of, like, he slipped a disc or something. And so he was like, I'm sorry. I just can't fight you because I'm, like, injured.
Speaker 2:And there was a big guy. There was another big, Onsome in crypto. Okay. Got the got the in the bit boy crypto guy. They were fighting.
Speaker 2:And there's there's Yeah. They had
Speaker 1:to fight?
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's shots of, BitBoy getting an as like, asthma. I was thinking, like, mid
Speaker 1:fight. Sam Hyde fights someone too. Look. YouTubers are really good at this. Like, the the content No.
Speaker 1:And and Bryce
Speaker 2:what's the guy? Bryce Hall? Bryce Hall has gone into bare knuckle boxing and performed. Really? He has done well.
Speaker 2:And bare knuckle's gnarly because if you make a mistake or you get clipped, like, your entire lip will get cut off. Like Luke Rockhold, the the former UFC Yeah. Middleweight went in and was fighting, god. What's it? Mike Perry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, Luke just gave up midway because he was his face was getting and this is a former UFC champion. His face was getting so damaged. Yeah. He just was like, I'm not gonna do this.
Speaker 2:And Bryce Hall goes in and does that Yeah. Does well.
Speaker 1:The fight club stuff's tough because, like, it's really hard to balance out all the different factors. Like, even the Zuck, Elon fight, it's like I think Elon has, like, 5 inches of height on Zuck, something like that. And and so he's
Speaker 2:much bigger. Size matters.
Speaker 1:Size really does matter, but then Zuck's been training for a lot longer. So it it depends on, like, if the fight was today, maybe Zuck's technique would work. But if you give him a year
Speaker 2:Technique, so
Speaker 1:the Elon might get up to speed. So it really was, like, 5050 for me.
Speaker 2:You take 2 amateurs
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And size is going to must always do it unless it's MMA where you can get a knockout.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I am so training
Speaker 2:for jiu jitsu
Speaker 1:but not just his entire life.
Speaker 2:Jujitsu is cool. Yep. Because smaller dudes can just destroy like, size matters less. Like, I I would have, like, all my I would have, like, a bunch of, buddies around Malibu over to do jujitsu. Rob from from Huberman would come, and some other, dad friends.
Speaker 2:And and it's just funny you have, like, a former, like, Ole Miss linebacker
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just kidding.
Speaker 2:Fighting, like, a college, like, basketball player. And they're, like, super even. Yeah. And now, like, they just in a true street fight, I could probably wouldn't
Speaker 1:Isn't there I saw someone on next talking about, doing some sort of, like, founder fight club. They wanted us to fight.
Speaker 2:That was Chris. Chris. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I thought it was kinda funny. Let's go to Atlas creatine cycle. He says, many of you used to be technology accounts. Is he just reflecting on, like, the shift to politics?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I felt like this was a a sub subtweeted subtweeted me. Of you. But it was actually just everybody, but it it was, as, you know, the fires, I think, catalyzed a bunch of people to say, I'm gonna stop posting about the pack for a few days and just focus on mayor mayor Karen and and the Newsom fires.
Speaker 1:And you stack all that on top of what happened to your speaker in your car, then you must have just been rocked. So makes sense that you're, you know, just broke. Broke character. Couldn't talk about tech anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Couldn't talk about tech.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to be I'm happy to be back talking about tech. You we got so you do well, I gotta sit in
Speaker 1:for Deep Dove. And, and we could get back into tech. Because there's there's still really interesting stuff going on. But but when big political things happen, like, you gotta address them because, tech is increasingly political because the stakes are so high. The the businesses are so large.
Speaker 1:And, you know, Elon is at Mar a Lago hanging out with Trump, and so, clearly, technology and politics are are gonna be continue continue to intertwine for a long time. Yeah. But, yeah, you can't ever slip fully into politics. It's just it's just boring. Should we do another promoted post?
Speaker 2:Let's see here.
Speaker 1:We We have on some lucky groom or you wanna move on?
Speaker 2:I actually got a promoted post from, our, Sean and Connor and Sean, sent this over. Connor and Sean over at the Ridge Wallet. They say 500 free ish Ridge Wallet's up for grabs. We donated $50,000 to LA Fire Relief this week, and are trying to find more ways to contribute. Wallets, unfortunately, are nonessential items, so donating product doesn't make a lot of sense, but money goes a long way.
Speaker 2:So here's what we're trying. If you submit proof of a 50 plus dollar donation to out any LA fire relief organization, we'll send you a Ridge Wallet for free. We'll do this for the first 500 people who submit. It's the cheapest you'll ever get a Ridge Wallet wallet, and you'll be doing good. Details below for how to submit.
Speaker 2:So, very cool. If you wanted to get a Ridge Wallet, now is the time to do it. If it's not too late already, I don't think it is.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:So thank you to Sean and Connor for, helping raise money for fire relief, here in Southern California.
Speaker 1:Cool. Let's go to some DMs that we don't have printed out, but I have here on my phone. Michael Tostad says the Tech Bros pod should have, quote, is this secret communist section? Really bring back the McCarthyism. And you said, That's great.
Speaker 1:Looking forward to the segment. We very 2 deep digging into secret
Speaker 2:So I think we should have I think I think we have a new segment. It can be kind of sporadic Yeah. Where we sort of try to figure out
Speaker 1:Who are the targets? Like, the venture communist?
Speaker 2:Well, so so Karen Bass was the target.
Speaker 1:Okay. Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:It turns out Did you get into her political career? Well, I guess this was just the beginning of her political career. She was a very active communist working directly with the Cuban government
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the seventies. So, yeah, I just think, I talked about this before. People have been, you know, looking for new slurs, communist.
Speaker 1:There's been a there's been a bull market
Speaker 2:in fixation on slurs. Yeah. And so venture capitalists, hey, John. That market map makes you look like a junior VC. You know, slurs like that.
Speaker 2:You know, communist mouth breather, low
Speaker 1:t.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Low magnesium levels.
Speaker 1:There's plenty.
Speaker 2:So there's there's plenty.
Speaker 1:Let's go to the next comment that someone said, no, is a photo of us, and they say no cases on their phone. Yeah. These guys have exits. Well, that's great. And then, Nate Nate chimes in with the Geordie Hayes stack.
Speaker 1:No phone case, no socks, no shampoo. Yeah. Marisol Rex. So where Ethan is? This is in the reply to Ben's post.
Speaker 1:He just
Speaker 2:Ben's so so Ben's producer Ben?
Speaker 1:Has been his account's been exploding.
Speaker 2:Account has been
Speaker 1:Get in get in now. He's a couple 100 followers. He's blowing up. It's great.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Alright. Here's a good question for us. Britton Winterrose says, tasked with hosting an an event VCs will want to attend. The options are Porsche racing experience, skiing, a panel of 3 other VCs, or other comment below. And Mario says TechGrossPod should have good insight.
Speaker 1:Jordy, what do you think? You wanna attract as many VCs to the event you're throwing? What do you go for?
Speaker 2:Honestly, the the last time I saw a true flock was the gundo. Oh, we remember that last year? True. Last, like, like Flock of VCs is a flock of VCs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because it was just an We need a
Speaker 1:name for that. You know you know how, like, if you get a group of lions, it's called pride of lions or you get a bunch of boys for murder of crows.
Speaker 2:I think a flock is good because you have Flock of sheep. Sea like, sea some of them are seagulls, like the rats. You know, the rats of the air. Some are pigeons.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Also kind of, you know, they're they're foraging. They're just trying to nip off. Like, just all I need is half a percent. That's my ownership target. You know, they're just trying
Speaker 1:to get a crumb. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Those are the, you know, more
Speaker 1:of, like, the the eagles.
Speaker 2:You know? Like, the the, the ones that sit high above. And and I put
Speaker 1:That's how we call eagles, though.
Speaker 2:No. I know. But I'm just saying we're gonna broad we're gonna we're gonna, flock of birds, I think, is is fair. So we gotta kinda bucket in a few different
Speaker 1:A group of eagles is called a convocation
Speaker 2:of eagles. Convocation. That's good.
Speaker 1:The convocation of an army or a congress.
Speaker 2:But do you remember that when when the gundo I think you catalyzed it in some way with your documentary that was already building. Yep. And then every everyone VC was was like, yeah, I'm gonna, let me know if you're around. I'm gonna be in The Gondo this week. You know?
Speaker 2:And, it's cool. I mean
Speaker 1:So you would say if you wanna host an event with VCs, just go to, like, the hottest new sub market that's blowing up.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like a high influencer, and then just take them out to a lot of startups in the area?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's probably good. That works.
Speaker 1:I would say big game hunting would also be good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The number of GPs that are secretly taking multiple trips a year to hunt elephants Yeah. Alks, lions Yeah. Really exotic.
Speaker 1:Mostly predators,
Speaker 2:but yeah. Predator hunting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hunting is really big right now. Yeah. Also, Porsche racing experience, that's fine, but you'd be better off doing the Dakar. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Putting a group together, driving from Yeah.
Speaker 2:The gumball is also
Speaker 1:good. Great great, option. Let's see what else. Oh my god. Someone just did guess the podcast, and it's just photos of us, I think.
Speaker 1:Like, this? That's hilarious. When is that today? Yeah. I guess somebody just posted this.
Speaker 1:I like this. That's great. Oh, that's bad. And you posted that. You took some you took some photos.
Speaker 1:They're proud of slides. That's great.
Speaker 2:Ben's out of control. Ben following Ben right now is, like, buying Bitcoin. Oops. Following Ben right now is, like, buying Bitcoin in in 1981.
Speaker 1:Just gets older every single time we promote something. Let's go to a bucket poll. We got juicy saying dudes be having the worst day of their life and still keep sending memes to their homies like nothing happened. 100 k likes. I completely agree with this.
Speaker 1:Even during the fires, you lost cell service, but I was still sending you memes. And I was like, he has a reply, like, like, hours. I think I did. This is bad. This is, like, very uncouth.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, this is the way, like, men
Speaker 2:No. I think peep I think yeah. I think, I was I was kind of processing this. I I was thinking about this last week because I was sort of oscillating between being extremely angry
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At the response of our leaders in California, and then also needing to kind of process it through humor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 2:And so yeah. I mean, I can I can remember the the SVB the period when when SVB was collapsing, it was very insightful on our on our business? But then I also had a family health emergency at, like, 2 AM that Thursday. And Thursday Friday was, like, the last money you could get money or the last day you could get money out. So but I still remember everybody was just, like, memeing it, like, internally.
Speaker 2:Like, it was, like, the biggest the most
Speaker 1:Existential moment.
Speaker 2:Crazy existential moment for Silicon Valley where we were like, did we did did this start up economy just get nuked?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then everybody was you know, the group chats were having a moment. You know? Of course.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:As they do. Never stops. Let's
Speaker 1:go to Mark Andresen. He says, well, this is really gonna cramp my style, and he shows a screenshot of message block. The semantic email security dot cloud service has detected content in an email that matches the following policy. Inappropriate content, 5 dotx.x. Please remove any language inappropriate for business and resend the message.
Speaker 1:The funny thing is, like, this is clearly, like, on a 16 c's network. Right? I imagine. Or maybe maybe it's for a different I can't even Like but it's just funny. He's, like, triggering the, the content flags.
Speaker 1:He's mouthing off so much. I love it. True technology brother behavior.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're bringing we're we're we're trying to encourage people to bring back intensity to the workplace. Yes. And part of that is saying not words like the r word. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's saying, like, the f bomb. Yeah. You know? Yeah. All caps would get it fucking done.
Speaker 1:You know the thing about Ron Conway? How every email he sends is all caps.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Incredible. It's just like everything you open is just screaming, basically. I don't know. That's true.
Speaker 1:But,
Speaker 2:you gotta turn you gotta turn the volume down before you open an email from from Ron Conway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Andrea. She says, much respect to us who have one Twitter account where we should post, conduct business, and socialize from Sigma moves. And I agree with this. Here's the classic question of, like, oh, I got some spicy takes. Should I set up at a non account?
Speaker 1:And I don't know. I think that, yeah, you just gotta find the correct line and only post things that you're comfortable living on forever. Being baked into the the the god in a box. Beat them in the the LLM. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the AI Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's that's part of it. We gotta issue toaster. Every one of us is training these models Yep. Through the stuff that we're putting online. Yep.
Speaker 2:And so if you want the model to be more politically incorrect, be more politically incorrect. Right? And do it on main.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's not you know, I bet I bet you they've I bet you XAI really, you know, tries I bet they're really good at detecting bots for XAI.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. For sure. You know,
Speaker 2:they don't want any of that slop that says, like, in my you know, check out my bio now. Yeah. You know? But, like, some of that stuff.
Speaker 1:Or even just, like, Chad g p t just destroyed Grock and Anthropic, like, 10 amazing discoveries below, like, this stupid threads, like, all those need to get filtered out. There is something to be said about, like, that mixed use account that's really cool. Like, Nikita broke it down where he was like, look, like, you're not gonna have, like, some deep insight or some, you know, revolutionary deep dive every single day. So you should just be kind of, like, hanging out at the water cooler, telling jokes, effectively shitposting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do that, like, just whenever something comes to you a couple times a day. And then but then you need to mix in a serious post, like, once a week or something so that
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then you're seeing see. Drea is, like, joking around, but she does some of the best analysis Exactly. On the consumer package side industry, and it's the most entertaining. So I think it's it's definitely and when you share stuff that is personal, like your personal interests, like for me, I'm always surprised if I share anything UFC related.
Speaker 2:I get a bunch of people that I that I'm friends with that I didn't even know like the sport, and they'll and we talk about it,
Speaker 1:whatever. I mean, that's the beauty of x is that it's not designed like siloed Reddit. So you don't need to, like, go and take your account over to watch Twitter or tech Twitter or media Twitter or UFC Twitter to engage with those people. You can just kind of, like, follow a few people, engage post, and the algorithm will send sometimes it sends posts off to a different region of x, and you're like, oh, okay. There's a whole different community here.
Speaker 1:And they love me or they hate me. Who knows?
Speaker 2:Maybe they'll lock my account. The Canadian.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Alaska. The Alaska. The Alaska. The Alaska has got me got me good.
Speaker 1:But, let's go to Roone talking to Grimes. Gruen says, if you guys aren't careful, I'm gonna start writing essays in the on the immigrant experience. And let me just say nobody will enjoy that. And then Grimes says, honestly, if you would just write any essay at all, I would be happy. Lazy fuck.
Speaker 1:Incredible writer. Proceeds to only proceeds to only tweet and not create a body of work. Upsetting. And then Roone says, LMFAO. Okay.
Speaker 1:Grimes is kicking my ass. I gotta do it. And then Grimes says, are you serious? You can't say it because then you won't do it. Please write something long form, and for the love of God, print it on a pamphlet, and let's not have another substack.
Speaker 1:Let's show some grace to the written word and also get some branding moxie around the ideas percolating in Silicon Valley. And then he says, yeah. Substack is lame. X articles is lame. The vibes on both of those have become bad.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. I mean, I I think there's some great Substacks out there and some x articles are cool. You don't wanna get censored, so you gotta put that up there too. But definitely print it out. Definitely send it to people in print.
Speaker 1:Did you see Max Meyer's new project?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The Oh, cool. Love Letters to America. Is that what it's called?
Speaker 2:A lot of letters to capital. Project under arena.
Speaker 1:Really cool under arena. So you can go subscribe, and and you'll just get a nicely, you know, delivered letter in the mail. And we're building a, mailing list, a physical mailing list. So send us your address. If you wanna get drops, we're gonna be dropping a bunch of fun stuff in the mail.
Speaker 1:And I think, you know, you should be keeping a a Rolodex. These things often build up around weddings. You you you you get everyone's address there. Keep that up to date. You need a real Rolodex.
Speaker 1:It's not enough just to have someone's phone or email these days. You gotta be able to send them physical stuff and stand out. Should we do another promoted post?
Speaker 2:What you got? I got I got one. We gotta do chair at some point. Yeah. We'll do the chair.
Speaker 2:We'll do the chair next. Look. Do you have some backstory on this chair?
Speaker 1:Well, it was recommended by, the obscure hobbyist of the year. Oh, really? Wilma Natus. Yes. Certainly.
Speaker 1:He said he said he's buying it.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Okay. Let's let's actually just run this.
Speaker 1:So Okay.
Speaker 2:I got a extremely important promoted post today, from and it's actually a recommendation from none other than Will Menitis.
Speaker 1:This is gonna be so pissed that we're leaking this out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. This is honestly I doubt he's bought it. Actually pulled the trigger yet. So we're gonna sell it out well.
Speaker 1:He had a couple other options. We're calculating the one that we think most aligns with our brand.
Speaker 2:We have a fantastic looking chair here. This is the William Jefferson Clinton Oval Office Chair from the History Company. It's only $3,475. And, you know, this thing just looks fantastic. Is this the act is this
Speaker 1:It's it's a replica. A replica? Yeah. Okay. It's designed to look like the Oval Office chair.
Speaker 2:Be at least 40.
Speaker 1:And I think it's great because, you know, if you're an associate at a venture capital firm, you come in, they give you some slop chair. You gotta get that out. Bring in your own chair. No one's gonna bother you if you just
Speaker 2:Oh, you can't.
Speaker 1:I need a more ergonomic chair. I I I got back problems or something. Is it It's an health issue. Can't stop you.
Speaker 2:So VC Associates, you'll see around us have a lot of them driving, like, Valkyries, like, you know, some of these hyper cars. No.
Speaker 1:I eights.
Speaker 2:I eights. I it's rapid to a rapt I eights.
Speaker 1:You gotta get the doors to go like this. The Valkyries has the doors frame.
Speaker 2:As long as the door go the doors go up, it's good good by
Speaker 1:the way. GP money.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The i8, that's yeah. That's where we're supposed
Speaker 2:to out there that,
Speaker 1:They use their nepos. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know. Yeah. I I I met a guy in the Alps a couple weeks ago that, worked for a pretty prominent venture capital fund and, is a billionaire through his through through his father's, you know, past success. But, so some of the you know, but anyways, great looking chair. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Highly recommended it. Out.
Speaker 1:Upgrade your chair.
Speaker 2:I don't actually like the these metal knobs here, but the what's really gonna be in Zoom is this top section, and it looks very regal. Yeah. And, need some other options. But Yeah. Highly recommend you getting a nice chair.
Speaker 2:Out the History Company Yeah. And, tell them the Technology Brothers and Will Minit has sent you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to a bucket poll from Ali. She says dating a VC must be so funny because imagine being in the middle of a fight, and he says, babe, let's think about this from first principles.
Speaker 2:Alright. Let me see this. So so, this wow. 2a half k. That is that's that's So that's a banger.
Speaker 2:Nice nice work, Ali. Ali's, fiance or husband or boyfriend. I don't I don't actually know. No. He's the Ali's, Ali's significant other
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Posted in late December, if I can get a Robinhood gold card, I will yeah. I will I will tattoo the Robinhood logo on my arm, Brex so this guy Brexton. And, he got his gold card
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he got a Robinhood tattoo on an absolute piece on his shoulder.
Speaker 1:It's big too.
Speaker 2:It's pretty big. It's pretty prominent. I'm curious if it's his first ever tattoo.
Speaker 1:He should keep doing this and just get logoed up everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like a NASCAR. It would be interesting to to go to these companies and say, you know, I'll get this logo, but I need a $100 a month for the rest of my life. And it's like a bulletproof contract. And it's like you can pay it out early.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, at at, like, you know, for, like, 80 years. Yeah. If you wanna just get it all upfront or you can just keep keep me on the payroll forever. Correct.
Speaker 2:Great. You load it up and you could probably get a UBI off that. That might be one of the last jobs. It's just getting a walking dog a walking dog.
Speaker 1:He was looking pretty jacked when I saw it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I think he just wanted an
Speaker 1:excuse to flex.
Speaker 2:Yep. For sure. For sure. Nice work, Breckx. And Ali, you know, I'm curious.
Speaker 2:We should we should get Ali's opinion on the Robin Hood and Tat. Yeah. She's got opinions.
Speaker 1:But that's great. Anyway love when my my my partner does, stupid
Speaker 2:shit. The old card better
Speaker 1:be live up to the hype. Yeah. Does look beautiful. Let's go to Luke Metro. He says it must be really it must really suck to be too smart to make money in crypto, but too dumb to make money in AI.
Speaker 2:That's just brutally real. Yeah. That hey. Podcasting. I mean, there's Podcasting is a nice a nice, you know, middle ground.
Speaker 1:Seeing these you keep seeing these, what what's the latest coin, fart coin that just mooned or something? There's so many just super stupid ones. And it's like, yeah, anyone rational or intelligent would just be like, this can't possibly happen. But then really, gigabrain, they can figure out that, no, this one's gonna meme Yeah. The Joe Biden coin or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But even that one ended up flopping.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, they all do, but it's about the timing. It's about Ponzinomics and playing it correctly. Yeah. But oh, well.
Speaker 1:So it's always always some opportunity. There's always a bull market somewhere. Yep. Let's go to Jack Suslow. He says, one cold email at a time, I built my life.
Speaker 2:Thought that was cool. Yeah. Was
Speaker 1:it a 16 z games?
Speaker 2:I wonder
Speaker 1:if he That's true. I would like to see the cold email that he sent to get that job. Share it, Jack.
Speaker 2:I, hear the story. It's funny because everybody has you know, I would hope that everybody listening has positive stories around cold emails. Yeah. But you always remember the negatives. There's this one guy.
Speaker 2:It wasn't even a fully cold email that I met in college, because there's one company here in Santa Barbara, Decker brands, they own HOKA, UGG, and a bunch of other companies. Great business, like, $20,000,000,000 company. You know, shoe companies, when they have hit shoes, do really well. And I met him at the gym, and he's like, here, just I was like, I'd love, like, let me, like, intern for you, work for you, whatever. I'll do anything.
Speaker 2:Like, here's what I'm good at. He's like, yeah. Just follow-up the email. And, like, longest, most thoughtful email. No response.
Speaker 2:Kept seeing him at the gym.
Speaker 1:Woah. Didn't I was just like, that's just There's a hair stabbing, Steve. 75 emails.
Speaker 2:75 emails. Send emails until they they they beg you to stop or
Speaker 1:give you a job.
Speaker 2:Trust me. But then do it a 100 times. You gotta do like, the volume is so deep. The volume. So, this is like, you know, the Baldo method.
Speaker 2:Like, he didn't just send a couple good replies. He sent 100, and he kept going. Crafting. And I'm talking to him in a couple
Speaker 1:He's actually a great poster. It's Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. I feel like he's he's also just gotten, become a better poster.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Through No. But but cold emails are are like little lottery tickets. Like, every time you post on x, it's like a little lottery ticket. Yep.
Speaker 2:You're buying with your time. Yep. And, but keep it concise. Send it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Keep it concise. Let's do another promoted post.
Speaker 2:Promoted post. We got a promoted post from Max. Max, I'm sorry for butchering your name, but he says, he has a company called Gumloop, which just got out of, just got out of YC.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And, what do they do? They're doing some it looked like something within the realm of, Zapier. I'm trying to remember now. I don't have any actual backstory on it, but the more important thing is, they raised a $17,000,000 series day straight out of YC, and Max says that Gumloop will be a 10 person, $1,000,000,000 company. They have 6 spots left.
Speaker 2:So this is a company that got 4, 4 people, took them to a $17,000,000 series a.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So they must be doing something cool. 17 or 7? 17,000,000.
Speaker 1:17,000,000 series.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sean from My First Million is in there. Cool.
Speaker 2:But anyways, cool opportunity. Go hit up Max and,
Speaker 1:just Tell him the Technology Brothers sent you.
Speaker 2:Tell him the TB sent you.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like this one. Casey says I got a bucket pull here. Casey says, I cannot overstate how valuable it is to have a regular gathering you can invite wonderful people to as you meet them. It's often the difference between that guy was cool. I wonder what he's up to and gaining a new friend and or collaborator.
Speaker 1:So this is like the the bro movie nights that we do.
Speaker 2:Is that
Speaker 1:Let me see. Casey. This is just a bucket pole of ice.
Speaker 2:No. This is cool. I I mean, it's so so that this is,
Speaker 1:people do this. They do a poker night. What do they do? Cigar night.
Speaker 2:Remote and and just kind of sort of working remote. Yeah. Because people in LA, I feel like, just have to kind of if you're in tech, you have to be, like, pretty remote
Speaker 1:in terms of how you work
Speaker 2:with people and meet people because there's just not that many people here. And, that is a downside of, like, well, there's only one Friday night every week. Yeah. If you wanna get a bunch of people together and then it's once you have kids, you know, you're sac if you're meeting up with, you know, work oriented people, you're missing out on time with your family. So getting 4, 5, 6, 10, 20 people together at once Yeah.
Speaker 2:Has a pretty amazing
Speaker 1:This is why it's so important to get a box of every f one race because then there's always something coming up. You can just say, oh, I'm in I'm in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 1:this is why we're gonna let me go. Miami guys are
Speaker 2:gonna start doing daily TV meetups at the New York Stock Exchange. Yep. Some one of the brothers recommended this, and I think it'd be very cool. Let's meet at the bowl every morning. Every morning.
Speaker 2:Just pray, you know, pray to the bowl. Pray to the bowl. We got time for one more post, and then we gotta
Speaker 1:Jet, but we'll see you tomorrow because the pod never sleeps. Wilma Nitis, let's close with him. He says, I think it will shock everyone how short lived the AGI fortunes will be. Secular nuts and bolts rationalism will not produce modern Rockefellers. They have failed at real institution building.
Speaker 1:They have weak family structures, polyamory, etcetera, and no transcendent morals. It's a once in a generation bag fumble. We're about to watch 100 of 1,000,000,000 get made and wasted on small dogs, luxury Marina Apartments, and tasteless Napa Homes. Roasted. Roasted.
Speaker 1:Roasted. But I I mean, I I I completely agree. Like, you look at the, I mean, have you seen Citizen Kane? No. Oh, man.
Speaker 1:Fantastic movie. It's a beast to to get through it and what it's a very different experience than, like, a modern movie. But, you know, it's it's basically the story of William Randolph Hearst. Hearst built Hearst Castle. Have you ever been to Hearst Castle?
Speaker 1:It's like in Central California, and it's like this insane castle. It's literally just a castle. It has, like, these ornate pools, indoor pools, outdoor pools just built by this, like, magnet. And it just, like, became this structure that, like, couldn't just be, like, absorbed by the market. So it became this museum, essentially.
Speaker 1:And and and that's that's always my hope when people say, like, you know, the elites aren't bad. We just need better elites. Like, you need elites that care about aesthetics, care about taste. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Matt Friedman is gonna build something that will live on past him. Yeah. Both in the company sense and also in, I'm I'm sure, whatever he winds up building in the festival. Gill Monument. Exactly.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, if you wind up making an AGI fortune, call Will, make some good decisions, and build a dynasty that will live on for centuries. And thanks for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Before we go, go, rate us 5 stars and and leave a funny review. Yeah. I want everyone to leave reviews.
Speaker 1:Send us a screenshot.
Speaker 2:On the app. Get creative. Send us a screen if you leave a creative review, send us a screenshot. We'll read it out here. Here we go.
Speaker 2:You can even leave a review that's just an ad for your business. There we go. Read it out on the podcast. That's good. So go whatever podcast player you use
Speaker 1:This is a great this is a great podcast. I love it. Also, this this review is sponsored by my company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. We'll read it out here
Speaker 1:on the next show. Company, sell the ad inventory. Call another company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Call a friend. Call a friend and say, hey. I'm gonna do the most profitable podcast in the world. I have a free ad slot.
Speaker 2:I have free. Give me give me $5. I'll send you the clip, and we'll clip it. Yeah. And, it's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I wanna I wanna see a lot of reviews because I love ads. Yeah. I want the opportunity to read more of them. So thank you, everyone, and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 1:Thanks a lot. Talk to you later.